The Resilience Advantage

The Resilience Advantage

November 2018 | 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST

Content

Featured Speakers

Moderator: 

Emily Stringer, Consultant Services Advisor, MBO Partners

Featured Speaker:

Jessica Glazer, Senior Faculty, Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)

00:06  Introduction of the event, MBO Partners, and speaker

04:29  Agenda of the webinar

05:59  Introduction to the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL)

07:55  The independent success capabilities

09:01  The case for resilience

23:42  Five areas of resilience

25:08  Area of resilience: Sleep

31:25  Area of resilience: Exercise  

35:20  Area of resilience: Mindfulness

50:04  Area of resilience: Gratitude

55:45  Area of resilience: Making Meaning

58:51  The 1% solution

1:00:10  Quick poll

1:02:14  Q&A 

1:13:55  Closing remarks

As a small company entrepreneur, the road to success is neither straight, level, nor smooth. To deal with all of the ups and downs, uncertainties, and head-spinning changes that come with the work, you'll need tenacity, discipline, stamina, and a healthy risk orientation. The recommendations provided by the key speaker of this webinar can help you to achieve business growth and gain expanded assistance.

In this exclusive webinar, Jessica Glazer, Senior Faculty of Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), discussed the importance of cultivating resilience. When you are confronted with failures, disappointments, and challenges, it is critical to be able to rapidly bounce back, stronger than before, with newfound knowledge to continue forward. This program provides research-based advice on what it means to be resilient.

This Q&A-style discussion covered:

  • What is “green exercise” and how it decreases stress, improves mood, enhances focus, and boosts self-control
  • How to be mindful of your own mental and emotional battery
  • How “art therapy” has been found to reduce stress, anxiety, pain, and discomfort
  • How “art therapy” engages the hands in productive, concrete, and finite work and fires up the brain’s reward circuitry

Are you interested in attending the next webinar in the Professional Development series? View our upcoming events.

[00:00:06] Emily Stringer Hello, everyone. Good afternoon and welcome to today's webinar, The Resilience Advantage, featuring Jessica Glaser of the Center for Creative Leadership. My name is Emily Stringer and I will be moderating the webinar today. A little background on me, I've been with MBO for eight and a half years. As a Consultant Services Advisor, I respond to requests from independents who are curious about MBO service offerings. This is done through consultation appointments, where we learn more about your background and needs and determine if MBO's services are the right fit for your business of one. MBO's mission statement is to make it easy for independent consultants and their clients to work together. For a high level overview, we offer a complete, all inclusive business operating platform for independent consultants. We take care of the administrative items that are typically outsourced to several different vendors, like incorporation, contract review, liability coverage, invoicing, expense review and processing, tax withholding and remittance and access to tax efficient affordable benefits. Now for some housekeeping items on the webinar set up, first and foremost, you can see the controls listed here. Secondly, we will be emailing a slide deck and a recorded copy of the entire webinar to all registrants within the next week. Last, we will be taking questions throughout that will be addressed at the end of our presentation and a Q&A session. Any questions that we do not get to will be answered via email after the presentation. Please use the questions field to chat those questions over to us. If you would like to follow along on Twitter for today's presentation, please use #MBOWeb to submit your questions and comments @MBOPartners.

[00:02:22] Emily Stringer At this time, it is my pleasure to introduce you to today's speaker, Jessica Glazer. Jessica is the Senior Faculty Member, Design Solutions Consultant and Executive Coach at the Center for Creative Leadership. Jessica partners with organizations to deliver leadership programs and long term solutions that meet today's most pressing business needs. She has experience as an independent consultant, having run her own training and public speaking company for over six years. Jessica has worked in and managed career service departments at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School. Prior to her work in the leadership arena, Jessica spent over 10 years in academia, teaching in Psychology departments and Business schools at Harvard and Johns Hopkins with a focus on positive psychology and developing Personal and Professional potential. Jessica, at this time, I'll turn it over to you.

[00:03:21] Jessica Glazer Thank you so much. How are you guys doing today? I hope you're all having a nice day. It sounds like for Emily, and the MBO team, it's a little bit cold up in D.C. with some snow. I'm based in Greensboro, North Carolina, which is where our CCL International Headquarters are. And I'm really excited to be here with you today. It's just a little rainy here, but I do have a coat on in my office and I'm excited to be spending the next hour with all of you. Well, I wanted to start with this quote here, it says, "Go into the world and do well; but more importantly, go into the world and do good." And I think it's an important reminder for ourselves and also for the work that we're all doing, particularly in your roles as independent consultants and trying to figure out how you both create a working business for yourself and also create value for yourself and for others. And so, I'm really excited to be working, particularly with this group today, to talk about how you can do that for other people, but also how you can sometimes turn inwards and make sure that you're checking in with yourself in an important area of resilience. Today, what we're going to be talking about are a couple of things. We're going to be looking at Independent Success Capabilities. And so at the start of our work, you first may have joined a session with my colleague George Hallenbeck, and he introduced several capabilities and competencies that we think are very important for independent consultants. And so we'll run through those as a quick reminder, because I'll refer back to them throughout the session. Now, let's talk about the case for resilience, Five Areas of Resilience, and we'll have some time at the end for questions and answers. Now, one caveat before we begin is that I know that sometimes this topic can bring up a number of questions that sometimes people prefer to ask privately. And since we don't have a direct connection to each other, I will have my email at the end of the session. That's also something that you can get from Emily in the group. And right now, just to share that, it's my last name, first initial glazerj@ccl.org. And I'll invite you to email me with any questions that you might have regarding what we talk about today and how that applies personally or professionally. So, again, we will have a little bit of time at the end. But should anything come up where you'd like resources or anything like that I can share with you and if I don't have an answer for you, I will do my best to find someone who does. I do want to invite you to do that right from the beginning. So we will follow through with this and getting started. I did want to introduce you briefly to CCL. So you heard about MBO's mission and it's a wonderful mission and our mission sort of coincides with that. And it's really to advance the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benefit of society worldwide. And that seems very broad. But we're really making headway there and I'll show you that in a moment. And our role today and generally is to help optimize leadership for businesses and for independent consultants as well. So for individuals to help them to optimize their leadership in service of that mission. Now, I mentioned I'm in Greensboro, North Carolina. That's because our founder had a family pharmacy that was in downtown Greensboro and it was known as the Vicks Corporation. And you may be familiar with Vicks Vaporub, Oil of Olay, Clearasil, any number of products that are now very known products originally started in a small pharmacy downtown in our small city in North Carolina. And as the company grew and it grew rapidly, they wanted to understand the need for innovation and business leadership. And so they started an organization in 1970 in the area where I sit now. Actually one of the buildings is our original building and we really want to look at what makes leaders succeed, how do we find the best leaders and what very quickly the research showed and what we've continued to show through over 40 years of research is that it's not about finding the best leaders, but about developing those leaders and that's the perspective that we come to you today with. And when we're talking about our worldwide approach, we really do try to think beyond boundaries, and we work with people on six continents; we have four headquarters continents and four headquarters. And we really do try to reach everyone as best as we can. So any kind of leadership needs that you may have. We hope that we can help you with. Now, when we talk about independent consultants and we talk about the success capabilities related to being an independent consultant, George put forth four specific areas at the beginning of the year, and one was about building an authentic brand. So you may have heard our colleague Glenn Miller speak with you about that on a recent webinar, and she talked about building an authentic brand. George also is an expert in learning agility. And so that's a big topic that we talk about. And so as you're an independent consultant, certainly having a brand to differentiate yourself that also is authentic for you is very important. But so is learning agility as you grow and transform and you really figure out how do you stay agile in the space that you're in. We also talked about networking and I had the pleasure of getting to do that with you earlier in the spring. So if you were able to make that webinar, that was where we talked about really working together to build something more beautiful. How do you find the right people? How do you build a network that will support you? And how do you even look for mentors within that network? Some of those things will be referring back to as we go today. And today we will talk about is the fourth area that George outlined and that's Resilience.

