Success leaves clues and gratitude is the key to success for the world's most successful people. That’s what we learned when Meggie Palmer, Founder & CEO of PepTalkHer chatted with Mary Jensen on how to start a gratitude practice.
Why gratitude is so important?
Mary: Firstly, in such a beautiful climate that we have right now, we cannot be in gratitude or be grateful and in fear at the same time. The main reason for us to do a gratitude practice every day is to fill ourselves up, fill our cup up to make us feel and be the best version of ourselves to step out into the day.
If we wake up in our defaults and sh*t happens, we go down, down, down. What we do with the gratitude practice is we fill ourselves up. We start our day. Then if the shoot of the day hits us, we may end up back here. But, we don't end up here. We wouldn't live in our car without petrol. We often jump out of bed and hit the ground running with a mediocre mood. Gratitude is precious. Remove that media and make sure that we present to the day the best version of ourselves.
“Success leaves clues.”
For people who've never done a gratitude practice, what’s the best way to get started?
Mary: Gratitude, for the first 18 months for me, was disastrous, absolutely disastrous. Success leaves clues. We know success leaves clues. If we look at Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey, Rene Brown, Ellen DeGeneres, they all do gratitude practices.
It's the most successful people in the world who are doing gratitude practices. I believe that would work for me too. I was taught to begin with gratitude. Each and every person needs to find their own way. It's not a one size fits all, because we all find different ways to be able to have that physiological change in the body.
When I began, I started “I am grateful for my husband. I'm grateful for Stephanie. I'm grateful for Adrian. I'm grateful for my kids.” And I'll be even more grateful when these goddamn practice starts working. It was not for me that way. I was doing a practice. I was not being grateful. For me at that point in time, it was another thing to add to my to-do list that was 100 miles long already.
Think of the things you love
Now, I open up my arms in my bed in the morning and I start with I love my bed. I love my bed. I truly love my bed. My bed’s there for me every day. It supports me. It makes me feel warm when I'm cold. I love it. Often, when we get back from holiday, I jump into bed at night and say I love you. And my husband says, I love you too and I go, “No, I'm talking to my bed.”
That's how I start. Then, I wiggle my fingers and I wiggle my toes. I love that I can wiggle my fingers and wiggle my toes. I stretch my body and I can feel all the muscles inside my body. I never used to be able to feel muscles inside my body because I didn't train before. Now that I started training, I feel all the different muscles in my body. I love that and then I'll get onto sticky things or like get onto colors or rainbows or the sun on my back or rain on it. I don't know where I'm going to go. I let my mind go where it wants to go. And I think of all the things I love, and they're not necessarily big things. People think it was supposed to be great. For the little things that are still going, that is still going to be there.
Feel a difference in your body
One of my clients can't do it that way. So, he spends five minutes with his dog in the morning. What we're looking for is a physiological change in the body. We're looking for you to feel a difference in your body from when you woke up to after you do whatever it is for you.
Some people use music, and some people use games. So, you got to find what works for you. What we're looking for is that physiological change in the body, that feeling of lightness.
Meggie: When you started making me do it, I thought it was a bit woo-woo and I was like, “Oh, so annoying.” But I started doing it and then you would check-in with me every week or every two weeks. And it's really made a big difference for me. What I do, and there's no right or wrong, is come up with three things. I just lie in bed in the morning. Get out of bed and just think about the three things. I don't write it down, it would be cool to write it down because then I'd have a list of a thousand things. But, I do highly recommend it.
At the moment Mary, a lot of people are scared. There's a lot of fear getting around. A lot of people are losing their jobs. There are a lot of tough things happening. So, what are your tips? Some people might say “gratitude is not going to get me a new job. Gratitude is not going to be able to like put food on the table for my kids.”
What are some great tips that might be helpful to people who are in a really tough spot?
Mary: We have this part in our brain called the reptilian brain. That's a part of our brain that says, fear. Many people would say it would be good if we didn't have that part in our brain. But, we do need that part in our brain because we do not want to walk over a cliff. We do not want to jump in front of a truck. that would be ridiculous. We need that deep part in our brain. But, the downfall of the reptilian part of our brain is that it stops us at anything it doesn't know the outcome of.
It puts in the fear space. Right now, we're in a real space of unknown. Nobody knows how long things are gonna go for nobody knows. That really happens. We are really in the unknown. So, the reptilian brain stops us. Our reptilian brain has two functions. Survival is a major function, but there have been two functions, breathing and eating.
While it's in survival mode, it is taking care of me and only me. The brain in the body works together to survive. So we don't have the patience. We think of ourselves. And that’s part of why people are going crazy about toilet paper and things like that. It is because they've tried to find something they can control, trying to find some certainty if they have enough. Even a toilet paper gives them the ability to feel a bit more comfortable.
