What the Paris Olympics has shown us about a deeper notion of gratitude

I don’t know about you, but I have always been just as interested in the individual stories of an athlete’s journey or their words after an event as I am in the event itself. To me these Olympic Games are characterised by expressions of gratitude more than any other Games I’ve seen. In so many cases, when the athlete is interviewed after they get out of the pool or are on the side of the track, there seems to be less talk about the race or the medal they have won or lost, and more a need to express thanks to all the people who have helped them to get there. They want to acknowledge the debt owed to their fellow competitors, to their parents, their coaches, the fans there and at home.

Many commentators also seem to be congratulating competitors on their efforts and the process of getting to the Games just as much as winning a medal. Here in Australia, we even see advertisements focusing on all the people who were there to support the athlete and it being about their medal, their Games. We hear slogans of connectivity and “we couldn’t get there alone”.

This is significant for many reasons. It signifies a break from the tradition founded on Aristotle, who proclaimed that we should avoid being grateful as it would force us to admit that we owe something to someone and this would take away from our human greatness. Gratitude to others would diminish our sense of being ‘self-made’. It’s this very tradition that emphasises individualism, affording status and position to the genius and hard work of the individual, that has ruled our way of thinking and being for so long.

In fact, when I first started researching the role of gratitude over 25 years ago, there was vehement resistance from many quarters to notions of gratitude that implied indebtedness to others. Many academic papers have tried to separate gratitude from any sense of obligation. Some participants in my work have rebelled against the ‘burden’ of feeling that they owed something to someone. They were reaching for a gratitude that was all about making them feel good.

To me, this reduced gratitude to being something self-serving and transactional, or dare I say, ‘Aristotleian’. As a self-appointed custodian of the deeper meaning of gratitude, I have argued that gratitude is all about acknowledging what we receive from others, and giving back – not necessarily reciprocally – out of this sense of acknowledgment. This is the only way gratitude can play its important transformational role in our families, workplaces and society.

More than any other time in human history, we need to acknowledge our interconnectedness, and learn how to be kind and giving to others out of this awareness. We need to grow our sense of belonging and help others to find theirs.

These Olympics Games are giving us a nudge, holding up a lantern, to show us how to celebrate our connectedness through a sense of indebtedness, and not to shy away from this in our expressions of gratitude.

With beautiful Paris as the backdrop, we can be guided in how to do this well by looking at the French word for gratitude, reconnaissance, which contains the meaning ‘recognition’. Gratitude is a particular way of way recognising another. Social anthropologist Margaret Visser in her wonderful book, The gift of thanks: The rites and rituals of gratitude, says that this recognition is so fundamental to our sense of belonging, identity and relationships that if we don’t give and receive it, we are not able to truly thrive as human beings. Most importantly she also says that we can’t give this recognition to ourselves, it must be given to us by another.

I was blessed to see a beautiful example of reconnaissance and its power to transform when I was invited to give a workshop on gratitude at a school in Sydney last week. This was for the forty or so general staff of the school. It was the first time I have seen a special emphasis on professional learning of this type for this group of people in a school setting. Most of the time, they are invited or required to tag along with something that speaks more to the teachers or to the school culture, than to the work they do in their particular role.

Yet, rightfully so, they were acknowledged at the beginning by Sarah, the school leader who invited me, as being the engine behind the school. She used words very similar to the Olympic athletes and stated that everyone in the school was so dependent on them and indebted to them. Everyone knows what a difference it makes to be greeted by such staff at a school with kindness and gratitude, even if you are calling to discuss fees, or your child’s absence. These people set the tone of the school.

Too often, we can find ourselves quickly or routinely thanking someone without getting to know them well enough or think about how they would like to be thanked. But this event was such a lovely example of reconnaissance because there was so much thought that had gone into it, and there were many examples of how it was purposefully designed to be meaningful to the participants.

In my prior discussions with Sarah, we had a long talk about what their challenges were and how a gratitude session could help them feel acknowledged and nurtured. The lunch following the workshop was clearly catered for just for them, where many said they had a different choice of food as compared to what was on offer at other events at the school. The principal came and thanked them as they were eating lunch.  They were also each given a copy of my book as they walked into the room, and Sarah said as she gave it to them and looked into their eyes that this is to thank you for all the work you do.

There was nothing transactional in all this. They weren’t being offered something to motivate them more or to help them do their job better. It wasn’t to make them feel more grateful or more positive. It was purely to say thanks, to acknowledge the school’s indebtedness to them.

I heard some very wise words recently, “If something isn’t working, it’s because you are not grateful to people around you”. If people around us do not feel sufficiently recognised and valued by us, they won’t flourish, and things won’t go well. From what I have seen from the Olympic Games and how well Australia has fared, the meaningful and authentic gratitude that is being expressed by so many during and leading up to these Games could well be a significant contributing factor to our success.

May the spirit of these Olympics challenge our antiquated and destructive notion of individual greatness based on one’s efforts alone. May it educate us to strive for an expansive notion of gratitude – one that embraces our interconnectedness and our indebtedness to others.