Today, I have something a little bit different, but it's also something I'm going to be doing more regularly. It's an Ask Me Anything episode where I am here to answer listener questions. Today we're going to be covering everything from how I recovered from burnout through to my thoughts on meditation and how I politely push back on demands for my time. Oh and also the dating app that I use to find my fiance because yes, that was
sent through to me as a listener question. Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor Amantha imber So. The first question for this Ask Me Anything comes from Christian and Christian asks if you got distracted due to a mind overload like company, health status, family affairs, how
do you get out of that? Well, Christian, I've been in this mind state quite frequently, particularly in twenty twenty four, and what I find makes the biggest difference is writing everything down. I literally make a list, and then what I do with that list is that I add rough timings to each item on the list. How much time will this thing take me? Because what our brains often do is they get quite overwhelmed. They build this really big list, and it's really easy to overestimate how long
all these things will take. And so I find if I can contain it, which making a list absolutely does. It contains things to being on a physical or digital sheet of paper, and then I can add rough timings and that will generally give me a sense of reassurance to go, Okay, I can get through everything that I
need to get through and hit all my deadlines. What I've started to do as a bit of a ritual is at the beginning of each month, I will think about what are my top priorities for this month, generally like what are those big bits of deep work that I really need to get done, And I will make a list, put timings against each one, and I will continually come back to that list throughout the month. And I've found that that makes the massive difference. Next question
is from Vadotus. I hope I've pronounced that correctly. So the question is meditation effects on work life balance? What does that do? And is having a nap in the middle of the day good for managing.
Stress at work?
Okay, So look, I have never really been able to get into meditation. I've tried it many times. Although my good friends Sarah Grinberg and Lisa Leong, who've both been on this show, still I'm only convincing me to, you know, maybe make it a bit of a habit or think about it differently. What I have done, though, for most of my life is I've used hypnosis. So I grew up with a mum who is still a clinical psychologist,
and she specializes in hypnosis. She uh trains fellow medical professionals in using hypnosis, And so for me, hypnosis was never something that I just thought about as what they do on the Scooby Doo and they you know, wave the medallion in front of people to send them to sleep and turn them into chickens. Hypnosis was actually a tool that I, you know, you heard about my mum using all the time, and I experienced from quite an
early age as well. And the way I think about hypnosis, where you're essentially getting someone into a state that feels like a kind of dream like state, I guess certainly a very relaxed state, not dissimilar to meditation. During hypnosis, the person doing the hypnosis will be making suggestions in terms of the purpose of the hypnosis. Often in my mum's practice, she works a lot with oncology patients, so
often the hypnosis is to help with pain management. But for me, I've used it for all sorts of things, particularly high stress situations like if I've got a high stakes presentation that I'm making.
For example, I will.
Often use hypnosis to just calm my nerves and give suggestions to my mind that I will be in a peak performance mode. So I think about hypnosis like meditation on steroids, so that I guess has been my form of meditation. I do also find jogging pretty good for getting me into a meditative state. Now, in terms of naps, if you are someone that does not struggle to get to sleep at night and stay asleep, so if you don't have insomnia, naps, well, there's a whole lot of
great stuff about naps. Typically, what most sleep researchers would recommend is don't nap for more than twenty minutes. So if I'm having a nap, I generally don't nap, but occasionally I do. And I generally don't nap because I have struggled with insomnia. Is I will set an alarm for thirty minutes from when I lie down in bed, and I know that it will probably take me a few minutes to get to sleep. So at the thirty minute mark, I know that I haven't gone into a
deep sleep. I'm not going to have that groggy feeling, and that is the best kind of nap to have. Okay, let's move on to the next question. So from anonymous, Okay, I'm currently participating in your Thrive Protocol program and loving it. And FYI, that is a program that we run at Inventium to help drive well being, resilience and productivity. So if that is a thing in your organizations, do reach out,
get in touch. So what is on my mind this week is creating healthy boundaries and being able to politely put pish back on requests, demands, expectations by people who can be very persistent and won't take no for an answer.
So that is the gist of the question. That's a little bit more there.
But what I would recommend here is a strategy that I've heard from a few people. One of those people was Nicky Sparshot, who she is at Unilever. She used to head up Unilever Australia. I believe she's now in a global role. She has a strategy that she told me about called yes but and I love this strategy. So when we get some sort of a request for our time, I mean, for me, I'm quite good at saying no, but I understand that sometimes this is not a thing that you can do, particularly when you're in
the system of a large organization. So yes but involves saying yes but putting some constraints around your answer. So let me give you an example, because I did actually use this strategy a few weeks ago with a client of ours, in Ventium, who asked me if I would do I think the request was for like a forty five minute presentation or like fireside chat Q and A with a large group of their employees. But they didn't have a budget, and normally I charged money for that
kind of thing. But I wanted to help them. We've been doing work with them, and you know, we plan to continue that relationship.
