The Best Gratitude of 2021: New Year’s Special

Bunny: (00:11)
Hi there and welcome to the lifesaving gratitude podcast. I’m your host Bunny Terry and I am joined by my co-host and producer Johanna Medina. And because it’s in January of 2022, we wanted to take a quick look at some of the, I’d say the top 20 statements that were made by our guests last year. Just to give you an overview of how incredible this has been. We thank you so much for listening. Thanks for checking in we appreciate everybody who’s taking time out of their day to like us, to subscribe, to review us. We’ve been pretty surprised at the folks who are paying attention and who are hearing some of the important messages about gratitude that are coming from this podcast that we had no idea was going to take this sort of a turn. We started this podcast in April of 2021, sort of as a means of promoting my book, lifesaving gratitude, but also with an idea of sharing some gratitude strategies, we had no idea how much we were going to learn from each guest in our first podcast, which I believe was released on April 4th, 2021, Johanna and I talked really frankly, about what lifesaving gratitude really is to us. And we shared each of our individual experiences from that time in my life when I had cancer, stage four cancer in fact. And for those of you who have never heard this podcast before I was diagnosed with stage four, colon cancer in November of 2012, and Johanna, my daughter was a college senior at the time and moved all of her classes to, she became an online student and came home and was my caregiver because I needed help. And, one of the things I said in that first podcast was I’m not an expert on anything other than what works for me, but lucky for you. I had a plan to find the real experts and the folks out there who understood the science of gratitude even better than I do. And what I said then, and what is still true is that I wanna be really courageous and really curious about what gratitude did for me and for a lot of other people.

Bunny: (02:47)
And I wanted to help us find different ways to use gratitude as a strategy every day in our life. I wanted us to find ways to continue to stop when we’re in the midst of something negative and just say very consciously and very mindfully. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I wanted to talk about something connected to gratitude in a way that worked best for everybody. And yet that wasn’t really Pollyanna-ish. And what I didn’t expect was how this was gonna play out over the past eight or nine months and the people that we would meet and the things that we were gonna learn and hear. So, here we are January of 2022, and this, this is the year when we were all so certain that life was gonna get back to normal and it’s becoming the year where normal is anything but that. So while we’re gonna give you an overview of the very best things we heard, I just want you to begin to think about… I hope that 2022 is a year that you’re looking at hopefully. Even though, even though we seem to be in the grips of this relentless pandemic at the moment, I’m still determined to be very, reflective, very, very careful about where I let my mind go. And I wanna be hopeful, but I wanna talk for just a few minutes about my three words for 2022, if you are accustomed to this practice of developing three years for each year, you’ll know that there’s a suggestion that you take some time to think of about how the past year went, how the year ahead looks, how you’d like for it to look, I’ve thought a lot about, how I want 2022 to look. 2020 and 2021 were years when I kind of hurdled headlong into, finishing and publishing my book and becoming more of a creator of content that I hoped would be helpful content that was gratitude focused. So, those were also years when I was still getting ready for my role as the board chair of the cancer foundation for New Mexico. So I don’t feel like I took a breath in 2021. So when I thought about my three words for 2022, I thought about, first of all, what I wanted to fill my life with what I wanted to take a lot of time to do and what I wanted to be conscious of. So my three words for 2022, are: joy, reflection, and care. And there’s a lot that went into that. I’ve said several times on the podcast recently that I joyful or joy was gonna be one of my words for this year, but I also feel like reflection is important because if any of you know, me personally, you know, that I never ever slow down and this needs to be a year when I slow down, I take time to breathe, I assess where things are going and I make really conscious choices, I say no to the things that aren’t going to work for me and for my life and for the things that are important for me. And I just spend time reflecting. My third word care is, um, really more about self care than anything else. And I think it’s part of reflection. Sometimes I don’t make time. I’m sorry. It’s not, sometimes it’s frequently. I don’t make time in the day to even go for a walk or to spend 10 minutes exercising because I’m so determined to check all the things off of my list. So I really want 20, 22 to be a year when I not only take care of the people in my, in my immediate circle and the board and the patients that we take care of at the cancer foundation, but for myself. So with those things in mind, with joy and reflection and care posted on my bulletin board and a part of what I wanna share with you and, and, and really with myself over and over throughout 2022, let’s take a look at some of the things that impacted me in a podcast in the last year, in that first, first episode, Johanna said something that really stuck with me. And I think it’s indicative of indicative of what we’ve learned and how we’ve learned to live our lives these days. I also think it’s really indicative of how unpredictable life can be at any given moment.

Johanna: (07:59)
I mean, it just doesn’t do you any good. You can’t help be anxious sometimes, but it really just doesn’t do you any good to worry about tomorrow or next week, because you don’t know really what’s, gonna come of it. That was, a lesson for me too, and learning, you know, life is unpredictable and it’s gonna throw things at you and it can change in the blink of an eye. And if all you have is a couple of things to be grateful for that can get you through that day or that week, or, you know, the year, a tough year that you’re going through. And also to know that, you know, things as quickly as things can change for the bad they can change for the good.

Bunny: (08:46)
So that was a great phrase that I read when I went back and reviewed all of our podcasts and this next phrase really stuck with me as well and little did we know at the time that we recorded that first podcast episode that we were going to, we were gonna embark on this podcast journey where we talked about mindset all the time. Here’s what she said,

Johanna: (09:12)
But I think having this, mindset and just gratitude practice and knowing that, I mean, in this type of situation, especially with cancer treatment, so many things are outta your control. You know, you don’t even the type of like chemo drug, you’re gonna get on you. Don’t really, I have a few different choices, but not a lot. A lot of things are outta your hands. So if you can take a little bit of control over your mindset, over your, um, perception of things, that’s gonna give you, like we were saying peace of mind and kind of a better grasp on that journey.

Bunny: (09:56)
So there was another powerful moment in the podcast that we did with Amber Hale. Amber is a friend of mine who is going to be a guest on the show again, very soon. Amber lost her son. This is the unthinkable. Amber lost her son at 13 to suicide. And in our, I believe it was our third podcast episode. We had a real long talk with her about self care. And, as I said, I chose the word care for one of my 20, 22 words. And, you know, obviously wanna take care of my listeners and my followers by providing good content. And I wanna provide care for the patients I helped through the can foundation, but Amber addressed one aspect of self care that I think is really important. And it’s something she learned the hard way. And here’s what she said.

Amber : (10:50)
The biggest thing to keeping yourself mentally healthy is to find your people find where you fit in and really, get involved with that group, whatever that might be. If you’re an artist, go do art with your artist, friends, you need connection, humans need connection. And I really learned the importance of helping people find healthy outlets to get that connection, to help themselves feel better and comfortable talking about their, deepest, darkest concerns and worries, feeling safe, feeling like it’s safe to talk to people about their concerns.

