The Happiness Habit with Kim Strobel

0:03 Welcome to the Catching up with Casey's show. If you are tired of chasing buy in, frustrated with teams who can't seem to get on the same page, or over the constant struggle of holding people accountable without micromanaging, this is the show for you. I'm Casey Watts, speaker, author and the creator of the Clarity Cycle Framework. I help leaders just like you take teams from frustration to alignment, so teams can work collectively toward a common purpose in a committed way instead of against each other as though they are functioning in different organizations. And we do it all through the craft of clarity. Whether you lead from the middle or you were the front facing leader of your organization.

0:46 On this show, we bring clarity to the seemingly small things in leadership that make the biggest difference because clarity precedes capacity. Now, with all of that said, let's dive into today's episode. OK, Hey everybody, welcome to today's podcast episode. Thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to have another Blondie on the show right next to me. And also, I mean, not just a Blondie, but a short blonde rocking and rolling with that cute haircut.

1:30 So today I have a guest that's going to be talking all about happiness and the habits that are necessary for bringing happiness to your life. And I'm so pumped for this episode. We had this planned for last week. Or was it it was earlier this week. It was last week Friday, I think. OK, OK. Yeah, yeah. But and we so we didn't do that last week. We're on the episode today. So welcome to the show, Kim. I'm excited to have you. You know what, I I can already pick up on your energy, so this is going to be great. Awesome.

2:12 OK, so before we get started, as I always do, tell everyone a little bit about who you are and the work that you do. Yeah, so I'm a former 4th grade teacher. That's where I spent a lot of my time. And then from there I was like a literacy coordinator for grades K through 12. So that really helped me be able to see what instruction and engagement looks like at every grade level. And then from there, I became a curriculum director and was really embedded in classrooms once again. And then in 2016, I think I gave my very laid back husband a heart attack when I said I'm quitting my curriculum director's job and I'm starting Strobel Education because I want to travel a country and inspire and empower and support educators.

2:55 And I always say that Scott Strobel has only stood up to me twice in his life. And that was one time he was like, he was like, I, I just how are you going to find these people? And like, you know, I felt like I was risking my family's financial livelihood sort of. But you know what, Casey, I have really come to understand that sometimes you just get those intuitive like God pools that just are in your heart. The seed is planted and you just cannot not, not do it. And for me, I took a big courageous leap. And so back at that time, I was a one woman show and I was going into schools and providing PD on about 15 different topics. And then in 2018, I became a motivational speaker because I've been studying personal development for 30 years because of the struggles I've had in my own life. You know, sometimes through your own pain and your own work, you decide that you get to take that pain and make it into purpose, which is what I'm about.

4:01 And so now I travel across the country and I do keynotes, which is my favorite thing to do. And then I have a team of gals. I always say we're like the the girl, the Girl crew. And they go in and they do lots of PD for schools. And then I run the back end of the business and do the keynote notes and I just, I feel so I mean it's. Hard right like the first several years I put in 80 hour weeks, but I I wake up every day feeling thankful that I get to do this work. Yeah man, we have very similar. I'm hopeful that that we have very similar trajectories because I just recently took that step of faith out.

4:42 And let me tell you, my husband saying he was super supportive, but he was like, should I find some additional jobs at like Walmart or something? And I was like, no, that's on me. If, if I need to, I'll get a job at Walmart. Like it'll be fine. But I just, I feel the nudge and I've got to take the leap. And man, I haven't looked back yet. Yeah. I mean, I've looked back, but it's just in awe of the the things that have happened and have taken place to get me to where I am. So, yeah, that's so inspiring. So I, I look up to you and you're just like a great example for where I think a lot of women probably who are, who have this high achieving spirit would like to go. So thank you for just sharing out about that and being open and honest about your journey.

5:33 That's super exciting. Yeah, OK. So I like to on the show ask people because it's easy. I think when people hear guests on the show, I think it's easy to picture them as having, I'm not going to say like a superstar life, right? But it's hard to envision when you're hearing someone share about their life and their journey on a podcast publicly. It's hard to envision like, OK, but what's the real human part of them? So can you share like a hobby or a quirk or just something that makes you uniquely you, but just kind of an average everyday person? Yeah, it's interesting because I think that, you know, when you hear the words like, oh, she travels across the country and she steps on stages and there's, you know, 5000 people in the crowd.

