Episode #13:

Sustainability Bonus Episode One: Gratitude

We’ve just finished our four-part Sustainability series, but I felt that there was a need for an additional two bonus episodes to fully complete the series. In today’s bonus episode, we’re discussing gratitude – the quality of being thankful, and the readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness. It’s the attitude of being thankful and content with the result you’ve created from sustaining through difficult times.

This time at home has left me thinking a lot about the effects of quarantine and what it means in terms of gratitude. Having time to reflect has given me a much richer appreciation of what’s important in life, that I’m not sure I’d have had if it weren’t for these times of quarantine. But it’s also made me contemplate whether we can really have gratitude without having gone through suffering first?

In this episode, I consider my own experiences and how my profound gratitude has always succeeded a period of suffering. There’s a big difference between practicing gratitude, having lived through suffering prior to it, and knowing about it, and a lot of it is to do with your thoughts. Join me this week to discuss why your thoughts can change actions and how you can use them to see things differently moving throughout your life.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

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How suffering can lead to immense gratitude.

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How to practice gratitude in your daily life.

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Why your circumstances in life do not define you.

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The equation that is reportedly able to help achieve life satisfaction.

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Why managing your thoughts can help you reach a place of gratitude.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

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Check out more episodes of the podcast here!

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast, with Dr. Susan Crockett. You’re listening to episode number 13: Sustainability in Difficult Times, The Bonus Podcast: Gratitude. This episode is dedicated to all those who suffer.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, where women learn to love their lives. Do you find yourself frustrated by society’s expectations? Looking for practical advice on how to discover your talents and level up your life? You’ve found the right place. Here’s your host, US News top doctor, robotic surgeon and certified life coach, Dr. Susan Crockett.

Hello, my virtuosas and my virtuosas in training. I am your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. You can call me Sue because we're having girl talk, and today, we are going to talk about gratitude. Kind of cool. Pretty excited about that. Today, I am sitting in my study with my little dog Ollie behind me. I did something fun this week. I've been practicing a little bit more about producing more content about doing video broadcasting.

I'm working on building a membership site called Heal the Healers of COVID-19. I'm having to learn a whole bunch of new technical stuff like that, but also having to stretch myself. Again, finding myself having to transform into the next version of myself already sooner than I had expected. That's what's been going on in my life.

I hope you are all doing well and staying safe inside. Today, I'm doing a bonus podcast. We just completed a four-podcast series on sustainability through difficult times, and I got to the end of it last week, which was legacy, and I thought, “I need two more weeks for some bonus content.”

So, today, we're doing bonus content number one, which is gratitude. Next week, we're going to do emerging from the cocoon. It's going to be about fierceness. I'm super excited about next week's. This one too. It will be good. As always, we're going to do a short little lesson. Then I'll have an exercise for you all, and hopefully something to feed your minds, and give you something to think about for the next week.

I'm going to start with a little story. You may have heard it before, maybe not. It's called The Wolf You Feed. One evening, and old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.”

The little grandson thought about it for a minute, and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.” Now, that may seem an unusual story to start off our talk about gratitude because it doesn't really seem to be about gratitude at all. Does it? I think if you'll stick with me till the end of the podcast, you'll understand where I'm going with that and what the story about the wolves has to do with gratitude.

So, let's start with a Webster definition of gratitude. It is the quality of being thankful, a readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness. Where does gratitude fit in terms of the four parts of sustainability through difficult times that we've just finished? Just to recap, resilience was the first part, and it's getting up when you get knocked down. Tenacity is ability to hang on when letting go appears more attractive.

Diligence is the practice of keeping going when it would be easier to quit, and then legacy is the product of sustaining through the hard time. So, gratitude then is the attitude of being thankful and content with the result that you've created from sustaining through the difficult time. I did a lot thinking about gratitude this week. I went on a couple long walks. I've been outside with nature a little bit.

I was thinking about all of these thoughts as we are in quarantine, and the effects of quarantine and what that may mean for gratitude. What's happened with me, and I think a lot of you all too, is the simple effect of simplifying our lives, and having to be at home or getting to be at home, and getting back to the very necessities of life and the things that are really important has given us a lot of time to reflect, and it's given me a much richer appreciation of the things that really are important in life.

