Welcome And Meet Christy

SPEAKER_02 0:10

And hello everyone. And this is going to be a very exciting podcast about the mindsets. I've got Christy von Minden with me. She's the founder of Mind Bright, a New Zealand Workplace Wellbeing, a sustainable performance consultancy helping leaders and teams navigate modern work and with greater focus and resilience and sustainability. Now, Christy has delivered over 450 keynote speeches, addresses. How do I even work? Workshops and keynotes, yeah. Workshop and keynotes across New Zealand and Australia. And I'm so, so, so excited that she said yes to be on this podcast. So let's dive into Krista's mind and find out what we can do better in life. Hello, Christy.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Hi, Arya. Nice to meet and meet you and thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Thank you for coming along. So take me back to who you are and what you do for those that haven't come across you yet.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Yes. So day to day for the last decade, I spend my time speaking at conferences, delivering keynotes. I think the biggest one I've just run last week was for 1,200 dentists at the New Zealand Dentists Association. But then I also work with small leadership groups, like I was up at Tiara doing one for AIA's top performers. So it varies the audience sizes, but mostly essentially working with leaders and teams, helping them to find an evidence-based pathway to sustainable high performance. And our in amongst our busy modern world. And I guess the kind of idea that underpins all my work is that in the last few decades, the way we've changed has, the way we work has changed dramatically in terms of constant connection, notifications, meetings, and busyness and information overwhelm and overload. Yet the human brain hasn't changed. And so there is a little bit of. And so we need to go back to that brain wiring and really take that into account so that we can redesign our modern work days so that we're not working against the brain wiring as many of us are, which is causing a lot of stress and disease.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

How did you get into it? What made you wake up one day and go, I want to help humans navigate this?

unknown 2:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

What drove you to this point? That's a really good question. So as I mentioned, I've been doing this for a decade,

The Corporate Hustle That Broke

SPEAKER_00 2:20

but I haven't always worked in the well-being and performance space. So I actually come from a 15-year corporate background. So I worked in media agencies, a really fabulous, you know, fun magazine looking after magazines like GQ in London and Victoria Beckham's Jeans and working in for a fashion agency in Sydney. And then I moved back to New Zealand and I was with one of New Zealand's biggest integrated media agencies for a decade. Now they were an absolutely wonderful company. They still are one of the best, wonderful clients. We worked with huge clients like the Warehouse, Vodafone, Heineken, DB Breweries, and wonderful team members and leadership. But the way I worked back then, which I thought, you know, I was a really diligent hard worker, and I moved my way up through the company with six promotions in a decade. But the way I was working, I now realize was unsustainable. And so I really worked or subscribed to that idea of working harder and faster to get ahead. And I, you know, no, no night in the office was too late, no deadline was too quick, no KPI too much, whatever the sort of request was, I met it with dedication and enthusiasm. I was always on and available, working weekends, late nights, never taking breaks. Now, this way of working actually worked for me in my early 20s. For the first, say, six years, I was quite energized by the thrill of, you know, always like going from one creative pitch to the next and constant meetings and industry events. But something somewhere along the way, about seven years in, something started to switch. And I started to feel quite stressed constantly internally, even though on the outside I was able to stay cool, calm, and collected. But inside I felt really overwhelmed and kind of like my life was like one of those hamster wheels, and I was the hamster and I just couldn't get off. I was just, everything was a million miles an hour so fast, always doing, always achieving. And then I had a simple back injury, disc bulge, and the doctors said it should heal with a bit of rehab and physio. It was actually at a work event. I was going above and beyond again, pushing a big wine barrel for a client at the World of Wearable Arts, one o'clock in the morning, and it didn't heal. And it went from being, you know, a relatively minor disc bulge where I couldn't walk very well and I couldn't exercise to all of a sudden I couldn't sit at my desk, I couldn't come to work without a back brace. Instead of taking sick leave, we all brainstormed and we just bought a couch in and I worked lying down in an open plan office for a month. That still didn't work. I went on bed rest, but I kept working really hard in the bed instead of actually resting. And eventually I was told the only way I could get over this pesty problem, back pain, so I could get back to the business of working for this next big pitch we had coming up was to have a major spinal fusion surgery. So I did that. And that was in my mid-20s. Now it still didn't work. And I then went on to suffer from five years of chronic back pain and nearly had a second surgery. And for the first time in my life, anxiety and depression and insomnia as I struggled to now be working these 10, 12 hour days, being always on and always available, plus managing this ever-present pain. So I tried everything to recover, nothing worked. And when I finally came across some research around the efficacy of mindfulness and meditation to heal chronic pain, and when I looked at my whole person, I realized that whilst I was, I thought I was really healthy from a Western perspective, drinking green smoothies. I used to, you know, run half marathons before my injury, getting plenty of sleep, drinking lots of water. I had absolutely no tools and no awareness when it came to my mental health, my brain health, which was the tool I was using all day, every day. And that was the most depleted dimension of my well-being. So when I finally gave that some attention with mindfulness and meditation, gave it space to heal and rest, eventually my whole body caught up. And within four weeks, I was pain-free. And eight weeks later, I had announced to me at the time, completely rewired my brain and have been pain-free ever since, just from meditating. And so that really is what led me to become fascinated with this idea that the way we're working in the modern world doesn't make any sense. The science is really clear that's what's good for us as human beings when we're well and when we're happy and healthy, that's when we can achieve high performance and actually sustain it over time without burning out and having to leave our jobs. So long answer, but a bit of a journey.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

