The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 114 - Self Gratitude

Transcript:

Jen: Hello, Peter.

Pete: Hello, Jennifer

Jen: I've had a couple experiences recently that I'd like to unpack with you as they relate to our sense of self, and gratitude.

Pete: Okay, I am very intrigued. We've talked about gratitude a few times, but I want to hear how it relates to sense of self. Mmm. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: So, this episode will be coming out sometime after Thanksgiving over here in the old United States of America. And typically around this time of year, people have a lot of conversations about gratitude. But this actually started back in October. So each month, my studio hosts an evening called JWS At Night. It is actually hosted by our mutual friend, Carly Valancy.

Pete: Yeah. You generously invited me along to one, it was delightful.

Jen: It's so much fun. Well, so Carly opens the night by doing a happy half-hour (instead of a happy hour, happy half-hour) where she pops people into breakout rooms with a prompt. So she'll ask a question, and then she sends us into breakout rooms and we just sort of like hang out with each other and answer the questions. So it'll be things like, "What's your dream vacation?" Or, "What is something that continues to blow your mind?" Just things like that. And typically, she'll send us in the breakout rooms and we'll be so excited to unpack these questions. Well, in October, one of the questions she asked was, "What is your favorite thing about yourself?"

Pete: Oof. Oh, golly.

Jen: Okay, so that was the reaction of the collective. She sent us into the breakout rooms and I was in a room maybe with five other people, and we essentially spent the entire time avoiding answering the question.

Pete: It's so funny, because the first thing that went through my head when you said that was like, "Oh, I hope you don't ask me that in this show, this episode." [laughter]

Jen: Well, I just found it fascinating. Because we were all so quick to shine a positive light on things that we loved that are outside ourselves, or things that we've learned that other people have taught us that are amazing. But turning the light inward was really, really challenging. So, the second experience was this month. I was running one of my homeroom sessions with my studio family. And I took them through a series of prompts around gratitude. And the final prompt was, "What are you grateful to yourself for?" And this was where people...they answered the question, but it was a deeply emotional experience. And I thought, "There's something in here that deserves to be examined." What is it about our relationship to self that makes us want to run and hide? And then when we're willing to engage with the gifts we have given ourselves, what makes that such an emotionally laborious unpacking?

Pete: Mmm. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay. I think this is related. It just reminds me of how so many people struggle to take a compliment.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And I've seen this time and time and time again, where you might compliment someone for something, or I will get, someone will compliment me, and I'll completely brush it off. Like, "Ah, no. It's nothing." Or, "That's not a thing." And I feel like it's related. This struggle we have with acknowledging our own strength, or our own superpower, or our own qualities that we should and could and might be grateful for. And I just want to share a quick story that relates to that. So just recently, we wrapped up one of the sessions of The Herd, which is a sort of a group coaching mastermind group that I run with a bunch of really brilliant people in the arts that are very generous changemakers. And I was trying to think, "How can I leave them with something in this final call that helps them remember their own brilliance? Other than just telling them. Me saying, 'You're all brilliant.'" And so what we did is we took...I've done this before. I actually learned it off a really brilliant friend of mine through the altMBA. We've used this a few times. And what we did is each person got a minute, and everybody in chat just typed as many things as possible that they love about that person. And so we'd start and go, "Jen. Go with Jen." I'd start the clock on, and we get a minute of just free flow (what we call "chat waterfall" in Zoom) of just all the things that I love about Jen. And then we had someone narrate it. So I would read them out loud, and you would just have to sit there and take it on board.

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Pete: And then at the end of it, we would say, "Jen, how do you feel?" And usually, the response was something like, "Oh, I felt like you were talking about a different person." Or, "I don't know how to take this on. I feel overwhelmed with emotion." And often a thank you too. Like, "I thank you so much. That means so much to me." But I feel like that is also related, right? Like, there's something here in a tangled thread that we're weaving.

Jen: Oh my gosh, this reminded me so much of an exercise that we do at my studio sometimes which I learned from a teacher of mine, Ellen Diamond, who used to whenever she would compliment my work would require me to answer, "Thank you. I know."

Pete: Mmm. Wow.

