Podcast 538: The Burnout Epidemic: Reclaiming Your Energy & Joy

(Intro)

MICHELLE: It's totally doable. But the problem is is we're so fast on that hamster wheel. So, doing the saw thing, right, that we don't stop and take a step back and go, "Wait a minute.”

MARTIN: Hi everyone, Martin Pytela here for Life Enthusiast podcast. You find me at life-enthusiast.com. And with me today is Michelle Dickinson, a woman who you should listen to because she's been there, done that, wrote the talk, presented the talk, and she is helping people find their strengths, keep their resilience, and avoid burnout. And we're gonna unpack that all today. Welcome, Michelle.

MICHELLE: Ah, thank you so much for having me, Martin. I'm thrilled to be here.

MARTIN: Yeah, it's really a delight. First of all, not everybody gets to do a TED talk, right?

MICHELLE: Yeah. No, you're right.

MARTIN: Yeah, that's a big deal. I mean, what did you get? 18 minutes or something like that?

MICHELLE: I think my talk was 11 minutes. 11 or 12 minutes.

MARTIN: And you probably spent what, 11 days writing it?

MICHELLE: Months. It was like three months. Easy.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: It's amazing how difficult it is to write something that's so compact, right?

MICHELLE: Yes. Exactly. You want to just pick every word just right so you land the plane.

MARTIN: Yeah. And then you had to learn the whole thing three times.

MICHELLE: Well, I had to learn it, and then I had to know it. Right. There's no notes on the TED stage, and then you deliver it, and then you, yeah.

MARTIN: And so that thing presented a major stressor in your life, didn't it?

MICHELLE: It was an opportunity for me to tell the story which was incredibly cathartic.

MARTIN: Let's try and share that. Right. Whatever you want to share, who you're talking to, you're talking to mostly women, a lot like you, in so many ways. We are dealing with the sandwich generation who have children who need help, who have parents who need help, who themselves are just up to here in life.

MICHELLE: Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. It's so common. Do you want to hear about the TED talk? What do you want to hear about?

MARTIN: I want to hear about everything. This is your show now. You are here to shine. I am here just to facilitate, to allow people to meet Michelle and learn the most, and find out just what or why they want to go to your website and do more with you. So, let's just tell it. It's the resilienceasalifestyle.com. We'll repeat it, but it's resilienceasalifestyle.com. And let's run with it.

MICHELLE: Yeah. So, for me, I was like a lot of people, working a corporate job, very intense hours, long hours. And a colleague of mine found out that I had grown up with a mother who was bipolar, and she nominated me to give a TED talk. And through the nomination process, I was selected, and I was in my company, so I was able to go on the stage and tell the story of my mom in an effort to create more of a compassionate narrative around mental illness, right? So, telling your story helps people see a little bit of their story, so I told the TED talk, and then I went on to write a memoir, and I, in both the memoir and the TED talk, I do talk about what it's like to love someone with a mental illness and how hard it can be, the roller coaster that is bipolar disorder.

MARTIN: Yeah, indeed. I come to it from understanding it and helping people solve it, and I work on the outside of the mainstream media, mainstream narrative, mainstream pharmaceutical controlled system, and I have ways of helping people to get stuff done. And I frustrate at seeing people who don't have access to it because the outcomes are so much less hopeful or less positive. Right?

MICHELLE: I gave the talk, wrote the memoir, released the book, and became an advocate wanting to create more open conversation in the world. But something always bothered me. I always said to myself, people are hitting burnout, people are hitting depression. And a lot of this, I believe, even through my own experience, there are things we can be doing every single day. So I wondered why we are not talking more about prevention instead of only fixing out the back end? So that's when ‘Resilience as a Lifestyle was born’ and I said, I'm going to help people get ahead of this, take better care of themselves so they're not up against hitting a wall of burnout.

MARTIN: We're told so many times without possibly letting it sink in that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And when we're twenty-something, we are bulletproof and immortal. And we don't realize that, oh my god, if only looking back, if only I had known. And I remember my father telling me, "If only I knew a way to share with you what I know now, but I don't think it's possible."

Anyway, You're probably going to run with it in your way.

MICHELLE: No, no, it's true. For me, I hit rock bottom when I lost my job in one week, and in the same week, my divorce was finalized. So, for the first time, I had to deal with these two major life events in one week. And never having experienced any type of a mental health challenge, just always being the observer of my mom, I had to figure that out.

I was very fortunate. I had a very conservative doctor who was, "I'm not going to give you medication. I really want you to find some healthy vices to help you through this life event.” Right?

I leaned into my health. I leaned into fitness. I leaned into connection with people that I love. And then down the self-discovery journey and did a lot of self-awareness programs. And so what I learned through that was there are things that I need to do for myself every day to keep myself above the line. Those things I teach.

MARTIN: You said something really important, which was to me anyway, which was that when life hits you hard, it's not that you're sick. You just have been dealt a really big pile of stuff to go through.

MICHELLE: Yeah. For sure.

MARTIN: And so it's not a mental illness. It's the circumstance, and you're having to process, right? We are not able to just say, "Oh, yeah. That happened." Yeah. No, it's a process.

