Confidence Classic: How Gratitude Will CHANGE Your Life With Chris Schembra USA Today’s “Gratitude Guru” & Rolling Stone Columnist

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Speaker 2 You can either wake up in the morning and focus too much on what's going wrong and not appreciate all the good things, or you can wake up and you can appreciate all the good things and not really focus on the stuff that's wrong.

Speaker 2 The difference is gratitude and ingratitude.

Speaker 2 And what I learned in that dark moment on the phone with my friend Scott is that the choice was mine to either look at my life through despair or to look at my life through appreciation.

Speaker 1 Come on this journey with me. Each week, when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

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Speaker 1 Meet a different guest each week.

Speaker 3 I'm so excited that you're back here with me this week. I cannot wait for the topic we're getting into or for you to meet my guest.

Speaker 3 Chris Shembra is the best-selling author of Gratitude and Pasta, the secret sauce for human connection. I love that title.
And his new book, which drops today. It's out today.
You got to go get it.

Speaker 3 Gratitude Through Hard Times. And that is an understatement.
USA Today calls him their gratitude guru.

Speaker 3 He's a founding member of Rolling Stone Magazine's Culture Council, and he sits on the executive board at Fast Company Magazine. Holy cow.

Speaker 3 He's the founder of the 747 Gratitude Experience, an evidence-based framework used to strengthen client and team relationships in profound ways.

Speaker 3 He's used the principles of gratitude to spark over 500,000 relationships around the dinner table, serving Fortune, 50 CEOs, Olympians, Academy Award winners, Grammy Award winners, number one recording artists, Super Bowl champs, and more.

Speaker 3 As a a viral marketer, his gratitude campaign, giving tribute and thanks to veterans, earned over 36 million views, 1.2 million shares, and two Emmys.

Speaker 3 Oh my gosh, Chris, I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thanks for being here with us.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me, Heather. A special shout out to Carrie Siggins for the original introduction, a sister from across the country.
Just so glad that we got to make this work today.

Speaker 3 Oh my gosh, I am so glad too. All right.
So I want to start off with, I like to keep it real, Chris.

Speaker 3 I know you do too, from your writing, but you know, gratitude is something that is, in my opinion, so over talked about, so overused. I hear about it from everybody.

Speaker 3 And the way you approach gratitude is a 180, completely different than any way I've ever seen it. The way that you're doing it is a real, real way.

Speaker 3 Like it's not this kind of BS talk that I see on social media quotes of gratitude. So how did you end up on this topic to begin with?

Speaker 2 You know, Heather, that's a great question. And I'm so glad that you see it or our work for what it is.

Speaker 2 You know, oftentimes when we go into an experience or an event with a team and they say, oh, here comes the gratitude guy. You know, you see a lot of rolling eyes.

Speaker 2 Gratitude for so many years has been this fluffy, wuffy, airy, fairy, spiritual, only see the positive, woo-woo. Yahoo.
What are you grateful for? I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for the sun.

Speaker 2 Well, here's the thing about gratitude. We think that to be grateful is to be grateful to someone.

Speaker 2 And this journey, our counterintuitive approach to gratitude, the science and psychology approach to gratitude, started, it started about six years ago.

Speaker 2 I just gotten done producing this tribute campaign for our veterans. I'd just gotten back from from producing a Broadway play in Italy.
I had a lot of weird things going on in my life.

Speaker 2 On the outside, my life looked pretty awesome on paper, but on the inside, I was completely screaming. I was a complete fraud.

Speaker 2 It happened

Speaker 2 around July of 2015.

Speaker 2 I took a fearless and searching moral inventory of myself and realized, probably like a lot of your listeners out there today, I was lonely, unfulfilled, disconnected, insecure, nervous, cautious, overwhelmed, anxious, alone.

Speaker 2 You know, all my friends on Instagram saw one side of me, but the inside, I was just broken.

Speaker 2 And, you know, it was in conjunction with me having just come back from feeling a really inspired type of way in Italy. We were over there producing the Broadway play, and it made me come alive.

Speaker 2 They walked different, talked different, loved different, told history stories different. It was intoxicating.
It was la dolce vita, as they say.