Bunny: (11:30)
So that’s, that was a powerful statement from Amber, but I gotta tell you working on today’s podcast has been amazing because it’s funny how I’m finding all these correlations to my three words. And what’s been said by the folks I’ve interviewed in the last year, as an example in May, 2021, we talked to my old friend, Stephanie Richardson, Stephanie had her left leg amputated above the knee as a result of excruciating pain after a lot of botched surgeries. And here’s a statement Steph made after talking to us about her medical journey and her new way of looking at life.

Stephanie: (12:08)
Absolutely. It’s not about, oh, I’m joyful that I only have one. I gonna have a heart. Uh, no, but, but I am so overjoyed at the life I get to live in spite of whatever.

Bunny: (12:25)
Now I have to tell you friends, that’s joy when you can say, Hey, it’s okay that I have half a heart and half a leg. I’m still joyful about it. You know, I can say the same thing. I’m, I’m joyful that I have this 12 inch scar and I’m missing 12 inches of my colon. I’m, I’m missing a, a slice off the corner of my liver liver because this today right now is a joyful life that I’m living. I wanna skip ahead from the podcast we did in the beginning and move into some of our later guests from my new friend Gianna Mucceri, who we interviewed here on August 24th and who survived in almost fatal car crash. We heard some really, really important words about care. She and I were talking about loving our scars. I had to learn in the hard way that you have to learn to love your scars. I mean, I have a 12 inch scar on my stomach. That is a result of my colon surgery. And, and she, and I talked a lot about that. And here’s what she said.

Gianna : (13:31)
Absolutely. It’s a such a process. Like every single part of it, you know, of healing is such a process to go through and we have to be so gentle with ourselves along the way, because yeah, our bodies change and it’s different. It’s like a different part of ourselves now that we learn to love unconditionally, like you were saying at the beginning.

Bunny: (13:55)
And then Gianna and I talked about having compassion for yourself. And we talked about the power of grace. That’s G R A C E, grace. And here’s what Gianna had to say about that. And that’s the self-compassion piece, isn’t it? I mean, you have to really give yourself a lot of grace. Yeah. When I love that we get into that place. I do too. I love

Gianna : (14:18)
I think it’s my favorite word, grace yeah. Cause we can be graceful, graceful. Isn’t just like, you know, this elegant, you know, woman or whatever, it’s like, it’s, we can have grace in anything we’re doing. We can have grace while we’re having a PTSD panic attack just by recognizing it, by having that compassion for ourselves and just being like, wow, wow. Look at that. It’s really showing up again. I really felt that again. And just being so loving and patient of like this takes time. And also there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m having a human experience. I’m having a normal reaction to the trauma that I experienced. And, um, that’s what I teach the people that I work with. So I work with a lot of people in now who has been through trauma or who experiencing PTSD. And that’s the number one thing that I tell them, first of all, you are safe right now in this moment you are safe and there’s nothing wrong with you. And that’s all it took for my therapist to say to me, to be like, oh wow, that’s right. I have felt I’m feeling unsafe in the world. That’s normal, I’ve experienced trauma. It’s a normal reaction. So

Johanna: (15:39)
Yeah, that’s such a good point to just say you’re normal. Like, There’s nothing wrong with you because you did experience this trauma and that’s real and feeling that, you know, yeah. Mentally the stress and the anxiety from it, like that’s okay. You know, you have to go through that. And that’s part of the healing too.

Bunny: (16:03)
And finally, at the end of my podcast with Gianna, we talked a lot about learning to breathe because Gianna really physically had to learn to breathe again at, after her accident. I’m gonna suggest right here that you go back and listen to that particular podcast in its entirety because her practical tips are just that they’re so practical and they’re so helpful that I think they’re gonna help you survive 2022 in a completely new and surprising way. Later on in September, I had the privilege of talking to my fight, colorectal cancer friend and fellow advocate, Josh Wimberly, and Josh who in his own words is perhaps in the, in stages of his colon cancer journey was brutally honest about the difficulty of remaining grateful in incredibly dark times of life. And Josh even said, I’m not just grateful in the darkness. I’m grateful for the darkness. And, I don’t, Josh’s words are much more eloquent than mine. So I’m just gonna leave this, this opening, which is that Josh is battling every day, but he’s also learning to be more grateful than any of the rest of us could ever dream of being here’s. Here’s what Josh has to say.

Josh : (17:30)
If the theme of what you’ve written about and what I’d like to talk to you about is gratitude, man, it’s hard. It’s hard to practice because my belief is that gratitude is a practice. If you see it as a destination, you’re only gonna lose it when you feel like you got it. And the more you say, okay, I gotta do this all the time. Boy, does that get challenging? When things suck? I mean like, how are you supposed to be grateful for being stuck at home for two years with COVID because you have a compromised immune system. I am Jesuit educated. I was an educator also in a Jesuit institution. The order of Jesuits is a Catholic, order that was founded by Saint Ignatius. And he has a spiritual practice that he promotes, which is The Examine. And that’s a big part of my spiritual life and a big tool for my growth and this idea of who I’m becoming even in difficulty and really important for gratitude because the examine a good part of it is at the, the end of the day, you’re trying to ask yourself, how did the day go, right? Were there places where you let people down, right? Were there places where you came up short, were there places that needed to be celebrated? And, how do you at the end of the day, think about that and reflect on it. It’s not asking you to make changes. There’s, you know, maybe you did somebody wrong and you need to go apologize, but it’s more just thinking those places where I came up short, what could I have done different? Right? What did I do today that helped somebody, if anything, and just trying to be aware of how your day goes, you know, how, and I think the more I practiced it and appreciated it, the more I was able to develop the ability to be grateful in the moment like to be. And that gets back to what I wanted to talk about today, because there’s a aspect of this. We haven’t gotten to that. If we have a few minutes. Talking about, we can talk as long as we want, which is I had to… So the more I practice the am then, and you can find out information about it. There’s all kinds of stuff you can read about it. It comes from St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises. I came to this appreciation of gratitude in that moment. It was so easy when I was younger. Or maybe if you think about gratitude on a developmental kind of scale, it’s not really tied to your age, it’s just tied to how you understand it. And how have you developed your practice. It was easy to be grateful about things in hindsight, right? Look back and be like, oh, I’m so grateful that happened. I’m so grateful this person came in my life. I’m so grateful. They helped me yesterday. It’s really hard to have that sense of gratitude when it’s happening. Right? Because part of me in my spiritual journey says that my gratitude is connected to my prayer life with God. And when gratitude is an outcome of my love and my compassion for myself and for others and for all living beings. And so when I feel it in that moment, I personally, from my faith perspective, feel like I’m close to God. Like I’m in that moment where I’m grateful right at that very second. And when it comes to my topic today, there’s another aspect of darkness that has hit me over the past year or so with these struggles lately, which is how do I be grateful for the darkness? Not just grateful in the darkness, but how do I practice being grateful for the fact that darkness happens in my life that I get in situations where this is hard and I don’t wanna do this. And these decisions make no sense. And if I don’t choose anything, that’s the worst possible choice I could make. Because then I’m just stuck here because for all up until a year ago, when I started thinking about it, like that. Gratitude in darkness was about the hope that this darkness is not gonna last, right? So much of that practice when I’m in darkness is telling myself and mantras of this is gonna pass. This too shall pass. Right? How many times do you hear that? When you’re in dark places, it makes me sick sometimes. And I hear it all the time from people like this is gonna a pass. Because I’m sitting here with stage four cancer at the end of my life. Like maybe not, you know, this may not pass. Like this could be the time that’s the end of my life. And that darkness is gonna be here until that happens until I find that light that I’m seeking for. So how am I… I Need to rethink gratitude in that darkness and ask myself if I really have gratitude, if that’s something I had as a goal and I wanna practice and have as a character trait, am I thankful for bad shit? You know what I mean? Like, am I really so grateful that I could sit in that darkness and say to myself, not all the time, but at least part of it be like, Hey, I’m glad that I’m here because that’s hard. But to me, if I really am grateful, I have to be grateful for everything I can’t pick and choose what I want to be grateful for. That’s not how gratitude works in my, and from where I come from. It tells me that if you’re grateful, you are grateful for it. All. Every part of it, self-acceptance all that bad crap you have in your life, all your trauma, all your baggage, you bring all the flaws you bring to relationships. You have to be grateful for that. Cuz if you’re not, I would say in a nice, careful way that your developmental sense of gratitude hasn’t graduated yet.

