3, 2, 1. Welcome to Jim's Take, episode 160. We gotta talk about the gratitude, man. We are in the grateful season.
Everyone is just so grateful and they're just so full of gratitude and everything is just so nice and you can feel it and the posts are coming and everyone's so grateful for their family and so grateful for the season and so grateful for all the other stuff. Everyone's become a freaking monk. I've thought about this for years.
It's almost like you enter the grateful season and you feel it. You feel great gratitude and you try to be helpful and you go volunteer at the soup kitchen and you buy gifts for the Toys for Tots and you do all this kind of stuff. But then come January, it's like you forgot everything that you were just espousing.
And I feel like gratitude is like the seasonal theater that comes up with. You're supposed to be grateful so you feel it and you do it and then come January, it all goes away. And what I was thinking about, the reason I wanted to do this podcast was, what does gratitude really mean? Not in the soft kind of like, oh, just appreciate things, but something that would actually work for me so that it doesn't just stop after the holidays.
How do you make something like this sustain? And so I started researching it and I did a lot of work and I learned something that gratitude is not an emotion. I was floored. This is amazing to me.
I thought it was an emotion and it turns out it's not. It's cognitive exercise. We'll get into that.
Tons of fun. So what I want to talk about today is, yes, the gratitude, but not the cheesy kind of gratitude. It's one, challenge you to ask this question of, I know I'm going to hear from you if you're a person that I know about how grateful you are for everything.
And that's so nice and wonderful and good for you. And you have this feeling, this love and blah, and that's so great. But the cynic in me is going to challenge you to say, well, what the hell are you going to do January 2nd when it's dark and gray and the season is over and you know, you got two months of cold and everything gets busy and all this other stuff, right? I don't hear people talking about how grateful I am now, or it becomes performative and it's all for like TikTok likes and everything else.
And I don't, you know, I hate social media. You know, I hate all of those things. What I'm trying to find for myself is some kind of perspective to allow me when it's that dark gray wintry season or the hot summer or whatever it is where you just sit and you have a moment and you're settled and you just have gratitude for all the beautiful things that you have.
And we have these moments and people teach it all the time. There are people who teach gratitude. The, you know, the Buddhists talk about it a lot about just kind of this objective view and the Eckhart Tolle and all of these, you know, it's all out there, right? The Alan Watts, the, you know, you can read books on all you want, manifesting it and actually seeing it and feeling it.
And but it's not a feeling and making it work for you is kind of where I'm always really interested in is that's nice theory over there. If you tell me what to do, I'm going to reject it 100% because it has to be my idea. I have to kind of interpret it, figure it out and spit it back out.
And so that's kind of what I'm kind of exploring today in terms of the gratitude and all that gratitude. Here's what I learned. And I'm happy to admit when I when I learned something new, I love learning new things and I did not know this.
Gratitude is not an emotion. It's an interpretation and the feeling we get like that parasympathetic nervous system response, and I'm going to talk about what that means in a minute, comes after your mind has recognized some type of gratitude. So it's not, you know, it's not the spontaneous emotional experience that it just kind of the world happens and we feel grateful and all that stuff.
We see something, we interpret it. It's cognitive in our brain. And then when we interpret it the proper way, that's when we get the feeling of gratitude.
So the emotion comes after the cognition. For example, we all know someone who's just like, oh, I love the rain because then I know the flowers are going to be coming or something like that. You want to smack them across the face, but that's gratitude.
They've kind of interpreted the rain for some offset benefit that they can interpret and say, this is what's good is, you know, we're going to have nice plants and trees, whatever the hell it's going to be. It's an interpretation of a difficult moment and how what lenses are we using as things happen to us to recognize the good things that are happening to us all of the time and good things are happening to us daily. We just don't, we either move too fast.
We either just don't care. Like today I'm talking about gratitude, but I'm tired from the weekend and I'm kind of pissed off and I'm a little cranky. So like this is almost in a weird way, not what I should be talking about today, but I'm going to try and get me out of it.
But there are plenty of people will talk to you about this life orientation, right? Like rather than focusing on what you don't have, how do you focus on what you do have, right? I don't have a job that pays me $5 million a year, but I do have a job that gives me the flexibility to spend time with my children, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and like do all this, right? It's all a matter of perspective and what your values are and what your motivations are and how do you do that and, and, um, and recognize it. So how do we assign value to the things that are happening to us? And, um, you know, world happens to us. We have to respond.
