We are hardwired for forward movement and progress. From the moment we are born, we begin growing. First smile, first step, first word. Then we go to school and continue learning every single day. Eventually, we get out into the “real world,” and we begin to stagnate. We reach a certain age and think that we’ve made it. We are who we are, and that’s it. We stop learning. We stop cultivating our skills and improving our attitude. We stop being curious. We stop using our imagination. We stop thinking.
However, the moment you stop growing, you are no longer really living. Anything not growing is dead. Even though we were birthed for growth, most people fall into complacency. In order to help sustain your growth and stick with the refuse-to-lose process, you should practice gratitude and empathy—these are your G and E vitamins. Gratitude and empathy are 100 percent within your control, and if you can lock in and focus on these states of mind, they can be transformative.
It’s important that you take these vitamins daily. If you stop exercising, you will lose the muscle mass you gained, and if you don’t regularly practice gratitude and empathy, you will begin to lose the energy needed to sustain your growth. The refuse-to-lose mindset is not a one-and-done permanent fix for all your problems. It is a way of life.
Practicing gratitude and empathy will change the way you see people and the world, creating a heart of forgiveness and compassion.
In November 2011, I got a call that my mom was sick in the hospital. I didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation yet, but I knew my mother wasn’t in the best health and didn’t take care of herself as well as she should. When I went to see her, the doctors explained that she had been living with untreated pneumonia for months. They would have to perform a surgery on her lungs, and they didn’t think she would survive the procedure.
I had spent all of my twenties hating my mother. I’d judged her and blamed her for my pain. I’d judged her for getting married so many times, for not putting me first in her decisions, for taking in so many foster kids, for not being the mother I wanted and needed, for not being better.
In a way, because I didn’t have a healthy, loving family, I made basketball my family instead. It was always basketball this and basketball that. Basketball had gotten me out of my toxic home environment. Basketball had given me mentors. Basketball had given me a full scholarship to my dream school. Basketball had helped me purchase my first home. Basketball had given me acceptance and love. Basketball, in essence, had saved my life.
I thought I was fine with basketball being the center of my life, with my mother pushed to the sidelines, but when the doctors told me she might not even make it to see the next week, I was terrified. I suddenly realized that she meant a lot more to me than I was letting on. My anger had been generated through extreme sadness and brokenness. I didn’t want her to die, and I definitely didn’t want her to die with our relationship fractured.
My mother had written me a letter earlier that year, telling me how my behavior was hurting her and how she wanted our relationship to be better. I’d previously ignored the letter, as I had made an intentional decision to keep her out of my life so that I could move on. I knew, though, that I would never be completely free of the anger I felt toward her until I forgave her, and I also knew that if she died with everything between us still broken, I would regret it. I couldn’t afford to live with anger and regret forever. For her sake as well as my own, I had to at least try to repair our relationship.
I made a vow, praying out loud to God, “For as long as you allow her to live, I will honor her. I’ll be the best daughter I possibly can be. She will come first. Nothing will come before her—not basketball, not my job, not my players, not anybody in my community. She will be priority number one. Just give me time to do right by her.”
She pulled through to the next week and then lived for two and a half more years. For that period of time, I kept my word to God. I didn’t know how long she would live, but I committed to loving her completely every single day. I’m grateful that I’d reached a place in my personal development where I was able to do this.
My brother was living on the other side of the country by this time, so my mother’s care fell to me. I coordinated everything for her because she didn’t have anybody else to do it for her. I lived almost four hours away, but I still made it to her doctor’s appointments and visited her regularly. I’d drive seven to eight hours in a day just to sit with her for a couple of hours. Throughout this time, I continued to work as a head coach, first at Tusculum and then at UNC Wilmington, where I began working in May 2012.
In those two and a half years, I watched her deteriorate from the strong, formidable woman who had always brought the hammer down in our home to a small, fragile husk weighing less than a hundred pounds. The entire experience was incredibly difficult but also incredibly healing. We were able to have needed conversations, create new memories, and achieve a peace in our relationship.
