Ask someone what they're grateful for and they will tell you: their health, their family, their home. All true, all sincere, and all completely inert.
You already knew those. Writing them down for the ninth Tuesday running doesn't tell you anything you didn't have on Monday.
The question is doing no work
A good prompt makes you look somewhere you weren't already looking. “What are you grateful for” points you at the biggest, most obvious things in your life which are exactly the things you have already thought about.
So the page fills up, the box gets ticked, and nothing shifts.
What works instead: make it smaller and stranger
Try these, which are the questions from page 52 of Calm:
Something that went right today that you'd have missed if nobody had asked.
Something you ate or drank this week that was better than it needed to be.
A thing someone did for you that they'd have forgotten by lunchtime.
Something you saw out of a window that you didn't mention to anyone.
Something that was funny and that you'd struggle to explain to anyone else.
A small thing that works. An object, a route, a habit that you take entirely for granted.
Every one of those requires you to go and look. That's the whole difference.
The test
Could this prompt appear, word for word, in any other book in this category? If yes, it isn't earning its page.
Written by the person who makes Mili Method. Calm is out now: 96 pages, digital £14, print £22.
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