Welcome to another heartfelt Thanksgiving episode of The Insight Interviews! As we gather to celebrate the season of gratitude, we’re reminded of the power of connection and appreciation, transcending borders and uniting us all. In this special episode, we explore Thanksgiving traditions worldwide, dive into the science behind gratitude, and share personal stories of thankfulness. From self-care and family to mentors and life values, we reflect on the many facets of gratitude that enrich our lives. Join us as we embrace this journey of reflection, connection, and appreciation together.
“As you, Jason, and I do our work here at Rewire, most everything we try to do links to some sort of neuroscientific fact. Gratitude, while certainly emotional, has fascinating neurobiology—what happens in our brains and minds when we’re grateful. For goodness’ sake, the entire field of positive psychology revolves around activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Living a life of gratitude, as we’ve heard, is a life worth living. Every year, we gather remarkable gratitude like a collection, sharing it in the hope it resonates with you, the listener, and helps you find your own gratitude.“
- Steve Scanlon
Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Hello and welcome to this episode of The Insight Interviews. This is the fifth annual Thanksgiving and gratitude episode, so I'm just going to introduce myself, Jason Abell as the host, and Steve Scanlon, my cohost, is right here, by my side, metaphorically. Hey, Steve.
I am by your side. Yeah, these days by your side, that can mean a lot of stuff, right?
Glad you are. You're on the West Coast, I'm on the east coast, but for the magic of technology, we are side by side right now. So, you've got a little something you want to say about gratitude and Thanksgiving, and then we'll get on to the compilation.
Well, yeah, Jason in in preparation for this, and we know Thanksgiving was yesterday, and you know, we dropped these on Friday. And so, you and I every year sit around and try to just do a little guessing about where people are on this Friday. It's a reflective day for a lot of folks. It's a, I don't know, it's a turkey hangover for some. Who knows. But it's certainly a really, really cool season in our culture. And so interestingly, in preparation for this, I just had this quick little curiosity about how many other countries around the world celebrate something like Thanksgiving, and as it turns out, quite a few. One of the things I noticed was many like Germany and Japan had different Thanksgiving-ish type things, but interestingly, a lot of them show up around the same time, and it's because people are thankful for a harvest, right? They've harvested in September and October, and they're eating in November, and they end up being grateful for that abundance of just food, really, is what that boils down to. And when you think about our thing with corn and pilgrims, that was the original Thanksgiving for us, as well.
Sure.
So look, dude, I mostly wanted to just say that you and I have now, this is our fifth year, like you said, of doing this, and I hope we have 10 years of doing it.
Amen.
I don't know that we're gonna change a whole lot, but here's why. Because, as you and I do our work here at Rewire, most everything we try to do is link to some sort of neuroscientific fact. And the fact of the matter is that gratitude, while certainly it's an emotional thing, and we don't need to sell that to some people for the power of what that can make you feel like, sometimes, and maybe this year, our one little subtle difference is, you know, there's some really cool neurobiology about what happens in our brains and in our minds when we are grateful. For goodness sake, the entire field of positive psychology revolves around the idea that we activate the parasympathetic nervous system and living a life of gratitude just is, as we've heard before, a life worth living. When you get to ask people that, and I ask people that on our on our podcast, we seem to accumulate some really remarkable and amazing gratitude’s, like a collection, and every year, we get to share that collection with people in the hope that it resonates in a way with you, the listener, and hopefully you can find your own gratitude, right?
Yeah, thank you so much for that explanation. I always like how you bring it around to the neuroscience behind it, and then also, yeah, we're celebrating Thanksgiving in the US, but this is a human being, you know, type of thing around the world, to be grateful and show gratitude. So yeah, thank you for that reminder, Steve. And I tell you what, listeners, enjoy, the compilation of the last years’ worth of people's answers. And we didn't give you everyone's answers. We kind of picked out some of the unique ones, some of the ones that stuck out to us. And I hope, just as you said, Steve, that one listener, you enjoy it, and two, yeah, it sparks some of your own gratitude insights. So really, that's it. Enjoy Happy Thanksgiving everyone and see you next week.
Happy Thanksgiving. Grateful for you, bro.
Where you are, where you're sitting, what are you grateful for?
"Oh, I love that question. I actually do a gratitude practice every morning and write down three things that I am grateful for. So, I wrote down this morning. So, I'll share all three of them, and I'll pick one to lean into. The stoic, I have been reading so much on stoicism recently, and I just can't get enough. You're gonna laugh at this. One, eye masks I put on de-puffing eye masks every morning, and then fireplaces. I live in Arizona, but, you know, people think it's always warm and sunny here, it's not. It was 30 degrees this morning, it was cold, and so I had the fireplace going, and that was just nice. I've got self-care rituals. I have my morning ritual in general, that allows me to put myself up for review, as stoics would say, to reflect and also to lean into planning for my day. I do some reading, some journaling, but while I'm doing that, why not have a little self-care?"
