How to do the simple things with focus and energy and intention.

30. How to do the simple things with focus and energy and intention.

“One of the keys to gratitude is pausing.”

—Kevin Monroe

Gratitude Encounters

Podcast Transcription

Hello, I’m Michael Kurland, CEO and Co-Founder of Branded Group. Welcome to the #BeBetter Podcast. To me, our company’s mantra to “Be Better” is more than a tagline; it’s a culture that permeates our organization, propelling our team to Be Better to each other, our customers and our communities as well as to ourselves. Each week on the #BeBetter podcast, I interview leaders who authentically exemplify how they are being better in their professional and personal lives.
We are grateful to our nonprofit partner, Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County whose mission is to end hunger in Orange County, California. Every dollar donated enables Second Harvest to provide three meals to our friends and neighbors in Orange County. Learn more about Second Harvest at feedoc.org.

Michael Kurland (00:01):

Hello and welcome to another episode of the BeBetter podcast. I’m your host, Michael Kurland. Joining me today, Kevin Monroe, and he is known as the Gratitude Guy. So Kevin, tell the audience a little bit more about yourself and why you’re the Gratitude Guy and then we can get into some gratitude stuff today.

Kevin Monroe (00:24):

All right. Well, well, Michael, I wasn’t always known as the gratitude guy. You know, it was about this time last year, a little earlier that a friend of mine contacted me and said, Hey, Kevin, would you do a webinar for our leadership team? I’m like, sure, what would you want the topic to be on? And they’re like, duh gratitude. I started other people, anytime I was asked to speak about something, they would say, come talk to us about gratitude. We think of you as the gratitude guy. And then it just kind of dawned on me. Gratitude was one of these things that if we can talk of it, like in the business language, Michael, it started as a side hustle for me. I mean, I was doing gratitude. You and I had this conversation before we both locked onto gratitude at very low points in life.

Kevin Monroe (01:13):

And I did not lock onto gratitude to be a business facet. Right. It was just something I was doing and it was my path out of dark seasons of life. Then I just started talking more about that, more about that. And during the pandemic, I started leaning into gratitude more and more. So over the last two and a half years, even before the pandemic, every meeting I started, I’d start by asking what’s something you’re grateful for now and just starting what I called, grounding everything in gratitude. Let’s ground in gratitude, grounded in gratitude. And just slowly, all of a sudden people thought of me as the gratitude guy. And, and I just realized, you know, there are a lot of things, much worse to be associated with your name in life than gratitude. Now, like if that’s it I’ll take it.

Michael Kurland (02:07):

Hey, that’s great. Like you said, there’s a lot worse things than being known as the gratitude guy. Right? So you talked about, you grabbed onto gratitude during a low point in your life. Are you willing to share your story? Let’s talk about that.

Kevin Monroe (02:23):

Yeah, it’s so funny because I dug this out. I have a journal right here and so I can take you to my journal and give you the date, the dark day of this last, well, not the last time, but the dark day when  gratitude really landed on me was almost a three-year anniversary of when we’re recording. It was April 17th, 2018. It was a morning where I struggled to get myself out of bed. Now that may be different for some people, a guy that’s up by 4:35 every morning without an alarm clock. So that morning it was 730 before I could get out of bed, but I couldn’t get out of bed. There was no motivation. There was just some of you listening, you know, that feeling, Michael, you know that feeling you and I’ve talked about it just really, is it morning?

Kevin Monroe (03:19):

Is it another day? Do I have to try to muster energy and go do something? Now here’s the power of a morning routine. I came into my office, grabbed my journal and sat down for my morning routine, but there was nothing there. I just uttered a prayer. I said, spirit, you’re the source of creativity, spark creativity in me. I laid on the floor and in all honesty, I was in that liminal space. I think I fell in and out of sleep. You know, slumber, a partially asleep, partially awake. 45 minutes later, I sat up and there was this idea that was 85% fully formed. Launch a 90 day program, invite others to join me because you know who needed the 90 day program most? Me! We called it the extra ordinary experiment. Could your ordinary life be a bit more extraordinary by doing simple things, with focus and energy and intention?

