Ep #176: The Science of Happiness with Kim Strobel

Hello empowered principles. Welcome to episode 176.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck.

Hello, my empowered leaders, and happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. Today I have a special guest. Her name is Kim Strobel. She is a former educator and is now known as the chief happiness officer. She is the founder of Strobel Education. As a former educator, she now offers support for schools in order to tap into your happiness levels.

So Kim is no stranger to darkness. She’s had her dark moments. But she has really come to realize how to tap into her happiness. How to help people get out of that emotional stress and into a more relaxed, calm state. She had a crippling bout of anxiety and panic disorder. Literally struggling to leave her house or even walk to her mailbox. She was able to overcome this, and now she supports schools in doing the same for their staff and their leaders.

So Kim and I connected through social media. Kim reached out and asked if we could be on one another’s podcast. Really, we are working together to bring this message to schools that emotional wellness is the priority for you, for your staff, for your students. It must be the target, the priority, to reach our goals in academics. We cannot expect kids to make academic gains if their social, emotional, and mental wellbeing is not in check.  So enjoy the podcast. Listen to all that Kim has to offer. She’s got some great nuggets. It was a wonderful interview, and I hope you enjoy the show.

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Angela: Welcome to the podcast Kim.

Kim: Hello Angela. Thanks for having me.

Angela: It is such an honor to have you on the podcast. I just want to share with the listeners that Kim and I actually met through I’m going to say Facebook. I don’t even know if that’s true or not, but we’re just going to say that that’s what happened. As you guys know, my word for 2021 is connection. I feel like I’m manifesting a lot of fun new connections in my life.

Kim reached out to me recently and said, “Hey, I’m the happiness coach. I want to be on the podcast. I think you’d be a great fit for my podcast.” I was like okay. We have been friends on Facebook technically. We have got to meet up and connect and collaborate here. So here we are.

What’s so great about Kim is that she is a former educator. Now she is a coach. She is a mentor. She is a keynote speaker. She’s got a lot of things going on in her world, and she supports schools and educators. So I have her on the podcast today. We’re going to talk a lot about the value of positivity, why we want to steer our brains back to the positives, and what we can do and what we do want to feel. We want to create this environment of positivity not just for ourselves, but the greater impact that it has on our school culture, on our staff, on our students, on our families as a greater community.

So I’m going to let Kim just share with you her personal journey, her personal story. What she used to do in education and what led her to what she does now. It’s a really powerful story. So Kim, can you just share with the audience your entire story? Tell us all.

Kim: Yes. So sometimes I’d get really nervous. Like back in the day when I got to step on a stage. There were like thousands of people on the crowd. They were sitting next to each other with no mask on. I would be introduced as like, “Oh, she’s this happiness coach.” I’d walk out and I’d just know that some people are thinking, “Like oh. She’s happy every day? Who’s happy every day? What is this craziness?”

So I’m quick to tell people that while I am a happiness coach and I practice happiness on a daily basis, I am not sunshine, glitter, and unicorns all of the time. In fact, my becoming a happiness coach is actually a direct result of my own darkness and my own trauma. So I am somebody who suffered from a debilitating illness called panic disorder with agoraphobia. So what this means is…I mean you can tell by talking to me Angela. I’m high energy. I move fast. I talk fast. I do everything fast.

So I can even see this as a little girl. I was always worrying about something. Like I just had one of those brains that would like come up with these crazy scenarios of what would happen. I remember being in the fifth grade, and my family was like, “Surprise. We’re going to take you to Disney World.” I’m like, “We can’t go to Disney World. I’m not going to Disney World. What if somebody takes my brothers or they get lost, or somebody kidnaps them?” My mom’s like, “What?”

So I was like, “I’m not going to Disney World unless I can attach a leash on my brothers and the other end of it is attached to my wrist.” You know here I am in the fifth grade with like two responsible parents and I’m concerned about this. So when I look back, I was like this super normal kid. I was a really good athlete. I had great friends. But I always had these little things in the background. These little worry things.

So when I was a sophomore in high school, I started having these episodes out of nowhere. I would be sitting in class, walking through the hall, driving my car home maybe five minutes away from school. Within like a half of a second, I would be filled with absolute terror. Like the walls would feel like they were closing in.  I would think I was going to lose consciousness. I felt confusion. I couldn’t think clearly. I had feelings of unreality and disorientation. It was like the scariest feeling. All I wanted to do was like just flee the classroom or get help.

