4 Signs That You’re a Truly Grateful Person

How do you tell if you’re a truly grateful person?

To study individual differences in gratitude, researchers typically use self-report rating scales, of which the best-known is the six-item Gratitude Questionnaire, or GQ-6. Participants rate statements on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Responses are then summed, with higher scores indicating higher levels of gratitude.

I admire the GQ-6’s elegance and brevity and have used it in my own research. But it may have difficulty distinguishing among people at the grateful end of the spectrum. Across several studies, participants have reported scores clustered near the top of the scale. In one study of U.S. professionals, the average GQ-6 score was 38.50, within a theoretical range of 6 to 42. That’s an average response of about 6.4 on a 7-point scale.

Maybe many people really are very grateful. But high scores could also reflect people’s tendency to engage in socially desirable responding when completing the GQ-6. That is, many people think of gratitude as a desirable trait to have, and previous research has shown that their responses to the GQ-6 partially reflect their attempt to describe themselves in especially favorable terms.

This doesn’t mean the GQ-6 is invalid. But questionnaires may not tell the whole story.

If I want a richer picture of how gratitude operates in your life, I’d invite you to tell me stories about your life. I wouldn’t necessarily ask for a story that demonstrates gratitude. Instead, I might ask you to describe a memorable incident from the past week, the past year, or your childhood. Who was involved? When and where did it happen? Why is the event memorable?

Researchers call this the narrative approach. I like it because I believe human beings are inherently storytellers—we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives, and we tell others stories about our lives to explain how we became the person we are. And you can learn a lot about yourself from the stories you tell.

This is the third post in a mini-series on the narrative approach to understanding gratitude. In the first post, I introduced the life story: the overarching narrative through which people explain how they became who they are. You might call it the big story of your life. I argued that grateful people understand themselves as both receivers and givers of goodness.

But the big story is built from smaller ones, namely, mini stories and middle stories, which are the focus of this post.

Mini stories describe discrete episodes lasting from a few minutes to a day: lunch with a friend, a visit to the zoo, or receiving important medical news.

Middle stories describe broader periods of life, such as high school, recovering from an illness, or childhood summers with grandparents.

Stories are not unfiltered windows into the self. There’s an editorial element in storytelling. To understand how gratitude appears in mini and middle stories, I’d pay attention not only to what happened but also to how the narrator makes sense of them. How does the narrator explain what caused the events in these stories and what they reveal about themselves or others?

But I wouldn’t simply count how often someone uses the words “grateful” or “gratitude.” Those words can be used habitually or performatively. Instead, I would look for recurring patterns of grateful interpretation.

I suspect the following four themes are likely to appear in grateful stories: gifts, grace, givers, and generativity.

1. Gifts

Grateful people tell stories about benefits they did not create or fully earn.

These gifts may come from other people, circumstances, nature, or chance. They might include a friend’s encouragement, an unexpected opportunity, good weather, or beautiful scenery.

In their stories, grateful people’s attention is drawn not only to what went wrong but also to the goodness that entered their lives.

2. Grace

Grateful people notice moments when kindness, patience, forgiveness, or opportunity exceeded what they think they were entitled to. I call this the abundance mindset and it shows up in their stories.

For example, they might mention a moment where they screwed up badly but, to their surprise, their supervisor or spouse responded with kindness rather than judgment.

3. Givers

Grateful people notice not only the gifts they receive but also the people who provide them.

In their stories, they name the teachers, relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and strangers who contributed to their happiness or success.

4. Generativity

Grateful narrators are deeply aware of how much they’ve been blessed. In turn, grateful people tend to express generativity. They are generous to others as a means of paying it forward. These experiences of making a positive difference in the world show up in their stories.

No single story can establish whether someone is a grateful person. But recurring patterns across many stories may reveal habits of grateful interpretation.

If you keep a journal, read through what you have written. Notice how you describe the events of your life. If you have a spouse, partner, or close friend, ask what kinds of stories they hear you tell most often.

Do the 4Gs appear? Do your mini and middle stories contain gifts you did not create, moments of unexpected grace, givers who enriched your life, and experiences of generativity?

And just as our stories reveal our gratitude—or lack of it—so too can they be used as a tool to help us cultivate gratitude. Here’s a simple recommendation: if you want to be grateful, find ways to incorporate the 4Gs into the stories you tell yourself and others.

Suppose you’re walking home one evening and pause to notice a beautiful sunset. That’s a mini story from your life. You might think, “Wow, the sunset is beautiful!”

But you could go further to recognize it as a gift: something you did not create, cannot possess, and were fortunate to witness. You could further reflect on how precious this experience is. You recognize that not everyone has access to it. After all, there are people who work indoors during sunset who don’t get to witness it.

These small acts of interpretation turn an ordinary event into a grateful story.

Let the 4Gs become an integral part of the stories you tell yourself and others. But don’t just notice these grateful stories. Write them down. Recount them. Tell them to others.

Because, in the end, you become the stories you tell.

If this article resonated with you, you may also enjoy my Psychology Today blog Gratefully.

References

Andersson, L. M., Giacalone, R. A., & Jurkiewicz, C. L. (2007). On the relationship of hope and gratitude to corporate social responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 70(4), 401–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-006-9118-1

Murray, M. (2003). Narrative psychology and narrative analysis. In P. M. Camic, J. E. Rhodes, & L. Yardley (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology: Expanding perspectives in methodology and design (pp. 95–112). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10595-006