As the Thanksgiving season approaches, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the two wolves inside us all: the Wolf of Gratitude and the Wolf of Complaining. Which one are you feeding? In this episode of Make Work Not Suck, co-hosts Daniel Steere and Ryan Hodges dive deep into the power of gratitude in the workplace and beyond.

Learn how practicing gratitude at any level—employee, manager, or executive—can make work suck less and even create a more fulfilling, effective environment. Discover practical strategies to express thanks authentically, foster a culture of appreciation year-round (not just during the holidays), and avoid the toxic spiral of complaints that drag teams down.

You’ll also hear:

[00:00] The "Two Wolves" analogy and how it applies to work.

[03:00] Why gratitude is essential to leadership and culture.

[09:45] How to navigate the tension between frustration and authentic appreciation.

[15:30] Simple practices to cultivate gratitude every day.

[20:15] How employees and leaders can build a habit of gratitude that drives real results.

[30:40] Using gratitude to align vision, journey, culture, and results.

[35:15] Why work sucks without gratitude—and how to make it suck less with it.

Whether you’re leading a team or just trying to get through a tough workday, this episode is packed with actionable advice to reframe your mindset and bring out the best in yourself and others.

Key Takeaways:

- Gratitude as a Daily Habit: Start every day by identifying one thing you’re grateful for at work and in your personal life.

- Gratitude in Meetings: Introduce a "gratitude moment" at the beginning of team meetings to shift the tone and foster connection.

- Shift Perspective: Stop feeding the "Beast of Complaining" and focus on what’s working instead of what's broken.

- Year-Round Thanks: Avoid limiting gratitude to Thanksgiving or holidays. Make it a consistent practice.

Ready to feed the right wolf? Tune in, reflect, and discover how gratitude can make work not suck for you and your team.

Inside of all of us, there are 2 wolves, the good wolf and the bad wolf, and they're constantly fighting each other. And the little boy said, well, which one's going to win? And the old man said, well, whichever one There are 2 wolves inside of all of us. Right? If we can take this analogy.

There is the wolf of gratitude and the wolf of complaining. And if we feed the wrong beast, it will continue to get bigger and stronger, and it will destroy the other one. So which one do you wanna feed? Which of those 2 beasts are you going to feed? The beast of gratitude or the beast of complaining? Because you can't feed them both.

Welcome to the make work not suck podcast.

With the Thanksgiving holiday coming up here in the US, I thought it'd be good to talk about what happens to work when you are not thankful, when there's no gratitude. I would argue that work sucks when there isn't at least some way you express some thanks and gratitude for the work itself.

Oh, so there's there's the question of how does work not suck with gratitude?

Mhmm.

And how does work suck without gratitude?

Oh, yeah. Great. That's there's kinda 2 things there. I'll start with this crazy story because you know that I'm a little bit weird. For a chapter of my career, I was working for a large company, and anytime somebody would see me, they'd say, you know, how's it going?

Right? Just kinda normal break room talk. And I'd say, you know what? It's crazy. If you go to Disneyland, they charge you probably a 180, $200 to come in to the park and ride the rides.

If you go to the movies, they charge you probably 10 to $15 to see all this drama unfold with all these characters. And if you go to Starbucks, you got to pay $5 to get a cup of coffee. But I get to come here every day and ride this crazy roller coaster with you characters and drink all the coffee I want, and they let me in for free. And nobody knew how to respond to that. Like, they just looked at me like, what a weirdo.

And they walked away. Like, I don't need coffee that badly. But what I was trying to do there was trying to help myself, because I definitely had my share of bad days there, and them try to reframe the thought of work, and to say, yes, there's certainly things about work that suck, and there's certainly things that we wanna make better, but there can be things for us to be thankful for. That was my silly way of of trying to help them realize the contrast of what we do every day matters. Yes.

There's drama. There's interesting characters. There's free coffee. There's, you know, there's all these things, but we can still find things to be thankful for in any sort of job situation.

You know, while you're telling that story, I was thinking, you know, Thanksgiving is next week

for

us here in America. And, you know, there's a lot of because it's Thanksgiving, we're reminded to give thanks. Right? Right. So next week, I'm sure there's a lot

of people that'll say, you know, thank you for what you do. I'm thankful for it. Happy Thanksgiving. And there's probably the I wouldn't call

it the obligatory thanks because I'm sure it's heartfelt, but it's it's reminded because it's Thanksgiving. Right. There's a little bit of of it around, you know, Christmas as well, but what about the rest of the year? Why don't we only give gratitude only on, you know, the holiday that's around you know, focused around gratitude? But what about the other, you know, 51 weeks of the year?

