KF #26. Being Resilient Archives - Page 9 of 18 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Kirsty, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Kirsty Bortoft
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to learn your wisdom and it sounds like you’ve got a lot of it. And I understand you’re a monk. What’s the story here?

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah, I know, it always makes people laugh when I say this. I am what’s called an Ishaya Monk of The Bright Path. So, yeah, it was a journey that started 2005 when I started getting really into kind of self-development and wanted to know more about, I guess, how to live my best version of my life, and I went on a bit of a soul-searching journey.

And in 2010, I bumped into a friend, and they’d been on this meditation retreat, and I was like, “You know what, I think I need a bit of Zen in my life.” So, he says, “Well, here’s the link, go and have a look.” So, I did. But, to be honest, I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had an image of meditation being pretty boring because I can’t sit around with my eyes shut, and I’m the kind of person that’s got quite a lot of energy, I like doing things, so I thought, “Oh, I don’t know if it’s going to be for me.”

But, anyway, I went to this weekend and I had this lightbulb moment, and the only way I can describe it is, imagine a jigsaw, and there’s one piece it just can’t find its way home. And on this Saturday morning, the lady shared something and it kind of went ca-chunk, and I just saw this vision of realizing that I’d been spending my whole entire life trying to fix myself on the outside. And I realized at that moment that no wonder I find life stressful and really difficult because there was always another problem.

And so, what they taught me was to shift my attention from the outside and go inside. So, I thought, “Oh, I think I need a bit of this.” So, after doing that weekend cause, I bundled my children into a car, we drove to Spain, and we lived on top of a Spanish mountain, and I studied with some Ishaya monks on the workings of the mind and how the mind-body connection works, and how to go inwards. And after about six years I graduated as a monk myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Six years? No kidding.

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah, that was quite a journey.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you moved to another country and hung out for six years.

Kirsty Bortoft
No, I came back and forth but, yeah, yeah, yeah. Came back and forth but, yeah, on and off for six years. And then in 2015, I graduated as an Ishaya monk, which is hilarious because you can see me, I don’t really look like a monk coming out of that stereotypical…

Pete Mockaitis
You’re wearing an XBOX headset on your collar at the moment which you see on brands for monks.

Kirsty Bortoft
My son’s. Very trendy. Yeah, so it’s cool. So, yeah, one of the things I do now is I teach The Bright Path meditation ascension, which means to rise above the mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about the mind. So, I want to dig into stress and mindset and just learn all of your good stuff. So, let’s think about, in your experience working with professionals, what do you see over and over again are kind of the biggest sources of stress?

Kirsty Bortoft
So, stress, really, is triggered by four different areas and you’ll relate to all of this when I tell you. You’ve got chemical stress, so you get stressed out because you’ve got a hangover.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that will do it.

Kirsty Bortoft
They’ll say that you would relate to that but that’ll do it. And a virus, which is obviously a big topic right now, bacteria, medications, for example, so that’s chemical stress. Everyday source of stress. But you’ve also got emotional stress and everyone knows when we’ve had that stressful day at work with perhaps a colleague, or maybe you’re just not going on quite well with your partner, or there’s been a fallout with a neighbor, so that kind of emotional stress. And then you’ve got that good old physical stress, so that’s when you’re injured or maybe you’ve just had a really long week at work and you haven’t stopped, and physically you’re exhausted.

But then there’s a fourth one, and I think this is the most important path that when I learned this it completely changed my relationships the way I saw stress. And that’s this, that we are the only organism, which I think there’s about something like 8.7 million other organisms on this planet, but we’re the only one that can trigger the stress hormone, which is cortisol, with thought alone.

So, what I mean by that is you could be sat on your sofa at home potentially thinking about, I don’t know, a business meeting, or perhaps you’ve had an argument with somebody yesterday, or maybe you’ve got to go and have a difficult conversation at work tomorrow, and your mind thinks that’s actually happening now. So, your subconscious mind has no ability to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not. So, it just thinks, “Oh, my goodness, little Johnny is having some sort of stress. We need to protect him.” So, it does its job and it triggers off the stress hormone.

Meanwhile, you’re actually sat on your sofa watching an episode of Game of Thrones, something like that, but your mind does not know that it’s not happening now. And I think it’s such an important fact for people to know that actually their thoughts have a lot to do with the mental, emotional, physical state in which we get into.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that resonates and I think, for me, it’s so funny how I can just kind of imagine that, let’s say, I’m going to submit some work to a client somewhere, and then I think that they might critique something. And then I would start thinking about, it’s like, “Well, they do that.” And I want to be like, “Well, look, you can’t change the deadline on me.” It’s like I’m already having a fight that’s not a real fight but with that imaginary person about something, which they probably won’t even bring up. And then I’m worked up truly as though they are ripping into me right now. And so, that happens all the time.

Kirsty Bortoft
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s good to know that, one, the body will just naturally react to that and produce those kinds of things as though I’m really there. I guess, two, immediate thoughts there are, one, if I don’t care to go there and have those thoughts and the emotions that come from those thoughts, how do I develop a sense of mastery of my thoughts so that I can just choose, “Hmm, yeah, I’m not going to think about that right now, and that’s okay”?

Kirsty Bortoft
Well, without having a lobotomy, the best way is… It is mastery. You are right in the terminology that you used there because one of the things I say in my signature program The Freedom Alignment Method is that, number one, awareness precedes all change. So, the first thing that we have to do is we have to become aware that we are actually going off into this addictive thinking actually because even if it is us having like an imaginary argument with our work colleague who’s really annoyed us because he never made us a cup of tea and made everyone else one, even if that’s what we’re doing in our mind, that is still, as I said before, triggering the stress hormone.

And so, the first part of it actually is becoming aware that you’ve gone off into that thinking pattern because, quite often, we go into imaginary states in the future or in the past and it takes us a while to even realize that we’re doing that. But, meanwhile, what happens is your mind and body are completely connected. So, you know this is true because if you’ve ever been really hungry and you’ve like walked into someone’s home who’s baking some fresh bread or you’ve walked into a restaurant and you can smell some beautiful food and you’re starving hungry, you see the food, it’s nowhere near your mouth but your mouth starts to salivate, and that’s purely because your mind and body are connected.

