Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: What we discovered is when people share gratitude in community, the result is exponential. It's not just linear, but would be this enriching experience.
If you start practicing gratitude now for the little things you discover, increasingly more and more things to be grateful for.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Hey there billionaire. Yep, I'm talking to you. If you expect to live another 31 years, you're already a billionaire billionaire not in money, but in the real measure of wealth, time. That's because 31 years is roughly a billion seconds. But most of us waste time in ways we'd never waste money. The currency of time billionaires is micro moments. The 90 second to 15 minute gaps hidden between the structured parts of your day. This podcast is about reclaiming them with quick research backed ideas to help you feel more creative, productive and alive.
Welcome to Time Billionaires. Let's make your next micro moment count.
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Time Billionaires podcast. So excited to have you here. And I'm also so excited to have our guest, Kevin Monroe here, who is a gratitude consultant and a recognized authority on cultivating hope and gratitude to transform workplace culture, which is such a cool job. As a gratitude consultant, he partners with organizations experiencing disengagement and retention challenges, helping them develop resilient, purpose driven teams through innovative hope building journeys and community.
What a bio. Thanks for joining us, Kevin.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Oh, thanks for having me. And congratulations on launching Time Billionaires podcast. I'm so excited for you and for you who are listening.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Thanks, Kevin. I'd love to jump into your gratitude challenge. So you launched a gratitude challenge and I would love for you to tell our listeners something that surprised you about the results from it.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Okay, so let me, let me share. I mean, this was five, six years ago when we first launched this. And when we launched it, we were doing everything by email, Rebecca. And no surprise, we had email challenges or challenges getting emails delivered.
We could get to the corporate servers, but getting from the corporate server to the desktop client proved to be challenging.
So we were looking to solve a technology problem. This is what I want to emphasize so much. We were looking to solve a technology problem.
And what we discovered, solving a technology problem was truly mind blowing.
And I had never read this before, I'd never seen any studies on it. But we moved into a community platform and what we discovered is when people share gratitude in community, the result is exponential. It's not just linear, right? It's not just, you've got one person, one person, one person sharing responses. So there are three. No, it was so much more exponential.
And what would Happen is my gratitude would be enriched when I would read other people's responses to the same prompt that I had responded to. And I go, oh, I didn't think of that. Isn't that fascinating? Right. And so it would be this enriching experience.
And we've continued to watch that six years later on a variety of different platforms.
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Amazing. That's fantastic. And I think that's such a good point. As we continue to share and expand, Gratitude expands. When you and I were talking earlier, this thought came to mind from the saying in the justice system, right? Justice delayed is justice denied. Gratitude delayed is gratitude denied. Because if we don't take the moment that we have something to appreciate the gratitude, we don't ever get that back.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: That's so true. I've never heard anybody use that metaphor, but I love it, Rebecca. And it is true. And I think when we were talking before, I also mentioned one of the big misconceptions is that somehow people act as though gratitude were a finite quantity. So they're saving up their gratitude until something really magnanimous happens. Right. When they get that job or when they win the lottery or they've just been recruited to the NBA or the NFL or whatever that. Or qualified for the Olympics, won the Olympics gold medal, then I'll be grateful.
Really.
Think about it, what you just said, how many opportunities for gratitude did you miss? And gratitude was denied all of that. Where if you start practicing gratitude now for the little things, you discover increasingly more and more things to be grateful for.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Right? Absolutely. Oliver Berkman talks about that too. Delayed gratification going too far for a lot of high achieving folks. And the athletes you just mentioned, I've heard a lot of them describe just decreasing, diminishing returns on the happiness from winning tournaments, sometimes to the point that they get no satisfaction from winning and devastation from losing. And it sounds like you're saying micro gratitude leading up to that could be the antidote.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Micro gratitude, I love that phrase. Yeah. And there are times that I have some experiments with people and we what's the smallest thing you can think to be grateful for that you've never expressed gratitude for before?
Right. So rather than thinking about the big things, what's a little thing? And I remember one day when we were doing this, I was like, gosh, you know, I've never been grateful for salt before.
