Why Our Resilience is Killing Us with Dr. Jenny Susser
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts
“We have this weird thinking that if we take too much time to rest, we're missing out, we're lazy, or someone else is getting ahead of us.”
— Jenny Susser
Understanding Energy & Burnout
Energy is more about replenishment than resilience
We need to replenish our energy ongoingly as a system
Waiting until we crash and burn is not an effective way to manage our energy
Energy is more about replenishment than resilience
Burnout happens when we have nothing left due to being resilient for too long
Corporate culture embraces the path to burnout
Physical cheats may keep us upright, but the cost is mental, emotional, and performance-wise; moments of high performance built on adrenaline or cortisol can lead to a slow burn.
The culture of "sleep when you're dead" is changing
We need to embrace taking breaks and creating a culture of wellness and energy recovery to always perform at a high level.
Understanding the Autonomic Nervous System: Sympathetic vs. Parasympathetic
The sympathetic nervous system is related to fight or flight, while the parasympathetic nervous system is related to rest, digest, recover, and replenish.
Athletes and people, in general, are not very good at calming themselves down and finding their energy sweet spot.
Resilience was originally a set of traits that successful survivors of childhood trauma had and that researchers believed could be taught to make people higher functioning and have a better quality of life.
Resilience is not meant to be for small things like answering emails but rather for big events such as trauma, emergencies, and grief.
What people really need is good energy, enough energy so that all their systems are a go.
The sympathetic nervous system has a high energy consumption rate, like running a car at the red line.
Resilience vs. Burnout: Taking Steps to Replenish Your Energy
People often don't realize they have an energy problem because it has been their baseline for a long time.
Signs of an energy problem include feeling exhausted, passing out frequently, lacking creativity, feeling less vibrant, and having negative emotional energy more often.
Lack of energy can make it harder to feel positive emotions such as curiosity, confidence, generosity, and connection with others.
Finding Performance Beyond Happiness: The Power of Resilience
Lack of energy can make people unaware of their energy problem as it becomes their baseline.
Energy is contagious, and leaders' moods may be affected by a lack of energy.
Energy depletion can lead to negative emotions, less creativity, and poor health.
Happiness is not a reliable indicator of performance or life quality.
Performance and functioning levels are better indicators of energy levels.
People often underestimate their energy levels due to societal pressure to "tough it out."
The Importance of Energy Restoration for Consistent High Performance
The spend / restore continuum is a simple but effective way to restore energy
Restoring energy is not a one-to-one process
Ways to restore energy include deep breathing, laughter, and changing chemical cocktail in the body.
Restoring energy moves you to the parasympathetic state and changes chemicals to serotonin or dopamine.
Different people have different ways to replenish energy
The cultural piece is the biggest obstacle to replenishing energy
Putting Energy Back Into The System & Your Way Of Restoring Your Energy
Ways to put energy back in the system include: Active and inactive restoration habits are both important.
The key to restoring energy is to feel relief from stress and spending energy.
Poor energy levels can lead to decreased cognitive functioning, hormone imbalances, illness, injury, and chronic problems.
Optimizing Productivity: The Power of 90-Minute Cycles
The body operates in 90-minute oscillatory cycles, making it ideal to structure activities around this cycle.
Chunking life into 90-minute segments and taking a 10-15 minute recovery break after 75-80 minutes of work is beneficial.
Setting alarms to remind oneself to take recovery breaks every hour can help.
Using these breaks to engage in restorative activities like breathing, meditation, or light exercise can help change the chemical cocktail in the brain and body and improve energy levels.
Schedule your energy for maximum productivity
Setting alarms throughout the day helps remind you to take breaks
It's important to schedule your energy into your time, rather than back-to-back meetings
Look at your calendar the night before and in the morning to plan your energy needs for each point in the day
Consider how much energy you need for each task or meeting, and plan for recovery/restoration accordingly
Aim to replenish the same amount of energy you expend, or slightly less, to avoid burning out by the end of the day
Maximizing Energy: Tips for Optimal Productivity
It's important to have some energy left when you get home from work
When you're exhausted, you tend to fail, and it's harder to take care of yourself
You won't become restored overnight, but if you start to balance things and look for replenishment, it helps
Schedule activities that provide relief and good chemicals, such as taking a walk, listening to music, or being introverted.
Breaking Down The Meeting to Rejuvenate & Training Your Mind and Body for Effective Energy Restoration
Scheduling breaks throughout the day is important for energy replenishment.