Kevin Monroe (04:19):

Now I call that focus, fervor and flair. But then we just talked about a little more focus, a little more energy and right in the middle of those 13 weeks. So we, each of the 13 weeks we picked the focus. So the very first week was just being aware, being aware of what’s around you, who’s around you because most of us live unaware lives, right? We’re in our own little world, we have no idea who’s around us. What’s going on in their world? And it right in the middle of that, we had a gratitude week and Michael, that was the first time in my adult life and I’m 61. Okay. I don’t mind saying I’m 61. First time in my adult life. I’ve lived 58 years before I ever pondered. Is there a difference between being thankful and being grateful and that’s when it started for me.

Michael Kurland (05:04):

Wow. So tell me more about this, this extraordinary journey that you started in this group that you’ve brought together. How many people were involved and what did you guys focus on?

Kevin Monroe (05:18):

So, Michael, I don’t know. I’m just, I am a blessed man in that I know a lot of people and people extend extravagant generosity to me. So we launched a landing page in a day and a half said, hey, we’re starting in two weeks. We had 274 people from 28 countries sign up to join us on this 90 day journey, 13 weeks. So each of the 13 weeks and it went a little progressively deeper, right? So the first week was just being the awareness challenge. The next week, I think we called it the noticing challenge. Just notice. Now you’re aware. Now notice. Then we invited people, Hey, connect with those people you see. Reach out and actually talk to them. Get to know the security guards name that you pass every single day or the receptionist or the barista. Engage them in conversation, find out something about them, and see them as a person.

Kevin Monroe (06:16):

So it was all of these things. We had a week on kindness. We had a week on listening. We had a week on being curious, asking questions. There were just, it was 13 weeks of that. Each week we started with on Mondays, we laid out the experiment for that week and a challenge on Wednesdays. We came back and we kind of gave a tip, Hey, how you doing? What about this? Then on Fridays, we paused and reflected what happened this week. Three years later, almost three years later, I still receive messages from people that were part of that say, Oh my gosh, it changed my life. Right? Because we started living with intention. I mean, that’s the bottom line. We started living with intention and stopped existing.

Michael Kurland (07:03):

Stop going through the motions. Right? That’s what a lot of people do is they get stuck in their mundane day to day routines that they don’t see things to be grateful for and then they forget how to live with intention. So I like what you’re saying,

Kevin Monroe (07:16):

Then fast forward a year later, or a little more than a year later, June of 2019, I had this idea of hosting a gratitude challenge. I host a podcast. I had a guest coming on and I’d been asking guests about what are you grateful for? I had a guy coming on that had written a book about gratitude. I call him up. I said, Hey, Steve, I’ve got a crazy idea. You want to host a gratitude challenge? He goes, sure. Michael, I thought he had asked me all kinds of questions like what’s a gratitude. How would we do? I said, sure. So we figured it out. We started hosting just 10 day challenges. We thought 10 days was long enough to get people hooked on gratitude. Short enough time for people to complete the challenge and not feel like a failure. So we hosted our first gratitude, 10 day gratitude challenge starting July 8th, 2019. We had 295 people join us. On day two of this, we had a hundred because we ran it as a closed cohort. I never knew I’d run a second one. I just thought I hosted challenge. On day two, we had a hundred people on a waiting list and we’re like, Oh, I guess we should run another one. So we’ve now run 13 gratitude challenges, had over 2,500 people from 50 plus countries join us to explore, express and experience gratitude and it’s just phenomenal.

Michael Kurland (08:36):

Well, this is a great segue point for me, Kevin. So let’s talk about these gratitude challenges. I believe you call them gratitude encounters. Is that right?