Bunny: (23:20)
And then Josh said something in conclusion that I think is really important. He told us that his dissertation was on hopelessness and he wanted to tell, talk about how we can combat hopelessness.

Josh: (23:34)
So my dissertation and my research when I was an academic was about hopelessness. So I hope that anybody that’s listening to this and having to deal with darkness knows that there’s hope I do fundamentally believe that no matter what circumstance we find ourselves in, there’s a path to a better future. And the minute we let go of that, that hope that seed, that it will get better with work. That yes, even if this is the end of my life and I can’t solve this problem, there’s a better future for me. My family has a better future. It’s it’s it will happen. It’s not gonna be easy. And so I want anybody that’s listened to this to know that there’s help out there that if you’re in darkness and you’re in a tough spot, you’re not alone. I think we’re, we’re all struggling with that feeling right now. Some of us better than others. And I think a lot of people feel alone right now, even if they’re around people and in proximity to people, they still feel alone because of what’s happened in the world. And we all need to be honest. There’s that word again? Honesty. We need to be honest about that so that we can help each other and say, you know what, what’s that? What is, I’m a big fan of Bene Brown? What does she say is the most important thing when someone’s in darkness is, you know, me too, me too. That you don’t have to do anything else. You just have to look at somebody and be present and say, yeah, it sucks sometimes and it, but it can suck with us together. You know, maybe I can make it suck a little less. And if we can just hold onto that, I think we can fight that monster. That’s hopelessness. That’s kind of seeps in when we’re not thinking about it. Because make no mistake. Gratitude is not the antidote to hopelessness in my mind. It’s a good part of it, right? But gratitude is not enough. It’s not efficient to help someone that’s in a really, really tough spot. And we have to be ready to share our, uh, love and our acceptance. That brings somebody to a place to where they can be more grateful than they were when we tried to help them.

Bunny: (25:49)
And that Josh said was the antidote to hopelessness. For those of you who are wondering, Josh is still struggling and the cancer seldom gives him a break, but I just saw a message from him that his two children are going to go back to school next week, that they’ve decided they want to normalize their life as much as, as possible. They’re going to wear masks, which is not particularly, um, popular, where he lives in Alabama. But, um, they’re getting on with their life. Josh is communicative and he is as funny as ever. And I hope he continues to survive and that we can have him back on the podcast. In 2022, we talked to Aaron Huey on September 28th and he gave us these five very actionable tips for saving your children from being at risk. I’m just gonna tell you if you’re a parent of kids at any age who are still at home, please, please, please listen to this five minutes of amazing advice from a guy who deals with high risk teenagers and high risk families. And by high risk, Aaron says, he means that they are double suicidal, that they’re doing heroin, that they’re dealing, that they added for really long term jail time. If there’s not some intervention with the teens and with their family. So take a minute to listen to the tips that Aaron gives to you. If you’re a parent.

Aaron : (27:16)
When your kids are doing well, what do I do to keep them from going into, at risk behavior? So let’s start with that one. Let’s start with there. There, there are five things you can do. Number one, family dinners. It is proven by Harvard. It’s proven by Stanford. Sit down, eat your food, no TV, no electronics have a meal together. Preferably one that people shared in the cooking and cleaning duties, but have a meal with no distractions, family connection time. Alliance before compliance, connection before correction, that’s number one top proven thing to prevent risky choices, family dinner, number two parents knowing their kids, friends, parents. I just wrote up a quote today on my parenting group. Facebook page, a child that is not embraced by a village will burn the village down to feel its warmth. You and I come from a time where, I remember, I remember breaking a bottle in the street. I found a beer bottle sitting on the side of the road. I threw it up in the air. I was 13 years old threw it, up in the air, came down and broke the houses on my block emptied. The people scolded me. Somebody came out with a dust pan in a broom. And by the time I got home, my mom knew because we all knew each other. And if you see the size of our houses and the size of our fences, that we’re gonna build these big houses next door to each other, and then big fences to keep us apart, which is it, which is it. Are we sharing this neighborhood? Are we sharing this work because we all say it takes a village. But very few people actually are the village elders that get out there and say, Hey, we got a lot of kids on this block. Let’s make some plans to keep them safe and take on that work. So that’s number two. The village concept, friends, parents, knowing their kids, friends, parents, you gotta know who your kids are talking to online. Do the work take the time. Number three is something for your children to do between three o’clock and seven o’clock. Those are the, I don’t know. What do we call ’em? The devil times? Idle hands do the devil’s work right? Now I know parents. I, I know we, we don’t all have the finances for it. We don’t all have the resources for it. And parents gotta work to pay their mortgage. But between three o’clock and seven o’clock between school and dinner, what is your child doing? Who is parenting, mentoring your child? It’s either the internet or it’s someone that you’ve put in charge. So find that person, vet them and find that person. Number four, the real honest to goodness, the real education for parents to teach the kids about what goes on in the brain with mental health and addiction. And for me, addiction means habituated behavior that messes up your life. I don’t care what it is. Shopping. Malls are not addictive, but shopping is an addiction. Slot machines are not addictive, but gambling is an addiction. Razor blades are not addictive, but cutting is an addiction. And to really understand what’s going on in your child’s brain developmentally, when they smoke cannabis, I’m not the BS dare tactics or the scare tactics of that old documentary that was put out god awful many years ago, I’m talking about, do you know what anandamide is? Do you know what a neuromodulator is? So you know how the molecule of THC copies aide and keeps your child’s developing brain from developing anandamide and how that creates depression and anxiety in a child’s brain? No marijuana is I’m sorry. Cannabis is not deadly. But it does damage. And for you to deny, that means you don’t understand it and I’ve been studying it. And I was a cannabis addict. Was I addicted to cannabis? Yes. Is cannabis addictive? I don’t care, that’s irrelevant. I was addicted to cannabis, but knowing what cannabis has done to my body, knowing what cannabis did to my developing brain. I used cannabis for 14 years for on the daily, I was a dealer. I was a grower. I knew everything about cannabis, including what it really does to the brain, not the 14 million Google searches your kid’s gonna bring to you and say it doesn’t do anything. And then of course the fifth thing to do is self-care. The best thing about self-care… And this is what I’ll say, the best thing about selfcare is understanding that through all the years of practicing, self-care my wife and I practicing selfcare. Now that my kids are 25 and 26 years old, when times get tough, that’s what they go to is self-care. My son will get stressed. He’ll go skateboarding. My daughter will get stressed. She’ll go hiking. They practice self-care. That’s what that modeled. Take care of yourself. First, when life’s not taking care, you or somebody’s not taking care of you. The school’s not taking care of you. Your employer’s not taking care of you. You’ve gotta do it. That’s number five. Number, number five is as always self care, taking care of yourself first. It’s what you model and ultimately it’s what your kids will do, which is what we want them to do in the first place.