Speaker 2 And when I got back here to New York City, I said, I got to do something, do something quick. That felt way too good not to recreate.

Speaker 2 So I thought back, what was it about my time in Italy that changed my perspective on everything?

Speaker 2 Well, it was their food. Specifically, it was pasta sauce.
And so back home in my kitchen here in New York, I said, I got to recreate this magic. And I invented, it's going to sound silly and simple.

Speaker 2 Your listeners are going to laugh. I invented a pasta sauce recipe, and I figured I should probably feed it to people to actually see if it's good or not.
And one night, I hosted a dinner party.

Speaker 2 It was 15 people in my friend's backyard in the middle of New York City. And we worked together to create the meal.
And we had some amazing pasta sauce.

Speaker 2 And when the time was right, I opened up with a simple

Speaker 2 question.

Speaker 2 If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don't give enough credit or thanks to,

Speaker 2 that you've never thought to thank,

Speaker 2 who would that be? And Heather, when we asked that question around the dinner table, we realized people didn't give the airy, fairy, farty, warty version of gratitude that we're all used to.

Speaker 2 They told real stories about people.

Speaker 2 Some were positive. Some were negative, but it was intoxicating.
It was life-changing. It was real.

Speaker 2 And it was that moment then and there that I realized there is a whole side to this thing, gratitude,

Speaker 2 that not enough people have seen before.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to make it my life's work to showcase it. And that started the journey six years ago, almost seven years ago.

Speaker 3 Did you feel scared? I always like to ask this because it just reminds me of that pivotal moment in my life when I got fired from corporate America and I was trying to figure out what I'm going to do.

Speaker 3 This is similar in that you were taking a leap of faith, but yours feeled like there was something calling to you. So did it feel a little bit more comfortable? What did that feel like?

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 What a story you have, by the way. The bravery it took and the courage to go out on your own and do what you're doing now.
I got to see that in people.

Speaker 2 I got to have people like you around my dinner table who shared these amazing stories.

Speaker 2 The stories that they had achieved tremendous amount of success in their life, but they never thought to thank their third grade teacher.

Speaker 2 They never thought to thank their grandfather that drove them to soccer practice. They never thought to thank their mother that never told them that she loved them.

Speaker 2 The mean ex-boss, that mean ex-girlfriend, that person who told them they'd never amount to nothing. These stories were real and it had a way of normalizing whoever was at the dinner table.

Speaker 2 We started hosting those dinners way early in our company. We started hosting those dinners just for free in our home for our friends.
And every week, people would pour in by the dozens.

Speaker 2 The rule was, simple rule. First time you come, you come alone.
Second time you come, you bring a friend. After that, you're eligible to nominate someone.

Speaker 2 And so we'd have people just show up to the dinner table. I didn't know who they were, but I'd Google them the next day and say,

Speaker 2 you're telling me that that person last night helped me make peanut butter and then cried around the dinner table table talking about their dead dog. Holy shit, we're onto something.

Speaker 2 And not only did the power of community save my life, but the power of gratitude. So gratitude practice, not in a self-reflective way that just goes in a journal that nobody ever sees.

Speaker 2 But when you practice gratitude in small group setting, it feels good to give. It feels good to receive.
And it feels good to observe other people doing it. So that was saving my life.

Speaker 2 I had no choice but to continue it.

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Speaker 1 I asked you to try to find your passion.

Speaker 3 So you get this business going and it starts ramping up really quickly. You start now you're hosting Fortune 50 CEO.
You're hosting elite people now.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So companies would call us

Speaker 2 way in those early days, companies would call us and essentially say two things. One, we have a really disconnected team, or two,

Speaker 2 I'm looking to build better relationships with our external partners and clients and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 And so we'd fly all over the world, putting on these experiences, large or small, with a sole goal of helping them bring their people together and everybody crying.

Speaker 2 I know it sounds silly and crazy and kind of psychotic to say my goal is to make people cry, but that's literally proof that we're doing something right. That's our goal.

Speaker 3 And that's something that the research tells you to break that down a little bit for us because it does sound a little crazy.

