What If You Could Be Grateful forthe Hard Stuff Too?

By Jason Shelfer

Host of The Living Lucky® Podcast | LivingLucky.com

I want to start with what this blog is not.

It is not a pep talk. It is not a suggestion that you slap a smile over something painful and call it gratitude. It is not toxic positivity dressed up in nicer language. I have zero interest in any of that, and I don’t think you do either.

What I want to talk about is something harder and more honest and, in my experience, more transformative than any gratitude practice most people ever try. We call it Radical Gratitude. And the reason we put the word “radical” in front of it is because it asks something of you that the regular version doesn’t.

It asks you to be grateful not just for the good stuff. But for the hard stuff too.

Not because the hard stuff wasn’t hard. It was. Maybe it still is. But because when you look back with enough honesty and enough distance, something becomes visible that wasn’t visible when you were in the middle of it.

The hard stuff shaped you. And some of what it shaped you into is the best of who you are.

Let me tell you about a conversation I had with a woman I was coaching a few years ago. She had been through a divorce that gutted her — financially, emotionally, in every way you can imagine. She came to me still carrying a lot of anger, a lot of grief, and an understandable certainty that the years she’d lost were simply gone. Stolen. When I first introduced the idea of Radical Gratitude, she looked at me like I’d suggested something offensive.

“You want me to be grateful for that?”

I told her I wasn’t asking her to be grateful for the pain. I was asking her to get curious about what the pain had given her. Those are two completely different things.

She thought about it for a long time. And then, slowly, she started to name things. The strength she hadn’t known she had. The friendships that revealed themselves in her hardest season. The clarity about what she actually wanted from her life that she never would have found if everything had stayed comfortable. The version of herself that only existed because she’d had to become her.

By the end of that session she was crying. Not from grief. From something that looked a lot like relief.

That is Radical Gratitude. Not pretending the divorce wasn’t devastating. Choosing to also see what it built.

There is a concept in psychology called post-traumatic growth — the idea that people who experience significant hardship often report not just recovering, but growing beyond where they were before. More resilient. More empathetic. Clearer about what matters. More willing to take risks because they’ve already survived the thing they were most afraid of.

The research on this is substantial and it keeps pointing to the same thing: the people who experience the most growth after adversity are not the ones who suffered the least. They’re the ones who found meaning in what they went through. Who asked not just “why did this happen to me” but “what did this make possible?” “how did this happen for me?”

The second and third questions are Lucky Questions. And they change everything about what your brain goes looking for.

Jana’s story is the clearest example of this I have ever witnessed up close.

On May 23rd, 1990, Jana was paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident in rural Kansas. She was 15. She spent weeks at Craig Hospital in Colorado crying herself to sleep every night. By any measure, that is one of the hardest things a person can go through.

And yet.

The woman Jana became — the Elite Multi-Medalist, the World Champion at 50, the Hall of Famer, the coach and speaker and creator who has reached people in 134 countries, the woman who built Living Lucky® out of four words written in a journal — that woman exists because of what happened on May 23rd, 1990. Not in spite of it. Because of it.

I am not saying the accident was a gift in any simple sense. I am saying that the life Jana has lived — the depth of it, the reach of it, the meaning of it — is inseparable from the hardest thing that ever happened to her.

That is what Radical Gratitude looks like when it has decades to breathe.

Now let me bring this closer to home. Because most of us are not processing a spinal cord injury. We’re processing a job we lost, or a relationship that ended, or a version of ourselves we had to let go of, or a dream that didn’t work out the way we planned. And we’re carrying those things with more weight than they deserve, because we’ve never stopped to ask what they gave us.

Here’s what I’ve found, after years of coaching and after living this philosophy myself: the things we most resist being grateful for are often the things that did the most important work on us. The failure that forced a better direction. The ending that made room for something new. The loss that revealed who actually showed up. The season of struggle that built the muscle you’re standing on right now.

None of that means the hard thing wasn’t hard. It means the hard thing wasn’t only hard.

This is where journaling becomes one of the most powerful tools you own. Because Radical Gratitude is not a feeling that just arrives. It is a practice. It is something you build through honest, deliberate reflection — the kind that only happens when you slow down enough to really look.

When you write the hard thing down and then sit with the question:

what did this give me that I couldn’t have gotten any other way?

You don’t have to find the answer immediately. You don’t have to feel grateful before you’re ready.

Radical Gratitude is not a performance. It’s a direction you point yourself in, again and again, until one day you look back and you can honestly say: I am who I am because of all of it. The good chapters and the hard ones. The wins and the losses. The seasons that felt like they were ending something and turned out to be building something.

The fourth question in our 4-Minute Formula is “How lucky am I?” And on the days when life is good and everything is flowing, that question is easy. But on the hard days — the days when the answer doesn’t come quickly, when you have to sit with it and look for it — that’s when it does its deepest work.

Because the habit of asking “How lucky am I?” even on the hard days is what trains your brain to find the thing that is still true even when everything feels heavy. The breath in your lungs. The person who checked in. The fact that you are still here, still asking, still growing. That is not small. That is everything.

Start where you are. Think of one hard thing you’ve been through — not the hardest thing, just one hard thing — and write it down. Then ask yourself honestly:
What did that season give me?
What did I learn?
What did I become?
Who showed up?
What became clear?

You might be surprised what your pen finds when you ask the right question.

The 4-Minute Formula Journal gives you a daily space to practice this — including the question that started it all. Available on Amazon and at livinglucky.com.

Why is it that even the hardest chapters of my life were quietly building the best version of me?

Write that down. By hand. Let your brain go looking. It will find more than you expect.

Start Living Lucky® — gratitude for the good stuff is a start. Gratitude for the hard stuff is where the real transformation lives.