69: Boost Your Focus, Drive, and Micro-Resilience

to have Bonnie Saint John on the podcast. For over fifteen years, Bonnie has circled the globe as a keynote speaker,

Fortune five hundred leadership consultant, and thought leader. Bonnie combines the lessons she learned as an amputee she had her right leg amputated at the age of five, an Olympic athlete, rhodescholar, White House official, and entrepreneurial business woman into flexible, highly impactful, yet entertaining presentations designed to provide insightful and inspirationial solutions to the challenges of today's dynamic global workplace, so that

all in one breath. NBC Nightly News called Bonnie one of the five most inspiring women in America. Her latest book co author with Alan Haynes, is called micro Resilience Minor shifts for major boosts and focus, drive and energy. What a delight it is to chat with you today. Thank you so much, Scott. This is great, It is great,

and what a fascinating concept. You know, in the field of positive psychology we talk about, you know, resiliency is kind of a buzzword in a way, but micro resiliency has not become a buzzword yet, but maybe now it will. Could you talk a little bit about what the differences between macro and micro resilience. Well, it's on a couple

of different levels. It's the problem a lot of people think of resilience, you know, the problem we need resilience for is something really big, like rebuilding a town after a hurricane, or recovering from cancer or a divorce or abuse children, you know, getting back to normal or getting back to life. Those are big problems. We're not looking at that. We're looking at smaller problems. Is how can I be more resilient this afternoon than I was this morning.

So it's we've defined the problem as much smaller. Actually, I've started to realize we've been doing this work for a while that it's like, oh my gosh, it's so much easier to make progress if you just define the problem as smaller. We also define the solutions as smaller too, So we're really looking at small things that you can do in the midst of a busy day. And we purposely scoured the research looking for things that are so easy you can do them, like while you're in a

conference call or while you're in your car commuting. And the criteria we also had is that they need to have same day impact. So with macro, what we define as macro resilient solutions are things that you have to do for a while, like you know, you eat healthy for a while, you get enough sleep over time, you know, and these habits do you good. We were looking for things that have an immediate payoff. But the thing is, macro and micro go well together. You know, we're not

saying macro is not important. You know, it's the things we all know we should do, and it is very important. But even if you were doing all those things perfectly, which I don't know anyone who is, but even if you were, you still might have a tough day. You might have, you know, a deadline get changed, or something happened with your children and you feel like, you know, I'm thrown off my game and I got to get

back on track. So it's small things that help you be more resilient, not if you're you know, down in the dumbs, but even if you're just an average person, you could still be more resilient. And the great thing though, is that it goes well with macro and it also

can have cumulative effects. So micro certainly supports the macro, and it even works where if sorry to interrupt, but even if you like are having a tough day, so a lot of stuff gets thrown at you in a day, normally you'd be so exhausted and wiped out at the end of the day you might say, you know, oh, I just want to eat a burger and you know, sit in front of the TV. I just did that.

So if you have a tough day, but you don't get drained by it and thrown off by it as much, even though the same things happened, you're more inclined to go home and sleep better, eat better, and maybe even exercise. So the micro can support better macro as well. I really like that. So you talk about a lot of different of these micro resiliency factors. Let's go through some of them. One big one I know a lot of people are really going to want to improve is to

help focus better. You talk about creating an island in the stream. Is that right? Yeah, So we call it a zone. And it came about because I would read what organizational gurus would say, and they'd say, you know, we shouldn't be interrupted so much, so maybe you should only check your email twice a day or three times

a day. And for most people, including me, it's just not very practical to do that, And so we came up with this idea of saying, instead of you know, only checking your email a couple of times a day, and you just create islands in the stream. You know, we have so much communication coming at us. Can you just carve out an hour here or there and just have less interruption during that time so you can get focus work done. Yeah. I mean I would love to

know how to do that. A key thing for it is communication, I think, because if you can communicate with the people around you, the people who you interact with, and let them know, you know, I'm going to have certain focus times. And it depends on what you do. Some people can do this, you know, three times a day. Some people can only do it three times a week.

So but whatever the level you're at, you know, if you can bring a little bit more focused time in, you'll be so much more productive and you'll feel like you have more time. But you have to communicate with people. So for example, on my team, I tell people, if you need an answer to something you know right away, urgently,

text me and I'll know that that's urgent. But if you can just ask me a question and I can get back to you, you know in three hours or whatever, you know, whenever I have a break, then just email me and I'll know I can handle it that way. So, I mean that's a really simple example. But communicating with people about why you need zones and what is the

threshold to break it. You know, you can't really relax if you're in a zone if you don't think anyone can get a hold of you in an emergency for sure. And then also the converse, you can't relax if you feel like people can get through to you at any time as well. Right, both extremes like you know, like

your mother who might not respect boundaries. But what happens too when you communicate with people around you, is that they probably want the same respect too, and so it becomes a mutual agreement about how do we help each other to be more productive? Yeah, in an ideal world, in a world where everyone's respectful of each other's boundaries and cares. You know, what do you do if you

just have like a really jerk boss. I'm not saying I do, but necessarily, but what do you do if you have a you know, just a boss who like emails you at like eleven pm is like I want a grand budget by four am. I mean, if you're in that position and you really don't want that to be your life, then you know you need to start looking for a plan for how to get a job or how to get a new boss, you know, and that can take a while, but you know, we make choices.