Kevin Monroe (08:44):

Well, now I have three different things we offer Michael. It started as this gratitude challenge, which was just 10 days, just a prompt a day. Then I’m like, okay, this friend of mine, Tracy Fenton, she’s the CEO and a founder of WorldBlu a year ago, March. She asked me would I do a webinar on gratitude and I’m like, gosh, Tracy, I can’t think of anything more boring than to do a webinar on gratitude. Let me come and be a talking head. You should be grateful. Blah blah. I said, no. I said, but let me think about it. So two days later I called her. I said, you know what, let’s do a gratitude encounter. She said, what’s that? I said, it’s an opportunity for people to explore, express and experience gratitude. It’s not for me to talk about it.

Kevin Monroe (09:32):

So we designed this encounter. So I did it once, did it in August of last year and it was phenomenal. September 10thlast year I was on my morning walk and I can take you to the side street in the subdivision. I live in Woodstock, Georgia, where I had this question blaze through my mind of all of the things that energize and excite you. Kevin, what is the one thing that has the broadest appeal and the greatest impact and Michael instantly, I knew the answer to that question – gratitude. So I decided I was going to double down and triple down on things I did with gratitude and that day I decided I was going to start hosting gratitude encounters every single month. So I host them – free service first Tuesday of every month at 12 noon Eastern time, I host a gratitude encounter.

Kevin Monroe (10:19):

Gosh, honestly, probably in a couple of weeks, I’m going to start doing it every single Tuesday, because it’s just been so phenomenal. But a gratitude encounter – we pull people together and we just have three rounds where we express gratitude. So we do things like different. So yesterday we had this one question. Monday, I had an epiphany on my morning walk thinking. So the day you and I are recording the week after Easter, I started thinking about hope and I’ve known that hope grows in gratitude, but all of a sudden I started thinking on Monday that gratitude’s a catalyst, right? So a catalyst in case you’re listening, I had to look it up. I knew the word, but I wasn’t sure. A catalyst is a substance that enables a chemical reaction to proceed at a usually faster rate or under different conditions than otherwise possible without being consumed in the process.

Kevin Monroe (11:14):

So not only does kindness grow in gratitude. Hope grows in gratitude Kindness grows in gratitude. Compassion grows in gratitude. Positivity grows in gratitude. Abundance grows in gratitude. Possibility grows in gratitude, right? Gratitude is not consumed in the process. Gratitude grows. So that was one of the rounds. What’s growing in your gratitude? So we had 25 people yesterday from seven or eight countries around the world, about half from Europe, half from the U S or North America. One of the conversations was what’s growing in your gratitude. So that it. It’s a gratitude encounter. Then in December I had a friend say, you know what? This is a commercial service. I’m like, you know, it is. So now I’ve started hosting gratitude encounters for companies and we customize these for companies and we bring their people together and we help them explore and express gratitude. For example and I know this would be relevant for your company, Michael. Have you and your team faced challenges over the last year?

Michael Kurland (12:25):

I mean, obviously whose team hasn’t right?

Kevin Monroe (12:28):

Who hasn’t? So we, we talk about gratitude for a challenge you’ve navigated and invite people to express gratitude for a challenge they’ve navigated that can be in your personal life, your business life. Everybody’s got one. Another one I’ve done with a lot of companies, gratitude for a value you’ve seen in action in either the way the company makes decisions or the way you deal with your employees or your customers or clients. I know because I heard you in a conversation. When Jennifer asked, said something about laying people off. No, no, no, no. We didn’t lay people off. We furloughed people. We called them back. Why that’s a value you have, right. So what does that value look like in action? We did not fire people. We did not lay people off. We furloughed people. Those were the first people we brought back. Michael that is in your people would be grateful for that value and they have seen it in action in your company.

Michael Kurland (13:35):

Oh Kevin, that’s so much right there to unpack. Thank you for that. Let’s start with the word synonymous with gratitude, because I think that’s one thing during this season that has really come up a lot and you said it yourself hope grows in gratitude. We had Jennifer Cheaven’s on last show and she studied the psychology of hope, how it’s synonymous with gratitude and basically hope gives you pathways to get to your goals. Then you have gratitude for reaching your goals for those pathways. So you just hit on something that I was actually just listening to the podcast earlier today because it had just gotten released. So I got to listen to that one. It just came out today.