6:24 It's like for me, the 1st 5 minutes I step on the stage, Casey, I tell him my story, which is like, you know, I'm someone who suffered greatly with an anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. I was the woman who struggled to leave her house, walk to her mailbox, get in her car, drive to the grocery store. I mean, I'm talking intense, intense suffering and not knowing what was going on with my mind and my brain and feeling that my self esteem was at an all time low. And just to be, you know, completely honest with you, Casey, because I feel like if I'm going to have this platform, you're going to, you're going to hear like the bad and dirty and hard parts too.

7:04 But you know, I ended up that that was several years ago. But like, this has been a part of my life. And to be honest with you, I feel like I have a happy disposition. I mean, goodness, I've tagged myself as the happiness coach. I've studied happiness and well-being for 20 years. But in August of this past year, I titrated off my anxiety meds. I've done that twice now in my life. And I'm just going to tell you and it, it, it's it, it was a hard six weeks from December. I'm just now coming. And you know what, Casey, I, I had to go back on him. I, I did, I, I have a chemically imbalanced brain. As much as I don't want to have to take the medicine, I'm so thankful for it because I'm going to tell you what in in December.

7:49 Kim's trouble was back to her anxiety, her a little bit of my panic, even like low like sad and depression and like what's going on? And I feel hopeless. And you know, that's really hard to reconcile because like the real me is is pretty darn joyful and and enthusiastic. But like I've had to accept that I am somebody who perhaps has a chemical imbalance. And so, you know, I have a lot in my life. I run, you know, 25 miles a week. I walk 4 miles a day. I do my strength body workouts. I do my Transcendental Meditation. I've done a lot of work on myself. And yet yet there's this part of me that I need to learn to love and accept that says, you know what? There's just an also a part of you, Kim, that needs a lot of support.

8:39 And so I'm working like with the shame around that a little bit, to be honest with you. You know, I can be like this strong, boisterous, bold woman on the stage, but it's really important for me to be real and say I'm also the woman that sometimes feels like, can I make it through another day? Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh, I love the vulnerable ability there. I think people will definitely resonate with what you just said. Even I I resonate with what you just said too. I have had same thing, have been on anxiety meds for many, many years and every now and then I get this like urge to, I don't need that anymore. Silly me, silly, silly me.

9:20 And so I have tried to come off of it. And then I just find that why, why am I choosing to do this to myself if it is supporting me and I can continue to do, like you said, the other things that I know are going to further support. So all of those scaffolds, it's just like, it's just like in teaching, we need scaffolds in our life in order to help us to maintain our positivity, our joy, our fulfillment and show up not only for ourselves, but for the people that rely on us or that we want to show up for. Yeah. And, you know, I think too, like for me, I mean, I'm doing the work on the inside of myself.

10:04 I mean, I have a therapist. I, you know, do a lot of work. It's not like I'm just taking the medicine. But my husband the other day, he said, you know, Kim, that's like me deciding not to wear my glasses around all day. And it really did make me feel because I think like this is the real me, like this is the happy, emotionally regulated. And, you know, when I'm not on my medicine, I'll just be honest with you. I'm like, I mean, y'all can feel my, I'm on the medicine right now. And look how worked up I am, you know, and I've already worked out and I've done all my stuff this morning and I did my meditation and it's like still firing pretty high, you know? And it's my superpower too, right? Like it's my superpower on a stage. But yeah, I, and I think that's the thing, Casey, is like, we preach mental health, but like, you know, how many of us are really like acknowledging that this is the support we need.

10:54 And so having a platform and having a voice makes me feel very responsible for showing that real side of myself. Yeah, that's awesome. So let's talk about the happiness habit. And this is what you speak on pretty regularly. And and guys, if you're listening, highly encourage you, which we're going to talk about this at the end of the show, but I just want to bring it up now. You're going to want to follow Kim on social media because there you're going to see not only the what she's doing out in the world and speaking on stages, but also the very real, like here's what life looks like side of her. And I think that's super encouraging as well.

11:38 But talk to us a little bit about the happiness habit, specifically the message that you bring. What led you to? That Yeah. Well, you know, because I found myself in such a cage in my young 20s, I just started reading everything I could get my hands on when it came to, like, how do I, like, change and work on the inside of Kim so that I can get those outward results? And then about 15 or 20 years ago, I came across Sean Acre and Sonia Lubrmiski's work on happiness. And I was just so mesmerized by the research. And so one thing I want to say first is, like, what is happiness, right?