What happens when we’re stuck in the reptilian brain
The challenge with that right now is that while we're stuck in the reptilian brain. We don't move into the other areas of our brain, to help us make decisions. It means that we cannot make informed, rational decisions. While we make decisions all from our reptilian brain, the irrational decisions are only based on survival. So, we can't access long-term use.
How will that help us if we're trying to go for a job? Imagine showing up for a job and you're facing people and your body is tense. You're freaking out because you're desperate to get a job. People smell fear. We are all noticing that there's a lot of fear. We can smell it, we can feel it. Whereas if you turn up to a job interview thinking: “I am grateful for the opportunity because this may be the place to take me to the next fantastic opportunity of my life.” The energy of it is completely different.
It isn't woo-woo. It is about how we feel about ourselves. I was talking to a photographer last week. She's in a challenge at the moment because she can't go out and take the photos. So, we're looking at how she can businesses pivot right now. I said to her, “What is the essence of the photoshoot? What's your why?” She said it's how I make people feel. I say, “we've got a great opportunity for you to go out to your database right now. You jump them on some zoom calls and start helping them be great to show up online. It is the same thing.”
Meggie: Moving from that, I can completely hear what you say because I think it's similar to confidence. And I think that if you walk into a job interview feeling like you're not good enough and that you're not going to get the job I feel that employers notice that. We know physiologically through Amy Cuddy's work and others that the body does have the capacity to change the way people perceive you.
If people are wanting to move from fear into gratitude or away from their reptilian brain, are there exercises they can do? Are there tips that people can put into practice?
What practice helps us move from fear into gratitude?
Mary: There’s one exercise that’s really, really powerful. It is what we call box breathing. The box breathing is we breathe in for the count of five. We hold for the count of five, we breathe out for the count of five, and we hold for the count of five. And we do that three times over. How are you feeling right now maybe not bad, but probably could be done?
Feel your body and let's give it a go.
Breathe for five.
Out for five.
In for five.
Hold for five.
Once more in five.
Hold for five.
Out for five.
How are you feeling your body now?
Meggie: I feel more zen. I feel like I literally almost lowered my heart rate a little bit.
Mary: So, that takes us straight out of a reptilian brain. That is an exercise to bypass our fear, our reptilian brain at any time. We can do that throughout the day when we're feeling fearful about anything. People are feeling fearful about jobs at the moment. People feeling fearful about money at the moment. People are fearing that family safety at the moment. This is a fast way to be able to pull yourself out of that and then you can make an important decision using the parts of your brain that are long term views and actually can make better decisions.
Meggie: That's awesome. What are the things that you hear from your clients that you're working with right now? In terms of how they're approaching these stressful situations, how do they view the Coronavirus? Whether it’s trying to reframe it as an opportunity, rather than focusing on the negative.
When approaching stressful situations, what have you observed from your community?
Mary: Most of my clients have doubled their sessions at the moment because they know that part of surviving and thriving in the current market is in the mindset. It's all in the mindset, how we show up whether we see a challenge or whether we see an opportunity. A lot of them have doubled the sessions. I am jumping on calls every single day at the moment with people who are very fearful at the start of the call. You can hear it in the wavering in the voice. You can hear it in the heaviness in them and we jump off the call 45 to 50 minutes later, they're lighter.
We also start to reframe how they're talking about things. So, if they're talking about the negative spaces or the negative things that are showing up, we reframe them. Like with the photographer, she was saying: “I can't see anyone face to face.” But I said you can still go out to a database and coaching them how to feel great to jump on these sorts of things. It's not about the makeup and the hair. It's really about the internal feeling. Because you can even feel if somebody is in fear, or if somebody is in a great mood on a platform like this.
How to reframe opportunities
The other thing that I'm talking about with nearly everyone at the moment is reframing opportunities. So, she's got a huge database and photographer, and a lot of her database shots are for dating platform. I said, “you've got to pivot in these times when we've got to stay visible and we've got to stay relevant”. I say, “why don't you run a zoom get together for all your people that have had the single-shot right now? They can’t go out.”
We've got a look outside the square. We've got a look. We cannot do business as we've always done business. For me personally, I'm loving this because I do a lot of breakfast meetings, a lot of lunch meetings, some dinner meetings. As my daughter says, “you know, mum, you go to breakfast, lunch, and dinner and you talk a lot of crap all day.” That's what she describes what I do. Right now, I can't go to the breakfast, the lunches, or the dinners. So, the driving time for me has disappeared.
A mortgage broker I was talking to the other day said that after four o'clock in the afternoon, he had four customers sign on all the paperwork. He did it on zoom with all the paperwork and got the paperwork signed off to be submitted to the bank. He never could have done it before if he was doing face to face as he only would have been able to in one night. So, there's a lot of revolutionizing with this digital age that we come and that he's here. And a lot of businesses won't go all the way.
