Gratitude with Brittney Clarkson

[Intro] Hi, and welcome to my podcast. I'm your host, Corinne Powell. I'm an intuitive guide and the owner of Change Radically.

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Now, on to today's episode.

Corinne Powell: Oh, I'm so glad you joined me and Brittany today.

Brittany is going to share from her own story about how she came from negativity to a place of deep gratitude within, and how you can do the same if you'd like.

I want to share a little bit about who Brittany is before we jump into the conversation with her.

Brittany Clarkson is a mom of three boys and her desire is that every woman knows she is worthy of ease and joy, and that she finds the encouragement and motivation to pursue her best life possible. 

Brittany uses her own history of mental illness and stories from her past and present to teach other moms how to overcome their negative thoughts and embrace all that they were called to be.

Brittany is the host of the Meant to Bloom podcast. She's the creator of the Happy Mom Method and the Everyday Joy Planner. You're going to hear so much goodness in this short conversation that Brittany and I have, so I will stop talking and let her begin. Thanks for being here, Brittany.

Brittney Clarkson: Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to share my take on gratitude. Yeah, so I can jump into it here.

Hum, I used to be like a super ungrateful person. I get what it feels like to have people tell you just try gratitude and to be like, I don't know what that feels like.

I struggled with depression for like 15 years, and for the most of the time, I didn't even know what it was.

I thought I was just miserable. But yeah, I was super disconnected from gratitude, so I get that. And I had like this friend who was super happy and bubbly all the time.

And her secret was that, you know, she was really tuned in with gratitude. And I was like, yeah, I don't know how to do that. And so I started like looking into gratitude and searching it out at that point.

And everything you could find, it seemed like, you know, this was years ago, but it seemed like everything you could find about gratitude was like the science behind it from like Psychology Today websites. And it's like, it's great information, but how is it helping?

Because, you know, you'd get down to the end of their article, and it's like, here's a practical tip for gratitude. And it's like, wake up in the morning and list three things you're grateful for first thing.

I'm like, okay, if you're in this super disconnected from gratitude state, and if you're as far away from it as I was, I was waking up like pessimistic, already stressed about my day.

Like, I'm not waking up with this attitude of I want to better myself first thing in the morning. I'm like, I barely want to get out of bed. Give me coffee. I can't think straight. Today probably is going to suck anyway.

Like so far away from gratitude. The last thing you want to do is make a list of things that are good in your life.

So I gave up on it for a while. And eventually I ended up, like, in the minimalism side of things.

With, like, a mommy minimalist coach, and she ended up sharing a trick for, like, a gratitude exercise that I had never heard before, and it was what I needed. So I'm, like, all about this one.

And what it is, is it kind of gets you it goes ahead and taps into, like, the dark feelings when you are so ungrateful. And I think that's why it really helped, because I was so in depression, and I was so numbing out feelings.

But when I wasn't numbing out a feeling, the easier ones to feel were the negative, not the positive. So the exercise goes like this:

Think of three things, or you can even start with just one.

Think of something that is good in your life.

Something you would say you're grateful for.

Just pick something. Okay?

And then step two is imagine your life without it and actually visualize walking through tomorrow without that. And, you know, being me, I picked I think my kids or my husband at the time, and it was devastating to walk through.

Okay, what would a day be like without them? Or if you pick your house, what would tomorrow look like if you lost your house and actually walk through the entire day thinking of all the things you'd have to feel, all the things you'd have to do, and let yourself feel that negative feeling of not having it.

And then step three is pretty important. Now, putting in the gratitude for it is to think of all the ways your life is better because you have it.

And that exercise was so eye-opening to me that I actually felt gratitude for the first time.

Corinne Powell: Wow. Yeah, that's powerful.

Based on what you just said, I think I'm curious, how was that for you when you imagined the day without whatever it was that you, you know, you had in your life presently?

That sounds almost really scary. So like, how was that for you when you're going to that?

You already woke up not feeling emotionally like you were in a great place. So then you go to this spot where you can imagine something in your life that's not there.

How was that for you until you got to the third step?

Brittney Clarkson: Yeah. So when I was living in gratitude, it really came out as a lot of irritability and high stress.

And when I did this exercise, I got to seeing like the real roots behind a lot of the feelings. And it allowed me to tap into like the sadness and to cry and to tap into like the fears that I've been having.

I mean, anxiety comes out as irritability in a lot of ways, but it's rooted in fear.

And so when you can get to like the root of what are you feeling and why, instead of what is the side effect of what you're feeling? I mean, my side effect is I'm yelling at my kids over nothing.

But the root is that I'm afraid of something or I am really sad about something.  

Corinne Powell: Yeah.

Brittney Clarkson: You know, it could possibly be that I'm just afraid of losing them or I'm not even, you know, just not tapping into the right feelings can put you in such a disalignment and it's going to cause you to react in ways that you don't actually want to react.