I love it. What a journey. And I love the way you've put it so beautifully that you know what you could do in your 20s and going hard and going fast and you thought you could handle it, your body actually had like, hold on a second, we need break here. We need we need something else here. And I think a lot of people don't listen to their bodies.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

We're so out of tune.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

Yeah, we're so out of tune with who we are and what we need. And it takes a serious event. And the more people I talk to, the more people I interview, I find it time and time again, it if you don't stop and listen and make those adjustments, the body will force you. Something will happen for it to happen.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

We tend to favor the intelligence of our mind, which likes to be busy and important and achieve and be productive and tick things off our to-do list over the wisdom of our body. And I think in the modern world, because we're so in our minds with technology and information and the way we work, we're just completely disconnected from our bodies. We're not even hearing the feedback that it's sending us that's saying you're tired, you need to have a break. And so we ignore it and we just push through, which is what I did. And I ignored the feedback from my body for so long that my to rest that my body literally put me in bed, like I could not get up for years. So yeah, we'd must listen to your body, our bodies, and their feedback. I love that. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

That's beautiful. And in terms of what happened next, so you left your career.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

Yes. Well, what happened was at the time I was leading a team of about 20 beautiful young women or women, I think I had one male, lovely people. And when I came back from maternity leave, which is when I actually held my back while I was on maternity leave with my first daughter, I was Of course, what else will stop you?

SPEAKER_02 8:45

Have a break.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Have a baby, that's a break. Neither am I, oh my God. But I think I had the headspace to like, yeah, research it and have that time. But it was it was quite hard to do as well. There were many challenges. But I came back reset, not from maternity leave, but because I'd been practicing this meditation course over eight weeks, and I had rewired my brain. We can talk a little bit about that later on. And so I was watching my team, and they were all coming to me in tears in the boardroom. And constantly I was coaching them, not on PR strategy, but instead on, hey, you've got to you've got to practice meditation. Here's this app, here's how the nervous system and chronic stress is affecting, you know, and causing these symptoms you're experiencing. And I became so passionate about it and was just witnessing, yeah, as I said, just the ways that people were working, not taking breaks, working late nights, always being connected, even when they're having their lunch, looking at information and then wondering why they're feeling stressed and overwhelmed, and actually not being productive when they are working, because they haven't given their brain that chance to reset during the day, which, as we'll also talk about, I'm sure our brains need, that I just sort of dreamt up this program and I designed it uh in my spare time, like a full workshop, which was basically my the science behind how I recovered from burnout and chronic pain and stress, chronic stress. And then I just decided to take the leap and I retrained as a mindfulness educator, did some qualifications through Berkeley University, and got my first client, which was Sky City, through a friend, and then it literally just took off from there.

SPEAKER_01 10:26

That's incredible.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

That's a beautiful story to go from here I was, that's what happened, and then that's what I took away from it. I mean, because you could have been sad and depressed and upset, right, about things that would have happened and then thrown in the towel, but you went, hold on a second. I can I changed my life, how can I help others now?

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Yes, and I think that my whole story of my my signature workshop, which I've run hundreds and hundreds of times, it's called Rewiring for Resilience, is really a combination of science, but it's

Mindfulness That Ended Chronic Pain

SPEAKER_00 11:00

also telling my story so that people don't make the same mistakes I did. So I can use that. My story is the perfect illustration of unsustainable high performance. And then I can use it so take me to the brain.

SPEAKER_02 11:15

Take me to the brain. How does the brain work? What happens to the brain? How can we change that?

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Yeah, okay. Well, there's two kinds of areas that are really important. The first one is to do with chronic stress, which is an epidemic. Like we're living, the World Health Organization says we're living in a modern-day stress epidemic. One in four New Zealanders report high levels of stress and and anxiety. So it's a real problem. And these are only the people that are going to the doctor and getting professional help. I actually think it's much more like one in two of us. So, and this and this happened to me as well. So our brains are highly plastic, neuroplastic. That means they're always changing and adapting based on how we use them and how we interact with our environment. We have a hundred billion neurons and a trillion neural pathways. So when one neuron speaks to another neuron in the brain, it lights up like a piece of electrical activity. And this is called a neural pathway. And these neural pathways represent everything from thoughts we have over and over again to the habits we have to physical movements and also the regulatory systems in our bodies, like the stress response, fight, flight, freeze, and the relaxation response, breast digest repair. So neuroplasticity is a really helpful function of the brain because it helps us learn things. So, for example, when we first go to write with a pen, that neural pathway when we're young is very weak. It's not very well connected because we haven't used it much. And so we have to use our full attention and focus. Now, eventually, the more we practiced handwriting with our right hand, if we're right-handed, that will eventually become a really strong automatic neural pathway. And now you'll notice you pick up a pen and you can write, and you don't even really have to think about it at all. Now, we'll always have an opposing weaker neural pathway, but our brain is always going to go automatically without us even getting involved to the strongest one because it wouldn't want us to go to the weaker one because then we'd have to use focus and attention. And our brain's always trying to free up space and energy for thinking and planning. So it doesn't want to use extra cognitive energy when it doesn't have to. So we'll always go to the most dominant neural pathway. So it's great for learning something new, but unfortunately, the same thing happens for unwanted neural pathways. And what's happened in the modern world is we're activating the stress response so much through the day, more than we're activating that relaxation, that sense of calm, resilience, clarity, and restfulness, and giving our bodies a chance to restore. Now, that's supposed to be our dominant pathway, that relaxation state where we can rest, digest, and repair. That's where babies, animals, children spend most of their time in there in that neural pathway. But as adults, we're practicing and activating the stress response so much through the modern day that we've accidentally, without realizing, rewired our brains. And so we've changed the dominant neural pathway from safety, rest, and calm and clarity and resilience to danger, fight, flight, freeze. And so now it's become really easy for us to get stressed and overwhelmed and anxious because we practice that more, and so it's really strong. And it's become much harder for us to feel safe, calm, relaxed, and restored, if that makes sense. So that's one of the key areas that I see we're going wrong in the modern workplace, especially because we have a lot of stress that we're dealing with there. But the good news is the brain's highly plastic, so we can actually rewire the brain. We just have to focus on what we want to be the dominant pathway, and it only takes eight weeks. And you do this by simply activating the relaxation your pathway more than the stress one.