Right. It's like telling your middle of May or June or July.

Right. It's like telling your spouse to love them only on Valentine's Day. Right. You don't you don't get a lot of points for that, at least in my experience.

No. I mean, it's expected. So Yeah. You get you get docked points if

you don't, but you don't get points if you do. But I think a lot of it is because there's a lot of commiseration. I think people sometimes like to get in these bitch cycles where everyone's just complaining, and whoever can complain the loudest kind of wins, and I've done that. I understand the entertainment value of it, but as I look back on it, I don't think it was actually helpful. I don't think it was helpful to me, to my coworkers.

I don't think it put me in a better frame of mind. It made the company better, the culture better. I think it's actually probably more toxic than it is helpful, and yet it's very common for people to just complain and bitch about work. And I wonder if that's actually part of what makes work suck is we have this habit of just complaining about it all the time. It becomes somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Don't wanna get me started on on that, the the bitch box. So, you know, I'm I'm thinking, you know you know, business owner run several businesses, work with several companies. There's one particular one I'm very frustrated with right now.

Okay?

But then I'm thinking about, you know, I'm I'm I'm literally doing what I just asked the question of. Where where's the gratitude the rest of the year? And I'm going, okay. It's Thanksgiving next week. I wanna make sure people know I'm thankful for all their hard work.

But I'm very frustrated that we're not getting traction, and I wanna get this done. But I gotta give gratitude. You know, that sucks. You know you know, it's just I'll hit the leadership persona. Right?

The the executive persona. Sometimes that sucks. Like It really does. I have to give gratitude when, like, I'm busting my ass over here. At the same time, who's who's who's giving me gratitude?

Everybody just thinks I'm the bad guy because I'm, you know, trying to trying to help the company grow, trying to hold it, you know, hold people accountable to the mission and the core values, but you gotta give gratitude because of a holiday.

Right.

You you can split. Why not split the work from the professional or the personal and the professional? I I don't know. Let's let's I think there's a there's a lot of people probably stuck in that situation.

Yeah. I think it's very

common. Work, frustrated at work, whether you're the the the boss, the manager, or the employee. You wanna be nice. You got a holiday coming up. But what what about the other side of that where you, like, begrudgingly give thanks?

I have two thoughts on begrudging thanks. 1, I think is beneficial to you to force yourself through the exercise of finding things to be grateful for. It changes your mentality. It changes your orientation. It can change your mindset.

Even if you don't wanna do it, doing it anyways can have positive benefits for you. So at any level, employee, manager, leader, executive owner, spending some time identifying the things that you can be truly grateful for, even if you don't feel it in the moment. You can be like, you know what? I know this is a good thing. I certainly get frustrated with it at times, but I am thankful for this.

It's a valuable exercise. Now, point 2. If you don't feel it and you're not really in the spirit of gratitude, it is hard and potentially unproductive to communicate that gratitude to somebody else. Right? Begrudging gratitude is never well received.

So I would say And

I think the other side can call you out on it too. Everybody everybody's got a pretty good BS filter these days.

Right. It's it's yeah. It's hard to sell that consistently. But I think the practice of gratitude is super important because without it I know, especially for leaders, it's always easier to see the things that aren't working well, the things that are broken, the things that we haven't achieved yet, the gap rather than the progress that we've made. Every level needs to regularly practice some things that they're thankful for, even if they don't communicate it to somebody else.

So I'll tell you one simple practice, and I'm sure this is in a 1,000 self help books and, you know, all over the place. But, truly, picking one thing you're grateful for in the morning, get up out of bed and just pick one thing, I'm grateful for x. Just think about that all day long. It will actually change your mindset. You actually find you bitch less, you tolerate bitching less

Yes.

And you'll find more things to be grateful for.

Absolutely. As somebody who has been unemployed, having any job is something to be thankful for. I've had good jobs. I've had bad jobs. I've had no jobs.

Having no job when you've got people depending on you, that is a horrible place to be. And so no matter how bad it is, the fact that you've got a place to go that is paying you to be there is something to be thankful for. Could it be better? I'm sure it could be, but let's start with, you know what? I at least have a job.

Yep.

So let's let's also look at this one. And I think I I learned this from you. There's what you you build what you build, you optimize, and you scale. I know you say it's slightly different. How do you say it?

