Gratitude in the Hard

Episode Summary:

Kristen Boss opens up about the difficult realities of 2025 and how she’s navigating grief, loss, and uncertainty with intentional gratitude. As Thanksgiving approaches, Kristen invites listeners into a compassionate, honest conversation about finding meaning in hardship without resorting to toxic positivity.

She shares personal stories from her own challenging year and instead of glossing over the pain, Kristen explores how to extract lessons, build resilience, and reclaim agency even when life feels brutally hard.

If you’re feeling weary, stuck, or overwhelmed heading into the holidays, this episode will feel like a deep breath and a warm hug. Kristen reminds us that we don’t have to wait for life to get better—we get to decide how we show up in the midst of it.

Episode Highlights:

• Kristen’s deeply personal reflection on a difficult year
• Why she rejects toxic positivity and honors emotional honesty
• How to find gratitude without bypassing grief or pain
• Reframing hardship as a chance to build resilience and self-compassion
• Why waiting for external circumstances to change creates powerlessness
• Tangible advice for reclaiming agency and creating change in your life
• Holiday survival tips for navigating tricky family dynamics with grace

Call to Action:

Register for the 3-Day Success Rewire happening December 8–10 at 12pm CT each day. Join this event BEFORE you buy the pretty planner for 2026. This reset designed to help you become the consistent, empowered version of yourself in 2026—without relying on another planner or resolution.

Timestamps:

0:00 — Welcome + Thanksgiving reflections

1:20 — A hard year and why this episode had to be different

3:30 — Kristen’s personal stories: grief, health scares, and life transitions

6:40 — Resilience through adversity

9:20 — The myth of January 1st as a magical reset

11:00 — How to be the agent of change in your own life

13:00 — Holiday mindset hacks and boundary tips

14:30 — Final encouragement and sign-off

Share the Love:

If this episode resonated with you, leave a quick review or share it on Instagram and tag @thekristenboss—she just might repost you! ❤️

For more resources and to connect with Kristen, visit: www.kristenboss.com

“So much of your life is still available to you—should you decide to live it differently.” – Kristen Boss

Transcript for episode 240: Gratitude in the Hard

Kristen Boss (00:03):

I see you with brand new Eyes. You are listening to the Kristen Boss Podcast. I’m your host, Kristen Boss. As a bestselling author and performance coach, I’m on a mission to share about sustainable and purposeful approaches to both business and life. Each week, I bring relevant topics that I believe are necessary to create a life of purpose, significance and meaning. Entrepreneurship is about so much more than growing your bottom line. It’s about who you are becoming in the process and building a life that is truly extraordinary. Entrepreneurship is really just the beginning. Hey friends. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I am so glad you’re back. It is Thanksgiving week as this episode is dropping, that’s what we’re celebrating here in the us. If you’re a US listener, if you’re not just hoping you’re having a lovely fall season or wherever you are, hope you’re doing good.

(01:20):

But over here, I’m about to get ready for prepping. This is when I host at my house and I become a gourmet cook once a year where I dust off old Bon Appetit recipes and Martha Stewart recipes and binary woman recipes, and I just becomes the land of butter, sugar, and flour over here. So we’re excited. We’ve got some family coming into town. We’ve got some other things coming that I’ll talk about in future episodes. But hey, while you’re listening, if you have not registered for the Three Day Success rewire, I want to encourage you to do that right now. It is December 8th, ninth, and 10th. And seriously, it is my intervention before you go out and buy another planner calendar, set a goal for 2026. I promise this is the conversation that you’ve been looking for when it comes to pursuing your goals and becoming a consistent person, because that no matter what, I find that consistency is the thing, and it comes up for a lot of people.

(02:20):

So be sure to register. The link is in the show notes. Let’s get to the goodness of today. And I first, let me just say, I realized the title of this sounds incredibly cliche, and what I don’t want this to be is toxic positivity. I hate that. I also don’t want it to be an episode where you feel like you have to listen and gaslight the hard parts of what is going on in your life. When I’ve been talking to people about 2025, it has been a hard year for many, many, many people, myself included. It’s just been absolutely brutal in so many ways, letting go of our last business, building a new one, all the growing pains that go with that, dealing with just family stuff. And oh, I had a health crisis this summer where it was terrible. I had something called A CSF leak where your cerebral spinal fluid leaks somewhere out of your spine and causes your brain to sag in your skull and gives you the worst headache in your life because your brain is supposed to be floating.

