A Mason's Work

[00:00] We've been talking a lot over the past couple of weeks about a bunch of different topics,
[00:05] and I want to start threading some of them together.
[00:08] And the best place to start with that is gratitude.
[00:13] When you look at gratitude as an idea, a lot of folks get kind of this misconception about
[00:22] what gratitude is and what you're supposed to do with it and how it works, which is
[00:29] peculiar, right?
[00:31] Because you're not sitting there thinking, how do I deal with this happiness that I'm
[00:38] experiencing?
[00:39] Gratitude feels a lot like that.
[00:44] It's this very strong feeling.
[00:47] And so when we work with gratitude as a concept, there are tons of things that you can learn
[00:54] from it and do with it.
[00:57] So let's talk before we get into the episodes for the rest of the week about what the sort
[01:04] of business benefit of this gratitude business is.
[01:08] And we'll start on the subjective side.
[01:11] So the subjective side, meaning how you feel, how it changes your internal experience of
[01:18] self.
[01:19] When you are experiencing gratitude, you are moving towards that level of vulnerability
[01:28] and appreciation that sounds like authenticity.
[01:36] It feels like authenticity.
[01:39] When folks say, be yourself, you will have strong feelings.
[01:44] One of them is surrender, which we talked about last week.
[01:48] Another is gratitude.
[01:51] So from an experience side, gratitude feels good.
[01:57] It's ego reducing.
[01:59] It's humbling.
[02:01] It's really a sublime experience.
[02:04] On the benefit side, let's talk about what that really does for you sort of objectively.
[02:15] People who cultivate gratitude as a practice show lower anxiety in general.
[02:22] That means they also have fewer sick days and better sleep.
[02:27] They're more resilient when things go sideways.
[02:32] And one of the things that really grabbed my attention is statistically, they perform better
[02:37] at work and not just a little bit.
[02:41] Like measurable performance.
[02:43] The reason is kind of obvious when you look for it.
[02:46] A person who's genuinely noticing what's working around them and is grateful for those experiences
[02:53] is paying better attention than someone who's only focused on the sort of gap analysis kind of stuff.
[03:05] Someone who is competitive, for example, is probably not in the same capacity feeling gratitude.
[03:15] And because of that, they're not noticing the things in their everyday life
[03:19] that give them that sense of awe and humbling and, you know, all of the things that reduce ego,
[03:28] which again reduces anxiety, which reduces a lot of the sort of trouble that we create for ourselves
[03:35] in terms of lived experience.
[03:37] But on the express side, when you begin expressing gratitude, the benefits compound.
[03:44] And this is where it gets really cool.
[03:46] There was this guy named Douglas Conant who ran Campbell Soup Company
[03:52] through a pretty significant turnaround in the early 2000s.
[03:57] One of the things he did, which people thought was kind of crazy,
[03:59] was over the course of his 10 years as CEO of the company,
[04:04] he wrote around 30,000 handwritten thank you notes to his employees.
[04:12] They weren't emails.
[04:13] These were handwritten notes and they were delivered like,
[04:18] and they were about to something that the person actually did.
[04:21] It wasn't like, oh, you know, thanks for being cool.
[04:24] It was like, hey, you know, your work in this space was,
[04:28] was a significant contributor to the outcomes that this company is trying to create.
[04:32] And that took off.
[04:36] The engagement scores inside the company for the period of time that he was doing that
[04:42] were among the highest in the industry.
[04:45] And that led, you know, led Campbell's through a really kind of tough time.
[04:50] So what is the engagement scores mean?
[04:54] Like, so what is that all about?
[04:56] It means they showed up, they did kind of better quality work.
[05:03] And it means that they also spent extra time on the work itself.
[05:09] Discretionary time, stuff that's not in the job description.
[05:12] Things like keeping your workspace clean or, uh,
[05:16] things that are relative to the project that maybe you just went the extra mile.
[05:22] Engagement is what happens when people feel appreciated,
[05:26] when they don't feel like a number, when, uh, people go above and beyond.
[05:30] And it happens when people feel seen.
[05:33] Conan understood that.
[05:34] And when he was doing this,
[05:38] it visibly improved the performance in the company.
[05:43] And that expression of gratitude is also quasi contagious,
[05:47] which is really quite cool because when you start this process, uh, that,
[05:53] that is kind of like the beginning of a chain of events or a chain of gratitude for a lot of people
[06:00] in a lot of situations that really does transcend the original feeling and creates change in the world,
[06:09] which again is one of our goals, uh, as Masons.
[06:12] We want to become better change agents.
[06:14] So that's what this week is about.
[06:17] Today's challenge for you is think about something in the last week where something went well.
[06:24] And you maybe didn't stop to notice at the time.
[06:28] Just start looking around the edges for your experience of those opportunities that have missed gratitude.
[06:36] I think you'll find there's some, some great stuff there.