Bunny: (32:47)
One of the guests that I talked to is a success and mindset coach. Her name is Michelle Anderson and she and I met by what I thought at the time was accident. But of course it was nothing is accidental. And Michelle and I talked about the difference between the goal getter with a G and the goal setter with an S and how you can set goals, but then you never get to them. And her thoughts are especially in important here right now at the beginning of 2022, when you may not feel a hundred percent comfortable about how you’re going to reach your goals, just take a listen to what Michelle has to say about how the mind works and how important it is.

Michelle: (33:34)
So I’m, as I’m working with my clients, I’m spotlighting or reminding us. So first of all, everything stems from thinking everything, right? Whether it’s, um, how I’m going to feel today, how I’m gonna behave today. Everything stems from thinking. So what we think about is what we bring about in a lot of this is what we, what we know we know is through bold. And yet we’re only consciously aware of our thinking somewhere between three to 5% of the time. So that means we’re operating on habitual patterns of thinking somewhere between 95 to 97% of the time.

Bunny: (34:16)
Wait, can you say that again? Are we really only conscious of our thinking three to 5% of the time?

Michelle: (34:24)
Yeah. Yeah. And science shows this. So, so that, you know, we have so many examples of that. Anybody listening today can, you know, think about when you drove your car wherever you got. And if it was a routine you’ve always followed, you never were consciously saying to yourself, oh, now I make a, right now I make a left. And now I put my you’re not consciously thinking you are being driven by your unconscious thoughts. So when we talk about goal setting, for example, we’re in a conscious state because we’re planning and we’re thinking, we’re saying, I want this conscious thinking goal setter. And it’s the conscious, the unconscious mind that we say is a go-getter because that’s what’s driving. Most of your actions is coming from your unconscious thinking. There is, and I’m, I don’t, I think I’ve got this straight it’s Carl Jung, most people know who he is, Swiss psychiatrist, I believe. And he has a really great quote that says until we make the unconscious thinking conscious, it will direct our life and we will call it fate. So if we think about the unconscious thinking, everything lives there, your biases live there, our blind spots live there. Our limiting beliefs live there, our unlimiting beliefs live there. It all lives there. Right? It’s in thinking, it’s just, we’re not consciously aware of it. So conscious thought says I’m setting this goal. And then oftentimes we don’t reach it because our unconscious thinking and our I’m sorry, our conscious thinking and our unconscious thinking are not in alignment.

Bunny: (35:57)
And then Michelle goes on to explain how you get the, those two things, the unconscious and the conscious mind in alignment.

Michelle: (36:05)
All of us are prey to this. Right? So, so there’s lots of things we can do though, to get the unconscious mind and the conscious mind in alignment or the goals set and the goal getter in alignment or your matching your video. Like all of those things that we can say, and it takes conscious thinking. So again, it’s what do we do? Well, we start with, well, what are the goals? And so we were gonna write those things out. And as you know, some people will create vision boards and they’ll visualize, and, and as a coach will ask questions. So what’s important about that goal to you when you achieve goal, what happens in your life? How are you different who’s impacted by that goal? What do you feel like knowing you’ve achieved? So there’s all kinds of great coaching questions to get our unconscious thoughts, right. In our conscious thinking. So we can bring things to an awareness, but if it just stops there, because we’ve created a business plan, we did a dream board, then chances are, we won’t make it because it’s not an alignment. So there’s, we’ve got to do conscious work.

Bunny: (37:03)
There’s a lot more to what Michelle had to say, but I wanna skip ahead to something that came up in a podcast recently, it also has to do with goal setting. And this, this podcast was with Bud Hamilton, a businessman, a visionary he’s bud, really the most philanthropic person I know personally. And he is the former board chair for the cancer foundation for New Mexico, but also talked about setting goals. And this is what he said, and this is what’s sticking with me for the coming years’ work. And I know this concept from studying goal setting. And yet when bud said you have to set audacious goals, I realized that just the exercise of goal setting creates a goal in and of itself, which is that I want to grow intellectually and psychologically. And in order to do that, I need to set some crazy audacious goals. So I’m doing that for 2022. And I want you to hear what bud had to say about why we do that.

Bud: (38:05)
Well, I’m a firm believer based on, uh, successful experience with this technique that you set big audacious goals. And I’ll use the cancer foundation as being the best example of that be where we have specific numerical goals every year. And I just remember sitting down with the staff every year and they always want my opinion is what the right level of the goal should be. And, it was always beyond their reach unachievable. They never felt it could be attained and we virtually never missed it. And the reason is the psychology of setting big audacious goals is that you need to establish the mindset of those who are gonna work against the goal that you can’t just continue to work the way you work the previous year to get to that big audacious goal. You’re gonna have to do things differently. You’re gonna have to change personal behaviors. And that’s not easy to do for most folks.

Bunny: (39:09)
Bud also gave us some really practical tips for keeping up with the details of your life and your business, and for net networking it in an effective way, which is important because bud keeps up with everyone he meets and he touches them again and again. And that’s one of the reasons he’s so successful as a fundraiser, be sure and check out his podcast, which released on December 21st to see what those really actionable tips are. Also. Um, one of our guests in December, 2021 was the amazing Daniel Mangena. He’s internationally recognized and he talked about how we have to be very intentional and live the life we want rather than the one we think we should want. And here, what Daniel had to say about that. You said a great thing. And now I, and I’m sorry, I didn’t write it down, but you said, I believe a midlife crisis is what was the statement? You said…

Daniel : (40:07)
I believe a midlife crisis is people spending, you know, a few decades building up a life that they haven’t actually consciously decided is their’s. People dedicate resources to a career. Some people even go and start a family and realize that’s not what they wanna do, or they go and get the white picket fence and realize they really wanna live in the jungle. And that’s why I feel people then then go off and find themselves in all kinds of, addictions, going to buy a motorcycle, leaving a career, walking away from family infidelity. I think it’s that the breaking point gets reached where someone else’s story, you can’t keep living there anymore. And so we, lash out and when I first started coaching, that’s what I was working with. People that were going through that space, either a midlife crisis, or they saw the impending change and wanted to start writing life on their own terms. And that’s where the work actually the I do with people begins. And then starts to explore those. And just question is that mine is this mine. Is this something that I desire? Does this actually light me up or am I doing it from a sense of obligation or a sense of duty? And there’s more questions that unfold from that, that we can explore later down the line, but, you know, am I ready to let go of duty? Do I love myself enough to do what makes me have, have I even explored what it means to be happy? Am I ready to let go of my commitment to being unhappy? All of these questions come up and there’s a journey for all of them, but I’d say, yeah, definitely these, these two first steps are a great place to start.