So I said yes.
But so I said yes, I can absolutely do a Q and A, but it can only be fifteen minutes. I'm very happy to do that just as a gesture of goodwill for our relationship, and my client was really happy I was able to deliver a lot of value in that fifteen minutes, but I still set a clear boundary. So yes, but is an excellent tool. Let's see our next question here. How do you navigate making organizational change remaining committed to continuous improvement when you're relying on busy
colleagues making time for the collaboration. Mm, well, I I'm not the best person at doing this.
Generally, I will just push forward with.
The change that I want to make and actually forget to take people along for the journey, which is something I am trying to work on.
What though, I have found it's been quite a good tool.
Bit old fashioned, but doing a good old racy r AC I So if you haven't come across racy, racy is really great for setting roles clearly at the start of a project. RACY stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. There are a few different models like this, but I like the racing. So these four roles are the things that you think about at the start of the project. So who is responsible, who is actually responsible for doing
the work? Who is ultimately accountable? Like if the project fails, who is the person that is actually going to be accountable for what happens. Who is consulted along the journey, like who do we collaborate with a little bit, and who is simply informed? And this is a really key distinction because often we can confuse informed for consulted and informed are just people that we just need to communicate with,
keep them updated along the journey of the project. So if we can define this upfront, we can we can circumvent a lot of unnecessary collaboration. If you like, next question, how do you set up a nurturing environment for those on your team with neurodiverse brains so that they can be set up for success in the workplace?
Good question?
So you know what they say, if you've met one person with ADHD, you've met one person with ADHD. I think this is so important. Trying to group neurodiverse brains into the one bucket is a big mistake. So the best thing that you can do is just ask them, ask them, like what do you need? But other than asking them, I would say, one easy thing to start thinking about, well not necessarily easy, but one thing to
start thinking about is the sensory environment. So a lot of neurodiverse brains are quite sensitive to things like loud noises, bright lights, lots of chit chat and interruptions.
The brains just don't like that.
So think about what is the physical environment that you have set up for your teammates at work, particularly where it's in your control, Like what is the lighting light?
Can people adjust the lighting?
You know, bright lights, generally speaking, are not great for neurodiverse brains.
Lots of noise not great. Can you set up quiet zones.
Or quiet pods where people with differently fired brains can go to get away from the noise. They are certainly some good things to start thinking about initially.
Also, we have a bunch.
Of different tools that we use to help to help with collaboration and just getting the most out of all sorts of brains. So one of those tools that we teach to a lot of our clients at Inventium is a tool called shifting. So shifting involves in any kind of a meeting where you're asking for people's thoughts or inputs, which is hopefully any kind of a meeting because ideally you're not using meetings just for information sharing. Is getting people to think about the question.
Or the problem on their own.
First, give them five to ten minutes and then shift back as a group, taken in turns to share your thoughts and then build on each other's thoughts, and then you can repeat and repeat and repeat for however many times that you want. That's a tool called shifting that we find is very good because typically how most meetings and brainstorms are run is that they're set up to really favor people that are highly extroverted and great at thinking on the spot, which is really the minority of us.
So a good way to take into account all our different brains is to give people time to think on their own and then take it in turns to share as a group. We will be back soon with strategies that I personally used to help recover from burnout. Okay, this is a very specific question, and this comes off the back of one of the newsletters that I recently shared, which I think was titled my three non negotiables for
health Habits or something like that. If you don't sign up, if you don't get my newsletter, there is a link in the show notes. So I did talk about how one of my non negotiables is having twenty to thirty grams, not that I'm actually using scales to measure things, although I have done in the past, but you know, I can eyeball things and know how much protein I'm having.
So I do that with every meal.
Because that is a huge, huge benefit and has a huge impact on blood gluecose levels, which you want to try and have as stable as possible throughout the day for your energy levels. So the question is from Kelly regarding your protein powered meals. If cereal is off the table at breakfast, what is on the table?
Thanks? Okay.
So I typically have the same breakfast every single day. I'm a big fan of trying to reduce decisions wherever possible, and deciding what to have for breakfast every day is a decision that I try to remove from my life. So what I have is I get one and you might have seen these at your local supermarket. Is it's like a big carton of pure egg whites. It's typically in the freezer section, and I defrost overnight and I make myself an egg white omelet with spinach and tomato.
I make sure I use a good amount of olive oil so I'm getting a good amount of healthy fats as well, and if I'm not full after that I will also have some yogurts, so thinking about, you know, making sure I've also got some fermented food good for your gut, and also again just thinking about, you know, a different source of protein and fats. So that is my typical breakfast that I have almost every single day. Okay, the next question is from Elise. When you're feeling overwhelmed, what do you do?
How do you help yourself?