Instead of automatically scheduling hour-long meetings, make them 50 minutes or 40 minutes to have extra time for recovery.
Don't open up every hour on your calendar, and leave sometime in between meetings.
It's important to train the mind and body to recover quickly, such as using the walk to the bathroom as a restorative break.
Breathing exercises, such as box breathing, can also help with recovery, but training is necessary.
Thanks for listening!
Apply for a free coaching call with me
Get a Free Gift ⬇️
🆓 The limitless organization short video course
Connect with me
www.instagram.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.facebook.com/mikegoldmancoach/
www.www.linkedin.com/in/mgoldman10/
I invite you to assess your team In all these areas by taking an online 30-question assessment for both you and your team at
-
Mike: Dr. Jenny Susser has been engaged in the art and science of human performance her entire life, beginning with her own athletic journey, a four year all-American swimmer. She served as an assistant at UCLA, swam on two national teams, and competed at the 1988 Olympic trials. She's a clinical psychologist specializing in sport and corporate high performance, and the director of Wellbeing and Performance at the University of Florida's MBA program. She works with people who wanna do better and feel better while doing it.
She focuses on personal energy as the foundation for not only performance, but health and wellbeing. Jenny and I shared a stage in Gainesville not too long ago, the TEDx stage, and I was so impressed with their message that I said, I've gotta get her on the show. So, Jenny welcome.
Dr. Jenny: Mike, thank you. Thanks for having me. And listen, ditto on, so impressed with your TEDx talk. I thought it was beautiful.
Mike: Thank you. Thank you. I'd love to talk about me for the next 40 minutes, but we won't do that maybe. We'll do another one. We'll just talk about me, but tell us a little bit more about kind of your journey from Allstate swimmer and Olympic trials and all that to studying high performance and energy.
[00:01:33] Jenny Swimming At A Young Age
Dr. Jenny: Well, gosh. So I started swimming when I was really young, it was kind of discovered at five and a half and swam for a short period of time and then didn't swim for 10 years. So I swam from like five and a half to seven and a half and didn't swim again until I was 17. So I started swimming seriously right at the 1984 Olympics. So when I swam when I was little, my relay team had an age group national record, I think it was eight under for the medley relay.
And when we got back from the big meet, our coach gave us all these t-shirts that said, look for me in the Olympics in 1984. And you know, I was seven, I was six, you know like I was a kid at the time. Didn't really mean anything to me at that age. And then I quit swimming for, that's a whole other podcast and didn't swim for 10 years, but then I was living in Southern California.
I was going to high school in Irvine and the 1984 Olympics, as you know or may remember we're in Los Angeles. And so they were kind of in my backyard. And having them right there stirred up all this stuff and desire and all those dreams from being a kid. And so I got back into swimming and I ended up doing really well my senior year in high school and then I walked on at UCLA and wound up all-American all four years.
And I know like I make it sound like I had nothing to do with it. I worked really hard and I had great coaches. My high school club coach was fantastic. My coaches at UCLA were amazing. My experience was incredible. I worked really hard. I had amazing, incredible support from my family. And you know so what do they say?
You know you work hard and you get lucky and there's your fortune. So, but not swimming for that 10 year period. I didn't have all that experience and all of those successful events that build that confidence in a competitive athlete. And so I call myself a head case. I was a bit of a head case when I was an athlete at UCLA.
I'm friends with my former head coach, Cindy Gallagher, who retired a couple of years ago, and still to this day, when I talk to her sometimes I'm like, I'm so sorry. I must have been horrible to coach. And she's like, no, you just didn't have enough time. You didn't have as many years as all those people who had been swimming all their lives. And so when I finished swimming and felt like I really could have done a lot better, we started working with a sports psychologist.
When I was at UCLA, I knew I didn't want to coach. And then when I saw Dr. Bill Parham like spinning his magic, I was like okay. I can do that. So I went back and got a PhD in clinical psychology, clinical health psychology. Became licensed as a psychologist in New York State and started working with athletes. And then about 10 years into it, I met Dr. Jim Loehr from the Human Performance Institute and went to work for him.
So that I could be mentored by him and that's how I got into corporate high performance. And he is also the person, him and his program is what introduced me into the concept of energy and the power of energy management. So that's kind of the.
Mike: Beautiful and energy is the reason why I thought your message was so important is that the folks that listen to the show, the clients I work with are the CEOs and the leaders of the company. It's the leadership team and they're just you know it's a rollercoaster ride. And if you are not finding a way to manage your energy and that's why I wanna learn your secrets for me and my clients. If you're not finding a way to manage your energy, you just have no shot. You've got no shot at getting things done, you've got no shot of lasting and having that passion.