12:18 And so happiness is not like this. It's not like we jump through all these hoops and achieve these things and acquire these material things. And like you do all the right things. You go to school, you get a degree, you get a job, you get a better job, you make better money, you get the better house, you get the better car, you get married, you have the 2.5 kids, like all of these things. And then like finally, like, oh, finally I've I've reached what's called like the formula for happiness. I'm over here. And what I want to say is like happiness is a, it's not a destination, it's a journey. And every single day, we're all a mixture of happy and unhappy all day long, right? But what I do know is that happiness is, you know, like a sense of sometimes contentment, a sense of like positive emotion in our and well-being in our life.

13:12 Happiness is when we have like purpose, we have something that fires us up and how we want to contribute and we have meaning in our lives. And so to me, like those are the core ingredients of happiness, but also understanding that, you know, it is not something that you just finally get to the golden gates of happiness and you're like, now I'm a happy person. But what I do know, Casey, is that every single one of us can get happier. And I want to explain the research around happiness, if we can start there, because I think it's really shocking. And So what we know is that everyone has what's called a set baseline happiness level. So maybe my baseline happiness level is here and maybe yours is a little bit higher, Casey.

14:00 And so let's say that you and I leave and we go shopping for the day and we just have so much fun and we get a little boost in happiness, right? Or something good happens in our life and and we do get a boost in happiness. Well, after a period of time, it might be two hours or two days or two weeks, our happiness will return back to whatever our baseline level is. And where it gets very interesting is the same is true for when we endure hard things. The very vetted studies show that as humans, we can endure trauma and loss and illness and disease and adversities and our happiness levels will drop. But surprisingly so for most people, they will reset back to their baseline.

14:51 And I'm not going to lie, I do struggle to understand that. I know the research shows example after example. I believe in that because I know people around me who have endured really hard things and they go on to live joy filled, meaning filled lives. But there's still like a part of me that's like, I don't know, like if certain things did happen, how, how would I recover? But I think the research is very interesting. But then that begs the question, well, why does Casey have a higher baseline that she operates out of compared to Kim? And so I tell people, if you picture your happiness as a pie chart, the research says that 50% of your long term happiness is genetic. Yes, Casey, when I say this, I see 80% of the people in the crowd drop their heads and they're literally murmuring, I'm so screwed.

15:50 Oh my God, that's wild. I know. And it's such a big number, but it's like really. And like, you know how you're, you're either wired to hold on to fat or not. Some of us can look at a French fry and gain weight and some of us can eat French fries all day long. So there's this genetic piece that comes from our parents that says like you have a brain that's either wired towards optimism or you have a brain that kind of is wired towards like seeing all that's wrong. So like I always say, I was born to like a super happy, joyful dad who just kind of goes through life and everything just just doesn't really get to him too much. And then my mom is like this most loving, nurturing person, but like her brain is completely wired to the negative.

16:37 So like, she doesn't mean to, but she'll just like come over to my house and she'll say, Oh my gosh, you know, you, you really need to get those floors redone. They're, they're really. And then she'll go to the bathroom and she'll say, I'm not really liking that paint color. Or she'll say, sweetheart, you've got like this fever blister scar on your face. And you know, I just think you need to get like, she, she loves me. She thinks I'm beautiful, but like her brain just sees like things that are wrong, right? And so her brain has just fired like that. And I always giggle because I gave her a copy of my book, you know, teach happy. And I said, like, mom read it so that you can learn some happiness habits so that we can kind of get your brain pinging. So she did read it and she it's the only book she's ever read.

17:20 And then she said, sweetheart, that was such a good book, but I'm probably not going to do any of those things. And I was like, and this is the root of the problem. How did I you know? And so 50% is a lot. And I also believe in epigenetics, Casey and epigenetics say, OK, OK, Kim, you might be born with the gene that that, that, that predispositions you a little bit towards negativity, but your actions and behaviors and environment can decide whether or not that gene turns on. So I mean, I'm not ready to argue with Sonia Lubrmiski just yet about that, but I find it fascinating. So, so then where it gets really interesting, Casey, is we know that we can take every single external circumstance a human has had, like what kind of home were you raised in?

