Q&A WITH KEVIN CLAYSON

Q: The theme of our podcast is changing lives, and at the very beginning of your book, you mention the concepts in it that you share have changed your life and your wife’s life. How so?

• Just imagine for a moment, you are in foreclosure, your car has been seized, you don’t have enough money to buy a turkey for Thanksgiving or buy presents for Christmas, and you were previously the owner of a successful real estate company.
• Now, with nothing left, you find yourself working for $13/hour at a local retailer and cleaning bathrooms at night just so you could put the food on the table, after having a very successful career.
• Then I want you to imagine having an unbelievable amount of joy through that entire scenario.
• If you want to know how this book changed my life, I just gave you a piece of my life story.
• This book, these principles shifted everything for me.
• It changed my marriage, the way my wife and I interact with things, frustrations and difficulties.
• It changed the way we parent, the way our kids interact with the world around them.
• It literally changed everything for me financially, emotionally, you name it.

Q: In the book, you talk about something called the Red Door. Tell us about that.

• There were things I needed to do to find happiness in the middle of otherwise frustrating moments.
• As I got to the writing process, one of the things I really wanted to do was put out a kind of business parable.
• The story of the red door is about this guy who’s destined for something greater and is looking for something more.
• He encounters this interesting fellow named Patros who introduces him to this adventure.
• It involves a very beautiful red door and entering into a sort of enchanting and adventurous room.
• This main character, Jacob, ends up going through the red door that ultimately leads him to find unmeasurable wealth.
• Here’s a little spoiler alert; that unmeasurable wealth has nothing to do with dollars or diamonds or gold.
• It was just this way to articulate principles that could be understood through a different paradigm.
• I wanted to start the book with it because I thought it would kick things off in a cool way.

Q: You referenced flipping the switch and the book has this F.L.I.P formula. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Why don’t you unpack what that is?

• A lot of people think gratitude is a fleeting emotional thing.
• They think it’s a passive thing that transforms us.
• Gratitude journaling, going for a gratitude walk or gratitude jog aren’t bad things.
• However, for me, I’d got to a point in my life where things weren’t going according to plan.
• The crazy thing was on paper, everything looked pretty good.
• The company was doing well, we had money, this awesome family, but I couldn’t find joy in the life I led.
• Sometimes, we chase after things that are never actually fulfilling, but we think are going to fulfill.
• So, we continue to chase them. I had gotten to this point I wasn’t finding the happiness and joy I needed in my life.
• I went on this journey to figure out why. Gratitude became the thing that powered me out of this phase, and I began to call it “flipping my gratitude switch.”
• When I started to write, I realized this is a formula because no matter what’s happening, I can do it the same way, every single time. It creates the same results.
• I also realized the formula goes along with the letters F.L.I.P and thought that would make it much easier for people to implement in the middle of life’s difficulties.
• It all starts with an F which is “Find the frustration.”

Q: Unpack that a little bit.

• Our brains travel along this path. If we see one bad thing, we tend to look for other bad things to gravitate to that one bad thing.
• We rarely take a moment to realize why we aren’t feeling so good inside.
• Finding the frustration is doing the opposite of that.
• When something bad happens to me, the first thing I do is take a moment and acknowledge that I’m frustrated.
• When you’re frustrated, why are you frustrated? It’s really like slowing down that train.
• It’s all a mental exercise that makes us cognitively aware why we’re starting to feel the things we feel inside.
• That awareness makes all the difference because it allows us to identify why we’re feeling the way we are and work on it so we no longer have to feel that way.

Q: Tell us about the L?

• The L is “Look for what’s awesome.”
• Here’s the key. You’re looking for what’s awesome embedded in the frustration, and that’s the difference.
• Looking for what’s awesome about the frustration is doing the work.
• I stubbed my toe and I’m frustrated, I know I’m frustrated, what could be awesome about that?
• When you ask what could possibly be awesome, your brain does this exercise where it fills the void you created. It starts to change how you interact with it.

Q: What’s the I?

• In the book, I is “Initiate gratitude.” But I’ve come to use a different word that articulates it and explains it better and it’s INSTALL. We “Install gratitude.”
• What’s the app store of life? For me, it’s language, it’s words.
• How do we use words as part of the F.L.I.P formula to create new perspective of our lives?
• By seeing what’s awesome embedded in the frustration, we immediately move from I to P. it happens naturally.

Q: Let’s go to P.

• P is you “Power up with gratifuel.”
• This is a word we invented when I came to realize gratitude fuels every aspect of life.
• When we find the frustration, look for what’s awesome in it, install gratitude, our bodies naturally power up with gratifuel.
• You’re are hard-wired to feel awesome when you utilize active gratitude this way.
• The body will automatically release dopamine and oxytocin.
• Dopamine is the reward hormone, while oxytocin is what makes you want to hug someone.
• All of a sudden, you go through the process of saying you’re thankful, find the thing which is awesome in the frustration and you feel different.
• Also, when you do that, your brain begins to forge new neural pathways.
• When we practice this enough and our brains get rewired, when those frustrations happen, we’ll be predisposed to a new reaction. It’s not complaints, it’s gratitude.

Q: How can people follow you if they want to learn more?

• @kevinclayson on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
• You can also go to Amazon or Audible to buy the book, “Flip the Gratitude Switch.”

 FINAL THOUGHTS

• I loved how Kevin lived through real challenges in his life.
• So, when he talks about the F.L.I.P formula, he’s a guy that experienced a whole lot of difficulties much worse than stubbing a toe, and has being able to flip that around with some of the concepts he shared.
• I loved when he talked about owning happiness vs. leasing happiness.
• The analogy of the movie of our lives and that life doesn’t have to change for things to be better in our lives.
• Very often, it’s just a change in the lenses that we view things with.
• Kevin also said complaining makes hard things harder, and that really resonated with me.
• I also loved when Kevin said if you can change your moments, you can change your hours, days, weeks, months, years, and this can change your life.

RESOURCES

• Buy Kevin’s book