Bunny: (41:31)
Daniel and I also had a fascinating conversation about how the mind works and about being intentional. But one of my favorite parts of this podcast, when was when we talked about gratitude as a strategy, rather than as a reaction to your current life situation.

Bunny: (41:47)
And then we have step three.

Daniel : (41:50)
Gratitude!

Bunny: (41:51)
Which is my favorite!

Daniel : (41:53)
Favorite, favorite. Gratitude is interesting because, one of the key things that created the change for me, when I started to come to conscious relationship with what I’m doing, what I was doing was recognizing that gratitude is not something that has to happen after the fact.

Bunny: (42:09)
Right? I just wrote about gratitude being a strategy. Every single day, it’s a strategy. It’s not a reaction.

Daniel : (42:16)
No, it’s, it’s a preemptive. And I speak of it in terms of developing the positive expectation of what we want fear is we could say the counterpoint to gratitude. Both of them are going into the future to an outcome that hasn’t really happened yet and bring emotional experience of that into now so that we can develop the expectation that calls it into our experience, fear, anxiety, we’re going to future that we don’t want and bringing those outcomes to the, to the present moment. We can do that with gratitude, with something that we do want, you did it with your parents’ home, you went into the future, you felt the experience, you embodied it, of that experience of giving them back the title to their, and then you were able to create it because your mind follows expectation. That expectation shows up as the mental images that low volume radio that’s churning in the background. That’s leading us into how we do react or how we do respond and the choices that we are making when that starts to get wrapped in that strategy of gratitude, the positive, the outcome that we’ve got clarity on through the intention, we’ve set that we’re stepping into with the power that we’ve claimed in step one, sky’s the limit.

Bunny: (43:23)
I love it. I love it. When Daniel says that, that the sky’s the limit, I think I have to stop here. Not because there aren’t a hundred phrases that were spoken by all of my past guests, but because there’s only so much time in the day and this new year’s podcast has to end at some point. Our last guest was Cheryl Alters Jameson, and one of my Santa Fe friends. Who’s also a famous chef, a cookbook writer, a frequent guest on the food network. Cheryl is just amazing. And yet she had to rebuild her life when her beloved husband and her business part, and her co-writer died from cancer in 2015. So please go back and listen to her interview and listen to all the others that I haven’t mentioned here. There wasn’t a soul I spoke to in 2021 who didn’t inspire me as well as really surprise me. So thank you so much for checking in here’s to a prosperous, joyful, reflective, and care-filled 2022 for all of you. Thanks for following us for subscribing and for reviewing us. And we’ll see you next week.

Bunny: Hi everyone. This is Bunny with the Lifesaving Gratitude podcast. Just in case you don’t know me, I am a stage four colon cancer survivor and the author of Lifesaving Gratitude, which is a book about how gratitude helped me kick cancer’s ass. 

Today we’re going to talk to a special guest about how marketing and marketers can use gratitude to create business and connections with clients and also for themselves to create a really positive way to do their job. But first, I just want to thank you for being here and ask that you download the podcast if you’d like. And certainly subscribe wherever you listen to other podcasts. But enough about me and enough about the podcast. 

I want to introduce you to my special guest, who’s also a friend. Craig Cunningham is currently a realtor with Keller Williams, Santa Fe. And that’s how I met him. However, this is a recent career for him and he was, and correct me if I mispronounce the word, but you were a hotelier. Is that the way to say that?

Craig: Yes. 

Bunny: Yes. He’s spent 30 years in corporate sales and marketing. He’s traveled extensively. I’m going to let him tell you all the places that he’s been to, but he is the founder and principal of Cunningham + Colleagues marketing consultants. He was in the past the VP of marketing and quality for Seaport Hotels and World Centers and the VP of marketing for Core North America. So welcome Craig Cunningham.

Craig: Thanks so much for having me on your podcast.

Bunny: I’m excited. I know you have some great tips for all of our listeners. When I think about these podcasts, I always think about the people that are going to want the information we’re offering. I mean, we’re here to help people and we’re here to figure out how gratitude can make everyone’s life not just easier and simpler, but also fuller. So why don’t you start, Greg? Just tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us how in the world you ended up in this completely different career? And yet the truth is we’re still just marketers first and realtors, second. Tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell our listeners.

Craig: Yeah. So, as you said, I’ve been in marketing and sales for more than 30 years. I actually started off with an advertising and PR agency and then had the good fortune to be hired by my hotel client at the time, Wyndham hotels. At that time it was a North American chain and it’s now international. 

But from then on, I was in the hotel business. It’s definitely a career where if you are not focused on client service and the whole concept of gratitude, you’re not going to be successful. I always thought of our job as just surprising and delighting our guests and making them feel like they chose the right hotel to be with. And so it was always about waking up every day and saying, “What can I do to make somebody’s day and to give them a great experience?” And, of course, to do this you have to be grateful because they opted to choose your hotel over the million other choices that they had. 

So when I retired from the hotel business two years ago, I was trying to figure out what else I wanted to do with my life. I started doing more volunteering. I volunteer with Kitchen Angels here in Santa Fe to deliver meals to people who are not able to leave their homes. But I also started thinking of whether I wanted to do something else from a professional standpoint and the real estate business seemed like a natural extension, because it’s all about client service. You have to figure out ways to make people feel like they’ve made the right choice in working with you. So it’s all about being grateful every day and figuring out what can I do to help them today. How else can I extend what I’m doing for them in a way that they will appreciate and know that I appreciate them. So that’s what it’s really all about, because of course they could work with a million other other people

Bunny: Right. And let’s talk for just a second. Don’t you think that marketing has changed over the 30 years that you’ve been doing this? I mean, it seems to me that when we were kids, which was back before the crust cooled, we were sort of marketed at. Just talk for a minute about how marketing is different now than it was 10 years ago or 30 years ago.

Craig: It’s funny, because I was going to say the exact same thing. Back in the day, you were running a TV ad or a radio spot or a print ad and it was passive in that you just presented the information, unless you were direct sales. But really with the advent of so much digital media, you are instantly able to forge a relationship with customers through social media, through Facebook, Instagram, where you’re having a dialogue with them from the very beginning. This allows you to work in a much more personal way and to be able to find out much more quickly how you can serve those people. 