When I worked in the White House, you know a lot of things were emergencies, and you know, Glow it was a you know, an international emergency, and so if you choose to work in a place where that's the case, then you know that's what you're going to have to do. But often you can negotiate with somebody even if you think, oh, this person will never let me have focused time. If you explain to them, look, I just want to do the best work for you, and this is what I

need for this. You know you might make some headway. You might. You can try it. Like as you say, you know, some people are just jerks, but if you appeal to their own self interest, you know, you might be able to make some headway. I like that. Now you are quite an interesting person on easy John. Wow, let's just talk about you for a second. So okay, first of all, you just mentioned you're a White House official. Now under what administration? Was that? The Clinton administration? They

bill Clinton administration? Wow? And how did you get involved in that? It was that that was after your Rhodes scholarship. It was I had left England and gone to work for IBM in sales. Actually, so I was working in sales for a couple of years and then he got elected and some of my friends were in the campaign, and so they started putting out dealers for resumes for people to apply, and I put my resume in and I kind of forgot about it because you know, you

put it in during the transition. And then I get this phone call in February or March after the inauguration, and I got this message, you know, and I tried to call back and the phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing and finding I would get somebody and they said, you know, oh, we want to interview you for this job for the National Economic Council. And they said, but you know, we'll call you back and let you know

when the interview is. And they didn't call me back, and I called back, and you know, it was it was chaos. They're trying to organize the whole, you know, government, they're trying to restaff the top three levels of the government. So there was a lot of this going back and forth and back and forth, and find they said, we think we can schedule your interview on Wednesday, but we'll call you back, and I'm like, no, no, no, I'll

just come. I got on a red eye flight and at the time, the ticket to fly out there cost half of my monthly salary working as a sales rep at IBM, and it's not reimbursable by the government. So I had to bet half of my month's salary and go get on a plane. And I went out and it was crazy. It was actually Thurgood Marshall's funeral the day I was there, and so everything was off. We had to reschedule everything, but we finally got the interviews.

The funny part about this story is afterwards somebody was saying, well, I applied for a job in the White House too, but they didn't really want to hire me. And I said, oh, really, what makes you think they didn't want to hire you? And he said, well, they never answered any of my calls, they never returned any of my phone calls. And I just think it's funny that I didn't let that be a negative signal. Well, that's a like a resiliency factor

right there, or positive psychology too. Yeah, there's so many examples of that in my life, where if you just let yourself tune into the signals of reality, you might have given up. I mean, come on, a one legged black skier from San Diego with no money, that's nuts. So what did you study as a Rhodes scholar? I studied economics at Oxford As an undergrad. I did politics in economics, so I was always interested in basically politics and economics. And then what were you doing at IBM

economic related stuff? No, I was actually doing sales. I was selling computers, selling computers. I was really interested in working there because it was the you know, it was the beginning of the whole PC revolution and not politically correct, but you know, personal computers, and it was you know, technology was up and coming. And I started programming computers when I was twelve actually, and I was just really interested in learning. I thought it was the future. I

wanted to learn more about it. And sales in retrospect, I'm so glad I had a really great sale training program because I've been in my own business now for over twenty years. And if you're not good at sales, you know, you really can't be an entrepreneur. So learning both of those things was really helpful, so interesting, and when you were at the White House, you know, as you know, Billklinnin was a Rhodes scholar as well. If you ever like talk insider road stuff with him, like, oh,

I remember that Oxford table. I don't think anyone has ever asked me that, And the answer is no. We never rolled up our sleeves and had a sort of Rhodes scholar love fest. Not. I enjoyed working with the team. It was a lot of really sharp people that really thought about the future and thought about data, and I think did a lot of good things for the country too that didn't get reported that you don't get credit for. You know, it was great team. What did you do

there when you worked there? I was on the National Economic Council, okay, and I was responsible for working on human capital issues, so anything from labor policies, education policies, training policies, and what the National Economic Council was. It was invented under Clinton, and it was to look at

the national implications of domestic economic policy. So for example, when the National Security Council would look at something like the most Favored Nation status for China, they would think of it in terms of human rights and in terms of you know, international power, but they wouldn't think about what's the impact on jobs. So they wanted the National Economic Council to be able to analyze, you know, the domestic economic impact of a lot of the international policies

that we do or the decisions that we're making. Well, that was a really important time to look at that stuff. And now it's also important time to look at that different perspective. Now, very different perspective So what are some lessons you learned from having your a leg amputated at really the start of your life? Right, Well, the growth was stunted when I was born, so I never really

had a normal leg. I had braces and orthopedic shoes, and the amput did my leg when I was five, and that allowed me to have a prosthesis, an artificial leg that allowed me to actually walk a lot more normally. So it was much better, although I still was the crippled kid. You know, I didn't get picked for teams or you know, be able to represent the school for sports or anything. So the chance to be me neither.

