The Transformative Nature of Gratitude with Chris Schembra

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast. This is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 group, and today I'm really pleased to have USA Today's gratitude guru joining us on the show, Chris Schembra. Chris has got a number of feats in his repertoire right now around gratitude. He's the founder and chief question asker for the 7: 47 Gratitude Experience. He's Wall Street Journal bestselling author. What really fascinates me about today's conversation is the way that Chris has taken gratitude and made it such an important part of the fabric for teams and the future of teams and communities. So, welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Schembra: Dane, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here. Anytime I get a personal introduction from dear friends, David and Laura Bumby speak the world of you, and you guys do such great work together. To be here with you is quite the honor.

Dane Groeneveld: Absolutely. Chris, talking about connections and the way that people spark opportunities in our lives, could you tell us a little bit more about you? How did you come to be the gratitude guru? How did you come to be doing this wonderful work that you do?

Chris Schembra: Yeah, that's a great... It's a question that warrants a story, but the deeper underlying way that you asked the question was talking about the spontaneity of connections and the power of people. I think that my whole... The answer of how I got to where I am today, I think can be summarized by serendipity. How often do we walk around the world not living in the present, not able to see the serendipitous moments of connection and opportunity and all these great growth around us? So, it was an interesting way that you just asked that question. For all the listeners out there, I challenge you to look around and see where those chance encounters are all around you that you could be grateful for, that are moments of miracles, little tiny miracles that can bring joy into your life. But my story of becoming involved in gratitude started in July of 2015. Now, if you looked at my life in July of 2015, it probably didn't look too dissimilar from all you loyal listeners out there on this call. I had a job, I knew some friends, I had a family. I'd been through ups and downs in life. I had some cash in the bank. Life was looking pretty good, on paper. But as so many of you know, which is probably why you tune into this podcast today, just because a life looks good on paper doesn't exactly mean it looks or feels good in the heart. I realized that massive disconnection in July of 2015. I had just come back from producing a Broadway play in Rome, Italy. Boy oh boy, was it intoxicating. I can remember texting Laura Bumby the whole time I was over there, because we're talking about the food and the drinking and the loving and the conjoling and all the things that ancient Rome does so well, which is la dolce vita, it wakes you the heck up and it makes you appreciate life. When I got back to New York City, I realized the Chris over in Italy, intoxicated by life, was not the Chris here in America. I felt like a fraud. I felt like I was lying to everybody around me. I was not okay on the inside. I was unfulfilled, disconnected, insecure. That's a horrible place for me to be. A horrible collection of emotions for me to be feeling on a consistent basis. The last time I had felt all those things at once was in my early 20s, and it led me down a deep, dark path of non- suicidal self- injury, depression, jail, rehab. I didn't want to go back. I knew that if I didn't change my life around on the inside, I was liable to do some really bad things to myself. So, I thought, " What was it about Italy that changed my perspective on everything? What was it about Rome that changed my life?" Well, it's how they ate food with their friends, amongst community, to the wee hours of the morning. I said, " I got to do that here in New York." Well, what's step one? Invent a pasta sauce recipe. I know it sounds laughingly simple to say, but we invented a pasta sauce recipe that was decently good. I said, " You know what? I should feed this to people and host dinner parties to really bring people together." So, we started doing that every night, every week, every month for a year and a half, we'd host dinner parties for free in our home. Everybody would work together to create the meal. We'd serve each other. At every dinner, we'd ask the same question. We'd pause the whole dinner and we'd ask a simple question, " 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, who would that be?" Dane, the people's stories were crazy.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yep.

Chris Schembra: Positive, negative. Never thought to thank my dead dog. Never thought to thank my ex- boss. Never thought to thank myself or God. The stories were amazing. Everybody cried. We came together. We created moments. Moments that last lifetimes. We felt( beep) together. I said, " I'm going to do this for the rest of my life." That's it. That was my gratitude journey.

Dane Groeneveld: It's so powerful. What strikes me about that, Chris, you and I talking a little bit about the show, about my experience in Italy in September with Dr. Sirolli, and that word that you use, intoxification, it's real.

Chris Schembra: It's something.

Dane Groeneveld: That human energy is something else. And once you can harness it and do more of it, there is no looking back, is there?