MICHELLE: It is. So when we set out to create resilience as a lifestyle, I thought to myself, what are the very practices that are staples in my life to keep myself healthy, and could I share those with people? Could I help them look at adversity and stress differently? Because that's how I now look at it, because it's inevitable. We're always going to have stress and adversity from all aspects of our lives. So, how do we handle that? The first thing is our perception of it, right?

Does life happen to you? Does life happen for you? If you look at it as life happens to me, you have already put yourself behind the eight ball.

MARTIN: Yeah. I remember in 1991, or so I heard Tony Robbins say “it's not what happens, it's what you do with it.”

And there's a difference between reaction and a response, and figure out whether you can indeed put in a gap between what's coming at you and how you're going to interpret it and deal with it. It's the interpretation. It's the internal language. Is this the end of the world as I've known it? Or is this just well, this is bloody inconvenient. 

MICHELLE: But what is it here to teach me?

MARTIN: Right. That too, right? Why is this happening to me here now? Yeah.

MICHELLE: And if we look at those challenging times in our lives, they're calling us to reveal to ourselves our own capacity to handle it.

MARTIN: Yeah. So, people will have stuff come up. But let's dive into the tools that you have come up with. How do you help people?

MICHELLE: So, what I love about our work is it's a non-clinical conversation. We are not looking at people's past traumas or experiences. We're looking at today, what they do and how they think. Very important, right? We are what we repeatedly do and we are what we repeatedly think.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHELLE: So, you are constantly, "Oh, of course this is happening to me. Of course, again, it's going to happen to me." If you have that outlook on life, that's how you're going to handle any type of stress or adversity that shows up. You have to start to look at how you look at adversity.

The other thing is you have to look at what you do for yourself and what you're not doing for yourself. The average person isn't nourishing themselves the way they should with the right foods, the right amount of sleep, the hydration, all the basics. They're not doing those things. They're waiting until they're completely depleted and then trying to grab onto a lifeline. I am here to remind them, you are what you repeatedly do. You have to put the oxygen mask on yourself. You have to do those things. Even if you don't have time because the impact of not doing them is you don't show up. You don't show up for the very people who love you who you love, and that doesn't work.

MARTIN: Yeah, that too. Well, thoughts become actions. Actions become habits. Habits become character. It stacks, right? You're saying exactly what we learn when we really learn. And of course, the lesson I remember Oprah Winfrey long long ago said, well, the universe will come to you with a nudge, with a hint, with a bump, with a kick, with a hit.

And then you hit the wall, and then the wall will come down all over you.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: And ensure that the universe is trying to give you a message, at which point are you willing to receive it, right? This is what I heard you say in other ways, where we need to learn something, and it keeps on happening to us because we still have not learned the lesson.

MICHELLE: Right. Right.

MARTIN: The personal growth when we have learned the lesson, we have sublimated and subsumed and risen above, and we no longer see it happening again. No, no, no. It's just happening.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: And I'm surfing above it once I know that it's happening as opposed to it's happening to me again.

MICHELLE: It's interesting because I have teachers that come to me on the brink burnout and they're oftentimes saying to me, "next year when I get a co-teacher, next year when I get a teacher's aid, or next year when I'm in that school and I have reduced amounts of students to teach.” They're constantly waiting for their external circumstances to be different than they are.

MARTIN: And they're asking the universe to give them a resource that the universe is probably going to refuse to give them.

MICHELLE: Well, yeah, it’s that, it's also,

MARTIN: Because the budgets and whatnot.

MICHELLE: Right. Of course. But then they have no agency. Then they're at the effects of their life waiting in a perpetual holding pattern. And so what we do with this work is we're reminding people just where they have agency because they have a say in how they operate their lives and how they view those external circumstances. And that's really important because a lot of people, especially in education, are leaving because they're exhausted.

MARTIN: Well, is the job worth it? I have recently seen a presentation from China where they have, I think I’m not remembering the words, Lao Ban or something like that. Anyway, the translation was “let it rot,” meaning people decide, “I don't care. I'm not going to take it personally.” And they quit while standing. And I'm thinking, that's a horrible way for it to happen. But there are people who just simply quit whilst remaining on the job.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: They just stop caring, stop participating.

MICHELLE: But then what's the quality of your life if you're going to a job that you're no longer engaged with. So many teachers do this work because they genuinely believe in it, and they want to make a difference in the world, and they want to spark that education and that learning in a young mind.

MARTIN: Yeah. How could you not care about these children?

MICHELLE: Right. So when you get these barriers out of the way of the chronic complaining, when they say, "I want them to change this, they're not going to change that." When you can get them to realize, guys, you have to take care of you just so that you can see clearly and you can get back to that place. Most people don't believe it's possible, but if you reclaim some balance in your life, you're going to fall back in love with your work. And that's what we see time and time again in our data is teachers on the brink of burnout and quitting who come to me, then at the end of our short six to eight-session series, they are re-engaged in their work because they're making the time to nourish themselves.

MARTIN: Yeah. Completely reframing their relationship with the job.

