As we’ve taken ten or fifteen minutes just going through this gratitude practice, I feel more connected, more hopeful, and more excited to get to work on things.
Most gratitude practices stay on the surface. You go around the table, list a few things you’re thankful for, and move on. In this episode of the Humanizing Work Show, Peter Green and Richard Lawrence explore a deeper, research-backed approach called counterfactual gratitude—reflecting on the good things in your life that almost didn’t happen and the people who showed up when they didn’t have to.
Psychologists sometimes call this “mental subtraction.” Instead of asking, “What are you grateful for?” Peter and Richard work with questions like, “What’s something important in your life this year that almost didn’t happen?” and “Who showed up for you in a way they didn’t have to?” This way of looking at your life sharpens appreciation, increases happiness, and strengthens connection with others.
In the conversation, they each answer a set of counterfactual questions drawn from a new 23-question guide and share personal and work stories along the way, including:
- Peter’s turning point as a teenager and the people who helped him change course.
- How a near-miss with a church visit led to Richard’s son and daughter-in-law moving nearby and building a rich shared life in music and wine.
- Peter’s 12-year-old daughter secretly recording an “album” in Logic, and how that unexpected discovery turned into a meaningful creative project together.
- How a slowdown in Agile training demand nudged Humanizing Work to invest more deeply in CAPED, opening up new possibilities with clients.
- The generosity of friends, clients, and the local wine community who showed up in ways they didn’t have to, and what that reveals about the basic goodness of people.
By the end of the episode, Peter and Richard reflect on how just ten to fifteen minutes of this practice left them feeling more grateful, more connected, more hopeful, and more energized to do their work.
If you’d like to try this yourself—around the Thanksgiving table, with a team at work, or in a personal reflection practice—you can download the 23 Counterfactual Gratitude Questions PDF from this page. You’ll also find links to resources mentioned in the episode and the full transcript so you can revisit or share specific parts of the conversation.
Get the PDF and full resources:
Counterfactual Gratitude Questions
Explore More from This Episode
- CAPED: Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, and Delivery
- Certified CAPED Consultant Program
- Agile for Teams Workshop
- Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
- Research on Mental Subtraction and Counterfactual Gratitude
- Prospect Theory and Loss Aversion (Kahneman & Tversky)
Episode Transcript
Richard Lawrence: Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show. I’m Richard Lawrence here with Peter Green. Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the U.S., we wanted to do something a little different—something more personal, but still practical for our listeners. Not just a list of gratitude items, because everybody does that now.
Peter Green: There’s a lot of research showing that any gratitude practice, as long as it’s genuine, leads to higher life satisfaction, better mental health, and lower symptoms of depression and anxiety. Gratitude practices that include a focus on other people and how you’re grateful for them lead to more happiness and stronger social connection.
Today we’re going to introduce a specific kind of gratitude practice that most people have never heard of, even though the research behind it is really compelling.
Richard: It’s called counterfactual gratitude—the idea that you can deepen your appreciation by imagining what your life would look like if a good thing hadn’t happened.
Peter: Psychologists call this mental subtraction. It’s tapping into the loss aversion bias in our brain. If you imagine the absence of something really meaningful, it sharpens how much it matters. The research shows much stronger positive effects compared to just listing what you’re grateful for.
Richard: So instead of asking, “What are you grateful for?”—which can be good but often leads to an obvious list and limited insights—we can ask more interesting questions like, “What almost didn’t happen that you’re now deeply glad did happen?” Or, “Who showed up when there was no guarantee they would?” Or, “What’s one ordinary thing you take for granted that you’d miss immediately if it disappeared?”
Peter: You put together a list of 23 of these questions. We’ll share that in the show notes. And when I read that list, I immediately started getting emotional. And I appreciate you bringing up this approach. It feels very Humanizing Work to me—where we see blurry lines between our personal lives and our work lives. We think we can improve both by asking better questions, surfacing hidden variables, and noticing things we may have overlooked or taken for granted.
Richard: We don’t want to just share concepts around gratitude. So today Peter and I are each going to answer a few of these counterfactual gratitude questions. We’re working off the PDF you can download on the episode page. You can take these questions with you and use your favorites. Think of this as us modeling a practice you might want to bring to your Thanksgiving table tomorrow.
I’m going to start with number 20 from our list: Peter, what are you grateful for now because you know how different things could have been?
Peter: The thing that immediately comes to mind is that as a teenager, I was a knucklehead. I was headed down a dangerous path, and I’ve seen how others on that path have ended up, and it’s not good.
The turning point was when my dad came to me with a very pointed question about my identity. That woke me up and changed my trajectory.
As I tried to recover from that path, my mom helped me avoid the shame spiral that a lot of people fall into. She was my cheerleader—reminding me of the good things I had done and that I could do better.
And then meeting the woman who became my wife helped me want to work hard for many years to be a better person and stay on a different trajectory. Everything good in my life now, I can credit to their influence along with many others who helped.
Richard: That’s awesome.
Peter: Okay, Richard, number three: What’s something good in your life that you nearly missed out on?
Richard: I can think of a lot of things that narrowly happened, but the first one that comes to mind is that one of our sons and his wife moved close to us in Western Colorado. Our relationship with our sons as adults has been fantastic in ways I didn’t expect.
The thing that led to Brennan and Sarah moving here was that when we first moved to Western Colorado, we were looking for a church. We thought we knew where we’d go on that first Sunday but ended up searching again. The place we visited was about to close job applications for a music director role two days later. I realized it would be a perfect fit for my son. I called him and said, “You should apply.” He skidded in under the wire and got the job, which made their move possible.
If we’d waited one week to visit that church, none of this would have happened.