So I think it’s changed completely. Before you just sort of put it out there into the ether and hope that something worked, and now you’re able to engage. And I’ve found that so much in real estate where I’m getting emails from folks and then it evolves from the email into a phone call or a zoom call or something like that instantly. I think that’s so much better for both people. Especially for somebody like me who wants to find ways to engage with people and to be of service to them, it makes it a lot easier and more rewarding.

Bunny: I just think about the ways that I connect with my clients. It’s as if you’re somehow conveying to those people that you’re grateful that they showed up.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. I mean, my whole thought is that it’s not a transaction, it’s a relationship. And that relationship can be multifaceted. Once you’ve sold them a house or sold their house, I like to think that we’ve formed a friendship and a bond and that relationship is going to continue. And honestly, I don’t even care if I ever get another piece of business for them. Now think of them as friends. I want to have them to my house for dinner or go have coffee or something like that. 

I think that kind of thing that makes a difference for people in wanting to work with me.  It’s coming from a position of wanting to be of service to them and wanting to make them happy and finding the right solution for them. I’m working with some first-time-buyers right now and I kind of feel like they’re my kids. It’s about, okay, how can I really help them with this? And they’re grateful for the counsel I’m able to give to them, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with them. So it’s very rewarding. I think if you approach business relationships in the same way as you would with your friends, it’s a win-win situation for everybody.

Bunny: Well, talking about those first-time home buyers, I mean, that’s one of my favorite deals. You never make the most money from those transactions, but I’m so grateful to be reminded that we are providing the American dream when we’re selling real estate. Yeah. It’s amazing. It’s my favorite experience.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, for somebody to have their first home and to be excited about how they’re going to decorate it and what they’re going to do. And with this young couple, seeing them excited when they see a house brings out all my empathy and makes me want to really go the extra mile for them to make sure they find the right house at the right price for them. And then I just never want to stop. So then it’s like, “Okay, now I’m going to find this person for you to do the plumbing, and I’m going to find this person, etc, and I’ll be with you with you  to help explain things.” I just want to really continue to be of service.

Bunny: I talk a lot, especially on my blog, about Judy Camp, who was one of my first real estate mentors. She was a great friend and Linda Gammons partner for a long time before she passed away. But Judy Camp always says, “If you come from contribution, you can’t help but be successful.”

Craig: Yeah. I mean, just as I was saying, you can’t think of it as a transaction. I think, coming from contribution, how can I help you? How can I make this a better experience? How can I make this work? Because, especially in a real estate transaction, it can be stressful. It’s the biggest financial transaction for the majority of us. So how do you take the burden and the pressure away from them and sort of guide them through the process? I just think the main thing is that it’s much more fun, whether you’re doing volunteer work or in business, to wake up every day and figure out how I could make it fun for somebody else. Because then it’s fun for you and it gets you excited and passionate about what you’re doing.

Bunny: Well, it sounds like our big “why’s” are really similar. I certainly don’t want to put any words in your mouth, but it sounds like your big “why” is just to make the life of the people you come in contact with better.

Craig: Yeah. Of course making money is nice, but there are lots of ways to make money. It’s more about whether you are getting energy from it. And I think you really get energy when you’re working with someone and trying to figure out how you can help them, how you can make their day better, how you can make the service that you’re providing better. And also just doing things that saying, “What about if I do X, Y, Z?” and they’re  like, “Oh, you’ll do that for me?” And I’m like, “Of course.”

I have another set of clients where the transaction was fairly complicated and we were looking at lots of properties. Coming from a corporate background, I love to do spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations—things like that. And so after about the third thing we had to do, they’re like, “Oh, how are we going to organize all these bids?”  And then one of the guys said to the other guy, “Well, Craig’s going to do a spreadsheet for us. He’s probably already got it done.” So it’s that kind of thing where you’re looking for ways to make their experience better.

Bunny: So this is always a funny question for me to ask, because I have such a loose gratitude practice other than just waking up in the morning and saying, “thank you, thank you, thank you,” and then writing things down, but do you have a practice that you follow that helps you both in your business and your personal life?

Craig: Well, since I came into real estate with Keller Williams, which focuses a lot on being servant leaders and helping people, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing three things I’m grateful for that day. It could be that it’s a beautiful day or a dog or my partner or the opportunity to help somebody or the coffee’s really good that day, but waking up and appreciating what you have in your life is a good way to get in a good mindset for the rest of it.

Bunny: Oh, absolutely. Something I always say is that we kind of rewire our brains. We do. We create new neural pathways every time we say that we’re grateful. So in terms of nuts and bolts, is there a way that you let your clients know? I mean, I find that there are a lot of young people, young entrepreneurs or people who are new to business, who forget how to tell their clients how they’re grateful for them, even if it’s a line in an email. Do you have something that you do specifically over and over?

Craig: I think for me, it’s maybe more in the actions. I think of “This is really going to be helpful if I do this or if I provide this information.” I think it’s always in my voice and the way that I write. I try to always communicate openly and in a friendly and conversational manner. But then I also think “It would be really cool and really helpful if I did X , Y , Z.” I created a whole PowerPoint just on the neighborhoods in Santa Fe, because if you’re out of town it gets confusing. And that came out of a client saying, “Well, I don’t really know the neighborhoods.” And I thought that this would be a great tool for them. So I created it and then I was able to use it with others. 

So I think for me, maybe it’s sort of on the fly. I used to say in the hotel hotel business, “How can I make this a wow experience?” Because the other way to think about it is that every relationship is with people. When you’re in a service business you’re really in the business of creating memories. You can create good memories or you can create bad memory and it’s much more fun to create good memories.

Bunny: And that just comes from a spirit of generosity. I mean, you obviously want this to be the best real estate experience they’ve ever had.

Craig: Right. Right. I’m very grateful for the people that have helped me along the way. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to always work for people who were concerned about my career development and my personal development and became dear friends. And I’ve had a couple of bosses that have hired me twice in two different jobs. So I’m always grateful for the things that other people have done for me. 

So then I want to pay it forward. When I came to Keller Williams and I was introduced to the team here, there was so much openness and willingness to share and help and support. It has been fantastic. What strikes me the most is how grateful I am for what other people have done for me. And how do I pay that back?

Bunny: I mean, this is not a podcast to plug Keller Williams. It’s really more to talk about mindset, but the place where I learned it was sitting in that training room and learning that my mindset was the secret sauce. I mean, that’s the success piece, right?

Craig: Yeah, exactly. It’s not just about production and everything. It’s about weight and having a sense of gratitude and contribution and a sense of abundance. And I don’t mean that in a monetary way. It could be abundance in your health or your friends or all of that kind of stuff. And I think back to you. Your experience with cancer was far worse than mine, but I did have prostate cancer about nine years ago. Everyone I worked with during that entire time when I was going for radiation every day for 10 weeks was so supportive. And then on the last day of radiation, there was this very important meeting, and everyone knew it was my last day.My whole team had a celebration for me on my last day. That was turning something that was obviously a challenging situation into something where I knew they really cared about me and supported me.

