Episode 14: Redefining Resilience and Transforming Daily Routines for Enhanced Wellness with Monica Bodurka

Kayla: Hey Monica, how’s it going?

Monica: Hi, I’m great. I’m great, I’m so happy to be here. I’m very excited.

Kayla: Yes, I’m so glad that you’ve taken the time to come and talk to us today, but before we get started, I wanna introduce you so that I don’t forget later. Today’s guest is Monica, and she is the co-founder of the Leadership Wellness Group, where she provides workshops and coaching for both individuals and organizations. She’s also a certified international health coach, a yoga educator and a yoga therapist. Monica has several mindfulness meditation certificates, a diploma in adult education, and understands the fundamentals of the neuroscience of behavior changes and how to regulate our nervous system in a world where stress is the norm.

Kayla: She has just published her first book, which became an Amazon bestseller, entitled A New Way to Be Becoming Resilient One Breath, habit and Moment at a Time. Thank you again, monica, for being here, and with the question that I ask everyone what is your definition of a balanced life?

Monica: Oh my goodness. So I thought that was a really simple question when you sent me that note and it’s so funny because I actually wrote about it in a blog a couple of years ago and what I realized is it’s such a difficult answer it depends on where you are at this particular moment in time. So I was thinking when I was writing the blog a couple of years ago, my kids were a bit younger and I was really in that mindset of I’m trying to balance competing demands of a career and being present and nurturing my family.

Monica: But I completely forgot about myself, Like I wasn’t anywhere in there. Right, it was like queer and kids, and how do I be a good kid and how do I be a present and really contributing member? I was on a senior leadership team. I’m from Canada, so at the University of Toronto, at the School of Management there, and so you know how do I balance that.

Monica: And again, I forgot about myself and guess what? I clearly everything kind of fell apart. So I think of it now as really deliberately creating, you know, a life based on what you value the most. So, right from me, my family is very important, so being present and being able to nurture my kids. Being present for my parents as well, my sister, my siblings, so the extended family, and then, you know, being present in my career as well, is really important. And then I add that presence for myself, right, that self-care time, which almost is like you know, balances them all.

Monica: So, and it’s not every day, is not balanced Like it’s not that’s what I realized as well. Like some days I’m fully, you know, on the kids, right, and other days I’m fully, you know, in delivering workshops, right, but it’s the overall, like making sure maybe in a week that you know, there is time for me to breathe. I also actually now know that I need self-care every day, so I bookend it right, because I realize I can’t manage the career and the family and being present, present is the word that keeps coming up for me.

Monica: So it’s like in the time I’m with the family, I’m completely present. In the time I’m doing the work, I’m completely present, whereas I remember, you know, being at work before my kids were little. I was thinking about the kids and then being with my kids and I was thinking about, oh my gosh, all the things I have to do to work. So that mindful present moment and being fully in that moment when you’re there, is also for me sort of a little secret sauce I discovered, so not a very clear answer.

Kayla: It’s not black and white. So it’s not black and white, but I think that you were very clear and one of the things that I really like that you mentioned was the balance can change. It’s not gonna look the same and we have to be noticing what needs to change. Like you noticed, one thing that needed to change for you was that you needed to implement some form of self-care every day, so that you can show up the best for your kids or for whatever it is that you have that day.

Monica: And I didn’t see it before. I had kids and I was very career oriented, very career driven, and it was great because you’d finished the end of the day and you had you. It was like, okay, what am I gonna do now, in a way, even if it’s only a couple of hours, or if it was just me and my husband, right, and it’s like okay, so whatever. But suddenly when the kids came into the equation, I was like, oh my gosh, it’s this. I didn’t create time for me, it was just I was giving and just the kids, and then just the career. And that’s where I see what I see and I was sharing with you earlier.

Monica: I run workshops and programs on resilience now and I once did this workshop for a group of executive women who all happened to be mothers and it was really funny and we did this poll and they all were mothers and a lot of them were mothers of the kids, were quite young, like they weren’t like in college or university. They were kids at home. And I had run this assessment with them, this resilience self-assessment, and 90% of them said they were operating in crisis mode most of the time, which was 90%, and it really it alarmed them, it woke them up.

Monica: It was really interesting, and we spent the workshop almost entirely on how to regulate our nervous system, on how to prioritize things, on how to bring them into the equation right, because it was really fascinating, because that’s what leads to burnout, right? And then suddenly you can’t show up for anybody not your boss or your company, and not your kids, and you’re not even a good role model at that point.

Kayla: So no, no, you’re not. Yeah, it’s, it’s. And I bet those women were working so hard to show up the best they could in their work and I’m wondering what their level of satisfaction was in their lives.