We have to adapt. We have to interpret. How do we assign a certain type of value so that, um, we can orient ourselves around a really positive type of, um, feeling of gratitude.
So here's, here's an example, right? And the reason I said parasympathetic nervous system, there was this guy, his name is this guy, right? I think he's still alive. I hope he is Richard Boyatzis. Um, he's a professor.
He's out at not Carnegie Mellon case Western. Maybe he's an organizational psychiatrist. He's phenomenal, right? I love his work.
I love reading his work. I love watching his videos. I love everything about this guy.
Like I don't really recommend many people. Richard Boyatzis is legit. I had the opportunity to meet him almost a decade ago.
A super kind guy. He spoke at the conference, did all this. He's awesome.
Um, what he was talking about in his presentation back then, like 10 years ago was this idea of, you know, when we're stressed, we operate in this, um, sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system is what makes you go. It is stress.
Some stress is good. It makes you take action, blah, blah, blah, blah. The only way to lower your stress is to raise the anti-stress, which is technically called the parasympathetic nervous system.
So the whole presentation was on that. Fine. We won't get into the details.
But he gave us an example, uh, where everyone in the room had to think of someone who helped them and could have been an old boss, could have been a friend, could be a family member, right? You think about this time when you were helped and everyone thinks about, you know, a couple of these people and then they pick one and they do this kind of stuff. Then you have to share that story of how they helped you with the person next to you. People are crying.
They're doing all this stuff. And he said, all right, well, what feelings did you feel? And people said, oh, I felt gratitude, nostalgia, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different things, happiness. Um, and he said that feeling that we have no real, um, attachment to, we have no real word for that.
We were using all these other words is the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the feeling that is, you know, that is the gratitude because somebody helped you that you had, you had to cognitively think of it, put yourself in that moment. And on reflection, all of a sudden you had this gratitude feeling of parasympathetic nervous system, which is the anti-stress and all of that kind of stuff.
And people struggle with the gratitude thing. People struggle because we have to flip the whole gratitude conversation on its head. I feel like if, if gratitude was purely emotional, you'd be stuck waiting for it, right? If, if it's interpretive, uh, then you can train it.
And that's kind of where my head was going of, all right, it's not just sit around and wait for gratefulness, like the season. How do I actually train myself to be able to recognize these things and build the capacity to be grateful for these moments that I have in the middle of February when it's cold? I hate the cold, um, on a weekend when the kids are making a ton of noise and, and screaming in your ear and you're trying to read a book and you know, all this other kind of stuff. Like there are all these moments where the world is just everything straining for your attention and fighting for your attention and pushing you to do these things.
And how do you kind of cut through that noise and train yourself to be deliberate in recognizing the beautiful things that you have all around you? And this isn't about just saying, you know, be happy with what you have. That's not what I'm saying, but you do have some wonderful things and we should recognize that, right? Like, yes, you should always strive for more. I think you should always challenge yourself and do these great things and whatever.
But at a certain point, you also have to recognize that, you know, the person you were a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago would have killed to have what you have today. Right. And what you have today is a reflection of the work you've done over the past few years.
Right. And yeah, some of it, the world is kind of smacked you across the face and suddenly like curveballs coming to you and everything else. But you've built a resiliency throughout that to have something incredible in front of you today.
And everybody has something incredible in front of them today that they could be grateful for. I believe that. Just like everybody has a story that is worth telling that I would be super interested in hearing.
I believe that. Like at the core of who I am, everybody has something interesting to say. Now, they don't always say interesting things.
Right. Some people have pretty stupid things to say. I get that.
But everyone has at least one interesting story, an experience they had or something they've done. And I think everybody has at least one thing that they could be grateful for. And it's not that Thanksgiving is coming or Christmas is coming or, you know, any of these other holidays and it's the season and, you know, all that stuff.
It's about recognizing a perspective that allows you to embrace gratitude into the new year and beyond and beyond, well beyond. And it's not easy. Gratitude is not effortless.
Right. This is going to take work. It's, look, already I'm pissed off today and that's fine.
Right. And I recognize that and I'm trying to change my perspective. But there is anything that requires perspective or a perspective shift or a different way of thinking or whatever it is.
It's inherently effortful. Okay. It takes effort because the way that we operate, we operate intrinsically in our mind, like our default modes.