So, in the same sense, what happens is you attach yourself to a thought but then you go off into thinking. So, you start thinking about this work colleague or this deadline that you said, and then what happens is the thoughts are the language of the mind, but the body then kicks in with emotions, and all emotions and all thoughts are in the same vibrational level.

So, I, for example, have never had a client who is utterly peaced out, who is having an anxiety attack. The same way around, I’ve never met anybody who’s thinking really negative thoughts, who feels like they’ve got loads of energy. The mind and body are completely the same at all times. So, if you are feeling stressed, the stress hormone, some of the effects are it makes your heart go faster, it makes you feel quite clammy and sweaty, and it also makes you feel quite exhausted.

And, in the same breath, when you’re feeling elated and you’re feeling excited about life, you feel like you’re energized. Suddenly, you’ve got this like energy from nowhere and anything is possible. And so, that’s purely because your mind and body are completely connected, so one triggers the other. They always are the same.

So, how do you stop that? As soon as you become aware that you are actually starting to downward spiral, so you’ve gone off into that addictive thought, you simply go, “Stop, Kirsty. Stop right now.” Now, depending on where you are, I don’t suggest you say it out loud because people might think you’re going a bit bananas. But wherever you are, in your car driving to work, whether you’re working on your laptop or you’re with people, you can, literally in your head, just tell yourself to stop. And in that moment, you then take your attention and you put it on something different.

So, the chemical reaction of an emotion is 12 seconds. That’s it. So, if you take your attention and put it onto something different, very quickly you start to change the chemical reactions within your body, which then starts to change your thought patterns and vice versa. So, the big part of this is really going, “You know what, I actually have control over where I put my attention but the first part is I need to become aware, and become aware of where I am and put my attention.”

And, recently, because there is so much stress going on in our planet with the virus and then we’ve also got what’s going on in America right now, it’s very easy to get sucked into the TV and all the negativity, and it’s very easy to be caught up in conversations about that, and sometimes you have to ask yourself, “You know, how much of this do I need to put myself in front?” Like, “Okay, I need to know what’s going on in the world. But do I need to be like putting myself around that negativity 24/7 when it’s actually making me feel horrendous?” And the answer to that is no.

No, you have a choice. You have total choice. And I would say to people, you know, that we’ve got no control over what happens in our planet. So, it could start snowing, for example, and we’ve got no control over that. It’s fact. But we have total control over the meaning we give something. So, it might be that you have got a really sort of big event at work you’re about to embark on it, it may be pushing you out of your comfort zone, it may be quite challenging. But instead of getting caught up in the what-ifs and, “This could go wrong, and that could go wrong, and people might judge me. And, oh, my goodness, my career could be over,” instead of doing that, you can just stop and say, “You know, it hasn’t happened yet, and right now I have the ability to give it a different meaning. And the meaning I’m going to give it is, ‘God, this is so exciting, it’s new. Who cares if it doesn’t go 100% right? I’ll learn from it and I’ll still be living at the end of it, hopefully.’”

It’s all about you giving your power back to yourself and saying what meaning you might give in this stuff, and is it actually real. And by choosing the right meaning will change your state and change the way you feel about something.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a lot of great stuff there. Well, 12 seconds is, I think, that’s huge right there and I think that’s about true in terms of I think of talking about you’re taking three deep breaths, for example, it might be 12-ish or a little bit more seconds, and then that is sufficient to move from one place to another. And then choosing the meaning that you’re giving there, that’s cool. Well, thank you.

So, then let’s talk about choosing meanings in a big way when it comes to mindsets kind of across a whole lot of stuff as opposed to one given moment or experience. So, you are an award-winning mindset coach in your bio.

Kirsty Bortoft
I am.

Pete Mockaitis
Which I find exciting because I’ve been listening recently to Kelly McGonigal’s The Upside of Stress, and I hope to have her on the show soon.

Kirsty Bortoft
Oh, exciting.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was so intrigued how there were a number of mindset interventions which don’t take a whole lot of effort but really do kind of yield to, or yield great results whether whatever you’re measuring in terms of like it’s not dropping out of college or whatever years later, and so I thought that was awesome, whenever there’s just a little bit of effort produces a lot of bit of results. Very cool. So, can you lay it on us now, what’s a mindset? And what are some of the most high-leverage things we can do to adjust our mindsets to make good things happen for us?

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah, that’s a brilliant question. So, I think I want to start off first of all to say that our brains, for the last 50,000 years, have not changed very much at all, and our minds, which I think the brain is the house in which the mind works from. The mind has many different functions but one of the functions that it has is the stress response system, which has not evolved at all since the cavemen times.

So, we may have something going wrong with a colleague at work and we may feel stressed about it, but we can’t go into the office and start fighting for our lives when we get annoyed by somebody, or just run. Our fight or flight system, however, still kicks in, and it’s literally kicking in like a false alarm almost. And so, what happens is every time this happens, it releases a stress hormone into the body, into the system.

Now, any organism can deal with short terms of stress. We’ve been made to deal with it. It’s fine. The problem comes when it’s on repeat and it’s happening day in, day out. Now, unfortunately, most people, every single day of their lives, whether they’re aware of it or not, are triggering their stress hormone maybe not just once, twice, three times. And so, this is what happens when the stress hormone gets turned on.

You have two paths of your body that are happening all the time. So, you’ve got your immune system which is fantastic. It’s protecting you from viruses, it’s protecting you from bacteria, it’s doing a great job. And you’ve also got maintenance because your body is continually rejuvenating. I mean, in the last five days, you’ve had brand new taste buds on your tongue, which is phenomenal. So, you’ve got these two aspects at work.

But as soon as you start getting stressed, and you start having acute stress, the first thing that happens is your immune system gets switched off. Now, again, if it was just switched off for a short time, not a problem. But you can see where the problem kind of kicks in when it gets switched off for long term.

So, how do we deal with this? How do we ensure that our immune system, especially now, is firing on all cylinders? So, The Freedom Alignment Method is my signature program that I’ve created over the last 10-15 years and it addresses this exact problem. So, you might want to grab a paper and pen because I am going to literally give you the five most simplest steps that if you implement these, it works.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say it works, let’s get really clear. Now, what is the goal, result, the outcome that we achieve by doing this?