Monica: Oh, I think you’re operating in crisis mode. I don’t even think they’re thinking about level of satisfaction, You’re actually in survival, right, I think? Crisis mode, you’re in survival mode and so what ends up happening? Actually, it’s really fascinating when we look at the nervous system. When you’re operating in crisis mode, you are not.

Monica: One of the things I teach is Dr Dan Siegel’s model of the brain, which is fascinating and he’s an interpersonal neurobiologist fascinating and I actually encountered him first when my girls were little and I was trying to figure out why they’re having these meltdowns. Right, so he has a oh, yeah, Uh-huh. So he teaches the hand model of the brain which says you know, we’ve got. And actually he uses his hand and he says it’s a handy model and this looks like for brain.

Monica: But he teaches that when you go into crisis and this is your prefrontal cortex, which is your thinking brain, your rational sort of part of the brain that helps you be creative and innovative and really make good decisions. So when you think about being a leader, like those women I was, they were all. It was an executive women’s group. So you need your prefrontal cortex to be able to show up properly at work, but when you’re in crisis mode, you flip your lid, which means your whole downstairs brain, right, which is the survival instinct. But as well as habits and memories and emotions and sort of all the things that run on autopilot take over.

Monica: So there you are in situations of crisis, we’re needing to show up and make good decisions and be creative and be a leader. And you have flipped your lid, so your prefrontal cortex is disengaged, right?

Kayla: So it’s.

Monica: You’re then not making good decisions for yourself, right? So we need to step back, and this is why I’m so interested in the world of and the whole area of research of resilience, because there is another way, and I learned it on myself. They say we teach what we need to know, so I needed it.

Kayla: I needed it, yeah, and you talk about resilience, right, so can you speak more on what you mean by resilience? So what is resilience to you? What is it really, and why is it particularly important to?

Monica: moms. Oh, my goodness, this is a fabulous place to really start. So many people.

Monica: Or, if we first turn to the Webster dictionary definition of resilience, we find it is about bouncing back, right. So adversity strikes and you bounce back. It’s your ability to bounce back from adversity and it’s not to say that’s not true, right, but now imagine that, or that kind of assumes that this adversity will happen once. Right, there’s one adverse event that happens and then six months pass and you can bounce back to before.

Monica: Well, we know that’s not the case anymore. Like we’ve just been talking about these executive women or whoever right, whoever, anybody right, we are bombarded with constant stressors these days. Right, we live in this chaotic and volatile world with competing demands and a million emails and whatever text messages, and then this happens, and then we hear there’s a war, and then there’s a pandemic. And then there’s your kid like well, somebody’s online school, like whoa, like what are you bouncing back to? There’s no bouncing back to something like no.

Monica: Right, it’s about. There’s a certain sentence, there’s a certain ability to be able to handle all the stressors with grace and ease. Now the research shows and this isn’t from the research, but the way we talk about it in my programs. In our programs is we talk about resilience as shock absorbers in a car, right? So if you imagine the speed bumps on the road, or any bumps on the road, right, they’re always there and you don’t necessarily foresee them, right? However, if you have these shock absorbers, those bumps on the road will be a little less bumpy. Right, and we all know people who have all the stressors but they’re a little less frazzled by those stressors.

Monica: Another analogy that is often used in resilience research it’s like having your batteries charged, which is very simple, right. So the idea is, when your batteries are charged, right. Then when you’re hit with multiple stressors, you are more poised, you’re able to handle it better, you are able to keep your prefrontal cortex online, you don’t flip your lid as quickly, right. So those are really good analogies for understanding resilience.

Monica: And we also see it’s not necessarily about bouncing back, but often it’s about bouncing forward, right. So when all these stressors happen or there is an adverse event, you actually there’s a growth mindset. You actually can grow and bounce forward. You can be better than before, right. So I actually like to use COVID. We didn’t bounce back to something like before. We created a new normal, right. So that’s a really good analogy. It’s like oh, we kind of learned some things through the process. So that’s kind of the new evidence-based definition of what resilience is.

Monica: Why is it important? Well, it’s important because we live in this chaotic world, right, and for moms, especially with these competing demands of wanting to be completely present and wanting to nurture our kids, and there are all the demands with them, like, right now, it’s not just your child goes to school, oh, but they’ve got track and field and they’ve got soccer and they have ballet and they have tutoring and they have that, and meanwhile you’re across the city somewhere else and you have to pick them up and you’re whoa, right, so you’ve got all that you may have. You know, a lot of moms are also in the sandwich generation, where they’re also looking after their and maybe elderly parents and then they’ve got a career right. So whoa, like, that’s a lot of stressors. So why is it important? It’s important because we need to learn how to be able to regulate our nervous system.