You know, I think of Daniel Kahneman and his book, like we always, we have this negativity bias. We're always focused on, and we've adapted to this throughout humanity as we focus on the negative because that's what the threat is. So it's why when you're at work, you get 500 compliments, but one negative comment, you focus on the one negative comment.
Like we're just wired to do that. It's baked in, it's survival, it's all that. So gratitude is a very difficult recognition skill that has to interrupt our normal wiring.
So when we have to shift perspective, which is our kind of default mode kind of network and all that other kind of stuff, we have to shift our perspective. This is going to take work and it's going to change the assumptions and judgments that we have. I do feel like gratitude is an absolute elimination of judgment.
Because when we judge, we fill in the gaps and we fill in the gaps with our negativity, right? That's it. That's just kind of what we do. We make the assumption and we always go to the dark.
It's why the Republicans hate the Democrats. They think that the Democrats are going to, you know, they fill it with their mindset, you know, that they're going to take up and start a civil war or some kind of thing. Democrats don't even know what violence really is because they're all hippies.
And they're assuming that the Republicans are going to do whatever they think is going to happen in the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And that's why, you know, they hate each other because they fill it in with the negative fears and behaviors that they've adopted themselves. Forced perspective on other people. And when we think about this framework of changing our perspective, we have to ask ourselves legitimate questions.
And if you remember previous podcasts, you know what the definition of a question is. It is a question is a request for information where you legitimately do not know the answer. And when we're shifting our perspective, we have to ask ourselves these questions.
Normally, we talk about this in the context of work, right? Ask a question with no judgment or assumption so that you can get an open, honest, non-defensive answer. We have to ask ourselves these questions, too. And if we have to shift our perspective, we have to scratch the record, if you will, disrupt the, you know, the flow.
We have to ask ourselves honest and hard questions. And, you know, one of the questions you could ask, I feel like in terms of perspective is what are you taking for granted because you're used to it? Right. There's so many things that we just kind of take and we just assume and we do what's working in your life that you never name.
It just works, right? What are they? I talk a lot at corporate about, you know, these skills that we're supposed to have. So many things come so easily to us. We don't even recognize that they're skills because it's just the way that we are.
Right. And we tend to tell ourselves these stories that block our appreciation of our capability and our brilliance and our excellence and the things we enjoy and the things we value and the things that motivate us. So, you know, all of these things we tell ourselves stories because maybe we're supposed to be humble.
So we're not supposed to embrace that. And we've misinterpreted humility. Maybe we're told that we're supposed to be a certain way as an executive at work or something.
And so we're trying to be something that's not naturally part of us. And so we have to kill the natural part of us in order to be this thing that other people are telling us that we're supposed to be. More on that was last podcast on the never enough kind of thing.
And so we have to shift perspective, but then we also have to be present. And I'm embracing the presence thing a little bit more than I was a little dismissive of it in the past. But, you know, when the kids are screaming and you're trying to read a book is maybe you just put the freaking book down and you give them some attention.
And all of a sudden you're having a wonderful time around the table playing a game. Right. And you're just enjoying the moment that is right in front of you when you are thinking of something that needs to be done.
That's not going to be done that day. It just it's just hijacking, you know, anxiety hijacks your your presence, hijacks your joy of everything, your love of life, your experience, you know, everything else because you're thinking of something that's elsewhere. When you're sitting on social media, when you're sitting around with a group of friends and you're on your phone scrolling, you're not with your friends, even though you're physically there.
You're somewhere else. You're looking to look at this person and you're rushing past life and you're not enjoying these moments. And I don't understand that.
Like, I just don't understand how people could do that. And, you know, putting the phone away is such a good exercise like it's and it's not difficult. It's so cathartic.
I've been doing it more and more where I think for the month of December, I'm just going to lock my phone away. I haven't fully committed to that, but I think I'm just going to turn my phone off and just see if I can go a month without a phone. Um, and I think I'll be fine.
I really think I'll be fine, you know, outside of work. There's a special line for my clients. It's fine, you know, but no carrying the phone around because presence changes your entire perspective.
You know, going for a walk without headphones or run without headphones, um, just doing a puzzle, being present with the puzzle in front of you, uh, playing with your children, doing art, um, journaling, whatever the hell it is that you want to do. Um, there's a presence in a moment that allows you to be grateful for who you are and, and being still with yourself and being settled with yourself and, um, and taking just a moment to take that collective breath is so peaceful. Um, it allows you to, to be where you actually are.
