#1517 - Practicing Gratitude For A Reason

When I am on podcasts , usually we talk about breaking life up into health , wealth and love . That's usually the theme of the episode and Oftentimes when we get to the end , the host will say what advice would you give to our audience ?

And nine times out of ten I will say Try to build one new habit under health , one new habit under wealth and one new habit under love . Nothing crazy , something that's super sustainable , that almost seems like it's probably not going to do anything . And then I usually give it examples .

And when I talk about the loved one , I will usually say my wife and I have been playing the gratitude game for I don't even know how long years it yeah , it has to be years at this point where every night before we go to bed , we each say one thing we're grateful for about each other and we Very , very , very rarely miss like I'm .

99% of the time we do it . If we miss , usually I'll send a message the next day or in terrible response . We very , very rarely miss when we think about gratitude . I think oftentimes we assume gratitude is something that you feel , when I think gratitude is actually something that you practice . You practice gratitude constantly .

One of my favorite questions this is old , hyper conscious conversation . If you woke up tomorrow with only the things that you said you were grateful for today , what would you have ? You can feel grateful , and that's important , that's valuable and that's awesome , but practicing gratitude is the act of actually understanding . What does it mean to feel grateful ?

Practicing is telling other people

that you're grateful about them . Practicing gratitude for your body is using your body , or practicing gratitude for your Incredible brain is using your brain .

You clean it , you redo the floors , you renovate it , you do the landscaping , you mow the lawn , you make sure that if you've ever seen the movie Jumanji , shout out way back , way , way , way back , probably mid 90s there's a house that gets really overgrown and , like all like , there's like a jungle in the house .

If you've never seen Jumanji , it's imagine a house that's just not been taken care of for 60 years . That's what would happen to your home if you weren't grateful for it , if you weren't renovating it , if you weren't cleaning it , if you Weren't landscaping , if you weren't redoing the kitchen , if you weren't cleaning . Like I said , cleaning already .

The point is is what Kevin's saying in this episode , and this is what I agree with so deeply , because I often say people say , well , I'm grateful for my health and I honestly , there have been times where I've called some people out . These are clients ,

so I get paid to call people out at times and I'm doing it kindly , but it's listen . If you're really grateful for your health , you'll take better care of yourself . When you're grateful for something , you take really good care of it . I have a Mazda Kevin's hand me down Mazda and Emilia has a Model Y Tesla . That's really , really , really , really nice .

It's the nicest car I've ever had or been a part of . I should say it's not my car , but you know what I'm saying and I mean this is what . What are those go ? I don't know what are those go for .

I can't hammer the door right into the , right into the , the cinder block or the the sidewalk . I'm joking , but one of the coolest parts about having crappy cars my whole life is you just don't have to take that good care of them . The Mazda , I don't care right , hammer that door right into the ?

No , I'm being playful , but I put my coffee cup on the Mazda . Of course I do . Who cares ? Right ? Oh , you're gonna scratch the paint , I don't care , right , this whole car is worth what ? Four thousand dollars , I'm kidding , okay . So here's the point , though what you appreciate , appreciates .

We take better care of the model y Because the model y is more valuable , it's more important , it's more , it's worth a lot more . I Actually like the luxury of not having to take care of my car , but I also don't value cars that much . So that's , that's a me personal thing , and I like the luxury of just not having to worry about it .

But our home I try to take really good care of . And so this I had a mentor once who took better care of his Porsche . Then he did his own family , and I actually couldn't continue mentoring with this person because I Just can't . I can't separate someone's knowledge with their actual gratitude , I can't separate their character .

For me , a lot of people can say like oh well , you know , so-and-so is really good at golf and so-and-so is really good at business and so-and-so is really good at football . But who cares if they're a terrible person ? I do . I do so , you know , trigger warning . But , like Aaron Hernandez , for example , I don't care how good you are at football .

If you're an awful human being , that's what I'm gonna judge you based on , not not that you can , you know , catch a ball or whatever . So for me , I can't separate character and success . I just can't , and I won't do it .

So many of my mentors who had lower character , I just eventually had to be like regardless of how wealthy you are , I don't really care . I can't learn from you unless you're holistic , and I can't learn from you unless you lead by example . Particularly when it comes to gratitude , I don't want you to take better care of your pores than your wife .

That's unacceptable . I don't want you to take better , to care more about your car than your family Can't have it . And so gratitude has two sides to the coin .