So what happened is, this was back in the early 90s Angela. We didn’t know about anxiety disorders. So I literally went misdiagnosed from age 16 to age 22. Like I entered this just really dark area of my life because I was ashamed. I didn’t know why I couldn’t function like normal people. Because what happens is when these attacks start, then you become fearful of the next attack. You’re like, “Do I feel okay? Does everything look all right?” You’re constantly self-checking.

So I kept all of this hidden. I ended up going to college and quitting after a year because of this. I went to work as a secretary. Everything in my life became really hard. I tell people like the best way that I can describe a panic attack. Let me tell you. The story isn’t that everybody needs to have a panic attack to walk away with something from this episode.

A panic attack feels like if I were to put you on a train track, and I was to tell you that you’re tied to the train track. You’re not allowed to move. A train is coming at you at 300 miles per hour. I promise you the train will stop one inch before it hits your nose. Can you imagine how you would feel? Like it would be the worst feeling in your life. Like your body would shake all over. You would tremble. Your heart would beat.

Like that’s what a panic attack feels like for somebody like me, but it’s even worse because there is no train. There’s no one holding a knife to my throat. So when my brain couldn’t logically attach a reason for why I felt the way I did, I felt crazy. Then nobody was telling me what was wrong. They were like, “Oh maybe you have low blood sugar.” Anyways.

It got to be so bad that I really did have that bathroom rug moment Angela. My husband at the time had just left for work. There was always about 15 minutes between when he left for work and when I left for work. Usually I would start to feel panicky to be by myself. So I would run to the phone and call him in case I felt funny.

For whatever reason, that morning I had just gotten so bad. I had suffered so long that I felt like just like it was time to give up. So I still to this day remember walking into my little bathroom. It was the mid-90s. The décor back then was like burgundy and forest green. Do you remember that?

Angela: Yes. That was my bathroom color in 1994.

Kim: Yes. Yeah. Right.

Angela: Yes.

Kim: Like I still, I curled up in the fetal position. I still feel the plush green rug against my cheek. I just tell it like it is Angela. I pleaded for God to take my life. I really did. I said, “You know every 15 minutes of everyday is a constant struggle for me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I can’t drive to work by myself without feeling like I’m going to have something.” Sorry. My dog’s barking in the background.

Angela: No problem. We love dogs.

Kim: Ah jeez. I really just said, “You know I can’t go to Walmart by myself. I can’t drive my car by myself hardly. I can’t stay at home by myself. This is not natural. I’m 22 years old. I’m married. I’m completely flawed. I’m completely broken. There’s something majorly wrong with me. I don’t understand it, and I can’t do this anymore. I am suffering so much, and I can’t come up with a solution.”

I always tell people I don’t know if it’s like that voice or like an intuition. I don’t know. There was something that I heard like a message I received that basically said, “You’re not done. You’re made for more Kim. Get up off that bathmat. You have to get this figured out.”

So I went to the doctor. I happened to have a general practitioner who happened to be studying anxiety disorders. He said, “Kim, this is called panic disorder.” He explained it to me. I cannot tell you the relief. Now, I didn’t believe him when he told me I would be able to work through this.

Angela: It felt too hard, yeah.

Kim: It did. Yeah. Literally I got on an antidepressant that helped regulate the chemicals in my brain. I went into major cognitive behavioral therapy with a psychologist. It is at that time that I did this deep dive and discovered self-help and started doing all the work on myself.

So this story, I think, is important Angela. Because I think like not everybody has panic attacks, but we all have something that is things that are really hard. Like our chest feels heavy or we’ve had trauma, or we’ve had loss, or we’ve had just challenging times. We sometimes feel like we’re never going to come out of that, but I feel like it’s important to share my story of mental health. Because one, I don’t think we acknowledge our sufferings enough.

Angela: Absolutely.

Kim: Even in our schools. I mean a lot of the work that I do in schools is like how do we create a place where people feel safe enough to truly do the work that is necessary to create a climate and a culture that is based around the core things that we value. Which means we’re going to talk about educator burnout. We’re going to talk about anxiety. We’re going to talk about these tools and acknowledge that life is hard. Then we’re going to give you a set of tools that are going to help you get yourself out of the gutter a lot quicker.