So important. And I heard you say, I've got this kind of written down, I wanna read this, you say most of the high performers you work with don't understand energy for performance and are missing some of the most critical elements for high performance. So I wanna break that down. So you say two things there.
One is you know, they're missing some critical elements as a lack of understanding and they're missing elements. So the first thing is when you think of leaders, what is it that they don't understand about energy that they need to?
[00:06:18] Understanding Energy
Dr. Jenny: My whole thing around energy is that it's really not about resilience. It's much more about replenishment. And what we think. So the human body is like stupid resilient. We are resilient to a fall. We can take it and take it and take it and then keep getting up and taking it again. And while that's an amazing trait, it's also, you know a curse of a trait.
So we tend to spend and spend and spend and spend our energy. And we really don't think about that we need to be replenishing what we spend ongoingly like as a system. We kind of wait until we crash and burn, right?
[00:07:05] Burnout
Dr. Jenny: So we get sick, we become injured, something happens, takes us out of the game. We have you know, we become burned out. Burnout is when you've been resilient for far too long and you went from having a tank to an empty tank, to a reserve tank, to emptying your reserve tank, and that my friend is burnout.
And when you've got nothing left, you've got nothing left. And so we all have that tipping point. And what our corporate culture really embraces is this path to burnout quite honestly. So we're all kind of going, going, going, going, going, I'll drink some coffee, I'll drink something else. I'll eat all the cheats, the physical cheats to keep you upright and showing up every day.
But the cost mentally, emotionally and performance-wise, it's a slow burn and you can have moments of high performance that are built on adrenaline or cortisol. But you keep doing it and eventually you will tip, you'll hit your tipping point and you will crash. And I think that's what people don't understand. You know, we have this culture of, you know, sleep when you're dead. I know that's changing for sure over the last decade with all of the research on sleep.
And you know, I remember starting to read about sleep a decade ago and saying this will be the metric in 10 years. And it is. But we really don't embrace taking breaks and creating a foundation and a culture of wellness, well-being, health, energy recovery, such that we're always performing at a high level instead of saving it for those critical key moments.
Mike: So I've always used that word resilience as most people have as a good thing. But you're saying no that's a bad word, resilience. That's hurting us.
[00:09:07] Resilience - Is It Bad?
Dr. Jenny: So as a psychologist, what the corporate world does is it grabs all these psychological concepts and it twists them into something that is monetizable, right? I can sell this resilience, I can sell a program on resilience, right? You know, just like stress and mindset and grit, right?
We hear all these words and then we take them as a one-off and we think this is not a thing, right? If I'm resilient then I got it, then I can handle this. But resilience, you know, it was really funny my last project that I did at Human Performance Institute was to write a program called Resilience.
And I remember working on it and Jim gave me an outline and said here fill in the blanks. And I took it off of his model and I'm doing it and I'm putting it together. And I remember I walk up to my boss and I, who was not Jim at the time and I walk up to him and I hand in the course and I go, this is not gonna work.
And he's like, what are you talking about? This is great. Resilience is great. This is the thing. This is what everybody needs. This is gonna help people at their performance find their ideal performance state. You know, all that. And I said, I kept thinking like there's something missing. So then I started to dig into the science, our autonomic nervous system.
And our stress, like what our sympathetic nervous system does and how much it costs us energetically and our parasympathetic nervous system and started to learn that our parasympathetic nervous system which is driven by the vagus nerve, a lot of people have heard these concepts by now, but most people spend way too much time and sympathetic.
And not nearly enough time in parasympathetic. So their teeter-totter is imbalanced. And so it spends.
Mike: For those that don't know, cause I always get mixed up between the two. Tell us the difference between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic.
[00:11:00] Sympathetic VS Parasympathetic
Dr. Jenny: Okay, great. So our sympathetic nervous system is our fight or flight. So everybody relates to that fight, flight, freeze, faint and reproduce. The other F. That's our sympathetic nervous system. That's the one that we relate to as fight or flight. Our parasympathetic nervous is the balancing arm, and that is rest, digest, recover, replenish.
So when we begin to calm down, that's a function of our parasympathetic nervous system. Working with athletes for 25 years. I've discovered that even at the highest levels, people are very weak at their ability to calm themselves. We're so good at stressing ourselves out and getting amped up and spending, spending, spending energy, but we're not very good at that piece where can you calm yourself down?
