48. Gratitude Stickers
As I’m recording this episode, Russia is amping up its invasion of Ukraine, and there are stories all over the news about terrible things happening around the world and in the US. You could look at any week between 2020 and today - and truthfully even before COVID - and see the pain and suffering so many people are going through.
But let me ask you this, are you forcing yourself to be grateful? What this looks like is when you tell yourself, “Well, things have been hard for me, but at least I still have a job,” or, “I’m really struggling, but other people have it way worse than me.” This is what I call gratitude stickers, and while I’m all for gratitude, I’m showing you how you might be using it to minimize or downplay your experience.
Listen in this week as I show you how you’re using gratitude against yourself by placing gratitude stickers over your wounds. I’m offering why we feel the need to be grateful, even when we’re struggling, why this is not necessary, and how to truly support yourself through intense times in your life.
If you’ve found this podcast helpful, please subscribe, rate, and review the show! It would mean so much to me, especially as we near the one-year anniversary of the show. And remember to join my email list to be the first to know about some amazing prizes I’ve got in store for you to thank you for being here!
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What You Will Discover:
What it means to put gratitude stickers over your wounds.
Why you’re not practicing true gratitude when you use gratitude stickers.
The difference between being with yourself through difficult times and being grateful.
How to truly support yourself through difficult, intense times in your life.
Why you don’t have to be grateful when you’re struggling.
Resources:
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44. Experiencing Intense Emotions with Self-Care and Kindness
Full Episode Transcript:
If you're two to five years out of your MPH degree, love public health, but find yourself secretly unhappy at work and maybe even thinking about quitting your job, then this is the podcast for you. I'm Marissa McKool, host of the Thoughts Are Your Root Cause podcast. Join me each week as I share tips, tools, and resources to help you have the career you've always dreamed of without any of the stress you are experiencing right now. Come along.
Hello, hello, hello. How are my absolute favorite people on the planet doing today? Yes, that’s you. That’s all of you. Whether this is your first time listening, you’ve listened to every episode, no matter who you are, I love you. I’m so excited you all are here. It’s episode 48, almost at 50 episodes which honestly is so trippy, it’s kind of hard for me to sit in that moment and really revel in it, it feels so surreal. In a couple of weeks, it will be the one year anniversary of starting this podcast which blows my mind.
I mean some of you know this. I started this podcast not knowing, honestly anything except for I liked listening to podcasts. I started recording it in my closet with my own kind of sound padding I created, editing it all on my own, just figuring it out. And now here I am almost a year later. I have a production team. I have an upgraded mic. I can record at my desk and so, so much more, so many episodes, so many of you have come along and found this podcast and found it helpful. And it’s just so exciting.
So, to celebrate, to honor that we have some special surprises in store. I can’t give away too many details. One I can give away though is we’re going to be giving away some prizes. So, join my email list if you aren’t on it. We’ll leave a link in the show notes, and follow me on social media, follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn to be the first to know.
We’re going to be giving some awesome prizes to help you get more rest and reduce your burnout, from gift cards to fun special ways to treat yourself, to books and other kind of gear that you can get. And it’s just, it’s going to be really exciting so make sure you tune in for that.
Also, a couple of weeks ago the episode I put out around experiencing intense emotions with selfcare and kindness, so many of you loved that episode and found it so helpful. And I just want to share a little follow-up. As I’m recording today’s podcast episode, that shame I talked about is coming back up. And the shame I explained, how I sat with it in that podcast episode and how I interacted with it. And you know what? Several weeks later here it is again popping back up.
And I had a whole day where I resisted it, I suppressed it, I ignored it and then it came up to the surface yesterday and really piled up. And I felt like I was stuck in a mud pit, I didn’t know how to get out. And I was very, very fortunate, a dear coach friend of mine, Ali Ryan from Ali Ryan Coaching coached me. And she is amazing, if you need coaching on intense emotions, self-love and connecting with your body, she does some great emotion work.
And she really helped me move through that intense shame that came up that I felt stuck in. And get to a place where it’s not like the shame went away but I was able to relate to it differently and able to see my next steps. And I actually worked to clear my schedule. And I did what I talked about in the Experiencing Intense Emotions episode. I sat with it. I cried. This time I took a bath which I don’t love to do but I was like, listen, we’ve got to get our brain in a place where it’s not going to be wanting to watch TV and get on my phone and whatnot.