Sitting at the foot of her bed in the hospital and nursing home, I was able to forgive and even appreciate her. When I was a baby, she chose me. I could have ended up in the foster-care system, but instead I had a home. It may not have been perfect, but it was my home. When I flipped the light switch, lights came on. When I twisted the sink’s knobs, water came out. It was my mother who had given me that, and I’d never given her the credit she deserved for choosing me and providing for me. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I finally felt more love and gratitude than anger when it came to my mother.
My anger dissipated further as I realized and accepted that she had been doing the best she could. A key component of empathy is understanding that everyone in our lives is doing the best they can. We might think their best isn’t good enough, and we are entitled to our opinion, but it’s still their best. If they could give us more, they would. My mother gave me everything she could, and you know what? For as much as I had blamed her and bemoaned my circumstances, she must’ve done something right, because any success that I’ve had is a reflection of her efforts.
The gratitude and empathy muscles I cultivated by caring for my mother have allowed me to experience her, others, and the world in a different way. My G and E vitamins center me when I need to be centered. They raise my consciousness, giving me the emotional intelligence to deal with and manage intense emotions arising from loved ones’ deaths, past sexual abuse, relationship problems, workplace issues, and disappointments triggered by past experiences. They have played pivotal roles in my growth and development, and they’ve been integral in making adversity my advantage.
Gratitude is an energy force that attracts more positive things to you. When you practice gratitude, your heart is full of a deep appreciation for something. When you awaken this energy source, you see the world through a more positive and grateful lens and thus attract more of what you appreciate.
The law of polarity says there’s an opposite to everything. In and out, up and down, hot and cold, happy and sad, joy and pain, negative and positive, but never at the same time. A negative and a positive can’t live in the same space, and as such, when you practice gratitude, it is very difficult to be an angry, pessimistic, negative individual.
Another law—the law of vibration—states that everything in the universe is vibrating; nothing rests. A rock may appear to be completely stationary, but if you look at it under a powerful microscope, you will see that the rock’s component atoms are in fact vibrating. Vibration is energy, and so everything is energy.
Humans are not exempt from the law of vibration. At any given moment, you are vibrating at a certain frequency, and whatever vibrational frequency you put out into the universe is the energy you will attract back. By default, we vibrate at the frequency of our paradigms and belief systems, but often that frequency is not aligned with the version of ourselves we wish to become. Our vibrational frequency is a part of our subconscious mind, and we must learn to manifest results based on this fact. Gratitude is your secret weapon to maintaining the positive vibration you need to make the changes and get the results you desire. When you practice gratitude, you raise the frequency of your vibration, which will allow you to attract more things to be grateful for.
When we are faced with trauma and deep pain, like when we are grieving the death of a family member or friend or struggling with rejection, depression and sadness can set in. I have found gratitude to be the magical formula to counteract that. By choosing to change the focus of your thoughts, you can go from being sad to feeling deep appreciation.
The power of deep appreciation is apparent in the lives of all the successful people I have studied. The greatest among us all make use of gratitude as a key source of energy in their lives. Mastering this ability is vital to making adversity your advantage.
When you elevate your state of being to a certain vibration and frequency, you attract great things to your life. That’s the dial on the radio station that you want. You’re never going to get country music on the gospel station; you’ve got to find the frequency and get to the right channel. Fostering a state of gratitude is how you get the channel you want to be on.
Gratitude releases you. It has a profound effect on the way you think and feel, and thoughts and feelings become actions. At any given moment, I can think of my greatest gift—my grandmother, who loved me first and made me feel valued in this world—and with just that one thought, I can transform my entire state and see the world from a totally different lens. We all have that power.
You always have something to be grateful for. One of my favorite things that Oprah has said is that when you can’t think of anything else to say thank you for, go to your last breath. Be grateful that you had an opportunity to breathe—to have oxygen and to be alive. Not everyone got that option.