18:13 Were your parents married, divorced, single, widowed? Did you have money? Did you not have money? Were you bullied? Were you popular? Were you athletic even all your external circumstances as an adult and we can, you know, what kind of job do you have, you know, what kind of money do you make? And we can throw all of those things into the pie. And only about 10% of our long term happiness comes from those external circumstances, 10%. And. If you're like Kim Strobel, you will let some people and some experiences still way more than 10% for months or even years, right? And so it's eye opening and and I want to make sure that I'm being clear, you know, this does if you have depression or you have a mental struggle, I'm not saying oh, that it should only still 10%.

19:17 I am not saying that those conditions are outside of that, but what I think that stat does is it really shows that we have a lot more ownership than what we realize and that we choose at times to let things like our job or people or parents, we choose to let them steal more of our happiness for far too long. And so to me, there's personal power in that. Yeah. And then so we've got 50% genetic and we've got that little sliver of 10%. And then that leaves 40% of the pie left.

20:00 And that's the part that has fired me up for the last 15 years. Because what we know is that humans can increase their happiness levels by up to 40%. And it has to do with the thoughts they're thinking, the actions they're taking. And the behaviors or the habits that they have in their lives. And so my book is focused on that 40%. And I will tell you, Casey, I am not the happiness guru, but I am one heck of a happiness practitioner. And I have specific habits that are embedded in every single day of my life.

20:41 I mean, I batch them, I put them together. I knock out, you know, there's a top five happiness habits and I knock out, I think it's, it's the first 3 or 4 within the first hour of my day, you know, because I'm like, it's a part of who I am. It's a part of my discipline. Right. Yeah. There's. So much to unpack there, which is why if listeners, if you are, if this is resonating with you, it's absolutely going to resonate with your people. Definitely reach out to Kim, see how you can bring her on as a speaker or even bring on her team. So let me ask you this though. You, you speak about happiness and the habits of happiness when you're keynoting.

21:23 Did I hear you mention you're also a happiness coach? So do you coach people around this as well? So I tagged myself as like the happiness coach because I felt like like on my Instagram, which is Kim's trouble joy, and on my Facebook, like I'm, I'm, I'm kind of coaching people through my videos and stuff. But what I learned is at one time I thought I was going to go into one-on-one coaching and I don't really like that. Casey, I like 5. I like 5000 people in the crowd. 75 minutes. Let's raise that roof and I'm going to hug you and love you, but I don't want to coach you one-on-one. Yeah, that's so funny. OK, Yeah, All right. Well, that's good to know. But still bring her on your stages so that your people can start having having conversations about these habits and maybe they have a mentor that they can bring some of this to.

22:13 It's so funny. You said something and I don't remember. Maybe it was like your mom. Yeah. So your mom read the book and then she gave it back to me. And she was like, I don't see this. I'm not probably not going to do this. I saw a real recently and it's this woman who she's leaving her counseling appointment or her therapy appointment and she's like waving at the therapist like, oh, this is so great. Thank you. Bye. She closes this door and then there's like this, like punk rock music that comes on and she's like, back to my old self, you know, like I'm that was good. But I'm going to do my own thing because you have to make a super intentional choice about the things that you practice. So I'm so curious to know what are some things that you suggest, maybe some things that come from the book that would be helpful?

23:03 Oh yeah, I'm happy to teach a few of those. And I do want to say because a lot of people are going to Google Kim Strobel. And I do have two websites, Casey, because in the education world, my website is Strobel, education.com, but I also speak for businesses and organizations now. And so that's like the Kim strobel.com. So sometimes people like in the education world land on kimstrobel.com, but it's really, I want them on the education site, the Strobel education. But OK, so here's the I'm going to give you the top five research based happiness habits. I'm not going to explain them all because we don't have two hours, but I'm going to explain at least one of them really, really well for you.

23:43 So these are the top five researched ones that are going to work on that 40% that are within your capacity to do. And so the first one is the practice of gratitude. And I'm going to come back to that one and really explain it. The second one is move your body. Casey, we've got to move our body 30 minutes a day. And I know when I say this, there are people in the crowd saying, Kim, I have 17 kids at home, 62 practices in a week. I can't even breathe. And you now want me to go out 30 minutes a day. And I'm going to say, Yep. And here's how I'm going to show you, you have time. And I'm not trying to shame anybody because I have a problem with this too. But I'm going to have you go to your cell phone and I'm going to have you click on settings and I'm going to have you look at your screen time.