(03:37):

And mine was not floating. It was terrible, but super thankful that I’m on the other side of that with a clear MRI and all that fun stuff. But that, and then two weeks ago, my sweet dog, Hank, just passed very suddenly. It was very unexpected. Yeah, he was old, but there was no signs. He was a perfectly happy spry pup. And then one morning he woke up, he was not himself, and he passed while we were driving to the vet. And it was just, oh my gosh, grieving a pet. It’s just so hard. And so whatever your circumstances are, no, especially here in the holiday season, this is when I was joking with my therapist. She’s like, oh yeah, this is when it gets real busy for us. All of this stuff just comes up. You’re already dealing with this year, privately this year. What’s going on with our economy and politics?

(04:34):

And there’s just heaviness everywhere. And also what I’ve noticed is we have this longing for simpler days, and I think it’s a longing for less noise and less things we have to process each day. When I think about the amount of information we’re exposed to on a daily basis and the havoc that can wreak on our mental health and our emotional health is very real. And I think in an episode I had with my friend Sarah Boyd, she was just saying, grow up in the nineties, we had natural parameters because we weren’t on a phone twenty four seven. It did allow our nervous systems to get out of the flight response. We dealt with more boredom, we had better regulated nervous systems. And now I think we’re just chronically overstimulated. We have a lot to take in, so it feels heavy. And so as I look back at this year, the reason why I titled this podcast Gratitude in the Heart, and it was going to be a different episode, and I was just like, yeah, no, that’s not landing for me.

(05:37):

This is Thanksgiving when we’re supposed to be giving thanks, and that sounds light and fluffy, but how do we give thanks when it’s hard? How do we give thanks when everything is falling apart, when it’s heavy, when our dreams have not yet come to fruition, our prayers have not been answered. We’re in the messy middle when things are still hard, when there’s no light at the end of the tunnel yet, how do we still find gratitude in those things? And so that’s been my work all year long. This isn’t just like Thanksgiving time been, my work has been looking intentionally for the lessons of every hard lesson this year. And there has been so many and thinking often about how I was telling someone the other day, I was just like, I’m realizing that I didn’t realize how capable or resilient I was until I faced the things I had to face this year.

(06:40):

And it’s where all of the things I’ve been teaching for years, I had the opportunity to apply in my life real time. And so it’s not this idea of how do we find gratitude in the heart is it isn’t like to bypass the hard in our life, and it’s not to bypass and always look for the silver lining, especially when grief demands to be felt when there’s a lot of heaviness. I think it’s like, what can I take from this? You can’t control your circumstances, but you can decide what you want to take from them. And that’s been so much of my work this year, and maybe that’s what I want to turn towards you, is while you cannot control your circumstances, you do get to control the narrative you have about the circumstances you’ve dealt with this year. You do get to control the story you tell yourself.

(07:30):

You do get to decide what you make it all mean. And there’ve been many opportunities where I could make this year mean I’m a failure. It’s horrible. I don’t know, whatever other story, it’s just something I’ve not let myself wallow in, but looking for, alright, what do I want to choose to tell myself about this hard part or these hard chapters? And what has this hard chapter taught me about myself? That smooth waters, what is it like a smooth waters never makes a expert sailor. It’s just like, okay, I hate this, but also this is when I learned this lesson or this is when I learned this about myself, and maybe this is just an exercise in like, Hey, I’m going to learn how to actually take care of myself when I’m going through a challenging season. I’m going to learn to give myself grace.

(08:25):

I’m going to learn because I’ve gone through my own hard season, I now have greater empathy for others who are going through their hard season. And so it’s a short, sweet episode to really give you an opportunity to ask yourself, what is the story you want to tell yourself about the hard parts of this year? And not in a way that feels like toxic positivity, but what feels honest, what feels kind, what feels compassionate, and deciding what you want to take from that. And so as you go into the holidays, I do think there is this idea and I laugh about it. I’m like, when are we going to stop thinking that January 1st is this magical thing where everything resets and it’s going to be fresh and new, and it’s suddenly going to magically get better, and all of the hard is just going to go away.

(09:20):

I think we see January 1st is one giant Monday for all of us. Like, oh, finally going to be able to reset. And then it’s so funny. I feel like collectively we’re all disappointed that the year doesn’t pan out exactly the way we want it to. But I often think it’s because people keep waiting for external circumstances to change so that they can feel better about their life. And I want to ask you is that, do you keep looking at your external circumstances hoping they will change on their own? And then once those change, then you can be happy. Then you can feel like your life is in order. Well, if you do that, then you’re playing the waiting game. And that’s a feeling of powerlessness because we can’t control our circumstances, but we get to decide who we are in our circumstances. That is what you get to decide.