I've been rich, and I've been poor. I've been heavy. I've been overweight. I've been super thin. I've been sick, and I've had good health. I've been in places of power and influence, and I've been powerless. When you look at all of those things, what you start to realize is that those circumstances in life aren't really what define you at all. It's really not. They are just things.

A lot of you, I know, are dealing with anxiety about losses of money and jobs, and I want to encourage you that while I understand those and I have compassion for you struggling, for those of you who are struggling, I want to present an option of how to think about this and how to move through life. Money is not breath. Money is not fresh drinking water, and it is not clean air in a body that can move.

When I think about the things that I'm most grateful for in my own life, I'm grateful for my warm, little, snuggly dog Ollie sitting behind me in the chair as I'm doing my podcast. I have an acute awareness of how warm, and soft, and unconditionally loving he is, and it has brought out a depth of gratitude that I don't think I would have had at this moment if I hadn't been going through these times of quarantine.

How about toilet paper? Have you ever been so grateful for toilet paper in your whole entire life, or good food that you can go to the grocery store and get because not everybody has that opportunity? How about the love of your kids, and your husband, and your family, and your friends? Isn't that really what it all boils down to? Love, loving ourselves, and loving each other? How about that?

As I started thinking about that, it's difficult for me to think about that without thinking about the passing of my ex-husband, Dale. As I was going on my walk, I was thinking about gratitude and how today is never promised. It really made me richly, richly grateful for today and helped me appreciate that tomorrow is never gifted.

Dale, when he passed, which is almost three years ago, he was an ER physician, for those of you who aren't familiar with this story. He was an ER physician, and we had been divorced for several years. He went one night to my son's soccer practice, and at the end of the soccer practice, my son called me and said, “Dad's truck is here, but we can't find him anywhere.”

It was dark. So, I got in my car with a big sigh, you know, the divorced woman sharing custody type of sigh of, “Ugh, I've got to go take care of it.” Drove about 20 minutes to the soccer fields, and by the time I got there, they had found him, and he had been running around the soccer fields and had suffered a massive, instantly fatal heart attack.

By the time I got there to get Ryan, the ambulance had already come and taken Dale to the ER. In the aftermath of that, there was such a profound grief that was startling to me we went through as a family, me and the four kids. My current husband, who's just amazing, and wonderfully supportive, and was through all of this, went through this most incredible depth of grief.

It's actually how I ended up finding life coaching, was to figure out how to manage my mind around this thing that was totally unexpected. It was a traumatic and unexpected, very abrupt change in our lives, but also, I was completely unprepared for the depth of grief that I would feel. This was somebody that I had been with for about 25 years. We had been married for 21 years and had four beautiful together, but we had gone through a really difficult end of our marriage and very difficult divorce.

If you had told me that I would still have that level of grief at his passing, I wouldn't have believed it. I would've thought that I was over it, but I wasn't. As I started thinking about how I came and emerged out of that grief, one thing that has struck me is that I have a depth of gratitude about life. I have a profound gratitude and appreciation for daily life and the privilege to be with my kids no matter what is going on because I have today, I have breath in me, and he doesn't anymore.

So, as I was thinking about Dale and the relationship between suffering and gratitude, I started thinking about other times in my life or other things that I'm grateful for. For instance, I have a successful medical practice doing robotic surgery now, which is what I love to do. But in order to get to that place, I went through a fairly long period of suffering. I had a failed business. I was in a medical practice that was a wonderful medical practice with great partners, but I was not happy and fulfilled in it, so there was a level of suffering there.

My current marriage, I'm so thankful and grateful for my current husband. He's amazing, and kind, and loving, and compassionate. I realized that that was proceeded by a lot of loneliness and a very difficult end of a prior relationship. So, there was suffering that came before that gratitude. How about my kids? I’ve got four kids. Incredibly thankful for them.

Well, having my kids was preceded by seven years of infertility and a miscarriage proceeded by grief, and loss, and suffering. You know what? Nothing has made me appreciate my health more than being a doctor where I'm taking care of people who are my age or younger who are suffering from medical illnesses that are not of their own doing and are just debilitating.