[00:09:06] Jessica Glazer Now, as Emily mentioned, Resilience is a topic that I have been teaching for a long time. I started teaching Positive Psychology at Harvard in 2005. And so this is an area that is of a great passion for me and also one that I have found really relates to every level of leadership and is something that is not only a nice to have, but a need to have. And we really find that is a foundational area. So I'll explain a little bit more about that now. When we're talking about resilience, I think the easiest way to think about it is to look at this photo here and I'm going to open up the chat, and what I'd love for you guys to do is in the chat box, when you look at this photo, tell us a time or what? What do you feel? What's one word that comes to mind when you felt like this at the end of the day? What's going on in your head when you feel like this picture here on the screen? Emily, I'm not seeing it come through, so I don't know if there's a.

[00:10:15] Emily Stringer I'm getting a couple of pieces of feedback here that are just coming in, I've got exhausted, frustrated.  Working.

[00:10:25] Jessica Glazer Yeah, exhausted, frustrated, we often hear just at the end of my rope, I'm through with it. I recently got in the car the other day and I thought I had everything. Then I noticed that I had a bottle spilled all over me and I had left my wallet home and just nothing was going my way. It was just, I probably looked more like this photo than I would ever care to admit. That can be really hard. So, we've all been here. We all know what this feels like. So what about if I put this photo up. This next photo, what does it feel like when everything is going your way and everything is, you're really in the zone and things it's smooth sailing. So what are the words that come to mind for this? Emily I'm going to rely on you for this as well, because it's coming up on my end.

[00:11:18] Emily Stringer Sure thing. I've got a couple that are coming in. Elated, confident, flow. 

[00:11:25] Jessica Glazer  Yeah, flow. So we have some people who may have check on his recent work on flow. And when we're talking about that, that's often sort of that intersection of skill and challenge here with this elephant. It looks like she's really mastering that board with a very challenging wave. But sometimes it does feel like despite all the things against us, we really are able to get up and surf that wave. Even if we're an elephant, we really can make it against all odds, we're succeeding. Everything's going well. Maybe we haven't spilled about all over ourselves. We have remembered our wallet. Everything's just going our way. And so when we're in this experience like that, we also know we're there. And it's not hard for us when we're really at the height of everything going well or we're really that child crying with a crown on our head. It's often not hard to know when we're in those moments. But what can be very difficult is when we are feeling like that first photo to figure out how to get ourselves to the second photo. Sometimes it feels like it's all lost. It's just time to go to bed. And we do just get up and try again the next day or the next week or sometimes it feels like the next month. So what we're going to talk about is how do we recharge faster? What can we do to turn that around faster? And also how can we be more aware of our state so that it doesn't get to the point where we're the crying child? Maybe we get to whimper a little bit and then we can write ourselves a little faster. Now, we're talking about this because sometimes we feel like that first photo because we're stressed. And what the World Health Organization has identified, and this was a while ago, actually, is that the health epidemic of the 21st century according to, again, the World Health Organization, is that it's going to be Stress; and that stress causes significant issues not only for people's mental health, but then it trickles down to significantly impact people's physical health as well. People get sick. You see higher absentee rates at work. People are just really burning out. It has a higher turnover rates with organizations. And when we're talking about health, the impact of our stress levels being so high on our overall health is very significant. Now, the problem often is, that we live in what we call a VUCO world, rather. And VUCO world is, as you see here, an acronym for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. It's an acronym that came out of the military in terms of figuring out plans. And they found it is very hard to create plans because the world was volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. So when you made plans, they had to be plans that allowed you to be agile. So using that learning agility, but also you had to be resilient to a point where when things weren't working out, you didn't start feeling like that child and that in that original photo. So when we talk about a VUCO world, it is important that we combine learning agility and resilience to really be our best. And as independent consultants, that's especially important because often we don't really have the time to say, "OK, well, let me phone it in for a week" or "Let me just take a break for a month and I'll just take it easy. Take a few or fewer jobs and see how it goes.". We really have to be on a lot of the time. And so it's very important that we build a foundation of resilience. Now, when we're talking about resilience, what I'm referring to in this session is the capacity is Zoley's definition here, and "It's the capacity of a system, enterprise or individual to maintain core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances." I want to highlight here is to maintain core purpose in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.  As things change and as things totally are uprooted, or as the world seems crazy and business is crazy and our personal lives are crazy, how do we stay with what we want to do? And also the word integrity there? That's right in the middle, how do we maintain our integrity, both integrity as it refers to our personality and that people can trust us, but also integrity in terms of our purpose. What did we set out to do as independent consultants? And how can we continue with that even as things are in upheaval?

[00:15:31] Jessica Glazer Now, when we're talking about resilience, another important thing to consider is, how we are recharging and how we are maintaining our battery. Because it's all well and good. You see someone hiking up a mountain and that seems great. But everyone needs to rest from time to time. And there's a lot of training that goes into something like climbing a mountain. We use a lot of imagery like that for resilience. But a lot of times resilience is not only recharging, but remembering to recharge. So here you see this battery. And if I asked all of you and you don't have to write this in, but if I asked you right now, "Hey, we're going to go out until 10 p.m., do you need to bring your phone charger with you?" There's a very good chance that you would know very well, if you needed a phone charger, if your phone could make it or if I even asked you, all right, I'd like you to guess without looking what percentage your phone battery is right now, what percentage battery do you have? Most of you would probably guess within about 10 percentage points, because we're very aware of our social devices, of our mobile devices, our laptops. How much battery do we have? How much do we need and when are we going to get more? The problem is that often we're not aware of that for ourselves. And that's a very big issue. If we don't know that we're about to become that crying child, we get further and further away from being that surfing elephant. If we don't know that we're about to really burn out or we're so exhausted, we might get home and snap at people or we might snap at people at the office because we don't realize that our battery is so low. We're just trying to hang on. We're sort of in that low battery emergency mode and we don't want to be there. That's not going to help us to be at our prime. It's certainly not going to help us to reach our full potential. And again, as independent consultants, we want to be operating in that flow state, in that high performance state as much as possible. And so resilience is really going to be helpful. When we're talking about resilience today, we're kind of talking about plugging your brain end. The reason we're talking about your brain is because brains are universal. So even if it feels like not everyone you know has one, we can promise that they do. You know, you don't want to ask everyone about that. But there's a 99% sure that even the people you think don't have one are in possession of one. And they also control a lot. And what they really control is memory and performance and everything related to who you are as a leader.