And I cried some more, and I watched a movie with my partner that night. And I cried during the movie and then as I woke up today I kind of cleared my schedule to do only a half day, so I have more space to allow the shame. And so, I’m sharing this to say, if you listened to that episode and it was helpful, or if you’re experiencing intense emotions now go back and listen. But know that it’s not always a one and done even when you do the longer process of processing the emotion, it can come back up days, weeks, months later and you just do it all over.
And a lot of times it is really useful to have an outside person, a coach, or a therapist to help you when you’re really stuck in that mud. Even me, an experienced coach, someone who self-coaches herself every day needs that. So, if you do need that, I really encourage you to reach out and I would be more than honored to be that coach to help you with that.
Okay, with that let’s get into the episode and let’s talk about gratitude. And as I’m writing this episode there are so many things going on in the world, you could pop into any week in 2022 already or go back to 2021, or 2020, or even before COVID and there is a lot of heavy stuff that happens in the world. And I think more and more we’re just more aware of it and COVID has kind of made it that way because we’re more on our phones, watching the news. But it was always happening even before COVID.
But as I’m recording this, this week, Russia really has amped up its invasion on Ukraine and people are fleeing their homes. And there’s reports coming out of African and Black folks in Ukraine being denied access to leave and experiencing racism at the border. Media is becoming rampant, and people are pointing it out with news anchors saying things and comparing European refugees to refugees in the Middle East saying things like, “Well, they’re different refugees. They’re white and they’re Christian.”
Or saying things like, “It’s not like Syria here, these are middle class people.” And there’s a lot of folks pointing that out in the media. And as some of you know, I am Arab, so I am also noticing that and having my own feelings around that. And this week there was a shooting in Sacramento in California, three children were killed.
There has also been anti-trans policy in Texas requiring parents, and caregivers, and teachers to report families who have trans kids, claiming it’s abusive and many other anti LGBTQ laws happening and policies popping up around the US and many, many, many other terrible things. Why am I sharing this with you? And we’re going to talk about gratitude. Because so many of you are placing gratitude stickers over your wounds and emotions.
So, when you have a physical cut on your arm, what do you do? Sometimes you actually have to let it bleed out a little bit first before you can put a band-aid on it. Because if you put that band-aid on when it hasn’t really gotten enough pressure to slow the bleeding, the band-aid doesn’t really serve its purpose. You have to hold the wound and give it time. You have to monitor it and be with it. You might have to clean it and wash it. And then you put the band-aid on it for that to heal and then often you have to repeat, take the band-aid off and clean it, and put more pressure.
But you’ve done that initial work of letting that bleeding kind of happen, and the healing kind of happen, and the cleaning kind of happen before you put the initial band-aid on. And right now when you are experiencing emotional pain or suffering you don’t do this. What you are doing is putting a glittery, colorful Lisa Frank sticker on your wound. And your wound is still bleeding, it's bleeding outside the edges of the sticker and it’s more painful because the adhesive of the sticker is right on the open wound. And then it hurts worse. And when you realize that and take it off, that hurts even worse.
I call this metaphor the gratitude sticker. And what this looks like is when you tell yourself or others things like, “Well, things have been so hard for me but at least I still have a job.” Or “I’m really struggling but I really shouldn’t complain. Other people have it way worse than me.” You see the news, you see terrible situations, you hear about people you know close to you who have had challenging circumstances. And then you use that to downplay your own experience. You shut your emotions off and you tell yourself you shouldn’t feel that way.
You force yourself to be grateful. And while yes, many of you are truly grateful for the things that you say you are, your house, your job, your family, it’s not like you’re lying, that you hate those things and you’re not grateful. But when you practice gratitude this way, practice it in this way because you don’t want to sit with the truth of your experience, is that true gratitude that you’re practicing in that moment? You are using a gratitude sticker to deny and ignore your own lived experience. Your emotions are real, and they matter.
Your experience is real, and it matters. You can be honest that things are hard for you and you’re having a difficult time without having to counter that with something else. You can feel sadness without having to compare your experience to others. You can experience your negative emotion without having to cover it up because what happens when you use a gratitude sticker is you don’t actually feel better, you really don’t.
Imagine this, let’s say your friend was upset about a breakup and you came over and told them that, “Hey, could be worse, at least they didn’t cheat on you.” Or at work you tell your boss that your child’s in the hospital and then your boss says, “Well, good thing we provide you with good health insurance so you can cover this.” You would be so pissed, that other person would be so pissed. We are upset and pissed when other people do this to us. When we go to other people and share challenges and they respond in this way we feel dismissed, we feel not heard, we feel misunderstood and even worse.