SPEAKER_02 14:51

So what happens to people that just don't know how to relax? Because that's what I would be hearing back, right? And that's what probably you hear back as well. I just don't know how to relax, I don't have the time to relax. It's because they haven't prepped. It's too hard.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

And so look, there's there's whole evidence-based toolkits of relaxation techniques. I can give you some examples, and you can kind of think about ones you can do in the weekends and evenings, and then ones you can do and plan for in the workday, which I think are the most important, because most of us are not activating that relaxation pathway at all at work. Yet that's where we spend most of our time. So that's going to have a huge effect on our neural pathways. So ideally, you want to be activating the relaxation response pathway, the so that sense of safety and relaxation in your nervous system once every two hours at work. But the good news is it can take as little as one minute. So we're not saying you have to go out to a yoga class for an hour at lunchtime. Can you think of what you could do in one minute to calm down and feel better? Most people know this one.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Well, I would probably know because I've been looking into that quite significantly over the last few years. Because I would I was like you, where you know, high performing, overachieving, children, business, life, whatever, stresses, and then it gets to a point where your body just gives up, your body just goes, I've had enough. So I had to look into that as well. And it was deep breathing, absolutely definitely is one of the key ones, right?

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Absolutely. So 10 slow deep breaths where you're making sure you're not using your chest to breathe, because that's related to the stress response. So you can have both hands on your one on your chest and one on your belly, and just making sure the one on your belly is moving. But you really want to extend the exhale. So a good way to remember is in for four and out for eight. And you can just do that for one to two minutes, and that will give your body a spike of green, like a moment for recovery, calm, and sense of safety. And that will be practicing activating that neural pathway, which we want to be dominant, which avoids us tipping into those patterns of chronic stress and anxiety. And also our brain can't work, can't work, can't think properly. We can't access that prefrontal cortex when we're in that stress response because it shuts down. So we don't have access to learning, memory, communication, empathy, strategic, creative, lateral thinking. So by giving activating that relaxation response, that brings that part of the brain back online. So it's a really great thing to do during the workday. Even if you just set your alarm every two hours and just did a minute of breathing, that would make a huge difference. And if you did that over eight weeks, you would rewire your brain.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

Wow, that's really cool. Because what I've realized when I first started it is that I couldn't even breathe with my stomach.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

And apparently a lot of people yourself for thoracic breathing and holding your breath.

unknown 17:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Yeah. Yeah. So for those that are listening right now, I would love for them to just experiment that and see whether they can, whether they can breathe properly or not.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

And so a good tip because many of us have trained, it's just a neural pathway that's been retrained. Like our belly breathing, diaphragmatic breathing should be the dominant neural pathway. But because when we're stressed all through the day and rushing, we've been practicing chest breathing. And so we've actually rewired our breathing. That happened to me as well. And so the only way to reset that is to just practice belly breathing. But here's two quick tips. One is you don't want to wait till you're stressed to practice belly breathing because when you're in stress response, you can't access learning and memory. And so it will feel really hard to do. So you want to proactively set alarms and practice breathing so that your brain and body gets used to it. And then when you are stressed, you can be able to access it much more easily. Another tip is if you're finding it hard to belly breathe and it might

Neuroplasticity And The Stress Loop

SPEAKER_00 18:40

make you feel a bit anxious, try lying down because you can really access your diaphragm much easier and have your knees up, lying down on the floor. Yeah.

unknown 18:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

But practice things and don't wait till you're stressed to try it. Do it when you're relaxed.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

Okay, so these are the shorter ones that people can do, and that could be part of their daily habit. Yeah. What are the other things that people can do that you said they might try on the weekend or you know, once a month, or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 19:07