Speaker 2 Yeah. At those early dinners, like those early 18 person dinners, we would count if less than eight people cried, we considered it a failed night.

Speaker 2 It was very rare that we failed. It was.

Speaker 3 And I got to think that's not normal, right? Because in most business dinners, growing up in business, it was there is no crying at work. I mean, that's, you don't want to cry.

Speaker 3 So for people to break that personal personal barrier and what you've been taught and conditioned to do, that's really allowing people to see you at quote unquote your weakest.

Speaker 3 That's not easy to get to.

Speaker 2 From a psychological safety and trust with internal teams perspective, creating an emotional connection is paramount, right? There's all the studies now about.

Speaker 2 belonging and connection within the workplace, all that stuff.

Speaker 2 I won't go into those studies, but I'll say studies are coming out that shows it actually pays well to have your team get to know each other outside of work in meaningful and connected ways.

Speaker 2 Not the bullcrap ways of where are you from? Where is your kid going to college? You know, what's your dog's name, but the meaningful stuff. Like you're grateful.

Speaker 2 You've never thought to thank your grandfather who drove you to soccer practice. I had a grandmother who taught me how to knit.
Oh my God, we have a lot in common. Wow.

Speaker 2 I like this company where I'm working. I should stay.
So from a loyalty retention part, it's huge.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, on the client engagement side, anytime that you can bring emotion into a B2B sale, Google found in their promotion to emotion study that your buyers are five times more likely just to consider purchasing, 12 times more likely to pay to purchase, and 30 times more likely to pay a premium.

Speaker 2 So if you actually help people. get to know each other, not just for your product or your price or your

Speaker 2 competition in the marketplace, but actually like the human, right? People buy from people, not from companies. They actually get to know the people.

Speaker 2 You kind of are going to do some pretty good business. They're going to stick with you when times are bad.
They're going to reward you paying a premium when times are good.

Speaker 3 So, will you please repeat that data, the data point? And because

Speaker 3 I have not visited that study, I haven't researched that study. I haven't read that study.
So I'd love to hear it again.

Speaker 2 Just Google found in their promotion to emotion study that buyers with a strong emotional tie to your brand are five times more likely to consider purchasing, 12 times more likely to purchase, and 30 times more likely to pay a premium.

Speaker 2 So if you're Heather and you either have the option of charging $10,000 for something you do or $2 million for something you do, and all it takes is a true, deep, lasting, meaningful connection on an emotional level.

Speaker 2 with the people you're trying to do business with, you choose. Google proved it.

Speaker 3 Wow. That's so powerful to hear and really eye-opening.
However, it makes a lot of sense, right? So the business is blowing up. You're doing incredibly well.

Speaker 3 You are creating these emotional experiences. People are breaking down barriers.
They're making more money. They're having more business success, feeling more fulfilled, loving their jobs more.

Speaker 3 Now a pandemic hits. Where do you go from there?

Speaker 2 It's craziness. You and I had this conversation about overcoming your villains, your amazing book that launched in the middle of a pandemic.

Speaker 2 I get it, what it's like to launch our first book in the middle at the beginning of the pandemic, I should say. So going into 2020, God, we were on top of the world, right?

Speaker 2 At least inside our own mind. We were on top of the world.
We had this new book. It was going to launch in April.

Speaker 2 So I grabbed my book and I grabbed my dad and we sailed across to Europe to show Italy what she had inspired in me. And boy, that was amazing.
It was late February.

Speaker 2 We were dining with Massimo Botura at Osteria Francescana. We're buying all these great leather goods.
We're having a good time.

Speaker 2 And then my mom and my girlfriend call up and say, hey, there's this thing in Milan. It's called COVID.
You should probably come home early. We ignore them, but we land home February 28th.

Speaker 2 And the government says, you should probably enter quarantine. I'm like, whatever.
I'll do a two-week self-isolation quarantine. This is all going to blow over.
Well, it never blew over.

Speaker 2 So the whole world shuts down. Our book is due out April 7th, 2020, a book teaching people how to host their own 18-person dinners.

