Chris Schembra: Gratitude Puts Challenges In Perspective

hey everyone welcome back to make it happen mondays where we talk about sales business entrepreneurship personal growth mental health and everything in between with guests who i truly respect and i think make a positive impact on the world around us and you are in for a very interesting conversation right now with my friend chris chembra who is the author of gratitude and pasta he literally wrote the book on gratitude and i was introduced to chris through my business coach because one of my keynotes one of the pillars on my keynotes is gratitude and the impact that it had on me and helping me get through tough times and so i wanted to reach out to chris and talk to him about the application of gratitude we all know gratitude is a good thing but there's a lot of science behind it and how much of an impact it can have on your lives both personally and professionally and his new book gratitude through hard times is exactly that so we dive into his history and how gratitude saved him and how he applies it every single day to the people he works with and what a difference it makes so i hope you get as much information out of this one as i did and it gets you to think a little bit about how gratitude can really impact you and help you get to that next level in your career let's make it happen what's happening make it happen family big shout out to our partners today gong proposify vidyard and chili piper gongs data is more than valuable it's cornerstone in any organization looking to collect the data that's going to tell them where they can improve and where they need to spend their time making changes proposify is one of my favorite teams of all time what they do is they make the proposal and contract processes easy for the sender and the recipient and who can't benefit from that being a great experience right vidyard makes it easy for people to use videos anywhere no matter whether you're sending videos in email or on social media posting them somewhere or sending them in a dm vidyard has got you covered our friends at chili piper are so much fun to be around they make it easy for people to get on your calendar and every sales rep has got to have this function locked in it's one of the most important things we can do as a seller how can i get you on my calendar easily chili piper can make that happen for you be sure that you're checking out all these great tools and now let's pass it over to john to find out who's joining him today see you soon everybody hey chris thanks for coming on make it happen man appreciate you uh spending the time here and i'm really excited about this conversation john i honored to participate and i got to meet one of my country music uh idols as a kid before the call and david and i'm so excited to be here what a great start yeah this is one of those kind of the universe alliance one of those things right because uh there's many of my listeners know that i've been on a journey for the past year and a half dad passed away about a year and a half ago and was kind of ebbing and flowing and trying to figure things out and got re-centered recently got some more clarity and now i'm working on a keynote and some executive retreat stuff but one of the things i realized um was how important gratitude was for me through that whole process and getting me through it um but also some of the companies i was looking at uh from a gratitude standpoint and how they practice it and the ones that came through stronger and you have you have a couple of books you have one coming out tomorrow right you said tomorrow is it yeah and and it's it's the others it's the other piece but walk us through a little bit for the audience that doesn't know you you know walk us through your journey because you've had an interesting one i mean you went from was a theater producer things are going great you were in new york city and then shit hit the fan and it was just like and you started kind of unpacking a lot of different things so could you just walk us through that to set the stage for this conversation of of the importance of gratitude and like you said previously before even getting on here not the fluffy parts of gratitude but like the real concrete components of gratitude walk us through that journey a little bit there if you don't mind thank you john can i ask you a question first please do yeah what was your dad's name john i wasn't a junior but uh but uh he didn't want to give me a shitty middle name so if you could give creditor thanks to big john in a way that you've never thought to thank him right now what would you say to him oh man i've said a lot to him over the past year and a half um i think it it was you know for for whether i knew it or not given me um the support and uh the the vision of what even even people who aren't overtly you know thankful or overtly affectionate um giving me a guideline to see what being a real man is all about and how it's not just about work it's not just about it's about family and everything else i mean he gave me a really concrete uh example to follow even though a lot of times i didn't think he was the most affectionate person on the planet we didn't go as deep as we as i would have liked to in our relationship but i had a good relationship with him and i believe that a lot of my characteristics of what make me a good father husband and everything else today are directly related to him whether they be subconscious or conscious family fatherhood being a good person sounds like he was a great man he was absolutely he was my father is boarding a plane in five minutes to fly up for my book launch from south carolina and this is a man that we almost lost to covet and the second time he was in the hospital was what inspired me to start writing my new book that i remember sitting at his hospital bed in early 2021 thinking i got i got more to write and uh the fact that he's got bad balance needs a wheelchair at the airport he's going to come up and land at la guardia airport and he's going to be here for a wonderful celebration tomorrow uh it means the world to me and i i probably don't probably don't thank him enough uh so thank you for leading with that his name is phil phil phil john john chris you can call him phil and me refill there you go i like it oh it sounds like he's a good man he's a good man he's uh i definitely don't give him enough credit or thanks i think i used to but uh you know once the son thinks his britches are too big maybe they they start forgetting about the the value and the benefits they've received from others and that's one of my detriments yeah i think that's up for all of us right it's like the people we almost take for granted a lot of the good people in our lives because we always think they're going to be there when