But think about salt and all of the benefits and how salt enriches flavor, but it also preserves food and it increases health and all salt. Right. I'd never been grateful for Salt before. But in thinking about what's a little thing I landed on salt.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. And when you say that, to your point about compounding gratitude, I think about the fact that we iodize salt now to prevent health issues that come from not having enough iodine in your diet, which is amazing that we don't have to worry about that and being worth your salt. That used to be currency. Sailors used to be paid in salt because it was so valuable. Like you've mentioned, it can preserve food, it can enrich food. Paying in salt used to be common. And we've come so far now with all of the amazing things we have access to in our grocery stores that we forget that we are living in the peak of luxury many kings from most of human history couldn't have even imagined.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: So, Rebecca, now there's another one. The next time you go to a grocery store, you watching, listening, just, just pause for a moment and think about one item in the. Just one item in the grocery store. And there you are in a store that has thousands of items. But just pick one and think of how many people were involved in the creation, the production of that item, the transportation of that item, and all of the hands that touched it before you bought it. And what if you were to just pause and express gratitude? You don't know all of those people. I happen to have some friends here in the area of Atlanta where I live that started a coffee shop and they are 5th generation Honduran coffee farmers and family and they have farm to cup coffee. And now they know when, when you buy a bag of Marvin's roast, that's, that's Uncle Marvin to them that grew those beans and they have his story on the bag. And so now when you're sipping a cup of coffee, you can actually personalize this and think about Marvin and my friends at Alma Coffee and all of the people involved in making that coffee available to you.
Now isn't that amazing, Rebecca?
[00:08:14] Speaker B: It is, it is. And when I hear you describe that, I realize we have so many more things on a given day to be grateful for and not grateful for. And it makes sense evolutionarily that we would focus on the things that are a risk or a threat. But we'll never get to a point where we have no problems or no challenges. And so delaying gratification misses all the things that are going right right now.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So, Rebecca, there's one other thing I want to touch on in the time we have another thing we learned. This wasn't I talked about doing gratitude and community.
In 2020, October of 2020, I started hosting encounters where people come together to explore, express, and experience gratitude. And I still remember in the second month of hosting those in November of 2020, and there were, oh, 24 people in the room.
And in this, we. We structure an hour to where there are three. There are two rounds of breakouts, three rounds of gratitude.
And there's always a topic that guides round go, guides the overall event, a theme, and then there's a round one topic and a round three topic.
And people are together for eight to nine minutes in round one and six to eight minutes in round two.
In November of 2020, in somebody's feedback, they wrote, we arrived as strangers, left as friends.
And that's another insight to me is how sharing gratitude connects people so quickly and so deeply together in conversation. When people just lower their guard, open their heart, and just speak freely about something they're grateful for. In a session I led a couple of months ago, a new friend of mine had joined Ken, and Ken's an executive.
And the next day I was in a group with Ken attending, and he's like, oh, my gosh, Kevin. I was blown away how quickly and deeply we connected. And that day, Rebecca, I kept people in the same rounds for one and three.
And when they went back in the group, a new person had joined the group Ken was part of.
When that person came in, there were four people that had been together for eight minutes. Round one, this person that's adding for round three goes, gosh, it looks like you all have known each other for a long time. How did you end up here today? And they all started laughing, and they said, no. We met for the first time in round one, and we spent eight or nine minutes together, and we formed this kind of seems like I've known you for a lifetime connection.
[00:10:57] Speaker B: That is incredible.
So to that end, it sounds like just eight minutes or less is a really great opportunity for meaningful connection. What's one gratitude exercise that you want our listeners to do today that they can do in under five minutes?
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Okay, here's one.
I was thinking of several, and we had an artist join us when we first started doing gratitude challenges. And she drew illustrations to bring these concepts to life. So I'm going to illustrate one. It's a pom. It's a cheerleader holding pom poms, and it's called the cheerleader challenge.
So here is what I would invite you to do in the moments when you finish listening to this. What if you linger two or three more minutes and you think, who is someone in my corner cheering me on, either personally or professionally, Whatever the relationship is, think of it. Whether it's a family member, a friend, a mentor in the workplace, appear in the workplace, someone who cheers you on, what would you like to say to them and thank them for?
And then pause and send them a text message right now and say, I'm grateful for you being a cheerleader in my life and here's why. The impact it's had on you and Rebecca. I'm going to bet right now the response you receive will be something like this.
Thanks for sharing. You made my day.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: I love it and it's contagious. It took me less than 30 seconds to think of who I'll send my cheerleader text to and I'm very excited to go do that right now. Thanks, Kevin.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: It's amazing. Go do it. Go do it and let us know what you do.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: I will, I will. I'll send it to my friend Quinn and I'll keep you posted on what she responds. Thanks, Kevin.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: Thank you. Thanks for joining me. Time billionaires make the most of some moments today. You. I'm gonna do the same. I'm gonna send one of those messages right now myself.
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Thanks for spending this micro moment with me. If you found it valuable, share it with a fellow time billionaire and give us a rating to help others discover the power of micro moments. For more ways to reclaim your time, check out timebillionaires.org and follow me Rebecca Shattucks on LinkedIn. See you next time.