Zig Ziglar, one of the first pioneers of personal development, said that the healthiest human emotion is gratitude. He emphasized the law of the universe that a negative thought cannot exist in the same space as a positive one. Many times, people don’t want to be negative individuals, but due to their inherited belief systems, emotions, or paradigms, they can’t control their triggers or thoughts. Gratitude is the key here. You might not be able to prevent the negative thoughts from occurring, but you can balance them by focusing on positive thoughts instead.
The architect R. Buckminster Fuller said, “Never change things by fighting the existing reality…To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” You don’t need to fight the negative thoughts. Simply embrace them and then choose another thought. In this way you build a new model—you rewrite your story.
It’s hard to live a life of misery when you intentionally seek out gratitude. I advocate waking up every day and performing a practice of gratitude, acknowledging everything in your life that you appreciate. After you master a daily practice of appreciation, seek to have a continual attitude of gratitude. Walk through life looking for things to be grateful for—a sunny day, the checkout clerk who greets you with a smile, green lights on your way to work, a parking space right in front. You can find gratitude in all things.
Often gratitude is about flipping your perspective. Sometimes that means focusing on the good in your life instead of the bad, and sometimes that even means being grateful for your pain.
When I struggle with gratitude, I always go back to my grandmother, because I loved her more than I have loved anything. I first knew what love is because of the way she looked at me and because of the energy she exuded when I came around. Her death was the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through. But I learned to give it a new meaning. I flipped my perspective of her death, telling myself, “Wow, I got to feel and experience her love. There’s only one of her, and there’s only one of me, and we had a unique relationship that was just ours.” I’m grateful for that.
Nothing in your life is random or coincidental. Everything is happening perfectly as designed for you. If any single part of your life were different, then you would not be who you are today. If you hadn’t done “this,” then “that” wouldn’t have happened.
When you are in the midst of your pain, it is difficult to see its purpose, but eventually, months or years down the line, you will be able to look back on your life and see how everything, the good and bad, has been leading you to your new point. The boyfriend who broke your heart prepared you to meet a new person who is a much better fit for you. The job you lost led you down a path that ended up advancing your career. The sexual abuse you suffered gave you the strength to help others in similar situations.
Working on self-awareness and asking yourself empowering questions can help you create a state of gratitude for your pain even before you can see the end result—the sun after the rain. When faced with difficulties, ask yourself, “What is this here to teach me? What do I need to learn from this experience? How can I use this to my advantage?” Then reassure yourself, “Whatever it is, I am ready to learn and evolve into the next version of me.” When you look at pain and life through that lens, there’s no way to be miserable. When you assign a new, powerful meaning to your past circumstances, pain, and adversity, you are no longer at the mercy of those negative emotions. You are in control.
Now when I look back at painful experiences, I am able to say, “I’m grateful that it happened that way.” I’m grateful that I was raised in the home I was raised in and got introduced to basketball when I did, because it was my safety net. Later, I was able to make over a million dollars from coaching basketball, which I never intended to do. Now I’m in this position where I’m writing this book and telling this story. If any piece of my life had been different—if I hadn’t been adopted, if I hadn’t been sexually abused, if I hadn’t felt depressed and worthless, if I hadn’t turned to alcohol, if I hadn’t lost close friends and family—I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become the person I am today or the person I dream to be in the future. I’m grateful for the life I have, and I’m grateful for my experiences.
People who have gone through a great deal of adversity always say, “Look how far I’ve come.” The person from a third-world country who earns a degree from Harvard says, “Look how far I’ve come. I grew up on dirt floors, and here I am.” The once angry, broken little black girl who becomes a leader and empowers young black women all over the world says, “Look how far I’ve come.” The how-far-I’ve-come story is a powerful energy force. Gratitude for your humble beginnings can create energy that allows adversity to become a huge advantage. I always look in the rearview mirror and say, “God, look how far—look how far I’ve come.”
Just as you can—and should—be grateful for past events, you can practice gratitude into the future, using your imagination to be grateful for things you don’t have yet. As I wrote this book, I would look forward into the future and say, “I’m grateful that there’s a great book called Refuse to Lose: Seven Steps to Make Adversity Your Advantage. It’s an incredible book, and it’s going to uplift so many people and add value to the world.”