some somebody said this recently that that really struck me was that you know they asked about how many times how many how old is your mom right and uh at the time the person said you know she's 70 he's like so okay so let's assume she's going to live till 85 okay so how many how much time do you have left with her and they said well i got 15 years and they said well let's pat let's let's reverse that how how often do you see her every every year and he's like well probably twice a year once for the holidays and once you know intermittently he's like how many days do you spend with her each time you go out and see her and he was like you know four days maybe each right so let's let's round it up to 10 he goes so 15 uh you really only have 150 days left with your mom and when he said that i was like holy shit it reframed my entire perspective it's like wait a minute i don't have 15 years left with my mom i have literally 15 days left with i have 15 you know 100 meaningful conversations left with my mom and then so once you start tracking it that way you start putting things in a much different perspective of gratitude and outreach and everything else so it was it was a powerful way to express uh the time we don't have left with the people that we love it's a wonderful reframe in life is that you know we've been we've been told for the last 30 or 40 years uh you know abundance and self-help and you can do anything you want you can quit your nine to five to pursue a life of passion and infinite possibilities and all these things but but the truth is life is finite and the more that you can remember that the more you can learn to appreciate it you know the ancient stoics had a term called memento mori they would meditate on death every day in order to remind themselves of the things that they need to do while on this earth right and and to know that life is finite and there's such a a great blessing that comes in finitude yeah absolutely so so unpack that journey for you uh the gratitude where and how it helped you so first of all when when people on this program see me the gratitude guru and the gratitude guy blah blah blah i'm the least grateful person you're ever going to meet probably no shit you know i'm one of those typical you know guys who suck at whatever you know they're trying to teach to others so i'm not perfect you shouldn't listen to a word i'm about to say no but um i gratitude first came into my life in really about july of 2015 um if you if you looked at my life then uh you would have seen a guy whose life looked good on paper right i was in a different career path i was running a company i had peers that respected us i had friends i had family i had great things and so all look good um i just come back from italy actually producing a broadway play over there and when i got back home to new york though i realized god i'm a fraud i feel like a piece of shit on the inside like it's all a facade right i mean like italy woke me up it was it was intoxicating they lived la dolce vita they slowed down they ate together they honored history they watched the sunset it was a very uh alluring type of life and i when i got back here to new york city i said god this ain't it i i was lonely unfulfilled disconnected insecure nervous cautious anxious overwhelmed i i i was in a weird place when i realized that my life looked two completely separate ways what the world saw or what i felt on the inside and that was a bad place for me to realize that i mean last time i had felt those all those things at once uh the feeling of not not really being seen just faking it uh was in my early 20s you know it took me down a deep dark path of non-suicidal self-injury jail rehab depression all that kind of jazz so i didn't want to go back i thought what was it about this italy thing that changed my perspective on everything and i realized it's how they approach community it's how they approach connection it's how they approach just eating and drinking and talking together and i said i got to do this here in new york this right this this wealthy nation that has a poverty of the soul yeah and can i ask real quick yeah was it was it an epiphany where you like on or was it a slow realization as you were headed back so italy kind of faded and you found yourself in your i think what was your like 350 square foot 350 square foot studio apartment at the time yeah so was it was it like a light bulb went off or was it like as the allure of italy kind of waned you were like wait a minute i'm left so shit here so a combination of both you know you can you can see something you can see something in your life months in advance that needs worked on yet you don't listen to your gut and it lies dormant and it runs amok so i there was something there and then i was sitting in the car in rome with my drive privileged to have done some you know good things and i had a driver and i had you know all those things so i'd started a relationship the driver's daughter was the executive assistant of a very powerful man in rome who had really invited us to rome to start this whole journey and i said does she like working for this powerful man and he said in a very dramatic roman type of fashion you know she's wasting her life living out the dreams of another man it's not what she wants to do she's living out the dreams of this man and i sat there and i'm like holy shit everything i've built everything i dedicate my time and life and energy to doing is the dreams of another i have my own things that i need to work on first of all myself and so back in new york i was like i gotta do something about this what was it about rome well again it's how they ate and how they ate amongst communities so the least common denominator was to invent a pasta sauce recipe and start hosting dinner parties like we consumed in rome and it sounds so silly it's so so silly and simple to say that but i invented a pasta sauce recipe i figured i should probably feed it to people to see if it was good or not i started hosting dinner parties this was july of 2015 and every week strangers would come into my home and we worked together to create the meal we serve each other we drink a ton of wine beat some decent pasta sauce and i'd ask a couple really poignant questions and these questions would get people to open up and share the most authentic stories they'd ever experienced in their life and that main question that we settled upon that worked every single time was a question around gratitude and when i realized the importance that that question had in small group format i said this is my this is the topic that i'm going to dedicate the next few years of my life to studying i dropped out of theater and i started focusing in on the dinner table and i started focusing in on the principles of gratitude see at that