If it makes you feel any better, you were the last person picked for teams, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I had both my legs, so it's worse for you really, Yeah. Yeah. I had no excuse, but I you know, it was neat to get a chance to say you can be a champion, you can be strong, you can be trying, you can train and be an athlete. And so when I was fifteen, that was when I started skiing and I immediately started racing. So cool, So you certainly didn't

let that stop you. No. My brother used to say that I started so far behind the starting line, I had to like run to get to the starting line with everybody else. So I had momentum. Oh that's so cool. Oh I like that. Really, that's such a great metaphor as well. That's probably literally true. Very cool. Okay, So I can see how your whole life in a lot of ways has been a lot of micro resiliency and

macro resiliency. Let's talk about the role of emotions. That could be a really big limiting factor if we can't get your emotions under control or you let it kind of hijack the rest of your system when you're under a really tense situation. I'd personally love to get some tips on what you've learned to kind of prevent that

from happening. It's interesting emotions kind of go through a number of the frameworks, but that immediate feeling of feeling hijacked by your emotions is we put the research it in that area into the framework called reset. So it's how do you reset that hijack that you can get? And it comes OU don't know if everybody's heard the term amygdala hijack. He's listening, but it comes from the

concept of an amygdala hijack. So when are dellah in our brain sends a threat, it like sends out the fire alarm and the adretaline, and you know, it sets off all all of our smells and bells. Well, you know, so when we get set off, smells and bells can help calm you down. Actually, it's what we talk about.

So when you're having that reaction, it often is an overreaction, right because when we were primitive human beings, we needed to have that strong reaction to a possible threat because we might have to fight, or we might have to run, you know, we might have to do something. And now often we feel threatened in an office, you know, gosh, I didn't get invited to that meeting. What does that mean? Does that mean I'm not going to be moving forward?

You know, it's my boss not like me. Or you overhear something at the water cooler, you know, and so you can feel threatened, But it's in situations where you really don't need to fight. You need to think more clearly and you need to be more collaborative, and setting off your your adrenaline and your cortisol actually can do the opposite, can make you much more tunnel vision. So smells and bells can calm you down. If you're getting input that makes you feel threatened, certain smells can really

calm that down and break the reaction. Doctor Joan Borisenko, who was one of the early mind body researchers at the Harvard Mind Body Institute, talked about this and she talked about vanilla and nutmeg and cinnamon, and I said, wow, you know those are all holiday spices. Is that because you know we have that association with holidays And she

said no, no, it's the other way around. There's a physiological reaction, which is why we use those smells on holidays because they calm us down and cut through our stress response. But then where are the bells coming in? So the bell sounds, she said, sounds can do that as well. It's interesting. Eileen Fisher, the clothing mogul who

has stores all across the country. I got to sit in on one of her meetings with their senior staff and they have one of those like Buddhist metal bowls that sits on a little pillow and at the beginning of the meeting they ring the bell and then have a moment of silence and then ring the bell again, and then the meeting starts, and it is amazing when you experience that. It's like a palette cleanser. It just calms you down. It makes you very present in the room.

So it's kind of woo woo, but there's actually really good science behind. It's calming your amigdal of reaction. Oh, Bonnie, I am taking copious notes. You're the professor. You can know all this stuff already. Right, Well, I'll tell you I didn't know this. I didn't know about bells and smells, But I'll tell you I have tried everything else. I've done, meditation, I've done I have a bed of nails that I that I sleep on, which feels really good. It hurts

so good. There are these little like you know, it's occupy. It's like an acupuncture Matt. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. I thought you're kidding. No, it's so good. It's so good. It really relaxes you. I've tried. In terms of smells, you know they have you can have like lavender. I really like lavender and peppermint and lemon.