And what I want to point out is you are doing this to yourself when you use a gratitude sticker on yourself. Being with yourself in difficult times and being grateful are two different things. You can be with yourself in difficult times and not be grateful at all. You can be grateful while not actually being with yourself in difficult times. Using gratitude to try to be with yourself when things are challenging actually does not work. It puts a sticker, that Lisa Frank glittery colorful sticker right on your wound.
You can hold space to be with yourself in difficult times with difficult intense emotions and separately be grateful. They can happen at the same time for sure, but they’re separate. And most importantly, in order to support yourself in those challenging experiences and those emotions you’re having you also don’t have to be grateful. We are so quick to use gratitude in this way because we have been told to.
We have received a lot of messages that depict people who are not grateful and then society talks about them or sees them as terrible people. And you might have even done this too. We receive a lot of messages, and images, and stories, that show people who practice gratitude in very difficult circumstances, and they are talked about and put on this pedestal and promoted as this is how good things happen to you. They deserve their dreams to come true and all the help.
The media loves to portray people experiencing adversity, only typically, only if they tell their story while crying and saying they’re grateful, and generating a lot of emotions for the audiences they are projecting this media to. We have been socialized to equate gratitude with selflessness. We have been socialized to equate gratitude with being a good person. We have been socialized to equate gratitude with good things are going to happen to you. That if you are grateful you are selfless and that’s a good thing. And if you are not grateful then you are selfish and you get what you deserve.
And we have also been told that gratitude is the key to manifestation, that if you practice gratitude every day all your dreams will come true, all your troubles will go away. You’ll never have a negative emotion again. We have wrapped up the practice of gratitude in so many layers of judgment, and expectation, and pressure. Then we use that to try to deny our own lived experience of intense emotion and difficult experiences. And I think sometimes we use it as a shield from other people trying to prevent them from judging us and from us from judging ourselves.
Gratitude is from the Latin word ‘gratis’, meaning pleasing or thankful. Gratitude is not right or wrong. Gratitude doesn’t make you a better or worse person. Gratitude does not solve your emotional suffering. Can gratitude be helpful? Absolutely, do not get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s a complete waste of your time, throw it in the trashcan. Practicing gratitude can be helpful. It can help your brain’s natural negativity bias reduce. It can help your brain build the practice of seeing the positive that already exists in your life and many other things.
But what I am pointing out here and what I want you to take away from this episode is that gratitude will never serve those helpful purposes if you are using it to avoid, suppress, ignore, cover up or judge your experience of a challenging, or upsetting, or negative circumstance, or emotion you are having, never. That’s why gratitude stickers don’t work. Be honest with your lived experience about the emotions you are having.
When you’ve lost your job for example, covering up your fear and anger about that with forcing yourself to pretend you feel totally fine and you shouldn’t feel angry because you have stable housing does not make that fear or anger go away. When you have been yelled at by your boss, suppressing your emotional response with saying, “Well, other people at work have it worse than me.” That actually does not make it easier for you to go to work the next day.
If you have received a lot of negative comments on a draft at the paper you’ve turned in, telling yourself it’s not a big deal compared to the people whose lives are being threatened by policy changes or war, does not help you process your experience of rejection. Give yourself space to be honest and authentic about your experience, about your emotions, about your thoughts, about your challenges.
So, to go back to the metaphor, instead of using a gratitude sticker, this is where you allow your wound to bleed a little. You don’t ignore your arm and let it bleed to the point where you have to go to the hospital. And you also don’t have to go run around the neighborhood and show everyone your open wound unless you want to, that’s totally your choice. But what I’m saying is, you can let it bleed, examine it, clean it, wash it, see what you need, put a cloth on it to hold pressure, to help it, to get the bleeding to slow. And then after that you can put a band-aid on it.
And what that means in practice is let yourself have your emotion. Don’t ignore it. Get curious about your experience, see what you need to support yourself. Get coaching or talk to your therapist if you need to. Let your emotion process. And then once you’ve done that you can decide what you want to do moving forward, what changes you want to make or not make, what actions you want to take or not.