Corinne Powell: Sure. 

Brittney Clarkson: And so envisioning losing everything that was important to me, it let me actually cry. Like I'm not a big crier. I from a young age started like bottling up the feelings and would cry once a year.

And I started, you know, numbing out all the feelings because some reason my head got the idea that feelings were bad to have.

So, yeah, we overcame that.

Gratitude helped. Getting into this gratitude exercise really helped me to feel the feelings and accept that it's okay to have them.

Yeah. And the thing is like when you're depressed and you're trying to numb out those negative feelings, you can't do that without numbing out the good feelings too.

Corinne Powell: Right. 

Brittney Clarkson: You have to feel what it would be like to lose what you have in order to be grateful for having it. Otherwise, you end up with these like really superficial feelings.

Like when it comes to gratitude, like I used to have a really hard time with Thanksgiving when my family would go around the table and say something you're grateful for. I have this huge fear of being judged for what I'm grateful for.

Okay. Because I was not in the feeling of gratitude.

So I was like, well, what do I say I'm grateful for? What's something good in my life? Okay. Well, if I say something really cliche, then what are people going to think?

Like, oh, I'm grateful for my family. Everyone is. Right. Like, do I need to say it?

Yes, you do need to say it. You need to remind your brain that you are grateful for your family. Or if you go and say something that feels trivial, like one example I have is like my washing machine.

There are a number of days where I have journaled about being grateful for my washing machine.

I'm like, it feels like a trivial, dumb thing because it's not emotionally connected like my family. But imagine if you didn't have a washing machine, how would you wash your clothes? That thing saves you so much time.

And my washing machine is like a front loader and it gets really gunked up and having to wash it out puts me in a really bad attitude.

And so I've had to get into gratitude about it. Like, no, cleaning out this nasty filter is far better than going down to the river and beating my clothes clean with a rock.

Like, yeah, it could be a lot more work than this. Putting it into perspective, like reconciliating it all. Yes, there are. There's so many things that you can find today to be grateful for.

And I think so often we're just looking for, you know, what's wrong with things or how can I make something better?

Instead of looking at like, this is actually revolutionarily just amazing to have in my life.

And it can just totally change your perspective of how you walk through your day when you start finding reasons to be grateful and you start actually letting yourself feel the feelings of gratitude for the things.

Hum, I have this other exercise that I've done as a mom that has been so helpful and as a wife, it's really helpful in my marriage too.

Hum, but I, I think I started doing it with my, with my washing machine. It was irritating me. So I started thinking, okay, how grateful am I for this?

I shifted my perspective about that, got grateful for it. And then I took that into my relationships.

I'm like, okay, well, if the thing that's annoying me the most right now I can find gratitude for and change how I feel.

How about the people who are annoying me right now? My kids, I love them so dearly, but children like in nature, the way that they have so much high energy when I have my lowest energy can be so stressful.

And instead of like, I used to just feel resentment towards myself, like mom guilt that  I feel bad that I'm annoyed at my kids for just being kids.

And so instead of that, I chose when they are the highest energy and I'm feeling triggered for no valid reason to them.

I started stepping outside and practicing gratitude for them, thinking about everything

I love about them, every like adorable way they mispronounce a word every time they've been kind to their brother.

Hum, and I just really got into like feeling gratitude every time they were irritating me and it actually shifted my, my response, like my reaction to them because like two, maybe three weeks after I started doing that consistently, I walked into my kitchen to my then one-year-old throwing the coffee craft on the floor, which was glass and it broke and shattered everywhere.

And I just picked up that kid and I kissed him and I put him on the couch in the living room and I told him how much I loved him. I was overflowing with gratitude for my kid after he broke a coffee craft and I'm sitting there cleaning up the glass, thinking about how, wow, a past version of me would have been freaking out and yelling about this.

I would not have like, I would not have approached this with any kind of kindness. And instead I was flooded with actual gratitude for him when he'd done an unthinkable act of, you know, treason in our house.

So I've practiced, I practiced that gratitude and it worked when I really needed it too.

Cause now he doesn't have this scarring memory in his head of me yelling at him for, you know, a dumb little mistake, right? It actually allowed me to be the patient and kind mom that I've always wanted.

And it was practicing gratitude consistently and often that really changed that.

Corinne Powell: Wow. That's, that's a big deal.

I'm curious, do you couple this with, cause you said earlier you were feeling your feelings about like, what would this mean if I didn't have them here?

So how, how do you couple it with, okay, you're feeling something under the surface. You even mentioned like I'm triggered about something.

It's not maybe relevant to the kids at the same time that you're choosing to like sit in gratitude, which is, is clearly shifting your energy sitting in gratitude.

But what about like those other feelings that are present below the surface for another reason?

What do you do with that? Like when you're feeling irritability, but it's actually not for what's triggering you.