Speaker 2 That's kind of obsolete. It's called Gratitude and Pasta.
It's literally the how-to guide to make 18 people cry around your dinner table. Kind of obsolete.
So the whole book tour is canceled.

Speaker 2 All the corporate events are canceled. All our revenue is canceled.
I'm sitting alone doing the whole sourdough and garden, all the pandemic stuff that people got into. I'm doing it.

Speaker 2 I got nothing going on. And I take this kind of step back in the empty city streets of New York, 30,000 of our neighbors dying.
And I look around and I say, damn, I'm miserable.

Speaker 2 Right back to where I was seven years, at that time, five years ago. And I got back from Italy again.
I was lonely, overwhelmed, disconnected, insecure, nervous, cautious, anxious.

Speaker 2 What am I going to do tomorrow? What might my future bring? And I looked around and I said, oh my God, I'm not alone. There are others who feel this exact type of way.

Speaker 2 Boom. Let's host a virtual experience.
Let's get together some. Let's host a virtual dinner.
Well, the first one was April 19th, 2020. It was decent.
Eight people came.

Speaker 2 We didn't really talk about much, whatever. And I looked and I said, my God, it's missing something.
What is it missing? Ah, our signature sauce, gratitude.

Speaker 2 Not the pasta sauce, the real stuff, gratitude. And so the next one was April 26th of 2020.
We asked our signature gratitude question. We had breakout groups.
We used the group chat.

Speaker 2 We facilitated beautiful discussion. Almost everybody cried.
They came in feeling miserable. They left feeling grateful, connected, happy, wiser, lighter, joy.
And so we just kept doing it.

Speaker 2 Every night for the first couple months of the pandemic, we hosted a virtual gratitude experience for our community. 50 to 100 people came every night.
And one day, the phone started ringing.

Speaker 2 The companies, their employees. were all digital, disconnected, work from home, miserable, lonely, tired, nervous, anxious, the same stuff I was feeling.
And we said, Oh my God,

Speaker 2 we got to do this for them. And then it just took off.

Speaker 2 In the two and a half, three, what, two, two years, two and a half years since the start of all that, we've served tens of thousands of people, hundreds of companies.

Speaker 2 And what we found is that the principles of gratitude in the way that we do it had a 99.998%

Speaker 2 success rate, guaranteeing a positive, emotional, measurable, meaningful transformation with just a 90-minute Zoom gratitude experience.

Speaker 2 Whether our clients were bringing 20 people or 200 people or thousands of people, the impact was pretty much guaranteed.

Speaker 2 It was.

Speaker 2 High times in the city where the favorite word was we, we, we, it was live it up and have fun.

Speaker 3 and that's been going two years ever since to great acclaim but i think you know what came next yeah what comes next is not pretty and and it's not no one's forecasting what chris is about to share because i can tell you when reading it i about fell out of my seat and and i'm grateful that you share your own personal struggles like this because this is what is missing from social media and the world today.

Speaker 2 Thank you for saying that. And with your platform, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of great friends you have online, I can't wait to see how you bring gratitude to the masses after this.

Speaker 2 But look, you're watching this, you're reading this, you're listening to this. You saw my enthusiasm just before.

Speaker 2 That was kind of on purpose. That's the enthusiasm that American people had in October of 1929, during the roaring 20s, where the favorite word was me, me, me.
It was live it up and have fun. It was

Speaker 2 great profits, great family, big new house, great respect, accolades coming in every day.

Speaker 2 And then it all came crashing down

Speaker 2 with a terrifying crackup. It was Thursday, December 30th, 2021.
If you looked at my life, you would have been jealous. I had everything I had ever wanted.
But at 4:30 p.m.

Speaker 2 that day, I got on a one-on-one call with a client of mine, Lisa Penn. And she said, Chris, you don't look too hot.
We should probably end

Speaker 2 our hour-long discussion.

Speaker 1 And we did.

Speaker 2 And I took note of that because that's the first time a client's ever said that to me.

Speaker 2 And I went out to dinner that night with my girlfriend to celebrate her new job, our new home, all these great things.

Speaker 2 I drank too much

Speaker 2 accidentally. We got in a fight.
I got home, felt like a miserable piece of crap, like a fraud, an imposter, a monster.