Bunny: Wow. I’m interested to hear how your mindset was in the middle of that? 

Craig: I’m just by nature, an optimistic person. So even though it was scary, I felt like I was in good hands from a medical standpoint and I just felt like I was gonna beat it. I had done the education that I needed to and then it was really about having a positive mindset. 

This is probably too much information, but I’ll say it anyway. You’re doing the radiation stripped down to your boxer shorts. And so I jokingly put this Facebook thing about the fact that I needed a new pair of boxer shorts for every day. And people started sending me underwear—different pairs of boxer shorts for every day. So while I was sitting there in the big machine, where you’re sort of in there and it’s buzzing and scanning and all that kind of stuff, it got to be kind of a joke with the techs:  “Oh , what’s he going to be wearing today?”

Bunny: I love that.

Craig: That was a way to keep my spirits up. And also during that process, I really learned how to be very focused. I was in a waiting room with people that were going through, frankly, worse things than prostate cancer. Don’t get me wrong, prostate cancer is pretty serious. It is. People die from it. But I was seeing so many other people that were having a much more challenging time than I was. And we became a family. We all bonded together during that process, because we were all waiting, sometimes for an hour. So it’s things like that. And also things like the kitchen angels service, where it helps reboot you every day for how grateful you should be in your own life and grateful for the opportunity to help other people.

Bunny: Right. There are tons of people who do get what a gift it is. People who don’t even have a specific gratitude practice, but at least an attitude every day that you’re going to figure out something. I just wrote a blog post on limiting beliefs and one of the things that I wanted to convey is that we get to choose every single moment how we view the world. And maybe for somebody out there who’s brand new in business or who’s starting a new business. I just read a statistic that said that the entrepreneur demographics are changing. And now like 48% of new entrepreneurs are over 50. So hooray for the old people! 

But I know that there are people out there right now who are thinking, “Well, I’m not any good at marketing. I’m not any good at that piece of it. I can sell stuff, but I’m not good at the marketing stuff.” I’ve got to tell you, I’m married to a guy who doesn’t believe in self promotion because he came from a generation when you played down your assets, instead of being grateful for them and talking about them. So I’d love to hear what you have to say to somebody who has that limiting belief that they can’t market. And they can’t promote themselves.

Craig: You know, we could all market ourselves, and we do it every day in our interactions.  Whether we think of it as marketing or not, we’re marketing ourselves all day long in how we react and treat other people. The thought I had as you were talking about your husband thinking self-promotion sounds like a dirty word is that it doesn’t have to be you talking  about “me, me, me” and “I did this million dollars in revenue.” This is kind of a turnoff in some ways, because you’re talking about yourself. But if you’re talking about how you can help somebody else and how you can provide a good experience for them with your information and knowledge, you’re not talking about yourself in that context. You’re talking about how you can be of service. I think that’s a much easier way for a lot of people from a generation where we weren’t really supposed to be talking about ourselves.

Bunny: Well, it was pre-social media. Our face wasn’t out there. We just weren’t trained to tell people, “Here’s the reason you should hire me instead of the other person.”

Craig: Yeah, exactly. I mean, now we’re all our own brands on social media. But I think that rather than saying to somebody, “Here’s why you should hire me versus somebody else,” you should just talk about how you can be of service in what you do in an authentic way. Then people are more likely to want to work with you, because you’re radiating a sense of positivity and an interest in them. And they’re not thinking that you just look at them as a transaction and then you’re onto the next person.

Bunny: I frequently use with my marketing coaching clients the example of a dinner party. If you went into a dinner party (and this is for people who are just beginning in whatever business they’re in, especially if they’re self-employed), you wouldn’t simply walk in, take your coat off and say, “Hey, I’m selling something, come and talk to me.” Right? I mean, that’s what you don’t want to do with marketing. You want to start by building a relationship. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Craig: I think it goes all the way back to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. People do like to talk about themselves. And so the first thing is you should be listening. That was one of the first things I learned in marketing client service. You need to ask questions and learn from your clients. Focus on what they need, as opposed to talking about yourself. You really want to establish a dialogue with them about their wants and needs and hopes and fears and everything else. Then you can talk about how you can address them. But nobody wants to go in and all of a sudden have you sit down and say, “Here’s my PowerPoint about me and what I’ve done.” It should be more of establishing, from the very beginning, a relationship of openness with folks. Then, after hearing from them, you can say “Well, here’s how I think I can you and here are some ideas that I have that I could share with you.” So I think a key thing is really listening from the very beginning.

Bunny: I even found that to be helpful when I used to first go on listing appointments. I was so nervous that I would sit down and I would immediately try to book an appointment. You know, if you’re not in real estate, a listing appointment is just like sitting down with a prospective customer. I would be so nervous in the beginning and really coming from a place of scarcity where I thought, “If I don’t get this listing, I’m not sure I can pay the rent next month.” And if you’re coming from a place of scarcity, you’re likely to self-sabotage. But that’s such good advice because things changed when I finally learned how to sit back and listen: “I’m here to help you. Tell me what it is that you need. Talk to me.” It’s so powerful to give a client time to talk to you. And I think people forget to do that, right?

Craig: Yeah. And I think sometimes we do it because we’re afraid. What I’ve learned so much over the years in business working with people is that people are terrified of silence, so they will immediately start talking. If there’s a second of silence, you jump in and start babbling. Lord knows I do it. But if you just let somebody talk and let it sort of sit there for a second and not just try to be filling in all the time. It drives me crazy when people are doing that. It’s much better if you can have the client talk and then ask some more questions and then be warm and reflective about it. Back to the Dale Carnegie thing, I think one of his first points was if you’re at the dinner party, ask people about themselves. Most people do like to talk about themselves. So ask them and don’t just start talking about yourself. 

Bunny: I think that even people who would say, “I don’t like to talk about myself,” really do want somebody to ask them and listen to them.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s not just asking them to go on and on. It’s more meaningful questions about, for example, why they decided to move here. Just those kinds of questions that get them thinking. Growing up in materialistic Dallas, the joke was that the questions at a party were like, “Where do you live? What do you do? What do you drive?” And so it’s not questions like that. It’s asking them more about their life experience,

Bunny: You just brought me to another completely different point, which is for any realtors out there listening: I think it’s really important to convey to your clients how grateful you are for where you live. I mean, if our lifestyle is such a selling point, don’t you think you should share that?

Craig: Oh, yeah, exactly. I mean, living in Santa Fe there’s so much beauty. I’m looking out my window right now at the beautiful blue sky. When I leave my house in the morning and I see the mountains, and then when I’m coming home at night and the sun is setting over the mountains and I see all the different colors and everything, it’s just breathtaking. It’s great to live in such a great and wonderful environment and in a place that is very spiritual, going back with the native Americans—respect for the earth and nature and all of those things—I think it does help center us more than a lot of other places.

Bunny: How do you convey that to your clients? I know you’re doing something really cool online that’s different from some other realtors.