Can you find your baseline, your sweet spot for energy, expenditure and recovery that keeps you in a performance state. And so when I looked further into the resilience literature, what I found was that of course it's a psychological concept. And really what it was originally was a set of traits that some researchers identified that existed in survivors of childhood trauma that survived successfully.
And so they looked at the personality, character, mechanical traits that these adults who had childhood trauma contained. And then they compared them the ones who weren't successful as adults who had childhood trauma. And they thought well can we teach them this set of traits and make them higher functioning and have a better quality of life?
And yes we can. And so that's where it came from. Resilience was not meant be this pop psychology you know, resilience yourself out of bed every day to get your butt to work. You know like that's not really what it's for. It's for the big stuff you know? Resilience is for when you have trauma, for when you have emergencies, when you have grief events, when you know big stuff. Big stuff.
It shouldn't be for and I say this in my TED Talk, it shouldn't be for answering your emails. You know, like you shouldn't need resilience. The kind of energy that you need to be resilient to open up your computer or to walk in the door or to have a conversation with your boss or your direct reports or your team or whatever it is. So the thing that we need if you think about resilience as being kind of a special space.
The thing that we really need is we need good energy. We need to have enough energy so that all of our systems are a go. When we're in that sympathetic nervous system, it has a high consumption rate of energy.
It burns a lot of energy. It's like running your car if you have a car you know like a fuel based car at the red line.
Mike: So I wanna get into how we do that. If it's not about resilience, what is it about, you know, what do we need to do to manage that energy? But there's one thing I want to hit first and then we're gonna come back to that, how do you know? you've got an energy problem, right. For the folks listening, well I don't have energy problem. I don't feel tired right now. Like what are the signs of, oh crap, I've got an energy issue.
[00:14:29] How Do You Know You Have An Energy Issue
Dr. Jenny: That is a brilliant, brilliant question and the reason why people don't know they have an energy problem is mostly because they have had an energy problem for so long that now that feels like their base line. Right? I'm not tired but you sit down on the couch or you go to bed at night and you are out you know you go on vacation and instead of going sight scene, you pass out under an umbrella on the beach. People ask you if you wanna things socially and you're like no I'm way too exhausted.
And you're not an introvert. You know, it takes you twice as long to generate something that requires creativity than it used to take and that's not a function. Creativity, time for creativity does not decrease over age. It decreases over energy. You're quicker, you're shorter, you're less healthy.
You feel less vibrant. Your brain functions. You're in negative energy, negative emotional energy more often than you're in that positive stuff. It's harder to feel positive. It's harder to feel curious, confident, generous, connected with people.
Mike: So for those leaders listening, how might their issue with energy impact the team around them?
[00:15:49] Energy Is Contagious
Dr. Jenny: Well energy, first of all is contagious. So if you walk in a room and your leader, your boss, your team leader, your VP, your president, your CEO is upset, pissed off, short with you, not observant, not creative, not listening. We chalk that up to a personality trait.
And sometimes it is but what I wonder is how often is it a function of a lack of energy? Like who wants to feel crappy and no connection with the people that they lead? Nobody I've ever met, and I've worked with leaders for 10 years, nobody wants to feel crappy. Nobody wants to feel bad. Nobody wants to do a bad job. Nobody wants the people around them to think they're doing a bad job.
But when you're in the hole energetically, then all that stuff in the better parts of your brain, those become unavailable because you get so stuck in that survival piece. So you'll know it because you're not as happy and I hesitate to use the word happy because that's another word that corporate culture has like hijacked and monetized.
Mike: Wait a minute, don't tell me we're not allowed to be happy now. I'm just getting over the resilient thing. Don't mess me up that bad.
[00:17:15] "Happiness"
Dr. Jenny: So Mike, you're gonna need resilience. You know, like some of the stories you told in your TEDx talk about your son. Some of those moments were moments where you for sure needed to be resilient to be able to make things happen. And the story you tell so beautifully in your talk is a prime example of the proper use of resilience and displayed your resiliency for sure.
Happiness is awesome. I love happiness but happiness is like an emotion. And emotions are a byproduct of something. It's very hard to go into something and say, I'm gonna be happy today. Especially if you feel tired or you're depleted, or you're grieving you know or you're confused or you're wondering, or you're unsure, or there's some variability going on and questions and all those things.
Happiness is not, I don't consider it a pillar to rest your performance or grade your life upon. I love being happy. I search for happiness all the time in my life and when I can't feel it, I have my go-tos. You know, I live on a farm and I have animals and I can always find happiness with that.