Monica: Also, one of the very big important things to well, and I won’t even get into that. What I’ll get into first is the how do we develop that resilience, which is based on a definition from the American Psychological Association? And this was the key for me, because American Psychological Association said resilience is not a trait that you either have or don’t have, like, it’s not a trait that you’re born with, right, it is based on habits, behaviors, thoughts and actions that can be built at anyone, right, so that suddenly is like okay, so resilient individuals of habits, behaviors, have thoughts and take actions that make them more resilient, and that to me, was like wait a second so I can engage in these habits and thoughts and actions and be that more centered person.

Kayla: So I’m guessing for those women you were working with, who, 90% of them, said they felt like they were operating in crisis mode all of the time that is a helpful thing to understand that just because we don’t know these things right now does not mean we can’t learn them and use them to help us regulate Absolutely Starting now and in the future.

Monica: Right, yeah, absolutely so for them. You know, what was really important and I end up doing a series of workshops with them is we dove into what are those habits and behaviors? Right, what are those habits and behaviors of resilient individuals? And it was really interesting, and you know we do this in all of our programs. You know there’s almost these three pillars and often people think of resilience and they just think of the mindset. I’m going to have a resilient mindset, but guess what, when you flip your lid and your prefrontal cortex is unengaged, you can’t think your way of stress. So you actually start with the body.

Monica: You actually start with the body because the physical we call it kind of a physical resilience or physical mastery, because you know when your physical body is off, when you’ve got the flu, you can’t think, you can’t show up, you can’t be a nurturing, loving parent and, like this amazing career woman, you can play. It’s impossible, right?

Kayla: You just want to roll up into a ball. Exactly, I can definitely speak to that more recently, at the beginning. I know we’re November now, but who knows when this is going to be, it doesn’t matter. At the beginning of October I got really sick with something. I don’t know what it was, but I felt those effects of whatever it was for like the whole month. It brought me down. I couldn’t think clearly, I felt really tired. So, no, you cannot operate at your most optimal level if you’re feeling sick, and when we’re dysregulated, when we’re in that survival mode, it’s basically as if we’re operating while sick.

Monica: Yep, yep, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it, and that’s what it took for that particular group of women to get it. They were like, oh my God. So I’m like we have to put our physical bodies actually first. We have to be strong to be able to handle all the stressors. And so it was really interesting because we talked. The first thing we did with them was we talked about sleep. Turned out, these women were not sleeping, so we talked about sleep and the hygiene habits.

Monica: We talked about shutting off their phones at night, because the blue light at night is stimulating their melatonin, right, and many of them were perimenopausal, so that was even worse, right. So we talked about shutting off the phones, getting rid of, like, all blue light at night. Many of them and I have these, these blue blocking glasses I mean, I look like Bono in them but I kind of leave them off for the podcast but the idea of blocking that blue light at night so you’re able to get a full night’s sleep.

Monica: We talked about book ending, physical self care, so doing exercise in the morning, getting sunlight in the morning, so, again, to create the melatonin for sleep later, making sure they’re drinking enough water, getting the movement in, not from just, oh, I want to be toned and I want to be slim or whatever, but actually getting the oxygen to the brain, getting the. You know we have all these and you know from my we call them Nadis in yoga. But you know they’re like these meridians all through our body where the prana, the energy, is flowing. So you want to be moving to have that energy flowing right, because that’s sending a signal to your nervous system.

Monica: We talked about eating right. If you eat constantly junkie foods which many of them were eating breakfast, lunch on the go, like they didn’t even know what they’re eating, their EA or somebody would bring them some kind of food or something was left over or they’re having like some kind of insured drink or like horrible. You know I was explaining to them that that works for a day or two on our emergency situation. But when you do that periodically, over time it takes a toll on you.

Monica: And if you eat junkie food, I mean your whole blood sugar thrown off, everything you’re, and you know, over time you’re going to have junkie thoughts, junkie organs, junkie, like I used to tell my girls and I say this in my book when they were little. I was trying to explain. It’s like this is our house and we’re like the three little pigs. What are you building your house out of, right, like? Are you going to build it out of straw? Or let’s build it out of bricks? Right, and be strong and not take some planning and deliberate focus.

Monica: But the idea, this whole idea, and even understanding that we can use our body to get out of stress and again, in my physical mastery section of the book and in our courses we teach that we can use our body, or spine, for example, is the superhighway. So when we lengthen our spine, like, think about how we sit at the computer Well, we are sending a message to our central nervous system that we are depressed. We’re also cutting off the oxygen from our diaphragm, our breathe. We don’t. We don’t, we don’t have lungs up here, but many people when I talked to, they’re breathing here, so they’re sending a signal that they are actually in fight or flight, they’re ready to run.