If you’re grateful, you’re not fearful
Mary: If you're grateful, you are not fearful. We want to turn up every day being the best version of ourselves that we are. The model that this talk is about is the above the line and below the line model. It's about how much responsibility we take for what's happening in our world right now versus how much responsibility we blame on other people when we blame the external world or a person or a situation for how we think feeling right now, we take no responsibility and we cannot shift it or change it. The minute we take 100% responsibility, then now we have an option to make it mean something different and to be able to change it.
And a great example of this is about maybe four weeks ago now, my husband reversed my brand new Mercedes into a car in the car park. So he reversed out of the car space and a car going past him. So he beat himself up the whole night after it happened and there was barely any damage. I instantly went into gratefulness. I was grateful that there was barely any damage. It will buff it out. I was grateful I don't have to go through insurance at all. I was grateful that the guy that he said all good. Barely a scratch, shook hands and we're on the way.
So I instantly went into my gratitude practice but Derek beat himself up. He beat himself up that Sunday night. Monday, he came home. He's been at the company he's been working for nearly 25 years. He came home on Monday night and he said, I had the worst day at work in my whole entire life. I know that was because he was still beating himself up for what happened. And the crazy thing about it was he was trying to blame the other guy. He was saying, the other guy was driving too fast through the car, regardless of who's driving too fast through the car park. If you're the one reversing, you're the one at fault.
So while he sat, trying to blame the other guy for what happened, he kept taking up a huge chunk in his brain and ruining his whole time. It took him about a week and a half until he laughed. And then he said, I reverse out of the car park. It was totally my fault. And then everything eased away, and he was back to his normal, happy, jovial self. So how thinking takes us in and out of the space.
And another example of it is, we were driving out of our driveway. This is maybe even somewhere but like 12 to 18 months ago, and we're at the front of our driveway looking across the road and the people across the road, put a camera in on the front of the house, and I can either be the one above the line or below the line, or Derek can be the one above the line below the line, we will all spend time in each and that's normal. It's just about how much time we choose to spend below the line.
So I looked at the camera and I've done a complete breakdown. Oh my God, is that a camera? Does that take the front of our house? Is that an invasion of our privacy? Can that see through our bedroom? I was like, freaking out. Derek saw exactly the same, you know, object and he's like, it is a camera. It probably does take the front of our house and now cars will be protected. out the front. You know, we have six people living in this house, six cows, and four of them are across the front lawn every night.
Anyway, I didn't think I was ever going to be able to change my perspective about that camera. And within a week my son's car got broken into at the front of the house. And what did I do? Straight across the road to get the footage of what happened. Now, I am absolutely grateful for that camera being there. And you know, what, if they can see into my bedroom, lucky them.
Meggie: So what I'm hearing is that it's about reframing the way that you're viewing things. Is that kind of how you describe it?
How to reframe our perspective
Mary: Yeah, absolutely reframing how we're doing things. Yes, yes. So every time it's the perspective, so if you follow the works of Rene Brown, she talks about human beings being meaning-making machines. That's what we are meaning-making machines, and often what comes up first into our mind is, she calls it a shitty first draft. If we go back to high school or university and writing an essay, we've written the first draft of the essay. And then we rewrite and rewrite and go through it and usually be in a copy is nothing like the first copy.
If we think about it like that, what comes up is our shitty first draft. It's based on our defaults from our life. And it's based on the patterns in our thinking. And if it's not helping us in any way to move forward, we need to change that. So my shitty first draft about the camera was that it was an invasion of privacy.
My refrain was then that it's a great protection tool. So we can change everything. And either way, you know, people say but I want to know which one's right. There is no right. There's just lots and lots and lots of different ways. So if the way you're thinking about something is not making you feel good. Changes your shitty story and find a way to think about something that does make you feel good. And often you need to have assistance why people like you Meggie and people like me to help you be able to see a different perspective. Or for me with the car, it was an incident that helped me see a different perspective.
Meggie: I love that. Um, just before we wrap up, if anyone has any final questions, feel free to put them in the chatbox to me and we can ask Mary. But Mary if people want to keep in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out and just kind of follow the work that you're doing?
Mary: So they can join me on LinkedIn at as Mary Jensen. I'm also on Facebook, my business is on Instagram. I'm about to jump on a new platform because we're pivoting right now called TikTok so I'll be on Tick Tock by the end of the day and pump some videos out there. My Facebook page, my business page is Mpower Services. And I also have a personal page on Facebook and I would love everybody to connect because at the moment I'm going to be public Looking at everyday things to help us feel better in the current environment.
You can check out more info on Mary here.
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