Michael Kurland (14:24):

So you you’re right on schedule. I think that’s the two main things through the season and we’re halfway through the season on gratitude. We’ve really found there’s a lot of synonymous words, happiness, hope, kindness even forgiveness all fit into this bigger bundle umbrella of gratitude. The second thing that you would probably agree with is to do your gratitude and to get the most out of your gratitude practice, you have to have consistency, and whatever that consistency would be. So I think that’s a great segue for me to first jump into this. How do you personally practice? How does the gratitude guy personally practice gratitude and how often do you do it?

Kevin Monroe (15:15):

Okay. So fortunately I grabbed my journal, another journal. I’m a journaler. Some years ago, I don’t even remember when, but I started a journal and I started listing. So my morning I start pulling out a journal and writing down at least three things that I’m grateful for that day. I don’t have a hard and fast rule that I can’t repeat, but I try to be different. I try to diversify and I try to do what I call amp it up. So years ago I, I have what I would consider a weak, lame and anemic gratitude practice. I had a mentor that had said before your feet hit the floor, think of three things. And I don’t remember if he said to be grateful for or thankful for. But Michael, when I’m honest about it, my list was pathetic. You know, you wake up, and I’m a morning person, but I’m still not always fully awake.

Kevin Monroe (16:12):

I said, I’m grateful for my family. I’m grateful for my home. I’m grateful for my business or my job if you have. Right. So I may have had seven things that I just recycled through. So what are you thankful for today? My home, my family, but okay, well, let’s go a little deeper. So today I’m grateful for my wife, Gwen. Today is Gwen’s birthday. Next month we celebrate 40 years of marriage. I’m grateful for Gwen being a partner that supports me. There’s a sign over here in my darkest days, five years ago, I walked in my office one day and she had written the sign I believe in you. All right. So I’m grateful that my wife believes in me and supports me in this crazy work I do. But I write three things that I’m grateful for.

Kevin Monroe (17:01):

Some days it’s five, six. That’s one thing I do. Another thing I do, and this is what we grew out of our gratitude practice. When I started hosting gratitude challenges, I wanted to do something different. So we’ve now created 52 cards and the 52 cards are innovative and creative ways to attract or to approach gratitude. Like here’s one that’s the beauty of nature. When we do gratitude challenges and I do this. What’s something about the beauty of nature that sparks gratitude in your life? So I live in the Southeast part of the United States. It’s spring and when I’m on my walks in the morning, Like this morning, looking at all the trees that are blossoming and flowers that are blooming. We have a Japanese maple out front that is just stunning in its color, right?

Kevin Monroe (17:58):

So I pause to express gratitude for that. So we call this amping up your gratitude rather than just saying, Hey, I’m grateful for my family. What about your family are you grateful for? Not just saying thank you for the meal, but wow, that was an amazing dinner we had. I’ll be remembering this dish for a long time. Those kinds of things take it to a little deeper level.  So I have prompts on my phone. I’m a crazy kind of guy. I was sitting at dinner with somebody one night and they said, how many? I have 42 prompts. Now, they don’t go off with any sound, but they’re just these little prompts and they prompt me. I look down and I see something and it prompts gratitude, it sparks gratitude and just in that moment, I pause and express gratitude for something.

Kevin Monroe (18:47):

Maybe I’m starting an afternoon work session and I pause and I’m like, why am I grateful for this project? What is it about this client opportunity that I’m grateful for? Because can I say this? I used to moan about work sometimes. I know this has never happened to you, underbid a project, and now you’re doing a project and you’re losing money on the project and all of a sudden we find ourselves moping and groaning and moaning about the project. I was doing that one day. I thought, well, what if I just stopped and said, you know what, wow, I’m grateful that I have an opportunity to spend an afternoon with a group of leaders from around the world. It was Meals on Wheels. They’re making a difference in the lives of seniors around the world, around the country. I get to lead them in a session on abundance. Stop thinking about you underbid this and look at the good side, right? So when I started practicing gratitude for that? All of a sudden I’m excited rather than saying, gosh, you didn’t price this project right. But all kinds of things like that.

