040 | From Habits to Health: Expert Tips for Total Wellness

0:00:07 –
Welcome back to another episode of the Vital Strategies podcast. I’m your host, patrick Lonergan. I’m on an extended vacation with my family in Italy, rejuvenating and refreshing. In today’s episode, we’re revisiting some of our favorite guests to uncover their top secrets on how to build a life of health and wellness. We’re going to discuss mastering morning routines and overcoming poor habits to optimizing nutrition and mental health. This episode is packed with actionable insights that you don’t want to miss. Stay tuned as we dive deep into transformative strategies that can help you live healthier life, both physically and mentally.

Let’s get started. Our first guest is Claire Darr. We discuss morning routines and how a key decision and commitment can make all the difference. I think there’s this situation and I can look back at my life as an, an entrepreneur and I’m sure you’ve been there and it’s like we’re in this place of like overwhelm you know you were talking about outsourcing your life to people, right? Like I don’t even have enough time to go like, uh, do the things that I want to do. So how do we like, if we think about this idea of like the pressures of life from when I wake up to when I go to bed, I just feel like it’s on me. How do I create any margin to start creating some of these small little habits that will help get me out of this? I’ll call it cycle that I’m in. That is just burning me out.

0:01:39 –
That’s a really good question.

It starts with acknowledging and seeing and identifying that you have this burning need to make a change, that you’re potentially in a state of burnout. I think so many people are living in this state of accepting overwhelm or depletion or levels of unhappiness as just how it is. It’s kind of what you’re supposed to do and you stay that way until you retire maybe, and then you get to go live a life right and then off then. And so it starts with making a decision that there is something more for you, that you get to have something more, that you deserve to have something more. When you do that and you make that commitment because the commitment has to be there first right, the commitment to allotting the time, because if we don’t think we’re worth the time, then we won’t find it right. If we’re not valuable enough, we’re going to put everyone else ahead of us work, family, whatever situation. So it’s making that commitment to ourself first, and then it really is about finding clarity around the areas that you need to make a change in and asking yourself the hard questions, and that’s not easy sometimes. So it’s looking at your life. I like to see our lives in buckets for areas. And work, by the way, is not one of the buckets, Because work is just work, right. Career is just career, right, it’s not one of our buckets. So, our physical health, our emotional and mental health, our relationships and spirituality whatever that means to you, right. Relationships and spirituality, whatever that means to you, right.

And looking at those four areas and seeing where you’re depleted, where you’re less than where you really could improve. It takes time, right. I don’t know when I work with a client, you don’t know when you work with people, where they’re lacking, right, they need to do that deep dive, I found people find it easy to look at physical. Oh well, I should work out more. I need more sleep, right, that’s an easy one. Relationships are harder. I’m not showing up for my kids, I’m not spending time with my spouse, right.

But being aware of these areas and asking yourself the hard questions, then again coming back to making the commitment to filling these buckets, doing things intentionally every day that will help me, in one of these areas, feel better, show up better and trusting that it will happen, and then carving out the time. We all have time. We have time. Time expands. People don’t like to believe that, but time does expand right. The busiest of people can make time. You can find time in your day.

What people don’t like to do sometimes is make that commitment and carve out the time for themselves. It feels selfish, it feels like it’s a waste, or you’re stuck in an old cycle of but I get up and I immediately, you know, chug coffee and I get in the car because I’ve snoozed five times. And so for me and for a lot of my clients, it starts with a really good morning routine. Not a morning person. I trained myself to become a morning person, Getting up before everyone else and having some practices that you do every day that become as simple as brushing your teeth. You don’t think about it anymore and then you start to layer and layer, and I think the important thing is it’s not an all or nothing. It’s not okay. I have to start going to the gym, I have to spend time with my spouse, I have to do journal, I have to meditate. After you know, you slowly start to implement these things every day so that it becomes second nature to you.

0:05:34 –
Yeah, this is great. Okay, so there’s. There’s so many things I want to. I want to touch on there. So one of the things you, you acknowledged and I think this is so good is we can be aware of a problem, but oftentimes there’s not the willingness or the acceptance that I’m I need to go take action on it. Right, and I think the easiest one to look at is like, uh, my physical health you, you, you mentioned that like, yes, I’ve got some issues with my physical health, but I’m not willing to sort of take the time and energy to make that a priority.

