Take a small step to find love

Take a small step to find love
By Margot Carmichael Lester

Sometimes the search for love can be more difficult than you’d like and leave you feeling discouraged. But in honor of November, national “I'm So Thankful” month, why not take a break from looking at what you don't have and start being grateful for what you do have? A negative attitude isn’t going to result in a different outcome the next time you fall in love. What will help? Try to avoid repeating the same mistakes or reliving them time and again after they’re over. And that’s where our old friend gratitude comes in.

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“Being thankful for the experiences we have, however painful they might be, actually helps us avoid making the same bad decisions the next time,” says Phil Holcomb, a Seattle-based life coach and co-founder of Extraordinary Learning (www.extraordinarylearning.com). “Cultivating gratitude about our romantic lives can be a challenge, but it’s something we need to do if we want to abandon old patterns and past results and find our ideal partners.”

From Bitter to Better
All of us go through the ups and downs of dating, but do you let the hard times color your perspective? Consider the case of Tara Janeway of Phoenix: “I was so bitter about my last few relationships that I built a huge fortress around myself,” she admits. “It was a long time before I realized that that ‘protection’ was actually keeping me from finding good relationships.”

Practicing gratitude helps cut off unproductive negative feelings like these, so we can focus clearly on the present, which enhances our chances for the future. “Focusing on what you’re thankful for — as long you truly are thankful for it — has scientifically-proven positive effects on stress reduction, immune system response and sensitivity to pain,” Holcomb notes. Broken hearts included.

You can begin to practice gratitude by:
Acknowledge a bad situation, and then think of something you’re grateful for. It can be something related to the event or not. The idea is to own the bad feelings—but to focus equally on the good feelings. “Breaking up with Tim was horrible,” says Patrick Danville of Washington, D.C. “But afterwards I was grateful for the fun we had together. Plus, losing him allowed me to meet some other great guys.”
Then, think big and make a list of all the things you’re thankful for. Survey your life with a bird’s-eye view—this will help you regain perspective.
Actively notice things you’re grateful for every day. Say you got turned down when you asked that cute girl in the legal department out. Be thankful she said no right off the bat so you didn’t waste more time on her. Now you can focus on that hottie in accounting.

Feel Your Pain
Now, nobody’s saying that you should adopt gratitude at the expense of truly experiencing your pain.

“On the contrary,” Holcomb asserts. “Being grateful doesn’t make what happened good or OK, it simply acknowledges that whatever happened is a part of us and contributed to making us the person each of us is today.”

The challenge, of course, is to find something positive—an opportunity inside the problem. “We can choose to see the problem as a negative. Or we can choose to use the problem as an opportunity to make a different decision; to develop a new part of ourselves to meet the challenge or recover from a setback,” says Holcomb. And that’s something we can all be thankful for!

North Carolina-based writer Margot Carmichael Lester is the author of The Real Life Guide To Life After College. She has a lot to be thankful for every day, not just the 30 days of November.