Monica: So when we use our bodies right and we breathe into our upper diaphragm, which is, you know, up into our upper abdomen, which is where our diaphragm is right, we’re sending a signal we’re okay, right. So we can actually do that deliberately to send the signal and then our body starts releasing the chemicals to say we’re not stressed, right? So, again, that physical component is often lost when we talk about resilience, but it’s really, really important. So that’s where I started with these, with these moms, right.

Monica: Another key area and I mean I can go on, so you can stop me whenever you want so for that particular group of women was because another big part is that self awareness, right, and for them it was work recovery. So Harvard Business School is doing amazing work on what they’ve entitled work recovery, which really you know what it is setting boundaries, right. It’s really saying kind of like we said, okay, everything will be, you know. Like if you you have to charge your phone at night, right, you have to shut it off. Like if you don’t, or whatever, if you don’t charge, it’s going to die. Well, it’s the same thing with us.

Monica: So, having those real boundaries and understanding those boundaries and communicating those boundaries, and understanding that work recovery isn’t just about being away from work, you are. This is when we talked about right at the beginning, when we said we’re really present with our kids, like we’re really present, even for 20 minutes, we’re really present. We don’t have the phone, we’re not looking at our emails, we’re not, we’re completely present.

Monica: So you know, really shutting off from work, so that that was really important for them is really understanding what does work recovery mean and how do I start setting those boundaries? And, in a way, where many of us are addicted, there’s a dopamine hit when you get the email and there’s a response and there’s, you know, the notification, right. So it’s actually being mindful of our own, the own, the habits and behaviors we wired into our limbic brain to fire automatically. So we this is why it could be physically really difficult to change those habits, because they’re actually they’re neuro pathways that have been created right. So, yeah, yeah, so it’s. I mean, I can go on.

Kayla: Yes, they can be really difficult, but at the same time, when we acknowledge that for ourselves, like I’m going to do this, it’s probably going to be uncomfortable because I am the person who answers the email right away. When we do that and name it for ourselves, it can make it so much easier to not look at our phone and to put it away and give ourselves 15 to 20 minutes one on one time with our kids, because that’s what they crave. They don’t need hours, they just need 15, 20 minutes of our undivided attention.

Monica: Yeah, it’s so true. I read that somewhere years ago. You know that all a child it’s really needs. You can give them 20 minutes of your complete attention. They will thrive, right. Being with them for hours on end but being on your phone and cooking or whatever, that’s not the same. We’re watching to you, but really being there with them, and that’s why it’s very interesting. You know, a big core component of all of this is mindfulness and being mindful of our behaviors.

Monica: I like to call it presence. It’s really being in that present moment, and the same thing with the career being really in that present moment. You know, being really in that present moment with the kids, being in that present moment with yourself, care, right, Like really being present, because I think so many of us are always, you know, we’re either ruminating about the past or we’re like thinking about the future and we’re not here, right, and that creates other crises, right?

Kayla: Yeah, yeah. And so just a minute ago we were talking about how our nervous system can go out of whack, basically become dysregulated, right? So what are some of the techniques that you teach your clients in being able to bring themselves back down, regulate their nervous system so that they can find that regulation. Be at peace.

Monica: Yeah, that’s, that’s a good question. I mean, there’s so many things you can do, but I think for busy people, first of all, like you said, it’s having that awareness. So it’s noticing yourself, you know, almost before you get stressed, right. So noticing oh my gosh, you know what are. You know noticing your triggers when you have noticed that you are stressed.

Monica: As I said earlier, our spine is like a superhighway and it’s a it’s, it’s like a communicator, right. So there’s your nervous system actually consists of your spine, your brainstem, which is sort of right at the kind of at the back here of your head, and your brain. Right, that’s your, that’s your central nervous system, and the spine communicates to the brainstem, which sends the information to the brain, and then the brain sends information through the brainstem back.

Monica: So what you want to do when you lengthen your spine and you roll your shoulders back, right, right away, your signaling that, that you’re okay. Now, as we talked about earlier, if you breathe in through your nose, not to your mouth, we’re not doing that type of ventilating and sending a signal that we’re in danger, that there’s something chasing us when we take a conscious and deliberate breath in through our nose and trying to breathe into our upper abdomen. Okay, that’s where our diaphragm is, so we breathe into the upper abdomen and then when you exhale, you could even contract your belly a little bit right, so that actually helps your next inhale to almost be a little bit bigger right.

Monica: And then also, when you exhale for a little bit longer than you inhale, right, because that again it’s signaling that triggers your parasympathetic or your rest and digest branch of the nervous system. Right, when we’re mouth breathing and breathing fast into our chest, we can trigger our sympathetic nervous system.