And that leads me to Stephen Covey’s like seven habits of highly effective people and his rocks idea. Right, like, if we put the big rocks in first, the most important things and I’m going to argue that the things that you outlined physical, emotional and mental health, relationships and spirituality, like those are, those are big rocks that need to be attention, attention and work is like so. So Covey says you know, you put the big rocks in first and then the medium sized pebble, and then, if you pour the sand in it, all sort of fits, if you put the sand in first and then the pebbles, and then there’s no room for the big rocks, and it’s like, like you mentioned, in that scenario time expands to to accommodate all of those, those things. Well, and you know there’s, there’s also. Yeah, I like the analogy of when you get on an airplane, you know they tell you to put your air mask on first in case of emergency, before you help someone else, cause it’s like if I’m passed out, I’m useless, I can’t help anybody if I’m incapacitated, and so I think about that in in these things and it’s like, well, I will, I will take care of myself after I do all these other things.

It’s like, no, you have to take care of yourself first, because when you’re showing up with your best self, um, you, you can be more effective in all these other areas and you’re probably so much more efficient with better results. So, um, I just wanted to bring all those pieces into the mix. Uh, cause I, I think it’s it’s so true and like with our clients, we, we talk about, uh, we have an acronym called reach, okay, so the R’s for relationships agree with you there. Uh, ease for experiences, like hobbies, and you know, and and I even put bad experiences in there things I’ve screwed up, I’ve learned so much from, and I wouldn’t give those things up you know so uh.

So that’s, that’s a good one. Uh. A’s for advancement or growth, like just continuing to make progress. C is for contribution. This fits into the spirituality thing. The scriptures tell us it’s better to give than receive. H is for our health, and we think there’s three components to that. Physical health, right, like can’t give me cancer for any amount of money. There’s my emotional, mental health, right. If I’m depressed and I can’t get out of bed, what good is it? And then there’s a spiritual health component as well. So I couldn’t agree more with you on those buckets. We think those all align perfectly with the way we think about these things.

Our next guest is Dr Tom McCoyoy. We talk about the first steps to wellness, how to fuel your body, what a good fitness regimen looks like and the importance of sleep and recovery. I’d love to sort of dig into what do you see? Is the like foundational? We’ll call it level one, if I’m moving towards being well, what does that look like? What? What are like? What are steps one, two and three that most people like should get sort of tuned into before they start moving on to the next, next phases?

0:09:12 –
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question and you know it’s interesting because you know we work with the best athletes in the world to. You know people in their 70s and 80s who you know are in wherever location they are in their journey. We’re all humans. Our needs, you know to quote a CrossFit quote from Glenn Glassman, right, they differ in, you know, degree, not kind, right, and it’s the same thing when we talk with our professional athletes, right, it’s a human first approach.

And when you take that, you know lens through which to view health. It starts with how you fuel your body, right, what your fitness regimen looks like, and then recovery, right, which includes sleep and autonomic nervous system balance. And you know what your sympathetic inputs look like, which is a reflection of all of your allostatic stressors, right, that you experience, you know from friends, family, work. You know your engagement with social media. All of those things go into that bucket, right? How do you find balance with social media? All of those things go into that bucket, right. How do you find balance? And we can spend a lot of time talking about the minutia of this, that and the other. And you know this supplement or that medication and if you’re sleeping four to five hours a night, none of it is going to matter, um, and so you have to start there, with everyone, and you build from those core pillars from there.

0:10:39 –
Yeah, I love that. And I think sleep is probably the uh, it’s the best legal performance enhancing drug on the planet. Right, like, if you want to perform at a high level physically and mentally, you’ve got to get some sleep. And I this is something that I’ve had to learn the hard way. You know, just figuring I could grind, you know, go to bed at midnight, get up at four, 30, just keep it going and it’s like, no, I wear whoop.

I love the data. You know, I’ve had this thing for three or four years. It’s I don’t need it anymore, but I kind of like to know it. So it’s changed my behavior to that to the better. You know, sleep consistency I’m not opposed to people drinking alcohol. I just look at what it does to me and it’s like it just it screws up my recovery. So we’re like all right, you know. So, yeah, I, you know, just to highlight all of those things, I, I think those are all fantastic, but I think the sleep piece is one of those that people you know they’ll, they’ll stay up watching Netflix, whatever. Uh, everybody seems to be sleep deprived and like get dialed into your sleep because it uh, really, really matters.