But it's really about, are you performing? can you function at a level that you actually deserve to be functioning at? And most of the people that I work with and I would bet a lot of the people that you work with say no. And they don't really realize it. You know, because our culture is like the fishbowl we swim in is just keep going. You know? Tough it out, suck it up.
Mike: So if resilience isn't the answer, it's about I just need that one more cup of coffee and it's important to note it's not about that because it impacts your own wellbeing but as you said it as a leader, it's gonna impact those folks around you as well.
And that includes your family. Right? I'm not just talking business, the people around you a hundred percent. And it's so easy to say, but I'm doing this for them. I'm having this fourth cup of coffee so I can stay up and get stuff done for them.
But you're actually hurting them so what is the right answer if it's not about resilience? What do we need to think about as we, and I've heard you use the terms like spending energy and recovering energy. Talk about that and how we could use that as a basis for doing a better job of managing our energy.
[00:19:44] Managing Our Energy
Dr. Jenny: Yeah, it's, the problem with it is that it's so simple that people don't believe that it works. It's one of those things, I always do this, I talk about an oscillatory sine wave, right? And it gets a little mesmerizing, right? And you wanna think about spending energy, recovering energy, spending energy, recovering energy, spending energy recovering energy, right? Like you stress yourself out, but then you recover from it. You spend energy, you restore it, you put energy out, and you replenish it.
And the cool thing about this spend restore continuum is what I call it, is that it's not a one-to-one. If you spend energy for an hour. It doesn't take you an hour to restore enough energy to get you back into a high performing state or even just a good performing state. So the way that we restore, replenish, recover our energy is really personal. However, there are some things that just work for just about everybody.
So deep breathing. Laughter, which the thing about the restoration, the replenishment part about our energy is that really you wanna change your chemical cocktail that's going on in your body. So when you're under stress, there's a whole bunch of hormones that the brain and body release and begin to thrive on. Couple of the major ones that we hear about are the adrenaline, the cortisol. Right?
And those have high cost and take a lot out of our system. When you restore, replenish, or recover energy, you move yourself over into that parasympathetic state and you change your chemicals. You change your chemicals into serotonin or dopamine and not the addictive kind of dopamine. When you exercise, there's a couple of different types of cortisol. There's cortisol, that's emergency cortisol, but when you exercise and you push yourself hard, we have good cortisol, right?
So everybody has a different set of ways that they can actually replenish their energy very easily, very powerfully, and very regularly, but we don't tend to it. And the biggest piece to it is the cultural piece. I did a training with a team and they were a warehouse team for a large manufacturing company and they monitored the warehouse. They dealt with theft, they dealt with production. They dealt with all these different things.
[00:22:15] Putting Energy Back Into The System
Dr. Jenny: So it was kind of a cool group, all guys. Like all kind of like big security kind of personalities and we were talking about ways to put energy back in the system and sometimes putting energy back in the system is you know sitting, doing you know a crossword puzzle or playing wordle or listening to music. Or having a conversation with someone or going for a walk or walking your dog or meditating or doing some light stretching or eating something or drinking something, right?
I'm trying to give you like as many as I can in this moment. And this one guy was so funny cause we had the initial session and then I came back a month later to check in and see how they were doing. And he said this great thing he goes, you have given me permission to do my pushups and I was like, yeah I know. I had the same face that you just had like, what do you mean?
And he said, when I feel stressed, I usually drop down and do some pushups. When I need some creativity and I'm trying to think or work a problem out, I'll drop down and do some pushups. When I feel really good and I don't know what to do with all my energy, I'll drop down and do some pushups, and he's like you've given me permission to do that. And I was like that's awesome.
Like how cool is that? That's his jam. Nobody else on the team did that. I've never encountered anyone before or since that used pushups as their main recovery and restoration.
Mike: You think of pushups as spending energy not recovering, but it just goes to show you, I guess how personal it all is.
[00:23:54] Your Way Of Restoring Your Energy
Dr. Jenny: Yeah, exactly. You know for me, for having been an athlete and being an extrovert, for me movement is really one of the most restorative things that I can do ever. And you know there's active restoration habits and then there's inactive and we need a blend of them. You know you sit at your desk and you stare at your computer. You're not very active but you are spending energy.
So it's the same way with restoring your energy. Sometimes you're moving, sometimes you're not. But the key to it. The key to the replenish, restore, recover peace is that you feel relief. You feel relief from the stress. You feel relief from the spend. And if that's going for a hundred mile bike ride then great.