Chris Schembra: No, I mean, Maya Angelou, the great poet, activist, Nobel laureate, author, she might have even sang a few songs in her days. She once said, folks, she once said, " People won't remember what you did, and they won't remember what you said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel." Now, in a world where people are way too consumed with what they can say on social media, or what they do on their resume, or what they do at their job, " Hey, buddy, what do you do? Nice meeting you." Like that bull(beep). The Italians are over there making people feel some epic, ancient( beep), they're having some kind of Roman bacchanal. They're doing it. It's a feast. So, if you could be that person that helps other people feel some sort of way in life, you've got their attention, you got their wallet, you got their soul, and you can use it however you want to do. I hope you use it for the good, but that's how you create some magical moments.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, Keeping with that Italian theme, I read a great book called The Swerve, and it talked about, and this is not to go down a religious rabbit hole, but it talked about the ancient philosophers and the ancient ways, and just how, when you go back 2,000, 3, 000 years, how well they were living, the philosophers, the Epicurus, the Senecas, thinking about how we share food and life together, thinking about the strength of mind. Then you come through this last 2, 000 years, and for one reason or another, you can point to it at any given time, whether it's a new religion, whether it's war, whether it's a pandemic, a plague. There's always something that's getting in the way of people spending time together. Often, the quickest way to get out of that hole or that distraction is coming back to food. So, it's fascinating that you found it through pasta sauce.

Chris Schembra: Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, my two favorite books in the world are Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On Benefits by Lucius Annaeus Seneca. I mean, you get it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: This whole thing about food and belonging and togetherness. I mean, what did Jesus do before he died? The Last Supper.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: Right? What did Dorothy Parker do? New York City social seat, The Algonquin Round Table. What did Thomas Jefferson do? He gathered 12 people together for his Jeffersonian dinners. All of this stuff happened over food. Actually, if you study the Latin root of the word company.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: Companis, com means together, panis means bread.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow. I didn't even know that.

Chris Schembra: Right. Both you and I run companies.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: It started off, the origination, the root word of that was food and bread. That's it. Which by the way, Laura Bumby is a great baker. You should try her food if you've got-

Dane Groeneveld: She is, fortunately, when we lived together in Houston, I went inaudible for one of Graham's early birthdays and a few Christmases and Thanksgivings.

Chris Schembra: It's nuts. It's nuts.

Dane Groeneveld: It is nuts.

Chris Schembra: So, the thing that you mentioned in there about being able to relate what was happening in the world then with what's happening in the world today, it's very important, I think, for your listeners, across a whole spectrum. First of all, the notion that history is our greatest teacher, and we would be fools to ignore it. Folks, you're probably sitting at your computer screen or taking a run with your phone or wherever you're listening to this thinking, " The world's going to end tomorrow. We're all( beep), things are really worse than they've ever been, and we should all cry and there's no hope." Well, here's the truth, y'all, the world has survived far greater plagues and pandemics. The world has survived far greater periods of social divide. We've survived far greater periods of class warfare, of fighting unjust foreign wars, of running out of money, of record- high inflation. Everything that's going on in our world today has happened tons of times throughout history, and we've gotten through it. Hopefully, that takes a little bit of a stressor out of your day- to- day life of knowing like, " The world, actually, probably not going to combust tomorrow. We're going to be fine." One of the cool things or parts of history that I chose/ choose to study and relate a lot of our work back to is those ancient stoics. Take a man name like Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome. He was the fifth and last great emperor of Rome before Rome did all this stuff. He was alive from... He was emperor from 161 to 100 AD. During the period of him running Rome, which was the most powerful entity in the world, just like America, he had the Antonine Plague, which killed his wife and four children, he had political usurpers, social divide, class warfare, running out of money, fighting foreign wars, all the same stuff we're going through in our country right now. He used a series of his... He used to write every day. He used to write hours a day, every day, to help process what he was going through in life as this really in a tumultuous, complicated time. He is one of the founding fathers of ancient stoicism. His writings turned into books. His writings turned into a philosophy of minimizing negative emotions and maximizing positive emotions, not necessarily based on what's happening around you, but what's happening inside of you. So, everything that we do here today is because of what they invented back then. Some people dedicate their entire lives to the Bible, which was invented 2, 000 years ago, or written 2, 000 years ago. Some people dedicate their lives to stoicism, which was invented and written 2, 000 years ago. I fall under the stoic philosophy and how stoic philosophy has then translated into positive psychology, into actual research and evidence- based things like that. That thing. The gratitude that we practice is not faith- based, it's scientific, stoic, positive, psychology- based. So, you're talking, yeah, when you mentioned Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, I mean, that's my jam.

