Hopefully you’re looking forward to Thanksgiving. Amazing food, fun stories, catching up with good people, and some quirky and interesting traditions… Sound familiar? No? Okay.
Not looking forward to Thanksgiving?
For those of you who kinda dread getting together with a rather dysfunctional, forced into your life extended family, I want you to know you can flip the script. It all starts with your frame. At Jaunty, we go deep into frame, which in essence is how you view your reality. The most important thing to note is that you have the power to change your frame. What if you tried something different?
When I was younger, Thanksgiving always meant the same thing. The same traditions, same type of conversations, and same results. Tasty but pretty surface level.
It’s not the best feeling being with your family and struggling to make small talk. Guess what? They feel the same way!
One Thanksgiving long ago…
I did something different. I went deeper and weirder. I drank wine freely, opened up about my love life, and even cursed. All of a sudden, this opened the floodgates around the table. My extended family starting sharing crazy stories about things they witnessed at their work in the hotel industry. The humor got really fun and sarcastic, and before long everyone was laughing and having a great time. At Thanksgiving? Yeah, for real.
It was a real turning point with a few of my cousins. We opened up and let each other know more about ourselves beyond work, school, and how exactly we cooked the turkey this year. We’ve gotten a lot closer as a result and now I look forward to getting to hang out with them.
This year, be a conversation influencer at the long or short table. Ask deeper questions like “So what’s the most interesting or crazy thing that happened to you this year?” See what happens. The goal here is to break the routine. I want you to visualize a completely different type of Thanksgiving rather than the usual turkey snooze-fest. And then go shake things up and make it happen. Let me know how it goes!