very first dinner we asked a simple question john it wasn't anything extraordinary if if you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don't give enough credit or thanks to that you've never thought to thank now who would that be and people sat with that question at our dinner table and said oh man you see that that's physiological who have i never thought to thank my god i've never thought to thank my wife who's sitting next to me i've never thought to thank my dad who just passed away i've never thought to thank my third grade teacher who bought me my first pair of shoes i never thought to thank my my ex bad boss who made me realize what kind of a leader i didn't want to be i never thought to thank my ex-girlfriend who made me realize i was gay all these are made up stories but i'm just saying the stories were amazing and that started to save my life johan hari is a man who gave a wonderful ted talk who once said that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety it's human connection that's when we could bring people together and strip away all the hierarchy and get them to make peanut butter and pasta sauce together and sharing some conversations you'd really get to know the truth about people can can we pin and put a pin on the uh the loneliness factor right because you one of the things you brought up it blew my mind in your book it's it's uh loneliness is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day and it's more dangerous than stress it's more dangerous than all that stuff like that's a pretty vivid image of what loneliness does and and what i wanted to ask is you know you hear it all the time in this socially connected world and everybody's so connected to so many people that we're more lonely than ever do you think loneliness itself is an epidemic right now um and and could you talk about what you've learned about how harmful and and what loneliness means it doesn't mean you're necessarily alone could you could you help us understand that a little bit more totally and by the way i think this epidemic started like hundreds of years ago and i blamed some little guy named renee descartes please explain descartes descartes is an ancient motherfucker who fucked us all okay he said a very simple sentence one day ergo cognito sum i think therefore i am do you know how dangerous that actually is throughout the history of humanity see human beings are innately tribal empathetic connected creatures we need each other if you look 50,000 years ago if you didn't know how to interrelate with others you were kicked out of the tribe and you died you got eaten by an elephant or something i don't know elephants don't eat people but you just you died yeah right and so you know there's there's there's this there's this wiring in our dna homo empathicus that like i want to get along with you not only for survival but because of it's just like a general human thing to do so the minute that you do the polar opposite of that and say i think therefore i am the only thing i really need to focus in on is my individual thought and my individual dreams and my individual consciousness you rob community from occurring you start creating ego you start creating all these things and i think that's been very detrimental to society is that people really believe that they don't need others to get to where they are today that they are the smartest person in the room like they don't need to continually learn and these are all bad things i think obama you know obama said that a while back where he was just and he got eviscerated for it and i don't like to get political i'm just saying what he said you know he said you know if you're super rich if you're really successful you didn't get here by yourself right there were people who made the roads for you to drive on there were people who you know did this so you might have been a solo person that built your company potentially by yourself but everything that took you to get there and i remember he just got but i even challenged what you i even just challenged what you just said you need other people without question but in general he got shredded for it because he was like are you out of your mind you know i i earned this and i it's like whoa whoa whoa back up here pal like you yes you earned you might have earned it but that doesn't mean you didn't you earned it yourself that is the plague of the ungrateful man yeah when you think that you've done everything yourself and you do not appreciate the benefits or the value that you've received from others you are an ungrateful man in the ancient language of tamil which is in south india in the ancient culture of tamil which is in south india and in different places around the uh east asia nandri katanai is the worst thing you could be called in the world that means a gratitude lacking dog oh yeah seneca seneca the elder lucius anius seneca some ancient motherfucker from 63 ad once said that ingratitude or the ungrateful man is what's caused homicides and tyrants and liars and thievery and adulterers there's nothing worse in humanity than the ungrateful man who can't appreciate the benefits they've received in the world so how does this compare to and i totally agree um but how does this compare to the i think it's related love yourself before you can love somebody else right so the idea that we are important right like i think therefore i am is i agree with you it's like you know no we are a community we are tribal but then there's the you know the giving factor of love and how you can't truly give love unless you love yourself so how do those two marry each other one of the sentences you said is i think therefore i am the other things that you're talking about is giving love to yourself you need to learn how to show yourself self-compassion which i suck at it i suck at cultivating self-compassion i suck at giving myself gratitude take the thinking out of it right maya angelou is a great poet artist activist nobel laureate and she says people won't remember what you did they won't remember what you said but they'll always remember remember how you made them feel the same applies to you the way you treat yourself and your feelings will outlast the way you think or you know the any of the stuff that comes out through the head you know we got to get into the heart when you know whether it's in a business context or a professional setting when you can connect with the heart or lead with the heart or actually invest in your heart you're going to solve a lot of really really really good things you know robert waldinger is uh the director of a 80 year longitudinal study at harvard on the study of happiness and one of the most classic things he found um the the main thing that determines the quality of of one's life and the length that one can live is