[00:17:55] Jessica Glazer Now, when we talk about your brain, the reason that stress is, a health epidemic and the reason we consider it as such a big threat is because previously a stress threat looked something like this and not that long ago in human history, it might have looked like seeing this guy face to face. Now, if I see this guy face to face, my stress experience is not going to be very long. I'm either going to get to safety and then I'm going to breathe a sigh of relief and hopefully not see him again, or it's not going to go quite as well for me. And again, my stress levels are not going to stay high for a prolonged period of time. But today's stress levels look very different. Today, we see stress levels spike because of something like this. I can feel people watching right now from their desks shuddering at seeing over thirteen thousand emails, possibly in someone's inbox. It might look like this. You go to go home every day and the roads are just congested and terrible and, you know, it's going to be an awful drive home and your stress level spikes or it might just be looming deadlines. Now, I know a lot of people who aspire to inbox zero, but it seems like this unicorn's state that the minute you have inbox zero, you blink and all of a sudden 15 new emails are there. And so we have these deadlines, we have these pressures, and we have this all of the time now. So it's no longer fight or flight. Now, we're still experiencing that because our brains haven't progressed past that, but it's a constant state of that. And what that means is that we're having an influx of cortisol and that's a stress hormone in our brain that kills our brain cells and stops our brain from really communicating correctly with us. And that interferes with a lot of things that are probably important to all of you. It interferes with your memory, your mood, your learning, your problem solving, decision making. If you've gotten home at the end of the day and a friend or a family member said, what's for dinner? And you think I cannot make one more decision, there's a good chance that your stress that day and really you have reached your limit for decision making. If you can't focus when you're stressed, if you can't concentrate, if you lose your keys, because you think the world is conspiring against me, it's probably just that your brain is overloaded. But other things that impact or impacted our creativity, and really, when you look at this list, these are all the things that often add up to performance, that we're making good decisions, we're solving problems, we're learning well and we're creative. When our memory and our mood are all being interfered with by this cortisol influx, it behooves us to really try to figure out how can we lower that. And so, you know, it's a rainy day. It's a snowy day. And now I've shared a whole lot of bad news with you about your brain and your stress levels, so I have some good news, and that is that your brains can flex, they can adapt and they can grow. It's like building new roads. So if you've ever seen someone laying new roads and putting out the pavement and going over and over, that's the same thing with your brain, we call that Neuroplasticity. That's the property that allows your brain to change its structure and function. So as your having different experiences, as you practice new behaviors, your brain can change. And so we often hear you can't teach an old dog new tricks. And I would disagree. You can teach any dog new tricks as long as the dog wants to learn those new tricks. So if you're willing to learn a few new things and try a few new things, you actually can change your brain for the better. Even things that seem very hardwired. You're able to lay new roads. So when we're going through this resilient stuff, think about not just plugging your brain in, but kind of giving it boxing gloves. We're going to teach you how to recharge and also how to do that prophylactically so that you're really able to really give your best performance every day and know when you need to take a break in order to get back to that performance. And so we're going to take a look at that. We know you don't have a lot of time, day to day. So we're also going to be looking at how can you do this in a little bit of time with whatever time that you, as an individual have available. So we know that you are very heavy to do lists. We know that you're building books of business and helping clients and that being an independent consultant brings with it a to do list that's even greater than a person who might be very busy in a standard organization. We really want to maximize this for you. So if you're willing to dedicate less than one percent of each day, 15 minutes to focusing on one of these strategies, this will increase your resilience skills, your wellbeing, and will help you reach your full potential as a leader at home, at work, in your own organization and with your clients. We like the phrase "We are what we repeatedly do," because this is really about making a practice of some of the things that will work for you. The last thing to share before we move into these areas is that not everything I share is going to work for you. That's OK, and that's expected. You might find that one thing seems like something you've tried and you're just not interested in one thing seems like you might be interested in it and you want to give it a try. You also might think that something makes you uncomfortable or you just think that's not for me. If you have a strong reaction like that, I encourage you to play around with the techniques that I suggest if you feel like just is out of my comfort zone sometimes just giving something a shot. And again, we're talking about somewhere between five to 15 minutes. There are even things that you can be doing in 60 seconds. Give it a shot for five days in a row. Note if anything changes, if not, move on. And if it does work for you, you might have a reaction because it's just something that's new and it might be something that would really be beneficial. So I just ask kind of stay open and that you be committed to about five to 15 minutes a day. And we know that if we talked again in a month, some of this would really be making a big impact for you. We're really excited about all the research that is back that up. So moving into the areas of resilience, we're now going to look at five areas of resilience and we're going to do it fairly quickly because we look at these five areas sort of in an epigenetic way. But they can also be taken individually. Now we're looking at the individual things. We're looking at sleep, exercise, mindfulness, gratitude and social connection and making meaning. But the ones that we're going to focus on for most of the time today are exercise, mindfulness and gratitude, because we find that those especially are things that come up for us when we're working with independent consultants. There are questions that we receive specifically around those areas. Again, I've offered my email at the beginning. If you're just joining as questions arrive, rise for you, please feel free at any point now or in the future to reach out to me directly. My emails glaserj@ccl.org. We are happy to help you find resources either through CCL or recommend other things or just answer questions that may come up for you. A lot of times questions in these five areas and this may make more sense now that you see the areas are sometimes personal and you're welcome to ask those personally or through the chat box when we get to our Q&A. So we're going to anchor each of these in the questions and the information that we often hear when we're doing research with independent consultants. Briefly, we'll touch on sleep because a lot of times we hear who has time for sleep, I'm a one woman show. I need to spend my time working, not napping. I am just starting a new business and I do not have time to sleep. Sometimes I've even heard people say I'll sleep when I'm dead. And I think, my goodness, that's quite a way to go about it. And then what it makes me wonder is how many hours of sleep do people tend to get each night? And if you want to send those over to Emily, we'd love to hear how many hours of sleep are you usually getting each night? This is an area of research that we've also started looking into in terms of CEOs from our research at the center. And I'll share a little bit about that in a second. So, Emily, how much are people sleeping?

[00:25:49] Emily Stringer All right. It looks like we're getting anywhere between six and eight on average. I haven't seen anyone go lower than six. So that's good news for all of us here. That is good. That is. Oh, I've got a four to five. That's OK. All right. So we're seeing some results here.