Speaker 2 And I engaged in my most recent and largest episode of non-suicidal self-injury. It's called NSSI.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of folks that you know who have been through similar things. It's things like cutting and burning and scratching and self-mutilation.

Speaker 2 Well, my vice is cutting and I like my kitchen knives. That time I flew a little too close to the sun.
I'm lucky to be alive. In the days that followed, I was a pile of mush.

Speaker 2 I would watch Nancy Myers movies on repeat.

Speaker 2 I would

Speaker 2 cry at the sight of

Speaker 2 a lemon. I had friends that invited me to all these things, but I couldn't even muster the courage to show up.

Speaker 2 One day I was on the phone with my buddy Scott and he said, Chris, you just got so many things going on in your life. You couldn't see the clearing through the forest.

Speaker 2 And I said, my God, he's so right. Sometimes in life, we involve ourselves in so many things and we program ourselves only to see the bad, never to appreciate the good.

Speaker 2 And you're probably going through that right now. And I got to tell you, you're not alone.
And it's nothing new. Humanity has been plagued by this for many, many years.

Speaker 2 I mean, you look at the books on my shelf. I'll point at one book written in the year 63 AD.

Speaker 2 2,000 years ago, this guy wrote a book. You know him as Seneca the Elder.
His real name was Lucius Aeneas Seneca. He was an elder statesman during the Roman Empire.

Speaker 2 And in that book, he says that the greatest plague to Roman society is that we neither know how to give nor receive a benefit.

Speaker 2 And of all the vices common in today's society, nothing is more common than ingratitude. He said ingratitude has caused the worst in humans.

Speaker 2 The ungrateful man, homicides, thievery, adultery, all that kind of stuff. They were going through that 2,000 years ago.
We're going through the same stuff in our country today.

Speaker 2 You can either wake up in the morning and focus too much on what's going wrong and not appreciate all the good things, or you can wake up and you can appreciate all the good things and not really focus on the stuff that's wrong.

Speaker 2 The difference is gratitude and ingratitude.

Speaker 2 And what I learned in that dark moment on the phone with my friend Scott is that the choice was mine to either look at my life through despair or to look at my life through appreciation.

Speaker 2 Now, your life might not look like mine. You may be saying, but I don't have all those things, Chris.
Money's tight. My family hates me.
I've got no friends, no job. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Well, here's the thing that Heather was talking about earlier in the call. That happiness, woo-woo, positivity, bullcrap.
It's all fake.

Speaker 2 It's something that society has fed us for the last 40 years. That self-help space, the positivity gurus, the Tony Robbins of the world, they fed us crap.
Here's the truth.

Speaker 2 Life isn't supposed to look pretty. It's not supposed to be able to be fixed with a filter.
It's not supposed to be

Speaker 2 pretty this and epic that and monumental that. Life is a form of suffering.
How you choose to learn from those dark moments and use those to your advantage is something only you can control.

Speaker 2 And when I realized that, boy, my life shifted. And that was just a couple months ago.

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Speaker 3 It was so dark where you were. I was not familiar with what you described.
If I know people who do that, Chris, nobody's told me. And that's, this is why I love so much you share it, right?

Speaker 3 Because everyone has secrets. Everyone has some dark, hard past in their life, right? But this is one I hadn't, I wasn't familiar with.
So I was really grateful that you were so honest to share it.

Speaker 3 So when you're in that low, I mean, that's like you said, this is like one of your darkest moments ever.

Speaker 3 I mean, you literally could have died tactically and thankful for your friend that helped you to, you know, have this shift in your perspective.

Speaker 3 But tactically, what were some of the things that you were able to do to help you make that pivot to start focusing on this wonderful woman that you had in your life or the work that you enjoyed so much?

Speaker 3 Like, how do you go from that dark moment to like starting to find the little small wins?

Speaker 2 Great question. And I do want to call out Scott and Caitlin, Sean and Leslie, Alec and Shauna for being there in those early days.

Speaker 2 A researcher by the name of Philip Watkins from Eastern Washington University did a wonderful research study. He would eventually call the grateful processing of unpleasant memories.