I don't know the science of a roma therapy. I haven't studied all this, So I mainly say to people, you know, you can experiment and see what works for you and if you if you do have an association, like my husband Alan has an association with spearmint that his grandmother used to grow it and make it into tea, And so in addition to whatever physiological properties it has, it does have, you know, emotional associations as well. Oh yeah, I mean I'm going out tomorrow and I'm going to

look like Santa Claus. I'm going to have something bells on me. Trust me. That's so funny. With a lot of people talk about taking a deep breath too when you feel like you're getting that emotional hijack. The trick there is that a lot of people will take a deep breath and you see their chest expand, and that shallow chest breath can actually exacerbate that autonomic reaction, and so you really want to take a deep belly breath, and by practicing the deep belly breathing that is actually

a much better way to reverse that reaction. Yeah, that's great. Sometimes they kind of refer to like as like putting air into a balloon. Yeah, if you can put your hand on your abdomen and if you if you don't feel your abdomen moving when you're breathing, you know you need to do it differently. Singers do that. I was just going to say opera singing. Yeah, but it takes a lot. I think you have to understand too. It

takes them a while to really develop those muscles. And so if you want to use that as a way to calm yourself down, which is great because again you can do it during a meeting, you can do it on a conference call, you can do it while you're driving. So cultivating that deep belly breath is a great way to calm yourself down TOATS. So give me one more way to calm me down. This is uh. I have

a very strong personal interest in this one. Another great one is from the research by Matt Lieberman at UCLA is just labeling, and so he talks about when you're you know, in an emotion is like taking control of you. You can label it with a word or several words, and you don't have to even do it out loud. You can just do it in your head. So if you're you know, if you're in a meeting and something's happening and you know you can like speel the steams

starting to come out of your ears. You can say, you know, am I frustrating? Am I angry? Am I? You know? If you can put words on what you're feeling, if you're feeling disappointed, I'm simply the act of putting words on it actually de escalates some of that emotional reaction. I think of it as like a train coming out of the station. It's like, you know, it's picking up steam with this emotion. And I think by labeling it,

you're creating a little distance. Right, so it's over there and I'm over here, and I can put a word to it, as opposed to it being carried away by it or absorbed by it. What about like trying to full your system. Like let's see, you're really anxious and you're like, oh, that's totally feels like excitement. Oh yeah, I do that when I'm speaking. A wht do that backstage is they'll say, you know, oh, I'm nervous, And I said, well, you don't have to label it nervous.

You can label it excited. You know, I'm anxious to do well or and it is your body when you're backstage, you know, when you want to give a speech. It is your body trying to help you. But again, it's this outdated way that your body's helping you. And literally the hijack that you get when you go to speak deprives you of access to your brain. You know. That's why we get that feeling when you go out and stage and you can't remember anything you were supposed to say.

It's because your body's telling you stop thinking, go hit someone. Oh. I can't stand being when I'm on the stage, and then I start to like listen to myself talk and then I start to panic because I'm like, it's a weird out of body experience. Yeah, it doesn't happen that often, but it's better to be in flow when you're on stage, right it is. I mean, I practice. I tell people, you know, I have been speaking for twenty years now, and you know, practice makes it much easier to be comfortable.

But I still, you know, get worked up if you really care about what you're doing, or if it's a difficult speech. I've had some difficult speeches where I'm in a group and maybe I need to deliver a difficult message. Anyway, I can get very stressed out too, and I'll be backstage and I'll actually be telling my body in my head you know, thank you. I know you're trying to help me by you know, making my heart race and my palm sweat. But it's not helping, you know. Let's

do this differently. You can talk my body up the ledge too. Yeah, it's not helpful. It's not helpful. Okay, cool, So let's let's talk about what's really up up the positive psychologyality reframing your attitude. We know that optimism is such an important trait, scure characteristic, and that it is protective of health, even more than not smoking. I don't know if you do that. Optimism is actually a better predictor wow of health. So how do you change from

pessimism to optimism. Well, you're probably familiar with like ABCD reframe, which we talk about, but reversy well I was going to say we all leave that alone, but reversy is one that I just made up and I've done it with groups for many, many years now, and it's so much fun. It's like a quick and dirty way of doing it. You know. ABCD reframe is great and it works for like if you have a if you're in a real rut. It's a good way to help you

pull yourself out of the rut. But I like to do reverseit you in workshops because it's so quick and easy to explain. Oh wow, tell me so REVERSI. You just ask people to write down a limit or an obstacle that they're facing. We often have an index card and they can write it on a card and then we just say, flip over the card and write the opposite on the other side. So if somebody says I don't have time or money to get a higher degree.

You know, I need a degree to advance in my career, but I don't have the money or time, they flip over the card and they just write, I can get a higher degree. I can get the next degree. There was a woman who was doing this on a radio show. She heard me on a radio show and she emailed me afterwards and she said she wrote down, I'm going to lose my house after the divorce, and she flipped over the card it said I can keep my house.

And what it does is it just tricks your brain for a minute or so to think maybe it's possible. Because we get so stuck on our limits and obstacles. We're so convinced they're real and they're true that the ability to flip the card and and just entertain the idea for a moment that maybe it isn't true, allows different creative thoughts to come into your head. I know you're all about creativity too. Oh yeah, I liked multiple aspects of what you just said. Yeah, that's really cool.