Using gratitude in this way helps create a future world that you want, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the feeling of a wish fulfilled. You’re downloading new information into your subconscious mind, and you are tuning yourself to the right vibration that will bring about the future. Gratitude gives you the energy you’ll need to make your goals and dreams a reality.
To build an attitude of gratitude, start with concrete gratitude exercises.
One of the easiest and most effective internal gratitude exercises is to list what you’re grateful for. Right now, go put pen to paper and write down ten things you are grateful for. That list is your starting point.
You should practice gratitude every single day. I recommend trying to start and end your day with gratitude. Personally, I write in a gratitude journal at night and read a gratitude list aloud each morning. There are also apps you can use to work on gratitude, like Five Minute Journal, Grateful, or My Gratitude Journal. Some apps give you an easy place to journal, and others send you reminders throughout the day to be grateful.
A gratitude journal is where you list the things that happened that day or in your life that you’re grateful for. It can be as simple as being grateful for someone who held the door open for you. Oprah recommends keeping a gratitude journal because it makes you actively look for gratitude opportunities throughout your day. Wherever your attention goes, energy flows, so when you look for things to be grateful for, you cultivate an attitude of gratitude.
A gratitude list is just that—a list of the things you’re grateful for. This list can include past gratitudes (things that have already occurred) or future gratitudes (things that are still yet to come). You might come up with new items each day, repeat items, delete items, or add items. As your life changes, it makes sense that you will have new things to be grateful for, necessitating changes in your list. I’ve included an example gratitude list at the end of the book in case you need help getting started.
My personal daily gratitude list contains dozens of items, with both past and future gratitudes. I like to call out people’s names in my gratitude list. By expressing my gratitude for them, I connect with their energy and their spirit, and maybe I can change the way I look at that person in the future. Sometimes I focus my gratitude on people I’m going to interact with that day. So I might say, “I’m so grateful for Kelsey. We’re going to have a meeting today, and I know it’s going to be incredible.” Then, when it’s time for the meeting, I enter from a place of appreciation and joy, and that person is going to feel the energy I’ve already begun building, helping ensure that the meeting is in fact incredible.
Other times, I express gratitude for the people who aren’t in my day-to-day life anymore. This helps me feel connected to them despite distance or their absence. As an example, my brother lives in California, but I wake up every morning and say, “I’m grateful for Jamel, because he’s the first friend I had. He introduced me to basketball and never begrudged me tagging along with him. He actually wanted me there, and his acceptance was the best gift. He was the first person to make me feel that I was good enough, and as an eight-year-old girl, his approval made me feel ten feet tall. He has irrefutably enhanced my life.”
I do sometimes adjust my list, but for the most part, the core of my list remains the same. I like repeating the same items day after day because of the power in repetition. By ingraining your gratitude list into your subconscious mind, it can become one of the tools you use to help rewrite your story, reinforcing the thoughts you want to embody. For instance, each morning, I tell myself, “Today, when I walk out my door, if adversity comes my way, I know I’m a warrior. I am grateful that I’m capable of whatever I need to do or become, in order to get through and over whatever challenges arise.”
First you decide, This is who I want to be. This is what I’m about. Then you can use your gratitude list to create that feeling of absolute certainty and faith in your wish fulfilled. Let’s say you want to lose fifty pounds. Oftentimes, we speak so negatively about our bodies—our weight, our teeth, our hair, everything. We kill ourselves with self-criticism. The universe hears that, and we invite that energy back into our world.
Instead, rewrite the story of “I’m fat—I hate my body and need to lose weight” to “I am so grateful that I have this body. I am grateful that I have the physical health needed to get on the treadmill today. I’m grateful that I have access to good, nutritious food. Every day, I am getting healthier and healthier. I love my body.” When you rewrite the story, you begin aligning to the energy frequency that is needed to bring about this future state. In this way, your gratitude will help you achieve the results you seek. Find things to love about yourself and be grateful for them, including the things you’re working on daily.
