Gratitude Through Hard Times

Episode Summary
In this episode, Chris Schembra sits down with Jessica Weiss to unpack a radical but practical idea: happiness at work isn’t something you wait for in a distant future, it’s something you actively create, even in imperfect conditions. Drawing from Jessica’s book Happiness Works, the conversation reframes happiness not as a fleeting mood or a vague “choice,” but as a set of tangible, science-backed tools anyone can use right now. They explore why the single most powerful first step toward happiness is simply finding a friend at work, how resilience is a muscle built through small, confidence-building decisions, and why “good enough” choices often lead to more satisfaction than endless optimization. Together, they dismantle common myths about happiness, connect gratitude and joy to long-term resilience, and show how depersonalizing failure and using feedback as data can transform setbacks into progress. The episode culminates in Jessica’s five-part framework—connection, resilience, optimism, trust, and progress—offered not as a rigid sequence, but as a buffet of tools listeners can draw from as needed. At a moment defined by burnout, uncertainty, and rapid change, this conversation makes a compelling case that happiness isn’t fluffy or naïve; it’s a strategic advantage for individuals, teams, and organizations alike.
10 Quotes
“Happiness isn’t something you wait for in the future; it’s something you build, even in imperfect conditions.”
 
“The fastest way to improve your happiness at work is shockingly simple: find a friend.”
 
“Happiness is not the absence of unhappiness; it’s having tools you can rely on when things get hard.”
 
“Resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s a muscle, and you build it through small decisions.”
 
“Good enough decisions often create more happiness than perfect ones that take forever.”
 
“Happiness isn’t a choice. It’s strategies, tactics, and habits you practice every day.”
 
“Failure is inevitable. The real skill is learning how to depersonalize it and extract the lesson.”
 
“Trust is the foundation of feedback—if you don’t trust the source, the message won’t land.”
 
“Gratitude and joy aren’t just reflections; they’re mindset-shifting tools that build resilience.”
 
“You don’t need to change your entire life to be happier—small, consistent actions change the trajectory.”
 
10 Takeways
Happiness is actionable.
It’s not a vague feeling or personality trait—it’s built through repeatable tools and behaviors.
 
Connection comes first.
Having even one genuine friend at work dramatically improves engagement, wellbeing, and performance.
 
Resilience is built in micro-moments.
Small, quick decisions create confidence and momentum over time.
 
Perfection kills happiness.
“Maximizers” suffer more than “satisficers.” Aim for progress, not perfection.
 
Tools beat willpower.
Relying on “choosing happiness” isn’t sustainable. Systems and habits are.
 
Gratitude trains the brain.
Practices like joy journaling rewire attention toward presence, meaning, and resilience.
 
Depersonalizing failure is a superpower.
Treat setbacks as data, not identity, to grow faster and suffer less.
 
Trust enables honest feedback.
Without psychological safety and trust, feedback becomes noise or threat.
 
Progress fuels motivation.
Ending the day knowing you moved something forward is essential to long-term happiness.
 
Happiness scales across life stages.
From basic security to meaning and purpose, happiness tools apply at every level of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Episode Overview
In this episode of Gratitude Through Hard Times, Chris Schembra sits down with Brent Kenneway, National Group VP of Sales at UKG, for a conversation about the kind of relationships that aren’t transactional, the kind that actually nourish the soul. 
Brent opens with the gratitude question and doesn’t hesitate: he gives credit to his wife, Jenny, the person he says made his life and career possible by “holding down the fort” while he built his leadership path. From there, the conversation expands into parenting, identity, and leadership, especially Brent’s lived experience of managing “multiple personalities” at home with four kids and at work with diverse teams. The thread that ties it together is intentionality: Brent wants to be more present when he comes home, more human at work, and more consistent about building culture one interaction at a time.
Chris and Brent then go deep on a core leadership shift: moving from blame to radical accountability, and from problem-obsession to solution-finding. They talk about debriefing as a life skill (“What went well? What could have gone better? What will we do differently next time?”), and they challenge the cultural reflex to fix what’s wrong without first helping what’s already right go more right. Brent adds a key leadership balance: culture without systems breaks, and systems without culture underperform, you need both.
Finally, they tackle the future: AI, change, and uncertainty. Brent argues for People-First AI—AI as augmentation, not replacement, using the story of the handheld calculator as a reminder that tools can free humans to do more meaningful work. The takeaway is clear: the companies (and families) that win won’t be the ones that move fastest alone; they’ll be the ones who pair speed with depth—building trust, presence, and gratitude at scale.
10 key takeaways
Gratitude isn’t a “soft” thing—it’s a performance tool for leadership, retention, and resilience in hard moments.
 