Brittney Clarkson: Yeah.

I think that shifting through your mindset and focusing on the good instead of the bad, I feel like it can just like, it puts you in a better place to actually observe the situations in your life instead of observing your feelings about them.

Corinne Powell: Okay.

Hum, yeah, like I'm a big advocate for just stepping away from your situation. When you're too close, you can't, you can't see all the pieces.

And I know there's like a really good metaphor thing out there somewhere that I heard recently, and I can't think of it now, of course.

But it's like when you're too close, you just can't see the big picture.

And when you're too close to what you're experiencing and what you're going through, and you start feeling one thing about something you're looking at, if you can step back from how you're feeling about this one thing and look at everything that's going on, start to notice the good that's happening too.

Because once you start hyper focusing on the negative, you're going to see negative everywhere. You know, it's the whole, you buy a white car and then there's white cars everywhere.

It's what you notice because it's what you're looking for. Right. That's just, it's how the brain works. It's...

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Brittney Clarkson: I'm remembering where I heard it now.It was on Brain Games. Inattentive blindness.No, inattentional blindness. It's not seeing something right in front of you because you're so focused on something else.

So it's literally like how magicians do the sleight of hand. They distract you or, you know, how the pickpockets. They distract you to look one way so they can take something important from you.

And to me, it's getting into the gratitude that helps you focus on what's important to yo instead of that distraction. And that just, that grounds you into a life that is so different from living disconnected from the gratitude.

It's one of those things that just completely changes your life without actually changing anything in your life.

Corinne Powell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can feel it. The fact that it's impacted you so much that you are, you're grateful for gratitude.

Yeah. That's awesome.

Brittney Clarkson: Thanks.

Corinne Powell: So, so it's affected your relationship with your children. It's affected the way you see life.

Can you give us a couple other examples, like just what your life used to be compared to what your life or your days are like now because of you grounding yourself in this gratitude regularly?

Brittney Clarkson: Yeah. So I had to practice a lot of gratitude towards the house I was living in. We had these big dreams.

We moved into a fixer and we had these big dreams five years ago of fixing it up into our dream home.

And then we had two kids and, well, two more kids because we only had one little one when we moved in.

So then we added two more kids and then my husband bought a business and then I started a business and we found ourselves looking around.

This place is a piece of trash and we have not made any progress in about three years. And so we kind of got to realizing like we can't, it's not practical to stay here, but it wasn't the right time to move either.

Like I spent a year with my husband on board that we weren't going to stay there, but we couldn't look yet. The market was just really, really bad. Super high interest rates.

And he's like, we're not buying in this market. We're not going to move right now.

So a lot of waiting and in that waiting, I had to find the gratitude. All right.

So I had to find gratitude for my home in the waiting period. And it was rough and it was hard because you're constantly bombarded with things to compare yourself to.

And they are distractions, spending a lot of time on Pinterest, looking at dreaming up what I want my home to look like, knowing that I can't get it to that right now.

Like, and it was the simplest of things that I did not have gratitude for, for a long time, like proper floor transitions and having trim on the walls, having like our entryway had been re-drywalled, but it wasn't finished.

So it wasn't even textured and painted yet. It was just bare drywall that you couldn't wipe clean when the dogs came in and rub mud on it.

And I'm like, there's literally nothing I can do about this other than like stapling a sheet over the top of it, which looks even like worse almost.

So just in this place of like, there's not a lot I can do, knowing that we're not going to stay here. So it was a lot of deep breathing, a lot of gratitude for what it did have for us.

Gratitude for even when I couldn't find gratitude for more than just the roof over our head and running water and the electricity being on.

I would find gratitude for things in the house or people in the house, memories we've made in the house.

I started creating like little happy zones throughout the house where I could just like, like next to my bed, I got this really, really soft blanket that I love. And I would just put it between my bed and the wall.

And I could tune out everything else in the house and just be in this space where I could do meditations and prayers and journaling and just not think about all the little things that were wrong about the house.

Okay. And I shifted myself into such a place of gratitude. I literally learned to love the house that I had hated.

Ended up creating like a whole course about it with every piece of, you know, layered gratitude for different things and tiny transitions I was able to make just in how I showed up in the house and I shifted myself so much.

And I knew I had to learn how to be happy there. If I was going to be happy in the new house. Now I'm living in my literal dream house. It is everything I ever wanted.

And I'm grateful for trim on the walls. I'm grateful that every window is properly framed in. I'm grateful that every wall has texture and paint on it.

Like, yeah, I'm grateful for all the dumb things. I'm grateful that all the outlet covers match. These are things that you overlook in most houses.

But I lived without it and I experienced without it. And like, it's dumb how much it impacts your mental health.

But it does. And so I am so grateful to be where I am now because of where I was.

Corinne Powell: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's powerful stuff. Very powerful.