So that’s really been my story. It’s why I’ve studied happiness for the last 20 years. It’s why I believe that when we can create positive work environments centered around a sense of connection, a sense of wellbeing. That these are the things that need to come to the forefront. We can’t just keep poopooing them away. We can’t say, “Oh, I’ll deal with my educators feeling completely overwhelmed or my own feelings of burnout and overwhelm after I’ve accomplished this.” The time is now for us to deal with this because we can’t keep feeling the way that we’re feeling.

Angela: Exactly. I love what you said about bringing these conversations into education as a normal part of our practice. I feel like emotions have been taboo for so long. We teach emotion on the surface, but we teach it in a way that I feel like it’s very flat. It’s very like you see the posters in the classrooms like “I feel…happy, sad, glad, mad, frustrated.” The little faces are there. It feels very one dimensional. Versus emotions can feel very complex and very intense.

As you were sharing your story, just listening to that story brings up emotion in the listeners and in myself. Like oh my gosh. I don’t think I’ve had a panic attack to that level, but I have felt panic. I have felt the emotion of panic in my body. It might not have been based out of a fear. It was out of a fear, but in a different situation and different experience. I went through a divorce that was extremely painful for me.

Kim: Yes. These are real things that are happening in our schools.

Angela: Yes. They’re happening to our educators. Educators are trained not to be human in a way because we’re not expected to have emotions or have a life outside of school. We’re supposed to be prim and proper. Don’t post anything personal on social media for fear somebody would see it, and then the district would look bad, right.

So bringing these conversations up. Like what you were saying is it’s not just studying happiness. It’s not just pretending that life should be happy all the time. It’s seeking out positivity and happiness and accepting that life is also hard. If we’re going to feel happy, we also have to let ourselves feel the panic or the fears or the frustrations or the grief.

Kim: Yes, yes.

Angela: And understand where that emotion’s coming from and how to process it.

Kim: Yeah, you know. It’s so funny. Because the number one keynote that I get asked to do is called the science of happiness because let’s be honest. We all want to feel happier in our lives, and we don’t know how. When we look at this at the district level or at the school level because I know you work with so many school leaders.

So the research is really strong. That 25% of job success comes from IQ, and that 75% of the ability for your employees to succeed at what you do comes from their optimism levels, their social support systems. That’s what you and I are talking about, right. Creating a social support system. And the ability to see stress not as a threat but as a challenge. Because you do have the resiliency skills that you have developed and honed so that you can deal with this in a more productive way.

So I think that from what I’ve read is that we’ve all been fed this formula for happiness. Here’s the formula Angela. Your school leaders are going to resonate with this, right. So we’ve been told over the years, here’s what leads to happiness. Go to school, get a degree. Hopefully, you choose a degree where you make a lot of money. Climb the ladder, make more money, get a higher position, work your way up through the system, make even more money. Eventually buy the big home, get the nice car, get the 2.5 kids or whatever that stat is, right.

Angela: Right.

Kim: When you’ve accomplished all of these things. So you’ve got the job, you’ve got the salary, you’ve got the home. When you have achieved all of these things, then you will have arrived at happiness. What we know from Shawn Achor who’s a positive psychology expert at Harvard University and Martin Seligman who has studied positive psychology, which is how do we flourish as human beings. He has studied that at the University of Pennsylvania. What we actually know Angela is that the last 10 to 15 years of research says that formula is completely backwards.

Here’s what the new formula is. The new formula is when you put your happiness and your wellbeing at the forefront, it changes every single educational and business outcome. When you put your happiness at the forefront, here’s what we know happens Angela. We know that when your employee’s wellbeing and your wellbeing is in check, we know that you are ten times more engaged in your job. We know that you are three times more likely to come up with creative solutions to problems. We know that your stress levels decrease by 23%. Get this stat. A positive brain is 31% more productive than a brain at negative, neutral, or stressed.

Angela: Wow.

Kim: So when you’re thinking about that, you’re thinking about is your brain as a school leader mostly at negative, neutral, or stressed? Or is it at positive? Your schoolteachers, your custodians, are their brains at negative, neutral, or stressed? Or are they at positive?

This is why the work that you do when you’re actually coaching people in your program to overcome and really take control of how their thoughts are delegating their mind. Or the work that I do in schools where we actually work to combat this idea of educator burnout and bring wellbeing to the forefront. To me, this is some of the most important work we can be doing right now for educators.