The strategize, standardize, optimize?

Yes. Okay. So I butchered that by saying build, optimize, scale. So I'm gonna roll with that one because that's in my head. Okay.

Is I think I think sometimes we're so focused on the build Mhmm. And everything's not perfect that we don't give gratitude for the people that are doing the work to to standardize or to optimize or to scale, which is just doing the daily grind. So if you're a, you know, manager or an executive and you got it and you're not where you want to be, you know, whether it's a a project or a rock or KPI or whatever, and it's in the build phase, I think I think you've got 2 levels of gratitude there. 1, gratitude for the people helping you build it, and 2, gratitude for the people that are helping maintain it while you're building it. And I think sometimes we're so focused on the build that we negate the maintaining because somebody still gotta sweep the floor, answer the phones, respond to the customer, etcetera, etcetera.

So and a little bit of gratitude just on those day to day tasks can go a long way.

Yeah. I would say that maybe expand it a little bit. I I know it can be easy for leaders to thank the salesperson who makes who's selling the next deal, the development team who's developing the next version of the product. But the unspoken heroes are the people who are taking care of the current customer and supporting the current version of the product and doing more of, kind of, the day to day less seen but almost more important tasks of an organization. And I think it's very easy for leaders who are focused on growth and tomorrow and the next thing to overlook a large percentage of their organization that is just keeping the lights on and keeping everything running on time, which is a huge deal.

So work sucks when you are not grateful. Would we also say that work does not suck when we are grateful?

I think the well, you know, it pops the image pops in my head is the the meme with the house on fire and and the little girl going, it's all good.

This is fine.

I mean, I guess I guess it can be if you're delusional or if you choose to ignore it. I mean, sure. But I think work sucks less when there's mutual gratitude for the work that's being done. I think gratitude comes from having a higher consciousness, if you will. I'm gonna butcher this a little bit.

When we are negative, we're using our emotional side. Right? We're a little illogical or maybe very illogical, but we're not using you know, the thing that separates us from animals and and humans, you know, our neocortex, our intelligent part of our brain, versus gratitude comes from that neocortex. You have to think through what you're trying to be grateful for. You have to put yourself above the animal brain, etcetera, etcetera.

And so I think it's it's very easy to get to the animal brain and go negative versus that gratitude is very intentional positive. I think when you're in that gratitude mindset and you're providing it and you're receiving it in a non emotional way, it puts you into an elevated state where you're using a higher level intelligence, which, again, builds compounding interest as long as you're, you know, working in the right direction.

Right.

So I think there's a level of just being in that mindset will make work suck less because you're doing the right work. You're working on the right things. You you know you're getting you're putting points on the board. You know you're scoring, etcetera.

You know, one of the kind of frameworks that I've used in gratitude is that vision journey culture results that we've talked about so many times. There have been times in my career when, you know, I've felt stuck in a job and kind of going through that cycle and trying to understand, okay, what do I have to be grateful for? You know, vision. Hey. You know what?

This was the job I wanted 2 years ago, and now I'm in that job. That's something to be thankful for. No. No. Does that take away everything that sucks about it?

Well, no. It doesn't, but there's a sense in which I have achieved a goal that I had for myself of getting into this position, or getting that promotion, or finally getting that set of responsibilities. That's something to be grateful for, even if it's not everything I thought it would be. Or the journey, what are the things on my calendar this week that I get to do that I really enjoy? Whether it's working on a particular project, working with a particular person, maybe it's a, you know, a lunch with a favorite client.

I don't whatever it is, find that thing that you actually are getting to do this week that you enjoy. Maybe it's the culture. Maybe it's the person. It's a relationship. It's the person that sits in the cube next to you that you just really enjoy hanging out with, or it could be the results.

Right? It could be the fact, you know what? There's a lot of bad things here, but I'm thankful that next Friday I'm getting a paycheck, and I get to take care of the people I love. Maybe go out and have a little bit of fun that weekend. That vision journey culture results can be a helpful framework to say, okay.

There's gotta be something here I can be thankful for. And by choosing to focus on that, I'm choosing a different mindset. Even though I can't change the reality,

I can change the way I am viewing reality. Oh, that's good. You just reminded me of a of a scenario between Maria and I that was literally on the plane that I was on this morning, and it ended up in a level of gratitude. And I hope I hope I'm correct. I hope when she listens to this, she says, Yeah, that's right.