In addition to creating an internal gratitude list, another effective practice is to express your gratitude for others. You can write a letter or sit down and have a conversation with the influential people in your life where you tell them that you appreciate them and value what they’ve given you. This is an activity I implemented during my coaching career. I always encouraged my players to write a letter to their parents or whoever had influenced them—that coach or teacher.
In all of these gratitude practices, it is imperative that you believe your gratitude messages are true, whether they’re in the past, the present, or the future. At a Steve Harvey conference that I attended, he said that when he lists out what he’s thankful for in his life and what he would like to appear in his life, he always ends his prayer with “I believe these things to be true, and I expect your abundance in my life and receive these things now.” Words are powerful, but they need to be backed up by belief. You must expect your dreams and be open to receiving them. You can’t just go through the motions here; you must feel it.
This goes back to the law of attraction. When you truly believe in what you are saying, you are setting the stage for those things to come true in reality. For example, if you tell yourself that you’re grateful for the great attitude your son will demonstrate today and how he’s going to be a better role model for his younger sister, you will be bringing a positive attitude and energy to the situation, allowing it to happen more readily in reality.
Any sort of gratitude practice, whether you express it internally or externally, is empowering. It changes the way you see the world and makes it hard to be miserable. Be authentic to yourself. Try out a variety of gratitude exercises and then do what works for you.
Gratitude gives you energy, and, unlike other sources of energy, this one is a renewable resource. If you feel like you don’t have the energy to do whatever you’re trying to do, go to gratitude. It will be your energizer, the battery in your back or your secret weapon.
Gratitude is largely about what you give yourself. It’s about adopting a more positive, appreciative mindset that will attract good things back to yourself. Empathy, on the other hand, is what you give to other people. Empathy is how you become a better person for others, for the outside world.
Empathy means you can understand someone else’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences without experiencing it directly yourself and even without that person explicitly explaining it to you. Empathy is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and imagining how they must feel. If I am empathetic toward you, I can hear you. I’m sensitive to your struggles. I acknowledge you, your pain, and your efforts. Even though we haven’t gone through the same experiences, I can see myself in you and understand your journey.
I learned the true meaning of empathy while watching my mother die for two and a half years. Watching someone’s life come to an end will change the way you live your own life. I thought I was an empathetic person before my mother’s illness, but I wasn’t. I judged people that didn’t behave the way I did or that had different beliefs than I did or that didn’t share my thoughts and ideas. Doing this was wrong, and I was wrong for judging my mother the way I did all those years. I let my pain and anger stand in the way of my ability to see the human being in her and, more importantly, to see myself in her.
All of us can be empathetic, but many people practice empathy selectively. Society has separated us into boxes based on race, religion, gender, age, political beliefs, and dozens of other divisions. We’re separated and encouraged to empathize only with our group. Our country was built on that energy, and that’s why there’s oppression and inequality. We disregard people who are different than us. Our mission should be to learn to identify the similarities between us all so that we can practice empathy with anyone.
Selective empathy is what I experienced with my mother. I had zero emotional intelligence when it came to her. I was just a wild ball of hurt and anger. As is often the case, my anger came from unmet expectations. Many times, we define in advance what role someone is supposed to play in our life, and when they fail to live up to that definition, we judge them and get angry. Empathy helps with this anger because empathy releases us from being reliant on preconceived definitions of a person’s role. Instead of defining others’ roles in our life based on societal expectations or our personal paradigms, we allow people to simply be themselves. When we stop defining who and what people are supposed to be, we free ourselves from expectations. As expectations disappear, so does judgment.
Empathy ultimately enables forgiveness. I spent years and years disliking my mother until I sat with her for the last two and a half years of her life and watched her die. I was able to see her as Joretta, the human being, someone who had been hurt, someone who had fears, someone who needed love, someone who wanted to feel important and significant. I realized that she was just a person trying to do the best she could. And I could feel her. I felt her sadness. I listened to her, put myself in her position, and understood her world better simply by being in her space and empathizing.
