How gratitude gets you from London to LA!

San Francisco was my destination in 2005 where I began a yearlong programme called “Living The Question”. It was an amazing journey for me which involved two weekend retreats at gorgeous locations in California, working 1-2-1 with participants on the course throughout the year via telephone calls and emails on a variety of mini projects combined with a group call every month.

both absolutely loved Beverly Hills.
We then stayed at a fantastic little bijoux hotel on Sunset Boulevard called Sunset Plaza Hotel. Although it didn’t have major facilities, we were very comfortable and it was a step out onto the great Sunset Boulevard. Walking down the Boulevard we passed some gorgeous shops and restaurants. Although we didn’t recognise anyone famous, it was clear that there is an eclectic mix of people out for lunch, gossiping, reading their papers, simply just being in LA.

The Celebration Dinner was being held that night in West Hollywood and some of our fellow GGs were actors, writers, one lady was a minister-in-training, another a relationship counsellor. It was an interesting dinner and sharing our experiences of the GG journey was great. What I couldn’t get my head around was that we met at 6 pm, ate at 8 pm and it was over by 9 pm. You can imagine that here in Spain we only start to go out at 9 pm. So GG Jan and I were a little flat at the end of it as no-one suggested let’s go out to a bar and have a fun evening, but grateful to return to our hotel and have an early night to prepare us for moving down to Santa Monica the following morning. En route the following day, we drove via Rodeo Drive and it was all that we had seen on TV. Glitz and Glam! But we didn’t have time to linger too long as we were meeting friends of mine who flew in from Texas to meet us in Santa Monica.
We stayed in a fairly standard Best Western as it was a good rate but to be honest the room was rather tired. What was good, however, was the excellent service we received at Reception and for that alone it was value for money. We had fun going round the shops in Santa Monica, spending HOURS in Barnes and Noble looking (and buying) loads of books and drinking our Starbucks coffee out of what seemed like buckets! I was amazed at the number of 'down and outs’ in Santa Monica - with the screen writers strike still prevalent in LA at the time of our visit, there was a guy begging for money with a little note in front of him saying “Penniless Writer”. It reminded me of the film with Nick Nolte called “Down and Out in Beverly Hills” and I wondered if some film mogul was going to discover this guy on the streets as there were a few helicopters circling overhead. Having met my friends, we ended the day by visiting Bubba Gump’s shrimp restaurant on the pier and on a whim after a few cocktails we decided to drive up Route 1 to Carmel, some 300 miles the following day.
What a beautiful drive through Santa Barbara and some amazing little towns; we even stopped in one for a quick lunch and found a Tea Shoppe owned by a woman from London who went to California as an au pair and 50 years later set up a tea shop with all things English-authentic, bizarre! For me, the pièce de résistance was Carmel where we stayed in the lovely Carmel Comfort Inn. Such a beautiful town with great energy by the sea. Houses are so quaint, some even built around the cypress trees that are indigenous to the area. We had champagne and canapés at Doris Day’s hotel, where visiting pooches were adored and pampered with silver dog bowls and comfortable cushions!
The following day I walked along the beautiful white beach at 7 am, meeting the locals who walked their dogs (all very friendly) and then joining my friends in a local café for a fantastic breakfast of pancakes and fresh berries. We then visited Clint Eastwood’s ranch later that day where we hope to run some workshops next year (more on that in the future!). Sadly, Jan and I had to leave that afternoon but our friends stayed on and joined the locals with Clint for a sing song well into the night…..
We had a great visit to California, firstly in LA and then to Carmel. Our last night in LA was staying at the fantastic Hotel Angeleno. We had a blast listening to a live jazz band in the bar at the top of the hotel which had a fab view of the city and an amazing buzz of people of all ages: bliss! And hey ho, heading back out to the airport it was a truly amazing experience; even though we had only planned to go to LA for dinner!