the quality of your relationships not the quality of your thoughts not your ability to express your thoughts freely or clearly or accurately to an audience but the actual ability to connect on an intimate heart-to-heart basis with another person that's what makes you live longer and that's kind of the opposite of loneliness what's up everybody I know you're enjoying this conversation John does a great job with genuine curiosity on these episodes and our guests consistently bring the heat we want to take a moment here and let you know that you've got an opportunity an opportunity to become better than you were yesterday and you can do so by gaining access to all of JB Sales content all of their training tips, techniques, tactics and takeaways can be yours for $1 a day $365 for the year gets you annual access to everything including our private Slack channel for members only which you get access to all of us directly 100% of the time 24 hours a day and then at the same time you're going to get access to our bi-weekly Ask Me Anything sessions where you can bring real deals to the table and get the help that you need where you need it this is very very important sales reps that invest in themselves are often found at the tops of their leaderboards join us today and get the help you need to become the seller that you deserve to be that URL one more time is joinjbsales.com let's get back to the show with JB and our guest for this week so define loneliness for me because again loneliness could some people could think of it as I'm by myself and nobody will go out to dinner or drinks with me right so therefore I don't have a significant other so therefore I am lonely but there are plenty of people who are perfectly okay without being you know engaged or married or any of that stuff so could you help us define loneliness in this construct here there's a chapter in my first book part of this is quoted in and then we turn it into a couple paragraphs in my new book that comes out tomorrow it's a simple sentence you don't have to be alone to be lonely what I mean by that is you could be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of amazing people like you and I yet you could feel like the loneliest person on the planet if you don't feel authentically seen and heard in a genuine sense of belonging loneliness to me occurs when you think that you have far more indifference than you have in common with even yourself or one person or a hundred thousand people the scale of the number of people in this equation is relative but the feeling that comes when you don't think that you see yourself or that you don't think that others see you or appreciate you or honor you or understand you it's like the worst feeling in the world and unfortunately what happens is that in wealthy nations such as the United States of America this problem is amplified Mother Teresa calls it the great poverty of the soul that afflicts the nation of wealthy and she says that it's the greatest poverty she's seen in the history of the world you know Thomas Thomas Janer Thomas Joyner I won't be able to quickly be able to quote it in my new book your success may even be making you yeah even the most socially connected and successful leaders feel pretty isolated today some of you have vast networks and a strong digital presence and still feel a lack of emotional connection even your long-term relationships may lack the depth of authentic intimacy you don't have to be alone to be lonely your success may even be making you lonelier according to Thomas Joyner author of Lonely at the Top people often neglect close social relations in favor of focusing on goals associated with making it big but with so many opportunities for surface level connection and little else most of society is suffering from a lack of connection you've convinced yourself that because you have a ton of followers on LinkedIn contacts in your phone and people on your team you feel a genuine sense of connection in reality though you probably don't know that much about most of the people in your network you don't know the adversity they've experienced you don't know what brings them authentic and genuine joy you don't know about how they feel it's like they're hiding in plain sight this is the world that we live in yeah it's funny you know tactical thing here so I've been on LinkedIn forever I got you know give or take 400,000 connections but I've reached the 30,000 connection limit right and so now I can't accept any more invitations and the reason that LinkedIn gives that 30,000 arbitrary numbers because well we want to make sure that you know you're using LinkedIn for meaningful relationships and I'm like wait a minute if it was that then it would be 20 would be the cap yeah 10 would be the cap not 30,000 don't tell me I need I can be having a relationship with 30,000 people come on right so obviously quality over quantity and it's funny that you bring up entrepreneurs and quote unquote successful people and how some of the most lonely people I had a conversation recently with somebody who talks about imposter syndrome and those type of things and where does it come from and what was interesting was she said that it comes from the fact that you are successful in the sense that every time you reach another level right you've never been there before so you are automatically an imposter so that's where that comes from so a lot of these traits are from what seemingly from the outside are successful people is there a commonality to that though that you found in your talking with people and having these dinners that it's not it's not just the fact that they were successful but it was something else there were some other characteristics that drove them to that peak but also that level of loneliness this is going to be a very biased answer because a lot of the people that we've served around our dinner table have either opted into coming or I've personally known or a client has invited for a very specific reason they would enjoy the experience and so usually you don't sign up to coming to one of our virtual or in person experiences without seeing the description and being like I'll opt into going to that you know so that's the that's the for the scientists out there that's the that's the thing that I gotta say first of all it's my belief that you have to be able to label and not ignore the authentic emotion you're feeling in order to label it as loneliness I do believe that there's a vast amount of people on this planet who don't even have the education of labeling their emotion like they feel something but they're like I didn't know what this is I don't know what the five letter word to describe it so I'm just going to kind of pretend that it doesn't exist yeah so I don't know if you can consider them lonely people because