A couple of ones for the workplace. First, the ones that I get really great feedback from my toolkits that people love. It sounds a bit fluffy, but it's mindful colouring, and it's not fluffy. There is whole neuroscientific research papers and books written about it by neuroscientist Dr. Stan Radowski. Mindful colouring, you know those books you can get, and having a few coloured pixels and popping one of them by your desk is absolutely incredible for our physiology. It lowers cortisol, it slows our brain rays down into alpha, which is more creative, relaxed, lowers blood pressure, it slows your heart rate down, and it restores our depleted attention circuits. So you might notice you can, when you first get to work, you're on fire, you know, everything's working, and then you just start to run out of mental energy and you're not really being productive. That's the time you want to go and do some mindful colouring because it restores and refreshes your cognition. So just five to ten minutes of mindful colouring can make some incredible physiological changes in terms of stress and focus for when you go back to your desk. So highly recommend that. You can do anything that's mindful, like a lot of the businesses I work with have mindful colouring stations, but they also do things like puzzles, is great. You can just doodle, you know, on a piece of paper, drawing. It's essentially anything where you're not using your prefrontal cortex for information processing. So it's going back to the old-fashioned things. So some people do knitting, crochet, you can interact with other humans. That's that counts as a relaxation um activity, creates all sorts of positive hormones like oxytocin. So having an engaged chat without your phone with a colleague, having a laugh, a random act of kindness for someone, or expressing gratitude are all wonderful ways to activate that relaxation response. And one of the absolute no-brainers that I think every single person that works in an office should do is go outside for a walk at least once a day without your phone.

SPEAKER_02 21:00

So that's the work done. I love that you said without the phone because I feel like people these days are so glued to the phone, and it removes that whole nine to five work as well, because you're constantly on the phone, you're constantly responding, and even if you're not responding, you see things coming in. I mean, I'm I think I'm talking about myself, and I see things coming in, and I'm like, damn it, I have to respond to this now. And it becomes that burnout moment of being constantly on.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, these days, and there's but there was a sharp decline in our mental health around 2014 in terms of the data. And can you imagine what happened then? It's when smartphones reached mass saturation. So when most of us had our desktop internet in our pocket all of a sudden. And what's ended up happening slowly over time is that we now fill every little gap that we used to have for our brain to catch up with the processing of information from the last 90 minutes. We're filling it with more information as we stand in the lift and reply to a message, or wait in the shopping line queue and quickly pay a bill, or you know, get down to the beach to. Take a photo and then see something pop up and end up doing that. We're plugging all those little gaps. There's not many moments where we're not being productive during the day. And our brain really needs white space because we can only process 90 minutes worth of information at one time. And most of us are stacking information on top of information all day. Anytime we're connected to a device, our brain's still having to process that data, even if it's an ad being served to us that's not relevant. Our brain still has to know what to do with that, upload it to short-term, long-term memory, delete it, or problem solve. So it's really important to plan these breaks during the day where we're away from information input. So essentially away from any device.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Yeah. Because the other thing you talk a lot a lot about is managing your energies. Yes. So not really managing your day, but managing your energy. Can we tap into that a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 23:05

Yeah, so we've all got 24 hours in a day, but I think that it's really what's different is our energy in terms of our brain energy and how we can actually perform. That doesn't stay the same through the day. So we often kind of just plan, plan, plan, plan, plan. But actually, our our brain really has moments in the day where it's primed for peak performance. And we want to really plan our day around when that energy is. So if I was to ask you, when do you think that your brain is most energized for complex work?

SPEAKER_02 23:38

I would say it's the morning. Yeah. I wake up, I'm fresh, I've shoved, I've exercised, dropped the kids to school, I'm ready to go.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Yeah, absolutely. So for most people, the first three hours after we wake up are the most productive cognitively. Our brain's been asleep, it's now recharged. And so we want to plan our day around that brain energy. And then if I was to ask you when your brain is least energized, what would you say?

SPEAKER_02 24:04

I get the after-lunch slump. Yeah. I feel like between 12 to 3, it tends to be a little bit difficult to concentrate on higher performing tasks.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yeah, absolutely. So I think when we talk about managing energy, it's knowing that we can't, admitting that we can't operate it 100% the whole day. And so knowing our own personal energy peaks and energy troughs, and really planning our most important work around those peaks and being really conscious of it. And you will be so much more productive if you do that. And it also means planning recovery time in because our brain can actually only work. We've got these things called performance or trade and performance rhythms. So you might be familiar that when we sleep, we have REM cycles, sorry, sleep cycles, we have REM, light sleep, deep sleep, and that also 90 minutes. So there was a sleep researcher, Nathaniel Clytemann. He was just studying our sleep cycles at night in the 1950s, and then he discovered we have these 90-minute cycles in the day as well. But in the day, these 90-minute cycles account for the ebb and flow of our mental energy.

One-Minute Resets For Workdays

SPEAKER_00 25:10

And so you might notice this. So when you first sit down in the morning to work, you feel like on fire, everything's really easy for 90 minutes, and all of our physiological measures start to increase. So our heart rate's slightly elevated, our temperature's elevated, our muscle tension's elevated, our brainwaves are at their highest in beta. And that's really priming, our body is priming us for peak performance. But then after 90 minutes, at the end of 90 minutes, you might notice that you start to not be so focused. You might be distracting yourself, checking your phone, switching tabs, you might start to yawn, you might feel tired, you might start to go hunting for things. And that's actually because you've reached the end of a performance rhythm, and your brain is now craving a trade-in recovery period for 10 to 20 minutes. Okay. So we used, I think we kind of have a hangover from the factory worker days where we work with machines. And the harder and faster we work the machines, the more outputs we got. And so we're trying to do that with our brains. We're just trying to work all day, like work as hard as we can, as long as we can, hoping that we'll get the most work. But our brains are the total opposite to a machine. They need to switch between expending energy, working really hard, and then short bursts of recovery. And then when you recover, you go back into another ultradian peak performance rhythm. So we really want to be listening to that feedback when we start to yawn. And what do most of us do instead? We go to the kitchen and we get, and I don't think that's wine. A coffee. We get a coffee to try and get fake energy and we get sugar. So we're trying to, it's like borrowing money from a credit card that we don't have. We're trying to give ourselves false energy with sugar and caffeine, whereas we'd be much better to take a short break, let our brain recover and recharge, and then we'd go back and work with those hormonal and physiological changes, which prime us for peak performance. So coming from a corporate background, look, I get it. We can't always plan our day in 9010, 9010, 9010. But even if you were to go, what I like to say to my clients, you know, it's still not a hard and fast prescription, but it's still a biological principle. Our brain simply is meant to operate, alternating between periods of focus and recovery during the day. So if you look at your diary at the beginning of every day, you've just got to look, where are those moments where I can really protect my focus and then how can I recharge? I like to say, suggest to my clients, the companies that I work with, you aim for a minimum of three brain breaks a day. And you can do that by not having an hour for lunch. You can cut your lunch break down to half an hour, and then you can do 15 minutes of morning tea and 15 minutes of afternoon tea. And even just that will make a huge difference to how productive you are, and you'll be less tired at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_02 27:54

