Why I Love Treasure Hunting...
- R.E.A.C.H. Team
- 3 days ago
- 5 min read
May is Mental Health Awareness Month and I hope you're aware of the power of gratitude.
There was a window of time in the first three or four years after I started R.E.A.C.H. when I was doing a lot of traveling for speaking engagements. During that stretch I figured out something I thought was a life hack. I figured out that if I had a customer service experience I didn’t like and I wrote a nasty email to the corporate office and threatened to put them on blast on Twitter or Facebook, there was a good chance I could get their services for free or at a significantly discounted rate the next time I used them. So because I was traveling so much, I started going into rental car companies, hotels, restaurants, airlines, whoever I was dealing with, actually looking for something to be wrong. When I found it, I emailed the complaint, made the social media threat, and more often than I expected, I ended up with a free rental car or free nights at a hotel or a credit with the airline. I felt like I had cracked some kind of code for saving money. Before long, I found myself walking into almost every customer service situation already looking for a fight.
What I have since learned about neuroscience is that where your brain fires it hardwires. What I didn’t understand at the time was that I was literally hardwiring my brain to find the negative in all situations. I was training myself to look for what was wrong everywhere I went. And what I now understand is that when it comes to your brain, you find what you’re looking for. If you look for things to be wrong all the time, you will find those things. But if you look for things that are right, or things to be thankful for, you’ll find those too. It all comes down to what you literally program your brain to do.
What I hadn’t anticipated was that my brain couldn’t compartmentalize that negativity only to customer service situations. Our brains don’t know the difference between engaging with a rental car clerk or going to a friend’s house for dinner. So no matter where I was or who I was with, I was always scanning for the negative, always looking for something to complain about, always looking for something to be wrong.
My little experiment to save money spilled out of my professional life and into my personal life. I started noticing everything wrong with my house, kids, my marriage, and even myself. I had created an incredibly toxic mindset and didn’t realize how much damage it was doing. My wakeup call actually came at the so-called happiest place on earth, Disney World. I have a strong working partnership with the Florida Police Activities League. Since before I even started my company they had been bringing me in to train their youth and the officers who worked with them. All of their trainings and conferences are held on Disney property, and many times they let me bring my family and even gave us all free park passes. By this time my family had been to Disney World at least a half a dozen times. On this occasion, we had just been there two months earlier. That trip was in November and happened to be during one of their low attendance weeks. The weather was beautiful and the parks were practically empty. It seemed like we could ride anything we wanted as many times as we wanted. It almost felt like we had the whole place to ourselves! So then that January I went right back for another training and took my family on another trip to Disney World we didn’t have to pay for. On the Saturday that we planned to go to the parks, it was cold and rainy. I remember seeing a news report saying that that day was on record as being colder in Orlando than it was in Anchorage, Alaska! Definitely not ideal theme park weather, but we put on our raincoats and jumped on the shuttle bus anyway.
The bus was packed with families. Everyone was wet and cold. As we rode to the parks I noticed a sign hanging at the front of the shuttle that said No Park Ticket Rain Checks. Disney was letting everyone know that if your ticket was for today, you were going today or you weren’t going at all. No exchanges because of weather, even if the temperature was in the low thirties and it was raining sideways. When I saw that sign, I immediately got angry. I couldn’t believe Mickey Mouse could be that cold hearted and greedy. On the way to the parks I started formulating the email I was going to send to corporate and the threat I was going to make about exposing their greed on social media. I could feel the anger building, and I was ready to let it run wild.
Then that’s when something hit me. I looked around at all the families on that shuttle and started thinking about how many times my family had been to Disney World and how little we had spent to be there. I looked at the parents and kids around us and realized some of them had probably saved up for months or even years to come one single time. Meanwhile we were starting to lose count of how many times we had been, and the one time the trip wasn’t perfect, I was ready to go off, even though we weren’t paying for any of it! Two words came to mind about my attitude. Disgusting and sad. I could not believe how ungrateful I was being.
I knew something had to change, but I didn’t know what. So I talked to a therapist who said that if I could put so much energy into finding everything that was going wrong, maybe I needed to put that much energy or even more into finding things that were going right. So I added a gratitude list to my daily writing routine. Every day I wrote down three or four or five things I was thankful for. I also started writing little thank you notes on restaurant receipts. And when companies emailed surveys after getting an oil change, getting my teeth cleaned, or attending an event, I made sure to fill them out and highlight what I appreciated instead of what annoyed me.
I started doing the work to detox and rewire my brain from negativity. And just like I expected, the world started to look different. I woke up excited to go out and find the good. And like I said before, you find what you’re looking for. Now I call it treasure hunting. Everyday I go on a treasure hunt, I go looking for things to be thankful for.
Now did that mean my life became perfect from then on? Absolutely not. Struggles never go away. But that shift in mindset allowed me to become more solution minded than problem focused. Instead of magnifying the negative, I choose to amplify the positive. I don’t ignore what’s wrong, I just keep it in context. Some days and in some moments it’s a lot easier than others, but now, more than twenty years later, I still understand that the peace of heart and mind it brings me makes it all more than worth it.
Here's a tool you can use and share that can help you find the treasures in your life when times get a little tough.
And here's a quick video that talks a little bit more about the power of gratitude.
As always, thank you for the work you do,
but most importantly for the person you are.
Also don't forget to share this to your socials!