I think we all just need to sit in that. Like what you just said, there's so much to that.

You know, like you're looking at what you have, and…OK, so I'm remembering a story based off of someone I was named after.

I was named after a woman named Corrie Tenboom and her family hid Jews during the Holocaust. And then they themselves were sent to a concentration camp because of it.

And in the biography or the autobiography, they talk about how at one point there, the beds that they had were infested with lice or they were in their hair was.

But they found a way to be grateful even for that, because it meant that the guards didn't want to come to those quarters.

So without the guards, without the guards coming there, like they had a lot more peace. They you know, so it was like it just reminded me like in anything.

There is something that we can find gratitude for. And I mean, I know I've come out of like just I grew up in an environment where we were conditioned to just be grateful no matter how else we were feeling.

So I kind of, you know, have to like sit with with it. And I recognize for me, I want to choose gratitude, but I don't mind somebody else saying like right now I feel super disappointed.

Oh, can you tell me about your disappointment? Like instead of having to jump directly to gratitude. And but that's because of what I've come out of.

Right. That's because what I came out of was we don't even talk about the disappointment. We just talk about how we're grateful and we kind of shut down those other feelings that might be there.

But what I hear you saying is really just you're transforming your life by recognizing that there's goodness all around and that things like trim and little, you know, transitions on the floor, all these things that you are enjoying them because you know what you came out of and you found contentment in that place before you came into this space where you have your dream home. 

So I hear you saying something different, right, than what I was reflecting on. And the impact of it is so profound.

Brittney Clarkson: Yeah. Yeah, it really is. You're talking about like in your childhood, you were told, you know, you're trained to be grateful all the time.

I came from one of those houses where I was told I should feel grateful, but I was never taught how to feel grateful.

And that actually put like it became this tug of war between like shame and gratitude. Yeah.

And I know I've talked to a lot of other people who felt that, too, where it's like, oh, well, we were told, you know, like you sit down, eat dinner and you don't want what's in front of you and your parents are telling you, well, you should be grateful because they're starving kids in Africa.

It's like, cool. I can't do anything about that. Am I supposed to mail this plate to them?

I just remember always like it really caused a struggle with gratitude in those earlier ages, like not understanding how to transfer and feel it.

I was just like, OK, gratitude is something I should feel, but I don't know how.

Corinne Powell: Mm hmm.

Brittney Clarkson: Until I felt allowed myself to feel what absence feels like and then getting grateful for it. 

And then you can kind of train yourself into, you know, imagining the absence without having to experience it so that you can feel grateful for what you have now. 

Yes. And it's definitely like, you know, don't get into gratitude because you should feel it.

Get into it because it's going to empower you and change your mind in ways that you didn't even realize you could. 

Corinne Powell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Good stuff. Can you tell us a little bit about your journal, the one that you offer?

Brittney Clarkson: Absolutely. You know, today I'll talk about the gratitude journal that I have. 

I created a prompted gratitude journal because really when you're trying to get into gratitude and it feels cliche and it feels mundane and even if you've practiced gratitude for a long time, you can kind of get into these ruts with it where it's like I'm just listing the same thing over and over again and I'm not really feeling into it as much anymore.

So I created a prompted gratitude journal that asks you about different areas of your life or different things from your past so that you can look at gratitude from a different angle in your life.

Okay. And so that's available on Amazon.

I mean, really, I'd look more into that inattentional blindness.

Don't become inattentionally blind to the important things in your life.

Don't let, you know, don't let comparison become a pickpocket in your life, stealing your joy away and stay grateful for what's really important in your life and that's going to shift how you show up every day.

Corinne Powell: Good. Thank you. Yeah.

And so where is the best place that people can find you?

Brittney Clarkson: I spend a lot of time on Instagram at @britclarkson. Otherwise, yeah, the Meant to Bloom podcast. I show up there once or twice a week.

Corinne Powell: All right. Fabulous. Well, this has been great. I'm pulling things from this, but I'm going to take and implement as well. So thank you for your time.

Brittney Clarkson: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you.

Corinne Powell: If you enjoyed this conversation that Brittney and I had, I wanna highlight a few previous episodes I recorded that you might also find helpful that expand on the topics within this conversation: from season 3 episode 6 - Help for the hard times; from season 3 episode 12 - A key to healing:self-compassion and from season 3 episode 19 - The inside scoop on happy homes.

Here we are, we've come to the end of another episode. Sit back and reflect on what you heard. What’ the one thing that resonates with you that you take away and do something with? Let’s not just listen, let’s listen and take action. Now action may look very different for us, but it’s doing something with what we hear. I hope that you’ll share today’s episode with a friend that you think will also enjoy it and please come back next week.

I hope that you have a fabulous week and that you remember when you pillow your head at night, when you’re going through your days, that who you are is good and I am glad that you're alive.