It’s not to much to say that David Steindl-Rast is the ambassador of gratitude. The Benedictine monk is known worldwide for his teaching of practices of gratitude. “Practices” may actually make it sound more difficult or complex that it needs to be, however, as Brother David’s counsel in this TED Talk is really rather simple. Reminding us of the three instructions we were given as children when approaching a street corner, he tells us to “Stop, look, and go.” Stop – slow down, take a break, pause long enough to take a breath. Look – notice and pay attention to just how many things are given to us freely and without...

Do you have seven minutes to change your life? Really. This is one of the more powerful and important videos I’ve seen in a long time. It’s about happiness. In particular, it’s about the connection between gratitude and happiness. As it turns out, expressing gratitude is one of the most effective ways to increase happiness. Which is what makes this video powerful – not the idea itself, which we’ve explored in other places on this blog – but because the good folks at Soul Pancake actually took research about the connection between expressing gratitude and levels of happiness and replicated the experiment and filmed it for us to...