Kirsty Bortoft
So I always imagine cortisol being like little taps in your brain that releases into the body. So, if you imagine what it does, it allows the little taps to be switched back off so that your stress hormones stop releasing into the body and you start to return back into homeostasis.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we stop stress just like that. Okay, intriguing. Let’s proceed.

Kirsty Bortoft
So, the first step is, you probably know this first step because it’s quite commonly known that when we get stressed, we don’t breathe very well. We really go shallow in our breathing so it cuts off oxygen to the brain which makes us feel weird. So, the first most simplest step is let’s get some oxygen into your brain and take three really big breaths. And that is so simple, I know, but, honestly, I can’t tell you that our first little step, how it sets you up for the rest of this process. So, once you’ve done the first part and you’ve got some oxygen in the brain, you start to feel less weird.

Now, step two, I mentioned earlier, awareness precedes all change. So, you, first of all, ask yourself, “What have I been putting my attention on?” So, it might be in your mind or it might be actually something in front of you, okay? So, it could be actually happening or it might be just that you’re thinking about it. So, what have you been putting your attention on?

Once you’ve established what you put your attention on, the next thing is you need to start taking personal responsibility for the next step. Now, what does that mean? You’re probably going, “Well, I do.” Well, it means is that, probably, what you’ve been doing over and over again hasn’t been working so we need to do something different.

Now, I just love what Einstein said, which is like, “The definition of insanity repeating the same behavior and expecting something different.” Oh, my goodness, how many times have we all done that and then got really crossed because we haven’t either felt better or things haven’t turned out right for us, and we do this all the time. And so, this part of the process is going, “I’m prepared to do something completely different and trust that, by doing something different, I will get a different result.” So, this is where the paper and pen comes in.

So, this process is called the feel, deal, and dump process which is what I named it, and it’s for our fundamental part which underpins The Freedom Alignment Method, and it’s the most simplest thing, so listen because you might miss it.

The first part of this is you need to ask yourself what was that thing that I asked you to do in step two, which was, “What are you putting your attention on?” So, I’ll give an example. Let’s say you’re at work and you’ve been putting your attention on a deadline and actually you’re winding yourself up, getting worried, thinking you won’t get it done, then this is going to be the title that you put on your paper. So, you put that at the top of your paper, “Stress or worried about a deadline.” Now, this is the part that is fundamental to this process.

Now, before I share this part, I always say this process is really not difficult, and it isn’t, but it is different. And because it is different, the mind will try and jump in and say, “This is too simple. It’s not going to work.” I’m going to invite you now to ignore that running commentary and just do something different anyway and just see the result.

So, you’ve written down at the top of the paper, you’ve written down that, “I’m worried about a deadline.” Now, this is what you need to do next. You take your paper to pen, pen to paper even, and without thinking, which is quite difficult, which is why I get you to write because when you’re writing, it takes your mind off actually trying to think about something. I want you to just directly go to that title and ask yourself, “How does this, honestly, make me feel?” And I just then want you to start writing and allow your pen to flow like a stream of consciousness.

Now, what might happen is your mind might try and kick it. If it does, just take off your pen off your paper, take a deep breath, go back to it and just keep on writing. This exercise can sometimes take a minute, or 10 minutes, or 20 minutes. It really doesn’t matter but you’ll know when your brain dumped enough because there’ll be nothing left to write.

And what you’re actually doing at this point is you’re actually going straight into your subconscious and you’re releasing any suppressed emotions directly onto the paper, so you’re letting things go and you’re doing something different. So, you keep writing. Sometimes when I do this exercise, I can’t even read my writing. It’s like a mess. It doesn’t matter. The intention is how this process works. So, you keep writing until there’s nothing left to write. And as soon as you have finished, you ask yourself a simple question, “Have I written about my feelings or have I written about what went on?”

Now, if you’ve written about what went on, I want you to stop and go back because it’s really important that you write about the emotion and not the act, the actual thing that’s going on. Once you finish this, you take your piece of paper, you just crumple it up, and you go outside and set it on fire, and give it back to the universe. And what we’re doing there is we’re just doing a cycle, so we’ve taken the emotion out of the body, onto the paper, and then given it back to the universe.

It is so simple that people sometimes get it wrong. And I know that’s ridiculous because I’m saying it like this right now but it’s because the mind, the egoic mind is a control freak, and it likes to keep you in your comfort zone. So, when you do something different, it will have a running commentary, and its commentary is always pessimistic because its job is to look for problems. It’s not the enemy actually. It’s doing its job but your job in this moment is to override that and not listen, and just go back to the emotion.

Now, once you set it on fire, you’ve given it back to the universe, you then need to take your attention, so this is step five, and put it onto something upward spiraling. And to be honest, the best upward spiraling thing that you can ever put your attention on is simply gratitude because gratitude naturally expands your experience upwards. So, just by one thing, it doesn’t matter what it is, and just write down why you are grateful for that thing or you can even say it loud, it’s fine.

But what you’re doing then is you’re now choosing to put your attention on something that’s expansive rather than downward spiraling. And when you do that, it allows you to be more grounded and centered in the present moment and stops you from going back off into that kind of mindless chitter-chatter that’s going to cause the stress and trigger the hormone again. There you go in a nutshell.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we start with the three breaths, we say what’s our attention on, “I’m worried because of a meeting,” or whatever, and then we journal on, “How does that honestly make me feel?” just sort of the emotions, not the thoughts, not the thing, just the feelings. Then you set the page on fire, and then you put your attention on something like gratitude, and that’s your five steps.

Well, let me talk about the fire just for a second. Like, if some people are in office buildings…

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah, you can’t do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you rip it up or is that okay?

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah, that’s okay. Yeah, please don’t be like, “Our fires have gone up.” Yeah, absolutely. If you’re inside, don’t obviously do that or maybe save it to later. Yeah, don’t do it and set the fire alarm off.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s intriguing here is, I think, in step three, that distinction in terms of the feelings. Like, can you give us some examples, like, “How does this make me feel?” Because I think that you can just say, “Sad,” “Angry.” Well, yeah, but I have a feeling there’s going to be a little bit more to it than that.