Monica: So just knowing that, okay, I’m breathing in. I roll my shoulders back, I, you know, I lengthen my spine and I breathe in. You know, we often hear in yoga belly breathing. Well, a belly is a little bit low, right, but it’s, but it is, it’s your upper abdomen and you breathe in there through your nose. You might notice the warm air coming in or the cooler coming in and the warm air coming out.

Monica: These things can take a second right, but they do really let your nervous system, if you want to go farther in your fear by yourself, right, you might not want to do this in like an open concept office, although you can do with your kids is you actually can hum or sigh or chant on the exhale, and the reason is is then you’re stimulating your vagus nerve and the vagus nerve is this beautiful wandering nerve that again starts kind of at the back here, back behind yours, and then you’ve got a few hundred and crisscrosses through your body, crisscrosses through your diaphragm and into all the organs and it sends a signal you’re okay.

Monica: So the moment you let’s say you breathe in, and then you huh, I feel better, right, or you mmm, yeah, mmm, now I’m like mmm. My kids used to love to do that, used to teach the kids to. These are really good tools for the kids. I used to teach them which in yoga is called an ujjayi breath, or they translate it to be like an ocean breath, so sort of where you constrict the glottis in your throat. But I told the kids it’s like a dark vader breath.

Kayla: So when you’re like so that’s underneath so like for you, kind of constricts listeners not watching the video but you constrict your throat, okay, make that dark vader and elongate it again.

Monica: It’s just, we’re just signaling to the nervous system it lengthens that breath, right? So, yeah, it’s, it’s really neat and it’s fun. It’s a fun one, an easy one to do with the kids, because I do, I’m like, okay, do your dark vader breath, you know. And they’re like okay, okay, mommy.

Monica: So those are little things that are really good for people, and I actually learned this from a dear friend who teaches mindfulness and she, she really taught me to use triggers to help remind myself, right, to remind. And she teaches lots of workshops to remind ourselves to do these practices before you get stressed, right. So you’re constantly resetting your nervous system.

Monica: So, for example, your phone rings and before you answer the phone, you take that deep breath, you lengthen your spine. Let’s say you’re going into the office, as you’re touching the handle of the door, you take a few breaths. You, you know you transition between home and work, so you take a few breaths. You may sit in your car for a few breaths before you come in and you set, you know, an intention of I’m now leaving that, I’m leaving that world, I’m coming in to be fully present and you take a few breaths.

Monica: Or as you’re waiting for your shower right, that’s a great time to warm up, take a few breaths. You’re waiting for your tea, your water, to boil my gosh. You know, I make a smoothie every day and it takes 90 seconds. There’s a lot of breaths to be taken there and I have to hold the top, otherwise it’ll like go all over the place and it’s happened before. So I have to sit there and hold it. So this is my time to do my breathing into my doing that periodically through the day you’re constantly resetting the nervous system, constantly resetting the nervous system, and you are recharging the battery, you are strengthening those shock absorbers.

Monica: So then when something happens, it’s almost like okay, you know, now my cup is full, I can, I can handle it, right, I’m not depleted. So those are really good strategies for moms especially. Or you know, now I have I have a 14 and a 12 year old now, right, so there’s different kinds of meltdowns, but you know the ability to respond as opposed to react when someone’s screaming at you or your toddler’s having a meltdown in. You know the store right. So you know, you, we get stressed right away. So if you can first, take a break and take or take a breath, right, roll those shoulders back and take that breath we’re modeling to our children. Right, it allows you.

Monica: You know, victor Franco said in his man search for meaning he said between stimulus and response there’s a pause. And that’s, that’s the magic. We have to use that pause, however small, to take that breath and and intentionally reset our nervous system. And and you know at first, when you do it, it’s not a habit. So this is what we talked about we have to instill these habits.

Monica: Remember those resilient individuals, habits and behaviors, thoughts and actions, yeah, that they practice. Well, we want those habits to happen automatically, right, we want them to be wired into our limbic brain, right into our basal, ganglick, ganglick part of our limbic brain. So what we have to do is we have to repeat it often. We have to do it. So, literally, use like sticky I have stickies all over remind yourself mindful breath, mindful breath, mind. Roll your shoulders back.

Monica: You know mindful breath, you

Monica: know.

Monica: Give yourself, put it in your calendar right every hour.

Monica: You know it’s really good practice. We have these ultradiant rhythms, right, so we have the circadian rhythms, our sleep cycle, but we have an ultradiant rhythm during the day. So it’s really good practice every so often, and everybody’s a little bio individual, but in general the research shows. Let’s say, if you’re working straight for 90 minutes, guess what? Your reserves are deleted. You’re not able to think yeah right, that’s too much.