[00:26:06] Jessica Glazer All right. Well, so as they come in and I'll definitely check those out to at the end of the session. But what we're really looking at when we're talking about how much sleep people need, most people need about seven to eight hours. People can often function on lower levels, lower amounts of sleep, but often that's with the help of some sugar, some caffeine. I know that I have relied on those in the past. Sometimes it's just sheer willpower. Really what we're looking at, though, is a bell curve with that being sort of in the middle. There are certainly outliers, people who need four or five hours or people who need over ten. But when we're looking at averages, again, that's seven to eight hours and that can be really hard to come by. But we'll talk about why that's important in just a moment. When we're looking at research, though, our colleagues, Mary Ann Ruderman and Kathleen Clark in here at CCL actually did research about sleep habits of CEOs. What they found was that often, the people in the organization assumed the CEOs were sleeping maybe five, six hours a night because they had so much to do and they were very busy, and what we found in the research was that CEOs were sleeping about seven to eight hours, that they were prioritizing that, that they found that to be their best, they had to prioritize that. Now, if you've ever had children or were a child, I am assuming most of us have had one of them, one or both of the experiences. We know that we often put children to bed and we say you have to have a bedtime. It's very important that you have a bedtime. But as we've become adults, we often forget to do that for ourselves. As we talk about the importance of this, one thing to consider is do you have a regular bedtime and how might that impact the benefits of sleep for you? Because when you don't get enough sleep, you have diminished attention, decision making, memory, this looks a lot like the things that stress impacts as well. Our reaction times are lower, our relationships are impacted negatively, we have lower motivation and creativity. All of the things that happen when we have an influx of cortisol also happen and we're not getting enough sleep. Conversely, we have an increase of a lot of things that we don't want to see. So we have an increase in depression rates when we're not getting enough sleep. People tend to be more irritable and anxious. They're more impulsive. So they're making decisions that seem rash, and then the next day when I've slept on it, they think, my goodness, why did I do that? You also often see an increase in appetite. So people might be hitting up the vending machine more often on the nights when they're not getting enough sleep. Sedentary behavior and even things like smoking we see increase when people aren't getting enough sleep. Now, one way to do that when we're not getting enough sleep at night is to take naps. I like this joke saying here consciousness, the annoying time between naps. But when we're looking at naps, it's really important. If we think about naps rechargers instead of naps, we find that people's attentional control, their impulse control all goes up, engagement goes up in a workplace efficiency and memory is heightened. Almost immediately after people return to work from a nap. And that can be even 15 minutes of going, and if you work from home, for example, laying on a couch, setting a 15 minute alarm and just getting a quick amount of sleep, you don't have so much sleep that you go into deep sleep. But just getting a quick recharge, it can be really helpful. A lot of times we think that we shouldn't do that. We think, oh, my gosh, you know, I don't want to waste my time sleeping. Like I said in that first quote, we hear a lot of times, especially from independent consultants, I just don't have time. But sleep is work, and it's important to remember that sleep is not wasting time. Sleep is actually working on things. You see that here, with this quote that if you're trying to solve a problem and you sleep on it, you're actually working on the problem because your brain is not only putting things in the right places, it's actually clearing out the things that you don't need and it's helping you generate ideas. So if you've ever woken up from a nap and you suddenly know the answer to a question that's been nagging at you, it's because your brain continued to work on it. And if you don't give your brain that time, it's really a problem. So I like this quote as well, "the world would be a better place if people slept more and took naps." And if that doesn't convince you all, I'll point you to a NASA study of pilots who took short naps shortly before doing flight tests and their alertness improved by 54% and their performance by 34%. Again, these were short naps. So if you ever feel like you're dragging and you think I just don't have time to sleep, I'm going to plow through. I would encourage you to set that alarm, take a quick nap and you'll find that when you return to work, you do a lot better. So we again, we're not going to focus too much on sleep. You could all you need to do is take a flight and there's not a Sky magazine that I've encountered that doesn't talk about sleep or a magazine or an article. You can't it's hard to go a day without a health article about sleep. We all know that. But a lot of times it's really about how do you get more sleep at night? What we're going to encourage you to do as a very busy independent consultant is try just getting a nap in, if that is something that appeals to you. So if of all the things that we talk about today, nap is the best one, go for it. It's not a silly thing. It's not just for preschool. It's really something that can actually help you and NASA pilots alike. So moving into exercise is another thing that we often hear is I don't have time for a break. I eat at my desk. I don't get up from my desk. I sit at my desk all the time. If not sitting at my desk, maybe I'm sitting on my couch. I know that in times when I've been working independently and working from home, sometimes it's very nice. I have two dogs. They flank me and we sit on the couch together and all of a sudden I look up just like this quote here and I'll look up and it's five p.m. and I have not moved. What we find is that that is really detrimental to your brain. And when you are relying on your brain as an independent consultant as much as you do, it's very important that you exercise. John Ratey at Harvard calls it Miracle-Gro for the brain exercise. It's one of the few things that we know that can really that has a very strong rate of increasing happiness and of growing new brain cells. But the good news is that even five minutes of exercise and what Kelly McGonigal calls "green exercise" can reverse a lot of the effects of the negative things that we've talked about and so can improve your mood, your focus. A lot of times over the last thing that we want to do and we're busy and we're charging toward a deadline is get up and move away from our computer. But if you can do that and if you can go outside especially, it's very important. It really helps; again, has a stronger immediate effect than going, running and doing a really high impact workout. Now, that's not to be disregarded, but what we're talking about today are really specific tactics that will work for you as an independent consultant. Specifically, what I'm interested in today are tactics that can work for you today, that you can try while we're on the phone or hopefully you're not napping yet or right when we get off of the phone and right off of this webinar. Just five minutes of being outdoors can have an immediate effect that's stronger than going for a very strong run. Now, where we're looking at that, that's because walks in nature associated with really higher mental well-being, positive feelings, lower rates of depression. We see a decrease in the part of the brain associated with rumination. We'll talk about that in just a moment. We also find that pictures work. So if you don't want to put on your snowsuit today and get out there in the cold, you can also just look at a photo like this and spend some time doing deep breathing, which we'll also talk about in a moment that can also settle your brain. When you find that you're just looking at a photo and being calm and looking at photos of greenery that can actually enhance your mood as well. So all those old screen savers before everyone replace them with their old photos and we have those original screensavers of the beach, there was actually something good coming out of that. So find a photo of an outdoor place you like, stick that on your screen through the winter, and you may find that you're in a happier mood. So it's important that you get up from your desk and these are easy to try. Every 60 to 90 minutes. I would recommend that you set an alarm and just send a set of reminder to yourself. That's usually a good amount of time where people will start to see a fairly significant drop in their attention. After you've reached that peak, it's important to get up and have that recharger. You can take a walk outside every day. Sometimes you might find, especially if you work from home, you get up, you make breakfast, you go to your work. All of a sudden it's dark out and you've lost the day. So try to get outside if you can, even if you're just opening your window on a very particularly cold day, just try to get some fresh air. So just walking meetings to your clients or you can put a headset in and take a walk while you're on a call and try to get 20 more hours of sleep or take a 10 to 12 minute recharge nap. That should help you with some of your physical wellness benefits.

[00:35:05] Jessica Glazer Now, we also do research on nutrition here at the center. So if that's of interest, we do have a very interesting white paper care and feeding of a leader's brain. And we have information on all of this. So, again, reach out if any of this is particularly grabbing your interest. Now, speaking of grabbing interest and grabbing attention, we're going to talk about the idea of mindfulness. A lot of times when we talk about mindfulness, people think that's that thing that my yoga teacher talks about at the end of class, or that seems to be this buzzword everyone's talking about, and I really wish they would stop talking about being mindful. I'm going to share a little bit about why we talk about that, because a lot of times we hear from consultants - "It's hard for me to focus. I have too many things on my to do list. I just don't even know where to start." Or we hear that they're obsessing about clients and that they'll go to a presentation or they'll send an RFP and they keep replaying it in their head. How they could have done it better, how they could have bid for that client better, or how they didn't get a repeat client and now they're just going over and over and over what went on.