So the woman who said I'm going to lose my house after the divorce, she emailed me after the radio show and she said, I wrote that down. I flipped it over and she said, I started to realize my mother is elderly and she's fine living on her own now, but in a few years she won't be. But what I can do. We we're into my house now with our combined incomes, I can keep the house. So she

thought of a new creative idea. There was a guy too, who was in one of our workshops, and he said, I can't do the innovative things I want to do in my department because I didn't get my budget increase. So he flipped the card and he wrote, I can do innovative things. And what he realized, and it's so

obvious when you say it. What he realized was, if I go through my existing budget, I prioritize and I take out the least important things, the old things, you know, get rid of those, I can reapply the money to the more innovative things. And it's so funny because it sounds so obvious when you say it, but he was so stuck in his thinking he didn't see it until he flipped the card. Wow, that could become like an

expression like flip the script, you know, like flip the card. Yeah, And actually you can do it in a even quicker way than that. There was a doctor that we put through the program and he talked about how he's in urgent care settings. We said, every time he gets a new patient walking into the room, he has a little feeling of adrenaline, like a threat response, and so that's

really exhausting. And so we had him say, you know, when he could feel that happening and new patients coming in, he would just say to himself, this is going to be a great patient. This is going to be a great opportunity to meet somebody. So he would just instead of thinking, oh, no, is this person cann have blood or stitches? You know, he would say, oh, this is going to be great, So he would literally just flip the script in that, you know, thirty seconds if the

person's walking in the door, I really like that. And so this is not this is totally not not about like being diluted or like optimis like unrealistic optimism. So like, how do you define optimism? How do you find that word? Let me just back up a on reversity, because I think this is important. Great, it works, It works by tricking your brain into being more open minded. But it

also works if you're talking to other people. So if you're going around saying your limits and your obstacles, people are just going to agree with you and commiserate and say, oh, me too, you know, my life sucks. But if you are talking from the other side of the card, people can give you new ideas too. So it's it's how

you're showing up. And I think it's often important too that you do talk about what's on the second side of the card with other people, because then you can get new ideas and so, you know, you may be so stuck in your own thinking you're not going to think of it. So it is important to also talk to other people There's one company where they decided to use reversy in their staff meetings every week, and they would have one person put in a limit and everybody

else would say, let's try to help reverse it. It can be fun as a social exercise as well. That sounds just market this. We are you are like a board game or something reverse. Well, there's reversy. What is it? It's a fellow It's like reversing. Yeah, that's cool. So yeah, I do want to ask you then, so you could sceptualize optimism not as just having a sort of wishful thinking, right, but in seeing possibilities. So that's cool. It's kind of

like creativity. You're giving me a little bit of an Amigeal hijack here because I'm talking to somebody who's a professor in positive psychology and you're asking me to define optimism. Like, isn't there like an official definition at u PEN for optimism? Well, no, there's no. What is Marty Seligman's definition? Well, yeah, I mean he certainly views it as having a sort of explanatory style. So you have a certain like when you see something that goes wrong, you don't overgeneralize, you know,

about it? You don't you know, catastrophize about it, and you sort of put in pet active and you sort of and you don't take it too personally as well. So he kind of sees it as like a mindset or like an he he refers to as an explanatory style. And when you talk about that in the book too, is the PPP versus CCC. Yeah, is, as you say, not taking it personal and not saying it's permanent or prevalent, so not over generalizing, but then asking yourself the questions

of what are my choices? You know, what am I committed to in this situation and what is the challenge? So so that is a tool that we give people that is related to Marty Seligment's work on that great and it's it's also something that is based in prior experience as well. You know, it's not just optimism for the future of that it's just completely blind. You know,

I know everything will be all right. It's because you've had successes in the past, so you can you know, realistic optimism and you can pull yourself into a more successful explanatory style. You know. I had to interview Wendy cop the founder of Teacher but that was one of the questions we asked her. We were interviewing her for the book we wrote, How Great Women Lead. And you know, I don't know if you know the whole story about how she found to Teach for America. I don't know

the whole story. Now, what was her senior thesis at Princeton and she came up with this idea for this program, and her teacher told her is totally unrealistic. This is you know, this is a crazy idea. It's not going to work at all. So we were really curious. We said, you know, how do you know when you're being too optimistic?

And then, you know, what Teach for America does is take inexperienced college grads and throw them in the most difficult classrooms in the country and say, hey, try to help these kids catch up with three grade levels, you know. And so we said, you know, could be too optimistic. And what she said is we tell the teachers we put in the classroom to be at the intersection of

optimism and reality. So take your kids and diagnose all their learning disabilities, you know, understand how far they are behind and reading or math, and really know what you have and then sheet a really challenging goal, you know, bring them along to go after it. So I've always liked that explanation too. Is it's not about just how do you define optimism, but are you committed to optimism and reality at the same time. Oh I really like that. Yeah,

it's you know, having positive imagination that's realistic exactly. I really really like that. So let's talk about the body for a second, because you had mentioned a little earlier in this interview the importance of the body mind connection, and you know, we shouldn't forget that when we talk about resiliency. So talk a little about some of the ways that you can kind of maintain high energy physically. As I say this, as I'm drinking water, I know

