Gratitude Worksheet

A professional whose attention has collapsed onto problems, risks, and shortfalls comes to sessions with a consistent narrative of what's wrong. They are not catastrophizing — many of the concerns are real — but their attention is so fully occupied by what needs to change that they cannot hold anything positive in view simultaneously. The six-prompt table interrupts that pattern by requiring responses in categories the client normally bypasses.

Don't argue with the client's problem focus before introducing the tool. 'We're going to spend fifteen minutes on a different kind of inventory. Six prompts — today's gratitude, people you're grateful for, something awesome that happened, a best memory, the best part of your day, something that made you smile. Not to contradict anything we've discussed — just to build the other half of the picture.' The 'other half' framing avoids positioning gratitude as a corrective, which clients who are legitimately dealing with real problems often reject.

Watch the 'something awesome that happened' and 'something that made me smile' prompts for this client. These are the lowest-stakes prompts — they don't require self-reflection or evaluation, just noticing. If a client cannot populate these prompts, the attentional narrowing is significant. Note which prompts produce responses and which don't: the blank ones often tell you more than the completed ones.

After completing the table, ask the client to read their entries aloud. Then: 'Does anything here surprise you — something you wrote that you wouldn't have predicted you'd say before sitting down?' For clients whose attention has narrowed, the surprise is often in a minor positive entry that surfaced during the exercise — something small that they didn't initially think of as relevant. That's the practice working.

A professional who intellectually values gratitude practice has never established a consistent form for it. They have tried freeform journaling and abandoned it. The six-prompt table provides a structured format that requires no creativity — just responses to specific prompts — which makes it easier to maintain than an open-ended practice.

Emphasize the format's design. 'The six prompts are specific categories, not open-ended questions. You don't have to decide what to write about — you just respond to each prompt. That's the feature that makes it easier to maintain than a blank journal. Five minutes, six prompts, done.' For clients who have abandoned freeform practices, the structured constraint is actually the selling point.

Watch for the 'best memories' prompt specifically. This prompt asks for something from any time period, not just today — which gives clients access to positive material even on genuinely difficult days. A client who leaves this prompt blank on a bad day may not have realized they can draw from any point in their history. If the prompt is consistently blank, ask what they wrote last time the category felt easy to respond to.

After two to three consistent weeks, look at the 'best part of my day' entries across multiple uses. 'What shows up in this column most often?' The recurring 'best part' often reveals what matters most to the client in their current life — and sometimes it's something they don't normally count as significant. That information can inform goal-setting, prioritization, and what the client should be protecting.

A coaching session has gone into difficult territory — a significant setback, a painful acknowledgment, a hard decision. The client is present and has done real work in the session but is finishing in a raw state. The six-prompt table is used as a session close: fifteen minutes of directed noticing before the client transitions back to the rest of their day.

Name the function explicitly before using it in this context. 'We've done some hard work in this session. Before you head back into your day, I want to spend fifteen minutes on a different kind of noticing — not to dismiss what we just did, but to give you something to carry out alongside it. Six prompts, brief responses, and we'll close with what you want to keep from today.' The close with 'what to keep' anchors the session's productive work rather than only the difficulty.

In a post-session use, watch whether the client can access the lighter prompts — 'something that made me smile,' 'something awesome that happened' — or whether the weight of the session's content is overwhelming the exercise. If the client genuinely cannot access positive noticing after a difficult session, don't force the exercise. The inability to complete the table in that context is itself information about how the session landed.

In this context, the debrief is brief and intentional. After completing the table: 'Of what you just wrote — what do you want to carry with you into the rest of your day? And what do you want to set down?' The two-part question creates a deliberate transition: acknowledging that what was hard in the session can be held at a distance for the rest of the day, while the positive observations from the table are something to carry.