Jen: And so we do this sometimes at the studio, where we'll have one person up after they've worked in front of the room and I'll ask everyone who observed the session to pay them a compliment. And the person can only respond by saying, "Thank you. I know." And it is so uncomfortable for the person. Like, I just watched you writhing over there on the other side of the screen. [laughter] But there is something really powerful. And it's helpful to have the script to know that those are the words you're expected to say. "Thank you. I know." It also reminds me of one other thing. My dear friend, also named Peter (not Australian, English), happened to be at a workshop I was facilitating. He was just visiting. But the work that he does is very relevant to the work that was happening in the workshop. So, I introduced him and brought him up to the front of the room. And I was so excited to have him there, and I knew the participants were going to sort of freak out with joy that he was there. So, I introduced him. I said a lot about how meaningful his work was and how pleased I was that he was there, and he sort of brushed it off. He was embarrassed. And after the workshop, he apologized to me. He said, "I want to apologize for not taking in the compliments you were giving me. I realized in that moment, I made it all about me. And what you were doing was acknowledging my work, but also giving a gift to the people who had come to the workshop. And I took that away from them."

Pete: Wow.

Jen: And I was like, "Woah, this is why I like you so much."

Pete: Yeah. Shout out, Peter.

Jen: Like, the self-awareness after the fact to be able to see that accepting the compliment is the generous act and deflecting the compliment is not a generous act.

Pete: Say that again.

Jen: Accepting the compliment is a generous act and deflecting the compliment is not a generous act.

Pete: Mm-hmm. Wow, there is some painful, painful, painful truth in that.

Jen: So now let's tie this back to the compliments that are coming from within, when we can acknowledge ourselves for the things that we're proud of. One of the very poignant responses I got from someone in my homeroom class was, "I'm grateful to myself for always keeping my eye on my dreams." I was like, "Oh, that is so beautiful." That is so beautiful. So, I wonder how can we get out of our own way. Because it doesn't help us to not acknowledge the work that we've done. Hiding from that, or pretending like I've got nothing to be grateful to myself for, I imagine is hurting more than helping.

Pete: Yeah. And we talk about, and you hear often people talking about...you know, and one of my practices is writing, you know, three things you're grateful for in the morning.

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Pete: And that's had a lot of research into how it can shift your mindset and the lens of which you view your life. So you start to actually look for things that you're grateful for in your life, as opposed to looking for things that you don't have. But what's interesting, I think, is often where we would start is we would write down external things.

Jen: That's right. That's how we started homeroom. That's what we did.

Pete: "I'm grateful for the roof over my head. I'm grateful for being close to a beach. I'm grateful for..." like all of these externals. And I would have to go back and look at my journal, but I would wager there's a pretty small percentage of the time where I say something like, "I'm grateful for my growth mindset." Or, "I'm grateful that I love reading books so much." Like there's, I think it's probably come up here and there, but probably not that common.

Jen: Okay. So let me tell you the progression of these gratitude prompts, because maybe the listeners would want to do this. So we started by identifying things, without any sort of caveat attached...things that you're grateful for, acknowledge those things. And then the next prompt was, "What are you going to do with that gratitude?" So instead of just holding the gratitude, how do you activate it? So it might be like, if I write down, "I'm grateful for my relationship with Peter." I can hold that close to me, or I can say to you, "Peter, I'm grateful for our collaboration. I'm grateful for our friendship. I'm grateful for this relationship. How can we do more of it?" Like, I can actually activate that gratitude.

Pete: That's good.

Jen: Right? And then we did the same thing with, "What are you grateful to yourself for?" So in your case, "I'm grateful for my love of books." And now, what are you going to do with that gratitude? How can you activate it? How can you turn it into the next step?

Pete: Yeah. I think you just gave me permission to buy a bunch more books, which I'm very grateful for.

Jen: You're welcome. You're so welcome.

