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Nicole was so fed up. With life. With herself. With all the bullshit.

Every day seemed to bring more of the same… More frustration, anger, and that pissiness that just rarely seemed to go away any more.

Painful stuff.

Everyone around her was sick and tired of listening to her bitching and complaining. After all, from the outside it seemed like she had it pretty damn good.

On the inside, though, she felt like a time-bomb just waiting to go off.

It totally sucked.

Worse yet, she didn’t know how to change it.

Time to experiment.

Nicole had read quite a bit about the power of gratitude. She’d come across tons of articles (like this one, and this one) touting the effects of gratitude on ones state of happiness and general satisfaction with life. She’d always found them interesting, but had never actually tried to do anything with any of the information (sound familiar?).

Until one day, she did.

It wasn’t anything memorable that brought her to the end of her rope.. it was more just an inner knowing that finally (finally!) enough was enough.

She did a ton of reading (various books from the library, articles online, serveral published studies, etc..) and cobbled together some action-based ideas that she thought might work for her.

And then she actually started to put them into practice.

It didn’t happen overnight, but Nicole started to see some shifts in her life.

At first, it was little stuff… She wasn’t quite as snippy with her co-workers and family. She didn’t dread getting up in the morning quite as much as before.

Gradually, these shifts got more and more profound. She’d find herself smiling (like, a real smile… not that fake shit that she used to paste on her face), or even [gasp!] laughing now and then. This had been nearly unheard-of prior to her experimenting. She knew then that she was on to something.

Then, one day late in the summer, she was leaving work at the normal time and in the normal way. Suddenly, everything felt anything but normal. The colors outside were bolder and richer. The annoying sounds of traffic faded into the background. She smelled fresh-cut grass, and noticed a bird-of-paradise in full bloom (not that she was a huge fan, but have you really looked at one of those things when they’re in full bloom? They’re so vivid and alive looking!). Driving home, she actually felt herself giggling and damn-near giddy! There were joy-bubbles rising up from deep within her. Yes, ‘joy-bubbles’ (only way she could describe it).

This was something she’d never experienced before.. not for any length of time.

And now… everything looked different. Everything felt different. It all was different, and she knew it.

She also knew why.

Her experiment had kicked in and had taken over.

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It’s almost time.

The Experiment is almost ready.

Are you?