Confidence Classic: Finding Gratitude In Your Hardest Moments With “Gratitude Guru” Chris Schembra

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0:32Don't wait for a problem to remind you you're uncovered. Policies start as low as$29 a month. Get protected in minutes at nextinsurance.com. That's N-E-X-T insurance.com. 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. The difference is gratitude and ingratitude. 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.

1:20I'm 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. I'm ready for my close up. Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to. So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. 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.

1:56Chris 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. Gratitude Through Hard Times. And that is an understatement. USA Today calls him their gratitude guru. 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. He's the founder of the 747 Gratitude Experience, an evidence-based framework used to strengthen client and team relationships in profound ways. 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.

2:50As a viral marketer, his gratitude campaign, giving tribute and thanks to veterans, earned over 36 million views, 1.2 million shares, and two Emmys. Oh my gosh, Chris, I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thanks for being here with us. 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. Oh my gosh, I am so glad too. All right, so I wanna start off with, I like to keep it real, Chris. I know you do too from your writing, but gratitude is something that is, in my opinion, so over-talked about, so overused.

3:31I hear about it from everybody 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. 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? You know, Heather, that's a great question. And I'm so glad that you see it or our work for what it is. 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. Gratitude for so many years has been this fluffy, wuffy, airy, fairy, spiritual, only see the positive woo woo.

4:21Yahoo. What are you grateful for? I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for the sun. Well, here's the thing about gratitude. We think that to be grateful is to be grateful to someone. And this journey, our counterintuitive approach to gratitude, the science and psychology approach Gratitude started, it started about six years ago. I just got done producing this tribute campaign for veterans. I just gotten back from producing a Broadway play in Italy. I had a lot of weird things going on in my life. On the outside, my life looked pretty awesome on paper, but on the inside, I was completely screaming.

5:02I was a complete fraud. It happened around July of 2015. 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. You know, all my friends on Instagram saw one side of me, but to the inside, I was just broken. 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. They walk different, talk different, love different, told history stories different.

5:46It was intoxicating. It was la dolce vita, as they say. 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. So I thought back, what was it about my time in Italy that changed my perspective on everything? 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. 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.

6:26and one night I hosted a dinner party. 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 and when the time was right, I opened up with 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? 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. They told real stories about people.

7:13Some were positive, some were negative, but it was intoxicating. It was life-changing. It was real. And it was that moment, then and there, that I realized there is a whole side to this thing, gratitude, that not enough people have seen before. 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. Did you feel scared? I always like to ask this because it just reminds me 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. This is similar in that you were taking a leap of faith, but yours feel like there was something calling to you.

7:55So did it feel a little bit more comfortable? What did that feel like? Wow. 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. I got to have people like you around my dinner table share these amazing stories, the stories that they had achieved tremendous amount of success in their life, but they never thought to thank their third grade teacher. 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.

8:30The mean ex-boss, that mean ex-girlfriend, that person who told them they'd never amount to nothing. These stories were real and had a way of normalizing whoever was at the dinner table. 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. 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. 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, you're telling me that that person last night helped me make peanut butter and then cried around the dinner table talking about their dead dog?

9:23Holy shit, we're onto something. 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. 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. I had no choice but to continue it. 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. Yeah. So companies would call us, I mean, way in, you know, way in those early days, companies would call us and essentially say two things.

10:13One, we have a really disconnected team or two, I'm looking to build better relationships with our external partners and clients and all that kind of stuff. 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. 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. 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.

10:48Yeah. 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. it was very rare that we failed it was and i've 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 so for people to break that 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 that's not easy to get to from a psychological safety and trust with internal teams perspective, creating an emotional connection is paramount, right?

11:36There's all the studies now about belonging and connection within the workplace, all that stuff. 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, 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 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 I like this company where I'm working I should stay so from a loyalty retention part it's huge and then you know on the client engagement side anytime that you can bring a motion 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 purchase, and 30 times more likely to pay a premium.

12:37So if you actually help people get to know each other, not just for your product or your price or your competition in the marketplace, but actually like the human, right? People buy from people, not from companies. They actually get to know the people. you're going to do some pretty good business. They're going to stick with you when times are bad, and they're going to reward you paying a premium when times are good. So will you please repeat that data, the data points? Because 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.