Mike: For me it's a walk like almost right before this, I got back about 30 minutes before I went out and took a four mile walk and that's when I feel kind of revived if I need it. And it's also the time I come up with my best ideas.
Dr. Jenny: Yeah, exactly. There's just a ton of science around what moving the body does for brain function. So I talk about this from you know like an energy perspective but underneath everything that I'm seeing, there are piles and piles and piles of science.
You know, when your energy is bad, your cognitive functioning goes down, your hormone balance decreases, it's which sets you up for illness, injury, and chronic problems. Physiologically and health-wise you know this is not just my good idea.
Yeah, sure it sets you up for excellence in terms of performance, but it also, like we've got incredible health consequences when we don't take care of ourself that way.
Mike: So when we think about this idea of spend, recover, spend, recover. is there a formula, right? Like I'm always trying to simplify things. if you're spending an hour at your computer working really diligently on something for every hour like then go take a 10 minute walk or go meditate for like what? Is there some formula? Some way we ought to think about how much time you're spending and then how much time you're recovering.
[00:26:16] Our Bodies 90 Minute Cycle
Dr. Jenny: Yeah. So, the body goes in 90 minute oscillatory cycles, so we're really designed for like 90 minute segments. So when I learned that, I started designing all of my keynotes, lectures, presentations, conversations, everything around this 90 minute cycle. And if you really can chunk your life 90 minutes and work like 75 or 80 minutes. And then take 10 or 15 minutes to recover, that's incredible.
So I'll also tell people, start with you know 1, 2, 3 minutes every 60 minutes. Set an alarm on your watch or your phone to beep every hour. Remember when we had those old casio watches that had the hourly chat. Right?
When I started at HBI, we had iPhones but we didn't have Apple watches and so I was still wearing my running watch or casio watch, and so I just said it to chime every hour unless I was presenting of course but every time it went off, I would stop and if I had five minutes, I'd do something that was restorative for five minutes.
If I had one minute, I'd breathe. If I had three minutes, I'd meditate. You know, like anything to stop. Recover, provide relief from what you were doing so that you change that chemical cocktail going on in your brain and body so that you feel better. Feeling better is what puts energy back in our tank.
Mike: So what you just made me think about is I have these full day and two day meetings with my clients and every hour and a half or so which at first I'm like ooh, I'm doing the right thing, but I don't think I'm doing the right thing.
Every hour and a half or so I'm like all right, we're gonna take a 10 minute break or a 15 minute break and I even might call we're gonna go take a brain break, but
Dr. Jenny: Yeah, perfect.
Mike: What really winds happening? Well, it's not perfect because what winds up happening is what do people do? Do they really take a brain break?
No. That's when they get on their email. So it sounds like you know, first off maybe I ought to do 80 minutes and then 10 minutes and not 90 to get that full 90 minute chunk. But there's probably some things I should do to make sure they are truly taking a brain break and maybe give a longer break take five minutes and do email.
And then I want you to take 10 minutes and go take a walk. Like something where they're resting their minds and they just no wonder by the end of day two, nobody can think anymore cause they're not really recovering the way they should.
Dr. Jenny: And if they've got got something pressing that they're looking for and they're waiting the next break to be able to check in with that pressing issue, then that's even more costly energetically. So that's a brilliant idea you know. Like we have this weird thinking that if we take too much time to rest, we're missing out, we're lazy, or someone else is getting ahead of us.
I remember the first competitive cyclist I worked with and cyclists have this culture like they train, right? They train and they train really hard and they have this very competitive culture that if they're not in the seat you know if they're not in the saddle, the bike saddle, someone else is.
And so they have this terror around taking days off and having physiological recovery. And that's something that's really hard for us mentally, emotionally, and even physically in the business world is you know if I take a break and I rest, someone else is gonna get ahead.
But if you're not taking breaks and you're working slow and your slow work is not very creative and you don't feel very good about it and it takes you an hour or it takes you three hours to do something that could take you an hour or an hour and a half then where are you really?
Mike: Right. It's not about how long or hard you're working, it's about the results you get and you're not gonna get those results if you're not thinking straight. So diving down getting super pragmatic you know I imagine someone listening to this saying this all conceptually makes sense.
but I'm working my ass off and I'm trying my best. I've got a lot to do. Like for that person. What's their first step? Because the concept is great, and you threw out some very things people could do to recover their energy. But how should we be thinking about this in terms of okay, starting tomorrow, I will start doing this.