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah, so let us just take the title that we’re stressed because we’ve got a deadline. So, it might be, this is hypothetical, “I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling scared. I’m feeling like judged, feeling not good enough. I’m feeling hopeless.” I’m just making that up. It’s that simple and it’s literally whatever is there in the moment for the person, they write down. And the power of this exercise is the energetics, really, of what you’re doing, because the person is doing something completely different to what they’ve been doing.

So, mostly, what happens when we experience something that’s uncomfortable is our kneejerk reaction is to push that thing away whatever it might be, even if it’s not actually happening in real life; it’s happening within our mind. Our kneejerk reaction is to push it away. And the reason for that is because we’ve been programmed to move from pain to pleasure at all costs, which is why when we decide to go on a diet and lose weight, unless we have actually dealt with the unconscious programming in our minds, what will happen is we will sabotage ourselves every single time because the desire to move from pain to pleasure will be so great that we’ll then go back in the fridge, eating that piece of chocolate cake, saying, “I’ll start one day.”

Before, when we felt stressed, we’ve suppressed the emotion back down into our subconscious usually by distraction techniques like drinking, maybe spending money we haven’t got on our credit cards potentially, staying up too late, playing video games, all these types of things, our distractions are really from the real feelings that are actually going on in that experience.

And so, what this process does is it takes us from what I call resisting the experience into feeling. And when we do that, we go into a state of allowing. When we go into a state of allowing, that is the only place where healing and letting go can happen. So, when we’re in resistance, it’s not possible because we are literally pushing something and resisting something, and we haven’t got the space for something to move. But when we shift that into a state of allowing, it allows it to go, it allows it go move on and be set free.

And so, this simple, simple exercise, the power in it is because the person, for the first time, is taking out resistance into a state of allowing. And when they do that, they’re allowed to freely let go of the suppressed emotion, the anger, the guilt, the fear, whatever it may be. They’re allowed to honor it, feel it, and let it go.

We’ve been taught, most of us, from childhood that negative emotions are not good. I was told when I was younger, you know, “Come on, Kirsty, please stop. You’ll be fine,” if I was upset about something. And it wasn’t that my parents were being awful. It was that they thought they were doing the right thing, but the truth was that I immediately learned from a very young child that it wasn’t good to show being upset because I felt like I hadn’t done something right or it wasn’t good to feel angry.

And so, what I learned was to push these emotions down. And we’ve all done it. And the reason for that is because the way that the brain has been designed is that between about the age of two and the age of seven is our brainwaves are in this like Theta state, which is the imaginary state.

It’s also the time called the hypnotic stage as well. And the hypnotic stage of the brain is when we download programs. So, we download how to survive, we download how to be in the world, we download how to interact with each other, we download our parents’ belief systems, we download at school what’s right and what’s wrong. And the majority of it is really good stuff, and it teaches us how to be adults. The problem is that there are certain things that are slightly dodgy and don’t serve us.

So, for example, well, the one that money doesn’t grow on trees. And so, what happens, we download these pros and cons, and suddenly, at the age of seven, our brainwaves change, and we go into Beta state which is what you and I are in now. The fundamental shift with that is that now we only can learn through repetition, right? So, what happens is when we have a stressful experience, the brain, being designed to keep you alive, so what it does is it takes that experience, and if it could speak, it would say something like, “Can little Johnny, right now, deal with this stress? No, he can’t,” so it takes that emotion and it would push it into your subconscious mind.

And I always described it a little bit like before like we’ve all got this rucksack on our back, which is invisible, but we carry in our life, and every time we go through something really stressful, we chuck a bit of it into this bag. Now, as I said too early, your mind and body are completely connected, and so this bag is large but it’s not infinite. And so, at some point, it gets so full it starts to overflow. And when it starts to overflow, it offloads from the mind into the body and starts manifesting as stress and anxiety and depression and migraines. And so, all we’re doing when we’re doing this exercise is we’re not just dealing with the actual stress at the moment. We’re actually starting to release some of that out of our bag.

So, when we start feel, deal, and dumping, we’re letting go of some of this unnecessary stuff that we have just dragged through our whole entire life. And so, what I love about this technique, the feel, deal, and the dump, is that it is so simple, and it’s probably likely you’re going to have to do it more than once because you’ve got a lifetime of stuff, but that’s okay. And what I suggest to people is if you are feeling really stressed, you are feeling really anxious, then just keep doing this exercise over and over again, and you will get some relief, I promise you. And if you’re struggling, then reach out. Reach out and have a chat because I’d love to help you.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Thank you. All right. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Kirsty Bortoft
Shall I tell you about my book that’s coming out in two weeks?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing.