[00:36:09] Jessica Glazer So I'd like to introduce the idea that pressure does not equal stress. A lot of times we started talking about stress and we think, oh, I'm stressed all of the time. A lot of times when we're thinking about being stressed, we may just be under pressure. We may have deadlines, we may have things coming down on us. But it may just be a pressure situation that is not stress. And the difference here is that pressure is something that is external. Pressure is the deadlines, pressure is the map, pressure is the inbox, and stress is the way that we think about that. Stress is how we conceive of those things when we're talking about mindfulness. "Mindfulness is the ability to know what's going on in your head without taking the bait and acting on it." And that's a quote from Dan Harris. And I love that because it's really it's a very simple way of explaining it. It doesn't involve anything that you want to put on yoga pants to get around this idea. It's just you're not acting. You're not at the whim of whatever is happening in your head. John Cabot's in who's known as the father or grandfather, depending on what you're reading about it of mindfulness. It calls it affectionate attention. It's noticing what's going on in your head and not necessarily getting all amped up about it, getting really upset about what's happening. It's not being at the whim of going down a negative spiral of thought. Mindfulness helps us to do three things that we're going to take a quick look at. These really, really relate to the work of an independent consultant. They help us to stay in the here and now because our brain has the propensity to time travel, we tend to always be moving back and forth, I mentioned yoga and some of you might be thinking, oh, my goodness, I've been to a yoga class and a long time, the last time I went to yoga and all of a sudden you're in the past- or you might be thinking, you know, yoga, I have been in my house a long time, we just talked about exercise. I should probably get to a yoga class today. I wonder if they've yoga class tonight, and I wonder if John will be there. Now, we're already in the future and we're always moving back and forth. Very little of our time is actually spent focusing on what we're focusing on. Many of us probably sit and watch TV at night with a laptop on our lap, also looking at our phone and checking our text messages and probably trying to get some dinner in. And so we're not used to focusing and staying focused. But, one of our researchers here can talk about is that leadership happens in the here and now. When you're moving as an independent consultant and you're moving into work with a client, it's happening in the moment. It's very important to stay focused on what's happening now, learning from yesterday and focused on tomorrow, but really taking things day by day, in a way that allows you to be present with what you're doing  and stay malleable so that you're not wedded to what you set as a goal or you're not wedded and burdened by what's happened in the past. Now, a lot of times when we are focusing on what we could have done better, how that RFP should have worked out, what we find is that we're having an intentional narrowing. We start to sort of spiral. We sort of circle the drain here, and you see that actually happen in your brain. You have a negative emotion and then you get stressed and you sort of get this tunnel vision. And that's very hard, especially as an independent consultant. We're trying to build networks and we're trying to see opportunity around us. And so it's very important that you find a way to put yourself on an upward trajectory instead. Barbara Fredrickson calls this broadening and building that you have positive reappraisal, you have a state of mindfulness. You get more excited about what you're doing. Things become happier and your aperture essentially opens. And that's where when we talked about networking at the beginning of the year, you start to see more possibility. In studies on luck, you start to become luckier. It's because you just have a broadened awareness of what your possibilities are. Now. It's hard to do, so we are spiraling, when we do feel like that child who's crying with the crown on, it's very hard to interrupt that broadcast. So find something that works for you. If I'm working at home sometimes I mentioned this already. I'll snuggle with this little guy here if that's not enough and I really need something more, sometimes I'll humiliate him and dress them up like where's Waldo? Or just look at a photo of Halloween past. But I do something to make myself smile, to make myself happy and to jog a better, happier emotion and reaction. You can see that this is what I do. But finding something for yourself, putting a screensaver up that makes you smile can do that.

[00:40:40] Jessica Glazer Now, another thing that mindfulness helps us to do is disengage from autopilot. So I'm going to share a study with you and then I'd like to get your thoughts on it. So they did a study at Cornell that was very interesting. And first, it may seem like it doesn't relate, but I think you'll see how it relates very quickly to the work that you're doing. And what they did was they found a random pedestrian and they had a lost person who was really a researcher posing as a lost person, walk up to the person and say, "Hey, excuse me, here's a map that I have. How do I get to such and such a building?" And the pedestrian generally said, sure, "I'll show you how to get to that building." And all of a sudden, as the pedestrian was giving information to people carrying a large mirror carrying excuse me, a large door walked through and they said, excuse us coming through, pardon us. We just have to get through this very heavy. And they walked through and they walked right between them. And after they passed, the last person said, I'm sorry, that was such a rude interruption. So as you were saying, where was the building? And the pedestrian continued to give them instructions. What the pedestrian didn't realize was that the people walking past had actually obscured a quick change as they were walking past with the door, they were holding the door to hide a person from the other pedestrian. And that person, the switch person, switched places with the researcher. All four people, person A, B, the lost person and that person switching out. We're all part of the research team stopping this random pedestrian. And so all of a sudden, as they walked through, they obscured the change where the researcher then walked away with those two people and the person left saying what a rude interruption was actually an entirely different individual. Now, what percentage of people do you think noticed this change? If you could send that in to Emily, that'd be great. I'd love to know. Do you think it was twenty five percent. Thirty eight percent. Forty seven. Fifty five or sixty nine percent of people who noticed that standing in front of them asking that question and holding the same map was literally an entirely different human being.

[00:42:41] Emily Stringer Looks like the collective bets are on twenty five percent here. About 3 38s. We are split between 38 points and 25.