24:27 And I'm going to have you look at how many times did you spend today watching video reels, being on, on Instagram, being on Facebook, being on TikTok because Kim Strobel does that too. But if you're saying, oh, wow, I spent 100 and, you know, 2 minutes watching these reels and, and stuff today. But like, I don't have time to move my body. That's where I'm going to fight with you. And I'm going to be like, are you choosing things that fuel you or are you choosing things that drain you? You know, and I'm going to tell you what, like I struggle with this too. Like I got to set timers on my phone because I can go down those rabbit holes forever. So move your body 30 minutes a day. The third one is random acts of kindness. And this is just little things like I'll go to Walmart later today and I will be like, Oh my goodness, you know, you were the best cashier.

25:12 Like this is hard to be in here. We're getting ready to get Snowmageddon and like you checked me out so fast. Thank you so much. Or I'll smile at someone or I'll give someone a compliment. Like these are little tiny things and we just have no idea that they not they don't only change the chemicals in our brain. They are having such a positive effect on the person that gets to receive those. So random and the acts of kindness is the third and then the 4th and these are in no certain order. Is meditation the practice of meditation? So I am an empty nester and I have a lot of time now. So I learned Transcendental Meditation. So this high strung girl does 20 minutes in the morning, 20 in the evening.

25:52 But we actually know that if you can just sit for a 2 minute period and just concentrate on your breath, get your mind calm, concentrate in and out, just on your breathing, yes, your mind's going to be everywhere else. It doesn't matter. But give yourself a teeny tiny pocket of time to just ground yourself. And then the fifth one is social connections. The relationships that we have in our lives, the relationships we have with the people that we work with, our friendships, our social activities. And that's the one Casey, I was kind of lacking in because, you know, I love my work and and I'd love to work really hard. And there's a whole problem with that sometimes too, Casey and will not. But that's a whole different episode of breaking down to them struggle and her issues.

26:39 But I've really worked hard in the last couple years and I'm like, I want to pour into my friendships more. So guess what? I play pickleball now. I just formed a mahjong group. If you haven't heard about mahjong. OK, So my girlfriends and I got together last night. We played that. And so these are like little social connections that like really do to elevate our our happiness levels. But what I want to do is I want to go back to the first one I said, which was gratitude. Well, before I do that, Casey, is there anything you have for me before I go into gratitude? Because I know that I can just kind of like go real fast and not give anybody processing time. No, and that's OK. So I'm I'm just going to pause here and say, guys, go back and listen to this episode again.

27:21 Even if you want to just jump to those five things and write them down. But you know, I'm ready. Let's go for it. OK, so Oprah preached gratitude to me for 15 years. I love my Oprah, but I do not know why I would not adopt A 2 minute daily practice. But I finally read a book that explained why it has such a profound effect on our positive emotion levels. And so the average human being has about 70,000 thoughts a day. And of those 70,000 thoughts, if you're an average human being, what we know is that 80% of those thoughts are negative.

28:05 So most of us, when we lay our head on the pillow at night, we've had 56,000 negative thoughts, OK? And they're coming so fast in our subconscious mind that like we, we don't even realize they're firing. You know, like I'm over here and like, even though you and I are talking, there's this whole other dialogue, Casey, that's going like, well, isn't she kind of cute and petite? Well, wow, who could rock a haircut like that? I couldn't rock a haircut like that. Look at how nice and smooth her skin is. Like, you know, I'm like critiquing myself, comparing myself to you the whole time we're talking because our brain just does that, that, you know, And so, and then what's even crazier is that of the 80% of thoughts that are negative in a day's time, 95% of those are the exact same thoughts you had the day before. Oh.

29:00 My gosh. And it and it comes from ancient times. We we have this thing in our brain called the amygdala. We still have it today. But back in caveman and cavewoman times, the amygdala had one job and that one job was to scan for danger or negativity all day long in order to keep you safe. Is there a Saber toothed tiger that's going to jump out and eat me? Do we have shelter from the storm? Is there a clan of people from another, you know, tribe riding in to murder us? Like our brain was in such an unsafe environment that it scanned the whole time. And the issue is it's 2026 and we still have an amygdala. So it's not that we're just naturally negative people. It's like a survival mechanism, but it doesn't always serve us. And So what we know is the research says when I can get you to write down three different things that you're thankful for every single day, somewhere between day 21 and 30, I actually start to create a new neural feedback loop in your brain.