And I think gratefulness has an important component to that. And when we have the time to be present, um, but that's again, another perspective shift that we have to take. So that's it.
Um, why do I not like the gratitude commentary on the holidays is because people will say it, but they can't point to any real evidence. I think I'm big on evidence. I'm big on doing the things like the proof and everything else.
Um, and I think when you truly have gratitude and presence, you have no desire to tell someone else, a stranger, 500 miles away that you are feeling this way. Right. I think it's, you know, you don't, the proof is something that is felt.
It's not shown when you have true gratitude. And, um, a lot of times also we have to like, when we think about proof of gratitude, we have to recognize it ourselves. And we do have to take the effort and time to recognize it ourselves, because if you don't take recognition of the progress you've made, then you can't be grateful of the progress that you made.
Right. And we've evolved. If you were to think about who you were five years ago and where you are today, you've done amazing progress.
You've built amazing things. You've got amazing people around you and you've done all of these things. That is proof that you can be grateful.
At the same time, the proof isn't proof for anybody else. It's only proof for you. One of the things I have a lot of clients do, imposter syndrome is a big thing.
And I think I could do a whole episode on imposter syndrome, um, which I hate the term. Everybody's got it. Everybody thinks that.
I have clients struggling with that. And you start this kind of positivity doc, or I have a lot of people do it when they get into a very senior role, like someone who's finally joined the C-suite. They got there and everything else.
There is always going to be a moment where you question your ability. And I have them start this pause doc. And what the pause doc is, when you think back, and this again, the cognitive brings you back to the moment so you can feel the emotion and that kind of thing.
I have them write down, and I started this years ago and it was really helpful when I started my business, was compliments you got. Or something that someone said to you that hit you a certain way and made you feel good. And usually it's like half of mine are just offhanded comments, but I'm like, that's exactly what I need.
I mean, I remember the president of the business saying, give it a frolly. I know it'll get done right. That's in my positive.
Like I felt so good, right? The lady at the United lounge, um, on my first business trip, when I started my business looked at me and she goes, you look like you're walking your purpose. And I was like, it's amazing. Right.
All right. I made the right choice. It's great.
But you get that when you say these things, compliments or whatever, it brings you back to that moment when you were there and you get that parasympathetic feeling and the feeling of gratitude and all of those other types of things. And so there is proof that's needed for you to recognize this type of work. And that's a practice item to help you do it.
We have to build the capacity to do it. We have to build the exercises to do it. And this isn't just creating a habit.
It's about challenging yourself, maybe asking yourself a question every day. What worked today? What did I do that was new today? What did I learn today? What did I handle? Well, like whatever it is, um, you don't have to journal it. You just got to take a moment of silence.
And, um, Trish Barker did that one of my early podcasts, right? Five minutes of silence. I think it was a 10 seconds of silence. I forget what it was, but it was a couple of seconds of silence and what comes out of that silence.
And it's an amazing exercise, um, to go through. And so you can just create this kind of proof folder of gratitude. And, and, and so I'll, I'll wrap everything up.
I know I've rambled for like 20 minutes on this, but like gratitude is not a seasonal thing. It is an absolute power move. Um, it's not softness.
It's not being weak. It's not sentiment. It's not any of these things.
It's clarity, it's focus. And it's, um, it's you putting attention on the things that really matter to you. And that's where gratitude is so important.
Um, practicing it consistently is so important. You, when you are focused on what's important to you, your motivations, your values, your whatever, you become less reactive. You become less anxious.
You care less about what other people think because you're grateful of what's in front of you. You're not, you know, thinking about what other people do. Um, and it's a lot harder for people to knock you off your game when you feel so good.
And, uh, that's strength. I think, I think there's real strength in gratitude. Um, but don't just sit and wait for it.
You have to go out and build it. So that's it. Anyway, think about it.
Gratitude, make it last until the next year. I hope you enjoy your holidays and all that good stuff. I might do another podcast this year.
I don't know. We'll see. I will see what my mood is, uh, checking out off my phone and everything.
We'll see if I'm in, you know, whatever. A second book has just been completed. Look for that in the new year.
And, uh, I'm very excited to share that. Have a wonderful week. Have a wonderful holiday and be grateful.
