THE GRATITUDE TRAP

We’ve all been well trained to say “please” and “thank you” as soon as we could talk. But what happens when being grateful becomes just another thing to make you feel small? LIA HYNES weighs in.

Im having lunch with a friend and we’re talking about how busy we are. Like many of us, she is juggling. Work. Kids. Social life. Suddenly, she catches herself. Something clicks in her head. “Of course, I’m really lucky to be so busy,” she says. “I’m so grateful.” As if she hasn’t worked incredibly hard, and gained a huge skill set over the years that has led to her being so busy, so in demand.

I want to shake her. Because her success is down to so much more than luck. She doesn’t need to be grateful, she needs to be proud of herself. To be clear, I am not suggesting that gratitude is a bad thing. Obviously, it has its uses. Oprah puts her entire success down to the keeping of a gratitude diary. Studies have found that being grateful can increase happiness by as much as 25 per cent. So I get it. Gratitude is good. Or at least, it can be.

But there is a flipside. When gratitude is used against us. A box to keep you in, keep you silent. Because if you’re being grateful, you can’t complain. And it can make it hard to ask for more. Like being paid properly for your work. Like gender equality in the workplace. Like flexible working hours.

And sometimes we need to complain.

You should be grateful for being able to work flexibly and to see your kids. Oh, and it means doing a five-day job in four days.

You should be grateful to be able to scrape a living in a creative role. Oh, and we’re not paying you, it’s for credit. If you don’t, someone else will.

Don’t ask for more money, better conditions, gender equality. You should be grateful just to be here.

The gratitude trap.

Dublin-born, London-based fashion journalist Caroline Ferry has written for many of Britain’s biggest fashion titles. “I literally can’t tell you how much experience I’ve had deeply inside the gratitude trap,” she reflects. “It is the only consistent thing throughout my career. It started for me in school; I had no interest in anything vocational. So when it came to working and interning in magazines after university, it was the first time I was really engaged. I couldn’t believe that I could work in something that I loved; my gratitude was through the roof. Like, ‘Oh my god, thank you, I’d love to work an 18-hour day.’ ‘No, let me buy you a coffee, Editor of the magazine. I’ve got tonnes of money on my unpaid internship, thank you so much,’” she recalls now.

“I felt so happy to belong, to be able to make money, and that people saw something in me that I hadn’t seen in myself. I would do anything for them. I’m going to live in this fashion cupboard for the rest of my life. Are there any windows? No? Absolutely no problem. What was unsaid was, ‘Someone else will do it if you don’t.’ That is what you’re fed throughout intern years. You’re so lucky. A million girls want your job.”

It was only when she moved into a different line of work and began working with more men that her attitude changed.

“It’s not even that I’ve been inspired by them, in the way that they’re like, ‘don’t ask, don’t get’. I was actually more like, ‘God, I’ve the same job as these guys that are absolutely useless, I am

doing their job a million times better, working a million times harder, and I know they’re earning more than me.’

So it was more in spite of them than inspired by them that I had an awakening. I thought to myself, ‘I need to not be so grateful now. Because no one’s grateful that

I’m here. Otherwise, they’d pay me the same.’”

Someone who knows all about imposed gratitude is Anna Whitehouse, aka @mother_pukka, a British journalist whose campaign #flexappeal aims for flexible working to be made a right, rather than the privilege it is currently so often considered to be.

At the moment in Ireland, there is no law in place to allow workers to request flexible working – it is entirely at an employer’s discretion. In Britain, an employee can make a flexible working request after 26 weeks in a position. Both approaches set you up to believe, as Anna, who receives a huge amount of feedback from Ireland, puts it, that flexibility is “something you have to earn. It’s a bonus ball. Whereas what flexible working is actually about is counterbalancing the huge gender inequality in the workforce.”

Anna reflects that she hears from so many women

“a mindset of ‘I’m so lucky to have this’. If we have that attitude of gratitude for everything we have

– that someone is allowing you to do what? Five days of work in four, for less money? That’s extortion.

That’s not something to be grateful for.”

“Challenge it,” Whitehouse, who is a mother of two daughters, urges. “If not for yourself, for your daughters. Don’t be left feeling like you are in a lucky position. None of us are currently in a lucky position.

There is still a gender pay gap. There are still so few women in boardrooms.”

The point here is not to dismiss gratitude. If gratitude comes from within, then it is a good thing. It is when it is imposed from outside that things get manipulative.

“If you know your value, if you understand what you’re bringing to the table, then gratitude will have a different feeling,” explains personal confidence coach Maria Lynch (confidencebuilding.ie). “If I know what I bring to the table, then I am grateful that I have the opportunity to present myself in this environment,” she continues. “Which is different to ‘I’m grateful that somebody let me be here.’”

“We can force ourselves to have it, but it will not come from an authentic place. It will not be in your best interests, it will keep you small,” Maria explains. “When people manipulate your emotional state, they are working against you, rather than in your favour.”

Of course, one of the things we’re all trying to avoid when we engage in the grateful dance is the possibility that we might appear arrogant. Big-headed. Full of ourselves.

“The big thing, and I hear it all the time, and I challenge it all the time, is really successful women standing up and saying they’re lucky. I think that is a misnomer,” says designer and businesswoman Sonya Lennon. Lucky is, of course, another way of saying I’m grateful. Of placing the kudos for something elsewhere than yourself and your own talent and hard work.

Yes, Sonya specifies, we are lucky by virtue of being born into a western country with a relatively stable economy. “However, to get to the position that they’re in, these women have worked really, really hard, and made tough decisions, and they’ve gone through all sorts of worlds of pain to stand on that platform and say, ‘I’ve done it.’ So luck isn’t the main piece of that, and I think we have to own our achievements. Rather than deflecting on to the ephemeral. We need to own it. I don’t think you hear many men stand on stage and say how lucky they are.”

What is the answer? Ciara Kelly, a doctor, journalist and broadcaster, reflects that she has always had what she describes as quite a male mindset in her approach to work. “I think it’s really important to re-empower yourself. To just remember what it is that you actually want. To keep your focus on that, and not worry about being grateful to people. Be nice to people, of course, but be true to yourself. If you want something, why should you feel grateful, or beholden? I never saw myself as anything other than an equal who was competing with everybody else. On that basis, the only thing I was ever grateful for was my ability to do something. My parents gave me a start in life. I was lucky enough to be reasonably clever. I have my health. I’m grateful for those things. People have done me favours, and I would always say thank you, but I don’t think we, particularly as women, need to act like we’re getting a favour just by being there.”