Dane Groeneveld: The nice thing about that is that it's open and available to everyone. It's in a language that's accessible regardless of your beliefs, regardless of your life background, it's just right there in front of you to take hold of.

Chris Schembra: Our entire second book, Gratitude Through Hard Times: Finding Positive Benefits Through Your Darkest Hour is all just my modern interpretation of ancient stoic philosophy. That's all it is.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: That's all it is.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I love it. So, pasta sauce, obviously, a great catalyst for moving that forward. Paul Newman is one of my heroes, and I love what he started to do with his pasta sauce, and obviously around some different end goals around helping children in need and creating the camps and some of the stuff that he did. But there's this theme here around eating. There's this theme around stoicism. And there's also a theme around businesses struggling right now more than ever before, because they're responsible leaders, business leaders, HR managers, department managers, are now responsible for the experience of their employees more so than ever in history. So, how are you bringing pasta sauce to have good outcomes? How are you bringing some of these gratitude practices in teams, in the businesses that you're working with?

Chris Schembra: Well, great question. Then I'm going to turn my back on pasta sauce in a sec. We started off with those free dinner parties, and the dinner parties were again in our home, for free, you show up with a bottle of wine, you're going to cry, you're going to meet amazing people, you're likely going to leave the dinner party and go quit your job and pursue a life of passion. I don't know. Or come out gay, or forgive your mother, or I don't know. Do something. So, this crazy( beep) was going on. The rule of our dinner parties was that the first time you come, you come alone, the second time you come, you bring a friend. After that, you're eligible to nominate someone. So, if you come to my dinner table and I make you cry, and I give you a life transformational experience, and I say, " Hey, Dane, you did so good that you get to come again, invite a friend." Now, you think back into your life and you say, " Who's the coolest cat that I can bring to this dinner party?" And you invite some epic mother( beep), and those people would end up becoming our first clients, the people that were invited through friends of friends. Our social network was growing rapidly because of that come alone, invite a friend, nominate someone. Pretty soon, the door of our, at the time, studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, seven years ago, our door was being knocked on by Fortune 500 CEOs, Academy Award winners, Grammy Award winners, Super Bowl champions, Hall of Fame athletes, and more like. It was epic. Eventually, those CEOs, they said, " Hey, man, you're pretty good at doing this whole connection thing. Why don't you meet me in London and let's put on a whole week's worth of dinner parties to help me and our company connect with our customers in London." You'd say, " All right, let's do it." That began the business. So, for 20... Well, technically, 2017, 2018, 2019, 98% of the dinner parties and events that we produced were for client- engagement purposes.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow. I didn't realize that.

Chris Schembra: Oh, yeah. 98%. Let's say you've got 20 clients in Milan, or let's say you've got 20 clients in Chicago, and each of those clients represents$ 10 million a year for your business, $ 100 million of revenue in the room. You want to get them engaged, connected, more than satisfied, emotionally saved, all these beautiful things. Because if you can do that, if you can bring emotion into a B2B sale, you'll increase upsell, cross- sell, revenue referral. You will save that account that is maybe not going to renew with you next year, because personalities don't mesh. Now they love you as family, and now they're in for the next four years. There's a lot of great( beep) that's happened around the dinner table like that. That was our shtick for a long time. Then COVID happened. And when COVID happened, the world, or the universe, or God, or whatever you want to blame it on, ripped the dinner table, ripped pasta sauce away from us. We're sitting there and we say, " That sucked." But we've still got this really impressive gratitude question. We've still got this really impressive ability to connect people in a really meaningful way. Why don't we bring our stuff online?