[00:42:53] Jessica Glazer All right. All right. So we have a low estimation of our fellow pedestrians. You're not that far off. But they did a fair a little bit better. The first study, they got 47%. Now, not everyone was as well as you guys are of this tendency among people. So the researchers thought this is way lower than we expected. This cannot be possible. So they thought, you know what, something must have gone wrong. We must have been a towel. We must be tipping them off. We didn't do it right. Let's try it again. And they ran it again and only 33% this time. That's a lot closer to what you guys originally guessed. That's actually where they shook out on the second study. And what they attributed this to was something called change blindness. Now a change blindness is our tendency to focus so much at the task at hand that we lose sight of everything around us. Now, consider that if this was just a random person who has stopped to ask, it was stopped by another random person to just give instructions to a random building, not a major task, not a major deliverable even that they got so focused on their task that they didn't realize that a totally different human being was standing in front of them. What happens to us, as independent consultants when we're focusing on a gig that's really important to us or we have a new client we really want to win over, and that's really where we're focused? What happens to us professionally, what might happen to our other clients? What might happen to other opportunities around us that we may let go? What happens to our brand awareness of how we are keeping up with our brand for the people we're already working well with? Are we keeping up with that or are we staying with what we want them to see? When we're looking at networking? Are we suddenly giving up on other opportunities because we're so focused on what we're focused on right now? And when we're looking at personally what happens to us personally, when we're focused so much on our business, what happens to us at home? Are we aware of our friends, our family members, our partners, children or nieces and nephews? What's happening to us when we find that suddenly we haven't seen our best friend in a month and we really don't know actually what our partner or our spouse has been doing at work for the last couple of weeks because we've been so internally focused, we see that we can really lose sight of all of those things. So what I'd like you to do for just a moment, I'm going to pause and ask you to be present and think about five percent more now. Five percent is very little. If I said we're going to go five percent over for time, you probably wouldn't be too worried if I said, I'm going to give you a five percent discount to buy something. You might not actually be inclined because you might think at five percent, I don't need to buy that right now. It's not really a great deal. So if you were just five percent more present in your day, what might you notice at work, at home and about yourself, about your own battery? So just like you to think about that, you don't have to share that. I know we have a large group today, but if you do want to think about that and send that to me, I'd love to talk to you about that. You can send that to Emily and we can talk about that in the Q&A. But really, this is for you to think about. If you were five percent more present in your day, what things might pop up for you at work, at home and about yourself? I'm going to take a pause for just one second while you think about that. All right, so hopefully you've come up with a few things I've heard, very interesting things I've heard, you know, I would be more aware of going to coffee with my clients. I would be more aware of the fact that my children are having a hard time in school and I'm not aware of that. Or I might just be more aware that my friend really needs a friend right now. And I haven't been that friend for her. Or sometimes I just would be more aware that I'm often feeling like a crying child at the end of the day. And I need to figure out some kind of recharger so that I don't get to the end of the day feeling like that. I might not feel like a serving elephant, but there is a middle ground there and I'd probably be better off at seven o'clock. I felt like I was somewhere in the middle. So the last thing that we want to talk about today is that mindfulness helps us to focus and that can be really hard. We often multitask, especially as independent consultants. And what we know about multitasking is that it's a fallacy. It doesn't actually work. And actually it's dangerous to try to use the IQ of those who try to juggle email messages while working falls by 10 points. And that's actually more than double the four point policy, not for smoking marijuana. Now, chances are most of you are not trying to lose a whole night of sleep. That's also the same IQ drop. It's not. So there's a good guess. And it's a I would say a recommendation that you're not inebriated while you're working well. And when we're not going to do that, why would we do something that we know is detrimental to us in the same way we know that email doesn't work for us while we're working. We know that it's really just switching tasks. When we try to multitask, we're just going back and forth and we're not doing anything particularly well. And again, that's something that you've probably read in just general literature online. And yet we still do it. And so even if what you do today is say, you know what, I'm going to shut my message notifications, I'm going to set my timer. So three times a day I check my email or two times a day I check my email and I said, I'm out of office letting people know that I check my email in the morning. In the afternoon, we'll get back to them. That is going to benefit you and your ability to stay focused. Another thing that you can do is just 60 seconds of breathing. And this was something we posted a blog post a couple of days ago through MBO. And that's something that we recommended just taking a breath for 60 seconds, focusing on breathing in, breathing out. And that's just a very simple thing. You could even do it with your eyes open if you're at work and you don't want everyone to see you sitting there meditating. But if you watch billions or if you watch a lot of TV shows now, you'll see that people meditate on these TV shows because it is such a strong impact. So even 60 seconds of taking a deep breath and focusing on just getting a nice rhythm of diaphragmatic breathing can make a big difference to your stress levels. Another thing that you can do if you want to take some time on the subway or, you know, you really need a way to decrease stress at home. Adult coloring, it's meditative. Without the meditation, it can reduce your stress. It encourages you to have a sense of play, but also a sense of control, because you can color that whole lion in and you can call it whatever you want and it's finite and then it's finished and you've succeeded. And so that's a nice way to also do that if taking deep breaths isn't for you. So throughout the day, consider this is brain booster's, not time wasters set intermissions. If you want meetings, if you're spending a day with a client, suggest breaks. They probably want to take a break as well. You can even start the meeting with a reset breath breath. A lot of times we run from one meeting to the next and just saying, all right, everyone, welcome. Let's take a breath and get started and really focus on where we are. Help us to slow down. That's going to be important for you. Now, the two final ones that we're going to talk about are going to come probably fairly naturally to you. So we're not going to spend too much time on it. But I'd like you to do and we're not going to write in about this because I have a feeling we're going to say. But you look at this photo, there's a good chance if you are about 90 percent of people looking at this photo that you can I'm going to get my little drawing tool here. You see a face right here. So there's a good chance you saw that face there. And if I went to the next let's see, let's go off of this. And if I went to the next screen, which I. Now can no longer do erase the drawings, let's go off the drawing tools, normal mode, all right. And if I go to this next one and I go back to let's try a spotlight, there's a good chance you see a face here, too. And a lot of times people will tell me they see a crying face. Now we see emotion in the face. That's because our brains are built in size for social connection. So if you ever think that your outlet is smiling at you, if you ever think that you see a fire hydrant and look sad, that's because our brains look for faces now when we have when we feel left out. Studies show that if we're playing fetch fetch, I have two dogs. Obviously, if we're playing catch with somebody and they leave us out, we actually feel brain and feel pain in the same part of our brain that I would feel pain. And if someone kicked me in the shins. So if I see everyone in my office get up and go to lunch without me, my brain lights up in the same spot that I would feel that would light up if I felt actual physical pain. And that's because we're a social animal now when we're working at home or we're working as independent consultants, a lot of times we're just communicating through email. And when we hear a lot from independent consultancies, I miss having colleagues. I feel lonely. I want it to be an independent consultant, not an isolated consultant. And even when I'm in a shared office space, everyone's working. I don't get to talk to anyone. I don't have that camaraderie and I miss that. So one thing that we suggest is really prioritizing social connection schedule lunch time with friends. You know, when, if, you know, a bunch of independent consultants have a weekly or monthly lunch where you get together, said coffee meetings with your contacts instead of doing everything through phone or email. And that will actually help with your networking and your relationship building. And in the evenings when you're tired, try to still prioritize social outings and seeing family and friends and really having that time, because that's an innate part of our brain and our wellness is having that social connection. And it won't just make you happier. It's going to help with your networking. It's really a nice two for one. That's an essential component for you succeeding as an independent consultant. Now, another part of that, though, is that a lot of times when we are with people, we really line up in that complaint's category. We don't share gratitude as often as we could. And that's another kind of two. For one. Gratitude makes us nicer. It deepens existing relationships and it actually generates social capital. So people get more nice things from other people and give more nice things to other people when they are increasing their gratitude. So there are a few easy ways to do this that you can start today. The first is a gratitude journal. So if you're having trouble sleeping and you think, you know, I thought naps might work for me, but I'm not good at sleeping, you could try keeping a gratitude journal right before you go to bed and see if that helps to exercise. Get rid of some of the stress that you're experiencing. It will help you to feel connected to others. You'll have more energy and more frequent positive moods. And that's just by writing down three to five things each day that you're grateful for from that day with as much specificity as possible. We can point you again to that blog post from this week for a few examples. Another thing that you can do that we really suggest is write a gratitude letter and all you need to do is make something that's concrete, specific and not too long. You really just talk about what was the situation, what did someone do and what was the impact on you that could be as simple as today, writing a letter to your brother in law and saying, you know what, Mark? Hey, thank you so much for hosting Thanksgiving and agreeing to host everybody. It really helped me because I don't have a lot of time right now as I'm getting my business off the ground and I'm doing so much work. It allowed me to really feel a lot less stressed and to really focus on winning a few new clients right before the holidays at a crucial time. Thank you. That's really quick. It's very easy. You don't have to prolong it. You don't have to write them the lengthiest love letter you've ever written. You just need to let someone know that you thanked them. So after this session. But before you get it from the computer, if I could ask one thing, it would be that you open a new email screen, you send a quick note using that situation, behavior, impact process. What was the situation? What did they do and what how did it impact you? It could be one sentence or three. And that you said that you can also handwrite it. But I would ask that you send that today or tomorrow and it's a great time. It's Thanksgiving. It's a you know, it might be a nice way to enter into that. And what you may find is that it doesn't just benefit them, it benefits you. It's really something that we see people having benefit from when they give these letters up to a month later. So that's one thing that you can do. So make a date for next week, make a lunch date, schedule coffee with the client, try to see your friends on the weekend. And if you want to do this gratitude thing as a habit, you can keep a daily gratitude journal or you could even try something that you know, I often recommend to clients or executives. They'll often do it on Friday or Monday. They'll start the week writing a gratitude letter to someone or they'll end it that way before they go home on the weekends. So, you know, there are several CEOs I've worked with who found that this was something that they did to both build and create their network within their own organization and also to increase their own happiness at work, and so the last thing that we'll share, we're not going to get in, as I said at the beginning, very deeply into this. But it is important and I think it's an important reminder because a lot of times as an independent consultant, it can feel like we're spinning our wheels. Suddenly we're doing all of the activities of things that we didn't want to do or we're managing the books, we're creating the contracts, we're doing the actual PowerPoint or we're doing every aspect of the job as we build our business. And that can be hard. So it's important, especially as we get into the busy time of the holidays and also the sort of doldrums of the winter that you connect the work that you're doing back to your larger goals, that you don't see it as drudgery or I hate doing this, but you see it instead of a have to as a want to. So instead of I crunch numbers today, you got your finances in order for your new business, that's all yours or you didn't just input contact info. You bet your future client book of people that you can help with something that is uniquely your skill set. So it's important that you do that. So things that you can do to connect to this is try posting a goal statement in your work area. We started today talking about CCLs mission and MBOs mission. If you haven't created a mission statement for yourself or your organization, and that's not something you have to share with clients or anyone, but you create your own mission statement and put it up. And when you feel like I have to do something and you find yourself saying, Oh, I have to do this, try to figure out by looking at that mission statement why you want to do this, why you want to input clients, why you want to send a holiday card to all of your clients, why you want to crunch your numbers or do your taxes. What were the things that made you do this in the first place? And how do you turn those have to into want to. So there we talked about connecting each task back to your larger goal. You might also want to keep a journal of successes. So if you think I like journaling, but you know what? I don't think gratitude journals are going to work for me. Keep a journal of your daily or weekly successes. So when you feel adrift or you feel like it's a rainy day and it's a snowy day and I haven't seen the sun in a couple of weeks, here are the things that really are why I'm doing what I'm doing. And then finally going back to what we talked about with networking and building a brand and also staying agile, how do you find a mentor to guide you through these challenging times? How do you connect with someone who may have experienced this, who can really be a sounding board when you're not sure where you're going or what's happening and can help you to find and create and continue to make meaning in the work that you're doing? So that was a very quick dove into a very vast body of work. But hopefully it helped you with a quick resilience recharge in terms of your information. And hopefully it gave you a few ideas for a resilience recharge that you can take today. So we talked about sleep, about exercise, about mindfulness, about social connection and gratitude and about connecting back to the meaning. So if you can find one or two of those things, I think you'll find that in under 15 minutes a day, you'll really be able to get a recharge. That very little time, you'll be able to see the significant benefit of. So, again, if you dedicate one percent of each day that's so little, such a little amount of time, we know that the dividends are significant. The IRA on that one percent is far greater than the time you're going to put into it. So it will increase your well-being, your resilience skills and your full potential. So, again, we repeatedly do we hope that you'll repeat some of these new practices and we hope that you'll get in touch with us and let us know how that goes. So I let Emily and MBO team know that I am happy to stay on for any questions that you might want to share with a broader audience. But again, I'll actually skip ahead right now to share my contact information. Should you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me again if I don't have the answer for you. My background is in positive psychology, leadership development and mental health. If I don't have the answers for you and often I don't, I will be happy to share resources or my best guess as to where you can find those, both at the Center for Creative Leadership and otherwise. So please be in touch. Let us know if any of these things particularly work for you. And now I'm going to pause and see Emily if anything's come in for us or if I'll be fielding those questions through email.