Give credit to the people behind your success—Brent names Jenny as the foundation of his career and family stability.
 
Parenting and leadership are the same craft: multiple personalities, different motivations, one mission—learn what makes each person tick.
 
Presence is a transition skill: coming home from “business mode” requires intentional switching into family mode.
 
Radical accountability beats blame: the real shift isn’t “what did I do wrong?” but “how can I be better next time?”
 
Debriefs create growth without shame: “What went well / better / differently” builds learning loops that scale.
 
Culture + systems = results: positivity without structure fails; structure without humanity underperforms.
 
Leaders don’t hand answers—they develop thinkers: Brent mentors by asking, “What do you think we should do?”
 
Standardize first, operationalize second: clarity reduces confusion; consistent process multiplies performance.
 
People-First AI is the way forward: AI should remove the mundane and return time to relationships, creativity, and real human connection.
10 Quotes
“We’re here to talk about relationships and gratitude—but not the transactional type. The soul needs nourished.”
 
“I’m not at the position I am in my life without [Jenny’s] backing, her support, her guidance.”
 
“All four kids—completely different personalities. That’s the joy of parenting… and leadership.”
 
“If you’re present and recognizing the situation, it’s a lot easier to have that inward focus.”
 
“People are distracted… and that makes it harder to stay solution-oriented.”
 
“Culture without systems breaks—and systems without culture underperform.”
 
“I never give the answers. I ask: ‘What do you think you should do?’”
 
“We’re spending more time at work than we are with our families—so you might as well make it fun and human.”
 
“People-first AI… it’s augmentation. It speeds up the mundane so you can spend more time with people.”
 
“You can never connect the dots forward—only backwards.”

Podcast Show Overview
In this episode of Gratitude Through Hard Times, Chris Schembra welcomes back Julie Peck—a seasoned tech and growth executive and current CEO of Talent Neuron, a global leader in workforce intelligence. Returning after a powerful first conversation (“The Gift of the Curvy Path”), Julie brings both lived experience and a front-row seat to how AI is reshaping work, leadership, and the talent market.
The conversation opens with the show’s signature gratitude thread: Julie re-centers her enduring gratitude for her mother—an “anchor” figure defined by generosity, steadiness, and wisdom. From there, the episode expands into a bigger thesis: we’re moving from a knowledge economy (being paid to “know”) to a wisdom economy (being valued for discernment, context, ethics, and humanity), right as AI accelerates technical capability faster than society’s ability to govern it wisely.
Julie explains what she’s seeing in real time—from the lightning-fast evolution of “prompt engineering” (job → skill → everywhere) to the rise of AI agents, “managers of agents,” and even early signals around digital twins / digital clones. The discussion is both exciting and sobering: the future isn’t just humans using tools—it’s organizations learning to coordinate human employees + virtual workers while wrestling with ownership, ethics, and identity.
They land the plane with an antidote: in a world speeding up, the advantage is learning to reclaim your humanity—through presence, boundaries, real conversation, and the ancient technology of the dinner table. Chris frames it as “slow food and fast cars” (Emilia-Romagna) and the “AND, not OR” mindset: use AI to amplify impact and protect what makes life meaningful.
 
Key Takeaways
We’re shifting from “knowing” to “discerning.” AI can produce answers; humans are needed for wisdom, ethics, and context.
 
The pace is the story. Roles like “prompt engineer” moved from nonexistent → hot → embedded in everything in about a year.
 
Soft skills are becoming the real differentiator. Adaptability, learning agility, collaboration, and communication are what survive a fluid world.
 
Digital cloning raises ownership questions. If your work footprint trains a “you,” who owns it—you or your employer/platform?
 
Reclaim humanity through designed friction. Put the phone down, limit your digital exhaust, and build anchor points (like dinners) where real presence returns.
 
Memorable Quotes
Julie Peck: “I call that reclaiming your humanity.”
 
Chris Schembra: “The dinner table is truly the last thing that AI can get to.”
 
Julie Peck: “The technical capabilities of AI are evolving far faster than the world’s ability to be wise about how we build it and interact with it.”
 
Julie Peck: “Put the phone down and talk to each other and actually look each other in the eyes.”
 
Julie Peck: “If you’re standing at Lake Geneva and you’re looking at the Alps, don’t try and take a picture of it. Just look at it.”
 
Chris Schembra: “We’re living through the collapse of the knowledge economy… What if we’ve been playing the wrong game all along?”
 
Julie Peck: “We don’t understand the rules of the game… and we’re unprepared for it.”