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Chris Schembra: So, we started hosting these Zoom gatherings that were filled with breakout groups, and group chat, and facilitated discussion, and me still being able to do my thing that I do so well in person, but now I just do it through a screen. They started off just like the dinner party started, for free, every night of the pandemic, 50 to 100 people would come and we connect in breakout groups, and gratitude, and cry, and all that stuff. Pretty soon, the companies yet again started calling. That became phase two of our business. So, no longer did we need pasta sauce, no longer did we need a dinner table. From this place right here, we could turn on a Zoom, we could invite 200 of their team, employees, clients, whatever, onto the screen. And with a 99.998% success rate, we could guarantee a positive, emotional, measurable transformation. The average group comes in feeling overwhelmed, nervous, cautious, tired, anxious, unfulfilled, tired, sad, lonely. The average group, with a 99.998% accuracy, leaves grateful, connected, happy, joy, inspired, wiser, lighter.

Dane Groeneveld: Just from that one session.

Chris Schembra: 90 minutes of bliss.

Dane Groeneveld: Amazing.

Chris Schembra: Oh, we're working our (beep) off to get it done. Our team is amazing at inventing stuff. So, we invented this thing that just works. Through COVID, we've worked with hundreds of companies bringing together tens of thousands of their teams, teammates, across every continent, every time zone, any day, any night, any time of whatever. And we kind of forgot about pasta sauce. I mean, it sounds laughingly simple to say, but gratitude has become the star. Gratitude is truly the best thing we've got going for us.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's awesome. I love, in the book, you talk about gratitude is a loyalty and retention tool, and you've just explained it there. People come in overwhelmed, stressed, fearful, and they leave with this feeling of gratefulness, of connection to their teammates. Surely, that's a supercharge, it's like it's not just a supercharge of your existing batteries, it's loading a whole bunch of extra batteries onto team members to go back and do good work together.

Chris Schembra: Yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, what will I believe and what some other researchers believe is that what will help companies get through this really difficult time is, yes, a new go- to- market strategy, how do we raise the stock price? How do we obtain more sales? All these things. But no, the most important thing you can do is prevent your employees from dying of burnout, stress, loneliness, overwhelm, anxiety, prevent them from leaving, prevent them from just quiet quitting, prevent them from feeling so isolated and disconnected in a hybrid or virtual, remote environment that they would... Yeah, people are just, man, they're really feeling it. They're tired, they're burnt out. They need your emotional support. For so long, well, not for very long, but for so long, companies first cared about employees' physical health. How did they do that? They got them gym memberships. They got to subsidize the right nutrition coaching. They got to take them on 5K runs, or this kind of team- building challenge, or whatever. The next evolution was that companies started caring about their mental wellbeing, getting them access to Calm, and Headspace, and BetterHelp, and all these patient reimbursement therapy programs for the brain. What we are a part of is the next revolution of taking care of their soul and their emotional- social connection. We believe that loneliness is the greatest epidemic, and our country faces today, and that is destroying the workplace. There are more people that are isolated and disconnected and just craving belonging than ever before. It's really hurting people. That's the little space that we play in. But the market is only growing.

Dane Groeneveld: It is growing. I think you said in the book, 51% of American workers consider themselves to be lonely.

Chris Schembra: Yeah. Vivek H. Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States put out that statistic pre- pandemic. Crazy.

Dane Groeneveld: Well, so it's only got worse.

Chris Schembra: It's only gotten worse. Pre- pandemic, that 51% of the American workforce reports being lonely on a consistent basis. Studies show that that's equivalent to a deduction of lifespan of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which is about seven years off your life, 15 cigarettes a day, each cigarette is like seven minutes off your life. So, you're talking about really bad stuff.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's hectic.

Chris Schembra: Loneliness, when a person feels lonely, disconnected, disengaged, whether it's in their own life or in the workplace, and they live in that silo, it's really hard to see the good in others. It's really hard to collaborate. It's really good to feel the self- confidence needed to innovate or be creative. It's really hard to develop the empathy needed for curiosity and connection. So, all these things just dwindle. And you have a bunch of really miserable people looking at the world through the lens of ingratitude.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And that's not just a work problem. That's a problem when they go home to their family, to their communities.

Chris Schembra: Oh, it's all over. It's all over.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, cracks right through life.

