A Mason's Work

Gratitude exists on a spectrum. In this episode, we dive into the "shallow end"—which isn't a negative term, but rather the essential starting point: Appreciation. This is the outside-in feeling of noticing a light breeze, a good cup of tea, or a colleague's quality work.

Key Highlights:
  • Minimum Viable Awareness: Appreciation is the "floor" required before deeper gratitude can emerge.
  • The IT Guy Syndrome: Why our brains are wired for "negativity bias" and gap analysis—only noticing when things break rather than when they work perfectly.
  • Flipping the Script: How to consciously carve out time to increase your "noticing" sensitivity.
  • Today’s Challenge: Stop what you are doing at one point today and notice just one thing that is working exactly as it should.
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  • Tim Dedman
  • Jorge

Creators and Guests

Host
Brian Mattocks
Host and Founder of A Mason's Work - a podcast designed to help you use symbolism to grow. He's been working in the craft for over a decade and served as WM, trustee, and sat in every appointed chair in a lodge - at least once :D

What is A Mason's Work?

In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.

[00:00] Yesterday, we talked about what gratitude does for your performance, for your team,
[00:05] for the people around you.
[00:07] Today, I want to get into what gratitude actually is, because I think most people are only aware
[00:13] of kind of one version of it.
[00:15] At least when we say gratitude, they think of one side of the coin, as it were, or one
[00:22] end of the spectrum.
[00:23] But on the, let's say the shallower end of the spectrum, and not that shallower is good
[00:28] or bad, it's just maybe the place you have to start.
[00:33] At one end of the spectrum is what I would call appreciation.
[00:37] It's what most people are familiar with.
[00:41] It's that outside-in kind of feeling where you notice something in your environment.
[00:49] You see a good piece of work that someone did.
[00:51] You had a conversation that goes somewhere useful.
[00:54] You see something on the road and you, wow, that's beautiful.
[01:00] Or you get this just the right moment where it's, you know, a light breeze or just the
[01:08] right temperature in your tea or coffee.
[01:12] You register at that moment, like, this is good.
[01:15] I appreciate this.
[01:17] I like it.
[01:18] Um, that's the kind of prompt that we're talking about.
[01:22] That's an appreciation sort of prompt that your body and your mind create for you.
[01:30] Um, when the environment is in some way pleasing the interoceptive sort of language here, the,
[01:37] that feeling that's making its way, uh, you know, from the outside, when something good
[01:43] happens through the inside to a lived experience of appreciation is kind of the way the early
[01:50] parts of the gratitude process work.
[01:54] The appreciation appreciation kind of thing is something that you can do and cultivate on
[02:03] a daily basis.
[02:04] It's something on any given day, like a Tuesday, you can, you know, without going through a ritual
[02:10] or without having done anything in particular, you can notice these things in your day.
[02:15] And as you start to build that sensitivity, that awareness, uh, you can move to, uh, higher
[02:25] levels of gratitude.
[02:27] So appreciation is really just like we talked about last week with the minimum viable environment
[02:32] for work, uh, as the floor of work that you need to have before you can start.
[02:37] Appreciation starts to become the minimum sort of viable conditions for gratitude to, uh,
[02:45] the deeper levels of gratitude to emerge.
[02:47] It's, uh, something that you kind of can't skip because the more you train that sensitivity,
[02:53] that awareness, that, um, appreciation, the more frequent you can access more frequently
[03:00] you can access the higher levels of gratitude and what that really kind of feels like.
[03:05] But let's stay focused on appreciation.
[03:09] It's, it's a process that is, uh, strangely enough, repeatable and you can cultivate this
[03:18] awareness as you go.
[03:20] You don't have to develop a complicated journaling process or some sort of meditation practice
[03:27] per se, although I recommend all of those things.
[03:30] Um, what it does take is, uh, a conscious, uh, intention to take a moment of time to carve
[03:39] out a little piece of time in any given day or any given process or cycle to increase your
[03:49] noticing, to increase the things that you are looking for your sensitivities and awareness
[03:55] to, again, cultivate that sense of appreciation.
[04:00] When I say this is harder to do, uh, cutting time out, uh, is one thing, right?
[04:07] So you can say, okay, well, I'm going to take five minutes at the end of this hour and I'm
[04:11] going to think about this and see what happens.
[04:13] When we are going through our everyday life, however, it's very common that your only sort
[04:22] of lens is, um, that gap analysis that we kind of talked about a little bit yesterday,
[04:28] where you're looking for what's missing or what's broken or what you need to fix or repair
[04:34] or mend, or in some way bring back to whole, what we don't notice is the kinds of things
[04:44] that are already doing exactly what they're supposed to.
[04:47] They're already delivering the results that they're supposed to have.
[04:51] That bias is a negativity bias.
[04:54] It's this, um, this sort of mental frame of mind that you're running because that's largely
[05:00] how people operate in general.
[05:04] All of the work is usually, uh, in your everyday life is usually is designed essentially to close
[05:12] these gaps, to, to identify an ideal state and close it.
[05:16] And in that process, we lose the sensitivity or we push away maybe that awareness of what
[05:25] is really also working well and, uh, doing kind of doing the job.
[05:30] Uh, this is a subtle note to your IT guys in the world.
[05:35] No one calls them up on a regular day when the computer is working just fine.
[05:41] This is kind of a challenge when you start to really begin to develop your sense of appreciation.
[05:50] You need to take that time and flip that mental script to make it work.
[05:56] So today's challenge is simple.
[05:58] At some point today, stop what you're doing and notice one thing that's working.
[06:06] You don't have to write it down.
[06:07] You don't have to do anything.
[06:08] Just start the noticing process.
[06:10] That's the beginning of that minimum, uh, viable awareness that you can use to begin the appreciation
[06:22] process, which leads to what we'll talk about more tomorrow, which is really kind of a deeper
[06:29] version of gratitude.