In a world obsessed with speed, optimization, certainty, and AI-driven answers, this episode of Gratitude Through Hard Times offers a necessary pause. Chris Schembra sits down with Eric Stine, CEO of Sitecore, for a deeply human conversation about leadership, belonging, gratitude, and the courage to say yes before you feel ready. This is not a tactical episode about growth metrics or technology stacks—it’s an exploration of what it means to lead, live, and connect in a time when instinct is being outsourced and humanity is at risk of being optimized away.
Eric reflects on a 25-year career across some of the world’s most influential enterprise technology companies, but reframes success through a different lens. Rather than crediting restraint or perfection, he points to saying yes as the defining strategy of his life, yes to unfamiliar roles, yes to reinvention, yes to creativity, fatherhood, philanthropy, and Broadway. Along the way, he opens up about imposter syndrome, those quiet moments of doubt that surface even at the highest levels of leadership, and why authenticity—not certainty—is what ultimately creates trust and psychological safety for teams.
The conversation reaches back to Eric’s eighth-grade years, when he felt like an outsider searching for his people. Theater became the place where he learned that difference wasn’t something to hide, but something to bring forward, a lesson that continues to shape how he builds culture today. That theme of belonging becomes especially resonant in today’s age of fragmentation and loneliness, where many people feel disconnected not because they lack opportunity, but because they lack spaces where they can show up fully as themselves.
Midway through the episode, Eric answers the signature gratitude question, offering heartfelt thanks to his father, Mark, whose belief in living authentically influenced everything from Eric’s leadership philosophy to a Tony Award win on Father’s Day. The moment grounds the conversation in gratitude, not as sentiment, but as a force that shapes identity, values, and legacy across generations.
This episode is especially important now because it confronts a growing cultural tension: while AI can deliver answers at unprecedented speed, it cannot deliver wisdom, belonging, or meaning. Eric draws a clear distinction between systems of record and systems of engagement, arguing that the future belongs to leaders and organizations that pair data with instinct, scale with empathy, and efficiency with humanity. In an era where people are burning out not just from work, but from hiding who they are, this conversation offers a different model, one rooted in community, peer-driven recognition, and shared accountability rather than control.
Ultimately, The Power of Saying Yes is a reminder that culture cannot be engineered from the top down and growth cannot be achieved through optimization alone. Culture comes from community. Belonging comes from permission. And the most meaningful paths in life are rarely the safest ones. This episode invites listeners to slow down, embrace impermanence, and choose the more interesting path, not because it’s easy, but because it’s human.
10 Key Takeaways
Saying yes creates momentum.
Progress, growth, and meaning often come from leaning in before you feel ready—not from waiting for certainty.
 
Authenticity is a leadership advantage, not a liability.
When leaders model vulnerability, they unlock psychological safety and better performance across teams.
 
Imposter syndrome doesn’t disappear—it becomes a compass.
Doubt is often a signal that you’re stretching into something meaningful.
 
Finding “your people” changes everything.
Belonging fuels confidence, creativity, and resilience—whether in theater, business, or family.
 
Gratitude is a strategic tool, not a soft one.
Recognizing people for their impact on others builds trust, loyalty, and culture at scale.
 
Culture cannot be built top-down.
Leaders can only create the conditions; community does the building.
 
AI needs humans in the loop.
Data delivers insight, but instinct and empathy deliver relevance.
 
Impermanence creates meaning.
Moments matter more when we know they won’t last—whether on stage, at work, or around the dinner table.
 
Accountability is empowering when framed as ownership.
We don’t work in isolation—we work in ecosystems where shared responsibility drives excellence.
 
The best life is an AND life, not an OR life.
Passion and profit. Speed and care. Technology and humanity. Both can be true.
Eric Stine Bio
Eric Stine is the Chief Executive Officer of Sitecore, driving the company's vision and strategy to unlock business value for clients by empowering them to create compelling digital experiences. Eric was previously Chief Operating Officer, where he led all customer-facing functions.
Before Sitecore, Eric was Chief Executive Officer of Elemica. Previously, he was Chief Commercial Officer of Skillsoft and Chief Revenue Officer of Qualtrics. Eric has also held executive roles at companies such as SAP, Ciber, and Blackboard.
Eric earned a law degree at Boston University School of Law and a Bachelor of Arts at Northwestern University, where he and his husband are the founders of the Eric and Neil Stine-Markman Scholarships. They are the first permanent endowments at either institution directing funds toward LGBTQ+ students.
He is based near New York City.

