In the final episode, CNBC Senior Personal Finance Correspondent Sharon Epperson shares how she overcame personal challenges and redefined her work through gratitude, communication, and the interplay between the two.

In this episode, we explore how gratitude can have a profound and far-reaching impact in the workplace – and how it extends to enrich a person’s entire life. As guest and associate professor at University of Massachusetts Emily Heaphy sees it, “If you think about a company that is really embracing recognition, gratitude, and appreciation, they can bring that home to their families, loved ones, and friends – and cause a ripple effect.”

This week, Elizabeth Stokoe, professor of social interaction at Loughborough University in the U.K., explores the pivotal role communication plays in fueling gratitude in our day-to-day interactions.

For episode one, we go back to square one. What is gratitude? What does it do? Why is it so important that we developed an entire podcast series to explore it? To do that, we turned to Dr. Emiliana Simon-Thomas, the science director at the University of California Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center who helped us break down the concept of gratitude and its effect on us as people.