me too. We look not at a lot of intense nutrition or anything, but we just talk about micro managing your metabolism. So, for example, a lot of people say, drink six to eight glasses of water a day, and that's great, and that's a macro habit and it's good if you do it on average, it's going to work well. But what we find most people do is they have

great water habits until they're under stressed. So I've got a proposal that I have to get out tonight, or a big presentation have to do, and then thinking about drinking water completely goes out the window. And that's at the time when they need it the most. You know, your brain is a higher percentage of water than the rest of your body. So you could be feeling fuzzy and the ideas aren't coming and you know your brain's not performing as well, and you don't even feel thirsty yet.

So it's important to not look at just how much water do you define average? But are you drinking water when you need it the most? So again, this is what micro resilience is about for us, is your hour by hour performance, not just are you doing it on average? Right, So let's get some specific tips. When you talk about the sciens of hydration. I don't know much about that science. It's a lot about you know, people do better on tests when they drink water first, and your brain performs better.

I do pull more poorly when I give talks because then I have the pe doing the middle of the talk, and it's awkward. Gallons of water either. You know, it's funny. I'm a woman of a certain age. I'm fifty two and so, oh, you're young. I think many women will tell you at my age that problem about having to go to the bathroom more often is a big problem. So I do. I have to balance the hydration and it's desire to under the restaurate exactly, but it's good.

Another example like that is exercise too. Is a lot of people, you know, you look at exercises. I do it three times a week or four times a week, and I'm good on average. But if you have a big day, a big important day, you say, oh, I don't have time to exercise today, but I did it yesterday, I did it tomorrow. You know, I'm good. I'm good

on average. But the micro perspective is different, because what you're saying is there's research that shows if you do exercise, just you know, a moderate amount of exercise, you're smarter for hours afterwards. You access memory better, you connect the dots of ideas better, you generate more creative ideas. So if you understand that research, you would say, I have a big day to day, I can't afford not to exercise because I need to be smarter today. I love that. Well,

what do you think about nootropics? You know, supplements to help with that. I don't know what nootropics are. It's kind of like a new field. It's kind of the wild West because they're not FD eight, they're not FDA approved. But there's this like supplement company called QUALITYA where they try to like put lots of neurotransmitter things help the brain think faster and smarter. It's people are experimenting with

these supplements. Well, this is the first time I'm hearing of it, and so I dare not tread where the FEA has not yet tread either, So so you don't have a big supplement routine. Then I take vitamins, and I do think that's important. I take really high quality vitamins because you know, I think a lot of our food is coming from soil that doesn't have the same nutrients that used to have. And I don't think you can just count on getting everything you need from even

a balanced diet. So I do. I do take vitamins. But even that could be controversial, right, I think some people say it's worthless, but I find that it definitely helps. Oh, anything can be controversial. I can make anything controversial. So we talked about the body. The other things we talked about water. The other thing we talk about for micromanaging

your metabolism is your blood sugar level too. And again, you can eat healthy generally, you can be eating a healthy diet, but if you're skipping lunch and you know, letting your blood sugar fall, you're still wasting a lot of energy with just ups and downs. So we're just saying, you know, notice what you're doing hour by hour, not just what you're doing on average. And you know, so healthy snacking, eating low glycemic food, not a lot of sugar that throws you up and down. A lot of

this is if you think about it. So if there's five frameworks you know for your brain not being hijacked so much reframing to the positive micromanaging your metabolism, a lot of it is about looking at what is it that drains you. If you want to be more resilient every day, look at what drains you and where are there unnecessary drains that you don't need to have. So having a roller coaster with your metabolism just takes away

a lot of energy you don't need to lose. Spiraling to the negative too much, you know, it wastes a lot of energy. The hijack we talked about is really an inappropriate, primitive response to modern problems. So if you can reprogram yourself to do that, it's like having an operating system upgrade, right, So a lot of just like not wasting so much energy and then you feel so much better. Have you read the book like what fills up your bucket? No? I haven't. Who wrote it? Tom

Rath has? Oh yeah, he's strength Speners. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Tom Rath and Strength Finders, and he has written about filling up various buckets for optimal vitality and stuff like that. I think it just dovetails very nicely with your own work. Yeah, it does. I think what's unique about what we did is that it cuts across so many different fields. You know,

it's neuroscience, it's positive psychology, it's physiology. And you get a little bit like I'm saying, we're not trying to be nutrition experts, we're not trying to be brain experts, but we give you some handles on things across the board. And so what we found when we put people through the program and that we followed them for a while, they just it's like they move forward in a quantum leap and people say things like you didn't change me, you just made me more me. I just feel more