Craig: Well, I’m not just posting on my Facebook page,” Hey, I just sold this house or just sold that house.” Well, that’s great. But I’m more talking about new experiences in Santa Fe: new restaurants, or a new place to go hiking, or something exciting that’s happening at one of the museums or things like that—enthusiastically talking about the experience of living in Santa Fe. And if down the road, by the way, you’re looking at this stuff and you decide you want to buy a house here, I would love to help you. But it’s more about conveying the reason why we all want to live here

Bunny: And tell us about your blog, because I think it’s amazing.

Craig: So I created this blog, which is called Santa Fe Scenes. It’s that same kind of thing where it’s just talking about having fun in Santa Fe. One of the things was, you know, we’ve got the old Santa Fe trail and we’ve got the old Pincus trail, but did you know that we had a Margarita trail and a Chocolate trail? Stuff like that. Just being whimsical about it and talking about some of the things are unique about the city and sharing my own passion for Santa Fe. I was very fortunate to be able to do a lot of international travel for my job. I was grateful for the opportunity that I was given to see places that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise from Bogota to Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and Beijing and places like that. So I’ve always been enthusiastic about travel and now living in such a beautiful place like Santa Fe, I want to share that enthusiasm with people.

Bunny: And you’re getting some good feedback on that I bet, right?

Craig: Yes, I am. I’m getting good feedback on it. It’s been a wonderful thing to reconnect with friends who are saying, “Good for you, you old dog! You’re back out there trying something new.” Because whenever someone says, “Oh, you’re a new realtor,” I say, “Well, I’m an old new realtor. I’m 61 and I’m starting this for the first time.” But it’s been great from that perspective and the support that you get from your friends. Then people are saying, “Oh, well, I know somebody who might be interested in sending you that information.” I think that’s one of the positive things that social media has done where we’ve been able to reconnect with so many people that we might have completely lost touch with.

Bunny: Oh yeah. I did a post not very long ago about how grateful I was, and it was in the middle of all the fear over Facebook and Twitter. And I just said that it’s such a great platform for reconnecting with cousins that I haven’t seen since I was six. I mean, I just turned 60. I’m an old dog and this is a new trick for me, but I think that if you use it the right way, it’s a real gift. I also think there are so many realtors, like you said, who just post either pictures of houses that they have listed or their accomplishments. And I think they’re really missing an opportunity.

Craig: Yeah. Because then you’re just talking at someone. You’re not sharing information and excitement about things with them. People don’t want to look at that stuff. They want to look at things like the fact that there are like six great chocolate tiers in Santa Fe. And then the next time I’m in town, I want to go to each one of them. Or discovering an amazing new hiking trail or a beautiful image of a shop window or a piece of art or something like that. 

Bunny: Yeah, it’s so much better than “I just listed this house at 123 main street. Don’t you wish you owned it?” Exactly.

Craig: Exactly. I think more people would react to it. I’d really like to have some of that green chili chocolate over at The Chocolate Smith or whatever. It’s much more interesting than a picture of a kitchen that has granite countertops. Oh my goodness.

Bunny: And, you know, Craig, I found that people will call me and they’ll say, “Well, I’ve been following you on Facebook for two years. And I feel like you’re my best friend. I think you’d be the right person to show me around and help me find a house.” And I bet that’s happening to you too.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. It’s funny, you mentioned that. One of the people I’ve been mentoring told me a story about how she posted a lovely picture of herself and then somebody called her and said, “I feel like I already know you because you just look like a nice person and I feel like I can trust you.” I think also that it’s our eyes and our smile and everything that conveys so much of what you’re talking about. If you have a spirit of gratitude and service and a sense of abundance, not scarcity, it shows in your face, your eyes, your smile, and your whole persona.

Bunny: Well, we’re going to have to wrap up here in a minute, but I would love to hear if you have just three great tips that you would give to somebody who feels kind of stuck in their marketing. It could be what you’ve learned in 30 years or in the last three days, whatever it is.

Craig: I think one is changing your question from “How do I market myself?” to “What can I do for this client?” or “What can I do that’s going to excite the people? How can I make them feel appreciated and valued?” And this can work in cases where you’re actually working one-on-one with a client or cases where you’re trying to figure out how to promote what you’re doing. How do I find ways to surprise and delight people? So I like to do that with social media buys, where you come up with quirky, little things to talk about that are authentically Santa Fe or a funny picture of my dog or something like that. You want to put a smile on people’s faces. And social media gives us so many opportunities to be able to do that in ways that we couldn’t before. So the main thing at the end of it is to put your client first, and then I think everything else will come from there.

Bunny: You’re absolutely right. I think as long as your passion is helping people, then success is just a natural by-product of that.

Craig: Exactly. People feel that energy and then they want to tell their friends about you.

Bunny: What I’ve found is that people want to be able to trust somebody, especially in this business where they’re making possibly the biggest purchase of their life.

Craig: Right? I’m thinking back to these younger clients. We were touring houses, and they were interested in one particular house and I was like, “No, I’m not going to let you buy this. This is not the right move.” And I think all of a sudden they’re like, “Wow, he really cares. He’s not just thinking ‘Tick tock, tick tock. We’ve seen three houses.’” This is not House Hunters International where there are the three properties and you have to buy one. So again, it’s not a transaction. It’s a journey. It’s a relationship.

Bunny: I think that’s the most important tip for somebody to take away. Whether you’re selling widgets or earrings or house cars or houses, this is not a transaction. It’s a relationship. We want people to trust you and come back over and over. I don’t know how you can love your job if you’re not doing it the way we’re doing it.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. And have fun with it. We get to meet interesting people all day long. We get to see things. We get to use our own creativity to express ourselves. I know there are people that are in jobs that don’t have that. But I also read things about  the janitor in an elementary school who takes real pride in what they do, and they are going to do the best job that they possibly can. So I think in almost everything, you can come at it with a mindset of “How can I make this a great experience for me and for others?”

Bunny: That’s great stuff. Tell us where people can find you and where they can find your blog.

Craig: Well, probably the most fun thing I’m doing is the Santa Fe Scenes blog. 

Bunny: Okay. And we’ll share that on the information page for the podcast. And then, of course, if people want to buy a house from you, they can find you through there?

Craig: Yeah. All my information is on there. So one stop shop.

Bunny: Craig, I’m so excited that you were here. This was fun. I think we could do it again.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah.

Bunny: Because I think this is the place where people get stuck. People who are self-employed get stuck in this part. And so I think there’s a lot of stuff that we can talk about.  But I’m of course really grateful that you agreed to talk with us.

Craig: Oh, thanks. It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate it. 

Bunny: And to everybody else, thanks for being here. This is once again, the Lifesaving Gratitude podcast. I’m Bunny Terry. You are welcome to go to my website if you’d like to learn more about me and about buying my book, which is all about gratitude and how gratitude helped me kick stage four cancer’s ass. And we’d love to have you follow us and subscribe on spot Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks so much, Craig.

Craig: Thank you. Next time.