At the time I was the only European taking part, all the others were Americans from all over the USA. As a result of the connections I made there I was recently sent an email from a Los Angeles-based professional writer specialising in women’s interests called Jill Daniel who also took the course. Jill had started a Gratitude Programme for women friends and was looking for volunteers. I coerced my good friend Jan from London to take part with me and we jumped head on in to 40 days of a life-changing programme. The subject of Gratitude has been a high focus on Oprah Winfrey’s programmes, you hear about it on the radio and books are coming out left right and centre.
Obviously, Gratitude has been around since the year dot but what I liked about this particular programme was that it would be a small select group. Et voila! We knew it was the right timing for my friend Jan and I to connect as she’d just spent a full-on year planning her wedding then getting married while simultaneously running her own coaching and consultancy business. So here we were – my Gratitude Girl (GG) Jan and I – on our journey every day, receiving a thought for the day which we discussed with each other. We explained the feelings we had or the emotions that were evoked. Some days I felt elated talking about the thought for the day and on others I was angry, often sad or impatient. My GG felt the same way, she also had some reactions, which I didn’t experience.

One of the most interesting things that arose for Jan was that she wasn’t creating enough ‘me’ time for herself – her work, husband, family were taking up all available space - but this programme made her create her own space to chat and look at things differently and I know this brought up some interesting emotional responses to a fair number of things. The focus of my article is not to take you through the Gratitude Groove in detail but I just wanted to share with you a couple of the ‘Thoughts for the Day’ and see what reaction you get to them!

Day 1. “You cannot be grateful and unhappy at the same time.” Anonymous Day 4. The better you are at accepting a compliment the more entitled you will feel towards gratitude in general. Self-help author Iyanla Vanzant says, “Everything that happens to you is a reflection of what you believe about yourself. We cannot outperform our level of self-esteem. We cannot draw to ourselves more than we think we are worth.” (Just a small sample!)

So how did we end up in LA? Well Jill Daniel decided to have a Celebration Dinner in LA for all who took part. So my GG Jan and I thought “let’s just get on a plane and go to dinner in LA!” The next thing I know we were coming in to land at LAX! I was amazed at how sprawling the city looked (which became even more apparent when we drove around). To get over our jetlag we stayed at a hotel near the airport; in fact you could call it Hotel City as I’ve never seen so many choices of hotels as we took the courtesy bus to our destination which was the Renaissance Montura Hotel. It was very comfortable – nice Egyptian cotton sheets on the beds and all the usual freebies of a good hotel. It didn’t take us long to settle down, flick through the channels on the TV only to find that we’d arrived in the middle of the first storms for 30 years, landslides, flooding, destruction in the hills behind Hollywood! (Thoughts that came to mind then were, we should have stayed in Europe!) Undeterred, we decided to visit Universal Studios. We could have taken a guided tour package for around $90 but thought it would be easier to take public transport. Well my dears NOT THE CASE!! We first took a bus to a tram line, then changed to another train, then walked a little way, then took another small train again. Although it only cost us less than $5 for the trip it took us over 1.5 hours to get across LA, a total of around 20 miles.
We did, however, see some amazing parts of LA that you wouldn’t think existed. I had always had the idea that LA was all glamorous, but we saw some pretty down and out homes, lots of graffiti, kids hanging around lots of street corners as well as the down and outs begging. A quick change of scenery and when we got to Universal we were back in the glitzy full-on American dream. We had such a laugh visiting the various interests – our favourite was going on a Jurassic Park ride, got soaked, laughed so much that our fellow riders must have thought we’d come off a slow boat from China and our pictures reflected that as we viewed the standard photos taken as you come down the water shoot to the end of the ride …. Lunatics!! Still we enjoyed ourselves immensely there. After paying our entrance fee of $65 and deciding we couldn’t face the public transport return journey, our taxi fare cost $50 so we should have taken the guided tour after all! The following day we hired a car. Now I’m not used to automatics but we chose a lovely little sports Cabriolet and maneouvering through the streets which had become rivers with the heavy rain, it was a little freaky with driving. We took Mulholland Drive down to Sunset Boulevard and saw the most amazing homes as we drove through. Simply beautiful and to be honest we