Oh? Man, I have played around with a lot of different strategies because I feel like I spent a lot of twenty twenty four and even parts of twenty twenty three feeling quite overwhelmed about certain things. So the strategies that have worked best for me. Firstly, cyclic sighing. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Cyclic sighing is a great breathing strategy to immediately calm your nervous system.
It involves taking a breath in I don't know if you can hear that through the microphone, and then when you feel like you've taken a really big breath in, taking another quick breath in to really fill your lungs, and then sighing out, so gradually sighing out through your mouth and if you repeat that for five minutes. I mean I would even do it just for one minute and I would find a difference. But repeating that for five minutes has been shown to really reduce that state
of arousal and calm us down. So I reckon I was doing that probably most days of twenty twenty four. Another strategy that I find very helpful at Inventium we call it scar sc is to firstly spot the stressor s Spot the stressor, so identify what is the thing that is making me stressed? Then see check your control, So how much control do I have about this stressor is it something that I have direct control over? Is it something that I can influence or is it something that I have no control over?
And then a is accept or act.
So I will act if I have direct control or some influence over and if I have no control over it, which sadly is most of the stresses in our life, I will try to accept it and not try to change it. I use that a lot when I'm identifying stresses. The final thing that I found very effective is making
a state change. So if for example, I'm at my desk and I'm feeling stressed, a state change might be going for a walk around the block, or it might be you know, more extreme, like water has very calming effects, so maybe I'll just I'll jump in the shower. I remember when I was on holidays last year and I was lucky enough to be staying at a place that had a pool. I was having a really stressful day. I was meant to be on holidays, but I had
been hit with a couple of work emergencies. It got me into quite a state of stress, which I was trying to work through apply scar to SCA. But then I just thought, I'm just going to go for a swim, and I went for like a ten minute swim in the pool, and by the time I was done in the pool, my state how I was feeling had completely changed and I was no longer feeling overwhelmed. So that they are a few techniques on what I do. I do also find actually hypnosis that I talked about earlier
is very very effective. Next question a bit of a random one. After I heard you on the mid podcast. I want to know which app you found a knee on? Who Neo is my fiance and the mid podcast is by Mum and Me. I will put a link to that in the show notes. It is a different kind of interview that I gave where I talk about finding love after getting divorced, which happened five and a half years ago. Now, so how I met Neo. The app that I found Neo on was on Hinge.
There you go. That was over three years ago.
So I don't know what state Hinge is in now, but certainly at the time it was worked out well for me and Neo. Okay, I'm interested in learning more about professional jealousy and the impact is can have on career growth and progression in organizations and how to deal with this. Oh ah, that's such a meaty question, and you know what, I reckon. I might take that to a future Ask Me Anything episode because I have so much to say about that. I've thought so much about it,
you know, very quickly. I do try to think about my own sort of my own goals and sense of achievement for myself as just thinking about personal bests and what can I do, because ultimately that there's always going to be people that we can do upwards. Comparisons too, in terms of social comparison theory, so people who are doing better than us and we can also make downward comparisons people that are doing worse than us. We're always going to have both in our life no matter where
we are. I do find that quite helpful to remember. Funnily enough, it was a concept that I researched in my honors thesis in psychology many many years ago.
But I reckon I'll get.
More into that in a future episode. But also I do recommend checking out the interview that I did with Sarah Greenberg that came out a week or two ago. We do talk about some topics around that final question.
I'm interested in.
Learning more about you recovering from burnout and what tools you put into place to maintain this, especial considering your role as a business leader with a stressful schedule ongoing. I'm finding this challenging in my own life, so would love to hear from someone who has been through it and continued to balance both a high performing role and a healthy, balanced life. Okay, great question, and again I'm gonna I'm gonna get into more content around this and
more strategies around this as the year progresses. But in short, I made some small changes, like some of the things that we've spoken about ay that I've spoken about cyclic siging, applying scar state changes, They've all been things that have
worked incredibly well. I lean very heavily on my amazing support networks, my partner NEO, my close friends, some of whom are in HR and offer particularly wise advice, you know, when it comes to all sorts of sort of people and culture and other kinds of you know, challenges that I think pies a lot of leaders lives. My family are great, and also I've got some amazing peers who are also founder CEOs. So I leant heavily into support networks. And then I also asked myself this question a lot.
What part did I play in creating the circumstances that contributed to my burnout? You know, who did I attract into my life? Like, how was I complicit in that? What business decisions did I make? So I do think a lot about what do I need to own because I think it's very easy when you're burnt out to place the blame externally. So I will be expanding on those answers in future episodes. But that is it for
today's Ask Me Anything episode. I hope you found it useful and if you have more questions that you would like me to answer, Please drop me an email or you can find me on the socials. I love getting listener questions, so please send them through and I hope that you've taken at least one gem out of today's episode. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the warrangery people, part of the Cool And Nation. A big thank you to Martin Nimma for doing the sound mix.