13:08Just 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. 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 with the people you're trying to do business with, you choose. Google proved it. Meet a different guest each week.

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17:07So the business is blowing up. You're doing incredibly well. 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. Now a pandemic hits. Where do you go from there? It's craziness. You and I had this conversation about overcoming your villains, your amazing book that launched in the middle of a pandemic. 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?

17:40At least inside our own mind. We were on top of the world. We had this new book. It was going to launch in April. 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. We're dining with Massimo Bottura at Osteria Francescana. We're buying all these great leather goods. We're having a good time. 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. And the government says, you should probably enter quarantine.

18:22I'm like, whatever. I'll do a two-week self-isolation quarantine. This is all going to blow over. Well, it never blew over. 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. 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. 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.

19:04I'm doing it. 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. Right back to where I was seven years ago at that time, five years ago. I got back from Italy again. I was lonely, overwhelmed, disconnected, insecure, nervous, cautious, anxious. 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 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 we didn't really talk about much whatever and i looked and i said my god it's missing something.

20:05What is it missing? Ah, our signature sauce, gratitude. 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. 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. 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.

20:51The companies, their employees were all digital, disconnected, work from home, miserable, lonely, tired, nervous, anxious, It's the same stuff I was feeling. And we said, oh my God, we got to do this for them. And then it just took off in the two and a half, three, two years, two and a half years since the start of all that. We've served tens of thousands of people, hundreds of companies. And what we found is that the principles of gratitude in the way that we do it had a 99.998 % success rate, guaranteeing a positive, emotional, measurable, meaningful transformation with just a 90-minute Zoom gratitude experience.

21:44Whether our clients were bringing 20 people or 200 people or thousands of people, the impact was pretty much guaranteed. It was high times in the city where the favorite word was we, we, we, it was live it up and have fun. 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 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 I'm grateful that you share your own personal struggles like this, because this is what is missing from social media in the world today.

22:29Thank 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. But look, you're watching this, you're reading this, you're listening to this. You saw my enthusiasm just before. 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 great profits, great family, big new house, great respect, accolades coming in every day. And then it all came crashing down with a terrifying crack up.

23:22It was Thursday, December 30th, 2021. You looked at my life, you would have been jealous. I had everything I had ever wanted. But at 4.30 PM 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 our hour-long discussion. And we did. And I took note of that because that's the first time a client's ever said that to me. And I went out to dinner that night with my girlfriend to celebrate her new job, our new home, all these great things. I drank too much accidentally. We got in a fight. I got home, felt like a miserable piece of crap, like a fraud, an imposter, a monster.

24:10And I engaged in my most recent and largest episode of non-suicidal self-injury. It's called NSSI. 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. 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. I would watch Nancy Meyers' movies on repeat. I would cry at the sight of a lemon. I had friends that invited me to all these things, but I couldn't even muster the courage to show up.

25:03One 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. 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. 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 I mean you look at the books on my shelf I'll point at one book written in the year 63 AD 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.

25:54And in that book, he says that the greatest plague to Roman society is that we neither know how to give nor receive a benefit. Of all the vices common in today's society, nothing is more common than ingratitude. He said ingratitude has caused the worst in humans. 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. 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.

26:37The difference is gratitude and ingratitude. 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. 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. Well, here's the thing that Heather was talking about earlier in the call. that happiness woo woo positivity bullcrap it's all fake right 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 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 uh uh pretty this and epic that and monumental to that.

27:41Life 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. And when I realized that, boy, my life shifted. And that was just a couple months ago. 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? Because everyone has secrets. Everyone has some dark, hard past in their life, right? But this is what I hadn't, I wasn't familiar with. So I was really grateful that you were so honest to share it.

28:16So when you're in that low, I mean, that seemed, like you said, this is like one of your darkest moments ever. 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. 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? How do you go from a dark moment to starting to find the little small wins? 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.

28:55A researcher by the name of Philip Watkins from Eastern Washington University did a wonderful research study. He would eventually called a grateful processing of unpleasant memories. And it's a wonderful study that shows he took a number of participants and he said, think about a negative experience. And 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. That was group number one. Group number two, thought about a really negative experience and then just wrote about it.