Mark Pope: "You cannot be more happy than you are grateful."

Thanksgiving week is a time of togetherness and giving thanks — it’s in the name for a reason. You bounce from house to house spending time with family and loved ones, catching up while feasting on turkey and deliciousness, maybe enjoying a couple of football games on the couch. For some, it’s the best holiday of the year.

Mark Pope doesn’t wait until Thursday to celebrate, though. He doesn’t even wait for this week, for that matter. Instead, the Kentucky head coach stresses the importance of gratitude every day both in his personal life and with his team.

For the latter, he brought the “gratitude circle” with him from Provo to Lexington, something the Wildcats have utilized from day one. It’s a way to regularly practice gratitude, which Pope believes is one of his “foundational principles” that, like very little else, is a “100 percent truth” in life.

“We talked about this from day one, it’s something that is near and dear to my heart. One of the things about the successful makeup of a team, one of the foundational principles — we have a core philosophy, we have foundational principles — one of them is gratitude,” Pope said during his call-in radio show Monday evening. “Gratitude needs to be practiced. I’ll say this, and you’ll hear me say this a million times, but there are very few things that I will say are absolute, 100 percent truths.

“Everything I tell my players, it’s all the numbers, ‘Well, there is a 62 percent chance you’ll have this outcome.’ A 100 percent truth, as much as I know anything in life, is that you cannot be more happy than you are grateful. This is just a true principle of life.”

You can have a number of circumstances thrown your way that can impact your life in both positive and negative ways. Sometimes the happiest people can be poor and the saddest people can be famous. Very few grateful people, though, are unhappy. The best part? It’s something you can work on day in and day out.

That’s a major point of emphasis for Pope when coaching his teams, especially now at Kentucky — his dream job.

“It’s so true. Gratitude is something that we have, but it’s something we have to practice. There is a direct correlation,” he said. “I’ll also say it this way, I can turn it around. If you are great at being grateful, by definition, you will 100 percent be happy. Grateful people are happy, right? Ungrateful people have a really tough time being happy. It’s interesting. You see rich people that are happy and rich people that are sad. You see famous people that are happy and famous people that are sad. You see poor people that are sad and poor people that are happy.

“You see people in any type of circumstance — it doesn’t matter the circumstance, it matters the gratitude that you bring with it.”

That’s where the gratitude circle comes in, a chance for the team to intentionally practice it in real time when things wrap up each day inside the Joe Craft Center. The players gather around and share what they’re grateful for in that moment or day or period of time, whatever comes naturally.

It’s called “gratitude tag.”

“We have a gratitude circle where we practice gratitude. You can actually get better at being grateful, you can actually practice it,” Pope said. “Our guys practice it and they’re great at it. We do a gratitude circle after practice where we’ll go around and play gratitude tag. One of the guys will say what they’re grateful for, then tag someone else on the team — well, it’s not a literal tag, they just say someone else’s name. They talk about what they’re grateful for and it’s a beautiful thing.”

The best part? It works, and that’s something the Kentucky head coach is proud of.

“It actually makes us perform better as athletes and we really win in life where we can understand the impact of gratitude,” Pope said. “Clearly, I’m super passionate about it.”

The Wildcats are thankful, but not only because it’s Thanksgiving week.