Kirsty Bortoft
So, Break Free from Pain, it’s my first book, so I’m really excited. It’s more like a guide to help people with physical, emotional, and mental pain. And it’s a step-by-step handhold process to be able to really support you and ensuring that you can live an empowered life rather than a stressful life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now can you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Kirsty Bortoft
I’m a massive, massive fan of a number of different scientists but especially newer scientists. My favorites are Joe Dispenza, I love him, he’s amazing and his publications on the mind. And, also, I just love Biology of Beliefs, which is another book. I also love David Hawkins, and his work is incredible. And, unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago, but his work, he’s got a fantastic book called Letting Go which I would say is my go-to book. And he’s also done lots and lots of studies on consciousness and the mind, and I just think he’s phenomenal. So, his work and publications, I would recommend over and over again.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Kirsty Bortoft
Meditation, I guess, is the first thing that came into my head. But I would also say that it’s not just meditation. I’m a massive fan of daily rituals. So, every morning, I feel like the first hour or two has got to be about inputting back into the soul. So, for me, I get up and I do meditate, but I also move my body a little bit. I also ensure that I have some good nutrition. And I also make sure that I set a really positive intention for not just the day but just for my life. And I think that that makes a massive impact on how I feel for the rest of the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah. All my clients know what I’m like. And one of the things I would say is I just think that the first couple of hours of your day really set up the rest of your day. So, if you get up and you are consciously inputting positive expansive things into your experience, what happens is I feel like I go out into the day and so, obviously, real life still happens, but I feel like I can deal with it. It doesn’t get to me. It’s, again, about making a conscious decision about the meaning I’m giving things. And how I do that is by these daily rituals. And I guess another thing I throw in there is back to the old gratitude as well because it’s such a superpower, and I think so underused.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kirsty Bortoft
So, come and get in touch definitely at www.Kirsty-Bortoft.com and you can email me at hello@kirsty-bortoft.com. I’m on YouTube which is the Mindset Coach at Kirsty Bortoft, or you can find under the same name on Facebook or Twitter, Kirsty Bortoft. And if you want the spelling of that, I don’t know whether I need to spell that really slowly, or whether it will be somewhere on here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure, it will be on the show notes but B-O-R-T-O-F-T, and Kirsty not Kristy for the…with a K. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kirsty Bortoft
Yeah, I just think that it’s got to come back to that we, as human beings, are so powerful and we give away our powers way too easily, and I think that the action here is tomorrow when you wake up, is just remind yourself that you have the choice of where you put your attention firstly and the meaning you give things. So, don’t give that power away because anything is possible. And, honestly, you sincerely are in control of your destiny when you do that. So, just make sure that you live your best version by putting that first.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kirsty, it’s been fun. I wish you lots of luck in all your adventures.

Kirsty Bortoft
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Rasmus, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Rasmus Hougaard
Pete, thank you very much. It’s my pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued. So, right in your bio, you live in both Copenhagen and New York. Can you tell me how do these nations contrast, well, these two cities? The cities and the nations, the cultures contrast.

Rasmus Hougaard
Yes. Well, I have very fast rowing boat so I’m just going across the Atlantic every Wednesday. No, that’s not true, of course. And just a disclaimer, this was before the whole COVID because like the last – what is it now – two and a half months or so, I’ve been based in Copenhagen. But, yes, I have a house in New York and a house in Copenhagen. But I’m, honest, spending most of my time everywhere else so I travel a lot of the time.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in the US versus Denmark, what would you say are some of the key cultural differences?

Rasmus Hougaard
Anywhere you go in the US, people are smiling and being really happy and like kind, open. Denmark, and with all respect for my own nation, people look at their feet when you meet them for the first time. It’ll take like two years before they say hi to you, so probably that’s one of the bigger differences.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, it’s a good thing that you’re an expert on mindfulness and resilience so that doesn’t get you down and, I guess, you’re just accustomed to it. So, I was reading your recent piece in the Harvard Business Review, and there’s so much good stuff in there, I want to dig into some more details. So, can you tell us the science behind how constant bad news puts our mind in a natural place where we get distracted? Like, what’s that mechanism or link?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, that’s a great question and something that probably most people experience right now. So, when we come under stress, when we basically become anxious, because of like a crisis that we’re experiencing now with both our health and our financial situation under risk or under attack, the fight-flight part of the brain, which is a very old part of the brain, kicks in, and we basically start to look for all the threats, we start to look for all the changes in the environment, and that in itself makes us incredibly distracted. So, that’s why we check the news more often, that’s why we’re bingeing on social media. Yeah, that’s how the brain works.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I love that’s pretty simple and succinct there in terms of, I guess, I before got how, yeah, okay, fight or flight, you get kind of nervous, and there’s cortisol, and you see a threat and you’re amped up. But then, naturally, to scan for threats in modern times means we check the news, check the social media, check the texts, like, “What’s the new thing that’s going to…I have to be aware about and defend myself from?” So, that’s very clear. Thank you.

So, then, your study, you said that recently you saw that 58% of employees reported an inability to regulate their attention at work. Tell us, how did you conduct this research and when did it happen and what’s the story?

Rasmus Hougaard
So, we have around 600 global companies we work with and we do a lot of research on their employees and their leaders. This specific study, we were out and using technology through the phone to basically measure where is their mind at random points during the day. And what people then have to say is, “Oh, I was on task,” “I was off task,” and what we see is just that most of the time, we’re just not on task. As you said, it’s more than half of our time we’re really not paying attention to what we’re doing whether we’re in a meeting, or reading a report, or trying to do an email. We’re not there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, so not to like dig super deep into your details but I’m going to a little bit. So, we say on task, I think sometimes the task at hand is resting, like, “I am deliberately daydreaming, taking a walk around the block, getting a cup of coffee.” How do we account for that?

Rasmus Hougaard
Right. That’s a good question. If, as you said, you’re deliberate about letting your mind wander, then you’re on task.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good.

Rasmus Hougaard
If you’re going for a walk and you are actually present with going for a walk, you’re on task. If you’re going for a walk, wanting to go for a walk, and just rest, and you just can’t help ruminating over the latest, let’s say, plummeting stock market news, then you are off task.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Rasmus Hougaard
Does it make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Very clear. Well, so then that 58%, so the majority of us are off task the majority of the time? Is that fair to say?

Rasmus Hougaard
Unfortunately, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And this has been the case prior to the coronavirus and it’s gotten worser, or do we have a comparative situation?

Rasmus Hougaard
This was prior to the coronavirus and it has certainly gotten worse since then. We don’t have the data yet. We will be getting that in a few weeks but the preliminary studies that we’ve done is staggering, first of all, that people and, specifically, leaders just have such a hard time being focused. And the second thing is that distractions that they have are 89% of them are negative. So, just imagine you’re distracted most of the time, and 89% of your distractions are bringing you to a negative emotional state.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s awful.

Rasmus Hougaard
I mean, we are moving directly to a major, major mental health crisis right now.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so then I’m not going to pin you down on a precise figure, but with these preliminary studies, like kind of ballpark, how much worse are we talking about?

Rasmus Hougaard
I think it’s probably from the 58 that you talked about and probably around 65 to 75.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s percent of people or percent of the time?

Rasmus Hougaard
That’s percent of time for people in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. Wow! All right. Well, so there we go, we’ve framed up the situation. Thank you. Very starkly.