One side is feeling grateful to Kevin's point , and it's I am grateful for my health , I am grateful for this home , I am grateful for this community , I'm grateful for this podcast , I'm grateful for my lungs , whatever . But I think real gratitude and this is I'm so adamant about this take care of your lungs by not smoking .

I Was grateful For my mind in a feeling , but I wasn't taking care of my mind when I was drinking a lot . I Regret all of the times I binge drank because that was bad

for my brain . If you're grateful for your brain , you'll get good sleep . You'll not poison it with alcohol constantly . You'll take care of it you . The things we value and the things we're grateful for , we take good care of . And if you're not taking good care Of them , I think gratitude is not only a noun , it's a verb , it's showing gratitude , it's .

I Don't want , I don't want Emilia to think oh , ellen's really grateful for me . I want her to know in my actions . If you looked only at my actions , then you would know that I am grateful for Emilia . She would know that I'm grateful for Emilia and I think that goes so much longer .

I think walk is so much more important than talk , and that's ironic coming from a podcaster . We do a lot of talking .

The other day , taryn was having a little bit of a rough day and she ended up go shoot , went somewhere , she went to work and I Walked out of the office , I was walking down the hallway and Ace was just laying on the floor just like laying on his back looking for bellies , and I had this overwhelming moment of gratitude and I texted her and I said I'm so

grateful we , I'm so grateful we have a roof over our head and I'm so grateful we have abundance and I'm so grateful that we have this Nice , amazing family . And it just was a very surreal moment for me of oh , these are , these are our cats and this is our place , and there's a lot of amazing things going on .

Now , again , sometimes you have to double , triple , quadruple down on focusing on this things that you're grateful for , because you're overwhelmed . There's other stuff going on and we can lose sight of that . But again , you've heard me say this a million times . That's why I think reflection is so important .

I think reflection helps you Find gratitude , because you realize the contrast , whatever the contrast is , whatever it , whatever it may be , and when you reflect , I think you can find things to be Grateful for when I look back Living with Matt . I lived with my , my best friend , for four years .

Sometimes that was a pain in the butt Because we spend so much time together that we would kind of want distance away from each other . But now when I look back , I'm so grateful for that experience because now I see him once every other month . Now at this point I'm so grateful for all the time . I have so much nostalgia built into that .

When I think back , it's amazing . I just I think about that to the point A little call a dude ski a little call a dude ski , other the good old days , a little call of duty and a lot of whiskey back in the day . Now , I've never claimed to be I'm . I would argue that I'm probably not as grateful as for my brain , as Alan is .

So that's why my decision-making paradigm is different than Alan . Yeah it's not as much of a core value .

Yeah or being grateful for this opportunity , for this privilege that we have now . Yes , we've worked extremely hard over the last seven years to get to where we are , but I also understand wearing sweatpants , in a sweatshirt , in a hat and showing up from my office whenever I want is a wonderful thing to have .

But I want to remain grateful for that , because when you , when you lose gratitude , you gain entitlement , and when you gain entitlement , you lose all the things you were grateful for in the first place . Unfortunately , that's kind of the way it works .

I remember we talked about this years ago on the Hyper Conscious podcast . I think the opposite of gratitude is entitlement , meaning you think you deserve

it by default , so you're entitled to your health . So , whatever , I'll share this story and it fires me up , so just keep that in mind . I'm going to get probably fired up . I remember I was around the campfire back in the day when I used to frequent bond fires . I grew up in the sticks and I love me some bond fires and there was one of my .

This was a young man who I looked up to as a kid for sure . He was one of my close friends , older brothers , and I never understood back then how little other people care about their health , even though they'd say they care about it .

And I remember I said hey , man , why do you smoke so many packs a day ? Why do you smoke so much ? Just genuinely curious . And obviously this person is insecure about it . They felt attacked . They're like , well , I'm going to fucking die someday anyways , so who cares ? And I remember thinking that's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard .

And again at the time I just , oh , you know okay . And then I thought to myself like that is the worst logic I think I've ever heard in my life . It's like , well , what if I die tomorrow ? What if you don't ? What if you live to the statistical average of 78 years old , which is , by the way , the most likely case ? Not if you keep smoking , obviously .

And I remember I was really adamant . I was 12 years old and my mom used to smoke and she eventually quit because I just could not stop nagging her about it , because I was grateful , I valued my mom , I love my mom , I don't want to see her die . I was so adamant about her quitting smoking . She said I never would have quit if it wasn't for you .

