Realizing the Power of Gratitude
When he first started coaching, Steve specialized in supporting entrepreneurs to build their businesses.
However, his emotional and physical health began to suffer soon after he started. He was struggling with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which came with a range of mental challenges, such as stress, anxiety, and depression.
Steve tried various different solutions to feel better and take back control of his life and career, some of which only made his situation worse. It was around this time that he learned about gratitude:
“The very first article that I read was at PositivePsychology.com. [Even] having been in upper management in the medical community and having access to great doctors, nobody had ever suggested this to me.
So I started practicing gratitude, and I noticed over about six weeks, I started to feel better. My mindset changed. I had a fundamental shift in how I felt, what I was going to do, and my focus. Everything really started to change. And my gut issue that I was suffering from also improved.”
When Steve realized the significant changes he was making to his own wellbeing, he was inspired to make gratitude the focus of his coaching.
“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to revamp my coaching program [and] rather than helping people start businesses, help and inspire people to create a grateful mindset?’ Because I think if you have a grateful mindset and you make that the foundation for your business, you approach everything from that grateful mindset.”
In redesigning his program, Steve’s first focus was building a gratitude community where people could support one another.
For this, he had a specific vision.
The Gut Gratitude App would be a platform and community where people could help one another develop a gratitude mindset and learn practices to change their lives holistically.
It was particularly important to Steve that the Gut Gratitude App would “embrace the full spectrum” and acknowledge the wide range of human emotions. Drawing on his own experiences, he wanted to create a community “that supports you with the desire to have a grateful mindset, but also acknowledges the moments when you’re having different emotions.”
Steve started providing the Gut Gratitude Community with features and resources based on not just thankfulness and appreciation, but other positive psychology topics, too.
As he did so, he refined the approach that also informs his coaching work:
“It has gratitude as a foundation, [along with] mindfulness, meditation, motivation, letting go of toxic things in people, setting goals or success rituals, and then finally, living in the present. I believe that combination of elements can create a joyous life.”
When choosing resources to use with coaching clients or the Gut Gratitude App community, Steve emphasizes the research behind the tools: “I take it very, very seriously and mindfully because I really want to make a difference. I want to be able to deliver transformational coaching where we don’t just ‘solve the problem.’”
For example, he prefers to reference a toolkit like the 17 Gratitude Exercises because “they’re science-based typically. And if they’re not, there’s usually a study behind them.”
Steve also wants to maintain a consistently professional brand image as he builds Gut Gratitude. For instance, he reviewed the Mindfulness X© masterclass to expand and refresh his knowledge before covering mindfulness as a topic: “It was the one that stood out where I felt I needed the most support in articulating.”