Angela: Absolutely. Amen to all of that. This is what I’ve been teaching for the last three years of my coaching practice. Is that we think results are created from the actions that we take and the accomplishments that we accumulate, but the reason we create those accomplishments. It comes from the way we’re thinking and feeling.

Here’s what’s so cool about this. We get to think and feel how we want to right now in this moment. We get to be happy. We get to decide the perspective in which we’re going to assume and choose to believe that makes us feel the best, right? Like I think about COVID and pandemic and school closure right now. Like everybody reached out in the beginning, and then we kind of figured it out. Then it settled in with people. Either people were like, “Okay. I’m going to make the best of this. Or this is miserable, horrible.” There were two sets of stories going on, right?

Kim: Yes. Yes, yeah. You know, this leads right into the happiness research actually Angela. So here’s what we know about the happiness research because you’re kind of talking about external circumstances, and how these things are affecting us and our thoughts and our feelings. So what we know is that all of us as human beings, we have what’s called a set baseline happiness level. So like maybe my baseline is here and maybe your baseline is here.

So what that means is is Angela, you and I go shopping. We buy a new Anne Taylor suit or a new pair of shoes. Or we get a new job, or we get a new house, or we get a new car. Our happiness level will go up for a very short period of time, but it will always go back to baseline.

Angela: Yep.

Kim: What’s interesting about the brain research is the same is true of when we endure hard things in our life. We actually know from the research that a person can endure trauma. They can endure loss. They can endure divorce. They can endure illness, grief, COVID, all of these things. Their happiness levels will drop for a period of time, but for most of us our happiness levels are going to return to default time and time and time again. Now, a lot of people will be like, “Okay Kim. So where does default come from? How do I know what my baseline is?”

Angela: How do I change it? If I’m a negative person on the regular, how do I change it? How do I up my baseline? Right?

Kim: Yeah. So here’s what we know. I want you to picture your long-term happiness as a pie chart. So we know that 50% of long-term happiness is genetic. It comes from your mom or your dad or a mixture of both. Sometimes when I tell the crowd this, literally 80% of the people will hang their heads.

Angela: They’re defeated.

Kim: They’ll be like, “I’m so screwed. I’m so screwed.” But it’s true. There’s a genetic disposition to this. Some of us come in with a brain that picks out more good than bad. Others of us come in with a brain that sees all the negative. It’s genetic. But that’s 50%. Now here’s where I think it gets really interesting. Only about 10% of your long-term happiness comes from your external circumstances.

Angela: Amen.

Kim: That’s what you’re talking about Angela, right? So what do I mean by external circumstances? I mean if you’re married, divorced, single, or widowed. I mean if you live in a hundred-thousand-dollar home or a one-million-dollar home. If you make $75,000 or $7 million. If you need to lose five pounds or you need to lose 50 pounds, believe it or not that’s an external circumstance. COVID is an external circumstance. What happens is is that we allow it to eat up more than 10% of the pie.

Angela: Yes. Amen.

Kim: That’s on us. It is. Right? Like here’s the deal. If your husband or your wife suddenly leaves you, you are going to be unhappy for a while. Right?

Angela: Yeah. Those are some painful thoughts you’re having, right?

Kim: Yeah. Yeah. Here’s the deal. If like four years later or three years later you’re still in the gutter, I’m just going to say that’s on you. Right?  Like there comes a point and a time where we have to go, “Hey, I have to take 100% responsibility for my life. I need to get help. I need to hire a coach. I need to hire a counselor. I need somebody to help me deal with this external circumstance.” Because the brain research is really clear that it’s only 10% unless you allow it to be more than that.

Angela: Exactly. Exactly. So Dr. Martha Beck calls that clean pain versus dirty pain. When she means by clean pain is when a situation happens. She calls it a catalytic event. When a catalytic event happens in your life, it will trigger you into clean pain. When your spouse leaves you unexpectedly, there is going to be some clean pain happening there. There is pain associated with that that is triggered with that situation. When somebody dies, you grieve. You grieve and you have that clean pain.

Now, there’s clean pain and then dirty pain. Dirty pain are the thoughts about the situation that build up over time. If they go unchecked or unquestioned or unnoticed, that builds up. It’s like your house. If you don’t clean your house once a week, once a month, once a year, all of a sudden, you’ve got a lot of dust bunnies going on, right. You’ve got major cleanup to do.