Monica: On the other hand, many of us can’t focus anymore because we’ve taught ourselves to have like add right, because we’re constantly checking our notifications. But the idea is, if we set a time limit for ourselves maybe that’s a car, maybe it’s half an hour for you, whatever it is then you stand up, you walk away, you have some water, you do some movement, you take some breaths, you recharge and then you come back right, and it’s so interesting because I just recognized that this week I’ve been paying more attention to stopping, and that’s because we have some baby goats in our backyard that I need to feed during the day.

Kayla: My husband feeds them in the morning before he goes to work and he feeds them in the evening, but since I’m home, I’ve volunteered to feed them during the day, and so the whole process of making their milk, feeding them and cleaning everything up it takes exactly 15 minutes. But those that 15 minutes is something that I hadn’t been doing, and so I’m noticing like I felt like I’ve gotten so much done, like today even I was working on a presentation and I didn’t think I was going to get it done, and then I thought, oh, I have to feed the baby goats, I’m going to have to stop, and then I realized I needed that break so that I could keep going, and being around the animals, feeding them, watching their little tails wag as I fed them, only made me in such more of a better mood. So it was like an all in all encompassing break, but then I was able to come back and finish what I needed to do, when I thought I wasn’t going to be able to finish it even today.

Monica: Absolutely, absolutely. This is 100% bang on. This is what the research is showing. People think I just have to push through and I’m going to keep going and in what I’ll do, instead of taking a break. I’m going to have a coffee and I’m going to have a chocolate chip cookie and then the glucose, the sugar and the caffeine are going to push my career. It’s absolutely the opposite. And what I love about the baby goats and I love that story is because I think with the baby goats, you have to be completely present, right?

Kayla: Because they’re jumping and they’re probably like really excited.

Monica: So you can’t be thinking about your presentation because if you do, a goat is going to bite you in the finger or something. Do you know what I mean? And I don’t know a lot about goats, but I imagine that you have to be fully present and that’s why you know. And then so you fully disconnect. That’s that work recovery that Harvard talks about, right. You fully disconnect your brain. It’s almost like it dumps a lot of that junk and then you reset. So it’s perfect. Everybody should get goats. That’s the solution.

Kayla: Yeah, or something that’s going to allow them. I mean because there’s already so much research on how having a dog or cat and petting them for what five, 10 minutes can help. Yeah, regulate your nervous system and your breasts, because you’re co-regulating on each other. So animals yes, they’re something that you have to take care of, but they can be so helpful for you as well, and I also wanted to. You had said we often want to just push through, and I wanted to highlight the lie that we tell ourselves, if we stop, we won’t be able to get back in that groove, which is a total lie. That’s just what we’ve told ourselves, so that we don’t allow ourselves to have a break.

Monica: Yeah, yeah, and you know there’s two. This is again. There’s two parts of this, right. There’s the people. So this is actually, I think it’s HBR as well Harvard Business Review there’s a great article on adult deficiency trait. So that is like ADD, but we’ve taught ourselves ADD, right. So that’s one extreme is where we actually can’t focus because we have created these neural pathways of constantly. You know all these notifications, emails, call up to phones, text phones, constant interaction. So then we can’t focus. So that’s one aspect. And so we do have to teach ourselves focus.

Monica: And if somebody’s not able to focus, you know, really good techniques are things like the Pomodoro technique, where you actually you find it, it’s free, it’s on, you know, you find it on Google and you set it for 20 minutes and then you tell yourself I’m not going to look at anything else, I’m just going to work on this project for 20 minutes, and then the ringer, the little tomato, goes off and you take a break for five minutes and then you do it again, right. But then you expand that time, right. So you want to expand it. You know, ideally, I mean everybody’s different, but you can expand it to an hour maximum. That 90 minutes, right.

Monica: So that’s the one extreme. The other extreme is where we push, where we’re just working and we push beyond that. 90 minutes, and that’s also both of those extremes are will not lead to enhanced productivity. The enhanced productivity is your focus for a specific set of time and then you take a break, and that break could be five minutes, it could be 20 minutes, but the idea is is you totally break away, you don’t take your phone with you and look at your emails. You, I don’t know Again, go pet your dog, pet your goats.

Monica: Do something completely different. Do some stretches. That’s the amazing thing, you know. You stretch your body, again, remembering the spine. Do some breath work, right. I teach a lot of my clients how to do. You know the, the alternate nostril, naughty Shodana or various versions of it, because that brings all this oxygen into your brain. And also, when you do not alternate nostril breathing, you’re elongating your exhale, which is your parasympathetic system online, right. So you again, again, you’re calm, right.

Monica: So there’s all kinds of neat things you can do for yourself, but it’s about making the conscious decision to do these micro practices, and that’s what I teach people micro practices when we try to overhaul everything and we’re like oh, I’m going to now do this and do it up.

