gratitude as your unfair advantage

Christian Ray Flores here, feeling immense gratitude for my 12k readers of the XE newsletter. Happy Thanksgiving!

passion to profit lab

We changed the date of this upcoming workshop to December 15th.

I am super excited about this one. I am unapologetically bullish on building a personal brand for any pro with real expertise. We’re helping a small group of pros build a concept and a business model around their personal brands in real time.

Here’s a short video about it. Claim your pass here.

gratitude as your unfair advantage

Here’s a truth most people never realize:

Your brain cannot feel gratitude and anxiety at the same time.

It’s neurologically impossible.

Which makes gratitude not just a virtue, but the fastest and most reliable way to exit fear… and enter your future.

My dad likes to tell me gratitude is a gift I have.

Wherever he’s visited me — and I’ve lived all over — I’ve greeted him with the same wide-open enthusiasm:

“This place is amazing.”

And he’s right — I do feel so much gratitude, it may be a gift.

I’ve vowed never to live in cold climates again (and I haven’t for 20 years)…

yet Deb still laughs when she remembers visiting me in Moscow, where it’s bone-cold and gray half the year — and I was going on and on about how amazing it was.

Some of that might be wiring.

But here’s the part that matters:

Gratitude is also a skill.

A lifestyle.

A practice.

And when cultivated, it reshapes your entire life from the inside out.

When gratitude becomes part of your identity, everything shifts:

1. your relationships get richer

From spouse to kids to friends to colleagues — expressed gratitude deepens connection and expands trust.

2. your joy increases

The brain’s default is survival, not happiness.

It looks for danger, problems, and worst-case scenarios.

Gratitude interrupts that primitive loop and reorients you toward possibility.

3. your creativity unlocks

You can’t create in survival mode.

Gratitude pulls you out of fear and into presence — and presence is where creativity actually lives.

4. your health improves

Grateful people are healthier, wealthier, and they live longer.

The research is everywhere, but the truth is intuitive:

how you feel shapes how you live.

Thanksgiving is the one day America collectively puts gratitude at center stage — and I love that about this culture.

But here’s what I know from experience, coaching, and the trenches of my own life:

Gratitude doesn’t need a holiday.

It can become your operating system — the baseline that builds high performance, deeper peace, and a more expansive future.

And when it does, life opens up in ways most people never experience.

for my wonderful paid subscribers

Here’s the exact gratitude-maximizing practice stack I coach my clients through — the habits that create a powerful internal shift over time.

If you haven’t invested in a paid subscription yet, this is a great moment to deepen your growth.