they don't know what the word is and so that in itself is a barrier to addressing this issue the second thing that comes up is fear so I think that you have to be able to be pretty brave or courageous even if it's in the moment for the first time to acknowledge that you feel lonely to acknowledge that you feel shame or regret or some kind of authentic negative emotion right you have to have you know if you're fearful of displaying that vulnerability you're you're you're getting over in the moment so the people who come to our dinner table or to our virtual experiences and communicate about this loneliness or overwhelm or anxiety they're establishing bravery in the moment and so that's a big big big thing is to go against a hundred year history that says vulnerability is a weakness you're not a man if you're vulnerable and then just be vulnerable with a tremendous quality that a lot of these people have to have in order to acknowledge that they're lonely so with that talk before we jump into kind of some of the details talk to me about some of the research you've done like factual research oriented things about the importance of gratitude as far as people living long or whatever it is what are some of the ones that you've been like when you were reading it you were like this isn't subjective like this is real shit here and we should pay attention to it I'll bring up two brief studies so the people that are watching this you know that you know I invented pasta sauce I started hosting dinner parties companies started hiring us we're having a really good time and wrote a book gratitude and pasta about all the intuitive things that we learned around the dinner table and the pandemic hit and I said oh shit the pandemic just literally ripped away my pasta sauce what are we going to do now so we pivoted to virtual and we were able to start producing these virtual gratitude experiences that were there for people at in the darkest hours of their life you know the pandemic hit but you still had mothers dying people getting cancer people getting divorces like life was still happening and so when we pivoted we were able to find this wonderful research assistant who came on board full time and just started feeding scientific studies and like neuroscience and positive psychology and all these different topics and so then we became able to not just link our intuition with gratitude but actually link like science and psychology with gratitude it's been a wonderful thing and two of the studies that I'll mention the first is just a quick kind of positive thing it's Marty Seligman is the founder of the positive psychology movement and I won't go into what the movement is but what he found is that he did a series of micro interventions with a couple hundred people and studied the impact of these micro interventions some of them were journaling interventions some of them were empathy interventions some of them were connection interventions the number one micro intervention that had a lasting long-term impact after the study was the gratitude visit so he was actually studying people writing or talking actions of gratitude and hand delivering a letter or going and giving gratitude in person to someone and what he found in those studies is that gratitude had the most impact of all the positive psychology micro interventions and it had the longest impact it had the impact up to a month after the study that's like a pretty cool thing so that was really powerful to learn that we had accidentally stumbled into one of the most meaningful things that you could become an expert at to create positive transformation and Marty Seligman just proved that the second study that was really impactful for us actually came out of Eastern Washington University it was a researcher named Philip Watkins and the title of his study was called the grateful processing and what he went out to prove he didn't address like the positive memory recall of gratitude like I'm grateful that my dad drove me to soccer practice that's a happy memory yay but he went for the negative and that's the stuff that I really care about so he did a study of a couple hundred people where there was a control group and two variables he asked the first variable group was write down about a negative autobiographical experience from your past the second variable the third group was write about a negative experience from your past find the positive benefits in it give gratitude to it and make it part of your story of the three obviously the control was the control the first variable did pretty good because he got them to write about a negative autobiographical experience which takes an unprocessed chaotic memory that's roaming around in your head and they got to write it out formulating a narrative around it help you process it help you close it destigmatize the negative impact it has over you so that group did pretty but the third group they did that and then they looked at it and they found positive benefits from that negative autobiographical experience and they got to give gratitude to it and that was so impactful in this study and we've been running to the cleaners ever since and I'll give you a real world example of this so I'm going to relate this back to my story and I want to warn people that there might be some triggers that I'm about to share this is my story so yeah woohoo go to Rome realize I feel like shit invent pasta sauce COVID happens pivot to virtual gratitude experiences I'm on top of the world at least I tell myself we've got all these virtual clients and we're making all this impact we're doing all these things and all these coaches are telling us how to scale and boom boom boom boom boom 430 PM December 30th 2021 I'm on a phone call a zoom call with one of my clients Lisa Penn from SAP dear friend and she says 30 minutes in she says you know Chris you don't look so hot you should go take a nap I'm like yo no clients ever said that to me before okay so we hung up the call my partner Molly and I go out to dinner that night we just bought a home she just started a new job she was flying home the next day to Detroit to go be with their family so we go out to dinner that night and celebrate the drinks are flowing everybody sitting around all this is happening the class azul is flowing and all of a sudden I say some stupid thing and I start a fight not physical I started verbal altercation with my girlfriend and I say some hurtful things I get home and feel like the biggest piece of shit in the world I was misunderstood I wasn't seen I did mean things my whole life's falling apart I took out a kitchen knife and went slam right across the arm and I engaged in what is known as non suicidal self injury folks I don't have suicidal ideation I do not want to end my life but what that was was a cry for help