I'm grateful for you. Thank you, everybody. Have a wonderful week.
Everyone is just so grateful and they're just so full of gratitude and everything is just so nice and you can feel it and the posts are coming and everyone's so grateful for their family and so grateful for the season and so grateful for all the other stuff. Everyone's become a freaking monk. I've thought about this for years.
It's almost like you enter the grateful season and you feel it. You feel great gratitude and you try to be helpful and you go volunteer at the soup kitchen and you buy gifts for the Toys for Tots and you do all this kind of stuff. But then come January, it's like you forgot everything that you were just espousing.
And I feel like gratitude is like the seasonal theater that comes up with. You're supposed to be grateful so you feel it and you do it and then come January, it all goes away. And what I was thinking about, the reason I wanted to do this podcast was, what does gratitude really mean? Not in the soft kind of like, oh, just appreciate things, but something that would actually work for me so that it doesn't just stop after the holidays.
How do you make something like this sustain? And so I started researching it and I did a lot of work and I learned something that gratitude is not an emotion. I was floored. This is amazing to me.
I thought it was an emotion and it turns out it's not. It's cognitive exercise. We'll get into that.
Tons of fun. So what I want to talk about today is, yes, the gratitude, but not the cheesy kind of gratitude. It's one, challenge you to ask this question of, I know I'm going to hear from you if you're a person that I know about how grateful you are for everything.
And that's so nice and wonderful and good for you. And you have this feeling, this love and blah, and that's so great. But the cynic in me is going to challenge you to say, well, what the hell are you going to do January 2nd when it's dark and gray and the season is over and you know, you got two months of cold and everything gets busy and all this other stuff, right? I don't hear people talking about how grateful I am now, or it becomes performative and it's all for like TikTok likes and everything else.
And I don't, you know, I hate social media. You know, I hate all of those things. What I'm trying to find for myself is some kind of perspective to allow me when it's that dark gray wintry season or the hot summer or whatever it is where you just sit and you have a moment and you're settled and you just have gratitude for all the beautiful things that you have.
And we have these moments and people teach it all the time. There are people who teach gratitude. The, you know, the Buddhists talk about it a lot about just kind of this objective view and the Eckhart Tolle and all of these, you know, it's all out there, right? The Alan Watts, the, you know, you can read books on all you want, manifesting it and actually seeing it and feeling it.
And but it's not a feeling and making it work for you is kind of where I'm always really interested in is that's nice theory over there. If you tell me what to do, I'm going to reject it 100% because it has to be my idea. I have to kind of interpret it, figure it out and spit it back out.
And so that's kind of what I'm kind of exploring today in terms of the gratitude and all that gratitude. Here's what I learned. And I'm happy to admit when I when I learned something new, I love learning new things and I did not know this.
Gratitude is not an emotion. It's an interpretation and the feeling we get like that parasympathetic nervous system response, and I'm going to talk about what that means in a minute, comes after your mind has recognized some type of gratitude. So it's not, you know, it's not the spontaneous emotional experience that it just kind of the world happens and we feel grateful and all that stuff.
We see something, we interpret it. It's cognitive in our brain. And then when we interpret it the proper way, that's when we get the feeling of gratitude.
So the emotion comes after the cognition. For example, we all know someone who's just like, oh, I love the rain because then I know the flowers are going to be coming or something like that. You want to smack them across the face, but that's gratitude.
They've kind of interpreted the rain for some offset benefit that they can interpret and say, this is what's good is, you know, we're going to have nice plants and trees, whatever the hell it's going to be. It's an interpretation of a difficult moment and how what lenses are we using as things happen to us to recognize the good things that are happening to us all of the time and good things are happening to us daily. We just don't, we either move too fast.
We either just don't care. Like today I'm talking about gratitude, but I'm tired from the weekend and I'm kind of pissed off and I'm a little cranky. So like this is almost in a weird way, not what I should be talking about today, but I'm going to try and get me out of it.
But there are plenty of people will talk to you about this life orientation, right? Like rather than focusing on what you don't have, how do you focus on what you do have, right? I don't have a job that pays me $5 million a year, but I do have a job that gives me the flexibility to spend time with my children, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and like do all this, right? It's all a matter of perspective and what your values are and what your motivations are and how do you do that and, and, um, and recognize it. So how do we assign value to the things that are happening to us? And, um, you know, world happens to us. We have to respond.