Episode Overview
In this rich, sensory journey through the Eternal City, I sit down with food historian, author, and Rome expert Katie Parla, a woman whose love affair with Rome began at sixteen thanks to her mother’s quiet act of generosity. What started as a high school Latin club trip became a lifelong devotion to understanding the flavors, history, and soul of a city that was never meant to exist. Rome began as a malarial, snake-infested swamp, yet somehow became the beating heart of Western civilization.
Katie has written, edited, or contributed to more than twenty books and countless articles in publications like The New York Times, Vogue, and The Guardian. Her newest work, Rome: A Culinary History Cookbook and Field Guide to the Flavors That Built a City, is not just another recipe collection. It’s a layered love letter, part history book, part field guide, and part emotional map to the spirit of a city that has endured famine, fire, empire, and rebirth. Together, we explore what Rome can teach us about leadership, gratitude, and the art of being human in an age of acceleration.
We begin where all gratitude stories begin, at the table. Katie gives thanks to her mother, “Jojo,” who worked multiple jobs to make that first trip to Rome possible. Through her mother’s sacrifice, Katie learned the essence of perseverance, the same relentless spirit that built the city she now calls home. From there, we wander through the neighborhoods of Rome, from the ancient core to the medieval center, and finally to Testaccio, her favorite district, where modern graffiti meets ancient terracotta ruins. It’s there that Katie goes to meditate on impermanence and the balance between chaos and beauty.
As our conversation unfolds, history becomes a mirror for modern leadership. We talk about Rome’s “bread and circuses,” how the government once used food and entertainment to keep citizens loyal, and we draw parallels to today’s corporate perks and engagement programs. We explore the emperors of old and the executives of now, and what it means to “be a Caesar, not an Augustus,” a leader who serves with benevolence and dignity rather than domination and fear. We even touch on the city’s engineering genius, from the 2,700 nasoni fountains that keep Romans hydrated to the grain ships that once fed an empire. Every system, every aqueduct, every loaf of bread carried a lesson about sustaining people, not just power.
But Rome’s real brilliance lies in its contradictions, what I call the “and” mindset. It’s a city of war and peace, tragedy and triumph, speed and stillness. It forces us to hold two opposing truths at once: to hate what was violent and love what was beautiful, to accept the brokenness and still celebrate the feast. In our current age of AI and instant answers, Rome reminds us of the value of friction, imperfection, and effort.
We wander next into the Roman Forum, where citizens once gathered to argue, trade, eat, and bear witness. It was the original “third place” between home and work, the birthplace of civic belonging, a space for conversation and connection. Katie draws a line from the Forum to today’s trattorias and pizza-by-the-slice counters, where people stand shoulder to shoulder, talking to strangers, sipping espresso, or sharing a quick lunch of supplì or cacio e pepe. These are the modern temples of togetherness.
Then comes the food. Not just the postcard dishes of carbonara and amatriciana, but the soulful, often forgotten recipes of Rome’s working class: chicken gizzards with fettuccine, veal intestines simmered in tomato sauce, and involtini, rolled beef stuffed with prosciutto, carrots, and celery, cooked slowly until tender. Katie calls it “one pot, two dishes,” a metaphor for efficiency and abundance at once. Her approach to cooking, and to life, can be summed up in three simple words: just enough.
By the end of our conversation, one theme rises above all others: dignity. From her mother’s resilience to the humble Roman bakers who built an empire on grain, from the laborers who carved aqueducts to the chefs who open their kitchens to curious foreigners, Katie’s gratitude is for everyone who never gave up. “Leave so much time in Rome unplanned,” she says, “and dare to have an adventure.” It’s not just travel advice, it’s a philosophy for life.
 
Reflections and Takeaways
Rome, like gratitude, is a practice. It reminds us to slow down, to see the sacred in the mundane, and to find beauty in imperfection. Leadership, whether in the Senate or the boardroom, is about giving people both challenge and dignity. Progress and empathy are not opposites, they are partners.
Katie’s story reminds us that effort is its own art form. Whether you’re simmering a pot of cacciatore or steering a company through uncertainty, the recipe is the same: patience, precision, and a dash of love. The lesson of Rome is the lesson of humanity, that endurance, generosity, and curiosity will always outlast convenience.
 
Explore Further
Katie’s independently published masterpiece Rome: A Culinary History Cookbook and Field Guide to the Flavors That Built a City is available at shop.katieparla.com. You can find her Rome travel guides, restaurant recommendations, and food tours at katieparla.com, and follow her everyday adventures on Instagram at @katieparla.
To explore more stories of gratitude, connection, and leadership, visit 747club.org and join our growing community.