Speaker 2 And it's a wonderful study that shows he took a number of participants and he said, think about a negative experience.

Speaker 2 He split them up into three groups. There was one group who thought about a negative experience and let it like, you know, ransack their brain and then just carried on with their life.

Speaker 2 That was group number one. Group number two thought about a really negative experience and then just wrote about it.
That was group two.

Speaker 2 Group three thought about a negative experience, wrote about it, found the positive benefits in it, gave gratitude to it. That was group three.

Speaker 2 Group one was like miserable. They thought about a negative experience.
It ruminated chaotically in their brain and then they just carried on with their life and like nothing happened. Group two

Speaker 2 thought about it chaotically and then wrote about it.

Speaker 2 And science shows that when you write down or talk out about a negative autobiographical experience, you destigmatize the impact that negative emotion has over you.

Speaker 2 You kind of organize it and normalize it and talk it out or write it down and say, that wasn't that bad.

Speaker 2 But group number three,

Speaker 2 they actually

Speaker 2 wrote about it and then looked at it and said, hmm, now, did it teach me empathy? Did it give me family closeness or community closeness? Did it give me self-confidence, self-efficacy?

Speaker 2 Did I actually make money from it? If you could say yes to a whole host of those positive benefits, it can actually become one of the greatest things that's ever happened to you.

Speaker 2 See, it's not when your life is perfect. that you actually learn.
When you pretend like your life is perfect and your ego gets too big, you stop on the constant life learning process.

Speaker 2 You think like you know everything and you become miserable to be around. But when you can actually get knocked down into that hole and look around and say, what am I learning?

Speaker 2 Where can I learn more about what I'm learning? How can I use that as a form of connection with others?

Speaker 2 So I started realizing that this scar that I have across my arm is actually the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.

Speaker 2 And me communicating that story actually gave me the introduction to my book, which I was struggling to come up with for 15 months.

Speaker 3 That is kind of crazy.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to downplay,

Speaker 2 and you mark my words, people. I'm not going to downplay non-suicidal self-injury.
But if it took me going there in order to find the words to say to go there,

Speaker 2 well, then yeah, I'm super grateful for it. But I'm also the guy who, when I was robbed inside my own home

Speaker 2 and police then had to come and fill out the police report and I had to cancel three client, well, three prospect sales calls.

Speaker 2 And then each one of them, I said, oh yeah, I was being robbed in my own home when we were supposed to be on the phone. Thank you for rescheduling.
I got every, I won every single deal.

Speaker 2 So did me getting robbed in my own home help me make a ton of money? Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, these are things you could be grateful for. You know, people walk around this world

Speaker 2 with regret, with shame, with guilt, imposter syndrome, whatever.

Speaker 2 The opposite of each of those things is a positive emotion. So, the opposite of walking around like an entitled asshole is being a humble, curious, question-asking, supportive, empathetic person.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 So what if we could destigmatize the guilt you have about being entitled and reinforce the positive of being curious and empathetic? What if we can destigmatize the negative emotion around regret?

Speaker 2 You know, what do you regret giving up on too soon in life?

Speaker 2 Let's destigmatize that negative emotion and actually give gratitude to the positive benefits that came from actually what you did choose to pursue in life. Great.

Speaker 2 The opposite of every negative is a positive. Ingratitude, gratitude.
Regret, gratitude. Entitlement, humility.
Adversity, superpower, whatever.

Speaker 2 And so I just applied some of those things because we had learned that through our virtual gratitude experiences and the people that people have, you know, the stories that people have been sharing through the years.

Speaker 3 Thank you for. having this unique, different, very real approach to gratitude because it's helping me so much.
And I know it's helping everyone who's listening.

Speaker 3 One of the things that you write about that again i i really i like learning about i'm a constant learner i'm always curious i always want to know more and you talk about stoicism and the teachings of stoicism and that's i'm not well versed on that so i want you to share with us why the importance of stoicism and what did you take from that what did you learn from that i read a book subtle art of not giving a by mark manson in it he mentions the stoics on the back he mentions a guy named ryan holiday ryan holiday is a guy that when he was 19 years old, he picked up a book by an ancient Stoic, Marcus Aurelius.