Listen, you can be grateful, I am all for gratitude. But gratitude is not required to process emotions. It’s not required to stop the bleeding. It is not needed to get through challenging experiences especially if you tend to use gratitude in a manipulative way, to try to stop you or prevent you from feeling the negative emotion you are having. Be grateful, definitely. But don’t use gratitude against yourself to deny yourself or your experience because that’s what the gratitude sticker is.
When you use gratitude in a way that shuts you down from honoring and being honest and processing the actual emotion you’re having. If gratitude could speak for itself I bet you it would say, “Please don’t do that to me. Do not use me in that way. That is not my purpose. That is not helpful.” Be with your negative emotions, process it, allow that, and yeah, you can still have your gratitude but that’s separate.
Don’t use your gratitude to shut yourself down, to make yourself feel worse, to dismiss yourself and your experience, to minimize what you’re going through. Don’t do that, it doesn’t help anyone, especially you. Alright you all, so I want you to ponder this and notice if you start to do this, if you notice yourself doing this and name it. Say, “You know what? I think I’m putting a gratitude sticker on this. How can I just be with myself while I examine this wound and be with anger to know it and see what it needs to heal.” And then you can practice gratitude separately, okay, you all.
Before we go, I’m so excited in two weeks for you all to hear the surprises we have coming out with the podcast for our one year anniversary. And one thing that would be super, super helpful in advance of that, so we can really make sure that this is the best pod one year anniversary ever and everyone has access to hearing what’s going on and getting the amazing prizes and the support, it’s going to be amazing. Is for more people to get access to this podcast before and during that surprise, the anniversary.
I almost slipped there but I caught myself. So, one thing you can do to help our community, to help other folks in public health to be a part of this really exciting anniversary and get access to the podcast and also get a chance to get those amazing prizes like a spa gift card, or some Health Equity clothes from one of the partners that I’m working with. And some books to help them stop burning out and get more rest, and other exciting stuff.
Is for you to rate and review wherever you listen, put some comments of what you have learned, what you have found helpful, will really, really, really help other people to get access to this podcast. And it would mean so much to me. And I also love reading them and seeing what you all think and what you’re finding helpful. So, if you have found this helpful, this episode or any others, please consider doing it. I know it feels like it takes a lot of time and if you haven’t done it, it feels like a lot of work and extra, but it can take less than two minutes.
And it helps not only me, and this podcast grow, but so many people in public health who haven’t been able to find it, to find it and get the help they need. And they want to hear from you. They want to hear from your voice as a listener, what have you found helpful. What do you think is the most important. And why do you listen, so that they can click on it and know whether it’s for them. They want to hear from you all about why you’re listening in.
So please consider rating and review, it takes a few seconds, a couple of minutes, and it means so much to me and everyone else in the future who’s going to read it and then listen to this podcast, and then reduce their burn out and get more rest. I mean, what’s more amazing than that? Alright you all, talk to you next week. Bye.
Are you ready to make a change? Whether that's learning to love your job, making a career move, or anything in between, I can help. I'd be honored to coach you through figuring out what's next and navigating the steps to get there. So, head on over to mckoolcoaching.com/consult that's mckoolcoaching.com/consult to set up a time to chat and talk about how you can achieve the career of your dreams.
Hello, hello, hello. How are my absolute favorite people on the planet doing today? Yes, that’s you. That’s all of you. Whether this is your first time listening, you’ve listened to every episode, no matter who you are, I love you. I’m so excited you all are here. It’s episode 48, almost at 50 episodes which honestly is so trippy, it’s kind of hard for me to sit in that moment and really revel in it, it feels so surreal. In a couple of weeks, it will be the one year anniversary of starting this podcast which blows my mind.
I mean some of you know this. I started this podcast not knowing, honestly anything except for I liked listening to podcasts. I started recording it in my closet with my own kind of sound padding I created, editing it all on my own, just figuring it out. And now here I am almost a year later. I have a production team. I have an upgraded mic. I can record at my desk and so, so much more, so many episodes, so many of you have come along and found this podcast and found it helpful. And it’s just so exciting.
So, to celebrate, to honor that we have some special surprises in store. I can’t give away too many details. One I can give away though is we’re going to be giving away some prizes. So, join my email list if you aren’t on it. We’ll leave a link in the show notes, and follow me on social media, follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn to be the first to know.
We’re going to be giving some awesome prizes to help you get more rest and reduce your burnout, from gift cards to fun special ways to treat yourself, to books and other kind of gear that you can get. And it’s just, it’s going to be really exciting so make sure you tune in for that.