a scream out in pain and in the days that followed that I would just I mean I just picking up the pieces right I would walk around my apartment I would watch a movie I would watch a Nancy Myers movie and cry my eyes out I would look at a lemon on my counter and I would cry I would look at my books I would cry I call my family I would cry and I call my best friend Scott and Scott said you know what the problem was Chris you just got so many things going on in your life you couldn't see through the clearing in the forest you appreciating none of it I said holy crap Scott's right see instead of waking up and actually appreciating the overwhelming good I have in my life and helping things go right maybe focusing on fixing a couple of the bad things that would be gratitude I woke up every day focusing in on fixing fixing fixing what I didn't have what was broken what I wanted blah blah blah and spent no time appreciating the good that is gratitude versus ingratitude and people even back 2000 years ago called ingratitude one of the greatest plagues known to man you said a friend kind of brought it up to you and that was your epiphany to say looking back on it what I usually try to do myself is I'll find myself in a situation that works out for however it worked out and I'll try to reverse engineer what happened to get me to this point so that I can give some advice along the way to others so they can skip a few steps if there's somebody out there right now questioning I think I'm pretty grateful but am I is there something that you can go through or just a way to realize your level of true gratitude versus what you perceive as gratitude is ask yourself when's the last time you were grateful for yourself and I know that sounds like an easy answer but listen to these statistics I've asked a simple and by the way this is going I'm going to loop this all the way back around to the finding positive benefits giving gratitude to it part I just wanted to tell the story for it if people in the last seven years I've asked our signature gratitude question to a lot of people right if you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don't give enough credit or thanks to who would that be who have you never thought to thank 99.8% of the people have friend God Donald Trump Joe Biden whatever how many people actually say themselves very few doesn't that conflict a little with the ego piece there that you were talking about as far as how ego is up here that's the thinking part the heart part to be grateful for what you bring emotionally into this world you can give gratitude to that I don't want to be grateful talk about the difference between like the thinking and the feeling I don't want to be grateful that my original thoughts helped me build a company no I want to be grateful that I was courageous enough to share my authentic story and underlining vulnerabilities and it helped me connect with others that's what I'm grateful for and I don't give myself enough credit see in that non-suicidal self-injury episode when I couldn't see the clearing through the forest I didn't believe a word anybody was saying the more times people would call in with congratulations or you're doing so well or you've made such an impact the more I'd say those people are liars if they actually knew me they wouldn't say it so I had no gratitude no self-compassion and the unfortunate truth is I don't have an answer to your question I don't know how to hack that thing it took me going to the depths of despair to maintain that perspective see my friend Sarah Fern came on my podcast the other day and said you can't know gratitude without knowing pain yeah that's true if you don't know pain if you don't know suffering how can you feel grateful and so it took me getting into that moment in order to realize I did not have gratitude and I wish there was a cheat code to it but I don't think I'm the guy who's here to give people cheat codes right it's it's you know at least with my personal story there was no cheat code but you know what happened in the days after I'm not talking about months right it I don't want to give a cheat code so that bad things don't happen to you I want to give the cheat code so that when the bad things do happen you know quickly how to process them yeah I don't know how moment in those days after I look back at the non-suicidal self-injury episode and said did it teach me empathy yes did it teach me appreciation yes did it give me a positive self-view yes did it give me self-efficacy and self-confidence yes did it help me connect closer to my family yes did it help me connect closer to my community yes get this question did it give me material gain yes in the days after my non-suicidal self-injury the minute I started talking about that deep dark episode we had a record profit month and all our keynotes would then have that story it helped me connect better to the audience I made more money so when you can say yes to all these things you can look back at something that almost ended my life as one of the greatest things that ever happened to me by far it gave me the introduction of my book yes I've been stuck on that for 15 months and that's seeing that's for me it's like I try to deconstruct it too so again I don't think we all need to go through pain we all need to learn on our own way but maybe with a little bit of guidance but there was two that very vividly stuck out to me and for personally and professionally it's one when my first fiance broke up with me because I you know and I thought hey this is what you're supposed to do she brought it up with me and it was devastating for two days but then I was like oh my god this is the best thing that could ever happen to me and then when I got fired again worse thing but then it was the best thing and so you know definitely I think there is that punch in the face moment we all need to have to get us to stop and think and my hope is that COVID was part of that for a lot of people and so with that as a you know kind of a learning lesson for you and even with I mean it sounds like you came out of COVID really strong you did similar to me like 90% of my revenue was ripped away from me because it was all on site now pivot we're doing good things and then you hit this next milestone here for yourself where you're just like so what what's the new book what's your learning about what you wrote today versus what you wrote a couple years back and how has it evolved about gratitude and the application of it yeah it's it's just it's filled with a ton of stories it's filled with a ton of science and psychology you know the first book was written out of intuition I mean the first book you know all 150 pages of it sopping wet was me telling my story of pasta sauce saving my life me bringing it to the people this is how you can