0:11:43 –
Um, yeah, it’s a. It’s a funny because, um, you know a couple of points there before we move on to me. You’re preaching to the choir, right? You’re somebody who spent the majority of my career sleep deprived and would regularly work 24, 36 hours without stopping, and to my physical and ebook right, with our professional, uh, athletes. And they asked me what I wanted to write about, right, it was the first one, and so it was a no brainer. You know, sleep was the first one.

They’re like, really, I’m like yes, my friend, we start with sleep, so we were a little surprised with that that it wasn’t nutrition or a training protocol, um, but, as you said, the science is very clear, um, and you can look at reaction times, uh, you know perceived level of exertion, uh, recovery, uh, peak performance outputs, um, you know more nuanced findings with coordination and scoring and back. I mean, all of those studies have been done, uh, and there’s a very clear linear relationship there.

0:12:48 –
Yeah, yeah, and I don’t, you know, can’t believe everything you see on social media, but I saw some study, uh, that said you know, the percentage chance of getting injured on poor sleep goes up dramatically and it’s like you know, it’s just across the board. Um, you know, sleep is is so good for you. Business coach David Greer is our next expert and we get real personal with David talking about his own experience in recovery from alcoholism and how important it is to admit when you have a problem. We also discuss the importance of our mental health and finding fulfillment.

0:13:33 –
Here’s the deal If you’re not selfish like you can be selfless and give all to your business or all to your family, but in the end, if you do that like forever, you will crash and burn, right Like. The only way to be there for other people is to first be selfish for yourself and to make sure that you are replenished physically, emotionally, spiritually, um, and mentally Right, right, a hundred percent.

0:14:03 –
Like, if I’m not well, it’s really hard for my business to be well, it’s hard for, you know, my relationships to be well. And let’s just use a business example, right, like if, if all of the cash gets sucked out of the business, right, that’s an unhealthy business. It’s not going to last very long, right. So it’s like, okay, we’ve got to maintain an appropriate level of of financial health in this business and if we don’t take care of it, it’s not going to take care of the rest of us either. And it’s the same, the same way with us, like, uh, we’ve got to take care of ourselves. And I think this leads us to a uh sort of the next part of this discussion. Um, and and I I think you can speak with some authority on this Um, you’ve got some history that you talk about, uh, of how you’ve dealt with that. And I think, as entrepreneurs, we’ve talked about the stress of running a business. It is not easy. Most people actually shouldn’t do it, financially speaking.

It’s better to just go get a W-2 job, right, the success rate is way higher than running a business, and so dealing with all that stress, if we don’t find a good way to take care of ourselves, you know it can manifest itself and you know we can be workaholics, we can be alcoholics, we can have a gambling problem, a sex problem, a whatever problem, right, and it’s like we need to find healthy ways to deal with those things. So do you mind just sharing a little bit of your? Journey and how that plays into this so for your listeners.

0:15:31 –
You know I’m an alcoholic and I’ve been in recovery for some time now. Congratulations, thank you. Yeah, it’s not easy, but for a very, very long time I was in complete denial, and so that’s the first really big challenge is you know? At what point are you willing to admit that you have a problem? You know I was a daily drinker for, you know, at least 20 years, and alcoholism is a progressive disease. So it like got worse and worse over time and had to consume more and more, and there’s even neurological reasons why that happens to us. Time and had to consume more and more, and there’s even neurological reasons why that happens to us. But I was in such deep denial Mondays I would go to the local liquor store for the supply for the next couple of days, and Wednesdays I’d go to the one that’s a little farther away, and Fridays I’d go to a different one because the same person kept selling me that booze. They might think something of me. So there’s a part of my brain that’s like doing this and at the same time, another part of my brain that is in complete you know denial. Yeah, like um and and and this is the weird thing about you know some about.

You know mental health and about you know alcohol use disorder is a mental health problem. It’s officially diagnosed right and it’s not a moral failing. And alcohol is particularly problematic because it’s socially acceptable, acceptable, right, and it’s one of the few things like if you stop eating bananas, no one says to you why did you stop eating bananas? Here, have a banana. Don’t you know how good bananas are for you? You stop drinking. Why did you stop drinking? What Is something wrong with you? You know? Oh, here have a drink Like, like man. You know, which makes it that much harder to stop. Yeah, that coach, kevin Lawrence.