Also, a couple of weeks ago the episode I put out around experiencing intense emotions with selfcare and kindness, so many of you loved that episode and found it so helpful. And I just want to share a little follow-up. As I’m recording today’s podcast episode, that shame I talked about is coming back up. And the shame I explained, how I sat with it in that podcast episode and how I interacted with it. And you know what? Several weeks later here it is again popping back up.
And I had a whole day where I resisted it, I suppressed it, I ignored it and then it came up to the surface yesterday and really piled up. And I felt like I was stuck in a mud pit, I didn’t know how to get out. And I was very, very fortunate, a dear coach friend of mine, Ali Ryan from Ali Ryan Coaching coached me. And she is amazing, if you need coaching on intense emotions, self-love and connecting with your body, she does some great emotion work.
And she really helped me move through that intense shame that came up that I felt stuck in. And get to a place where it’s not like the shame went away but I was able to relate to it differently and able to see my next steps. And I actually worked to clear my schedule. And I did what I talked about in the Experiencing Intense Emotions episode. I sat with it. I cried. This time I took a bath which I don’t love to do but I was like, listen, we’ve got to get our brain in a place where it’s not going to be wanting to watch TV and get on my phone and whatnot.
And I cried some more, and I watched a movie with my partner that night. And I cried during the movie and then as I woke up today I kind of cleared my schedule to do only a half day, so I have more space to allow the shame. And so, I’m sharing this to say, if you listened to that episode and it was helpful, or if you’re experiencing intense emotions now go back and listen. But know that it’s not always a one and done even when you do the longer process of processing the emotion, it can come back up days, weeks, months later and you just do it all over.
And a lot of times it is really useful to have an outside person, a coach, or a therapist to help you when you’re really stuck in that mud. Even me, an experienced coach, someone who self-coaches herself every day needs that. So, if you do need that, I really encourage you to reach out and I would be more than honored to be that coach to help you with that.
Okay, with that let’s get into the episode and let’s talk about gratitude. And as I’m writing this episode there are so many things going on in the world, you could pop into any week in 2022 already or go back to 2021, or 2020, or even before COVID and there is a lot of heavy stuff that happens in the world. And I think more and more we’re just more aware of it and COVID has kind of made it that way because we’re more on our phones, watching the news. But it was always happening even before COVID.
But as I’m recording this, this week, Russia really has amped up its invasion on Ukraine and people are fleeing their homes. And there’s reports coming out of African and Black folks in Ukraine being denied access to leave and experiencing racism at the border. Media is becoming rampant, and people are pointing it out with news anchors saying things and comparing European refugees to refugees in the Middle East saying things like, “Well, they’re different refugees. They’re white and they’re Christian.”
Or saying things like, “It’s not like Syria here, these are middle class people.” And there’s a lot of folks pointing that out in the media. And as some of you know, I am Arab, so I am also noticing that and having my own feelings around that. And this week there was a shooting in Sacramento in California, three children were killed.
There has also been anti-trans policy in Texas requiring parents, and caregivers, and teachers to report families who have trans kids, claiming it’s abusive and many other anti LGBTQ laws happening and policies popping up around the US and many, many, many other terrible things. Why am I sharing this with you? And we’re going to talk about gratitude. Because so many of you are placing gratitude stickers over your wounds and emotions.
So, when you have a physical cut on your arm, what do you do? Sometimes you actually have to let it bleed out a little bit first before you can put a band-aid on it. Because if you put that band-aid on when it hasn’t really gotten enough pressure to slow the bleeding, the band-aid doesn’t really serve its purpose. You have to hold the wound and give it time. You have to monitor it and be with it. You might have to clean it and wash it. And then you put the band-aid on it for that to heal and then often you have to repeat, take the band-aid off and clean it, and put more pressure.
But you’ve done that initial work of letting that bleeding kind of happen, and the healing kind of happen, and the cleaning kind of happen before you put the initial band-aid on. And right now when you are experiencing emotional pain or suffering you don’t do this. What you are doing is putting a glittery, colorful Lisa Frank sticker on your wound. And your wound is still bleeding, it's bleeding outside the edges of the sticker and it’s more painful because the adhesive of the sticker is right on the open wound. And then it hurts worse. And when you realize that and take it off, that hurts even worse.