We have to adapt. We have to interpret. How do we assign a certain type of value so that, um, we can orient ourselves around a really positive type of, um, feeling of gratitude.
So here's, here's an example, right? And the reason I said parasympathetic nervous system, there was this guy, his name is this guy, right? I think he's still alive. I hope he is Richard Boyatzis. Um, he's a professor.
He's out at not Carnegie Mellon case Western. Maybe he's an organizational psychiatrist. He's phenomenal, right? I love his work.
I love reading his work. I love watching his videos. I love everything about this guy.
Like I don't really recommend many people. Richard Boyatzis is legit. I had the opportunity to meet him almost a decade ago.
A super kind guy. He spoke at the conference, did all this. He's awesome.
Um, what he was talking about in his presentation back then, like 10 years ago was this idea of, you know, when we're stressed, we operate in this, um, sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system is what makes you go. It is stress.
Some stress is good. It makes you take action, blah, blah, blah, blah. The only way to lower your stress is to raise the anti-stress, which is technically called the parasympathetic nervous system.
So the whole presentation was on that. Fine. We won't get into the details.
But he gave us an example, uh, where everyone in the room had to think of someone who helped them and could have been an old boss, could have been a friend, could be a family member, right? You think about this time when you were helped and everyone thinks about, you know, a couple of these people and then they pick one and they do this kind of stuff. Then you have to share that story of how they helped you with the person next to you. People are crying.
They're doing all this stuff. And he said, all right, well, what feelings did you feel? And people said, oh, I felt gratitude, nostalgia, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different things, happiness. Um, and he said that feeling that we have no real, um, attachment to, we have no real word for that.
We were using all these other words is the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the feeling that is, you know, that is the gratitude because somebody helped you that you had, you had to cognitively think of it, put yourself in that moment. And on reflection, all of a sudden you had this gratitude feeling of parasympathetic nervous system, which is the anti-stress and all of that kind of stuff.
And people struggle with the gratitude thing. People struggle because we have to flip the whole gratitude conversation on its head. I feel like if, if gratitude was purely emotional, you'd be stuck waiting for it, right? If, if it's interpretive, uh, then you can train it.
And that's kind of where my head was going of, all right, it's not just sit around and wait for gratefulness, like the season. How do I actually train myself to be able to recognize these things and build the capacity to be grateful for these moments that I have in the middle of February when it's cold? I hate the cold, um, on a weekend when the kids are making a ton of noise and, and screaming in your ear and you're trying to read a book and you know, all this other kind of stuff. Like there are all these moments where the world is just everything straining for your attention and fighting for your attention and pushing you to do these things.
And how do you kind of cut through that noise and train yourself to be deliberate in recognizing the beautiful things that you have all around you? And this isn't about just saying, you know, be happy with what you have. That's not what I'm saying, but you do have some wonderful things and we should recognize that, right? Like, yes, you should always strive for more. I think you should always challenge yourself and do these great things and whatever.
But at a certain point, you also have to recognize that, you know, the person you were a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago would have killed to have what you have today. Right. And what you have today is a reflection of the work you've done over the past few years.
Right. And yeah, some of it, the world is kind of smacked you across the face and suddenly like curveballs coming to you and everything else. But you've built a resiliency throughout that to have something incredible in front of you today.
And everybody has something incredible in front of them today that they could be grateful for. I believe that. Just like everybody has a story that is worth telling that I would be super interested in hearing.
I believe that. Like at the core of who I am, everybody has something interesting to say. Now, they don't always say interesting things.
Right. Some people have pretty stupid things to say. I get that.
But everyone has at least one interesting story, an experience they had or something they've done. And I think everybody has at least one thing that they could be grateful for. And it's not that Thanksgiving is coming or Christmas is coming or, you know, any of these other holidays and it's the season and, you know, all that stuff.
It's about recognizing a perspective that allows you to embrace gratitude into the new year and beyond and beyond, well beyond. And it's not easy. Gratitude is not effortless.
Right. This is going to take work. It's, look, already I'm pissed off today and that's fine.
Right. And I recognize that and I'm trying to change my perspective. But there is anything that requires perspective or a perspective shift or a different way of thinking or whatever it is.
It's inherently effortful. Okay. It takes effort because the way that we operate, we operate intrinsically in our mind, like our default modes.
