What if it didn’t matter what kind of day you had…and you still knew you’d feel wildly grateful to be living it?
I’m delighted to introduce you to the Impartial Gratitude List. A simple 5–10 minute writing practice that gives you somewhere to put the fear, frustration, uncertainty, beauty, support, desire, and possibility of your life—and see what happens when you allow all of it to exist on the same page.
BTW. If you do not consider yourself a journaler (yet), that’s okay! Journaling is not as fancy an endeavor as it may sound.
In fact, what makes it so enriching is that it is raw and flowing like the nature of Life. If you can make a grocery list, you can do all the practices I share at Kenzie’s Desk!
Impartial gratitude is the new Alchemist’s Stone. I’ve used this practice for over a decade to change my thinking, my ability to receive what I desire, and rewrite pain and anxiety into strength and serenity. This 7 day experience is revolutionary.
The practice is beautifully simple.
✧ 1. Tell the ugly truth.
Put the fears, doubts, uncertainties, frustrations, or resentments you’re carrying onto the page.
✧ 2. Notice the support.
What is nourishing you? What is working? What is beautiful, useful, steady, surprising, or quietly holding you up in the middle of all this?
✧ 3. Write what comes next.
Turn your attention toward the experiences you want to grow into and write from the perspective of already having lived them.
Stuff that sucks. Support. Self-authorship. All on the same page.
YOU KNOW ITS FOR YOU IF :
You’re grateful for your life and occasionally pissed off about parts of it.
You have a tendency to overthink, spiral, or get stuck in the mental weeds.
You’re going through a transition, waiting period, creative drought, or plain old weird season of life.
You want a reflective practice that makes room for reality rather than asking you to paste positivity over it.
Or maybe nothing is particularly wrong. You just want to experience your life more fully.
***And again—you do not need to consider yourself a journaler.
WHAT CAN CHANGE :
✧ Cultivate agency
Hard circumstances can exist without becoming the theme of your entire day. This practice helps you acknowledge what’s happening while remembering that you still have some say in what happens next.
✧ Pivot mindfully
Begin noticing when discomfort isn’t simply a dead end, but useful information about where your attention, effort, or expectations want to go next.
✧ Interrupt anxious thinking
Give swirling thoughts somewhere to land—and give yourself something solid to lean against in the present moment.
✧ Relish abundantly
Become ridiculously good at spotting the people, pleasures, resources, coincidences, and tiny graces already supporting your life.
✧ Practice self-authorship
Rather than simply reacting to the story unfolding around you, pause long enough to ask:
What do I want to experience next?
HOW IT GOES:
+ For one week, we’ll explore the Impartial Gratitude List together through a series of short emails.
+ I’ll introduce you to each part of the three-step ritual and send you prompts, small experiments, bonus actions, and a printable journal companion guidebook.
+ The actual writing takes about 5–10 minutes.
+ You don’t have to keep up perfectly.
+ You don’t have to write beautifully.
+ You simply have to show up with something to write on and a willingness to tell yourself the truth.
+ By the end of the week, you’ll have a simple ritual you can return to whenever life feels beautiful, confusing, difficult—or all three.
And yes, there’s actually a human on the other side.
The emails are automated.
I am not. I (Mackenzie) personally read and reply to your messages.
Why am I so obsessed with this little list?
When the ugly truth and appreciation are allowed to sit together, something phenomenal happens. Love and pain collide, creating quantum leaps in healing and growth. This is the Impartial Gratitude List phenomenon.
I started playing with this practice because traditional gratitude lists weren’t transformative and honest enough for me.
I didn’t want a practice that required me to look away from fear, frustration, disappointment, or uncertainty in order to appreciate my life.
I wanted to know:
Could I be grateful while telling the whole truth? What would happen to my life if gratitude was my baseline emotion.
So I experimented. I trained my brain with this exact practice, the impartial gratitude list.
Eventually I started sharing the practice with my best friends and family. Because my results had a ripple effect on those around me. My gratitude became a lighthouse to others who were feeling lost or tired or wired by life.
Then I taught it in workshops.
I wrote about it.
I included it in my published Courage to Change Recovery Journal.
And now I’m sharing it here.
Because, to be perfectly honest…
I’m determined to start an Impartial Gratitude revolution.
And, you’re invited.
Free • 7 days • about 5–10 minutes of writing at a time
✧ Because today doesn’t have to be “just another day.” Today can be day one of something new and powerful.
Kenzie’s Desk 