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
Thank you for saying that. And with your platform, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of great friends you have online, I can't wait to see how you bring gratitude to the masses after this. But look, you're watching this, you're reading this, you're listening to this. You saw my enthusiasm just before. That was kind of on purpose.
That's the enthusiasm that American people had in October of 1929 during the roaring 20s where the favorite word was me, me, me. It was live it up and have fun. It was great profits, great family, big new house, great respect, accolades coming in every day. And then it all came crashing down. with a terrifying crack up. It was Thursday, December 30th, 2021.
If you looked at my life, you would have been jealous. I had everything I had ever wanted. But at 4.30 PM that day, I got on a one-on-one call with a client of mine, Lisa Penn. And she said, Chris, you don't look too hot. We should probably end our hour-long discussion. And we did. And I took note of that because that's the first time a client's ever said that to me.
And I went out to dinner that night with my girlfriend to celebrate her new job, our new home, all these great things. I drank too much accidentally. We got in a fight. I got home, felt like a miserable piece of crap, like a fraud, an imposter, a monster. And I engaged in my most recent and largest episode of non-suicidal self-injury. It's called NSSI.
There's a lot of folks that you know who have been through similar things. It's things like cutting and burning and scratching and self-mutilation. Well, my vice is cutting and I like my kitchen knives. That time I flew a little too close to the sun. I'm lucky to be alive. In the days that followed, I was a pile of mush. I would watch Nancy Meyers movies on repeat.
I would cry at the sight of a lemon. I had friends that invited me to all these things, but I couldn't even muster the courage to show up. One day I was on the phone with my buddy Scott and he said, Chris, you just got so many things going on in your life. He couldn't see the clearing through the forest. And I said, my God, he's so right.
Sometimes in life, we involve ourselves in so many things and we program ourselves only to see the bad, never to appreciate the good. And you're probably going through that right now. And I got to tell you, you're not alone. And it's nothing new. Humanity has been plagued by this for many, many years. I mean, you look at the books on my shelf, I'll point at one book written in the year 63 AD.
2,000 years ago, this guy wrote a book. You know him as Seneca the Elder. His real name was Lucius Annius Seneca. He was an elder statesman during the Roman Empire. And in that book, he says that the greatest plague to Roman society is that we neither know how to give nor receive a benefit. And of all the vices common in today's society, nothing is more common than ingratitude.
He said ingratitude has caused the worst in humans. The ungrateful man, homicides, thievery, adultery, all that kind of stuff. They were going through that 2000 years ago. We're going through the same stuff in our country today.
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. Now, your life might not look like mine. You may be saying, but I don't have all those things, Chris. Money's tight. My family hates me. I've got no friends. No job? I don't know. Well, here's the thing that Heather was talking about earlier in the call.
That happiness, woo-woo, positivity, bull crap, it's all fake. It's something that society has fed us for the last 40 years. That self-help space, the positivity gurus, the Tony Robbins of the world, they fed us crap. Here's the truth. Life isn't supposed to look pretty. It's not supposed to be able to be fixed with a filter. It's not supposed to be pretty this and epic that and monumental that.
Life is a form of suffering. How you choose to learn from those dark moments and use those to your advantage is something only you can control. And when I realized that, boy, my life shifted. And that was just a couple months ago.
Great question. And I do want to call out Scott and Caitlin, Sean and Leslie, Alec and Shauna for being there in those early days. A researcher by the name of Philip Watkins from Eastern Washington University did a wonderful research study he would eventually call the grateful processing of unpleasant memories.
And it's a wonderful study that shows he took a number of participants and he said, think about a negative experience. And he split them up into three groups. There was one group who thought about a negative experience and let it ransack their brain and then just carried on with their life. That was group number one.
Group number two thought about a really negative experience and then just wrote about it. That was group two. Group three thought about a negative experience, wrote about it, found the positive benefits in it, gave gratitude to it. That was group three. Group one was miserable. They thought about a negative experience. It ruminated chaotically in their brain.
And then they just carried on with their life and nothing happened. Group two... thought about it chaotically, and then wrote about it. And science shows that when you write down or talk out about a negative autobiographical experience, you de-stigmatize the impact that negative emotion has over you.
You kind of organize it and normalize it and talk it out or write it down and say, that wasn't that bad. But group number three, they actually wrote about it and then looked at it and said, hmm, Now, did it teach me empathy? Did it give me family closeness or community closeness? Did it give me self-confidence, self-efficacy? Did I actually make money from it?
If you could say yes to a whole host of those positive benefits, it can actually become one of the greatest things that's ever happened to you. See, it's not when your life is perfect that you actually learn. When you pretend like your life is perfect and your ego gets too big, you stop on the constant life learning process. You think like you know everything.
Then you become miserable to be around. But when you can actually get knocked down into that hole and look around and say, what am I learning? Where can I learn more about what I'm learning? How can I use that as a form of connection with others? So I started... realizing that this scar that I have across my arm, it's actually the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.
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