So you know, I went to my first we’ve been talking a bit about Rockefeller Hobbits and Vern Harnish and his stuff, and I went to this event in 2007 to learn about Vern and his stuff and the one-page strategic plan. But at the back of the room were two coaches. I talked to both of them and one of them made me more uncomfortable than I’d been in a number of years and that was Kevin Lawrence, who I’ve mentioned a few times in this conversation, and I had tears in the corner of my eyes and I, you know, after I sold Robel, we did a big adventure. We commissioned a sailboat in the South of France and we took our three kids and we homeschooled them for two years while sailing 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean. But you know, I came back and I did this angel investing and what Kevin pointed out to me was how completely unfulfilled I was. You know, I had joined this young software startup and, you know, by 25, I was already in trade flow shores, trade floor, the floor of trade shows, like giving demos the majority of the demos and selling software, and like doing all these things that you know I learned how to do and to try and coach someone. You know it was taking a year to bring them up the ladder. So, anyways, kevin gave me his card. It was by my phone for probably three weeks and every time I thought of calling him, the phone weighed’t know at least 10 000 pounds. Yeah, and very, very thankfully, kevin called me and that started our coaching arrangement and we worked together for a total of nine years.

But we worked together for 18 months before I finally got to a point where, on the night of January 26, 2009, I drank my last beer and I’d kind of planned it all because I’m a planner and I sent an email. My mode with Kevin was I would always send an email message the day before saying what the topic for our coaching call the next day would be. And I said the topic of our call is my drinking call the next day would be. And I said the topic of our call is my drinking. And, um, um, that was the first admission of defeat. And the thing was, I’d built such a strong trust relationship with Kevin I knew the jig was up, cause he would never let me off the hook Like.

And the next day, um, we had a coaching call and Kevin coached me, toed me to give a try to 12-step recovery, and I agreed to go to a meeting before the end of the week. And it was a Tuesday, january 27th 2009. And, being the overachiever that I am, I looked that afternoon. I knew I was going to a networking event downtown, a technology networking event presentation. I knew it’d be finished by eight.

So I went online and I looked and lo and behold, there was a 12-step meeting. That would be a quarter of a block off the road I would be driving down on the way home. It started get this at 8.30. Perfect. So I went and that was my first meeting and I kept going back and a month or so later I made that what’s called a home group, which is the group you commit to going to every week, and a couple of weeks ago I wasn’t able to take my cake celebrating. We take a cake which is in our neck of the woods in our 12-step recovery to celebrate, and I was away when my actual anniversary date was. So just a couple of weeks ago I took my 15-year cake celebrating 15 years of continuous sobriety, and that home group has been my home group. Kick, celebrating 15 years of continuous sobriety, and that home group has been my home group the entire 15 years.

0:21:20 –
Finally, we finish with Amanda Acy. We talk about our self-assessments for mental health, coping in healthy and unhealthy ways, how we can lean on numbing behaviors and finding a trusted confident to help us see things that we maybe can’t see ourselves. How do we assess we’re not on the right path before we get to this point where, like my body, physically or emotionally, just shuts itself down Like what is there? What is the best way to do that?

0:21:50 –
Yeah, that’s a really good question, right, because you’re exactly right to your point when it comes to going to the doctor, right, or assessing our physical health, okay, we can climb a set of stairs, we can step on a scale, we can, you know, go to the doctor, and those are pretty concrete of determining where we’re at with our physical wellness, right, and you know, obviously, outside of those things that we can’t see and you know, we’ll put that aside, right, but physical health is a lot easier to to assess because we kind of have external tools to do that, right, and it’s very actionable. Mental health is a little trickier, because we don’t know what we don’t know and so a person might not be aware that they are on a path to self-destruction until they’re in crisis. And, as a mental health professional, right, and also someone who has a specialization in working with addiction, that happens incredibly frequently right when they don’t know something’s wrong until it explodes.

0:23:14 –
Yeah, and I was going to. I should have mentioned, you know, we could have the, you know the panic attack we can. Also, you know, drinking sex, gambling, spending, like some of these other behaviors can show up in a really unhealthy way as well. You know, and it’s like, um, which sort of is the addictive piece of it? Right, like I can fall into addiction and like be coping with my unaddressed mental health in you know, unhealthy ways.