You know, I always think about the smoker breaks that people have. They do that. The smoker breaks, you know, apart from that cigarettes are bad for you. But like the smokers are actually quite relaxed people, if you think about it, because they breathe, right? They do the whole thing.

SPEAKER_00 28:10

You do die from that breathing, yeah. And they're socializing usually and they're outside away from yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking of smoker, but not smoking.

SPEAKER_02 28:21

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring back the smoker breaks without smoking. And again, like the whole vaping thing, I think, is just so dangerous for the society as well, but it's a whole new other topic that we we cannot cannot go to. Chris, so you've got children. You've got okay, two two children.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Yeah, two daughters, yeah. Two children. Yeah. How old are they? So eleven and five. Do you talk to them about these things? Oh, always. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually do run mindfulness courses in their school and kinda, which was really cool. So I can adapt this for children as well. In fact, I think we should all be learning it when we're young because it's you can't even learn maths if you're in the stress response. So we need these fundamental human tools and emotional awareness and literacy from a young age. But yeah, some things I do with them are meditations when they're going to sleep. I'll taught them through a body scan. I teach them about deep breathing with their favorite toy on their belly. We do gratitude, we do naming emotions and feelings. Yeah, lots of things.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

I think that's so important in today's age as well, when there's so much information overload from all sorts of sources, right? Like if we think about when you and I were kids, there wasn't much. I mean, I grew up in a country where we only watched TV on a Sunday. There was only, I think, 30 minutes of Disney Channel, and that's it. I had no TV growing up at all. And and now, and you know, a lot of my time was spent playing outside and doing puzzles and crosswords and whatever. And now I look at the kids these days, and it's so so hard for them because they're just flying though. Yeah. So if the parents are already stressed, how are they gonna cope with their kids that are also stressed? So it's sort of like oxygen mask if we can help parents to learn how to refocus themselves and re-regulate first, yeah. Yeah, rewire, and then that way they should be able to help their children. So it's not for the whole society, really.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Totally agree. And a lot of these things you can actually do. If you notice, you know, around five o'clock, everyone's a bit stressed. Do some of the tools with your kids. Like kids love to sit down and do mindful colouring with me, and most kids do. If your kids like to dance, dancing's a great way to discharge stress hormones, put some music on and dance together. Go if you have a dog, all take the dog for a walk together. So, you know, I kind of like suggest, like to suggest that people have like a list of tools that they can reach to. Put them in the fridge or on the on the wall somewhere, and everyone can take a turn picking one a day. Often after school, there's a lot of energy and emotion that's been built up. And same for us at work. So rather than just trying to get straight into all the admin, try and do something to all regulate as a family is a great way to do it.

SPEAKER_02 31:13

I love that. Now, you know, obviously I work in the money space, you know, there's a lot of clients I deal

Energy Peaks And Brain Breaks

SPEAKER_02 31:20

with that come to me and they want to buy a house, it's the most stressful time of their lives. Yeah, the brains are firing, all the things. What sort of things can you suggest to people to try to manage that stressful time of their lives?

SPEAKER_00 31:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:35

What things they can be thinking.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

Well, there's lots of lots of ways you could approach it, but I think a lot of the time we're not aware that our thoughts that we have can turn on the stress response. So if we're having negative thoughts about around the process and fear around the process of buying a house, that in itself can actually just turn on the stress hormones. So whilst we can't always help the thoughts that pop into our head, we can be aware that they're happening and then we can turn the stress response off with one of the tools, whether it's breathing. One of the best tools is to help get stress hormones out of the body is three to five minutes of vigorous movement because the fight-flight freeze response was designed to be followed by a short burst of intense physical activity as we fought the predator or ran back into the cave. So you can you can feel pretty yucky if you've got these thoughts building up and turning on the stress response, and you're just sort of sitting around. So movement can be really key in managing that. But yeah, just having those awareness around the thoughts, around that process and making sure you're matching the stress with some green, with some with some relaxation to help keep that balance in the nervous system.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

I find that through this journey with my clients often, I I do say to them, okay, let's take a deep breath, let's think it through, you know, let's let's just calm down for a moment because I feel a lot of the time they feel the pressure from someone else. They feel like the agents are putting the pressure or the vendors are putting the pressure, or you know, they're scared that they will lose out on the house, or they lose their finances are not in the greatest shape. So I find the more knowledge you have, it helps to calm the brain as well. Like it gives the brain the information that things will work out.