Chris Schembra: The way that this always loops back to gratitude is we have a very simple view of how humanity works. You can either wake up and appreciate the good, or you can wake up and dwell on the negative. Most people have actually not too bad of lives. It's just we choose to focus on the couple things that are bad, than appreciate the overwhelming mountain of good, and what a miracle it is to be alive. That simple shift, that's the two sides of the brain like that, that's the difference between gratitude and ingratitude. Shifting from the lens of ingratitude to the lens of gratitude does not require you to change anything externally in your life. It requires you to change and maintain control of your internal perspective. What we believe, or what we try to teach is acknowledge that you're living a life of ingratitude, you run by fear, anxiety, uncertainty, competition, all that kind of stuff. Just observe it, label it. Just the idea of seeing it driving conscious awareness to it, destigmatizes it, lowers its impact over you, so you can do a series of positive psychology micro- interventions to shift into a lens of gratitude and then build up those gratitude muscles. That's when you can start looking at the world through the lens of empathy, curiosity, connection, creativity, bravery, all these kind of things.

Dane Groeneveld: No, that's really neat. And I love the muscle piece because it is a-

Chris Schembra: Something you can work on.

Dane Groeneveld: And it has to be worked on. Right?

Chris Schembra: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Because so many people today, particularly when you've got an app for everything, they kind of think, " If I can download the app, I'll be fixed." It's not that easy.

Chris Schembra: No, you got to put in the work. Although, here's the counterintuitive thing that I'm actually preaching is I don't believe that people should create a habit- forming, ritualistic, " I need to do this gratitude practice."

Dane Groeneveld: Right. Tell me more about that. That's interesting.

Chris Schembra: I think, and we've seen it through a lot of the things that we've all been a part of in life, once you make something have to do instead of a get to do, once you make it formulaic, once you make it automatic, once you make it something you must do, it loses its impact over you. So, creating a gratitude practice, that requires a dedicated, automatic, " I must find things that I'm grateful for every day in my life and put it in my journal and put it in the bedside drawer that I never look at again and move on to the next miserable activity," I think is messed up. What I'd rather teach people is nobody's living in the present, how do we take the distractions away that are competing for our time, competing for our heart, competing for our attention, actually coming to the present long enough to realize, holy smokes, I've got some things in this room, I've got some things within myself, I've got some things in my past that I was reminded of last night that I can be grateful for. When you drive conscious awareness to that feeling of gratitude, take an action on that gratitude right now. Go call someone, write a letter to someone, write a letter to yourself, do some kind of gratitude intervention. I'd rather teach people how to feel it when they want to feel it, even if they don't feel it for a long period of time. And when you feel it, take action on it. That'll be a far more qualitative impact on you than the quantity of repetitive have to do, formulaic, automatic, doesn't mean( beep) gratitude journal.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. No, I think you explained that well.

Chris Schembra: Now, I don't really want to knock the gratitude journal, because at least it's a start. But boy, I hold people to some pretty high standards of gratitude, high. And the conscious awareness, coming to the present moment, when you feel an authentic moment of gratitude, go take action on it, especially in a pro- social way, most people think of gratitude as a self- reflective exercise that they do by themselves. To us, to be grateful is to be grateful to someone and to practice gratitude in a communal, pro- social way is the most impactful way to practice gratitude, because studies show, and we write about it in our newest book, Gratitude Through Hard Times, that to practice gratitude amongst community feels good to give, feels good to receive, and feels good to observe.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, I hadn't caught onto the observe. I saw in the book that you mentioned, it feels better to give them to receive the gratitude, but tell me more about the observe. So, if you see gratitude being practiced in your team, in your community, that lifts you, individually?

Chris Schembra: Yes. Sara Algoe, researcher out of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, originated a study called witnessing theory. She essentially found that hypothetically, well, not hypothetically, she found empirically, it's backed by evidence, but hypothetically, you've got 10 people on your team, and Peter is new to the team. Well, if Peter observes Dane giving gratitude to David, he's more willing to associate himself with Dane, the giver of the gratitude, because he sees Dane as a grateful person. On the flip side, if Peter sees Dane give gratitude to David, Peter is more willing to associate himself with David, because he sees David as the recipient of gratitude, meaning he did something to provide a benefit to Dane at some point in the recent past that is now worth giving thanks to.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: She proved that empirically.

Dane Groeneveld: That's fascinating, because you often hear about people talk about people pleasers getting into a bad place and framing themselves and their teams wrong. But essentially, the observed pleasure on gratitude in a team can be really powerful to that individual.