Rasmus Hougaard
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, what do we do about it? What do you recommend? Here we are, what should we do?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, I think there are few things that we need to do. First of all, we need to learn to manage our mind. If we can’t manage our mind, we really can’t manage where it’s spending time. We can’t take a walk when we’re taking a walk, and we can’t be focused in a meeting when we need to be focused in a meeting. So, that’s the first thing. And that is obviously done by mindfulness training because that’s the training of basically rewiring our brain to be present with what we do. So, that is the first and most fundamental step, in general, and especially in a crisis.

Secondly, we need to look, like carefully look at how we’re living our lives. Like, do we need to check the phone when we get up in the morning? Do we need to bring our technology into meeting rooms? Do we need to have all of our notifications turned on at our phone and our computers? So, do everything we can to be able to be more present with what we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, the second piece here, some basic kind of practices, habits, environmental situations, like, “Hey, maybe I’m just going to put the phone elsewhere.” So, then the first part, learning about how to manage the mind via mindfulness practices. I tell you what, Rasmus, I have been up and down in my mindfulness practices. I find it really is genuinely beneficial and I see good things on the day of and the weeks that follow when I’m consistent with it. And it is just amazing how much I don’t want to do it. It is just striking.

Just yesterday I was trying to talk myself into it again, it’s like, “You know, Pete, in a way, that’s one of the benefits, is to get good at doing things you don’t want to do, or starting them is massively valuable.” And this is me trying to talk myself into it. It’s, like, it’s probably one of the safest, lowest energy-demanding ways that you can train at. I don’t need to get tasered repeatedly, “I don’t want to do that,” and I don’t need to do a ton of taxes at work, which I don’t want to do, which drains me.

And so, here I am trying to talk myself into it. So, I’m going to let you do it for me. Can you lay it on us, some of the most just hard-hitting, quantifiable, mind-blowing benefits that professionals who want to be awesome at their job should know about to help them get through their resistance to doing mindfulness practice?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, I think the first one, as you also alluded to, like, knowing what are we getting out of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Rasmus Hougaard
Because having that carrot is helpful. And the quantifiable benefits, I mean, they’re way too many for me to mention them all now, but I’ll just rift off a few. You will have better sleep quality. You will have more happiness. You’ll have better work-life balance. You’ll be more focused. You’ll be more effective. You’ll be more prioritized. And then there’s all kinds of physiological things, like your heart rate will be more healthy. Your skin will be more healthy. Your eyesight will be better. And I could just keep on going. I’m not going to go further down that thing.

The most striking and fascinating thing, I think, is that, what researchers have found, that if we’re doing mindfulness practice 10 minutes a day for eight weeks in a row, they can actually measure that a part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is just behind your forehead, is actually growing thicker, so it is exactly the same as going to the gym and training your muscles. That’s what’s happening in mindfulness training.

And then you might wonder, “Well, what’s the benefit of having a little bit thicker behind your forehead brain?” The big benefit is that that part of the brain is what is controlling or what is managing what we call executive function, meaning our ability to moment-to-moment monitor, “What am I thinking right now? What am I saying and what am I doing?” So, it basically puts us back into control of our life. And that, I think, is the most important benefit coming from the practice. So, that was the first answer, is know the benefits because that motivates a lot of people.

But then there are a few tips on like how to institute the practice because sometimes just knowing the benefits is not going to be enough. So, we can talk a little bit about that if you want to.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, please. Well, yeah, I want to hit the tips and if we could just get a little bit. All right. So, can you give me some particulars about better sleep and more effectiveness? Because what I find compelling about those, I’m just such a numbers dork, it’s just like, “All right, Pete, this is like ROI stuff. It’s like if I gained more minutes, then I invest, then I am just a fool for not putting on those minutes because it’s like getting free resources, like someone dumping a bag of money into my lap.” So, can I hear about the sleep and the effectiveness?

Rasmus Hougaard
Absolutely. So, I can give you a few different numbers here. First of all, I’ll talk about the work that we do ourselves just because that’s what I’m most familiar with and where we do a pretty thorough research. On average, there are people that we work with, and we’ve worked with around 300,000 people so far from different companies. On average, they get a sleep quality that is in their own experience 36% better. That means they fall faster asleep, they wake up fewer times, and they get into deeper sleep. So, that’s pretty significant.

In terms of effectiveness, depending on how you define effectiveness, there are a few factors of that that is the ability to stay focused on task, their ability of prioritizing the right thing, and then there’s the ability of having the awareness of re-prioritizing when you need to. And out of those factors, again, our clients have an average increase of 40% so it’s pretty significant. Then you may think, “Oh, Rasmus is just touting his own horn and all that,” but other studies done by Harvard and Stanford are coming to more or less the same numbers, so this is quite impressive.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, now you’re getting me there. So, when it comes to prioritizing, a 40% increase in your ability to prioritize. Well, I’m a huge believer in the 80/20 Rule and how, indeed, certain things are 16 times as important as others. So, if that can be doing those things 40% more often, well, then that’s just massive. So, okay, thank you. I will be returning to your words frequently when I am resisting. So, yeah, now let’s get into the how-to. If we want to start training the mind, how do we get that going?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, very good. So, a few things that you can do if you want to actually adopt the practice is, first of all, like the hygiene stuff. Make sure you have a place that you do it, make sure you decide for yourself what time of day, and make sure you decide how long time you want to do it. And a few tips that works best for most people is 10 minutes a day in the morning. And the place, whatever place in your house that is most conducive, so most quiet, and there are no perfect places. That’s like the hygiene factors. When you have that, you create a habit of coming back to the same place, and it gets a little bit easier.

Then the second thing is to just puncture the biggest illusion that people have around mindfulness practice, which is the illusion that, “I’m going to practice mindfulness so that my mind will be calm and serene and beautiful, and I will never, ever be distracted or unhappy again.” That is more or less the unconscious idea that many of us have around this practice, and that is such a mistake because the human brain is wired for distraction. It is basically, through evolution, made to look out for movements and changes in environment to save us from that saber-tooth tiger that’s about to attack us. So, that means we are distracted all the time.

