Chris Schembra
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Chris Schembra’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You can either wake up in the morning and focus too much on what's going wrong and not appreciate all the good things, or you can wake up and you can appreciate all the good things and not really focus on the stuff that's wrong. The difference is gratitude and ingratitude. And what I learned in that dark moment on the phone with my friend Scott is that the choice is
was mine to either look at my life through despair or to look at my life through appreciation.
Thanks for having me, Heather. A special shout out to Carrie Siggins for the original introduction, a sister from across the country. Just so glad that we got to make this work today.
You know, Heather, that's a great question. And I'm so glad that you see it or our work for what it is. You know, oftentimes when we go into an experience or an event with a team and they say, oh, here comes the gratitude guy. You know, you see a lot of rolling eyes. gratitude for so many years has been this fluffy, wuffy, airy, fairy, spiritual, only see the positive. What are you grateful for?
I'm grateful for my health. I'm grateful for the sun. Well, here's the thing about gratitude. We think that to be grateful is to be grateful to someone. And this journey is Our counterintuitive approach to gratitude, the science and psychology approach to gratitude, it started about six years ago. I just got done producing this tribute campaign for veterans.
I'd just gotten back from producing a Broadway play in Italy. I had a lot of weird things going on in my life. On the outside, my life looked pretty awesome on paper. But on the inside, I was completely screaming. I was a complete fraud. It happened around July of 2015.
I took a fearless and searching moral inventory of myself and realized, probably like a lot of your listeners out there today, I was lonely, unfulfilled, disconnected, insecure, nervous, cautious, overwhelmed, anxious, alone. You know, all my friends on Instagram saw one side of me, but on the inside, I was just broken.
And, you know, it was in conjunction with me having just come back from feeling a really inspired type of way in Italy. We were over there producing the Broadway play, and it made me come alive. They walked different, talked different, loved different, told different. History story is different. It was intoxicating. It was La Dolce Vita, as they say.
And when I got back here to New York City, I said, I got to do something, do something quick. That felt way too good not to recreate. So I thought back, what was it about my time in Italy that changed my perspective on everything? Well, it was their food. Specifically, it was pasta sauce. And so back home in my kitchen here in New York, I said, I got to recreate this magic.
And I invented, it's going to sound silly and simple. Your listeners are going to laugh. I invented a pasta sauce recipe. And I figured I should probably feed it to people to actually see if it's good or not. And one night I hosted a dinner party. It was 15 people in my friend's backyard in the middle of New York City. And we worked together to create the meal. And we had some amazing pasta sauce.
And when the time was right, I opened up with a simple question. If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don't give enough credit or thanks to, that you've never thought to thank, who would that be? And Heather, when we asked that question around the dinner table, we realized people didn't give the airy-fairy, farty-warty version of gratitude that we're all used to.
They told real stories about people. Some were positive. Some were negative. But it was intoxicating. It was life-changing. It was real. And it was that moment, then and there, that I realized there is a whole side to this thing, gratitude. that not enough people have seen before. And I'm going to make it my life's work to showcase it.
And that started the journey six years ago, almost seven years ago.
Wow. What a story you have, by the way. The bravery it took and the courage to go out on your own and do what you're doing now. I got to see that in people. I got to have people like you around my dinner table who shared these amazing stories. The stories that they had achieved tremendous amount of success in their life, but they never thought to thank their third grade teacher.
They never thought to thank their grandfather that drove them to soccer practice. They never thought to thank their mother that never told them that she loved them. The mean ex-boss, that mean ex-girlfriend, that person who told them they'd never amount to nothing. These stories were real and had a way of normalizing whoever was at the dinner table, right?
We started hosting those dinners way early in our company. We started hosting those dinners just for free in our home for our friends. And Every week, people would pour in by the dozens. The rule was, simple rule, first time you come, you come alone. Second time you come, you bring a friend. After that, you're eligible to nominate someone. And so we'd have people just show up to the dinner table.
I didn't know who they were, but I'd Google them the next day and say, you're telling me that that person last night helped me make peanut butter and then cried around the dinner table talking about their dead dog, holy shit, we're onto something. And not only did the power of community save my life, but the power of gratitude.
So gratitude practice, not in a self-reflective way that just goes in a journal that nobody ever sees, but when you practice gratitude, in small group setting, it feels good to give, it feels good to receive, and it feels good to observe other people doing it. So that was saving my life. I had no choice but to continue it.
Yeah. So companies would call us way in, you know, way in those early days, companies would call us and essentially say two things. One, we have a really disconnected team or two. I'm looking to build better relationships with our external partners and clients and all that kind of stuff.
And so we'd fly all over the world, putting on these experiences, large or small, with a sole goal of helping them bring their people together and everybody crying. I know it sounds silly and crazy and kind of psychotic to say my goal is to make people cry, but that's literally proof that we're doing something right. That's our goal.
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