like me. Sounds good. It is because I think it's your best you, and it makes perfect sense. If you're not being hijacked as much, if you're not hangry all the time, if you're not wasting all this energy, you're more of the best you that you want to be, for sure. So how do people can they still be part of a program or is that over? If you go on my Facebook page, you can sign up for a series of classes that we're doing. You can see what the dates are and things on there and how

to sign up. Is that all online? That's online and it's that Actually, those are just free classes that we're doing during the book tour. You could get the book and those are the main ways we do corporate programs, so we'll take groups of people through the program in corporations as well. Very cool. Sure a bunch of listeners

will be going to your Facebook page after they hear this. Well, let's talk about renewing your spirits because you refer to purpose as a way to renew your spirits, right, yeah, I mean it's we all have observed this phenomenon that when somebody's really purposeful, like they're on fire and they have so much energy, and problems seem smaller, and you know, it's even like when you're in love, it's like, you know, you just don't let things get to you as much.

And so how could you tap into that kind of energy? And the interesting thing is even people that you think have an obvious purpose, like a teacher or a doctor or a nurse, we find that those are people that can get the most burnt out on purpose. Oddly enough, that so what we talk about in the micro renew is how do you tie that into your day? How do you make sure that purpose is present in your day hour by hour in a way that gives you fuel.

Can you elaborate a little bit about like how people can get this that's a purpose if they kind of feeling lost. Well, we find with a lot of people that we worked with in the program is that for most people, you need to do some work to kind of clarify your purpose. And even if you are a nurse, for example, and your purpose seems obvious, you still should clarify your unique purpose. You know, not just well, I'm a nurse. It's life and death. But why did you

go into nursing? You know, what is it that makes you passionate about nursing? So in the book, there are three macro exercises that you can do to help clarify your purpose. So before you can do the microwork of tying it into your day, you kind of need to do the macro work to clarify. So those are things like there's Values Detective, which helps you examine your detect your values of what you really believe in, what you're passionate about. There's goals looking at you know, what are

the most meaningful goals in your life? And then tagline kind of pulls it all together is, you know, can you come up with a motto that kind of summarizes this purpose work that you did. So once you're clearer about your overall purpose, then we can move to the micro exercises of how do you tie it into your day? And it's simple things like it can be a touchstone.

There's a woman Sylvia Burwell Matthew Silvia Matthews Burwell, and she was at the Gates Foundation and again, you know, it seems like a place where there's obvious purpose, But you can get sidetracked into paperwork and rules and governments and egos and all the things they have to deal with while they're trying to make the world a better place. So she hung a picture in their conference room of a ten year old girl from Africa, and she called

it the Boss. So if they're in a discussion about, you know, how do we solve this health problem, you know, this part of the world. Should we solve twenty percent of the problem for eighty percent of the people, or eighty percent of the problem for twenty percent of the people, she would use that picture as a touchstone and say, well, what would the boss think? And it kind of pulls you back to perspective of not just you know, what

do the egos and the governments want? But what could I you know, look this girl in the eye with, you know, with a straight face and say this is what we're going to do. You know? Would you feel good about yourself? So it's a touchstone to bring our whole team back to a sense of purpose. I really like that. Can you tell me more stories? Tell me a story about it. The brick layer. Oh, this is

an old parable that I've heard. It's been reprinted over and over again, but it's you know, there's a man laying bricks and someone was walking by and he says, you know, what are you doing. He says, you know, I'm laying bricks, and he's pretty obvious. And he walks further down the wall and there's another guy laying bricks and he says, what are you doing And he says, well, I'm building a wall, and he goes to the next person. He says, I'm building a cathedral. And then he goes

to the next person. He says, I'm worshiping Gone. So they're all laying bricks, but they're seeing what they're doing really differently. I felt that a lot when I was training for the Olympics and I was waiting tables and you know, some diner in Colorado. But I wasn't just waiting, you know, I wasn't just waiting tables. I was on you know, I was preparing for the Olympics. I was supporting myself while I was training. So it's having a sense of purpose makes it easier to get through the

drudgery that we all have to go through in life. Man. So you okay, you were in the Olympics, were you like one of the like amputees ever to be in the Olympics. Well, no, I was actually competing in the Paralympics, so it was a fair fight. I was racing against other amputees. Gotcha, Okay, gotcha. It's interesting. I competed in the third iteration of World Games, World Winter Games for the Disabled, so it was the third time they had it, so they hadn't even come up with the name Paralympics yet.

Actually when I competed in it, and it was under the auspices of the Olympic International Olympic Committee, so on my medal, I actually do have Olympic rings and it was the early part of that movement for people with disabilities to compete on an international level. You're so badass. That's a great compliment. I'll take that. It's definitely a compliment. Okay, I want to share one more show, please do It harkens back to the takes us back to the beginning.