And I just can't settle on this idea of oh well , I'm going to die one day anyway , so I'm just going to smoke like a chimney . Okay , if you want to smoke , don't rationalize it with idiocy . Just say honestly it's worth it to me . I don't really value my health very much . That's the truth . You don't value your health very much , that's okay .

I , kevin and I , were joking about how in high school we've smoked cloves and we thought we were cool and I drank a bunch , right , but I wasn't lying to myself saying , oh , I value my health at 10 out of 10 and I'm still going to binge drink on the regular .

I think that we lie to ourselves and we lie to each other and the truth is you're not being grateful for your health and maybe you're not . Maybe that's a choice . Maybe that's a conscious choice . Maybe you aren't that grateful for your health . Maybe you don't really care that much about your life .

I tell this story about how , when I was at my most miserable at least fulfilled , I would say I was at a girlfriend named Courtney at the time and she had graduated nursing school from the UMass School of Pharmacy . It's a really awesome nursing school and we went to celebrate her and all her classmates was like 30 of us .

So we went to this place called Gillions , which is like for those of you who don't know I don't know if Gillions is global , but it's like an arcade bar and you have pool tables and ping pong and every arcade game . It's actually pretty awesome . And I remember I did nips in the car nips or little bottles of alcohol .

I remember I put a couple of nips down right in the car right before I got in and I acted like I did .

I acted like my life was awesome and at the time I made a ton of money and I did have the dream that I think everyone thought was a dream , and , as far as misery goes , I think I was still living in a free country and I still had a roof over my head and I had a lot of money coming in . So I think there were some benefits .

But at the end of the day , I was deeply unfulfilled and I was pretending that I was happy , when the truth was if I had just been vulnerable and honest with myself . The truth is I'm unhappy . I don't really want to go and show my face in this bar and pretend to be happy .

I do want to celebrate Courtney and her achievement , but I don't know if I'm capable of that right now because I don't feel good about me . And so what I did was I drank some alcohol and I went and pretended to have a blast . I think my intentions were pure to try to celebrate her , but at the end of the day , I think a lot of us are full of it .

I wasn't grateful for my health and I wasn't showing it in my actions , and so what you appreciate appreciates . Check in . This is NLU , right , we're not here to just talk about fun stuff all the time . Check in what aren't you appreciating that you might regret . I regret poisoning my brain .

I regret a lot of the choices I've made and fortunately I've felt those regrets . I've faced the mirror of what I didn't appreciate and I'm sure there's still things that I'm not appreciating enough now that I'll regret later . But I think that's life and I think that if you look in the mirror and go , what do I appreciate most ?

What am I showing in my actions that I appreciate most , and will your future self thank you for that ? Or will you , a future self , go ? Wow , wow . I really , really didn't appreciate that enough . I didn't understand what I had when I had it and , yeah , I think it's really important that we all do that in advance .

I think we call it reverse engineering , regret and I think all my regrets in life . This will be the last thing I say I promise this is my next little nugget . All the things I regret in life are things I didn't appreciate Makes sense , yeah , things that I didn't appreciate .

When my dog died , right , I was so upset that I wasn't I didn't spend a lot of time with him that day . Just , you know that that all of my regrets come down to me not appreciating things enough and me getting entitled for sure . So you know , I think if we just look at that , I think our future will be much better .

I think from the outside perspective you might say that's dark and that's unhealthy , but every time I try to do this , every time I walk by them and one of them rolls over for bellies , I stop , even if I'm in the middle of something , even if I'm busy . It takes five not even five minutes , it takes two minutes that I sometimes Ace sleeps with me . He

sleeps in between my legs and it's kind of I sleep really well now , but sometimes it's a pain in the butt but it's like , honestly , I don't really care , whatever , so I don't get as good asleep . I'm going to remember this forever . This is my favorite thing in the world . I love this .

Versus honestly it's worth it to me right now and I need the cigarette . That's vulnerable versus just all ego .

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Christmas is coming up for those who celebrate that . This is one of the reasons family is so challenging in the holidays , because you're connecting with people you haven't talked to maybe in a year since last holiday , and there's a lot of weird stuff that happens around the holidays with boundaries and family .

So we're going to talk about that tomorrow for episode number 1,518 . As always , we love you , we appreciate you . Grateful , Grateful , grateful , grateful for each and every one of you and NLU . We do not have fans , we have family . We will talk to you all tomorrow .