Anytime you find yourself judging someone else, you lack empathy. I don’t care what their story is—if they’re a murderer, a drug addict, your dad, or the president. If you’re judging them and their behavior, then you lack empathy for their journey. You can disagree with their actions and beliefs, but this doesn’t mean you should then judge them. We are all more alike than we are different.
Today, I don’t harbor any negative feelings toward my mother. I can’t even find that old anger. I look at her and think, Gosh, she was trying the best she could. She had a house full of kids, and she was doing it by herself. She made sure we had great Christmases. She loved making us Easter baskets. She believed in God and introduced others to Christ. She was hardworking, always had two to three jobs. She was independent and feisty and stubborn, and she was such a strong person. I can have those thoughts now because I choose to look at her through a lens of gratitude and empathy.
You already know how to be empathetic. At some point in your life, you’ve felt others’ pain and sought to understand their journey. The key to becoming more empathetic is extending your empathy beyond your inner circle of loved ones to everyone in your life and beyond, no matter how different they are or how they might have hurt you in the past. I believe that if success doesn’t look like loving the people around you, then you’ve missed the whole point of life. You can’t call yourself a success if you have hate in your heart toward others simply because they’re different from you or because they’ve hurt you.
It’s important to find appropriate ways to understand people. One way is to get out of your world and experience other people and things that are different from you. Sometimes people are forced to interact with other cultures and peoples, whether it be at work, in the neighborhood, or at friendly gatherings. However, many people spend their entire lives surrounded by people similar to them. If you’re not forced to interact and connect with people different from you, it becomes all the more important for you to go out and make a conscious effort to do so. If you don’t, you miss out on the opportunity to better understand other people and their struggles and joys.
You likely know where your empathy gaps are. If there are certain groups you tend to judge or lack empathy for, make an effort to learn more about them. That may just give you the understanding and context necessary to be empathetic.
If you can’t interact one-on-one with people from different backgrounds than your own, start by reading a book or watching a movie or documentary that features a different perspective from your status quo paradigm. If you never step outside of your comfort zone and experience things you’re not accustomed to, you’ll continue operating on your downloaded systems of belief and go into assumption mode.
Other great exercises for expanding empathy are travel and volunteer work. These are great ways to enter spaces outside of your world. I talk about race a lot since it’s an issue that affects me and my people personally, but your empathy gap may involve other subgroups—cancer survivors, drug addicts, veterans, illegal immigrants, victims of human trafficking. The possibilities are endless.
Since I resigned from my coaching position, I’ve had my eyes opened to so many different hurts in the world. I went to a seminar where I listened to stories about human sex trafficking—young girls being kidnapped, forced to consume drugs and alcohol, and sold for sex. I’ve learned more about how our veterans return home from service and can’t mentally conform to civilization. They feel isolated and alone, often turning to drugs and alcohol. After one of my speeches, a young Hispanic man came up to me and told me about how his mom had just been deported three days prior. He was only eighteen, and he now had to figure out a way to support himself and his little brother. Every single person in this world has a story—unseen heartache, hopes and dreams, joys and struggles—but we often are so wrapped up in our own worlds that we don’t notice and, even worse, don’t care.
Actively seeking to build your empathy for all sorts of different people will build your character and increase your humility. When you work on your empathy, you become more vulnerable, and you widen your perspective of the world. This benefits you as much as it benefits those around you. When you can give your pain perspective and see that you’re not alone, it’s easier to deal with life when it punches you in the mouth.
On the most simplistic level, taking daily doses of your G and E vitamins will make you a better, happier person.
Gratitude is how you build your best life from within, by learning to appreciate everything. Being grateful is my happiness formula. Empathy is how you build your best life outside of yourself. It’s how you can look at other people nonjudgmentally, without expectations, and learn to accept people as they are.
For me, as a person of faith, I think of gratitude and empathy as our God values. They’re all about love—loving other people and loving our lives. When you practice gratitude and empathy daily, you bring love to the table in every circumstance and situation, thus ruling out hate, anger, and negativity.