I call this metaphor the gratitude sticker. And what this looks like is when you tell yourself or others things like, “Well, things have been so hard for me but at least I still have a job.” Or “I’m really struggling but I really shouldn’t complain. Other people have it way worse than me.” You see the news, you see terrible situations, you hear about people you know close to you who have had challenging circumstances. And then you use that to downplay your own experience. You shut your emotions off and you tell yourself you shouldn’t feel that way.
You force yourself to be grateful. And while yes, many of you are truly grateful for the things that you say you are, your house, your job, your family, it’s not like you’re lying, that you hate those things and you’re not grateful. But when you practice gratitude this way, practice it in this way because you don’t want to sit with the truth of your experience, is that true gratitude that you’re practicing in that moment? You are using a gratitude sticker to deny and ignore your own lived experience. Your emotions are real, and they matter.
Your experience is real, and it matters. You can be honest that things are hard for you and you’re having a difficult time without having to counter that with something else. You can feel sadness without having to compare your experience to others. You can experience your negative emotion without having to cover it up because what happens when you use a gratitude sticker is you don’t actually feel better, you really don’t.
Imagine this, let’s say your friend was upset about a breakup and you came over and told them that, “Hey, could be worse, at least they didn’t cheat on you.” Or at work you tell your boss that your child’s in the hospital and then your boss says, “Well, good thing we provide you with good health insurance so you can cover this.” You would be so pissed, that other person would be so pissed. We are upset and pissed when other people do this to us. When we go to other people and share challenges and they respond in this way we feel dismissed, we feel not heard, we feel misunderstood and even worse.
And what I want to point out is you are doing this to yourself when you use a gratitude sticker on yourself. Being with yourself in difficult times and being grateful are two different things. You can be with yourself in difficult times and not be grateful at all. You can be grateful while not actually being with yourself in difficult times. Using gratitude to try to be with yourself when things are challenging actually does not work. It puts a sticker, that Lisa Frank glittery colorful sticker right on your wound.
You can hold space to be with yourself in difficult times with difficult intense emotions and separately be grateful. They can happen at the same time for sure, but they’re separate. And most importantly, in order to support yourself in those challenging experiences and those emotions you’re having you also don’t have to be grateful. We are so quick to use gratitude in this way because we have been told to.
We have received a lot of messages that depict people who are not grateful and then society talks about them or sees them as terrible people. And you might have even done this too. We receive a lot of messages, and images, and stories, that show people who practice gratitude in very difficult circumstances, and they are talked about and put on this pedestal and promoted as this is how good things happen to you. They deserve their dreams to come true and all the help.
The media loves to portray people experiencing adversity, only typically, only if they tell their story while crying and saying they’re grateful, and generating a lot of emotions for the audiences they are projecting this media to. We have been socialized to equate gratitude with selflessness. We have been socialized to equate gratitude with being a good person. We have been socialized to equate gratitude with good things are going to happen to you. That if you are grateful you are selfless and that’s a good thing. And if you are not grateful then you are selfish and you get what you deserve.
And we have also been told that gratitude is the key to manifestation, that if you practice gratitude every day all your dreams will come true, all your troubles will go away. You’ll never have a negative emotion again. We have wrapped up the practice of gratitude in so many layers of judgment, and expectation, and pressure. Then we use that to try to deny our own lived experience of intense emotion and difficult experiences. And I think sometimes we use it as a shield from other people trying to prevent them from judging us and from us from judging ourselves.
Gratitude is from the Latin word ‘gratis’, meaning pleasing or thankful. Gratitude is not right or wrong. Gratitude doesn’t make you a better or worse person. Gratitude does not solve your emotional suffering. Can gratitude be helpful? Absolutely, do not get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s a complete waste of your time, throw it in the trashcan. Practicing gratitude can be helpful. It can help your brain’s natural negativity bias reduce. It can help your brain build the practice of seeing the positive that already exists in your life and many other things.
But what I am pointing out here and what I want you to take away from this episode is that gratitude will never serve those helpful purposes if you are using it to avoid, suppress, ignore, cover up or judge your experience of a challenging, or upsetting, or negative circumstance, or emotion you are having, never. That’s why gratitude stickers don’t work. Be honest with your lived experience about the emotions you are having.
When you’ve lost your job for example, covering up your fear and anger about that with forcing yourself to pretend you feel totally fine and you shouldn’t feel angry because you have stable housing does not make that fear or anger go away. When you have been yelled at by your boss, suppressing your emotional response with saying, “Well, other people at work have it worse than me.” That actually does not make it easier for you to go to work the next day.