Michael Kurland (19:52):

I want to pause you here. Because I think you said it earlier and you know we’re talking about it a little more. I think it’s important to hone in on is when you do have a negative situation and you can see the positive and we’ve said it before on the show, be a victor instead of a victim. You could have been a victim to your circumstance or I could have been a victim to my circumstances that led me to move out to California and start Branded Group.  I could’ve stayed back in New York. I could have moaned about getting laid off and getting divorced and I could have taken the next available job and stayed in my state of victim. Instead I became a victor and I really express gratitude about that now.

Michael Kurland (20:38):

I had a guy, Chris Schembra on the show. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. So he came on and we talked about the time that I went to his 7:47 club dinner in Los Angeles. We talked about someone I was grateful for and I said my ex-wife, because if she hadn’t had done what she had done, I would have never moved to California, Started Branded Group and be where I am now. So I’m very thankful for some stuff in the past that is sort of negative. It’s the lens, right? I think you’ll agree with that.

Kevin Monroe (21:15):

The way I say it. I hear myself saying it helps us define the good and the beautiful, even in situations that are not so good or not so beautiful. We can find something good in it because gratitude becomes that filter or that lens that we’re now looking at this to find something good and beautiful in a situation,

Michael Kurland (21:38):

I think all the other synonymous words with that also go into that lens. Are you going to be happy about something or are you going to let it adversely negatively affect you? Are you going to have hope about a situation or are you going to be defeated? So, you know, you can look at all those things in different lights, but at the end of the day, when you are grounded, like you said, grounded in gratitude, you can really use that tool in your tool belt to help you pull yourself out of certain situations like you and I have both pulled ourselves out of it.

Kevin Monroe (22:14):

So Michael, when you say that, that sparks a thought for me. Are you familiar with Viktor Frankl? He lived through Nazi imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp. He was a Jew. He wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning, which is a classic book. But he had this one point. So for me, if you’re listening, one of the keys to gratitude is pausing and Viktor Frankl says there’s always, always a moment between stimulus and response. So something bad happens. When that happens, there is a moment. It might be a micro moment, but in that moment, we can choose to push the pause button and say, how else can I see this situation? Or we can just bite the bait and get ticked off and go into a rant and think how bad this is and how horrible this is. But Viktor Frankl says we always have a choice and there’s always a moment between the stimulus and our response.

Michael Kurland (23:27):

I think you talk about something really, really great there. We always have a choice. We always have a choice and I’ve thought long and hard about things that happen in your life and so stimulus and response. It’s the only thing that we can control in this world that I’ve come up with is your actions and your reactions. Your actions and you can control your reactions. So it’s very similar with what you’re saying, and you can choose to act a certain way and you can choose to react a certain way. Why other people are dealing with you. You have no control over anything else on the outside world. So once you start grasping on that, you can be very grateful that you don’t have a lot of control and you can only control yourself.

Michael Kurland (24:12):

That was a little bit of a tangent there. So let’s talk a little bit about COVID-19. I don’t know how Georgia is handling the pandemic, but California is doing a very good job of getting the vaccine rolled out. They’ve actually just announced today that there’ll be reopening full force on June 15th, which is super exciting for me because I’m getting married June 26th.  All the wedding guests just know wedding guests, it’s going to be open. It’s going to be wide open, fully open. So anyway what has COVID-19 taught you about being grateful? What did you learn from this whole thing?

Kevin Monroe (24:55):

So I’m going to pause a moment.

Kevin Monroe (25:00):

You know, I’m going to answer this a couple of different ways. I’m going to answer it one way that’s less personal. Then I’m going to go personal, Michael. As I said to you, I always start meetings with this question. What are you grateful for? So over the period of COVID-19 in hosting multiple meetings every week, there was one thing, two things I always heard that hit the radar screen, starting a little over a year ago, people were more grateful for their health and their family. Those were responses. I also noticed during the pandemic time that when I would ask, what are you grateful for people more often than not responded with a person’s name. So I started, I changed the question. Who or what are you grateful for? You know, so I just noticed we are more grateful.