Maybe she can drop a note in the comments if I'm either full of shit or if I'm correct here. It was a moment of going through a situation and we were going back and forth. You know, it was a frustration. And we did. We I started taking the wheel, and I'm like, okay.

What's the vision here? Okay. It's vision. Do we know the journey? Okay.

Okay. This is Agile scrum problem. Alright. Let's go to the culture. There's the disconnect.

Mhmm.

Okay. So we have a culture we have a we have a culture behavioral problem that disconnect us from the journey, the process. Okay. So let's go back to that conversation. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

You know, do we understand how we didn't hold this behavior, which then turned around? We didn't follow agile scrum, which landed us in this results where a team member did did something without product under approval. It wasn't a breakdown in process. It was a breakdown in, you know, adhering to the core values. But because we use the wheel, we've navigated through this and we figured it out.

She said, yep. I was wrong. I'm sorry. And I said, yep. And then it was, hey.

I appreciate the fact that we went through this. It was a frustrating experience, but because we were able to identify it using the wheel and go down to, okay. We identified the core value where we we missed, which means we we didn't quite understand the journey. Alright. So here's where we're disconnected on it.

Alright. Let's go back to the vision. What's the vision? This is the goal of the objective. What's the journey?

Okay. We're using Agile scrum as our journey process. We know our core values. Alright. Can we produce the result?

Yes. Then the moment of a gratitude happened of, hey. I appreciate you taking the time to work through this with me. I think we've got more clarity. Yes.

I agree, etcetera, etcetera. And so even in that moment of frustration, there was gratitude expressed because we took the time to understand the problem. We use the wheel to do so, which drove clarity, and then we move forward.

That's great. Yeah. Very very rare for a moment of frustration to produce gratitude, but that's fantastic if you can do it.

Well, what was what was interesting and well, maybe a little too much plug for the simplified method here, is is what it really was is this was an effective or I'm sorry, a health problem, you know, vision culture alignment problem.

Mhmm.

But it was perceived as a journey problem because it felt like we weren't following some level of agile scrum, and I went, no. No. No. No. No.

No. No. We need to go vision, culture, then journey, then results. And so this because we had a health problem. Right?

What failed us? Effectively, we didn't get the objective done. But why did we fail the objective? Because we had we weren't, you know, healthy, if you will, in this in this particular scenario. And so by using that to say, okay.

Let's address the health component. Okay. Addressed. Now let's go to the effectiveness component. Got it.

Then we were able to progress forward. Interesting. From her mindset, she was looking vision journey culture, and I went, let's align on the health access because we have an effectiveness problem. We didn't we weren't effective, which means we didn't get the job done. We had an issue, etcetera, etcetera.

Let's go to health, vision culture. Align vision culture, then we went to journey.

Is that a recommendation? Framework. Recommendation. Are are you are you recommending that that when you've got a problem, you you start first by assessing the health, or was that just kind of a intuition that you had about what the problem was?

Well, so it started with what's the vision, and we got it. And I said, what's our process? Algae, scrum. So we went vision journey culture results. The disconnect was once once kind of identifying, you know, agreeing on kind of the the the binge journey culture results going through it.

Once we kind of outlined it, it went, okay. Then why did we have a breakdown? And I started with health because we always say you can't be you can't be more effective than you are healthy. Right? True.

So we always look at health first. So then when I went to the health component, that is where we actually found the root cause to fix the issue, which then made us more effective. And by going through that process, we ended up with the level of gratitude where, you know, I appreciate her going through it. I felt understood. We were on the same page.

I according to our phone call, she was no longer mad at me,

and we moved on. Excellent.

Excellent. Again, if I if I'm if I'm full of shit, she can,

you know, call the comments. Comments. Alright. So what would be your advice to employees, managers, and leaders, executives. As we head into the holiday of Thanksgiving, at least here in the US, what is something that they could or should do from a gratitude perspective to make work not suck, even if it's just for a little bit?

I'm gonna challenge I'm actually I'm gonna challenge all levels on this one. Okay. Start a habit waking up every day. What are you grateful for? If you can do a personal one, what are you grateful for in your personal life and what are you grateful for in your professional life?

And really think through it. Don't try to do the same thing every day. Oh, I'm grateful for Bob. The next day, I'm grateful for Bob. Like, you gotta you gotta keep looking around.

Like, don't rinse and repeat Right. Every single day. But if you could just do that and start it right now, do it while the period of thanks is fresh in our mind and continue that on, it will have compounding interest over the next year. I think use the the the season because everybody's in that mindset. Use that as the motivation to build the habit.