do it on your own the second book was oh my god we learned that whatever we've been up to for seven years is actually scientifically proven to be beneficial to others let me communicate that data those stories those research papers but look 2020 2021 kind of dark chapters in people's lives yeah you know when we started hosting our virtual gratitude experiences first they were just for free for our community and then second they became you know for clients you know for their teams and clients and we would ask similar data points at every virtual gratitude experience this is across hundreds in the last two years with close to 40,000 attendees we'd ask the same question at minute six we would ask what's one word that honestly described how you feel right now in the moment and people would and then put that one word in the group chat below so people would start overwhelmed nervous cautious tired anxious sad lonely some optimistic and happy and hopeful but majority miserable miserable whether it was because they were quarantining alone or it was because they were still busy on the road with travel whatever it's just like if you actually ask a human being how they're doing they'll likely say they're miserable and if they're not it might be lying to them lying to you anyways there's a pretty pessimistic view of humanity but it's we've got the data right so then we'd work them through our virtual gratitude experiences and towards the end we'd ask them what's one word that honestly describes how you feel right now that you just came back from the gratitude part of the experience grateful connected happy joy wiser lighter inspired motivated 99.998% of the people reported a positive emotional transformation and we when we realized across tens of thousands of data points that we were on to something we said we got to write a book about that how gratitude had been there for people during some of their darkest hours I mean we've had people come into our experiences that their kid died that day their kid was born that day a family like everything everything and they said that they showed up because they knew that you know gratitude might be able to help them through it you know we've had people who have been given our book our new book even just recently given our book in the middle of a divorce or separation and after reading it two weeks later you see photos of them they're back together so it's like you know it was able to help people find a lot of positive benefits through their darkest hour and we'd be robbing them if we didn't write about it I love that I you know because I I went on a soldier is Sedona soul adventures journey about about a month and a half ago or I went to Sedona which is one of my favorite places on earth and two things that were really relevant for this conversation one was that you know I realized that people say everything happens for a reason I think that's I think that's a little disingenuous especially for people who are going through real bad shit right it's like certain things didn't happen but I do believe that if you look hard enough you can find a silver lining to almost anything right that change in state factor there right so again it's your lens and also the thing that was actually holding me back from getting to that next level in my life in my career wasn't necessarily giving gratitude or giving thanks it was actually receiving it because you know like a lot of us I'm oh it's okay you know no worries whatever that is and I almost diminish whatever I gave that person and whenever they come back and are thankful for it what I realized that that's actually robbing them of their happiness so oh dude right so you're so good well I mean and I want people to hear this because if you like when when you reach out and say thank you that took some effort for me to come to the point like hey Chris I really appreciate that and when you diminish that and I don't worry about it dude like you know that actually takes away my happiness of giving you my thanks and so now I'm trying to be extremely conscious in when somebody says thank you to just pause and say you're welcome type of thing right feel it yeah what's that be be a good receiver yeah there is John what you just talked about so in the year 63 AD Lucius Anius Seneca also known as Seneca the Elder a great elder statesman in Rome from 2000 years ago he wrote a book called On Benefits and in that book lines five through seven state that the greatest plague to Roman society is that we neither know how to give nor receive a benefit and that of all the vices common in today's society nothing is more common than ingratitude so by the way this isn't a new thing throughout the history of humanity people suck at receiving you know many can say it's a defense against intimacy if I receive your good praises or if I receive a gift from you or if I receive your gratitude I might feel like I owe you something you know I might feel like you know yeah oh my god there's so many there's a whole chapter in our book about that so I complete look gratitude feels good to you know we don't focus on the self reflective side of gratitude we focus on the pro social nature of gratitude especially when it's practiced in group format so in group format gratitude feels good to give gratitude feels good to receive so the giving is great which most people don't give gratitude because they fear the recipient won't value it and it will be perceived as a moment of awkwardness to even give it and so a lot of gratitude is just not given just because of that and then the receiving is what you just talked about of we have a defense against intimacy we brush it off we can't value ourselves enough to be worthy of receiving praise or thanks or whatever the observed part is interesting and Sarah Algoi is a wonderful researcher out of the university of North Carolina who did a study called the witnessing effect and what she found is that when I see John who I don't know when I see John give gratitude to someone who's like not here I'm more willing to be friends with John because I see John as a grateful individual on the flip side if I hear John giving gratitude to Beth who's in the room but I've never met Beth I'm more willing to want to associate with Beth because I know that she did something at some point that was of benefit to John and now John's thanking her therefore Beth is probably a nice person and so when when we I mean it's literally a chapter in a book called you get what you observe a real world example of that is my friend Diana Diana Lane Miller she is of Tamil South Indian descent and but she was born in America raised in America and when she goes over to to her family weddings she you know she didn't grow up in the country but she's still a cousin and in Tamil culture there's actually no word for