Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: How Gratitude Will CHANGE Your Life With Chris Schembra USA Today’s “Gratitude Guru” & Rolling Stone Columnist
Wed, 27 Nov 2024
In This Episode You Will Learn About: Taking on a positive perspective The principles of gratitude Developing strong relationships Resources: Website: www.747club.org Read Gratitude and Pasta & Gratitude Through Hard Times Join The 7:47 Gratitude Experience Listen to 7:47 Conversations Email: [email protected] LinkedIn: @Chris Schembra & @7:47 Instagram: @747club Go to ConstantContact.com and start your FREE trial today. Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/monahan Oracle is offering to halve your cloud bill if you switch to OCI See if you qualify at oracle.com/MONAHAN. Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/MONAHAN. Call my digital clone at 201-897-2553! Visit heathermonahan.com Reach out to me on Instagram & LinkedIn Sign up for my mailing list: heathermonahan.com/mailing-list/ Overcome Your Villains is Available NOW! Order here: https://overcomeyourvillains.com If you haven't yet, get my first book Confidence Creator Show Notes: Do you go through life with a positive or negative mindset? Only YOU have the choice to look at life with gratitude and appreciate everyone you interact with! Sharing your gratitude with others can CHANGE your life and theirs. Leading with thanks WILL deepen your relationships in business and in your personal life. What you give out will always find its way back to you. Chris Schembra the successful Author and “Gratitude Guru” will break down the life ALTERING pasta sauce, yes you heard that right, that led him to shift his perspective and start focusing on giving thanks to those around him. It’s time to train your brain to see the good in life instead of focusing on the bad!
Chapter 1: What is the power of gratitude?
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 is
was mine to either look at my life through despair or to look at my life through appreciation.
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. I'm ready for my closeup.
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. Chris Schembra is the bestselling 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. As 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.
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Chapter 2: How can gratitude transform your life?
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. 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 is Our counterintuitive approach to gratitude, the science and psychology approach to gratitude, it started about six years ago. I just got done producing this tribute campaign for veterans.
I'd 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. I 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 on 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 walked different, talked different, loved different, told different. History story is different. It 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. And 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.
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Chapter 3: What unique approach to gratitude does Chris Schembra offer?
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 feels like there was something calling to you. So 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 who shared 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. The 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, right?
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, holy 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.
If you're anything like me, you are too busy doing 800 different things in a day to sit around and think about how you can improve your life. But there are some simple things that you can do that make a huge difference. I mean, let's stop and think about having the right undergarments. They make a huge difference.
But too often, we are not taking the time to find out what the right product line is. Well, I found it for you. If you didn't know, I live in Miami where it is extremely hot already this time of year. We are already sweating like crazy. So I'm always on the hunt to find a bralette that can beat the heat and the humidity without irritating my skin.
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Chapter 4: How do dinner parties foster real connections?
I'm also super active. and I'm always on the go traveling. My schedule is jam-packed, and I need a bralette that can keep up with my active lifestyle. I recently discovered the Fits Everybody Racerback Bralette, and I didn't even know there was a product like that that existed. It looks perfect under t-shirts, flawless, no lumps, no bumps, while holding me up.
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And when you place your order, check out the creating confidence and let them know we sent you and that we are looking out for you. You are welcome. 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 way in, you know, way in those early days, companies would call us and essentially say two things. One, 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.
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. It was very rare that we failed.
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? There'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,
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Chris face during the pandemic?
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. 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.
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. I'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 year, or at that time, five years ago. And 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. 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. What 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. The companies, their employees were
We're all digital, disconnected, work from home, miserable, lonely, tired, nervous, anxious, 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 and 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. Whether 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.
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Chapter 6: What is the impact of emotional connections in business?
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. 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. 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 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. And 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. 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. He 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 Annius Seneca. He was an elder statesman during the Roman Empire. 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. 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. The ungrateful man, homicides, thievery, adultery, all that kind of stuff. They were going through that 2000 years ago. We're going through the same stuff in our country today.
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Chapter 7: How did Chris's journey inspire his work on gratitude?
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, bull crap, it's all fake. 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 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. 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 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.
So 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?
Like, well, how do you go from that dark moment to like 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. 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.
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 ransack their brain and then just carried on with their life. That was group number one.
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Chapter 8: What lessons can we learn from Chris's personal struggles?
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. The opposite of every negative is a positive. Ingratitude, gratitude. Regret, gratitude. Entitlement, humility. Adversity, superpower, whatever. And so I just applied some of those things
Because we had learned that through our virtual gratitude experiences and the stories that people have been sharing through the years.
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. One of the things that you write about that, again, 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 Fuck 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. And Ryan Holiday became the modern interpreter of Stoics. the ancient Stoics.
He would write books like The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, Stillness is Key. It was amazing. And then I read Oliver Berkman's book, 4,000 Weeks, Time Management for Mortals. And essentially what Stoicism is, as defined by Nisam Tlaib, And I've COVID brain, so I need to actually go into my book to get this.
But essentially what Nisam Tlaib defined stoicism as principles that will help you transform fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. The famous thing that Ryan Holiday quotes that Marcus Aurelius, a great emperor, of Rome 2,000 years ago once said was, the mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 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, conquer, learn from, use to your advantage, the negative things. And so then I just started reading all the ancient Stoics.
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, right? But they didn't write an entire book about the relationship between gratitude and stoicism. So we wanted to go out there and write that book.
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