Because if you provide that gratitude on a more frequent basis, then you will be more aligned with your peers. You will be a lot more aligned with your boss, and you will be more oh, not just aligned, but you'll you'll you'll have more understanding and meaning and more connectedness to your work. And, I mean, hopefully, it'll actually drive conversations. It's not gonna be an end all be all. It's not a it's not a miracle cure, but it's a step to identifying issues in a more meaningful way that then can be addressed.

Yeah. And everybody knows when you go into a situation elevated and frustrated, it never ends well. Versus if you come into a situation more level-headed and cooler, typically, you come to resolution faster. By building that gratitude habit, you will actually approach things in a more calmer, more intelligent manner, and you'll probably make work not suck or not suck as bad because you're approaching it with a different mindset. And I think that goes for everybody.

Yeah, there is an untold number of physiological benefits to gratitude, lower blood pressure, lower cortisol levels. There's a lot of research out there that says spending just a little bit of time thinking about the things that you're grateful for has profound mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits. So I love that recommendation. One practical example, I'm working with a client right now, and they don't start every meeting this way, but most of their regular scheduled meetings start with gratitude. They basically say, "What's something that you're thankful for?" And sometimes the thing that you're thankful for is that horrible thing I just went through is over, which is fine to be grateful for something that is no longer part of your day-to-day reality.

Exactly.

I've found it to be a pretty powerful way not only to start a meeting with the right attitude but also to get to know your coworkers a little bit. When you start to hear the things that they're grateful for, you begin to hear what's really important to them. I think that's a really beneficial habit that this would be a really good season, a really good time of year to start that habit and keep it going. If you have a weekly team meeting or a biweekly team meeting, whatever that is, and you have ownership of that agenda, I'd encourage you to just put that into the first five minutes of the agenda. Share one thing that you're thankful for today, and watch what that does to the tone of the meeting.

100%. So I took note of that one. I want to take your advice here. The other one is, as I was saying what I was saying a minute ago, I thought, "I should probably follow that advice." So I put a sticky note on my monitor to remind myself.

I would say I would echo your advice and challenge every layer of the organization. Employees at all levels can be a positive cultural influence from any seat in the organization. Even if you don't control the agenda of a meeting, you won't get fired for being grateful. So, in your conversations, find the things that you can compliment, the things that you can be grateful for, the positive aspects you can call out. Make that a part of the conversation. Even if you don't have the positional authority, I'd encourage you to be an agent of change in your organization.

1000%. You just said something, and I was waiting on it because I'm still in draft mode, but I'll sneak peek this a little bit. I’m working on an article called "The 5 Must-Dos for Leading Change from Within." It's about driving change from within, embodying change, influencing culture, engagement, and innovation throughout the organization. You don't need to be a manager or leader; it's about becoming an individual that embodies change.

Excellent. Most organizations are terrible at that. I know very few that are good at celebrating their wins.

I agree. Maybe one of the next podcast episodes will be "The 5 Must-Dos for Leading Change from Within." I like it.

I had a dear friend that I worked with many years ago who would say many organizations would rather admire their problems than solve them.

That's good.

And it stung so bad because I found myself part of that problem. We loved to complain about the problems there. Every organization has problems. Complaining about them does nothing but create a negative environment. Start doing something about them instead.

Should we throw out a Jocko Willink there? "Good. You have these problems. Now you have the opportunity to solve them." I was in a board meeting the other day, and he said, "I don't have to do these things. I get to do these things." We have the chance to solve complex problems.

Yeah, it doesn't actually help. Barack Obama once said, as the President of the United States, if a decision lands on my desk, it's not an easy decision because if it was easy, someone else would have solved it. I only get the hard stuff.

It's interesting because if it makes it to my desk, it's the difficult problem. The President has a cabinet to address things, while in the SMB space, it may not be the hardest problem that reaches the top.

Right.

You have the opportunity to solve that problem before it gets to your desk.

So here's how I would wrap up our conversation. I've been talking to my son about this a lot: there are 2 wolves inside of all of us, the good wolf and the bad wolf, and they're constantly fighting. Which one wins? The one you feed. There is the wolf of gratitude and the wolf of complaining. Choose the one you want to feed.

I like that. And with the season, use this opportunity to feed the gratitude wolf and make work not suck for yourself or your company.

Make work not suck. Our podcast talks about exactly that, our process, vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real-world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck. Hosted by Daniel Steere, cohost Ryan Hodges. Join us each episode and make work not suck.