So the longer we let those stories build up in our mind about that circumstance, about that divorce, about that grief, or about anything that’s going on at work. It builds up. Then you’ve got to clean house, and you’ve got to take more and more time to unravel all of that.

Kim: Yeah.

Angela: So I love that analogy.

Kim: Yeah. This is why we have to do the work on ourselves, right? like you and I talk about that. You get coached by a coach. I have a coach and a counselor in my life. Like that stuff builds up, and we can’t handle it on our own. So we all need help in these areas. There should be no shame around that.

Angela: Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting. When you bring up this idea of like a relationship that breaks up or ends. It had a beginning. It had a happy time. Then it obviously had a tumultuous time, and then it had an end. I think about that with school leadership. Where when we go into the position, so many times as educators we think we know how it’s going to be. We’re super excited. There’s that honeymoon phase where everything’s lovely and fun. Then you get into the reality of it. It’s like, “Whoa, this is not what I thought it was going to be. Or this is really hard.”

When you start down that spiral of things get challenging, things get hard. You believe that it’s because of you or you think that you’re not capable or you’re not cut out to be a leader, or it’s too overwhelming that you just can’t handle it and those thoughts go unchecked. The result of that is, right, you feel bad every day to the point where you get to the space on the bathroom floor where you’re like, “Just take me out of this. I can’t be a school leader. I can’t be in education anymore. Somebody please help me Take me away from all of this.”

But when you get the help, and somebody can help you see how it isn’t you personally. That you’re not broken. That it’s just a matter of reframing the thoughts about what’s going on in your life you can either pick yourself up and be like, “Oh, I am okay to be a school leader. I’m going to carry on.” Or “Wait a minute. I’m just thinking that I’m not a great school leader when actually I’d rather be doing something else. It has nothing to do with my ability to lead. It’s just that this isn’t my best fit. I’m going to coach myself up and be a school leader. I’m going to coach myself out and do something outside of education.

Kim: Right, right.

Angela: Neither of those choices are right or wrong. They just are.

Kim: Yeah. I know your listeners are probably saying, “Kim, there’s still 40% you haven’t talked about in the pie chart.” They’re right, right?

Angela: We’re wondering. Tell us everything.

Kim: So 50% is genetic. 10% is your external circumstances. That leaves 40% of the pie, which is the part that has fired me up for the last 15 years. Because here’s what we know Angela. We know that every human being regardless of their genetics, regardless of their external circumstances. Every human being has the ability to increase their happiness levels by up to 40%.

So that encompasses three things. One, your thoughts. Right? Your thoughts are contributing to that, right. Two, your behaviors. Three, your actions. Your actions. So I would need three more hours to teach you all the happiness habits, but I would like to give your listeners like one of the top five happiness habits that’s going to help them with that 40%.

Angela: They’re waiting for it.

Kim: Okay. I think you’ve already talk about it. I think I may have seen it on one of your previous episodes. All right. So it’s the simple concept of gratitude, but I want to really make the case for gratitude because here’s what we know. We know that the average human has, and you talk about this, between 60,000 and 70,000 thoughts in a day. We also know that if you’re an average human being, 80% of those thoughts are negative in a day’s time.

Angela: Yes.

Kim: So if you have 60,00 thoughts, that means that most of us are going around. By the time we put our head on the pillow at night, we’ve had 48,000 negative thoughts. We’re not aware of them because they happen on that subconscious unconscious level, right? You talk about this. This is what you help people with. They don’t even know the thoughts they’re having that are impacting their lives.

Angela: Right. It’s like ambient music in the background. It’s playing, and you’re not even really consciously aware that it’s happening.

Kim: Yeah, yeah. So what’s even crazier is that of the 80% of thoughts that are negative, 95% of the 80% are the exact thoughts you had the day before.

Angela: Repeat and rinse and repeat, right.

Kim: Yes, yes. Now, I want to normalize everybody because here’s the deal. The reason we have these negative thoughts is because way back in archaic times, we had this part of our brain called the amygdala that we still have today. The amygdala’s number one job is to scan its environment and constantly look for threat or danger. So back then, every five minutes of every day you had to be looking out for the saber tooth tiger. Would we have shelter to protect us from the storm? Would we freeze to death? Would we have fire? Would we have a water source?

So the issue is it’s 2021 and we still have the amygdala. Its job is still the same even though most of us know we’re going to have food. We’re going to have shelter. We’re going to have water. Most of us know our basic needs are going to be met, but our amygdala still scans and looks for everything negative. Okay.