You know, I think of Daniel Kahneman and his book, like we always, we have this negativity bias. We're always focused on, and we've adapted to this throughout humanity as we focus on the negative because that's what the threat is. So it's why when you're at work, you get 500 compliments, but one negative comment, you focus on the one negative comment.
Like we're just wired to do that. It's baked in, it's survival, it's all that. So gratitude is a very difficult recognition skill that has to interrupt our normal wiring.
So when we have to shift perspective, which is our kind of default mode kind of network and all that other kind of stuff, we have to shift our perspective. This is going to take work and it's going to change the assumptions and judgments that we have. I do feel like gratitude is an absolute elimination of judgment.
Because when we judge, we fill in the gaps and we fill in the gaps with our negativity, right? That's it. That's just kind of what we do. We make the assumption and we always go to the dark.
It's why the Republicans hate the Democrats. They think that the Democrats are going to, you know, they fill it with their mindset, you know, that they're going to take up and start a civil war or some kind of thing. Democrats don't even know what violence really is because they're all hippies.
And they're assuming that the Republicans are going to do whatever they think is going to happen in the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And that's why, you know, they hate each other because they fill it in with the negative fears and behaviors that they've adopted themselves. Forced perspective on other people. And when we think about this framework of changing our perspective, we have to ask ourselves legitimate questions.
And if you remember previous podcasts, you know what the definition of a question is. It is a question is a request for information where you legitimately do not know the answer. And when we're shifting our perspective, we have to ask ourselves these questions.
Normally, we talk about this in the context of work, right? Ask a question with no judgment or assumption so that you can get an open, honest, non-defensive answer. We have to ask ourselves these questions, too. And if we have to shift our perspective, we have to scratch the record, if you will, disrupt the, you know, the flow.
We have to ask ourselves honest and hard questions. And, you know, one of the questions you could ask, I feel like in terms of perspective is what are you taking for granted because you're used to it? Right. There's so many things that we just kind of take and we just assume and we do what's working in your life that you never name.
It just works, right? What are they? I talk a lot at corporate about, you know, these skills that we're supposed to have. So many things come so easily to us. We don't even recognize that they're skills because it's just the way that we are.
Right. And we tend to tell ourselves these stories that block our appreciation of our capability and our brilliance and our excellence and the things we enjoy and the things we value and the things that motivate us. So, you know, all of these things we tell ourselves stories because maybe we're supposed to be humble.
So we're not supposed to embrace that. And we've misinterpreted humility. Maybe we're told that we're supposed to be a certain way as an executive at work or something.
And so we're trying to be something that's not naturally part of us. And so we have to kill the natural part of us in order to be this thing that other people are telling us that we're supposed to be. More on that was last podcast on the never enough kind of thing.
And so we have to shift perspective, but then we also have to be present. And I'm embracing the presence thing a little bit more than I was a little dismissive of it in the past. But, you know, when the kids are screaming and you're trying to read a book is maybe you just put the freaking book down and you give them some attention.
And all of a sudden you're having a wonderful time around the table playing a game. Right. And you're just enjoying the moment that is right in front of you when you are thinking of something that needs to be done.
That's not going to be done that day. It just it's just hijacking, you know, anxiety hijacks your your presence, hijacks your joy of everything, your love of life, your experience, you know, everything else because you're thinking of something that's elsewhere. When you're sitting on social media, when you're sitting around with a group of friends and you're on your phone scrolling, you're not with your friends, even though you're physically there.
You're somewhere else. You're looking to look at this person and you're rushing past life and you're not enjoying these moments. And I don't understand that.
Like, I just don't understand how people could do that. And, you know, putting the phone away is such a good exercise like it's and it's not difficult. It's so cathartic.
I've been doing it more and more where I think for the month of December, I'm just going to lock my phone away. I haven't fully committed to that, but I think I'm just going to turn my phone off and just see if I can go a month without a phone. Um, and I think I'll be fine.
I really think I'll be fine, you know, outside of work. There's a special line for my clients. It's fine, you know, but no carrying the phone around because presence changes your entire perspective.
You know, going for a walk without headphones or run without headphones, um, just doing a puzzle, being present with the puzzle in front of you, uh, playing with your children, doing art, um, journaling, whatever the hell it is that you want to do. Um, there's a presence in a moment that allows you to be grateful for who you are and, and being still with yourself and being settled with yourself and, um, and taking just a moment to take that collective breath is so peaceful. Um, it allows you to, to be where you actually are.