There's nothing to make you appreciate your own body and your own health and have gratitude more than understanding there are people that don't have that. So, I started developing this thought this week that maybe suffering is a necessary seed of deep gratitude. I finished my walk, and I came home, and I did a Google search about gratitude and suffering.

One thing I found was there's lots of literature about practicing gratitude in regards to mental health. College students, and work happiness, marriage fulfillment. There's all kinds of psychological studies validating gratitude as a treatment for suffering. In the medical literature, we also find it as a promising new part of relieving or treating cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes.

I found lots of stuff about gratitude as a treatment for suffering, and then, of course, you find out all the religious stuff about suffering, and gratitude, and blah, blah, blah, and that's really not where I'm going with this today. That really wasn't what I was trying to get out. I was trying to tease out is suffering really necessary to feel gratitude?

As I was looking, I came across this idea. I found a column, a new column in the Atlantic online version, called “How to Build a Life”, and it's a new column that aims to give you the tools you need to construct a life that feels whole and meaningful. It's written by Arthur C. Brooks, who is a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School of Business and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Business School.

He started this column this month on how to build a new life, and the article that I came across was called “The Three Equations for a Happy Life”, even during a pandemic. Catchy, right? In it, he lays out three equations for happiness, and the third one, when I got to it, really struck me because it has a lot to do with gratitude.

That is that life satisfaction can be boiled down to an equation that says take what you have and divide it by what you want, and that's what satisfaction is, long-term happiness or life satisfaction. He quotes the Dalai Lama who said, in other words, what this equation is saying, “We need to learn how to want what we have, not to have what we want in order to get steady and stable happiness.” In other words, increase our amount of gratitude and decrease our desire for more things. I thought, “Yeah, that's gratitude, right? It's right there.”

I did some more thinking about gratitude as a result of suffering and about whether suffering was necessary to produce a deep level of gratitude. Suffering, in psychologic terms, is the state that we get into where we argue between what we want and what we have, or between what is and what we think should be happening.

When Dale passed, we grieved, but then we also suffered on top of that, and the suffering was produced by our thoughts about the conditions or the circumstances of his death. That exponentially increased the amount of suffering that myself and my children went through. The thoughts that kept coming up that we've worked through over the years are that he was too young. It wasn't his time to die. It was too sudden, and it shouldn't happen. All of those are examples of suffering that's layered on top of grief.

So, as I'm thinking about this suffering as a necessary seed for deep gratitude, I'm wondered and I contemplated, is it always necessary? Can you have gratitude without having gone through suffering? I think you can, on the surface, like you can say thank you for something.

You can have an appreciation for something because you've been trained to be thankful or to count your blessings, but there's a big difference between knowing about gratitude and practicing gratitude, and having lived through the suffering, and having received the gift of the gratitude that is on the other side of that.

So, I think it's the difference between knowing somebody as a friend like you know your best friend and knowing about them like you know about a celebrity or something like that. We know who celebrities are, but we don't know them personally, and I think that is the relationship between having gone through suffering and the type of gratitude that results from that versus gratitude as a daily practice that hasn't known that depth of suffering.

Then as I was thinking about that, I thought, “Well, does suffering always result in gratitude? Does it work that way? Can you flip it? If it's a necessary seed of deep gratitude, does it always result in gratitude?” I started thinking about that, and I remembered a passage from Philippians, which was written by Paul. He was writing a letter to the church in Philippi, and it's a verse that is quoted a whole lot. It's Philippians 4:11-13.

What Paul is writing about is he says, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be a need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through Him who gives me strength.”

Now, that last part, the verse 13, “I can do all this through Him who gives me strength,” that's the NIV version of it. A lot of times, when we hear people quote this verse, or you see it on signs and encouragement, a lot of times, we see it written as, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

So I was looking at this, and I've thought about this a long time. In fact, when I was going through my difficult divorce, this was one of the examples that I used of helping my mind, managing my mind and my thoughts about the circumstances we were going through. It was one of my first introductions into thought work. I deconstructed this verse, and this is regardless of your spiritual thinking.