SPEAKER_00 33:18

And you can't make you can't access that part of your brain responsible for good quality decision making in the stress response. So that's another thing you could do to your point, is even just doing some deep breathing when you're in that space where you're needing to make a decision, you want to be making sure you're in the relaxation response because otherwise you won't be thinking clearly or strategically.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Yeah. Oh, 100%. I said all the time, I'll be having a meeting with clients, and if they're stressed out, there's no way they will remember what we discussed about. So often I have to repeat myself many times. But also, what I find is that they come in and they want to have you know answers to 20 questions, but I will only answer the first few, or I will answer the most important ones because I feel like again, if I give them answers to everything at once, they're not going to remember it.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

No, totally. I love that.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

I love that. So, in terms of for you, where do you see yourself next? What's next for Christy in this space?

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Yeah, that's a good question. I'm always kind of honing my content, creating new content. I think I've got about 20 workshops now across all different areas of well-being, but I've kind of narrowed it down to my signature three, which are getting booked the most, and that is resilience rewired. I've got one called Minimize Distraction, Maximize Productivity, Why Focus is the new frontier of workplace health and performance. And then my final one is the secrets of sustainable high performance. So I'm really working on creating those programs and I'm actually adding in a behavior change piece to them. So often people will come to a talk and they'll the purpose of the talk is to you know, hopefully feel motivated, inspired, and learn something. But one of the biggest challenges I've found is that people go back to work and they've got this, you know, notebook full of notes and they're just busy and overwhelmed. So I really ensure that all of my workshops allow time and space for reflection at the end so you can do your goal setting there and know that you can walk away with one goal to because research, habit research shows if you try and change too much at once, you change nothing at all. So that is a real key tweak that I've been making to my workshops, and I'm now adding in a behaviour change extension piece for them where you team up with an accountability buddy for eight weeks and you meet once a week, talk about your goals because we're social creatures, and research shows we're up to 80% more likely to actually change a habit or create a habit and hardwire it if we're you know meeting someone and they're expecting us to discuss what our progress is. So that and also a habits e-course is now going with each of my workshops, which looks at how we can hardwire habits because many of us come away with well-being goals and that we're not, you know, we're we've got endless information when it comes to wellness, but the challenge is actually turning it into a habit that sticks. So that's a kind of add-on that I've been working on. And I'm actually, yeah, just expanding to Australia. I've just been signed with a couple of agents over there and doing a few talks over there, which has been fun.

SPEAKER_02 36:26

That's fun. I think the more people we have like you that out there spreading the message and showing that it can be done, the more people will believe. Because again, we are societal creatures, and I think seeing the proof that someone else has done it gives you that reassurance that, hey, I could possibly do that as well. And I love the way you said that sustainable high performance. Yeah, because there's a difference, right? There's a difference between high performance and sustainable high performance.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Can we just dig into that just a tiny bit, please? Yeah, totally. So high performance just means that you can perform at a high level for a time, but sustainable high performance means you can continually perform at a high high level whilst protecting your well-being, health, and relationships and enjoyment of life outside of work. We can all perform at a high level, but we can't sustain it if we're not supporting our well-being at the same time. Because that's the foundation upon which high performance is built.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

Yeah. And again, it's super, super important with the field what I do, because I I truly believe if people can't get hold of that mental resilience, the strength, it will affect their finances. It's so closely related. I mean, if they're not doing well, they're gonna start losing, you know, sleep, start losing their jobs, and then all of a sudden they can't afford their mortgage and yeah, whatever. So it just everything has a domino effect.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

It's all interlinked, and I always talk about the four-dimensional well-being model. We've got it's similar to Fare Tapa Fa and Multi Health. Yeah. But I refer to them as the mental dimension, which is not so much mental health, it's more your capacity for focus, being resourceful, problem solving, strategic thinking. Then we've got emotional health, which is your ability to regulate your emotions, be aware, and also how socially connected you are to your friends, family, and community. Then we have physical, which is your energy to get up and go and how well you're sleeping, your physical vitality. And then finally we have internal, and this is that bigger picture piece of our well-being and health. And that's you know, our purpose, our sense of fulfillment, progression in life, living in alignment with our values. And often a great place to start if you're you're not feeling great, but you're not really sure what where you should go. You cannot you can go through and actually rate yourself out of 10 for each of those areas and figure out what is your lowest rated dimension and then start with one habit in there to recharge it. Because the thing is, these four dimensions of our health are like an ecosystem and they rely on the health of each other to thrive. So if one's depleted, it will naturally impact the others. So for me, when my mental, you know, my cognition, my brain, because I wasn't taking breaks, I was working too hard, that was so depleted that I then didn't have the capacity to heal my physical injury. But when I gave some attention to the most depleted dimension, my mental well-being, my mind, with meditation and resting my mind for 20 minutes a day, then naturally

Kids And Families Learn Regulation

SPEAKER_00 39:25

all the other dimensions, including being able to heal my back, happened within weeks. So it's a really great. I don't know if I'm allowed to link some resources.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

I can put some resources together.