Chris Schembra: Peer- to-peer gratitude is one of the greatest tools to employee retention and loyalty known to mankind. But people will literally, there's studies that show that one in three employees will take equal pay and position at a competitor's firm if their employer was more empathetic and appreciated them more. Employee recognition is, I mean, it's... Look, in the world of the Great Resignation in the world of quiet quitting, in the world of layoffs, in the world of all these things, retaining your top talent is cheaper than acquiring new ones. So, you might as well recognize them and give gratitude to them and make them feel like they are appreciated and they are seen and they are heard. That's it.

Dane Groeneveld: That's it. But it's funny because that's not necessarily how we've observed leaders in our earlier parts of our careers behave. So, it is a shift for leaders in today's world. My mentor, Mark Murphy, came up with a great quote, we were meeting yesterday, and he said, " Leaders think that they're hiring employees and then a human shows up." Right?

Chris Schembra: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Because you think, "Oh, here's a job description. I need these tasks done." And then the human shows up, and what you are suggesting there is that leaders have to be very empathetic, they need to be creating the environment to embrace gratitude not only from themselves to their employees, but amongst their employees in the team and customers, from what you touched on earlier.

Chris Schembra: Yeah. But from a leadership- to- employee standpoint, unfortunately, most leaders in a position of power will look out at their underperforming team and say, " My employees are the problem. They all need to be fired." But the reality is they are probably the problem. I would even pause or caution leaders showing gratitude to their employees until they've shown gratitude and empathized with themselves.

Dane Groeneveld: Great point.

Chris Schembra: Because thanking your employees for the sake of thanking your employees can come across selfish, ingenuine, and lazy if it's not actually given in a generous and in a real way. We invented something called the benefit appraisal, and it's this three- part system on giving gratitude. The first part of the equation is that the gratitude must be something that the recipient likes to receive or is of value to the recipient. What I mean by that is that if I know that Dane loves quality time and acts of service, and all I do is send them an Amazon gift card for, I don't know, some... It's not being delivered in the language the recipient likes to receive it.

Dane Groeneveld: It's Five Love Languages.

Chris Schembra: Five Love Languages By Gary Chapman. It's a simple sentence that we have, not all gratitude given is gratitude heard, gratitude must be given in the language the recipient likes to receive it, and not the language the giver likes to give it, or most convenient for the giver to give it. So, it must be a value to the recipient, which means that you're going to value me driving across town, spending a day, volunteering at your favorite local nonprofit with you. You're going to value me helping you build your couch. You're not going to value a gift card to Williams- Sonoma when you don't cook. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: So, that's the first part of the appraisal. The second part is that the gratitude must have cost you something. What I mean by that is, it's very easy to make gratitude really convenient and cheap and lazy. This means with your dollar, with your time, with your effort, I'd rather the gratitude you give be inconvenient and maybe cost more, because it is a genuine inconvenience for you. So, if I know that you enjoy quality time and acts of service and your favorite thing to do is enjoy an oyster roast with people, I'd rather, instead of ordering a bushel of oysters to be delivered to my home, and you just come over and enjoy them, I'd rather drive two hours out to the Eastern shore of Long Island, and I'd rather pick up those oysters from the oyster harvester themselves, and then drive them back here, clean them myself, put them in the steamer pot, invite you over and enjoy something that was an inconvenient thing for me to do, to show you gratitude in the language you like to receive it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: Now, the third part of the appraisal is that you genuinely have to give a (beep) about wanting to give that gratitude.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it. Has to be effective.

Chris Schembra: Here's what I mean by that, is that it's so easy to make gratitude something you show at the end of the year to everybody in your CRM with a click of a button.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. The box of chocolates or whatever it is.

Chris Schembra: The box of... Or it's easy to think you should go out and thank your customers. But what if you're not actually grateful for your customers? Then don't show the gratitude. It will come off as insincere. These formulaic thank yous. Thank you for your service. Thank you for this. Thank you for that. If it's not genuine, don't do it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Chris Schembra: Don't do it.

Dane Groeneveld: It's damaging.

Chris Schembra: Damaging. So, it's our benefit appraisal.

Dane Groeneveld: That may be an interesting feedback, because if you get to the end of the year and you're not grateful for your team and you're not grateful for your customers, maybe you're not in the right place.