[01:00:09] Emily Stringer Great. Jessica, thank you for such a wonderful and informative presentation today. These are all things that our audience can greatly benefit from, and especially in the challenging arena, functioning as independent consultants and working for yourself. That said, we have a couple of polls that we need to get up here on screen before we move forward into our Q&A session. And Jessica, thank you for being willing to hang around. So we will get those launched here first and foremost, would you like more information about Jessica and CCL, yes or no? and we'll give everyone a few minutes here to get voted so that we can distribute out the appropriate information.

[01:00:52] Jessica Glazer And I think to clarify, I'm not going to send you information about my family or my Thanksgiving plans unless you specifically ask. We'll be sending you some information about the Center for Creative Leadership and the work that my colleagues and I do here. But if you'd like more photos of my dogs, I do think that they're very, very sweet.

[01:01:14] Emily Stringer They are awfully cute. We will always use dog pictures. Would you like more information about MBO partners? We have a feeling that the majority of you here are already engaged with us in some form of fashion. So we'll give you a few more seconds to get voted. And last we saw quite a few folks who had some very career oriented answers on becoming five percent more mindful. So you may want to receive an invitation to our proprietary marketplace called MBO Connect. So if you are interested in receiving an invitation to this network and you have not received one already, please let us know here. We will get that out to you. All right, we will go ahead and launch into our Q&A session. So, Jessica, if you have five or eight minutes to stick around. So first and foremost, can you circle back to how you define stress versus pressure and how we should be thinking about it?

[01:02:33] Jessica Glazer Sure, sure. So when I'm talking about this and if this is things people are interested in, we have a really interesting white paper from my colleague Nick Guidry. And what he talks about is stress versus pressure. And when we're looking at pressure, we're looking at things that are external. So, you know, I have a very long To-Do list and I have a lot of deadlines and I have all of these external things that are certainly pressure. So it's sort of like an exertion of pressure. Like if I squeezed my hand, those things are all putting pressure on me. But the way that I experience that mentally is sort of stress. So I can see that as a negative thing. I can see stress and I can see it as a stressful thing. Or I can think, you know what, this is a lot of pressure. I should consider figuring a different way to manage it. I should consider maybe getting some assistance, maybe I hire an intern or I get some help. But I can think about how I can decide how I want to process the pressure situations. I don't necessarily need to see that as stress in the way that we often think of stress. As I am so stressed, this is a bad thing. So a lot of times when we have a long to do list, that alone spikes stress, it increases our cortisol levels. We get upset about that. We think, oh my God, I have this very long inbox. Instead of maybe thinking, hmm, there are a lot of people want to get in touch with me. That's a great thing. And then if I conceive of it as a positive thing, if I see that not as stressful but as beneficial, for example, as one example, if I say, oh, my gosh, I have one hundred emails from over the weekend, my goodness, I sent out a marketing pitch and now I have this one hundred emails. This is so stressful. I had meant for this to be good. If we instead think, no, this might be external pressure, but this is a really good thing for my business. I'm going to address that in a very different way. If I'm stressed, maybe I'm going to try to send a form letter back to everybody. If I see that as a positive thing, I could maybe know that the next time I do that. I said that out of office and I say, thanks so much for getting in touch with me. We're right now in a high volume period. I look forward to getting back to you in the next three to five days. Now, I've set an expectation for people I can manage things a lot differently. So rather than seeing it as stress, the negative stress experience, I'm just understanding that there's pressure on me and it's up to me to decide how what lens I look through it with. Does that make sense?