SPEAKER_00 39:36

Yeah, I can do the it we call it the whole bang, well-bang audit. So I'll pop that in there for people if they're interested.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

Yeah, no, I think this is super, super important because the more we learn, the more we're eager to make changes. And as you say, I'm really into the behavior as well. I feel like it's all good and great that to listen to this talks and go, oh, yeah, that was a great idea. But if you're not going to change anything in your life, what was the point? Yeah. Like you've got to do something, you've got to change something. And I often come across very strong when I talk about these things because I'm truly passionate about this. Is I want to see people do better. I want the best for people because the the better they are, the better the society, and it just has that follow-on effect. Totally. I mean, you've got we've got children, I've got children. We've got to leave this planet a better place. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:23

No, I love that.

SPEAKER_02 40:24

Then what we've found it.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

Yeah, we need to look after ourselves first, and then everything else follows.

SPEAKER_02 40:30

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yes, I would love the links to the resources. We'll link it up under the podcast for our listeners. So please send us through. That would be that would be really cool. I had this beautiful question for you, and then it just the train the train left the department.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

Don't you love that? Well, I was gonna talk about I can talk about habits for a little bit if you want. Maybe it will come back. Yes, please. Um, habits are a really important piece of the puzzle, I think, because yeah, as I said, we can often go to these talks or look look up whatever we want on AI when it comes to well-being, but then we don't really know how to turn that well-being goal into a habit. And so all habits have three steps. We've got the there's always first some kind of reminder that makes the habit happen. So it could be a time, a place, a person, or a feeling. I'll give you an example in a second. Then we have the ritual, the habit itself, and then we have some kind of reward. So we have to have a reward for that neurological habit loop to go back and keep happening until it becomes hardwired. What people miss is mostly the reminder. So simple. Because we're on autopilot 40% of the day, so we're not even fully conscious, we're just going through the motions, we will just forget to do the habit. So we have to get really, really clear. So I'll give you an example of a habit most of us have, and that's coffee. So for some people, the reminder is the time of day, or it could be a feeling, feeling tired, seeing a person at work, having coffee with them, a place, a coffee shop they pass. But that usually happens to shog their memory to carry out the ritual. And then there is a reward. Either we like the taste, or we like the social connection, or we like the smell. And so that starts to cement that habit neurological loop. And then the I add a fourth R, which is repeat for eight weeks to hardwire because it takes eight weeks to create a neural pathway. So you kind of have to have patience and keep going for a good eight weeks, and then it will become really hardwired and it will just become automatic. So, yeah, if you why don't you give me a habit that you're wanting to, and we can brainstorm the reminder and the reward. Have you got a habit in mind that you want to start?

SPEAKER_02 42:36

I've just remembered my question.

SPEAKER_00 42:38

Oh, sorry, yeah, I thought that would happen.

SPEAKER_02 42:41

Yeah, I think the question was around, you know, meditation and how what sort of you know, what sort of tools you've got there for people to to refer to. Because often my habit is usually in the morning, I wake up, I grab my phone, and I hit the YouTube channel for meditation. I don't look at anything else. I train my brain not to get distracted by messages or emails or whatever. I grab the phone, literally hit the YouTube meditation channel is there, off I go 10 minutes into my headspace because I find that guided meditations work for me because I've got such a busy brain when I wake up. That's the only way I can pull myself back into not thinking about the day ahead. Yeah. So that's something I really want to work on more is to dedicate more time towards the meditation. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:26

Awesome. Yeah. Research shows if you are wanting to rewire the brain and get the full benefits, you need about 20 minutes a day. So it could be 20 minutes or two 10-minute sessions. I personally also like guided audios. I've meditated almost every day since 2014, and I just love it now. But it's yeah, it's a practice. Like you wouldn't expect to go to a golf, you know, video masterclass and then walk out on the green and hit a hole in one. It's like, you know, it takes time to for your body to feel safe to be stopping and not doing. Can it sometimes feel unsafe for people? But um, I've got some wonderful resources that I can share. Particularly, there's an eight week program by Oxford University professors, which is to rewire your brain. And all the benefits that come with that, which it goes through. It's called Mindfulness Finding Peace in a Frantic World. And it is really great. So you go through one meditation every day for a week and then you switch to week two. And it's only $7. So it's all completely science-pressed. Yeah, I really love that one. So I'll include that in the resources. And I've got some really lovely yoga nidras I do. Sometimes if I'm working from home, I'll after the lunch break, I start feeling tired. So I'll go and lie down and do a 15-minute yoga nidra, which is non-sleep deep rest. So it's really restorative for the brain. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

I find the problem is I fall asleep sometimes. I feel like I fall asleep for five minutes already.

SPEAKER_00 44:50

That's all right. It just means you've activated the relaxation response so much that your brain feels safe enough to go to sleep.

SPEAKER_01 44:59

I have to drag myself out of it.

SPEAKER_02 45:01

You know, one thing when you were talking about the energies, what I've realized is that a lot of my meetings I do at night as well. Like I do a lot of 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. meetings. And I found that people would often ask me, how do you get the energy for this? How do you do that? You know, how do you work so late? And what I've just realized as you were talking is often I'll put my kids to bed first, and I lie down with every kid. So now only two of them want me to lie down with them out of four. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 45:28

Wow, I just think a lot.

