A mindful standup.
A defense of making gratitudes part of your daily status meetings.
You don’t need a sign to practice gratitude, but a really cool one never hurts. (Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash)
What’s one thing you’re grateful for, today?
You can do it. Just one.
It’s a simple question: What’s one thing you’re thankful for in this moment. And not something you’ve accomplished — that’s something internal we give ourselves — but rather an external influence for which you’re grateful.
Take a moment. You got this.
What did you come up with? Is it a beautiful Spring day? Did your spouse/spice get up and make the coffee? Are you inspired by something you saw on the Internet? Did a coworker help you get a project across the finish line?
My team — designers, developers, PMs, and executives — answer this gratitude question every day during our daily standup. And this mindful habit has profoundly impacted our individual mental health and how we interact with one another. We’ve learned about each other, what we each value, and sometimes we’re even on the receiving end of someone else’s gratitude. New hires often point it out as something surprising and delightful they want to share outside the agency.
Daily gratitudes have an equally profound impact on company culture. My teams believe a love for complex challenges, an unbiased empathy for real people, a fearless sharing of ideas, and a selfless assessment of process are the best techniques to consistently exceed client expectations, to improve peoples’ lives, and to build the most rewarding place for problem solvers to work and thrive. Including a gratitude question in our daily standup reinforces these cultural values by cultivating presence, empathy, and understanding.
In this article, I’ll outline why you should include gratitudes as part of your teams’ daily standup and endeavor to show how it can positively impact your team culture and affect positive change in your participating team members.
To this end, I’ll describe:
How I discovered the benefits of daily gratitudes.
How to mindfully acknowledge gratitude.
Why a gratitude question makes a great addition to agile standups.
The science behind gratitudes and the physical, psychological, and social benefits you and your team can look forward to.
Let’s get into it…
How I discovered the benefits of daily gratitudes.
Illustrated gratitudes—a reinforcing habit and an excuse to draw doughnuts and butts. (Photo by the author)
Creative jobs are stressful. They’re intellectually taxing and emotionally draining while being simultaneously exciting and fast-paced. It’s very easy to lose sight of the good things in life when you’re chasing a deadline or have a boss/client breathing down your neck.
As the full-time user-experience design instructor at General Assembly in Atlanta, I saw students wither under this stress. The all-day instructional format combined with the demanding projects they were expected to work on after hours challenged even the most enthusiastic student.
I’ve always been open with the students, colleagues, and family about my personal struggles with depression and anxiety. Being transparent about these mental health issues helps me manage them and, hopefully, helps others know they’re not alone. So many insightful conversations have spawned just from the simple admission, I’m not ok — and that that’s ok.
One of the techniques I adopted to help manage my outlook is the verbalization of at least three things I’m grateful for, every day. My wife and I do this, together, typically first thing in the morning. And according to the Streaks app on my phone, I’ve done it 1,879 days in a row (as of this writing). I’ve recently begun illustrating them.
So, on a lark, I asked my students to start verbalizing a single gratitude as part of their daily standup, first thing in the morning before we got into lecture or work. There were some early holdouts in that first cohort but the impact for those who participated was immediate and dramatic and by the end of the program, everyone was participating. Despite the stressful demands of the course, this intentional acknowledgement of the positive improved their mindsets and lifted class morale.
I took this gratitude practice with me, first, to my own agency and ultimately anywhere the work took me. My. interdisciplinary teams voice daily gratitudes ranging from Covid vaccines to Spring weather, spouses and spices we love, or colleagues who made a project successful.
How to mindfully acknowledge gratitude.
The last few years have been incredibly challenging but there was never a day when something good didn't come my way—from something as monumental as my novel being adapted to audiobook to something as small as my dog attending his quarterly review. (photos by the author)
A quick Google search will turn up numerous results advocating for the regular, mindful, appreciation of gratitude. Many of these evangelists focus on journaling, listing multiple gratitudes, and reaching out to the objects of our thankfulness as a kind gesture. For our purpose — including a daily gratitude question as part of an agile standup — we’re going to focus on the simplest form of thankfulness:
Vocalizing a single gratitude.
While this activity appears simple enough, there are a few best practices that will help you achieve the maximum benefit for both yourself as well as the objects of your gratitude:
Be present and specific.
Many practitioners of the ultimate mindful practice — meditation — advocate the simple acknowledgement that we’re alive for another day. But whether existential or practical, keep your focus on the now. And be specific. Don’t just say “I’m grateful for my co-worker, Michelle.” Say, “I’m grateful Michelle took some extra time to share her research findings with me.”Look beyond yourself.
Where does gratitude come from? We can’t be thankful for our own accomplishments — that feeling is pride (not the bad kind). Real thankfulness must be humbly directed at an outside influence we don’t control: other people, the environment, a situation, even the divine.Vocalize it.
It’s not just enough to think it. You’re more likely to remember something if you say it out loud (even just to yourself). But if your gratitude is about someone else, tell them. Act on your thankfulness by transforming the feeling into an act of kindness. In addition to closing a dopamine loop in yourself by communicating your gratitude, you’ll extend that positive vibe to the recipient of your thanks, improving their mental state and wellbeing as well as your own.
The result of this mindful exercise is the appreciation of goodness in our lives. This isn’t to say our lives and jobs are perfect or that bad things don’t happen. But affirming the positive helps us shift our focus away from the evolutionary preoccupation with the negative.
