Arianna Huffington on When Women Thrive

steps you can take to protect yourself. Now, enjoy this conversation with Milan and Ariana from the Seneca Women Forum at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and following stick around for what we got out of the conversation and a few key takeaways you can use in your own life. We'll be back after this break. Speaking about amazing game changing women. Arianna Huffington's surely qualifies and I really thrilled that you're here. Arianna. Um, you are a true visionary.

Uh and um, look at what you've done. You've up up ended the media landscape. You're now the CEO of Thrive Global. First, it was Huffington's post. Now it's thrive Gobel. I wonder what is even next in the next chapter. Um, but this is an an amazing undertaking and one that clearly we all need to hear a lot about. But I want to start because we've had so much focus today with good reason on women entrepreneurs. Um, what it takes,

what the challenges are, and look what you've done. I'm sure there are people along the way who said to you, are you crazy? But you, as a visionary, you really wanted to stake out in the way that you did, and obviously you have enjoyed great success. So how do you see women's entrepreneurship. What are perhaps lessons from your own efforts over the years that you can impart to

so many who are here in the audience. Well, first of all, I want to say what a heroine you are for me and for not many women, and it is, and how much I love the opportunity to speak directly with you. And when it comes to women entrepreneurs, I be eave that whatever our particular companies, whatever our particular startup is, we also have very responsibility to change the way we work because the current system in which entrepreneurs

and frankly all women and men. Function was created by men, yes, and it's not working, not for us now, it's not working for anybody, I mean, and when we women change it with the help of many good men. I don't want to eliminate that very real possibility, but women need to to lead the way into saying we don't want us to build amazing companies. We don't want us to

be at the top of existing corporate structures. We also want to change this world because if you look at the casualties which are proliferating every day, it is not sustainable. We have m skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety, suicides, and chronic diseases. I mean, you've worked around the world and we have this incredible paradox that while communicable diseases are going down, chronic diseases are proliferating and their lifestyle diseases,

their diseases based on the stress we accumulate. And you know, for me, this has become kind of the mission of the rest of my life, and that's why I wanted to leave the Havington Post to launch this company to work exclusively on ending this stress and burnout epidemic. So you have realized that, just as you've said, with the way that we're living our lives, we can't keep the space that we're paying a price ergo thrive global. Now what was it that precipitated your engagement on this issue.

I mean, frankly, the first time told me about it, I really didn't know where you were headed with it. But it is brilliant in terms of recognizing that we have a societal problem and we have to do something about it. Well, actually, just a month ago, the World Health Organization recognized burnout as a real syndrome, affecting health, affecting productivity, effecting companies bottom line. But my own realization

came the hard way. In two thousand seven, two years into building the Huffington Post, was the divorced mother of two teenage daughters. Anybody here has teenage daughters? That kind of my favorite dress? It gets better? And and I literally had bought into the collective delusion that the only way to succeed as an entrepreneur as a mother was to be always on to power through fatigue and exhaustion. And so one morning I got up from my desk because I was feeling called to get a sweater and

I collapsed. I hit my head on my desk, I broke my chickbone and that was kind of the beginning of my wake up call. And being a bit of a nerd, I started talking to scientists and studying the problem and realized that it is a global epidemic and it's been compounded by a growing addiction to our phones because now basically there is no end to our working day. And so what we try to do a Thrive is to help people bring and changes in their way they

live and work, but very, very microscopic changes. We have discovered exactly so we have discovered that the way to change behavior is not through New year resolutions, which are abandoned by the third week in January, but through what

we call microsteps. We have seven hundred microsteps that affect every part of our journey sleep, um, exercise or movement, nutrition, gratitude, mental health, everything, meditation, meditation, every aspect of wellness, kind of the whole being wellness, not at one point solution. And would you like to know my favorite microstep, absolutely out of the seven hundred microsteps, if you want to start with one tonight, it is when you go home peak a time that you declare the end of your

working day. It's a personal declaration because I can guarantee you that there's nobody here who can say at the end of the day that I've done everything I could possibly have done. I have absolutely nothing left to do. And if there is anybody here can say that, I recommend you change jobs, because it means your job isn't interesting enough. But I'm sure that's not the case for anybody.