SPEAKER_02 45:30

Um yes, I find with my 13-year-old, he doesn't need me to lie down with him anymore. The 11-year-old has sort of shifted out of that space, but my eight-year-old and my six-year-old, they still need me. And often we'll lie down, we'll read a book, and then you know, we'll talk about the day and what's been. And then I'll just put some relaxation music. And what I've realized is that I will nod off for the 10 minutes, and then I have to Yeah, and then I have to force myself to get up, and I'll be going, Oh my god, why do I need to get up? It would have been so much nicer to fall asleep now, but then I realize it's only seven o'clock at night, probably not the best idea to fall asleep now. And then I go to the next kid. So it's sort of like, and then I do the same cycle all over again, and I go back into relaxation. I have to break myself out of it. But then somehow I sit down for my eight o'clock meeting and I have the energy, I have the brain capacity, I can do the numbers. And I think maybe because I was going through that brain relaxation cycle.

SPEAKER_00 46:26

Totally giving your brain a break from information processing.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

Yeah, because when I lie down with my kids, I usually put the phone away, I don't look at it, I just put the music there. And usually my clients know between five to eight at night, I'm with the kids, unless absolutely emergencies happening, that's cool. But most of the time I tried to put my phone away and just really concentrate on the children because what I found is that when I was on my phone all the time, the I would be stressed, and then the kids would be stressed. Yeah, and it just wasn't good for anyone. And then if I was sitting down for my eight o'clock, I would be stressed out, the kids would be waking up all the time. So then I decided, okay, let's just change those things up. And that worked. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

Yeah, fantastic. Yep. Cool reset. I'd be curious.

SPEAKER_02 47:13

Yeah, I'd be curious to know, like for those that are listening, you know, if you're listening right now and you're thinking, oh, this is what I've done in my life, please reach out because I often get this emails from people going, Oh, you know, you did this podcast, this is what I've done in my life. So I would love this moment for my listeners to go, what have they done in their life? Yeah, we can always all learn.

SPEAKER_00 47:32

Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_01 47:35

Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 47:36

Christy, just final question for you as we're wrapping up, because again, you know, the brain can only take so much, and I think our listeners are usually cap my episodes to 60 minutes. Yeah. I want to understand your relationship with money and how that has changed

Habits Money And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_02 47:50

for you over the years. Because again, that's a lot of brain work that needs to happen there.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

Yeah, that's a good question. I have a very relaxed relationship around money. I'm not sure why. Sometimes I think I should be a little bit more stressed about it, but I just I buy I buy things that really mean a lot to me, and you know, sometimes go with my heart over my head. But, you know, we own our own house and in Muraway, and I think money is not something that's super, super important to me as long as I've got the basics and a few little nice extras thrown in there. So I'm pretty relaxed around it.

SPEAKER_02 48:33

Interesting. Have you always earned money? Because you obviously a high you were a high performer, you worked super hard. Yeah. Like what was driving it? Was it the money or was it just the ethics that you built in?

SPEAKER_00 48:43

It's never about the money. And I I was on an amazing salary back then that I couldn't even dream of now, now that I work part-time, so I can be with the kids. So it was money's been always it's been around values for me. So for me, it was career excellence, I think, my craft that was really driving me, and the money that came with that was an extra bonus. And I managed to buy my first house on the North Shore in Rossay Bay on my own when I was 26. Wow. Yeah, and it but it just sort of seemed to come easy, easily, and I didn't really worry about things too much.

SPEAKER_02 49:18

Yeah. But maybe that's why it came easily because you didn't worry about it till much. Yeah, yeah. I find that people that overworry, overstress about the money, it doesn't come because money is a river, money flows. Like energy, isn't it? Like blocks, blocks that is interesting. It is correct. It's very closely related to energy because I'm doing a lot of work in that space of understanding how people's minds, people's energies work with money. And I find because I'm the same. Like for me, it was always the work ethics, yeah, and money came secondary to that. So the as long as you've got the right ethics in work, the money will flow.

SPEAKER_00 49:57

Yeah. Yeah, agree.

SPEAKER_02 50:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:00

Yeah, there's a great exactly uh the podcast, no audio book that I've been listening to. You might have heard of it called Love Money, Money Loves You. Yeah. Yeah, it's really worth read. It's a lot about the m the magnetics and and energy involved in money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:17

I think I'm I feel like I'm frozen. Yes, you are frozen. Oh, there you are. You're back. There you go. Yeah, finally, finally, I'm back. Yes, I will also look up that book and hook it up as a link for our listeners.

SPEAKER_00 50:30

Fantastic. I love that one. So I'm I'll make sure I the other one the meditation and the well-being audit.

SPEAKER_02 50:36

Thank you. And the one I will, I'm not sure if you've come across that one, but it's the art of the art of money. Oh yeah. No, I haven't. The art of money. That's a really good one as well. Great. It's a very good one. Christy, thank you so so much for jumping on the call with me. You're just an absolute bubble of energy, and I can just see how people can gravitate so easily to you. And with your talks, you are transforming lives. So I'm very grateful. Thank you that you've come. Yeah, well, you know, the more people we can reach, the better. And I know I've got a lot of listeners from America as well, which is maybe your new will be your new new market. I don't like that.

SPEAKER_00 51:15

That's on my list. Travel further abroad to spread the message. Yeah, thank you. I'll just leave I like to leave everyone with the idea that sustainable high performance is not about doing less, it's about doing it differently. So don't overhaul your life, just start with one small change and keep it consistent, and over time it will make compound to make a big difference, just like interest. I thought that was a nice, uh, nice analogy to end on, given we're on a money show.

SPEAKER_02 51:43

Love it, love it, love it, love it. Thank you so much, Christy. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 51:47

Pleasure. Lovely to meet you and um, yeah, stay well.

SPEAKER_02 51:52

Thank you. You too.