" I have the most awesome family. Well, you know, we're a blended family. We have five children and five grandchildren, and I'm married so far over my head. It's just, I mean, on a step ladder, I couldn't see over, so there's so much that I'm grateful for. Just the history of my family and the kids, the grandkids, the life that I'm able to live and, oh my goodness, just the ancestry. You know, I'm a big family guy, and I love our family, and I have a lot to be grateful for in many, many, many areas of my life, right? And, well, I've been through some ups and downs, and it's funny, you learn so much in the down times, and it's easy to forget them when you're living above that, but I really try to keep an attitude of gratitude about my life and where I'm at and what I've been blessed with."
"I guess I'm grateful to be here, to still have the ability to tell my message, because a lot of my friends haven't had that much or as much grace as I have to actually still sit here and be with us. So that's a lot of the reasons why I do what I do is for the ones that I've lost, that I've known over my career."
"I'm grateful today for my health and my fitness, and I'm overall grateful for being grateful, because sometimes in my life I haven't seen those parts. I looked at the negatives, but waking up being grateful and having that as a natural default."
"I would say I'm definitely grateful for everything that's ever happened in the past, because it's sort of like the Rocky cut scene in life that seems grueling and intense and unfair and unwavering. It feels that way in that moment, but as you would get older and we look back, those become the good old days. I find that the older I get and the more experiences I get under my belt, those are just a lot of good old days, even the times when things were rough, and without those, I don't think anyone would be where they are today. So that's what I would say I'm most grateful for."
"I'm grateful actually, for what we are doing right now. You and I were talking a little bit before you hit record on this, and we were talking about how we agree that when we speak or when we communicate, or when we get the chance to engage with somebody else, this is a service concept. It's about serving other people. The great communication is finding somebody who's interesting, intelligent, brings a unique perspective to the world, who enjoys life, and we get to sit down and talk with somebody else and share that with them? I think that's a gift. I think that's a total block of gold. So, I look for that in my own work, wherever I can. I think it's what sustains me, in the in the work, in the business that I do, but the ability to find a fellow traveler out there in the world, meet somebody new, and get a chance to connect and talk with them? I mean, that's a good day, right there."
"I personally grateful today and every day, for this newfound freedom to live outside of the box. You know, I revel in this every day. I have been able to tell a difference in my own life, in the lives of my clients, for having this permission to live life the way we say, and outside of any social limits or limits of what other people expect from us. And so, you know, the real core of it is just freedom."
"I'm grateful for where I am right now. I work for a great organization that actually puts their people first, and like you said, if you've done the homework, you mentioned the book, the new ROI return on individuals, it's all about the value that people contribute to an organization, and it's about culture. It's about leadership, it's about engagement, it's about aligning my core values with an organization's core values. So, I'm grateful to be here."
"I have been absolutely blessed to have the group of folks that have supported me through my career, that I've learned from. I've had some incredible mentors, I've had some incredible executive coaches, and then with both my mother and my stepfather being in this space, I've been able to accelerate my connections at a very early point in my career. That's really given me insight into a lot of different ways people approach problems and how they approach their work and their business and the frameworks, and so those things I'm always grateful for. And then, you know, always mom. You know, most people, I don’t know, but for me, you know, the mom is queen of queens. I've watched that woman my whole life raise two boys on her own for many years before she remarried, and she had to carve her own path with not a lot of support. And throughout that whole time, never did I feel like we were unsupported, that we went without, or that I ever had a need, even when we really didn't have a lot, but she always made it feel like everything was bountiful, so very, very grateful. And I'm still very fortunate that my parents are around, and I get to talk with them every day. So those are the things I'm most grateful for. And then the business partners I have. I got an absolute wonderful set of business partners. And so again, I can have straight talk with them. Everybody's got thick skin and a good sense of humor, so we're able to really break through things and get through stuff without all the red tape and the minutia that tends to get into the corporate world."
"These days, the thing that I'm the most grateful for is that practice. The practice of being able to reflect and go inwards and just like, really, like, reground and get in touch with myself, my own emotions, my thoughts, and then be able to say, hmm, what can I learn from that? What knowing is coming from it? Like, what's mine to do? Like, and some of the other sort of, like, really reflective questions I try to ask myself a lot these days, like, what would this look like if it was easy? So, I'm really grateful for having those deep roots and the fact that it's just part of all of your episodes."
