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We kick off the week by threading together our recent topics through the lens of gratitude. While often dismissed as a "soft" concept, gratitude has measurable, objective benefits for both individual performance and organizational health. We discuss the subjective experience of moving toward authenticity and the humbling, ego-reducing nature of being thankful.
Key Highlights:
- The Performance Boost: Statistically, those with a gratitude practice show lower anxiety, better sleep, and measurable improvements in work performance.
- Noticing vs. Gap Analysis: Why "noticing what works" makes you more effective than someone solely focused on what's broken.
- The 30,000 Note Turnaround: A look at how Douglas Conant used handwritten thank-you notes to lead Campbell Soup Company through a major turnaround by boosting employee engagement.
- Today’s Challenge: Identify one thing from the last week that went well which you failed to notice at the time.
Creators and Guests
What is A Mason's Work?
In this show we discuss the practical applications of masonic symbolism and how the working tools can be used to better yourself, your family, your lodge, and your community. We help good freemasons become better men through honest self development. We talk quite a bit about mental health and men's issues related to emotional and intellectual growth as well.
[00:00] We've been talking a lot over the past couple of weeks about a bunch of different topics,
[00:05] and I want to start threading some of them together.
[00:08] And the best place to start with that is gratitude.
[00:13] When you look at gratitude as an idea, a lot of folks get kind of this misconception about
[00:22] what gratitude is and what you're supposed to do with it and how it works, which is
[00:29] peculiar, right?
[00:31] Because you're not sitting there thinking, how do I deal with this happiness that I'm
[00:38] experiencing?
[00:39] Gratitude feels a lot like that.
[00:44] It's this very strong feeling.
[00:47] And so when we work with gratitude as a concept, there are tons of things that you can learn
[00:54] from it and do with it.
[00:57] So let's talk before we get into the episodes for the rest of the week about what the sort
[01:04] of business benefit of this gratitude business is.
[01:08] And we'll start on the subjective side.
[01:11] So the subjective side, meaning how you feel, how it changes your internal experience of
[01:18] self.
[01:19] When you are experiencing gratitude, you are moving towards that level of vulnerability
[01:28] and appreciation that sounds like authenticity.
[01:36] It feels like authenticity.
[01:39] When folks say, be yourself, you will have strong feelings.
[01:44] One of them is surrender, which we talked about last week.
[01:48] Another is gratitude.
[01:51] So from an experience side, gratitude feels good.
[01:57] It's ego reducing.
[01:59] It's humbling.
[02:01] It's really a sublime experience.
[02:04] On the benefit side, let's talk about what that really does for you sort of objectively.
[02:15] People who cultivate gratitude as a practice show lower anxiety in general.
[02:22] That means they also have fewer sick days and better sleep.
[02:27] They're more resilient when things go sideways.
[02:32] And one of the things that really grabbed my attention is statistically, they perform better
[02:37] at work and not just a little bit.
[02:41] Like measurable performance.
[02:43] The reason is kind of obvious when you look for it.
[02:46] A person who's genuinely noticing what's working around them and is grateful for those experiences
[02:53] is paying better attention than someone who's only focused on the sort of gap analysis kind of stuff.
[03:05] Someone who is competitive, for example, is probably not in the same capacity feeling gratitude.
[03:15] And because of that, they're not noticing the things in their everyday life
[03:19] that give them that sense of awe and humbling and, you know, all of the things that reduce ego,
[03:28] which again reduces anxiety, which reduces a lot of the sort of trouble that we create for ourselves
[03:35] in terms of lived experience.
[03:37] But on the express side, when you begin expressing gratitude, the benefits compound.
[03:44] And this is where it gets really cool.
[03:46] There was this guy named Douglas Conant who ran Campbell Soup Company
[03:52] through a pretty significant turnaround in the early 2000s.
[03:57] One of the things he did, which people thought was kind of crazy,
[03:59] was over the course of his 10 years as CEO of the company,
[04:04] he wrote around 30,000 handwritten thank you notes to his employees.
[04:12] They weren't emails.
[04:13] These were handwritten notes and they were delivered like,
[04:18] and they were about to something that the person actually did.
[04:21] It wasn't like, oh, you know, thanks for being cool.
[04:24] It was like, hey, you know, your work in this space was,
[04:28] was a significant contributor to the outcomes that this company is trying to create.
[04:32] And that took off.
[04:36] The engagement scores inside the company for the period of time that he was doing that
[04:42] were among the highest in the industry.
[04:45] And that led, you know, led Campbell's through a really kind of tough time.
[04:50] So what is the engagement scores mean?
[04:54] Like, so what is that all about?
[04:56] It means they showed up, they did kind of better quality work.
[05:03] And it means that they also spent extra time on the work itself.
[05:09] Discretionary time, stuff that's not in the job description.
[05:12] Things like keeping your workspace clean or, uh,
[05:16] things that are relative to the project that maybe you just went the extra mile.
[05:22] Engagement is what happens when people feel appreciated,
[05:26] when they don't feel like a number, when, uh, people go above and beyond.
[05:30] And it happens when people feel seen.
[05:33] Conan understood that.
[05:34] And when he was doing this,
[05:38] it visibly improved the performance in the company.
[05:43] And that expression of gratitude is also quasi contagious,
[05:47] which is really quite cool because when you start this process, uh, that,
[05:53] that is kind of like the beginning of a chain of events or a chain of gratitude for a lot of people
[06:00] in a lot of situations that really does transcend the original feeling and creates change in the world,
[06:09] which again is one of our goals, uh, as Masons.
[06:12] We want to become better change agents.
[06:14] So that's what this week is about.
[06:17] Today's challenge for you is think about something in the last week where something went well.
[06:24] And you maybe didn't stop to notice at the time.
[06:28] Just start looking around the edges for your experience of those opportunities that have missed gratitude.
[06:36] I think you'll find there's some, some great stuff there.