Peter: That’s amazing. It reminds me of something with my daughter and her music. The question here is number two: What happened this year that could easily not have happened?
My daughter Molly, who’s twelve, has been telling me for months that she has an entire album written. I kept thinking, “What does that mean to you?” She’s also been asking for social media, which we’ve put our foot down on because of the research.
She said, “Dad, once my album is recorded, I have to be on TikTok and Instagram. That’s how you promote music these days.” So I said, “Great. When the album is recorded, let me know and we’ll talk.”
Then I came home from a trip, and she said, “Oh, by the way, I recorded the album.” She had opened Logic on my computer, set up a click track, and recorded all the vocals. And they were good—really good. Well-written and emotionally poignant. I realized she has real talent, and I had been dismissing it.
Some songs had cello. Some had a simple guitar patch. In each song she left me notes like, “This one just needs some piano.” So we sat down and worked through them together. I came up with a melody for one, and she said, “Dad, you really love this and you’re good at it. You should do this for a living.” I told her my degree is actually in music and I did it full time for several years. Her response was, “You went to college?”
It has been a joy working on those songs together. If I hadn’t said, “We’ll talk after the album is recorded,” none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have seen her talent, and we wouldn’t have had this creative project together.
Peter: Richard, another one for you: Which difficulty turned out to be a necessary doorway to something better? That’s question 16.
Richard: A work thing comes to mind. Our core business for a long time has been Agile-related training and coaching. We’ve helped a lot of teams be successful with that work. But there’s not the same demand now.
As we talked with current, past, and prospective clients about their challenges, it became clear that CAPED met an unmet need, and it made sense to invest in it strategically.
If the Agile work had continued as before, we probably would have stayed with it, done it well, and treated CAPED as a variation for edge cases. But the shift forced us to focus on CAPED, which was good for our long-term future.
Ironically, after we invested in CAPED and built the Certified CAPED Consultant program, Agile courses popped back up, and we’ve stayed busy with those too. It feels like we needed that nudge.
I mentioned earlier that reflecting on gratitude for other people increases happiness and social connection. It gets even better when you layer interpersonal gratitude with counterfactual thinking. So let’s finish with number seven: Who showed up for you in a way they didn’t have to?
Peter: This happened two days ago. A leader in my faith community—someone I respect deeply and consider a role model—sent me a very kind text message after I made some comments. He shared how much he loved me, what an example I was, and thanked me for the work I do.
It brought me to tears. There was no need for him to do that. I already know him and love him, but anytime someone you look up to says they look up to you in certain ways, it means a lot. I thanked him afterward, and it was meaningful.
Another work example: our good friend Adam Weisbart, who’s going through some health challenges, has been referring clients to us. One turned into an amazing engagement with strong leadership support. It made a big difference for the client and for us this year.
It reminded us of the successes we had in the early days of Agile, where people lit up once everyone understood how complexity works and how Agile techniques respond to it. It also helped make our first public Certified CAPED Consultant course a great experience.
So thank you, Adam. We appreciate your support and friendship. How about you, Richard?
Richard: The support we’ve received from the winemaking community here has been stunning. We moved to the North Fork Valley because people we spoke with were supportive, but they’ve shown up far beyond what we expected. All we’re bringing is a vision and an interest. People could easily focus on their own work, but instead we’ve received so much generosity.
Yvonne, a retired winemaker, has let us use his cellar and equipment and has been collaborating with us. James, a winemaker in Palisade, has helped in many ways, even giving us fruit he wasn’t going to use. He calls occasionally to ask how fermentation is going and to offer advice.
Another winemaker, Alex, moved here from Napa and is working to elevate the region. He walked a vineyard with me and gave feedback as we considered leasing it.
These people don’t owe us anything. We don’t have much to give back yet, and they’re all busy, but they’ve been so supportive in ways they didn’t have to be.
Peter: As you were sharing that, I was thinking about how the media most of us consume focuses on bad news and bad people doing bad things. This gratitude practice reminds me that almost everybody’s good. We can find those good people and amplify that.
It counteracts the commercial media message coming at us saying, “Click on this.” And it grounds us in the reality that people are good.
It’s been a hard year in some ways—health-wise, and in other struggles. But taking ten or fifteen minutes for this practice has left me feeling grateful, more connected to you, more connected to the people around me, more hopeful, and more excited to get to work.
Even with the cameras rolling, it has been meaningful. Thanks for suggesting this episode and doing the groundwork.
Richard: Likewise. For listeners, if you want to try this yourself—maybe around the Thanksgiving table or in a conversation with a friend or family member—here are two counterfactual prompts:
First, what’s something good in your life that almost didn’t happen?
Second, who showed up for you this year in a way they didn’t have to?
Peter: Both questions create meaningful reflection and better conversations than the standard “What are you grateful for this year?” list. And if you want more options for conversation or journaling, visit the episode page to download the PDF with 23 great counterfactual gratitude questions.
Richard: Which almost didn’t exist—if I hadn’t dived into the research this week, I wouldn’t have been reminded. I’m grateful for that. And before we wrap, one more thing we’re grateful for is you—our listeners and our community. Not in a vague “thanks for listening” way, but specifically: when you write to us with a challenge, when you share a LinkedIn post about how you used an idea from a show or a newsletter, or when you share an episode with a colleague. That’s the fuel that keeps us inspired and full of new ideas.
Peter: Whether you’re listening on your commute or preparing for Thanksgiving dinner—whether you’re a Canadian thinking, “Why are you a month late?” or living in Europe wondering what all this Thanksgiving energy is about—we’re glad to have you with us. Happy Thanksgiving, and we’ll see you next week.
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