If we see that as a failure, because we believe that we should be serene and clear and calm, we’re going to feel so discouraged because we’re going to feel like we’re failures. So, first of all, just letting go of that illusion. It is called mindfulness practice, not mindfulness perfect, because a practice is something we do again and again and again, and then we become a little bit better but we never get the serene mind.

Bring some joy and pleasure into the practice. Many people find it, or think that, “Now, I’m sitting and I have to focus,” and like their eyebrows go together, and their face is frowning a little bit because, “It’s serious business now, I have to focus.” Let go of all of that. I mean, seriously, the rest of the day, people are busy and running around and attention all over, these are the 10 minutes you give yourself every day, so give yourself a break and just enjoy it. Just enjoy sitting with that breathing, how wonderful it is to sit and breathe. So, invite a sense of joy into the practice.

And the last one, really short, it is not a failure to drop off one day. It is only a failure if you don’t do it the second day. So, it’s okay not to do it every day, but if you decide you want to do it like 14 days in a row, if you drop off one day, no problem. Don’t judge yourself. Just remember the next day, get back on the horse again.

Pete Mockaitis
So, after two days we should judge ourselves?

Rasmus Hougaard
Maybe.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I guess, I’m curious, is that the underlying thought for that recommendation about sort of the research on habit acquisition and maintenance or kind of what’s behind the one-day versus two-day guideline?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, that is a whole research called Atomic Habits that is behind that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. All right. Well, so then…and we’ve hit this from a few different angles from a few different people in terms of what are we actually doing there. So, you take 10 minutes in the quiet place in the morning, and you’re acknowledging that your mind is not going to be calm, serene, and beautiful, and you’re focusing on the breath. Like, what are you doing? You’re sitting there thinking about the breath. Kind of what…lay it out for us.

Rasmus Hougaard
Yes. It’s actually quite simple. Having said that, it never feels so simple when we get started on the practice. But, first of all, it’s important to relax. So, relax your body and allow your mind to calm down a little bit, because when we relax the body and we relax the mind a little bit, it’s much easier to stay focused. When we’re tense, which all of us are, then it’s harder. So, spend a few minutes, the first two minutes, just relaxing, especially as you breathe out, just releasing and letting go.

Then start to bring your attention to the breath and let the breath become the anchor or the weight that you’re lifting in this practice. Just like you go in a gym, you take a weight and you lift it up, and you let go, and you lift it up, and you let it go, that’s what you do with the breath. You’re basically holding your attention on the breath as you are breathing in and breathing out, and breathing in and breathing out, and just keep doing that. And then, at some point, you’ll realize, “Hey, now I’m thinking about what to cook for supper tonight.” And that is a success.

I mean, that’s the moment where people feel they failed because, “Oh, no, I got distracted again.” But that moment is actually not where people got distracted because the distraction has been going on for a while. When they become aware, that is the moment that they’re actually mindful again, “Hey, I’m distracted.” So, that’s a moment of celebration. We should be grateful to distractions because they’re basically telling us, “Hey, pal, you are off track. Get back to the breath again.”

So, we’re sitting, focusing on the breath, then we realize we’re distracted, then we’ll just gently guide our attention back to the breath again. That is, in essence, what we’re doing in mindfulness practice. And then you may wonder, “Why should I do this? Yeah, I get it, I get a little bit better sleep and all that stuff.” But the key here is the rest of the day in our lives, our attention is our most scarce resource, so many things are calling for our attention. And by training our focus, we are more able to pay attention to what we need to. And then when in daily life, we’re sitting in a meeting, or doing an email, and we’re getting distracted by notifications, or people talking, or just our own ruminating mind, we have the awareness that we also train in mindfulness that helps us to come back again.

So, this skill of training focus and awareness helps us basically to be more effective at work, to be higher-performing, to spend less time on doing more work. That’s, in essence, what it is.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so well-said. Thank you. I’m digging it. So, then we’ve talked about the mindfulness practice and then the benefits and how that is quite worthwhile, and then what you actually do. I’m curious, are there additional practices, when it comes to building resilience and our ability to cope with these difficult times, beyond sitting and breathing that you’d recommend?

Rasmus Hougaard
There are definitely a few things that are helpful, and some of them are obvious. Just to cover out the basics, sleep is, by far, the most important for our wellbeing, so make sure you get enough sleep, but that’s just…we all know that. Getting a little bit of movement is helpful, and get good food is helpful, but we all know that. One thing that not everybody knows is if we want to have a little happier mind, feel a little bit more present, feel a little bit more balanced, multitasking is the enemy of all of that. So, stopping to multitask, and that’s a whole chapter in itself that we can talk about. But multitasking is the mother to all evil when it comes to performance, wellbeing, connections with others, and you name it.

Pete Mockaitis
Mother of all evil.

Rasmus Hougaard
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That might be all your quote, Rasmus. That might be. Well, so sleep, movement, food. I often hear hydration mentioned in that same sort of a sentence. Do you have any thoughts on water consumption?

Rasmus Hougaard
That’s very important. Of course, that’s very important, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Rasmus Hougaard
That’s a short answer.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess some people say, “You know, I want to drink water when I’m thirsty, and that’s all. Do I have to think about this any more than that?” And some people say, “Absolutely, you do. If you’re thirsty it’s too late.” So, yeah, where do you come out on hydration?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely true. When you’re thirsty then it’s a little bit too late. Most people are probably better at drinking enough than they are at eating the right stuff, especially those of us that are working in offices and working long days have the tendency of, like, after lunch and we have a dip in energy to stuff up with sugar, which brings us to the blood sugar rollercoaster which is very unhelpful for our brain’s ability to function very well. So, at least with the thousands of clients we work with, what we eat is more important than what we drink, unless if people are bingeing on energy drink, which is also not a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And then I’d also love to get your view, if we go right into the heat of battle in terms of, “All right. So, here I am, I’m trying to get some work done, and I think, ‘Huh, I haven’t checked the news yet. I wonder what’s on there.’ I’m prepping for my Rasmus interview. It’s like, ‘Oh, man, this guy is very impressive. Very accomplished. Oh, wait, what’s in the Wall Street Journal? I don’t know yet.” So, there I am, I’m there, I’m tempted, what do I do?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, what do you do? I think, in that moment, it might actually be too late. We need to train ourselves a little bit before we get into battle. That’s how all warriors or experts become good at what they do. It’s not happening overnight. So, again, it comes back to training the executive function in our brain so that we are more in control of what do when we are in the heat of the moment. So, my first answer would be practice mindfulness because that’s going to help.