Speaker 2 And Ryan Holliday became the modern interpreter of the ancient Stoics. He would write books like The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, Stillness is Key.
It was amazing.

Speaker 2 And then I read Oliver Berkman's book, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. And essentially what...

Speaker 2 what stoicism is as defined by Nisam Talib and I have COVID brain so I need to actually go into my book to get this. But essentially what Nissan Talib

Speaker 2 defined Stoicism as principles that will help you transform fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Speaker 2 The famous thing that Ryan Holiday quotes that Marcus Aurelius, a great emperor of Rome 2000 years ago, once said, was the mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.

Speaker 2 The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Speaker 2 So as I started reading all these books, I started realizing, oh my God, the truest answers to life don't come from the positive things. They come from how you accept.

Speaker 2 conquer, learn from, use to your advantage the negative things.

Speaker 2 And so then I just started reading all the ancient Stoics.

Speaker 2 And what I realized is, so the great Stoics, and then Ryan Holiday and Oliver Berkman and Mark Manson and Sebastian Junger and all these great people, they hinted at gratitude for like a paragraph, but they didn't write an entire book about the relationship between gratitude and stoicism.

Speaker 2 So we wanted to go out there and write that book. We will go deeper into the relationship between gratitude and stoicism in future books.

Speaker 2 Look, every time that I would see someone zig in life, I had the instinct to zag.

Speaker 2 Every time, especially now that I see people diving deeper and deeper into like the woo-woo positivity space to like solve their ailments through difficult times, the more I want to go the polar opposite way.

Speaker 2 Nobody,

Speaker 2 nobody has come to me and said, Oh my God, you believe in giving gratitude to the fluffy wuffy? You're so refreshing.

Speaker 2 No, i've got like one of the coolest people on the planet you literally saying dude your anti you know cultural gratitude the hard times thingy is refreshing as hell and i'm like yeah that's what we go for that's what we go for

Speaker 1 meet a different guest each week

Speaker 1 confidence clear

Speaker 3 while you're talking, Chris, I'm thinking about my own life, right? Like, I'm thinking about my own hardships.

Speaker 3 I know everyone listening, you know, listening right now, you are doing the same thing, right? Like, we, everyone has struggles. They're all different.
They happen at different times.

Speaker 3 But, you know, to your point that when you're on top and it seems like, oh my gosh, everything's going right and you're blasting it everywhere. Those moments, you're not learning.
You're not growing.

Speaker 3 You're not having these deep reflective moments. You're kind of like caught up in the process, just trying to keep up.
You're not self-reflecting, right?

Speaker 3 It's It's not these deeper, more transitional moments that are so incredibly powerful.

Speaker 3 And like you said, that scar on your arm is now this amazing reminder of what you're capable of, of writing the book, of this moment, this massive moment for you.

Speaker 3 And for me, that for sure was getting fired. You know, I've had other ones too, but that's a more recent one.

Speaker 3 that when you're in it you don't know how beautiful and powerful it's going to be you've just got to trust to get there and i love that exercise that you gave us about writing it down and then challenging yourself to see what are those potential positives that are transpiring or happening or unfolding right now because as you do that oh my gosh you are about to unlock something so incredible in yourself it's it's it's amazing

Speaker 2 heather

Speaker 2 if you don't mind me asking What's one moment of adversity you've overcome in your life that none of your listeners know about?

Speaker 3 Oh my gosh, I've written two books and I've done almost 300 podcast episodes. So I don't even know.

Speaker 3 Gosh, I don't know. I mean, I was abused as a child.
I wrote a whole chapter on that in my most recent book. I wrote about my divorce in my first book.

Speaker 3 I wrote about the 08-09 recession and bouncing back from that. I wrote about my boyfriend cheating on me about getting sexually harassed at work.

Speaker 3 Chris, I've had so many crazy things just like everybody, but

Speaker 3 I think I put them all out there.

Speaker 2 I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 2 I think you're the wrong person for me to have asked that to because you're sick. You've done so much work.

Speaker 3 Oh my gosh, so much work.

Speaker 2 But you know what's powerful?