Angela: Yep. That’s that fight, flight, or freeze response. That’s where that comes from. That part of the brain.

Kim: Oh yeah.

Angela: Yeah. That’s the reptilian part of your brain. That’s the oldest part of your brain. It’s still firing off the same, isn’t it?

Kim: Oh yeah says the girl who has panic attacks whose amygdala will fire in one-fourteenth of a second. Yes.

Angela: Yes, absolutely.

Kim: It does serve us, but sometimes I’m like can we just take my amygdala out?

Angela: Like an appendix.

Kim: Can we just take this surgery here and get that out of there? I just don’t think I need it. But I guess if I didn’t have it, I’d be doing crazy stuff like jumping out of cliffs.

Angela: Yeah. Just to your point, it does regulate us in a positive way. It can fire off in a way that doesn’t serve us anymore as we’ve evolved as humans. So I think I hope what you’re going to get to is there’s another part of our brain that we can wrangle and that we can go for it. That’s what I want to hear.

Kim: Yes. So here’s what we know. We can actually rewire your brain towards positive, okay. Now, I want to say something too. Because I do think there’s this term out there that I really do believe. Like I’m not talking about toxic positivity when I’m asking people to create positive systems within their schools. Toxic positivity looks like this. Angela, just pick yourself up and just go about your day and forget about that thought. Or Angela, now just calm down. Now don’t worry about that. Just focus on what’s good in your life.

I’m going to call total BS on that. We’re allowed to have hard, heavy feelings. We can’t just poopoo them away by, “Oh let me just think a positive thought. Oh just be positive.” Like no. Like I have to feel. If I’m going to get through this, if I’m going to process it, I have to allow myself to feel the heavy feelings.

Angela: Yes.

Kim: Right? But then I do have the choice at some point to pivot out of that. So please don’t misunderstand me that when we’re talking about like creating positive school climates and cultures, that everybody goes around with a smile on their face and pretends like everything’s just great when in fact it’s not. That’s not what I’m talking about at all.

But what we know is that gratitude is one of the top five ways that you can actually increase your happiness levels. Because it helps you to rewire your brain. So the research says that if you were to write down. Let me just tell you, you have to put pen to paper. It’s important to put pen to paper, right. If you write down just three different things you are thankful for every single day for the next 21 days, you will actually create what’s called a new neural feedback loop in your brain.

So basically, we all have these thousands and thousands of roads in our brain. The road that we are used to travelling is the one that becomes the most engrained, which is why you all are travelling these roads in your brain. It’s just happening naturally. You’re not even realizing the thoughts that you’re having.

What happens is with a gratitude practice. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s like the number one thing that people tell me changes their life. Of course I do it. But if you literally just write down three different things you are thankful for every single day for 21 days, you create a new neural feedback loop. Which means things start to pop out that are going well more often than all of the crap that’s coming into you.

Angela: Yes. This is so beautifully said. I love the simplicity of this Kim. Because it’s three things for 21 days. It’s not a big ask of your brain. It’s three things.

Kim: Two minutes a day.

Angela: Are you saying that those three things—Do they need to be different every day?

Kim: For 21 days they do Angela.

Angela: Okay. I just wanted to clarify that for listeners.

Kim: Yeah. We want you to continue that practice. I also don’t think we always have to do things perfectly. I have a gratitude practice. Every day I sit down. I bought a beautiful journal at TJ Maxx. I love their $3.99 journals. Every day I write the date.

Like today when we’re doing this. Well, it’s February 11^th, right. So February 11^th, 2021. Then I write the words, “I am thankful…”. Now, I do 10 every day. I don’t know why. The brain research says you only have to do three, but I’ve trained myself over the years to do 10. These don’t have to be profound things.

Like I’m thankful for flavored water because I struggle to drink regular water. I’m thankful that I had the courage to reach out and pitch myself on your podcast so that you and I could create this podcast and you can be on mine. I’m thankful that my dog is over here in the chair just relaxing. Acting like, “Hey it’s just up to you mom to bring the dough home because I just sit in this chair all day.” Right?

Angela: He’s a member of this podcast too.

Kim: Yeah, exactly. So it’s like this could be I’m thankful for my breath. I’m thankful for my hands. I’m thankful for sunshine. We don’t have to come up with these great things, but we want them to be three different things for 21 days so that your brain is starting to search for those things.