So you have to declare that arbitrary ending. And because we are creatures of rituals, I recommend that you declare it then market by turning off your phone and gently escorting it out of your bedroom. And that is hard to do. It is very hard to do. But what I recommend is, if you can't do it every every night, don't judge us. If remember we're talking backstage about you

judging yourself. No judgments. I told her that I always feel guilty because she's telling us how to thrive having gone through these microstops, most of which I don't do, and so one feels guilty. And every Sunday when I wake up and look at my iPhone, there's Arianna. She's coming in with her Sunday newsletter and it's about how you can thrive. And I'm thinking, damn it, there she goes again, and she told me not to feel guilty.

No guilt. No guilty is the worst. No gilt and especially for working mothers, if there are any here, you know, I think they take the baby out and they put the guilty in. So so no guilt and no self judgments. We are all works in progress. This is a journey. But all the science, all our microsteps are science based. There now in the behavior change up so that people can get nags and microsteps throughout the day. But the

key is to make them small enough. Like if doing this every day seems overwhelming, say once a week, I will put my phone outside the bedroom, or every morning when I wake up, I will take sixty seconds before I go to my phone to deal with texts and email. Sixty seconds. Can we get one minute in the morning to actually remember what we're grateful for, set our intention for the day, anything except rushing to the phone, Because if you think of it, what's incoming is the world's

agenda for you. We need to start the day. What do we want from the day? So that's for me, So what kind of reaction have you gotten. I mean, I remember being at the World Economic Form, which is usually brutally cold weather. We're all sleep deprived. First thing Arianna gave me was a tea bag of some t you were recommending, this will do you good. And then the book Thrive. I have a copy that was an unbound copy before it became a case. Clearly you saw

that I had a need and you were looking after me. No, no, that is not the case. It's just that if I can convince you, you will convince millions. I mean, look at her. I have no doubt she is thriving. And she's absolutely right because, as you've said, this is an evident space case today, the documentation is all there. We need to be into holistic health. And also I think what companies are realizing what we are likely to have great partnerships with many companies represented here today, like sap

Accentia Bank of American Sherry Brownston is following us. She's been an amazing partner brooking bringing both our workshops and our digital programs into the bank. And then she personally wrote a great piece about her microstep, the micro step she picked, and then she should talk about it when she comes out was not to send emails to her direct reports on Sunday night. Oh and you know, and she also wrote how one Sunday night should she broke

her ground rule? And that's all okay too. We need to accept that we're not going to do this journey flawlessly, but just beginning with these microsteps has a huge cumulative impact. So what kind of response have you got? And I'm sure that you get individuals telling you you change their lives, or you may have people saying, I'm so frustrated, I

cannot do this. What what is the typical If there's a typical reaction, I think the typical reaction is incredible relief when people begin to take these microsteps and they recognize that, in fact, they become more productive. That is what is really and the absolute truth from looking around us. Look at athletes. You know, athletes considered recovery part of training, like they would never show up for a game without being sufficiently recharged. So the same applies to all of us.

So we need to integrate recharging recovery time into our work time and it may mean sixty seconds. We have a feature in our digital product that we call Reset, which is sixty seconds during the day. Um, anytime you're feeling stressed, because we're not going to eliminate stress. The problem is not that the problem is stress becoming cumulative.

We also launched the podcast for people who don't like to meditate, because we want to reach people wherever they are, and there are people who find meditation don't think they find it not for them, So we launched the podcast called Meditative Story, and we basically have some great people and last night it was Danny Meyer who tell a story of people that are starting their lives that change their lives, and then we give you mindful prompt meditation prompts.