Kevin Monroe (25:52):

I remember about this time last year, one of the things I was most grateful for and how many simple things we became grateful for because we lost so much. But about this time last year, one of the things that just gave me so much hope on a daily basis. There was one week I was on Zoom calls or telephone calls with people from around the world. I started on a Monday morning with a lady in San Francisco. We were doing a walk and talk. We were both out on our phones on a morning walk talking. The next day I’m on a call with a lady from Israel. The next day, I’m on a call with my friend, David St. Martin from the UK. The following day, I was on a call with someone from Canada. Every one of those calls, I heard birds singing in the background, birds singing, and I thought, hmm, the birds didn’t get a memo to stop singing like most people I know, right?

Kevin Monroe (26:45):

This time last year, people were depressed, miserable. People weren’t singing. The birds didn’t stop. The birds kept singing. So that was one. Then May or June last year. Some stuff happened. We noticed something in our home. We’ve lived in this home we’re in for almost 30 years. Lived in the Southeast part of the United States and one Sunday, we saw something. What is that? Took a picture. Found that we had termite damage. All of a sudden, and you probably know this from the work you do, it’s like, Oh, how bad can this be? How bad can this be? And Michael, there was a moment that I realized several years before I had let the termite bond laps on the house. So now there’s this kicking myself for a decision I made that seemed like a really poor decision wondering what’s going to happen. How bad are things going to be? My colleague and friend Christie Carne sent me a quotation one day said, Kevin, I think you need this. It has become my favorite quotation on gratitude. It comes from Ann Voskamp: “No amount of regret can change the past. No amount of anxiety can change the future. Any, any amount of gratitude changes the present.

Michael Kurland (28:22):

I like that.

Kevin Monroe (28:23):

So now every time I’m doing a session, I’m using Ann Voskamp’s quote because every one of us there are things that we could regret and we can beat ourselves up, Oh, I shouldn’t have done that. I should have done that differently. You don’t to go into that rumination and just beat yourself senseless. Or there’s this right now, uncertainty still prevails in our world and in our countries and in our state. What’s going to happen? What’s the business environment going to be like? I’m wondering, I’m wondering anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. No amount of anxiety is going to change anything in the future. No amount of regret’s changing the past, being grateful in the moment. Wow!

Michael Kurland (29:05):

I think that’s well said and a very apropos especially for the current time that we’re going through. I really appreciate you sharing that quote with me and the audience.

Kevin Monroe (29:20):

Okay. So let me fast forward. Our termite damage was confined to one small room where the previous owners of the house had done something stupid, had not used enough crawl space and it was a concrete wall area and the termites were confined there. What we thought could have been tens of thousands of dollars ended up just being a few thousand dollars because of the kindness of my brother-in-law, who’s a builder who said, Hey, if you’ll do the demo, I’ll do the rebuild.

Michael Kurland (29:49):

Who doesn’t like doing demo? Swing a sledgehammer, have some fun. Just make sure you shut the electricity off.  Well, Kevin, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate the time for you coming on. I think you’ve put a lot of good information out into the universe. I’m grateful for that. If the audience wants to get ahold of you, how can they do so?

Kevin Monroe (30:16):

So Michael, let me make it simple. +1 404-713-0713. Call, text, WhatsApp. Reach out. You can find me on LinkedIn, Kevin Monroe, and just keep it simple.

Michael Kurland (30:35):
Kevin, you’re the first one to ever give out their personal phone number, but I appreciate that. I’m grateful for you being the first one to do that. So audience give Kevin a call. He is a great conversationalist. Kevin, again, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And audience until next time.

I’d like to take a minute to thank you, our valued listeners. My intention is for this podcast to inspire you, in some way, to be better.  Change starts from within and radiates outward. Therefore, start with being better to yourself and only then will you recognize how to be better others and your community. Thank you for joining us today! If you want to learn more about Branded Group, then visit us at www.branded-group.com. From our website you can follow us on social media. Also, always feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Until next time, Be Better.