One of the pieces of research that really set us on this course of action was Jim Lair was looking at tennis players and why certain tennis players always win. You know, like you're watching the Australian Open, which we just had in tennis, and there's so many people playing, but you're only looking at a handful because you know one of them is going to win, because they always win. He was like, why are they such consistent winners? What are they doing differently than the other people. You know,

everybody's got world class skills. And he videoed them and he was watching what they did, and he couldn't see a consistent difference until he started looking at what they did between the points, and what he saw was they had certain behaviors that they would do that would help them rest their arms, get their focus back, go to the you know, even if the last point was bad,

going to the next point positive. And he saw that as you went down the ranks of you know, how they were ranked, they were few and fewer those between the points behaviors. When he got all the way to the bottom ten, there were none of them. And now it's considered normal. They call it the sixteen second cure. They teach it in tennis camps. They've brought it into golf,

they brought it into other sports. So it's sort of like world class athletes have absorbed the idea that you need to recover along the way to be world class, to be better than the best. And it makes sense. You know, if we're playing tennis and you're recovering along the way, by the end of a long match, you are hitting it harder, you are running faster. Your world class skills look better than mine because you're doing that. And so we wanted to bring that insight to the

rest of us. Is you know, I grew up in the drive until you drop mentality that you just push yourself really hard and you know you fall over, You go see how tough I am. So this idea of recovering a little bit along the way is it's a redefinition of high performance. And so it's great when we do it with groups of people to really look at how we change the culture of high performance because driv until you drop isn't even enough anymore. You know, we're

in such a competitive, fast paced world. It's like there's a balance between push and recovery, and push has gotten so speeded up. We have to speed up recovery. So again, that's what we're doing is saying, if you can make the small packages of recovery more intentional, more research base, and more effective, you have a better shot at recovery keeping pace with the pace of life. Oh well, I

couldn't agree more with that. And I think Anders Erickson's work on experts at various fields has shown that definitely the case. With those who are doing deliberate practice, they only do it practice a certain restricted number of hours in the day at high intensity and then they rest the rest of the time. So is I think in the business world we don't always have that luxury either, is to be able to say, well, I'm only going

to work so many hours a day, especially on Wall Street. Yeah, and so so it's all we had one executive say to us going through the materialist, You're not telling me that I can't work sixteen hour days. You're telling me how to do it with more energy. Right. It's maximizing your energy levels because you're recovering along the way instead of waiting till the end. Yes, and you recommend diagramming

your energy levels. Right. Well, that's one exercise that came from a standar for a dschool professor, which is kind of fun. Is he's saying, track, keep a diary for a week or a couple of weeks and look at you know what activities that you do drain energy out of you, and which ones give you energy? You know, you feel like you have more energy actually did them.

And for some of the things that you have to do as a part of your routine that you do over and over again, if it's sucking the energy out of you, can you redesign that activity so that it has more energy. And I think of it as putting things in there that are your values or that bring you joy if you can add to it. So, like I mean a simple example, like one woman I know who does bill paying every month and she sits down and she calls it a bill party and hurt her husband.

They have martinis, they download a new album, and they do their bills and so it's you know, it's coming together. It's having a little fun and making that better. But you can do that with your commute. If you have a horrible commute, you know, how can you add things to your commute that make it a more fulfilling period of time. I love that. Well, I think we're kind of covered all the basis. I mean, how do we put it all together? Well, it's in the book too,

I know, I know I set you up. Yeah, thank you, But it's putting together your daily plan. And what you do is you go through the different frameworks and look at the things that you want to do, because not every tool that's in there you're going to want to use or you're going to think it has a return for you. So you find the things you want to

do and you put it into your daily schedule. A lot of people use the alarms or the reminders that you have in your phone to help you remember to do some of these little things, because that's one of the big challenges too, is they're so easy. It's easy not to do them too. So you can do that, and it's great because if you sow this into your day,

it has tremendous benefits. But it also does build build in the habits over time of doing it, and then when something hits you, you can be reactive as well. So if you're used to using your joy kid or you're used to doing reversing when something bad happens, you can also use it, not just in a proactive way, but in a reactive way. I like that. I like that a lot. Oh, Bonnie, thank you for such a fascinating interview and for being such an inspiring human being

thank you. I wish I know you can be a little cynical about like self help gurus and stuff like that, but for me, it's just my life. Yeah. I mean, but you put a lot of science into this, and you obviously put a lot of thought. I don't yeah, I don't put you in the camp of a lot of the things that I do criticize. So I wish your book all the success in the world. I know it comes out tomorrow and you must be super excited, and I'm honored that you talk to me the night

before the big release. Thank you. We've actually it's funny because we've been working with people on this material with since twenty eleven, and so we've worked with a lot of different companies and a lot of individual people, and even already this year we've done a number of corporate training programs, and so it's really exciting to see it come out and be available to everybody so that everybody can do it using the book. Yeah, that's great how

you've made that so publicly available. So yeah, thanks again and all the best. Thank you, Take care. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barak Kauffman. I hope you found this episode just as thought per booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com