I’m glad to be back in southern Florida. I recently returned from a week-long instructor gig at a motivational speaker training event in historic Albany, NY. The event was a huge success, but the overnight temperature lows during my stay hovered around freezing. I made the best of it, snuggling up in my car at night with a used copy of the classic Ironweed by William Kennedy. Set in Albany, NY, Ironweed is a story of the struggles that many faced during the Great Depression, with some characters even failing to secure shelter in the winter. As cold as it was during my stay in Albany, reading Ironweed at night filled me with the warmth of gratitude for the Toyota Sienna that I call home. #VanLife #Gratitude

The average person is not aware that most motivational speakers are unhoused. We hide it well. Ten-minutes alone in a gas station bathroom with a little running water and a disposable razor is all we need to transform ourselves from the ubiquitous street person to a clean-cut, bright-eyed, fresh-scented messenger of positivity and prosperity. Sadly, for many motivational speakers, this is only a facade. The reality is that for every Tony Robbins, or Les Brown, or Jack Canfield, there are a thousand motivational speakers that are just barely getting by—however, the truth about Tony Robbins, Les Brown, and Jack Canfield would shock you, but you won’t read about it here. #DogFighting #EpsteinIsland #Phencyclidine

Charlatanism is rampant in my industry, and criminality and mental heath issues are very common in the motivational speaking community. More than once I’ve witnessed motivational speakers bloody each other in backstage fistfights, once over nothing more than a stale croissant, #WayneDyer, #SuzeOrman, and I’ve had several colleagues that have died from drug overdoses, and several more that have served serious jail time for fraud.

But I refuse to dwell on the negative. I won’t. I can’t. I have too much love for motivational speaking. I feel too much gratitude for every presentation I deliver, for every audience I inspire, and for every payment check that doesn’t bounce, no matter how small. And it was during my week in Albany, snuggled up in my Toyota Sienna on those wintry nights, that I had this epiphany: in one way or another, all of my work as a motivational speaker is either about gratitude or about beliefs and attitudes you can and should adopt to strengthen your ability to remain grateful in every situation. While other motivational speakers specialize in areas such as leadership, or persuasion, or resilience, or entrepreneurship, I specialize in gratitude. And that got me thinking… if I could only share three tips to help others learn to cultivate gratitude, what would they be? Here’s what I came up with:

1. Always be conscious of your words:

We’re often careless with our language, not realizing the power words wield over the subconscious mind. Our subconscious mind is always listening, and it takes everything literally. We must choose our words carefully, and we must never verbalize negativity. Why? Science, that’s why. Researchers have stuck people into machines that image brain activity, and thanks to these studies, it is now well understood that words influence the activity in our physical brain. Given that over time these observable patterns of activity in our brain shape our mindset, and that our mindset, to a large degree, dictates our actions and behaviors, we can be made to understand how, with the right mindset, even negative situations can create positive opportunities. It seems magical, but magic is not required to explain this phenomenon. Our words shape our consciousness, and our consciousness shapes our perceptions; our perceptions dictate our actions and behaviors, and overtime, our actions and behaviors shape our lives. So choose your words wisely. Choose words that reflect gratitude and the feeling of gratitude will follow.

2. Always remember that you have the ability to decide how you respond:

A central tenet of the stoic philosophy is The Dichotomy of Control which states that some things are within our control and some things are not. Outside of our control is almost everything. The only things that are always within our control are our thoughts and our reactions.

It is always within your power to choose your thoughts. It is always within your power to decide how you respond to a situation. Focus your energy on the things within your control, your thoughts and your reactions. The next time you find yourself in a situation seemingly outside of your control, react with gratitude. You’re likely to discover that the situation is not as far outside of your control as you first believed. It works like magic, but it’s not magic; it’s the power of gratitude.

3. Learn to view small errors as not errors:

If you’re familiar with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), maybe you’re head it said that “there no is failure, only feedback.” There’s a lot of truth in that if you think about it, because unless you give up, a failure only moves you closer to success, if for no other reason than that you will not make that same, exact error a second time.

But if a failure doesn’t cause you to quit in the pursuit of your goal, was it actually a failure, or was it only a step on the path to your goal? Was it a failure, or was it feedback? Did it give you information that moved you closer to success? That sounds like feedback. But it’s up to you to decide.

If you rid yourself of the unreasonable requirement that all the steps on the path from start to finish must be known to you before you begin, then it becomes much easier to view smalls errors not as errors, but, instead, for what they are: steps on the path to achieving your goal. By this way of thinking, frustration from errors becomes gratitude for meaningful progress toward a goal. And while frustration blocks goals, gratitude propels you toward the finish line. Those who learn to leverage the power of gratitude in this way will always achieve their goals in the shortest time possible.