30:15 So your brain has thousands and thousands of roadways that it goes down, and whichever roadways it goes down the most, that gets even deeper in green. So if you went down that roadway 32 times today, tomorrow you're going to go down that 45 and the next day 72. And So what happens is when we write our gratitudes, we start taking a different pathway in our brain and we begin to go throughout our day and we start to have more good than bad poppin on our radar. And Casey, I did this with my 4th grade students. We started every morning with 90 seconds of gratitude.

30:55 We went around the room and everybody said one gratitude and in 90 seconds we had 27 gratitudes. At the end of the day, they got their gratitude journals out. They wrote the date they wrote the words. I am thankful because that's a very important phrase to write at the top of your gratitude journal, which I just get a journal from Amazon. I can share the link that I like That is just lined gratitude, you know, journal paper. And then you need to make them specific and you need to make them different at least for the 1st 21 days. So for example, don't say I'm thankful for my husband Scott.

31:37 That's way too generic. I say I'm thankful that tonight Scott Strobel and I have a pizza night, pizza date night. Don't say I'm thankful for my health. Say I'm so thankful that because I had this interview with Casey this morning, I had to really get it going on and get my exercise in early and I'm ready to go. Like be specific, OK? But it is a 2 minute daily practice. And Casey, I'm going to tell you that out of everything I teach, this is the one thing that people say it absolutely changes their life. Yeah, that's amazing. So it's interesting and I want to talk just a little bit more about this because I want to get really, really practical for our listeners. So first, it's interesting because one of the thing, I had an episode a couple of weeks ago maybe with someone who also we talked about gratitude just a little bit.

32:25 And I, you can get away from practices really easily for, for whatever reason, but for probably an entire year, I journal every morning and an entire year I had like a pattern of I am grateful for so and I had like 3 parts. So the first part was always, I'm grateful for, got away from that. And so this year I was like, I'm bringing that back. I need that in my life because I started to notice. It's so interesting. It matches everything that you're saying. But I started to notice that my, as I read through my previous journal entries, I was like, wow, there's like a pattern of negativity and I'm starting with something relatively negative.

33:05 And it could have been, it wasn't big negative, it was just something small like I don't know what to write today. And I literally would write and I don't know what to write today. Or man, it's gloomy outside or I've got a lot to do And that doesn't sound overly negative. And it's not necessarily, but it really is like I'm starting with just a slight negative approach to this journal entry. So I've kind of gotten back to that. But one of the things that I wrote yesterday morning was like I started, I am grateful for. And then before I started writing what I was grateful for, I wrote it. I feel like I'm grateful for the same things over and over and over again. And I feel like they're too broad. So if I, what if I got a little bit more specific and branched out to think about other things I could be grateful for, and it was really, really helpful.

33:58 So I love the specificity that you're talking about there. I think that's so important. Now, what about leaders in schools? Like let's say you've got a leader in a school who is they start early, their feet are to the ground, They feel like it's non-stop and they are dealing maybe with people who are somewhat resistant. Maybe they're in a toxic environment. What are what, what would you say? How could they go about practicing this habit of gratefulness? Yeah, well. First of all, like I, I'll just be honest, I've, I've been and worked in very toxic schools and it, it is rough.

34:40 I've worked in schools where there have been adult teacher bullying happening. And you know what? There's a lot of personalities as a school leader that you have to deal with and there's a lot of pushback and there's a lot of stories that come with people that have an impact on their perspective of things, you know, and so I, I love the energy. Best Buy John Gordon, You know, there are some people that you can move. There are some people that no matter what you do, you're not going to change. And we're not going to focus on them too much right now. We're going to talk, we're going to focus on the ones that are already kind of moving in the positive direction. And we're going to focus on the ones that are kind of in the middle that we think we can pull that way. But what I tell everybody with any kind of practice, it's if it's your exercise discipline, it's your meditation discipline, it's your gratitude Turtle journal discipline, it's your I want to eat healthier discipline.

35:29 You have to engineer your environment for success. And so this is not a habit for any of you all yet like no matter what, Kim's trouble is going to do this no matter what because my brains been wired now for years to do it. But let's say, for example, I would say first you need to decide, you need to tell yourself it's a 2 minute daily practice. It's a 2 minute daily practice. So you're going to get your gratitude journal. I'm going to send you a link, Casey, to the one that I use. And I'm also going to send you my, my gratitude prompt and tracker to share with your people. Because sometimes you're right, we get stuck and we're like, it is kind of hard to kind like what am I grateful for? Like I can only be grateful for my dog so many times, you know?

