When we express our gratitude to others, we tend to talk about ourselves. Instead, we should think about our benefactors. When we get help, it is common to talk about how the favor made us feel. But expressing gratitude shouldn’t be about you. Thanking someone who helps you keeps them interested and invested in having a long-term relationship with you. It makes their time, effort and inconvenience seem worth it.
Source: Harvard Business Review, June 29, 2016.
This is worth taking a moment to think about because most people get gratitude utterly wrong. More often than not, human beings are a bit egocentric by nature. We have a tendency to talk about ourselves even when we should be thinking and talking about others. So naturally, when we get high-quality help and support, we want to talk how it made us feel. Though to be fair, we assume that is what the helper wants to hear — they were helping to make us happy, so they must want to hear about how happy we are.