Really, what Paul was doing was he was in that one verse assigning at least four different thoughts that helped him manage his emotions, and how he showed up, and what his results were. His thoughts in this were that Christ was the one that gave him strength, and another thought in that verse is that he can do hard things. We use that one as encouragement all the time. There was also wrapped up in that sentence a belief that he has a source of strength outside of himself and a source of connectivity to others.

Those are the four thoughts that I teased out from that one verse, and I thought, “Well, those thoughts are available to us all the time.” Whatever your belief system is, you have the ability to believe that that gives you strength. You always have the ability to believe you can do hard things. You always have the source of strength outside of yourself if you want to relate to it, whether that's what you call God, or the universe, or nature, or whatever you want to call it. I call it God.

You always have the ability to believe that you're connected to others, that connectivity. So, I think this is a really good example of somebody choosing, in the midst of suffering, to modify their thoughts so that they end up in a place of gratitude. But does suffering always result in gratitude? No, it doesn't. It does in this case, but sometimes it leads to despair.

What the difference is, what makes all the difference in whether you go on an upward spiral to gratitude or you go on a downward spiral towards despair, is solely your thoughts. That is just the basic bottom line of what this podcast is about. It's about helping us manage our thoughts and our minds to become and create the best versions of ourselves and the best lives that we want to live our virtuosa selves.

So, the question is, does all suffering lead to gratitude? Does it always result in gratitude? The answer is no. You can choose to have thoughts like Paul did that lead to gratitude, but there are other times when our suffering and our thoughts about our suffering, or our circumstances that were going through, difficult times, lead to thoughts of despair.

I was thinking about this. I thought, “We probably need a new beatitude.” You know, The Beatitudes, the blessed are those who blah, blah, blah. So, my new beatitude is blessed are those who suffer because they may find the path to gratitude. My point here is that they may find it, they have the opportunity to find the path towards gratitude, but there is a choice in the path.

One choice is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other path is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith. Which wolf will you choose to feed?

All right, guys. For your exercise this week, I want you to start a gratitude journal. My friend Jennifer gave me one for Christmas last year. It's called “One Line a Day”. It's a five-year memory book, which is pretty cool. I, as a rule, do not like to journal. I don't enjoy it. I just have some hang ups about it, but I really enjoy this one. If you go on Amazon, you can find lots of gratitude journals.

The medical studies have shown that it takes time for it to change the chemistry in your brain, but it is possible of doing it. I'm going to challenge you to journal over the next 90 days as we move through the end of the Coronavirus pandemic, and use this as one of the tools to help you emerge on the other side stronger. Feed that wolf.

What I've shown you today is a bonus tool in our series on sustainability through difficult times. Talked about gratitude today and its relationship to suffering. I know that a lot of you are suffering through this time, and hopefully, this gives you some ideas about using that to deepen your gratitude and to increase your virtuosity, become a stronger virtuosa version of yourself.

What I'm listening to and reading, I kind of struggled with this section this week. It wasn't really obvious. What I'm listening to is a song that is not real new. It was from 2008, but really timely. It's from a duet, an unusual duet, between Kenny Chesney and Dave Matthews. Yes, that Dave Matthews. The song is called “I'm Alive”, and it's off of Kenny Chesney's Lucky Old Sun album. Really awesome. So, I hope you all enjoy.

Then I'm reading a book that has nothing to do with gratitude at all. It's called The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It's actually a fable about following your dreams, and it was given to me by a friend, golly, 10, 12, 15 years ago, one of my fellow female physician warriors. I reread it every once in a while. It's a really great book to read. I think that's going to lead us into next week's topic, which is emergence from the cocoon. We're going to tie that in with fierceness. I think this book is going to come in handy, so that's what I'm reading this week.

Okay, my virtuosas. Have a wonderful week. Remember that love always draws a bigger circle. Which wolf are you going to choose to feed this week? Have a wonderful week. Love always, Sue. I will see you next week in episode 14.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. If you want to find out more, come check out virtuosacoaching.com. That’s virtuosa - with an A - coaching.com. See you next week.

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