Gratitude also emphasizes the role other people play in our lives and reminds us we’re not in control of every influence on our success or wellbeing — and that’s ok. It helps us see beyond the self-serving bias: that when good things happen to us it’s the result of our actions or agency, but when bad things happen it’s the result of other people or circumstances.
Why a gratitude question makes a great addition to agile standups.
Not gonna lie. It can be challenging to vocalize a gratitude before the coffee kicks in, wether the standup is virtual or in-person. (Screen grab by the author)
In an agile work environment (and, yes, I intentionally lower-cased the word because I’ve never known anyone to really run an orthodox Agile project), a standup meeting is a short daily meeting used to align the team. It’s so-called because, traditionally, the meeting is held on foot to promote a swift agenda. In large organizations, a standup might be limited to members of a project team but in smaller agencies and startups, standups may include every member of the company.
A daily standup meeting is typically structured around three questions:
What did you complete yesterday?
What do you plan to complete today?
What is blocking your progress?
This daily meeting prevents a common failure among teams — that, in the absence of an explicit occasion to share information, critical knowledge may fall through the cracks — while cultivating a collaborative and empathetic culture that spares members from isolation and redundancy. And even though the agile methodology was developed to accommodate software developers, I find it profoundly useful with creative teams. It helps us focus on the immediate (the shiny object) and generate momentum whereas waterfall projects tend to lack immediacy (at least until we’re too close to a milestone or deadline).
The gratitude best practices described above — focusing on the present, on influence outside ourselves, and sharing our thanks with the objects of our gratitude — align extremely well with the agile standup agenda:
Immediacy.
Your focus is on the immediate. What was accomplished yesterday and what do you hope to get done today? Be specific.
Externality.
The meeting format is fundamentally about external influence: appreciating the work others are doing, hearing what they may need from you (as their external influence) and acknowledging blocks for which you need outside help.Sharing.
When you acknowledge a gratitude about one of your peers in this group setting, they hear it right away.
Adding a simple gratitude question to your agile standup agenda adds a fourth point of alignments between the practice and the methodology:
Community.
The sharing of gratitudes is an intimate and humbling exercise. Hearing a colleague express gratitude for something in their personal lives will help you understand them better and provide context for the struggles and successes in their lives. Every team I’ve practiced gratitudes with saw improved relationships, greater consideration, and improved comradery.
Thus, our improved, mindful daily standup meeting is structured around four questions:
What did you complete yesterday?
What do you plan to complete today?
What is blocking your progress?
What are you grateful for?
The science behind gratitudes and the physical, psychological, and social benefits you and your team can look forward to.
Break the cycle Morty, rise above, focus on science. (Image copyright Adult Swim)
While the benefits I’ve observed from including a gratitude question in daily standups may be anecdotal, the science on thankfulness is clear and voluminous (the studies sourced in this article are listed at the end).
The goal of any mindful gratitude practice is to change how we see the world around us and make gratitude a default feeling rather an occasional or exceptional one. Indeed, researchers at Eastern Washington University identified some characteristics of grateful people — traits our daily practice can strengthen and invigorate:
People who experience the most gratitude tend to:
Enjoy a higher sense of self-worth.
Feel a sense of abundance in their lives.
Appreciate the contributions of others.
Recognize and enjoy life’s small pleasures.
Acknowledge the importance of experiencing and expressing gratitude.
Avoid toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, and regret.
Better recover from stress or trauma.
Additionally, research by UC Davis psychologist Robert Emmons, author of Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, demonstrates that the simple act of writing down your gratitudes (in his case, in a daily journal) can significantly increase well‑being and life satisfaction over the long term:
Physical benefits may include:
Strengthened immune systems
Reduced incidence of aches and pains
Lower blood pressure
Increased frequency of exercise
Increased mindfulness of health
Better, longer, more refreshing sleep
Psychological benefits may include:
Higher peaks of positive emotions
Increased alertness
More frequent joy and pleasure
Improved optimism and happiness
Social benefits may include:
Improved passive empathy
Improved generosity and compassion
Easier forgiveness
More sociable behaviors
Fewer feelings of loneliness and isolation
Improved romantic relationships
Improved working relationships
And hard as it may be to believe that so simple a practice can have such far-reaching benefits, research shows that even a one-time act of thoughtful gratitude produces an immediate 10% increase in happiness and 35% reduction in depressive symptoms — a benefit which may last months. And when a daily practice of gratitudes is sustained for just a few weeks, brain function in depressed individuals is altered at a structural level.
No slaughterhouse, here. Just welcome reminders. (Photo by the author)
According to psychologist and researcher Jeffrey Froh, these benefits resonate with children as well as adults. His study of kids aged 8 to 11 found that kids who received gratitude lessons showed an increase in grateful thinking, appreciation, and positive emotions—a transformation which lasted five months after the program finished!
Such results shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with mindfulness practices. These outcomes are more than the simple consequence of repeating a gratitude question. They’re the natural by-product of cultivating a process of reflection and increased awareness of priorities and values.
Work mindfully with Sharpen.
We’re excited to show you how Sharpen’s premier team of creative problem solvers (with their fingers on design thinking, technology, architecture, and more) is the right team to help you. Because we do a lot more than just create beautiful, functional solutions—and that “lot more” informs how we approach every problem.
Contact us for a free remote consultation with our innovation leaders to see how we can help you and your company bring your visions to life and be more innovative than ever.