Speaker 3 And I want everyone to know this. Shame is either going to claim you or you're going to claim it.
For years in my life, shame claimed me, right? I would break down.

Speaker 3 Chris, you asked me that question 10 years ago. I would have started tearing up.
Oh my God, I hope he doesn't Google me and see the mugshot.

Speaker 3 I used to live in fear of people knowing I had been arrested. It tormented me.
It almost kept me from going to this massive event in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 I got myself to go, but the whole time I was paranoid, that's when I decided I'm putting all this stuff in the book. I'm putting it on the podcast.
The minute I flip the script on shame, I own it.

Speaker 3 Shame is my homeboy, right? It doesn't exist in my life anymore. And it makes me such a stronger, more confident person.
And that's why I love that you're digging into this work and that you did it.

Speaker 3 You flipped the script on shame too.

Speaker 2 Shame is my homeboy.

Speaker 2 Can I challenge one of you 100,000 people out there to please get like a tattoo of shame is my homeboy and let's get Action Bronson to get it and just like do an episode of Fuck That's Delicious and have a really good time.

Speaker 3 Well, I think people are going to have a really good time when they get your new book, Gratitude Through Hard Times. And for anyone going through a hard time, please pick this book up now.

Speaker 3 And for anyone in your life that you know is facing some challenges, get this book and give them the tools to work through it because Chris is working through it with you. Chris, last words.

Speaker 3 How do you want to wrap this thing up?

Speaker 2 Oh, man. I mean, Heather, you got me emotional when I was telling that story.
You know, I tell that story so much, but I don't actually get the opportunity to feel the emotion behind the story.

Speaker 2 That's one of the negatives of making your life story, your actual like message in your business and everything, is that like it loses its impact on you and you kind of forget about it sometimes.

Speaker 2 But I want to quote Maya Angelou in closing. for those of you out there, Maya Angelou that don't know, Maya Angelou is a poet, an artist, an activist, a Nobel laureate, you name it.

Speaker 2 And she once said, people won't remember what you did. They won't remember what you said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel.

Speaker 2 And Heather, you've given me that gift of feeling part of my life story. And I will never forget this moment.
And I thank you for that. It forever bonds us.

Speaker 2 It's part of Google's promotion to emotion study. The next time you're going to sell me something, I'll pay the premium for it.
No,

Speaker 2 no, but it's moments like these, folks, that you got to live for.

Speaker 2 When you're down in the dumps and you're feeling the stuff and you can make that part of your life story, it will not only help you, but it'll help a lot of people around you.

Speaker 2 So can't wait to hear some of your stories. And there's a lot of reflection questions in the book.
So definitely, you know, complete some of the reflections and feel free to email them into us.

Speaker 2 We always love hearing people's stories and can't wait to learn yours. And if you need any help, just reach out.
We're always hosting some kind of community event. We'd love to invite you to.

Speaker 3 And where can people go if they want to get more info on you, your event, or the book?

Speaker 2 LinkedIn, Amazon, Google.

Speaker 2 I hate to say it like a douchebag, but like just Google. You know what? You know what I'm proud of on top of the book? I'm proud of our Rolling Stone column.

Speaker 2 It's been a great joy to write for Rolling Stone over the past year and a half. And I'd say a lot of our great writing is very accessible just through that free medium.

Speaker 2 And when you just Google Chris Shembra, up will pop a couple of our different magazine columns and definitely get a lot of that free content.

Speaker 2 And if you like what we write, then you can go and purchase the book.

Speaker 3 Well, Chris, I'm so grateful to have you here today sharing real gratitude, which that is my jam. I love it.
Check out the book, Gratitude Through Hard Times. It's live now.

Speaker 2 You can get it now, and you are gonna love it.

Speaker 3 Chris, nothing but love and light to you, my friend. Thank you for being here and keep up the amazing work you're doing.

Speaker 2 Thank you, Heather.

Speaker 3 All right, guys, until next week, keep creating your confidence.

Speaker 3 change that dynamic

Speaker 3 i couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear start learning and growing inevitably something will happen no one succeeds alone you don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss it i'm on this journey with me