What's something very specific someone could do?
[00:30:54] The First Step
Dr. Jenny: Well, they could set a couple of alarms across the day. Like you have to put it in time. You can't rely on your mind to remember to give you a break if you've not been taking breaks, cause it'll be two o'clock and you'll be like oh I was supposed take a break at 10. You know, that happens all the time.
So I'm a huge fan of looking at calendar. Like I look at my calendar the night before and then in the morning and I schedule my energy into my time. I used to do back to back to back meetings. I don't anymore. Right? Even when you know like I have a small clinical practice and then I do executive coaching and then have my job at UF and I arrange, I am in control of my schedule cause you know what? I'm a grownup.
And so I look at my schedule and I think, okay, how heavy duty is my day and what kind of energy do I need for each of those moments? Each of those calendar points in my day. And if you start to look at it by how much energy do you need for that?
Then sometimes that takes a little bit of the wonder and the variability about how much recovery, how much restoration do I need to get? You know, if you think you're putting out 10 ounces of energy, you wanna put back in 10 ounces of energy or you wanna put back in seven or eight across the day so that by the time you get home you can catch up a little bit on some of those ounces that you missed.
[00:32:27] Lack of Restoration = Lack of Health
Dr. Jenny: But also have something left for when you get home, because what is the point in working? If you get home and you have zero left in the tank when you walk in the door, even if you live alone, I have plenty of people that I work with that live alone and when you get home and you live alone and you have no energy, guess what you don't do? You don't eat well. You don't rest well, you don't. You're like the way you take care of yourself. It's so hard to cook for one, you know, dinner for one. It's really challenging. And when people are already exhausted, I find those people fail the most.
Mike: It's a vicious cycle, right, because it keeps getting worse.
Dr. Jenny: Exactly. So you wanna put in during the day. And here's the thing, that energy has a cumulative effect. So you did not become exhausted or burned out overnight. And you will not become recovered or restored overnight. But if you start to mix up some of the balance and look for a little more replenishment here, like I'm gonna make sure I take a walk depending on the weather. I'm gonna make sure I listen to a song that I like. I'm gonna make sure I call someone who makes me feel good. I'm going to go and be super introverted and play wordle or whatever it. And just go into my head and not let anyone talk. I'm gonna wear my headphones so that people will think that I am busy and they'll leave me alone. Whatever it is, like whatever helps you get that relief, those few minutes of relief and those good chemicals, that's what you need to do and you need to schedule it.
[00:34:07] Breaking Down The Meeting to Rejuvenate
Mike: I love that and it seems like such an easy thing to do that I know I'm not doing, especially with you got these calendar apps now like oh, check my calendly, and then I go from having nothing to do in a day to back meetings. It would seem like such an easy thing to do, to say, hey, instead of automatically scheduling the hour long meeting or the 45 minute meeting you know instead of an hour long meeting, make it a 50 minute meeting.
I promise you'll get probably as much done, but now at the very least, you got 10 minutes before your next one and go take a walk or do wordle or whatever or instead of a 45 minute meeting, make it a 40 minute meeting. Like it seems so easy to shave off that time. And that's more time for us to recover throughout the day. I love that.
Dr. Jenny: Yeah. And you know don't open up every hour on your calendar. You know when you post your calendly, don't open up every hour. Do like you know two 50 minutes in a row and then leave a half an hour. People you know people can meet with you at four o'clock. They can meet with you at 4:30 or 3:30, you know what I mean? Like it's really doable. We fall prey to our thinking about how it's supposed to go. And remember, it's cumulative. So the better you get at restoring your energy, the better you get at it and the quicker you can do it, you know like I can recover pretty quickly now.
[00:35:32] The Walk To The Bathroom
Dr. Jenny: I can have something like happen and need a break and need to recover from it and not have a long time and I've trained my mind and body that a walk to the bathroom is restorative. Like when I go to the bathroom, it is all restore. Sometimes I'm counting my steps. Sometimes I'm feeling the way that my foot hits the ground. Sometimes I'm looking for beauty. As I walk, I'm breathing. You know like I restore on the way there and on the way back.
And I use that you know like I always tell people if you're in like a heavy duty business situation, nobody is ever going to keep you from going to the bathroom. Now you can't go every five minutes. But you know, it's like a lifeline, you know, like you need to recover. Something happens that disrupts you and you need to get your bearings back. Nobody's ever gonna keep you from going to the bathroom, but you gotta train that muscle.