Monica: What happens is we actually activate. You know, our nervous system actually is like oh my God, she’s going to change everything and we like we. Our brains are designed to like the stable and familiar and they want to protect us. So all of a sudden, you’re like I’m overhauling my life Like that usually you’re you will self sabotage yourself.

Monica: So when you do tiny micro practices and you repeat them daily, daily, daily, daily, and then you add another tiny micro practice and you add it daily, daily and you read it. What ends up happening is you start building those neural pathways and then, over time, you become a new person. And this is why my, my book is actually entitled a new way to be right, because it’s a new way to be right and that’s why I said you know, it’s like it’s becoming resilient. One habit, one breath, one moment at a time. Right it’s, it’s it’s becoming a new person, a person who’s happier, who is healthier, who is stronger. Right, but it you have to be deliberate about it, you have to make that choice and then make these tiny little, engage in these tiny practices.

Monica: One of the things I love and I send to the participants in my program and clients is a book called the Compound Effect, and now you can find it. It’s just there’s a little video on YouTube you can watch which is like five minutes long. And what’s amazing is is and I forgot the author’s name and I’m so sorry right now, but again, we’ll Google it and we can find it and the video he shows the compound effect of the tiny micro practices, right?

Monica: So he gives an example of two guys, and one is like going for a walk every day after dinner for 20 minutes, and then you know what is the effect 15, 15 years later? Well, one is slim, trim and healthy, and the other one has a hard to talk, right, it’s that kind of thing, right? So the compound effect of those tiny little practices, you know, is huge, right?

Kayla: So yeah, and one of the things I do want to mention, because all of this yeah, it’s all about the small changes, but what I have found is a lot of the clients that I’ve worked with they are, at first, resistant to it.

Monica: Yeah.

Kayla: Because they’ve quote unquote tried it in the past. But what they’ve actually tried in the past is to only practice these things when they’re in a state of distress, when they’re in a state of dysregulation. So these things are not going to work because they never practiced them when they were at a normal state. For them, whatever normal is right. So, when starting these, what I wanted to really know was if you’re wanting to start a practice by recognizing your breathing, starting a new habit, make sure you’re practicing these things, not just when you’re stressed, but when you’re in, when you’re feeling safe and regulated.

Kayla: Yeah, and that’s because it’s that way you can build up that muscle memory and you can bring it in when you’re distressed in the future. So you need to practice both, not just one, because if you’re just practicing these things when you’re stressed and dysregulated, they’re likely not going to work because you haven’t given yourself the opportunity to really practice them.

Monica: Right.

Monica: So it’s like what we talked about, right, it’s those micro practices throughout the day, right. So it’s like, okay, you know what’s. It’s kind of like, again, you’re waiting for your water to boil to make tea. I live in Toronto, canada. It’s now gotten cold. I’m drinking tea now again, right, so I have to wait for that. Yeah, I could run off and be on my phone, but I’m like, hmm, there are there’s a good almost two minutes for me to do some breathing.

Kayla: Yeah.

Monica: Oh, when you’re brewing your coffee?

Monica: Yeah, or whatever you’re standing in line at Starbucks for a cup or whatever it’s. Nobody sees you doing your diaphragmatic breathing and most people are so self-absorbed they don’t even notice, even if you did the dark, fader breath, right. So it’s those kinds of things, right, just doing them over and over, like you said, and then you’re charging that battery. Charging that battery, it’s really, it’s really helpful, and I think the more we do it, the more than when we’re in that stressful moment, what we have a natural tendency to do, we don’t forget about it, because it’s like we, we, instead of going into fight or flight, we go into.

Monica: But the other thing I was going to say is, in our programs, what we start with is an overwhelm audit, right? So when people are overwhelmed, so, like you said, when there’s they’re completely dysregulated or burnt out, we say you really can’t start implementing these new resilience enhancing practices. You actually have to clean shop a bit, right? You almost have to start with priority setting and creating a really important or emotional why statement, right? So? And the reason for that is and I say emotional, I say your why should make you cry.

Monica: It just can’t be like oh, I want to have a balance lay, oh, I want to be thinner, or I don’t know or I want to like.

Monica: It should be emotional, because emotion lives in that limbic brain along with the habit. So when you have strong emotion, you actually you’re triggering that part of the brain, right, and so it’s actually helping you to create those habits. It gives you, you know, the willpower slash why? Power to get going right, and then again you put it on sticky notes all over to remind yourself to do these things right, because those it’s hard to those, those habits that are already instilled in our brain, are there already, right?

Monica: It’s like bushwhacking, right. So it’s like I go to a friend’s cottage and at the beginning of the season, when we go and the path to the look is completely overgrown and there’s logs have fallen over it and it’s hard. It’s hard to go, we get lost, we can’t find our way, we get scratched up or moving trees. Why are we here?

Kayla: What do we hope to do? This Right?

