Julia Child brought the “art of French cooking” to the American populace in 1960s through her cookbooks and television show. To gain the culinary skills that earned her the book contract (and the adoration of housewives across the United States), she studied at the prestigious Cordon Bleu cooking school in France and worked under master chefs. She logged thousands of hours in the kitchen, cooking recipes repeatedly to perfect them for American home cooks to learn from. She made so many batches of mayonnaise that she reportedly had to dispose of them in the toilet!
Child, along with the likes of Bill Gates, the Beatles, and chess champions, invested so many hours in honing their skills that they became experts in their fields. Contemporary thought has popularized the notion of logging some 10,000 hours to become an expert. But the research of K. Anders Ericsson revealed that being deliberate in practicing the skill is even more important than the number of hours invested in practice. To move toward expertise, one doesn’t merely log hours; one must be purposeful in honing the desired skill during those practice sessions.
Move Over Mayo
Gratitude is something that, for millennia, God has indicated through Scripture should be an integral part of life (see Psalm 107:1, 1 Thessalonians 5:18). Modern science has corroborated God’s wisdom, showing that gratitude improves our mental health and positively impacts our relationships with others. It’s now widely recommended to “practice” gratitude for overall health and well-being.
If one develops expertise in something by practicing that skill—deliberately—for thousands of hours, how might one “practice” gratitude with the focus needed to become proficient at it?
Should proficiency be the goal?
Probably not. Gratitude isn’t an achievement or a destination. There’s no credential earned to demonstrate one’s so-called expertise in being grateful.
But perhaps it is a skill –one that helps us become more attuned to God’s presence and work in even the most mundane (or difficult) aspects of our daily lives.
To practice something deliberately requires us to break down the skill into its discrete parts, emulating each aspect in nuanced detail and repeating it. The ingredients in Julia’s mayonnaise were the same as everyone else’s: eggs, vinegar, oil, salt, and mustard. But what she learned through making thousands of batches was how the temperature of the elements, how quickly they were combined, and for how long (and how vigorously) they were beaten together affected the result. That repeated effort is what allowed her to perfect the process and make it instructive for others.
Batches of Gratitude
Though I have moments of gratitude, I’d hardly call myself an expert in it. Much to the chagrin of many sandwich makers, I don’t care for mayonnaise. But I very much want to become a person characterized by gratitude. The skill ingredients in our recipe for practicing gratitude might be:
- Noticing: slowing down to reflect on where we see God at work around us—in our own lives, the lives of others, and the world at large (Psalm 107:43).
- Documenting: journaling about those observations, preserving them as a record of His faithfulness, evidence of His work (Psalm 77:11–12).
- Rehearsing: like mental practice, re-reading those journal entries (and the true stories of God’s people throughout history) can prime our gratitude when we don’t “feel” grateful (Psalm 119:49–50).
- Retelling: there’s nothing like teaching a skill to someone else to cement our own learning. Make a regular (perhaps daily) habit of telling others where you’ve experienced God’s goodness (Psalm 71:15–16, Mark 5:19).
By incorporating these “ingredients” into our daily rhythms—by practicing them purposefully—we’ll begin to refine the skill of being grateful. Not to arrive at a threshold of achievement, but to become characterized by a posture of gratitude that is attuned to God’s presence and expressive of our appreciation for His work in creation and our individual and corporate lives.
The best part: no “practice” batches of gratitude will ever be wasted.
—Written by Kirsten Holmberg. Used by permission from the author.