Then, now comes your situation. You are in that moment and you are tempted to go and check the news. Adopting a mantra of trying to have more space than more clutter is a really helpful one because we all tend to fill clutter into our mind. And then you may ask, “Why is it that we want to clutter our mind?” And let me tell you a story about one of the most fascinating research projects that I have ever come across, and I’m a researcher myself so I know a lot of research.

Pete Mockaitis
You have my attention.

Rasmus Hougaard
So, imagine this, you have a room, in that room there’s a chair, there’s a table, there’s a little machine with a button on it, and then there’s a wire from that button that goes to a wristband that is put around your wrist. Then, researchers put people into that room one by one. They put this wristband around their wrists, and they say, “Now, try to press the button.” And then they basically get an electric shock on their wrists, and they are asked, “Is this painful?” And people are like shouting and screaming, and saying, “Yes, it is very painful.” And they’re asked, “So, how much would you pay to not have that pain again?” And the people that have been through this research, and that’s many hundreds, are saying that, on average, they would give $47 to not have that electric shock again.

Researchers say, “Fine. That’s good. We understand. Now, what we’ll do is we’ll leave you in this room just with yourself. Between 14 and 7 minutes, you’ll be sitting in here. Are you okay with that?” People say, “Yes, I’m okay with that. Sure, why not?” And so, people are sitting in a room where there’s no TV, there’s no phone, there’s nothing they can do, nothing to look at. There are no windows, just left to their own devices, and a button whereby they can give themselves an electric shock that they would pay $47 not to have. What do you think they do? No, what do we think we’d do, because this is us?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ve heard references to this, but the $47 is new to me. I think a, surprisingly, large proportion of us, just to escape boredom or whatever, choose to self-inflict, right? Now, what’s the figure?

Rasmus Hougaard
Yeah, so the figure for women is 46%, so that’s a lot, like almost half of women. For men, it’s 76. And even one of the guys in the experiment, he did it 117 times. So, basically, the pain of being left to our own mind can be so horrible and scary for most of us that we would rather bring electric shock to ourselves than just be in our own mind.

And so, coming back to your example of you’re going to do an interview and then, “Oh, should I just check the news?” Our mind wants to check the news because our mind does not want space, our mind wants clutter, because when we have clutter, we don’t need to think about the bigger existential questions like, “Who am I? And why does life sometimes is so painful?” No, we’d rather drink a beer, or we’d rather have a piece of chocolate, or what’s the news, or do anything that avoids us thinking. So, that’s the answer.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s powerful stuff. Thank you. Rasmus, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Rasmus Hougaard
I would say in the crisis that we’re in right now, and this is just a heartfelt recommendation to people, is to really give themselves time and space, and avoid just cluttering the mind, because we need it more than anything else. We really need space to recalibrate to the new reality and not to get so anxious as most of us are. So, give yourself space and a mindfulness practice is really going to help. So, that would be it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rasmus Hougaard
A favorite quote would be Mark Twain saying, “I have experienced many terrible things in my life. A few of them actually came true.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Rasmus Hougaard
And the point of it is, obviously, that our mind is creating our reality, and we are creating so many catastrophic scenarios in our head that never happen, but we experience them. And, especially in a crisis like now, the crisis is not half as bad as our minds are making it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite book?

Rasmus Hougaard
William James wrote a book that is the big quote in there is “What you attempt in this moment becomes your reality.” So, this idea that our mind is like a torchlight. What we point our attention to is what becomes our reality, and we don’t see everything else. And if that’s really true, which I think it is, that means if we point our attention to the right things, we can actually create our reality by pointing our attention to the right things. We can create a really beautiful world and a really great life if we can manage our attention.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Rasmus Hougaard
I think OneNote. OneNote really helps me to structure everything so I don’t need to have it in my head.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known for, people quote it back to you often?

Rasmus Hougaard
I am known for, I guess, a few things. All of my colleagues have a favorite joke about me. When I started the company about 14 years ago, bringing mindfulness to corporations back then was just so far out. Like, nobody was interested in that. That’s very different nowadays. Back then, so few people actually wanted it that I had to go dumpster diving with my kids to actually have food on the table at home.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Rasmus Hougaard
That’s something my colleagues like to talk about.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Oh, that is commitment.

Rasmus Hougaard
Those were great times.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I had moments of being broke as an entrepreneur in my early days, but that is significantly more dramatic. Wow! Well, I’m glad you stuck with it. Thank you.

Rasmus Hougaard
I think my learning from that was, which I would share with anybody, like, being at the very low point, I mean, in terms of finances, teaches you that you can live on nothing. And when my wife and I and our kids would look back at that time, we were incredibly happy. Life was so simple and it was so beautiful. And while, now, life is very different, we have everything we need and much more than that. I don’t have the same contentment and ease as back then so I wouldn’t be sad to go back to that. I probably wouldn’t want to dumpster dive but just having a little bit more food back then. So, I wouldn’t worry about it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Rasmus Hougaard
Go to our website. I think PotentialProject.com is probably the best place.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Rasmus Hougaard
I mean, given the topic of what we discussed, it should be to take up the challenge of doing two weeks of mindfulness practice. we have developed a free app that people can use. And if you go to PotentialProject.app you can download the app for free. And there, you’ll be basically launched into a full program. Try it for two weeks. The worst thing that can happen is that you’re losing 140 minutes of your life, but, best case, and that’s going to happen for the majority, and we have worked with hundreds of thousands of people so I know. Best case is you will feel more balanced, you’ll feel more joy, you’ll sleep better. There’s so much to gain, so little to lose. So, adopt a daily mindfulness practice.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rasmus, this has been very eye-opening and enjoyable. I wish you all the best in unlocking additional potential for you and your clients and all you encounter.

Rasmus Hougaard
Thank you so much, Pete. And the same to you and to everybody out there.