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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Appearances
Yeah. At those early dinners, like those early 18 person dinners, we would count if less than eight people cried, we considered it a failed night. It was very rare that we failed.
From a psychological safety and trust with internal teams perspective, creating an emotional connection is paramount, right? There's all the studies now about belonging and connection within the workplace, all that stuff. I won't go into those studies, but I'll say,
Studies are coming out that shows it actually pays well to have your team get to know each other outside of work in meaningful and connected ways. Not the bullcrap ways of where are you from? Where is your kid going to college? What's your dog's name? But the meaningful stuff. You're grateful. You've never thought to thank your grandfather who drove you to soccer practice.
I had a grandmother who taught me how to knit. Oh my God, we have a lot in common. Wow. I like this company where I'm working. I should stay. So from a loyalty retention part, it's huge.
And then, you know, on the client engagement side, anytime that you can bring emotion into a B2B sale, Google found in their promotion to emotion study that your buyers are five times more likely just to consider purchasing, 12 times more likely to pay to purchase and 30 times more likely to pay a premium.
So if you actually help people get to know each other, not just for your product or your price or your, you know, competition in the marketplace, but actually like the human, right? People buy from people, not from companies. They actually get to know the people. You kind of, you're going to do some pretty good business.
They're going to stick with you when times are bad and they're going to reward you paying a premium when times are good.
Just Google found in their promotion to emotion study that buyers with a strong emotional tie to your brand are five times more likely to consider purchasing, 12 times more likely to purchase, and 30 times more likely to pay a premium. So if you're Heather... And you either have the option of charging $10,000 for something you do or $2 million for something you do.
And all it takes is a true, deep, lasting, meaningful connection on an emotional level with the people you're trying to do business with. You choose. Google proved it.
You and I had this conversation about overcoming your villains, your amazing book that launched in the middle of a pandemic. I get it, what it's like to launch our first book in the middle, at the beginning of the pandemic, I should say. So going into 2020, God, we were on top of the world, right? At least inside our own mind. We were on top of the world. We had this new book.
It was going to launch in April. So I grabbed my book and I grabbed my dad and we sailed across to Europe to show Italy what she had inspired in me. And boy, that was amazing. It was late February. We're dining with Massimo Bottura at Osteria Francescana. We're buying all these great leather goods. We're having a good time.
And then my mom and my girlfriend call up and say, hey, there's this thing in Milan. It's called COVID. You should probably come home early. We ignore them. But we land home February 28th, and the government says, you should probably enter quarantine. I'm like, whatever. I'll do a two-week self-isolation quarantine. This is all going to blow over. Well, it never blew over.
So the whole world shuts down. Our book is due out April 7th, 2020, a book teaching people how to host their own 18-person dinners. That's kind of obsolete. It's called gratitude and pasta. It's literally the how-to guide to make 18 people cry around your dinner table. Kind of obsolete. So the whole book tour is canceled. All the corporate events are canceled. All our revenue is canceled.
I'm sitting alone doing the whole sourdough and garden, all the pandemic stuff that people got into. I'm doing it. I got nothing going on. And I take this kind of step back. in the empty city streets of New York, 30,000 of our neighbors dying. And I look around and I say, damn, I'm miserable. Right back to where I was seven year, or at that time, five years ago. And I got back from Italy again.
I was lonely, overwhelmed, disconnected, insecure, nervous, cautious, anxious. What am I going to do tomorrow? What might my future bring? And I looked around and I said, oh my God, I'm not alone. There are others who feel this exact type of way. Boom. Let's host a virtual experience. Let's get together. Let's host a virtual dinner. Well, the first one was April 19th, 2020. It was decent.
Eight people came. We didn't really talk about much, whatever. And I looked and I said, my God, it's missing something. What is it missing? Ah, Our signature sauce, gratitude. Not the pasta sauce, the real stuff, gratitude. And so the next one was April 26th of 2020. We asked our signature gratitude question. We had breakout groups. We used the group chat. We facilitated beautiful discussion.
Almost everybody cried. They came in feeling miserable. They left feeling grateful, connected, happy, wiser, lighter, joy. And so we just kept doing it. Every night for the first couple months of the pandemic, we hosted a virtual gratitude experience for our community. 50 to 100 people came every night. And one day, the phone started ringing. The companies, their employees were
We're all digital, disconnected, work from home, miserable, lonely, tired, nervous, anxious, the same stuff I was feeling. And we said, oh my God, we got to do this for them. And then it just took off in the two and a half, three, two years, two and a half years since the start of all that. We've served tens of thousands of people, hundreds of companies,
And what we found is that the principles of gratitude and the way that we do it had a 99.998% success rate, guaranteeing a positive, emotional, measurable, meaningful transformation with just a 90-minute Zoom gratitude experience. Whether our clients were bringing 20 people or 200 people or thousands of people, the impact was pretty much guaranteed.
It was high times in the city where the favorite word was we, we, we. It was live it up and have fun. And that's been going two years ever since to great acclaim. But I think you know what came next.
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