Pete: Just what I need: Permission to buy more books. That activating gratitude is so profound, I'm finding in this moment. I wrote a blog just a week or so ago that was about...I have this tendency to try and sometimes I like to write as short a blog post as possible, and see if you can still deliver a message with as few words as possible. And so the blog was "All self improvement books distilled," or something like that, "The summary of all self improvement books". And my summary was, "You are capable of more than you realize." And so the question becomes: What are you going to do about it? Which I think is what you just described with gratitude. So you can be grateful for all of the things. Let's get them down. And, what are you going to do about it? Like the action, the activation...whether it's a self help book, or something you're grateful for, that's where the rubber meets the road. That's where all the work happens, all the magic happens is activating it.

Jen: This is pushing me forward in time. Because before you and I started recording today, I said to you, "At some point, we're going to have to do a 'How to make sense of the end of the year, and how to look forward to the next year.'" So I'm getting ahead of myself here. And don't worry, listeners, we'll figure out that episode in a couple of weeks coming. But it does make me realize that there's probably a great exercise in expressing gratitude for what has emerged in whatever way from the chaos of this year. What are you grateful for this year, 2020? And what are you grateful to yourself for as you navigated the 2020 phase of the global pandemic? And then, how do you activate that? Because chances are next year is going to have some pandemic in it, to be navigated. So if you're able to find some gratitude where there's been growth, or learning, or connection, or relationships, and then activate that, you might set yourself up for an even stronger time of it next year.

Pete: Mmm. Yeah. I love that. I'm going to add that to my list of activities for the end of the year.

Jen: Yeah, me too.

Pete: So, I'm still cringing and tossing around that question: What's your favorite thing about yourself? And why and how that links to gratitude. And why and how that's such a hard question to answer.

Jen: Are you going to take a stab at it?

Pete: Well, my immediate thought is to relate it to something that is very common in Australia and New Zealand, this idea of Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Jen: Mm-hmm. I knew you were going to say that.

Pete: Which is this...I mean, we say it's very relevant to Australia and New Zealand, but I do think it's universal. It's just we have a name for it, which is Tall Poppy Syndrome. And that is that if you are in a field of poppies where, you know, nothing stands out except for that one really tall poppy and you're like, "What's that person doing? What's that poppy doing? How dare they go out of shape, out of alignment, out of height with the rest of us." So we, the collective of poppies, we're going to cut that thing down so it's back to the same height as us. And that is like really, really baked into a lot of Australian and New Zealand culture. Which is if you are seen to be presenting yourself in a way that would suggest you're a tall poppy, culture, society, friends, family...perhaps not friends or family, but people around you, for sure, will in some way (whether they realize it or not, intentionally or not), they'll try and cut you down. And so, I don't know if this is like a coping mechanism of that for me personally or for others in Australia or New Zealand, but again, I suspect universally is, "Oh, I'm just not going to acknowledge that thing because that sounds like an arrogant or an over-the top-thing to acknowledge. That would make me a tall poppy, and I don't want to be cut down." I don't know.

Jen: Was that your long-winded way of saying you're not going to answer the question?

Pete: I mean, I think I sort of...okay, I'll answer the question. I think I sort of did answer the question. Which is, my favorite thing about myself is my commitment to growth. Whether it's a desire to read a book, or a desire to keep having these conversations with you, or a desire to challenge the work that I do and flip it upside down sometimes, or a desire to get someone to coach me and ask me questions and give me feedback, I am grateful that for whatever reason I have instilled in myself this desire to grow and adapt and change. And for that, I would say I'm grateful for. And I think that would be my...whew, I'm getting nervous saying this. I feel like that's my favorite thing about myself, Jennifer.

Jen: Gosh, I wish the listeners could see you in all your discomfort.

Pete: Cue the Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Jen: But you really...you made it through to the other side, so I'm proud of you. I think the thing I'm most grateful to myself for is my creative mind. I have an inherent ability to connect the dots between things. But I try not to rely on the inherent ability and instead like push myself even farther than that to find the connectivity between things so that I can create something new out of them. And I'm grateful that's the way my mind works.

Pete: Well, so am I. Because if you combine my favorite thing about myself, and your favorite thing about yourself, that is why this podcast can exist. That is why we can have these conversations. Because you enjoy connecting the dots and thinking creatively, and I enjoy growth, challenging myself, and trying to learn new things.

Jen: Wow. And that is The Long and The Short Of It.