0:23:44 –
Yeah, absolutely, and so that’s that’s exactly the right way to go. The right place to take this conversation is so mental health assessment, especially when we don’t know right, pay attention to behaviors. Do a behavioral assessment of yourself. Right, what do I do when I wake up in the morning? What am I thinking about when I wake up in the morning? Right, what am I doing during the work day? What makes me uncomfortable? What do I do when I get home? What do I? What am I doing on the weekend? What behaviors are showing up? Right?

And so the answer to that is you know, I wake up in the morning and immediately my brain is flooded with the to do’s of today and I don’t feel well because I’m just overwhelmed with all of that that’s going on. I get up, I get dressed, I skip breakfast, I grab a coffee, I go to work, and all day at work I feel irritated because people don’t leave me alone there. You know, I’m just working, working, working, working, and I go home at the end of the day and I’m so exhausted I just fall down on the couch, I scroll on my phone, I turn on the TV and I go to sleep. And so, looking at that behavior. And so, looking at that behavior, my question is going to be okay.

First, there’s obviously some anxiety happening there, right? Because if you wake up in the morning and you’re immediately flooded with mental stress and overwhelm and you can’t slowly calibrate yourself to the day, then, okay, there’s something there that needs addressing, right, and you don’t have to be a mental health professional to recognize that piece of it, right? If I wake up in the morning and I’m dreading the day, or I go to bed on Sunday night and I feel sick to my stomach because I have to get up and go to work on Monday morning, there’s something going on there, right. If I’m not engaging with other people, if I’m constantly staring at my phone when I get home, right. I like to refer to, like those behaviors that you kind of listed off, right, the you know, shopping, gambling, even drinking, substance use, scrolling for hours on your phone those are all numbing behaviors, right, we’re we’re numbing, we’re stuck in this state of fight flight freeze that we just can’t deal.

And so we’re going to numb because we don’t know what to do. What else to do?

0:26:26 –
That’s good. And one thing I was thinking about too that might be a worthwhile exercise is if you’re feeling like, hey, you know I’m not doing that. Well, I think talking to somebody that I’m just thinking of like a friend, a spouse, something along those lines like, hey, are you noticing any behavior that just seems unhealthy? And because a friend of mine was we were together in a group he’s dealing with some really challenging stuff and it’s like the way he’s handling it, dealing with it, is unhealthy. And it’s like, hey, we should maybe look at how we’re doing this and sort of take a step back and maybe find some different avenues to to process through things.

And I think the challenging part is, like, as busy professionals I don’t have. I don’t have the time or the energy to go work on this. I’m in the middle of the fire. I got to keep fighting the fire. I can’t step out of it for a second. And the problem is the fire just seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, and until we like it either forces us out or we make time to like get out of it. So, yeah, it’s, it’s interesting how loved ones can have a, you know, shed some light on, uh, maybe our, our poor behaviors that we’re not quite recognizing.

0:27:39 –
So, yeah, that’s that’s a very common thing to have other people see things that we can’t see Right, especially loved ones, people that were around. You know we have a partner or you know a close friend Right, someone that we trust Right, because that’s that type of conversation that you’re describing requires a level of trust and vulnerability, and so if you have that person in your life yes, absolutely you know you have somebody that you trust that is going to be honest and kind, but honest right Then that’s another good thing to include in a self-assessment. It’s like you know, I’ve been feeling like things are off. I don’t like the way that I feel. I don’t like the way that I’m operating. What do you notice? We do notice.

0:28:29 –
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Vital Strategies Podcast. I hope you found our guest insights as valuable as I did. Remember, small steps and simple habits can lead to big changes in your health and wellness. I want to remind you to rate and review the Vital Strategies Podcast on your favorite platform. Your feedback helps us towards our goal of saving our clients and listeners over $1 billion in taxes. Those dollars are better used in your hands versus the government bureaucracy. Thank you for listening and for being a vital entrepreneur. You’re vital because you’re the backbone of our economy, creating opportunities for your employees and driving growth. You’re vital to your family, fostering abundance not only financially, but in all aspects of life that matter most. Finally, you’re vital to me because you strive to build wealth, make an impact through your business and live a great life.