Linda Roszak Burton, Author of Gratitude Heals and
Ashley Eddings, Manager of Clinical Support at Wambi

September 21 is World Gratitude Day!

Gratitude has been defined as a strength, a memory of the heart, a pathway to greater health and well-being, and the parent of all virtues. Gratitude is linked to many benefits across the well-being spectrum, including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Research shows regularly reflecting and expressing gratitude leads to the following:

• a stronger immune system
• reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety
• better sleep
• fast recovery from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

… and more! Living gratefully leads to stronger bonds with colleagues, more satisfying relationships with your loved ones, and greater resilience in the face of adversity and trauma. It gives you hope, strength, energy, wisdom, and the serenity to meet life’s many challenges of grief, anxiety, depression, loneliness, and fear. Gratitude is the foundation of abundance and joy.

Keep in mind that practicing gratitude is much more than merely feeling thankful. Gratitude reflections and expressions about what’s good in life contribute to both your and other’s overall health and well-being.

Once you begin your journey towards leading a more gratitude-filled life, the results of having a grateful perspective can help you cope and build greater personal resilience, which is especially important to your professional success.  Thanks to your brain’s neuroplasticity, practicing gratitude will strengthen existing brain pathways and create new ones! Gratitude also creates an awareness of what is going well in your life, your positive emotions, your positive relationships, and your well-being combined, to enable you to truly flourish. When we are stressed out, gratitude offers a less negative impact on emotional health and a greater ability, mentally, to bring some closure. A grateful outlook can help promote the healing of troubled memories that arise from your negative experiences. Think of expressing gratitude as a technique to block the release of the stress hormone, cortisol. The number of positive health benefits that can be achieved through the consistent practice of gratitude include better quality and duration of sleep, lower blood pressure, and a stronger immune system (Wood, Joseph, Lloyd, & Atkins, 2009). It is important to note that building a discipline of gratitude takes commitment and is cultivated over time. In order for you to live a life filled with gratitude, you must bring your actions into focus.

In times of extremely disruptive and uncertain events like the COVID-19 pandemic, it may feel like practicing gratitude is unachievable.

But if we look through the lens of gratitude and seeking the positive in what can be an uncertain and difficult time, we’re bound to find all the good along the way. Now if you’re asking, “well, how can I/we practice gratitude at work?” The answer is quite simple: ways to practice gratitude include reflecting, expressing, and receiving gratitude.

To support all our healthcare workers, we have created The Gratitude Toolkit, a free 10-page workbook with exercises, resources, and educational teachings to provide guidance on purposeful ways to practice gratitude at work.  You can either print the workbook or complete the exercises using the editable fields on-screen to reduce your carbon footprint. Feel free to share this resource with your employees, supervisors, colleagues, and friends in healthcare!

Get a copy of your free Gratitude Toolkit today!

What are the topics covered in the gratitude toolkit?

1. Defining Gratitude
2. When Getting to Gratitude is Hard, Three Good Things
3. The Heliotropic Effect of Gratitude
4. Gratitude for a Strong Support System
5. The Healing Benefits of Gratitude
6. Receiving Gratitude
7. Gratitude – A Link to Stronger Mental Health

You will also find a Gratitude Letter Template on page 8. The gratitude exercises in The Gratitude Toolkit were designed to help you continue to build your reserve of resilience: a personal ability that enables you to rebound and recover from the inevitable negative impact of this crisis.

As you work through this workbook, observe the meaningful moments of your life. These observations are gratitude in application. May this workbook help you practice gratitude at work while also also allow you to restore, rejuvenate, and heal tired parts of your heart.  The Gratitude Toolkit is a pathway to greater emotional and mental well-being throughout all areas of your life.

Let us show you how Wambi uses the power of gratitude to transform employee experience!

• Gratitude Heals ~ A Journal for Inspiration and Guidance by Linda Roszak Burton.
• Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., Lloyd, J., & Atkins, S. (2009). Gratitude influences sleep through the mechanism of pre-sleep cognitions. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 66(1), 43- 48.

