If you went to your mailbox and found that you had won the lottery, I'll bet you would be grateful. You would probably jump up and down for joy, maybe even embarrassing yourself in front of your neighbors.

However, if you opened you mailbox and found a huge water bill, owing to your forgetting to turn off the hose for your pool several times, you might not be jumping up and down. In fact, the natural- or, rather typical, response- is to curse out your water company, your hose, the pool man- anything or anybody, including yourself, who has brought this awful experience down on your head. By the time you get to sitting down and paying the bill, after arguing for an hour with the water company, you may have completely lost your sense of well-being, your entire positive connection to the universe.

After that, your whole day may suffer. You may yell at your dog, grumble a bit too much when you see your son's report card, get bent out of shape when a colleague at work tries to warn you about your attitude in a meeting with the boss. Things can escalate in a totally negative direction just because you hated your water bill. But what if you took a different attitude? I'm not saying this is easy, but I am saying it is possible and probably beneficial.

Suppose the minute your water bill arrives, you look at it and say, "Gee, I'm so glad I have a pool that I can put water in" or "Wow, imagine, actually have the money to pay this big bill after I stupidly left the hose on." Or, even more eccentrically, "I'm happy to help out the water company that provides me with water for my pool and purifies the water that I drink." Now, although to many this may appear foolish, almost the reverse of human nature, it is an example exercising the "conscious gratitude"- looking for the good in what many would think is a bad situation. The results of the rest of the day might be quite different if you were smiling with gratitude when you filled out that water bill- and you wouldn't yell at your dog or frown at your son's report card or act like an idiot at the office. By exercising "conscious gratitude," you can hold back the tide of negativity in your life.

But habitually remembering to be grateful is not necessarily all that easy to do. One interesting technique can be the use of an anchor to remind one to focus on the positive, nurturing things in one's life and to think of positive instead of negative outcomes. In the film, The Secret, the movie gives important view as to the power of deploying the gratitude in one's daily life.

The in the Movie The Secret being conscious of gratitude on a daily basis, reminds us to think about all are truly grateful for in our lives. I.E.: our friends and family, who love us and care about us, or having food to eat each day, or a bed to sleep on or a car to drive. Even the fact that you are reading this now on the internet is an indicator that you are better off then the other 97% of humanity who do not have an internet connection.

Remembering Your stature in life versus that of the world community helps one to realize all the wonderful things in life to be grateful for. That's not far off from mom's saying's Like clean your plate Johnny, think of all those who have not enough food!!