So basically storytelling becomes the trojan horse through which we introduce meditation. So interesting. UM, I do think when you talk about the problems in our society, a big one is the addiction to emails and to texting. I mean, you can't go anywhere today, you know. I spend a lot of time on a university campus that the students just walk like this because they're all on their iPhones. You you see families sitting down at dinner each once on an iPhone. It is an addiction. It is become

all consuming. So you take small steps to work at your addiction right, absolutely small steps, starting with separating yourself at night from your phone so you can have very charging night's sleep. We've even created a product you can buy from Amazon. It's a little I'll send it to you. It's a little it's a little charging station that looks like a phone bed. It can charge ten phones and iPads and you It has a little blanking, so you put your phone under the blanket, Oh my god, and

they phone charges through the night. You charge in your bed and then you reconnect in the morning. That's adorable. Highly higher recommended for families with teenagers because then it becomes a family ritual rather than a punishment. When my friends with teenagers try to take the phone away from them and it seems like an existential threat. Also, it comes in Mahogany in in Lighthood, so you would think at UM companies clearly want their employees to be at

the top of their game. They want them to be thriving, they want them to be healthy. But at the same time they have a lot of expectations. Uh, feel free to work around the clock, or you know, answer my email. I'm emailing you at eleven o'clock at night or whatever. There. So there's this combination of demand because of the needs of the enterprise or the expectations. But then there's also the recognition that I need by employees to be um

really in good shape. So I think what's very important for us to realize is that there is no trade off. Let me give you one example. I Thrive we are we are a very fast growing company. You know, we do have high expectations. In fact, when we hire people, we do say, listen, if you want to come here and chee lander a mango tree, that's not their right job or not. And this is not a nine to five job. By there, there will be days when we're shipping a product and an engineer may have to pull

an all nighter. There will be a time when you have to work over there. We can that's not a problem. The problem is that people then need to take what we call thrive time to recharge. So for us, if you've worked through the weekend, take Monday off just like that. No, but it's not it's not in the interest of the enterprise.

Why would you want somebody to come to work Monday exhausted sleep deprived, making mistakes or sitting at their desk playing Fortnite falling asleep presentsm It's a huge problem at companies or trying to power through and getting sick. I mean, if you look at the data, people get sick after they have over exerted themselves and they have not taken time to recover. So it's in the interest of everybody to give people what we call thrive time. They have

to take it in imediately after over exertion. They can't bank it for a holiday. It really about recalibrating and being ready to show up fully recharged again. And if you look at the data, burned out employees have a thirty greater chance of leaving the company. So attrition goes up, and attrition is a terrible cost for companies. Productivity goes down, creativity goes down, resilience goes down. Right now, companies are dealing with all these mental health problems, and these are

so much a function of slip the professional exhaustion. We're not talking about real mental illness like bipolar, speci of any We're talking about garden variety of what we're bring on ourselves. And that's where we in partnership with Stanford, we launched a Thriving Mind to our digital program based on all the latest brain research to help prevent this from happening. Because ultimately seven five percent of healthcare costs and healthcare problems if you include mental health, are because

of lifestyle and stress related problems. And that's up to us to change through micro steps. We're gonna all have to read Pride because you know, singlehandedly, you you may You've already made enormous contributions with Huffington's post and all we've been able to get from that that resource, but with this you may singlehandedly truly bring very important change

to our society. And so thank you Arianna Huffington. You're a visionary and you are a caring person things and and in a very non judgmental way, you are changing our lives for the better. Thank you so much. And I would love to invite all of you to share your stories and thrive. Think of Thrive global and media platform as they haven't done passed without politics, what do we leave? So just contribute to our stress exact definitely does.

But if you know, I'm sure everybody here is a story of burnout or a story of your own microsteps, share them with everyone, because we have found that reading other people's stories and what they're doing, either right or wrong, is really helping change the way we live and work. Thank you so much, Thank you very much. Stay tuned for our takeaways after this break. Well, that was a great conversation with Arianna. Make sure to check out her work at Thrive Global. Now here's what I got out

of the conversation. First, there's really no trade off between performance at work and take and care of yourself. In fact, athletes intentionally build in recovery time for optimal performance. Second, pick a set time to end your work day and separate from your phone at night. It'll be there for you in the morning, and when you wake up, be sure to take a few minutes for yourself before reconnecting. That way, you can set your own agenda for the day,

rather than letting the world set the agenda for you. Third, and perhaps most importantly, we all have the power to change our own lives through micro steps. I, for one, am going to start by turning my phone off at night. I wish be luck with that. You're listening to Seneca Women Conversations on Power and Purpose brought to you by the Seneca Women podcast Network and I Heart Radio with

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