And I think gratefulness has an important component to that. And when we have the time to be present, um, but that's again, another perspective shift that we have to take. So that's it.
Um, why do I not like the gratitude commentary on the holidays is because people will say it, but they can't point to any real evidence. I think I'm big on evidence. I'm big on doing the things like the proof and everything else.
Um, and I think when you truly have gratitude and presence, you have no desire to tell someone else, a stranger, 500 miles away that you are feeling this way. Right. I think it's, you know, you don't, the proof is something that is felt.
It's not shown when you have true gratitude. And, um, a lot of times also we have to like, when we think about proof of gratitude, we have to recognize it ourselves. And we do have to take the effort and time to recognize it ourselves, because if you don't take recognition of the progress you've made, then you can't be grateful of the progress that you made.
Right. And we've evolved. If you were to think about who you were five years ago and where you are today, you've done amazing progress.
You've built amazing things. You've got amazing people around you and you've done all of these things. That is proof that you can be grateful.
At the same time, the proof isn't proof for anybody else. It's only proof for you. One of the things I have a lot of clients do, imposter syndrome is a big thing.
And I think I could do a whole episode on imposter syndrome, um, which I hate the term. Everybody's got it. Everybody thinks that.
I have clients struggling with that. And you start this kind of positivity doc, or I have a lot of people do it when they get into a very senior role, like someone who's finally joined the C-suite. They got there and everything else.
There is always going to be a moment where you question your ability. And I have them start this pause doc. And what the pause doc is, when you think back, and this again, the cognitive brings you back to the moment so you can feel the emotion and that kind of thing.
I have them write down, and I started this years ago and it was really helpful when I started my business, was compliments you got. Or something that someone said to you that hit you a certain way and made you feel good. And usually it's like half of mine are just offhanded comments, but I'm like, that's exactly what I need.
I mean, I remember the president of the business saying, give it a frolly. I know it'll get done right. That's in my positive.
Like I felt so good, right? The lady at the United lounge, um, on my first business trip, when I started my business looked at me and she goes, you look like you're walking your purpose. And I was like, it's amazing. Right.
All right. I made the right choice. It's great.
But you get that when you say these things, compliments or whatever, it brings you back to that moment when you were there and you get that parasympathetic feeling and the feeling of gratitude and all of those other types of things. And so there is proof that's needed for you to recognize this type of work. And that's a practice item to help you do it.
We have to build the capacity to do it. We have to build the exercises to do it. And this isn't just creating a habit.
It's about challenging yourself, maybe asking yourself a question every day. What worked today? What did I do that was new today? What did I learn today? What did I handle? Well, like whatever it is, um, you don't have to journal it. You just got to take a moment of silence.
And, um, Trish Barker did that one of my early podcasts, right? Five minutes of silence. I think it was a 10 seconds of silence. I forget what it was, but it was a couple of seconds of silence and what comes out of that silence.
And it's an amazing exercise, um, to go through. And so you can just create this kind of proof folder of gratitude. And, and, and so I'll, I'll wrap everything up.
I know I've rambled for like 20 minutes on this, but like gratitude is not a seasonal thing. It is an absolute power move. Um, it's not softness.
It's not being weak. It's not sentiment. It's not any of these things.
It's clarity, it's focus. And it's, um, it's you putting attention on the things that really matter to you. And that's where gratitude is so important.
Um, practicing it consistently is so important. You, when you are focused on what's important to you, your motivations, your values, your whatever, you become less reactive. You become less anxious.
You care less about what other people think because you're grateful of what's in front of you. You're not, you know, thinking about what other people do. Um, and it's a lot harder for people to knock you off your game when you feel so good.
And, uh, that's strength. I think, I think there's real strength in gratitude. Um, but don't just sit and wait for it.
You have to go out and build it. So that's it. Anyway, think about it.
Gratitude, make it last until the next year. I hope you enjoy your holidays and all that good stuff. I might do another podcast this year.
I don't know. We'll see. I will see what my mood is, uh, checking out off my phone and everything.
We'll see if I'm in, you know, whatever. A second book has just been completed. Look for that in the new year.
And, uh, I'm very excited to share that. Have a wonderful week. Have a wonderful holiday and be grateful.
I'm grateful for you. Thank you, everybody. Have a wonderful week.