(10:12):

And so waiting for the world around you to change is a passive way of looking at the world. And I want to remind you that you are the agent of change in your own life, and no one’s going to come and fix the story for you. No, no one can rewrite that for you. No one’s going to magically come down and wave a magic wand and change all your circumstances for you. Sometimes the circumstances never change, but we change. We change in those circumstances. And suddenly what felt impossibly hard and burdensome because we have changed, starts to feel lighter and less hard, or we become more capable, we become stronger. And so sometimes I think the thing we hold out for is like, okay, just when this finally goes away, then I’ll feel better. It’s like, but what if this is your circumstances for the foreseeable future, then then how do you want to equip yourself?

(11:05):

Then how do you want to approach this? Then what can you do here instead of waiting for it to magically get better? How can you make it better? How can you step in and be the agent of change? And that’s what I want to remind you of is just like, Hey, look for what you can be grateful for. And then ask, where do you have agency to create change in your life? Where are you waiting for it to change? Where can you decide, you know what, enough of this talk, I’m actually going to call a therapist and work some of this out. I’m actually going to put a boundary in that relationship. I’m actually going to stop pouring my time into those people where I constantly leave every conversation exhausted, disrespected, and frustrated. I’m done. I owe it to myself to have a boundary. Or instead of waiting for my job to get better, I’m going to apply for another job.

(11:58):

Or instead of waiting for this, I’m going to go back to school and skill up. I’m going to pay to skill up whatever it is. Stop waiting and ask yourself, well, what can I do? And this is just my little reminder to you that so much of your life is still available to you should you decide to live it differently. And there’s hope. Don’t think you’re too old or too far gone. We have this amazing thing called neuroplasticity or neuroplasticity. That means you can form new neural pathways in your brain, which means you can change your habits, you can change your thoughts, you can change your beliefs. Therefore, you can change how you walk about in this world. That should be exciting for you, and you don’t have to force your way into change from a place of shame or self-loathing. It’s about like, okay, how do I take this new level of awareness about myself and how do I go about my life differently?

(12:54):

What does it look like to integrate this day in day out? One small thing at a time? So as you’re reflecting on this year as you are surrounded by a bunch of people saying, Hey, give thanks this Thanksgiving. What is the one hard thing this year that gave you a lesson that maybe you wouldn’t have been able to learn it any other way except for the hard way or in that hard circumstance, and you never would’ve chose it? Maybe it did happen to you and you had no choice in the matter, but what is the lesson that you want to take from that in order to further your story and make you the agent of change in your life again? So I hope you enjoy this little sweet little nugget of a podcast as you are busy, maybe basting turkeys and getting the stuffing ready or Christmas shopping, or about to go into the absolute chaos that often follows immediately after Thanksgiving.

(13:49):

But just if I want to encourage you to just take a moment, calibrate each day and just ask, where can I be the agent of change in my own life today? I can’t change my circumstances. Many of you’re going to be around your family. You can’t change your family. You can’t change how they show up, but you absolutely can change how you show up. You can be a calm in the storm. You can be, what is it like? You could be a thermostat. You can bring the temperature down. You don’t have to rise to everything you hear at the table. You don’t have to have inside jokes with your spouse. Whatever helps you get by. Take more bathroom breaks. I remember once I was like, it wasn’t the holiday, but I just did the dishes a lot more. Like, if I stay here, I’m going to say things I am going to later regret.

(14:37):

So I’m going to just keep my hands wet and wash dishes in the sink. I’ll also say this, go in with a plan. Talk to your partner, your spouse, your person, your loved one, whoever your partner in crime is, whoever you do holidays with, have a little powwow with them and talk about, okay, here’s our boundaries. Here’s how we’re sticking together. Here’s our plan. Here’s how we’re going to look out for each other. Go in with a plan. Especially I know there’s a lot of personalities that play over the holidays. People are traveling. People talk about things. Politics comes up, religion comes up, it all comes up. So have a plan. Go in with a plan for how you’re going to respond and how you’re going to care for yourself and how you are going to show up in that time. So friends, enjoy this holiday week. We’ll be back next week with another juicy episode. I hope you enjoyed this little nugget to get you through your week, and we will catch you in the next episode. That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Listen, if you love what you heard here today, I would love for you to leave a real quick rating and a review. This helps the show get discovered by new people. Be sure to take a screenshot of today’s episode and shout us out on Instagram. We’ll shout you right back out. If you’d like to find additional resources or discover how to work with me, head to www.kristenboss.com. It starts right.