Monica: But as we travel that path more and more and more, there’s a path we don’t get lost really present, we see, we find the look, have no problem, we enjoy.

Monica: We’re like, oh, isn’t this nice? So it’s the same thing with neuro pathways we have to create them and that’s hard work, right. So we need that emotional why? And I’ll give you an example I worked with a woman once and she was told that she had to make all these health changes. She had to all these lifestyle changes, and she wasn’t doing them. And she was actually really hard on herself for it, like she was actually like beating herself up for the fact that she wasn’t doing what her doctor was telling her. So she knew to do this right, but she wasn’t doing it.

Monica: And so we went through the process, this one session, where I felt like I was just a two-year-old who kept saying, yeah, but why do you want to get healthy? But why, yeah? And then she would be like, okay, well, of course I want to be healthy, I want to have more energy, and but why? Why do you want to have more energy? You know, and and you know, we just kept doing this over and over again.

Monica: And all of a sudden she said I’m scared, I’m gonna die and my girls will be orphaned or not orphaned, but they won’t have a mom. And guess what. She started to cry and I was like, oh my god, I felt horrible. But the point is is suddenly she had the motivation to be like, oh my god, I have to change my life. I don’t want, I don’t want these girls to go to my funeral Like I have to do this, I have to do this and it’s gonna be hard work because it means I don’t pick up McDonald’s on the way home from work because I’m tired, so I, but I don’t want them to eat it, but I don’t want to eat it either.

Monica: And like, so, all of a sudden, you know we start brainstorming what are other things she could do? What are, you know, better prepared ideas Like what, how can she do? And everything changed. And you know that that is important, like when creating.

Monica: One of the hardest things with all these habits, right, and all these habits and behaviors is they are common sense. Like we’re talking about sleeping, we’re talking about eating. Well, we’re talking about moving. Yeah, we’re talking about being positive and being mindful. We know this, right, it’s common sense, but it’s not common practice. So we have to make it common practice.

Monica: And that takes that emotional, why it also often takes accountability right. So finding a coach, finding a friend, finding, you know whether it’s your doctor, whoever who’s going to keep you accountable, like I know, my dog keeps me accountable for going for a walk twice a day because if not he’s gonna poo in my living room. Look, that’s the bottom line and I don’t want to like or whatever. And he’s looking at me and I’m like you know what this is, this is good for me but it’s good for him. So that’s an accountability.

Monica: But you know, when you have a class, or you know a yoga class or a Pilates class with a friend, or you have a walking, like all the sudden, like it’s about what’s her name?

Monica: Gretchen Rubin. In her book Better Than Before, she says she does this work on sort of these four different personality types and most of us fall in the personality type of obligers. So we won’t do something for ourselves. But when it’s a teacher, when we have an assignment to, or it’s a boss or it’s, you know we’ve got this appointment, we show up but we wouldn’t do it for ourselves.

Monica: So that’s what we know, that about ourselves, and I know that’s definitely me, definitely it’s a problem.

Monica: I know I need a lot of accountability and, you know, even in publishing my book. I could never have self-published because I wouldn’t have written that book until like I don’t know 2030, like I wouldn’t, because I’d be there to always be something else, whereas I had a deadline I had, you know, I had that. Okay, this is do. Okay, now we need this now. We need this now. We and I was like okay, and and, just like in school, I got it done. So I think those are the ways we start to wire those habits into our brain and start to succeed right and start to overcome our what feels like self-sabotaging tendencies but it’s not self-sabotaging old habits we’ve got wired in there yeah, well, thank you so much, monica, for joining us today and giving us so many insights and how we can change.

Kayla: You know, some of these habits that have may have a hold on us, or it may feel we may feel like they have a hold on us. But before we end, if someone that listening is like, oh, I really want to work with Monica, or I want to, you know, learn more about what she does, what is the best way to get in contact with you?

Monica: yes, well, thank you. So probably the website, which is leadership wellness dot ca. Leadership wellness dot ca. And, and there, you know, there’s an email, there, there’s, there’s a free companion workbook to the book, if somebody wants, and there’s a whole series of exercises that you can do so you can go deeper into the content, you write out your why, you find your accountability partner. All that is there. So so please, yeah, come to the website and and you can also send me an email from there. And I mean, I’m on the other whatever social medias, but not okay, I need accountability to be a little bit better and more present there.

Kayla: I have yep, me too. I have gone on a unannounced hiatus and I need to get back to it, because I really do love showing up in social media. It’s fun, but I I need to start that accountability, please, for myself as well, right, thank you so much. Thank you, we’ll link all of that stuff up on the show notes so if you’re driving, don’t feel like you have to write everything down.

Monica: And thank you so much again, monica, for joining us well, it’s an honor and pleasure and thank you so much for having me.