"You know, many times we get so busy in life that we forget to just take in just what you have right with you, right? So, just family, just the moments where you live, just taking it all in. And, you know, the last couple weeks my father had had a health incident, he ends up being fine, and then we had a young kid in this town who ended up passing away in this very poor incident – a flooding event. And just looking at that, and just looking at the health of my family, and just looking at just, just what I have each and every day, right? Just certain things that we take advantage of. You know, many times we let that pass over, but it sinks in many times. And I've been trying to just pause, especially in the pace that I live in, just to take it all in and just take the moments in, because the moments pass very quickly."
"Hands down, it'd be my parents. They have such an unconditional love for me in my life, that I've just, as I've come to get older, I've really come to respect and appreciate how deep that love really is. And I know not everyone grows up in a household or a family like that, and I honestly wouldn't be the person I am today, and I wouldn't be where I am today without their love and guidance."
"What I am grateful for this morning, you know, is a conversation and the smile of my wife, you know? And then it's something I don't want to take for granted, for moment by moment. I have a friend of mine whose father is in a very severe degree of Alzheimer's. By all measures, he is no longer present to his life. You know, it's really a profound situation for a for a son with his, with his parent. And so, knowing that moment, would you be able to go, if you had the chance to go backwards in time and speak to all the versions of yourself that were younger and had those moments of lucidity with your father, with your parent, would you take that moment for granted as you were? So, it's the relationships, I suppose, that I have today."
"Well, when I think I reflect back, thing about the business, since we're family business, 52 years old, was founded by my father, he's retired a number of years ago, but I'm always grateful for, I guess, kind of the inspiration that he's given me. I think back, geez, I started in sixth grade. Not many people started their job in sixth grade, and here I am, decades later, still working at the same job. I started out, you know, sweeping the floors, cutting the grass, painting, learning electronics. Went to Kane University for my undergraduate and got a degree in computer science, then New York University. Studied telecommunications and media. Kind of always been surrounded in the family business, and growing up, I've been, you know, a hacker, a gamer, played with robotics, and a lot of that I thanked my father for. He kind of inspired me to always, you know, shadow over him and learn from him, and I still do to this day. And then it's an honor to run a business now for myself. It's been little more than 20 years I've been the president of the company and kind of giving it direction and innovating. And, you know, I guess I have ultimately, gratitude toward him and giving me the opportunity. Never had to actually create a resume in my life, which is kind of weird, or apply for a job. It feels strange, but I do that on the other end. I'm hiring people like today, I'm hiring somebody hopefully and going to meet with them. So, it's kind of a different switch than most of the people I talk to in the world of business."
"I consider that who I am now has always been a product of the people that have come into my life and the people that have helped direct my steps, if you will. And you know where I am today. You know, I have people that were in my parish that helped form me as a young minister. When I got into the FBI, there were people there that were just magnanimous in helping develop interested in me, wanting the best. I always say I am so grateful for the people that have invested in me and have taken the time, and you know, if there's any benefit from what I do now to others, it's only because of those people. I just worked with, amazing people, Jason. I just did. I could go on and on about these stars, these kinds of legends, and I got to learn from them, right? I got to pick their brains and see how they worked, and, man, it was just a great experience. So, yeah, it's definitely the people."
"I'm grateful for so many things in life. I'm grateful for the opportunities that have been afforded me, I'm grateful for my family, I'm grateful for my parents and how I was raised, you know? So, I think you have to look at all the positives in your life. It's not going to be sunshine and roses all the time, and when there's good things happening, you know, you should be grateful for all that you have not look at the negatives."
"I think community is the first thing that comes to mind. It's interesting. In 2021 I probably would have said the same thing, but in a very different perspective, given we were in and out of lockdown and probably in again when we last spoke. For me, I feel this way. I think it's pretty universal, this hunger to get back to, or return to, a semblance of real connection. I mean real real connection. Because when we went through the great, horrible experiment that took that away and made it look different, you know, you emerge from that. And even living in New York, I mean, we were kind of Ground Zero but being able to just go to a restaurant with a friend and have those formative and substantive conversations, seeing each other, that is something I will probably never take for granted, and I'm so grateful for it. And I'm grateful for what the insights of real connection has brought and how it has shaped building a brand online, because it has never been easier to grow a following, but it's never been more rare to grow a community, or harder to grow a community, and I think that all the things that I picked up in that great reemergence and what really matters to people from a connection standpoint, is pretty transferable online, but we might have gotten lost a little bit along the way or taken it for granted before that all happened. So, that's the immediate thing that comes to mind for me."
"What stood out for me from a call I had with a client in Australia this morning. So again, completely different time zone. Just part of our approach at DAPA, is to create space and to cultivate joy. And even though it was seven in the morning for me and last meeting of the day for my client, we just had such fun, and we really sort of delved into important conversation, but did it in a way that was light and engaging and felt like there was such authentic connection. So, I think I'm just grateful to build relationships like that with clients who are gathered around the world."
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