Should you count your blessings before running the GROW coaching model on a goal?

What each one is actually for

GROW Model

GROW is four questions asked in a fixed order, usually inside a single coaching conversation. Goal: what, specifically, do you want, stated concretely enough that you'd know if you'd gotten it, ideally with a timeframe attached. Reality: what's actually true right now — what resources you already have, what's gotten in the way so far, what you've already tried. Options: a genuine brainstorm of possible paths forward, deliberately kept open before anything gets chosen, so the first idea doesn't quietly become the only idea. Will: which specific option you're actually going to act on, what the very first step looks like, and by when — the point where a plan stops being a conversation and becomes a commitment.

Counting Blessings

Counting Blessings means writing down, at a fixed time — before bed, or at the start of the week — three to five specific things from the recent past you're genuinely glad happened. The specificity matters: not "my family" but "my sister called Tuesday just to check in, unprompted." Done as a one-off, it's a nice moment. Done at the same time, repeatedly, it becomes a habit of attention that starts noticing positive events as they happen during the week, not just when you sit down to write.

What you get out of pairing them

GROW buys a vague wish an actual shape — a stated goal, an honest accounting of where you stand, real alternatives instead of the one option you happened to think of first, and a specific next step, rather than staying a feeling you carry around without ever cashing it into a plan. Counting Blessings buys something that sounds smaller but does real work on the conversation above it: a documented lift in mood, and along with it, according to research on positive emotion, a temporarily wider field of attention that tends to notice more possible paths than a narrowed, threat-focused mood does. Most people walk into a planning conversation already carrying whatever frustration brought them there, which means the Reality and Options stages usually run on the narrower setting by default, without anyone choosing that on purpose.

What GROW Model rests on

• Implementation intention closes intention action gap randomised trials
  Pre-committing to a specific situational cue paired with a specific response lets the behavior fire automatically when the cue occurs, without depending on in-the-moment willpower.
• Self generated options increase commitment observational studies
  Options a person generates themselves produce more ownership and commitment than options handed to them.
• Structured reflection clarifies goals observational studies
  Walking through Goal and Reality in a fixed sequence clarifies what a person actually wants and where they currently stand.

What Counting Blessings rests on

• Attention shapes affect plausible mechanism
  Deliberately directing attention toward positive events changes emotional experience even when circumstances stay the same.
• Gratitude practice boosts wellbeing randomised trials
  Regularly recording things one is grateful for increases subjective wellbeing and positive affect over time.
• Positive attentional bias can be trained observational studies
  Repeated practice of noticing positive events trains an attentional bias toward noticing the positive by default.

Where they actually meet

Structured reflection in GROW and attention-shifting in Counting Blessings are both managing what a person is able to see when they look at their own situation — one manages it by imposing a fixed order of questions, the other by managing the mood a person is in before any question gets asked. A Reality stage run by someone in a narrowed, self-critical mood tends to produce a shorter list of resources and a longer list of obstacles than the same person's actual situation would support; a few minutes spent noticing specific things that are already going right doesn't erase the real obstacles, it just stops the mood itself from quietly editing the inventory before the conversation even starts.

The principle underneath both

The state you're in when you survey a situation changes what you're able to notice in it. Someone scanning from a narrowed, deficit-focused mood tends to generate fewer options and undercount their own resources; someone scanning from a state that's just registered a few concrete wins tends to notice more of both. GROW manages this by structure alone and usually just inherits whatever mood the person walks in with; Counting Blessings, aimed at that mood on purpose right before the Reality and Options questions, is a direct input into the same stages GROW depends on.

What that makes the real goal

The aim is to enter the Reality and Options stages of a planning conversation from a wider attentional state rather than a narrowed, mostly-negative one, so the resulting plan isn't quietly limited by a mood that happened to be running that day.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Solution-focused coaching traditions open sessions by asking what's already working before what's broken, aiming at the same widened state through a different mechanism — a direct question rather than a written list. Brief positive-mood inductions used in creativity research, like recalling a recent success for two minutes before a brainstorming task, target the identical widened-attention effect. A simple "wins list" review — three things from the last week that went better than expected, reviewed right before a planning meeting — does much the same job with less structure than a full gratitude practice.

A tradition that already does this

Solution-focused brief therapy, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg starting in the 1980s, already opens sessions by asking clients what's been going better since the problem started, before turning to the problem itself, on the explicit theory that starting from strength changes what a client can generate next. That coaching lineage arrived at "survey the positive first, then plan" independently, decades before the specific research on gratitude and widened attention existed to explain why it tends to help.

Turning a gratitude list into fuel for a small goal

Counting Blessings on its own usually stops at the list — three good things, written, closed. Borrowing GROW's habit of asking a next question rather than stopping at the first answer, add one line after your list: "what did this make possible that I wasn't already seeing?" If Tuesday's unprompted call from your sister is on the list, the follow-up might surface that you've been assuming she's too busy to help with something you've been putting off asking about. That's not a big goal-setting session, it's a single Options-style question aimed at the list itself, and it converts a mood-lift habit into an occasional source of small, real next steps without turning it into a chore.

Opening a GROW conversation with two minutes of what's actually working

Before naming the obstacle that brought you to a GROW conversation in the first place, spend two minutes writing three specific things from the last week that went right, related to the goal or not. This isn't about skipping the real problem — the Reality stage still has to name what's actually wrong — it's about not letting a mood that arrived already fixed on the problem be the only lens the Reality assessment gets built from. The concrete move: literally write the three things down before you write anything under "Reality," so the assessment that follows is compiled by someone who's just been reminded, specifically, of what's currently going right, not only by someone still carrying whatever frustration walked in the door.

Sunday night, planning the week, and the stalled project is the only thing you can see

You sit down to plan Monday and every thought about the stalled project arrives with the same flat, hopeless coating, which makes the Reality stage of your own mental GROW conversation come out short: no resources, no progress, nothing to work with. Instead of starting there, you write three things from this actual week — a colleague offered to review your draft unprompted, the client extended the deadline without you having to ask, and you finished a section you'd been avoiding for eight days. None of that touches the actual obstacle. But when you now ask what's actually true about the project, the list you generate is longer than it would have been ten minutes ago, because the colleague's offer is suddenly a resource you remembered you have, not a fact you'd have thought to write down starting from flat and hopeless.

When this is worth reaching for

You'll know the two minutes are worth it when whoever is walking into the goal-setting conversation is visibly deflated, self-critical, or convinced nothing is working. A Reality stage built entirely out of that state tends to undercount resources and options that were there all along — a slightly different mood would have surfaced them without a single new fact changing.

Where this does not apply

If the planning is urgent and genuinely time-boxed — a real emergency decision, a crisis triage conversation — spending time on a gratitude list before getting to Reality and Options is a bad trade against the clock, and GROW should just run on its own. And for someone who's already even-keeled and not stuck, bolting a gratitude exercise onto a planning session that doesn't need it adds a step that helps nobody; the honest fact is that most GROW conversations don't need this at all, and it changes anything only when mood is visibly the thing narrowing the Reality stage.

What the evidence does and does not support

GROW's four-stage structure has mostly observational and practitioner-reported support rather than randomized trials — a coaching conversation's structure is hard to randomize cleanly against a real alternative. Gratitude journaling itself has solid randomized-trial support for improving mood and subjective wellbeing over time. The specific claim on this page, that a short mood lift from gratitude changes the quantity or quality of options generated in a planning conversation immediately afterward, rests on the broader positive-emotion-and-cognition research rather than a trial of gratitude paired with GROW specifically; nobody has run gratitude-then-GROW against GROW alone and measured the difference.