36:10 And so it's a prompt that gives you 5 areas to look for gratitude and that can really help you to expand where you're looking for gratitude. So I'm going to include that link to you for you and your people and the the Amazon journal that I like to use. But here's what I would say. One, we got to engineer your environment, so decide when is it going to happen. So for me, I have a routine. I wake up, I go to my meditation chair, I do my TM meditation, I get out, I fix my protein shake, I sit in my chair, I write my gratitudes and I do my affirmations, I play on Facebook and then I go for my run. So I always know this is exactly what's going to happen for me every single morning. So you have to decide, is it going to happen right before you go to bed? Is it going to happen as soon as you wake up in the morning? And so if I'm a school leader, I'm going to maybe set my journal on my desk right there where I would leave every day because I also have to have my brain needs a prompt to remember to do it right.

37:11 So or I tell some people, put it on your kitchen counters or next to your coffee maker because you need a prompt that says, oh, I committed to doing this. Oh, there's my gratitude journal. Let me grab it. Let me give myself 2 minutes to do this. And so, so we have to know when it's going to happen and then we have to give ourselves a visual prompt of it happening. And then we have to say, I'm willing to give up two minutes, 2 minutes. Now, I will say back when I was a teacher, we did this really fun thing. There were five of us that called ourselves the Grateful 5. And every morning we would, at some time during the day, e-mail each other three things we were grateful for.

37:54 It was kind of fun because then you would throughout the day, like, let's say I just dealt with like, a kid who kicked me and punched me and, you know, left the room screaming. And then I would like, maybe open up and it'd be like, oh, there's Loretta. She just sent me her Grateful 3. And then I'm like, OK, I recalibrate, you know, so there's some kind of fun ways to do it. But yeah, that's really what I would encourage when it comes to any type of habit forming, habit stacking. Yeah, and with that said, I, I think it could be really powerful to have someone who could be kind of like an accountability partner or at least, like you said, a group of people who are doing this work with you. Or even if they're not doing it with you, if you can just share with someone. Hey, I'm practicing this.

38:36 Would you mind checking in with me every now and then? OK. Oh my gosh, we so. OK, listen, everybody, every time I have a guest before we start the show, I'm like, oh, we're we're going to try to stay between 25 and 30 minutes. I don't. I just love the conversation so much that it in always. I mean, you can go back and look at every episode. It's more than 30 minutes. I just need to let it go. Or maybe not. I probably won't. I'll probably still try to eat that. But this has been such a good conversation. Tell our We'll include the things that you mentioned in show notes. Where can they find yours? The best place to go? Yeah, so they can go to strobleeducation.com. They can go to my Instagram, which is Kim Stroblejoy. You're going to find like all kinds of. I'm going to always be posted about my dogs. I'm the dog rescuer.

39:26 I've rescued 247 dogs. So I'm kind of the crazy dog lady, even though I have a real human son too. But, and then I'm, I'm on LinkedIn as well. So yeah, any of those links would be great. And I would love if somebody like listens to your podcast, I would love for them to like message me and say, Hey, I, I heard you on, you know, a Caseys podcast. Just so to it's always fun to make those links you know and know who's listening and what they thought about it. Yeah, absolutely, definitely reach out. I would love to hear from you guys too, what you most enjoyed from this podcast episode or any episode that you listen to. Kim, thank you for coming on the show. Today. Thank you. It's been wonderful. OK guys, if you enjoyed this episode, it's actually pretty interesting and I did not plan it to be this way. It just kind of happened.

40:15 But Lindsay Deacon and I next week on the podcast are going to be talking about habit stacking. So, yeah. So that's going to be a fantastic follow up to this conversation. OK, We will catch you guys in the next episode. Bye. Hey, listener, I am so honored that you listen to today's episode, and I hope you gained something valuable from it. I'd also be honored if you did ME3 solid favors. First, subscribe to this show. I've got a lot of great content coming up and I don't want you to miss any of it. Second, be sure you're following me on social media platforms. You can find me at. Catch up with Casey on LinkedIn or Instagram. And finally, if you were looking to book a dynamic and relatable speaker for your next event conference or. Retreat.

41:00 I would love to bring a message about how the craft of clarity makes a significant impact on both leadership and life. Until next time, always remember.