[01:05:04] Emily Stringer I think that's very helpful, Jessica. And some great tips along the way in terms of shifting your mindset to be more positive overall. Yes, great. So another one that came in, that's very interesting. And I think there's a cognitive behavioral approach that you can take to this. So in terms of that personal battery life and where that falls, if you cannot identify your personal battery life at the time you're trying to do so, what are some tips in getting your arms around that and trying to identify that personal battery life percentage?

[01:05:39] Jessica Glazer That's such a great question. I love that question. It's really hard. It is very hard to do. I think of one of. So a couple of things. One thing that you could do is try some of those mindfulness techniques and see if it helps you to clue in a little bit fast or at least to slow down so that the spiraling doesn't happen quite as quickly. So if you do set an alarm, I do this for myself. So on my outlook, let me see exactly what it says. So I'm not telling a story here. It says, take a breath. That's exactly what it says on my outlook. And I put it on for ten minutes, twice a day, and it says, take a breath. And so wherever I am, it will pop up and sometimes I change it out so I don't ignore it. If we see the same thing over and over, we tend to think I'll take a breath later. But sometimes it will say, you know, you focus in whatever it is, whatever words you would like to use, set that on your calendar to pop up and it will remind you to suddenly check in. So sometimes it's a factor of not checking it. But Emily, as you mentioned, if we take sort of a cognitive behavioral approach, sometimes what we can try to do is be aware of the things that we're doing that are sort of leading up to this, that we have certain clues that if we really focus in on them and we can become attuned to them and again, the mindfulness will help. We can master them a little bit faster. So one of our colleagues here who manages our coaching portfolio, Kara Pinfield. She did a lot of her doctorate work in the idea of sort of doing backwards storytelling for yourself storyboarding, and so essentially what you might do is you might have to get to that breaking point a couple of times and work backwards from there. So if you find, you know what, I'm suddenly at the end of the rope, my rope, I'm snapping at people. Right before you snapped at someone, what were you doing physically? And if you can just identify one thing you were doing physically, maybe you were clenching your fists as you were screaming. You know, the next time you may find that you're clenching your fists about 30 seconds before you really lose it. Now we know that we're clenching our fists. The next time we see ourselves clenching our fists, we can get up and walk away and take a breath and calm down. Then the next time you clenched fists, you may find that, oh, my goodness, I didn't notice that. I'm getting I get a tightness in my throat and my shoulders right before I clench my fists. And that's why I'm clenching my fists. And so it takes a little bit of time. It's not something that tomorrow you'll necessarily wake up and suddenly be a different person. And, you know, you're Cinderella singing at everybody that you meet. But you may find that over time you can work yourself backwards to identify the physical and emotional triggers and signs within your body, in your mind that are leading you down that path. And when you're able to do that, what you may be able to work backwards to is just before I get that tightness, I actually start to fidget. And so really my tell becomes that I start to get really fidgety in a meeting when I'm getting upset and as I get fidgety, I know that you know what my battery is about to crash. I'm about to go to zero. So that's when I need to get say, excuse me, I'm going to take a coffee break or, you know, if I'm alone and I'm just sitting in the office getting fidgety, I'm going to lay down and take a nap or I'm going to get up and get some outdoor fresh air, whatever it is. Working backwards is often a really good way to do that.

[01:09:06] Emily Stringer Those are some great tips and I think very helpful, helpful for the audience if you have time for one more question. Jessica, we will take one more time.

[01:09:15] Jessica Glazer I'm happy to.

[01:09:16] Emily Stringer OK, great. So you can always add a walk or some breathing or an app, but sometimes it feels like there are just too many deadlines and there not. Is there any way to avoid burnout in this situation

[01:09:32] Jessica Glazer When there are too many deadlines and you've no time?

[01:09:35] Emily Stringer When nothing else was working and there are too many deadlines and there is nothing that is avoiding the stress of the burnout associated with the situation.

[01:09:46] Jessica Glazer Yeah,  I would counter that. A lot of times it seems like we don't have time and we do at the center what we call slowing down to speed up that. And here's an example that might resonate with people when you are working at night and you're thinking, I need to I'm just going to finish this, I'm going to plow through, I'm going to get through, I'm going to get through. And something that really in the next morning might have taken you 30 minutes suddenly drags out to three hours because you're really not at your best, you're really not focused. And so you're not doing your best work. You're having to redo things. There's more typos than normal because you're really trying to plow through. And it's the willpower is not getting you there. And that is often where we find that burnout that it's sort of you're like a car running on fumes and you can't go as quickly. You're not as agile. You can't speed up like you might need to. And so it's important that people try to work that in sooner. Now, when you get to the point where you're right up against the deadline and you really feel like you're going to lose it, sometimes you do need to prioritize your mental health over that. So certainly if you feel that you're now. So I do want to differentiate quickly. And so that will take another second here. But I think it is very, very important to realize that when we're talking about this, we're not talking about, like, significant mental health concerns and that your mental health is of the utmost importance and is extremely is just not to be played with. And so when things are coming at the expense of that, it's very important to seek the proper assistance for that, to speak with a doctor, to speak with a mental health counselor. I come from a mental health background. I can't recommend it personally enough or professionally enough so that is really important. And that is not to denigrate any of that, to say that, you know, oh, 60 seconds of breathing can change that. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about know daily work stresses and things like that. Now, for more questions on that, I'm happy to field those individually. But when we're talking about burning out like I'm just going to burn out on this project, not just burn out, I feel like I'm burning out as a person. You know, sometimes we just do need to take that break or we just do need to say, you know what, that's enough for today. I'm going to get up early tomorrow. Sometimes we do need to re prioritize and phone it, and sometimes we do need to get extra assistance. Sometimes we need to ask for help when we don't want to. Sometimes we think, you know, I wanted to build this business on my own. And you do know people who can help you and support you. And it's not always necessary to do things on our own from our networking session. We know this, that people work best in conjunction with others. Sean Aikau recently wrote a beautiful book on this. This very idea called Big Think. You know, it's important that people rely on others and don't see themselves as needing to just plow through by themselves. That said, you know, even 60 seconds of breathing can help. Even just getting up and walking away from a situation that's causing you stress can help. And again, it is of the utmost importance that you are focusing on prioritizing on your physical and your mental health, because especially as an independent consultant, it might seem that you can keep going and burnout doesn't seem so dangerous. But if you endanger your physical and mental health and you are your own business, that's a very big danger. There's no one to come in and swoop in if you are your business. So prioritizing that, making sure you're building a foundation off of that is important. And so hopefully some of this will help, especially during the busy times of the holidays when there's added pressures from home. Really, I do hope that at least one of these will stick with everyone listening in whatever way works best for you and that you'll be able to get through busy times at work and personally a little bit smoother. So thank you.

[01:13:55] Emily Stringer Great, Jessica. That is very, very helpful and thank you again for the wonderful tips, the great information to share with our audience, we can all use this as a reminder to get grounded, especially as we go into the holiday season. So, again, many thanks to you. Thank you to our audience for attending today. And we will look forward to seeing everyone on the line at some point in the future.

[01:14:18] Jessica Glazer Thank you so much. It is really a pleasure. And it's such a wonderful, wonderful group. I really love working with you guys, so thanks for having us again.