Dan Woloszyn has been in executive hospital leadership for 23 years, including nine years in his current role as the CEO of Rehab Hospital of Indiana (RHI). He has a unique management approach, combining servant leadership with understanding the neuropsychology of corporate hospital systems. Not only does he believe in looking at this neuropsychology from a clinical perspective, but through an administrative lens as well.

In today’s episode, you will hear how he incorporates these two philosophies into his everyday life, along with tangible examples of how to apply cross-sectional leadership to your own work.

1. 1. Reach out, communicate, and serve others.
   Supporting Quotes:
   Dan Woloszyn: “You don’t have to be expert in everything, but there is one thing that I really believe one has to be expert in, certainly from a leadership standpoint, is to reach out and know others, and to serve others . You have to have an expertise with that to kind of drive a reduction of silos and an elimination of silos. And that can be done through one’s own expertise or actively seeking other’s expertise.”Dan Woloszyn: “I think each person and each leader truly has to believe it’s a privilege to serve others unconditionally. There’s a professional and humanistic component to that. My true belief is you have to love something about the people you lead to be truly elite effectively. If you don’t love something about the people you lead, you probably are not in the right place, and you’re probably not in the right place to be a leader.”2. Trust and transparency are the foundations of cross sectional leadership.
   Supporting Quote:
   Dan Woloszyn: “Being transparent about self, and certainly being honest, is extremely important. It’s being honest about one’s approach and any errors that might be committed and examples of approaches to correct the errors and how to grow with that. My belief is you have to think out loud and you have to be able to help others to get a sense of your own thought process as a leader and how you came to certain conclusions. I know sometimes that’s difficult for people to do, but it’s extremely beneficial where it helps in a sense to become kind of an external organizer for others, where you move from a point of, of brainstorming out loud a problem you might be faced with, verbalizing struggles, and even kind of working through some of those tactics out loud so others can benefit from a variety of things. I think what it does is it certainly lends to a relationship building and credibility and honesty and transparency.”3. Model the behavior you are looking for in your culture.
   Supporting Quote:
   Dan Woloszyn: “First and foremost, it has to start with me. Laying the foundation has to be about modeling and certainly me believing in and what truly is important for our organization. There’s always an expectation to look at the glass half full and everything that we do in a respectful way while modeling that and handing off to others who also will hand off to others, and that kind of permeates throughout the system.”4. Make it a habit to regularly invite your leaders for collaboration and relationship building.
   Supporting Quote:
   Dan Woloszyn: ”I think there’s a conscious effort to tie others, to create alliances, not only within the organization, but outside the organization, within our community and really address this kind of holistically. Concretely, we do this a lot. I invite staff and leaders, online staff leaders, all different, team members, to our department meetings. I invite them to board meetings. I have them look at operational pathways they’ve generated and share their stories, because without that you truly understand the nature of what everybody’s doing amongst the organization.”

Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown – Buy Here.

In collaboration with Wambi, the Gut + Science Podcast Healthcare Series hosted by Nikki Lewellen, Director of Partnerships at Wambi, highlights accomplished, people-first healthcare CEOs (and executives) that share their powerful mindsets, experiences and tools that have helped them succeed. The show encompasses all areas of human capital at work and the successful best practices that breed healthy, engaged organizations.

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Join Dr. Bonnie Clipper and Sarah Gray, Founding Clinician and Head of Clinical Success at Trusted Health, for this micro-interview on being solution driven rather than problem focused to successfully tackle today’s issues.

To learn more about Sarah Gray, visit:

• Trusted Health – Flexible Jobs for the Modern Nurse
• Connect with Sarah Gray on LinkedIn

There’s more to explore in Wambi world! Click here to subscribe and keep your pulse on what we’re doing in the healthcare engagement space with thought leaders and the inspiring realm of employee recognition and gratitude.