D BEST INSPIRED COACHING

Introducing Gratitude Branching

Gratitude Branching is a reflective practice exploring the people, systems, and conditions that enrich our lives — like tracing the branches of a tree.

RELATIONAL WELLBEINGPRACTICES & TOOLS

Deb Best

10/31/20252 min read

Gratitude Branching is a reflective practice exploring the people, systems, and conditions that enrich our lives — like tracing the branches of a tree.

Identifying what we are grateful for enriches our lives. But whatever we are thankful for what created or supported by something else – so we can include those supports in our gratitude.

Identifying the various supports to the thing you are thankful for is called branching. Tracing each successive support is going out on a limb.

Step by Step

Name a person, place or thing you are grateful for.
Branch: list the people, places or things that support what you are grateful for. Ask “What made this possible?”
Go Out on a Limb: Choose one the branches, and follow it to it along asking, “Who or what enable that to be, so that I can include it in my thanksgiving?”
Continue until you can go no further.

Reflective Question

Where does the limb of gratitude end?

[spoiler alert: do this before turning to the example below]

Example

1. Name a person, place or thing you are grateful for. I am grateful for _____________________.

2. Branch

I'm grateful for my cozy bed. → I'm grateful for the people who made the mattress. → I'm grateful for the job that helped me buy it. → I'm grateful for the electricity that warms the room.

3. Go Out on a Limb

a) I’m grateful for my cozy bed.

b) I'm grateful for the people who made the mattress. They needed cozy beds too and worked to support their families.

c) I’m grateful to the company that makes mattresses, they provide employment and a valuable service to the community.

d) I’m grateful for the suppliers of materials to that company, they provide the resources to make the bed.

e) I’m grateful to the farmer who grew the cotton, the loggers for the wood and that factories for manufacturing these raw materials. There are so many people who had to coordinate to make this so.

f) I’m grateful for the cotton plants and trees, they provide for our society and enable us to have warmth and comfort.

g) I’m grateful for the soil and rain that supports the plants and all living creatures, that sustain all humanity.

h) I’m grateful for the sun’s energy and the moon that enables the tides, together these enable for all life on Earth.

Walk with me

D Best Inspired Coaching

In the spirit of respect and truth, I honour and acknowledge that I live and work within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Acknowledgement

Quick Links