Chris Schembra: Then think about why you aren't and what is the thing that needs to change within you in order to be able to feel that gratitude that you probably should be feeling. Because at the end of the day, the simple definition of gratitude is that you've received something of benefit or value from others. If that's a teammate sharpening your pencil, or if it's a teammate saving a deal that you messed up, that's something you should look within yourself as to why. The odds are it's because you're looking at the world through a lens of ingratitude yourself. Here's the good news, folks, if you think that that's you, you're an ungrateful person or you're operating through the lens of ingratitude, it's me, too. It's actually like we're just one of the many modern victims of an ancient plague. I mean, if you go to the year-

Dane Groeneveld: I agree.

Chris Schembra: I mean, if you go to the year 63 AD, you could point back to Lucius Annaeus Seneca's book, On Benefits, in the fifth through seventh lines of that book written in 63 AD state that, " The greatest plague to Roman society is that we neither know how to give nor receive a benefit, in all the vices common in today's society, nothing is more common than ingratitude." That mother( beep) wrote that 2,000 years ago.

Dane Groeneveld: And nothing's changed.

Chris Schembra: Nothing's changed.

Dane Groeneveld: Nope.

Chris Schembra: He calls adulterers, and homicides, and thievery, and drunkardness, and absurd behavior as a product of ingratitude, he says, " Nothing is more worse for humanity than the ungrateful man." If you look at ancient India, the ancient Pali language of India, the worst thing you could be called in that ancient language is foreign language, a gratitude- lacking dog.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Chris Schembra: Yeah. Here's the good news, folks. If you're miserable, if you are feeling a sense of entitlement, if you feel like a victim of unjust circumstances, if you feel like you're better than others, if you feel angry or dishonored by the world, if you feel like you've been jaded or judged or left out to the bleak, cold, midwinter of Peaky Blinders, if you feel any of that sort of way, you're just like me. We got a lot in common. And just the acknowledgement of that helps destigmatize that ingratitude.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. It's powerful.

Chris Schembra: And I want you to answer this question for me. If you, the folks listening, 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, who would that be? I want you to think about what's the greatest thing they ever did to you? What's the benefit you received? What's their legacy? What's the worst thing they ever did to you? If they were here right now with you right now, what would you say to them? Then pick up that phone and call them, or text them, or write them a letter. That will be an example of one little gratitude micro- intervention you can do to shift from a lens of seeing the world that's hurting you to appreciating the amazing benefits you've got in your life right now. Think to yourself, what are three things you're grateful for in your personal life? Three things you're grateful for in your work life? Three things you're grateful for within your own self? That's the second exercise you can do.

Dane Groeneveld: Yep. I like that one a lot, too. Chris, this has been amazing. I feel like I can speak to you for hours. I'm sure our listeners would love to speak to you for hours.

Chris Schembra: Let's do it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, they should, and we're going to connect on that here. I'm not going to summarize, because you've finished with such a poignant sort of call to action there, but one thing that helped me a lot, personally, and I think it'll help listeners, is that statement that you said at the end, " You're just like me." We've all got this. It's a plague, this ingratitude, and it starts with the question, and it starts with taking action now. I think the fact that that is available to each and every one of us and that it can bring huge benefits to our families, to our teams, to our customers, that's a gift. It really is. Thank you for today. How can our listeners find you? How can they find the book, the podcast, your team, if they want to build some experiences in their own groups and with their customers?

Chris Schembra: Yeah, if you're listening to this, just email Chris @ 747club. org or info @ 747club. org. I'll definitely respond. Check us out on LinkedIn, check us out at 747club. org. Our book, Gratitude Through Hard Times: Finding Positive Benefits in Our Darkest Hour is the one that hit number one on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, that's available on Amazon. Our first book, Gratitude and Pasta: The Secret Sauce for Human Connection will teach you how to host your own 18- person dinner party with pasta sauce and making everybody cry. That's available on Amazon as well. But I'd really like you just to reach out to Dane if that gratitude question brought up some emotion, if that gratitude question inspired you to reach out to someone you haven't thought of in absolute years and let him know how much you appreciate his questions. He's a great question asker and a great leader, who leads from the heart and the things that they're building here at the HUDDL3 group is what humanity needs, people and business, business and people, remember, it's all about taking care of each other, and they're certainly doing that for the business ecosystem, and it's pretty inspiring to see.

Dane Groeneveld: Thanks, Chris. Thanks for your time today, and thanks, and congratulations on just all the great work that you're doing out there in the world.

Chris Schembra: Thank you, Dane.