gratitude so they use the bestowing of titles and the kissing of the feet of the elders and bestowing honorific titles and all those kind of things so her way of giving gratitude to her grandma at a wedding is to bend down and kiss her feet her cousins standing around them cry watching her give gratitude to her grandmother she's not giving gratitude to the cousins the cousins aren't giving gratitude to the grandma they're crying by witnessing the power of gratitude it is a powerful thing once you really start to unpack it I mean I will say it got me through the past two years I mean starting my gratitude journal and just being and almost forcing positivity a lot of ways but also forcing the different lens right because we could get so caught up in the negative that if you just sit down beginning of the day end of the day write three or four things text somebody that you're thankful to be in your life the difference that makes is real and I'm looking forward to reading your second book as far as some of those statistics but we're running up here on time this ever evolving world of challenges that we're in right now anything specific that you want to leave people with here reflect on our question if you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don't give enough credit or thanks to they've never thought to thank who would that be think for a sec is this someone who's still with us is this someone who's long passed on is this someone who's sitting right next to you is someone who's sitting afar what language would they receive this appreciation in the best I mean to quote Gary Chapman's five love languages if you had to give gratitude to this person right now would they best receive it as physical touch or words of affirmation quality time acts of service or a gift remember that not all gratitude given is gratitude heard if you think about this person to which you'd like to go give gratitude to think about how to give that gratitude in a language that they appreciate or receive the most and if you do that it will be the most authentic version of gratitude I think known to mankind love it man all right well where where can we send people I know you got the book coming out where can they find out more information about you about the book about all the things you're working on right now I I mean from a from a from a free perspective if you just go to google and type in chris shembra you'll either stumble upon our linkedin or which is where john and i connected where this is being distributed or you'll stumble upon our column at rolling stone magazine or fast company magazine those are free articles in magazines that you can literally just read online from a paid perspective yeah definitely go to amazon type in gratitude through hard times chris shembra you can get the kindle for 99 cents i don't care you know it's no it's it's we specifically made the kindle 99 cents because there's i mean you know i'm watching the numbers here you know we're selling our ebook launched this morning and we've sold 448 ebooks since 9 a.m to you know to people who don't want to pay 17 dollars and 47 cents just people you know doing it at 99 cents and you know that's going on for the whole week and so definitely if you're watching this during launch week definitely would appreciate the amazon review but you know reach out if there's one thing that you heard here today that you agree with act on it go out there with bravery and courage and give this gratitude to the negative and the positive and when you feel how that feels feel free to reach out and let us know how it feels you know I think there's some neat things that can happen in your life when you apply the principles of gratitude absolutely I am a believer and practitioner of it myself more now than ever and I appreciate you coming on and for people listening it's Shembra S-C-H-E-M-B-R-A Google it and also don't you have isn't it 747 yeah 747 747 club dot org is our corporate yeah I mean you know if you're if you're a company and I say a company of all size our clients are everything from Microsoft Google IBM Dell Citibank the United States government you name it all the way down to a 20 person doctor's office but if you've got a team of people that you as an empathetic leader as a leader who listens knows that your people are lonely unfulfilled disconnected nervous cautious anxious overwhelmed and you just want to bring them together for meaningful moment of connection not me talking at them but me facilitating them to meet each other in breakout groups etc call us we've got a great track record and we'd love to learn and oh by the way my team is going to hate me for saying this but we are a pay what you wish company we charge everything from little to a lot some companies insist on paying us top dollar it's the highest facilitation fee you'll ever pay but some companies come to us and say you know what I got zero dollars but I got 50 employees who are absolutely needing connection right now can you come in and do something with us we might have budget next year for you we've never said no to that so reach out if that applies to you guys for sure if I have to donate 10 sessions after this podcast I don't care it's the impact this is the shit John that saved my life yep and we do well we're not in it for the money we're in it for the fucking impact and so if this resonates with you call us up we're happy to donate a virtual gratitude experience to your team your community your friends whatever it's on us it's on John I'll make him pay thanks so much for coming on man I really appreciate it I'm looking forward to this new book too I'm excited looking for people to not just think of it like you said it is a fluffy little oh no it's science there's statistics there's data around how important this topic is so thank you again for coming on of course thanks for having me absolutely and for everybody out there listening hopefully you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did and got some little things to think about and as I always say at the end of all my podcasts go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day went if you make somebody smile today you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now so thank you all very much for listening and I will see you on the other and last but not least if you're looking for training I'm adjusting my training approach this year and I'm actually going to be delivering training to the masses I'll be delivering live training the first and second week of every single month with our two marquee courses filling the funnel and driving a close to anybody who wants to join and it includes membership in our on-demand platform with weekly AMAs so you can go to jbarrows.com slash open to check out the details thanks again and have a great day