If you have received a lot of negative comments on a draft at the paper you’ve turned in, telling yourself it’s not a big deal compared to the people whose lives are being threatened by policy changes or war, does not help you process your experience of rejection. Give yourself space to be honest and authentic about your experience, about your emotions, about your thoughts, about your challenges.
So, to go back to the metaphor, instead of using a gratitude sticker, this is where you allow your wound to bleed a little. You don’t ignore your arm and let it bleed to the point where you have to go to the hospital. And you also don’t have to go run around the neighborhood and show everyone your open wound unless you want to, that’s totally your choice. But what I’m saying is, you can let it bleed, examine it, clean it, wash it, see what you need, put a cloth on it to hold pressure, to help it, to get the bleeding to slow. And then after that you can put a band-aid on it.
And what that means in practice is let yourself have your emotion. Don’t ignore it. Get curious about your experience, see what you need to support yourself. Get coaching or talk to your therapist if you need to. Let your emotion process. And then once you’ve done that you can decide what you want to do moving forward, what changes you want to make or not make, what actions you want to take or not.
Listen, you can be grateful, I am all for gratitude. But gratitude is not required to process emotions. It’s not required to stop the bleeding. It is not needed to get through challenging experiences especially if you tend to use gratitude in a manipulative way, to try to stop you or prevent you from feeling the negative emotion you are having. Be grateful, definitely. But don’t use gratitude against yourself to deny yourself or your experience because that’s what the gratitude sticker is.
When you use gratitude in a way that shuts you down from honoring and being honest and processing the actual emotion you’re having. If gratitude could speak for itself I bet you it would say, “Please don’t do that to me. Do not use me in that way. That is not my purpose. That is not helpful.” Be with your negative emotions, process it, allow that, and yeah, you can still have your gratitude but that’s separate.
Don’t use your gratitude to shut yourself down, to make yourself feel worse, to dismiss yourself and your experience, to minimize what you’re going through. Don’t do that, it doesn’t help anyone, especially you. Alright you all, so I want you to ponder this and notice if you start to do this, if you notice yourself doing this and name it. Say, “You know what? I think I’m putting a gratitude sticker on this. How can I just be with myself while I examine this wound and be with anger to know it and see what it needs to heal.” And then you can practice gratitude separately, okay, you all.
Before we go, I’m so excited in two weeks for you all to hear the surprises we have coming out with the podcast for our one year anniversary. And one thing that would be super, super helpful in advance of that, so we can really make sure that this is the best pod one year anniversary ever and everyone has access to hearing what’s going on and getting the amazing prizes and the support, it’s going to be amazing. Is for more people to get access to this podcast before and during that surprise, the anniversary.
I almost slipped there but I caught myself. So, one thing you can do to help our community, to help other folks in public health to be a part of this really exciting anniversary and get access to the podcast and also get a chance to get those amazing prizes like a spa gift card, or some Health Equity clothes from one of the partners that I’m working with. And some books to help them stop burning out and get more rest, and other exciting stuff.
Is for you to rate and review wherever you listen, put some comments of what you have learned, what you have found helpful, will really, really, really help other people to get access to this podcast. And it would mean so much to me. And I also love reading them and seeing what you all think and what you’re finding helpful. So, if you have found this helpful, this episode or any others, please consider doing it. I know it feels like it takes a lot of time and if you haven’t done it, it feels like a lot of work and extra, but it can take less than two minutes.
And it helps not only me, and this podcast grow, but so many people in public health who haven’t been able to find it, to find it and get the help they need. And they want to hear from you. They want to hear from your voice as a listener, what have you found helpful. What do you think is the most important. And why do you listen, so that they can click on it and know whether it’s for them. They want to hear from you all about why you’re listening in.
So please consider rating and review, it takes a few seconds, a couple of minutes, and it means so much to me and everyone else in the future who’s going to read it and then listen to this podcast, and then reduce their burn out and get more rest. I mean, what’s more amazing than that? Alright you all, talk to you next week. Bye.
Are you ready to make a change? Whether that's learning to love your job, making a career move, or anything in between, I can help. I'd be honored to coach you through figuring out what's next and navigating the steps to get there. So, head on over to mckoolcoaching.com/consult that's mckoolcoaching.com/consult to set up a time to chat and talk about how you can achieve the career of your dreams.
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