You know, I am a big fan of breathing and I love box breathing, which so many people have heard of. But you have to train it. You know, the example I give is we walk all day. But if I said to you, Mike you know you walk four miles every day and you walk around all day, could you walk a marathon tomorrow?
Mike: No.
Dr. Jenny: No. No way. You walk all the time, but you don't train your walk for that type of performance. So you want your breath to be there for you. Train. When you're not under total stress, so do box breathing every hour when you're relaxed or moderately relaxed. And we don't take the time to do it, which is so silly. We're just so silly that way.
Mike: Well, I also think it's looked at almost as a badge of honor to be incredibly busy. Like, oh my God, I got back to back back meetings. You're gonna say that and you almost talk yourself into being busier than you really are sometimes. But I think we've gotta get rid of that badge of honor of oh look at me how busy I am.
Dr. Jenny: Yeah. And that's the culture piece. And you know, Mike, we're lucky we work with the executives, you know, and typically the people who get to determine how some of that culture plays out. And if we can convince them to change their behavior. You know, I say character is what trickles down, very little else does, but character and behavior is what trickles down. You know, do as I say, not as I do is just crap.
Mike: Yeah. If a CEO is is emailing people at 11:00 PM. Then people start thinking that's expected of them too. And that's what cascades down. I love that. So as we kind of wind on down, other than your work with the University of Florida, tell us a little bit about how you work with clients, whether it's individuals or businesses. How do you do your work with clients? What does that look like?
Dr. Jenny: Well, when I decided to take the job at UF, it was because I was looking for something a little more meaningful. Like I kept doing in the corporate world like a lifetime of one night stand stands. You know, so I actually love to engage with people and feel that connection.
And some of the teams, I've been lucky, some of the teams I've worked with over the years, I've had a couple of a handful of great clients that I've worked with on you know over a course of a couple of years, which has been brilliant. And that's the part that I absolutely love. Do I love getting up there and doing keynotes?
[00:39:11] Working With Jenny
Dr. Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. Do I still do some? Absolutely. I enjoy the one-on-one coaching piece and so I have a you know like a handful of slots that I keep. And honestly, like I have a wait list for it. So I feel pretty lucky and blessed. So, I'll work with people one-on-one, which I absolutely love.
And I work a little differently, you know, because number one, I'm a psychologist and number two you know I come from a sport plus corporate background. So I love to engage in that one-on-one process. And then I have my work at UF with the MBA students, which I'm new there, I've only been there for a few months, so just still kind of getting my bearing, figuring things out there.
Mike: Well, it's a a beautiful campus. I know when we did our TEDx, I was in a hotel right across the street and people thought I was nuts cause I walking the campus for one day I walked about 10 miles, just muttering my speech under my breath. So.
Dr. Jenny: I remember you telling us about that.
Mike: I thought that was pretty funny.
Dr. Jenny: I did that one day too when I was at work and I was like I really need to practice my talk. So I took my phone and my phone was off. I took my phone and I held it up here and I pretended like I was talking on the phone and walked and did my talk.
Mike: Exactly I'm not a not a lunatic. I'm talking to somebody else. And this will all be in the show notes, but if someone wants to find out more about you and the work you do, where should they go?
[00:40:35] Where To Find Jenny
Dr. Jenny: drjenny.com. It's super easy.
Mike: Easy.
Dr. Jenny: D r j e n n y.com. Yeah, it's really easy.
Mike: Excellent. Well, hey, this was great. So useful and thanks so much for doing this.
Dr. Jenny: Thanks for having me, Mike. I really enjoyed this. You and I didn't really get too much time to engage cause everything was so busy during our TEDx experience. So I really enjoyed it.
Mike: We were in the green room trying to recover before going out and spending energy. In fact, I'll say one thing, I'll say one thing I remember and then I thought we were gonna end, but this one thing when we were in the green room and you really you're trying to just relax and kind of get ready and there was a conversation that started that was some kind of heavy conversation about, I don't remember if it was political or whatever was.
And I remember you saying, like hey, you know if you're gonna have this conversation, appreciate it you did it over there quietly or did it somewhere else, but now it's like yeah cause that was recovery time and man, while they were doing that wasn't very relaxing. So thank you for doing that.
Dr. Jenny: Yeah, I remember that moment. Yeah, that was definitely, I was nervous to do it, but we really just needed to protect our energy in that moment.
Mike: Absolutely. Excellent. Well, now we're really signing off. Thanks again.
Dr. Jenny: Now we're really signing off. Awesome. Thanks Mike.