I always tell people I’m really great at doing my gratitude journal Monday through Friday because I have routines. I don’t want to overwhelm people because they’re going to be like, “Oh my god. I can’t do all this.” I mean I’ve been a happiness practitioner for a while. I get up. I write my gratitudes. I write my affirmations. I take my five-mile run. I do my meditations. Like these are things I do to keep myself healthy.

Then on the weekends, I don’t do my gratitudes. I don’t know why. I’m just in a different routine. That’s okay. I’m doing my gratitudes 320 days a year versus 365. So like we don’t have to be perfect. The thing is on Monday I’m going to pick the gratitude journal and start back up again.

Angela: Yes. I love this so much. Okay so one, it’s simple, easy, and durable. It’s only three things, and it’s for 21 days. Here’s what I like to say. Number one, you might as well try it. If it doesn’t work, you can go back to not doing it. You can always go back to status quo, but why not give it a try?

Number two, what I love about this is when you said three, but you do 10. What I think is happening is that once you get started, your brain starts to think of like, “Oh my gosh. I have so much abundance in my life. There’s way more than just three things.” You can keep going. You don’t have to stop at three.

Kim: Right. Right.

Angela: Until you feel exhausted. What you’re really doing. When Kim was saying you are rewiring your brain, you are selling yourself on the things you already have in your life. So you are selling yourself by saying, “I have what I want, and I want what I have. I already have abundance in my life.” The pen and paper is like the physical representation of those things.

What I would like to add to that practice is if you’re going to write down three things a day for 21 days, I want you to take one minute of that practice and feel the gratitude in your body. You’re not just doing the practice of, “I have clean water. I have a home.”

Kim: Yeah. You have to feel it. I feel it.

Angela: Right? You’ve got to get in there and feel like honestly, if I did not have running water in my home, I can’t even imagine that. I’m so grateful that I have clean water. That I’m not having to walk to the river for five miles each way. Like I’m honestly grateful to have clean drinking water. I’m honestly grateful. Like you could look around your house.

I’m thinking like I’m honestly grateful that I got to go get my nails done. Like I can’t even tell you how excited I was after 12 months in quarantine to go get my nails done. Like it felt so luxurious, and I was so grateful. I was so grateful to be able to pay my nail technician double what I normally pay her out of gratitude for her waiting for a year to be paid, right.

Kim: Yes.

Angela: What I’m saying is do the three things but drop into the emotion of gratitude. Not just doing the act of it. Am I on the right track Kim?

Kim: Yeah. Like you have to feel it as you’re doing it. I included in the form I submitted that I actually created what’s called a gratitude prompt and tracker for your people.

Angela: Perfect.

Kim: So it takes them through a little bit of the research with gratitude. Like we do this work in schools, right. Like we train the teachers how to do their gratitudes. We train the teachers how to practice gratitude with their students. I used to do that in my classroom. We started every day with 90 seconds of gratitude, and then we ended each day writing three things we were thankful for. I can give your people this gratitude tracker. It’s like 21 days of them writing their gratitude down.

Angela: Perfect.

Kim: Then it also gives them prompts to kind of help them start looking at areas of their life where they can find gratitude. So that might kind of just give them a boost and get them started.

Angela: I love it. Thank you for that. They’re going to appreciate that so much because the simpler for busy school leaders the better, right.

Kim: Yeah, for sure.

Angela: Oh awesome. Kim, thank you for sharing your brain with us. Thank you for sharing your story and your expertise. I’m so grateful that you reached out, and I am so happy that we were able to support one another’s podcast. I really do want to work together with you in a more comprehensive way.

Because this work, we are offering different things. The collective package of coaching plays this mentorship and the work and the tools that you’re providing to schools at large. This combination is a winner. I think that this really is the missing link. It’s the shift, the pivot that schools can take right now with COVID.

Let’s break those barriers down. And let’s start helping people feel better so that we can actually educate in the way that we are intending to educate. Which is modelling what it looks like for kids to be emotionally resilient, to have mental wellness, for it all to be okay, and for us to know how to process those emotions. Not just resist them, push them aside, or stuff them down.

Kim: Yeah. I think that’s the real work to be had Angela.

Angela: You got it. Kim, thank you again for being on the podcast and for reaching out. I look forward to having you on the podcast in the future. Okay?

Kim: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Angela: All right. Take care. Bye, bye.

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