MICHELLE: Absolutely.

MARTIN: Yeah. This is the important part. This is where the coach, you, comes with tools.

Yeah. I keep telling people, having a coach is so important. It's like trying to walk through a dark terrain, and the coach shows up with a flashlight, and will light the path for you. Because it will make it possible for you to navigate this terrain that otherwise is impossible to navigate.

MICHELLE: We also live in this hustle culture where burning out is glorified. How many hours you're putting in, how much you're pumping out. We celebrate people that give all of themselves. And the first thing we do when we sit down with someone is we get them to take a step back and look at their life. Take inventory. And most people don't do that. They're not looking at what they're doing for themselves every day. They're not looking at how they look at things. They're not looking at how many hours they're working a week or how many hours they're sleeping. We get them to take inventory and really take a hard look at what the trajectory looks like if you change nothing. If you look at yourself a year from now and you keep doing this hamster wheel, what do you think is going to unfold for you?

MARTIN: Right.

MICHELLE: So, we get them to really take inventory and look at their life and say, "Hold on, time out. I think I really need to be thinking about doing different things and taking better care of me."

MARTIN: Yeah. So, you find some ways to find the time wasted or the energy wasted or whatever it is that they need to find?

MICHELLE: It's micro-habits. It's micro-changes. We're not asking them to create a three-hour routine for themselves. We're asking them to grab 15 minutes for a walk, to get up 15 minutes early, sit in silence, have a cup of tea, think of your day, fill your head with good stuff. Just doing little things builds that momentum that can completely shift their day-to-day experience. And with one good day, you can have one good week, and one good week leads to one good month. So we're giving them the hacks.

MARTIN: Reminds me of Stephen Covey and his “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.” And the habit number seven, sharpen the saw. Where he's giving the example and he says, you come upon a guy and he's sawing a log and he's sewing with a dull saw and you're telling him, "Listen, take the saw out, sharpen the saw." And the response is, "I know! I'm busy. I'm having to saw this log. I have to finish sawing the log." And it's the whole picture of doing the wrong thing but insisting on doing it instead of taking the break to get the right tool. Put yourself in a better space.

MICHELLE: So true.

MARTIN: You just said it so well. Anyway, this is a well-documented thing. The habit number seven.

MICHELLE: Yes, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. How do we keep going? You ask like an Olympian, if an Olympian does a race, do they turn around and do another race? Or do they take that time to rest, recover, and restore so they come back to the next race even more alive and ready to go?

MARTIN: Yeah. You have to time it. You have to be ready. You have to be able to perform. If you show up tired. It's just like you're saying it, race to race to race. You cannot do that.

MICHELLE: You can't.

MARTIN: Yeah.

MICHELLE: And the way I kind of get in people's faces, I say, "What do you think the impact is on the very people you love? Is it fair? Are they getting a watered-down version of you? Is your husband or wife getting the best version of you? Are they getting that depleted human being? They didn't sign up for that."

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, okay. Right. Back to Mr. Covey. First things first, find your priorities and understand what they are.

MICHELLE: Yes.

MARTIN: Right. And then habit number two, begin with the end in mind.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Which is, you have to see yourself on the other side and then design your present from the perspective of the future. How do you want to end up?

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Because if you don't look back toward today, then you will not know the road, the map that you need to follow. Awesome thing, right? Have you ever read that book or you're just doing it intuitively?

MICHELLE: No. Years ago. I feel like some of those principles I do live by, but I haven't read the book in a while.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, you internalize it, and you make it your own. That's how you deal with it.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Yeah. It's awesome. Okay. So, in specifics, how do people get to interact with you? They find you on the website and do what?

MICHELLE: Yeah. So, you can learn about our work on the website. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. I am always open to talk to different folks. We're in the healthcare space, the education space, and the corporate space. We have individual resilience training programs, one-on-one coaching, or we have group coaching and group training. One of the things we're really proud of is that we're teaching people how to handle conflict, right? Oftentimes, we have conflict at work, or we have conflict with someone we know, and we're bringing that home with us. So, we're really helping people learn how to be regulated in those most frustrating moments so it doesn't destroy their day and they're able to handle that stuff.

MARTIN: Yeah. You mentioned the teacher. I can just imagine you have this many hours, and then after the hours you have some more hours.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: And how will you fit it all in?

MICHELLE: It's so funny because the average teacher that I talk to will get home from work, four or five o'clock. And then I say to them, "What time do you go to bed?" And they say, "10 o'clock." I go, "How many hours are between when you get home and when you go to bed? And is it unreasonable for you to grab a few minutes just for you?" When you break it down, you can create a structure for yourself to give a little bit back to you, it’s totally doable. But the problem is is we're so fast on that hamster wheel. So, doing the saw thing, right? That we don't stop and take a step back and go, "Wait a minute."

MARTIN: I can just visualize you have children that need to be fed, washed, put to bed,

MICHELLE: Of course.

MARTIN: Lunch for the children. They're too little to make their own, blah blah blah. Right? There's all this lineup of stuff that is, what will have to be set aside? And yet, if you don't sharpen the saw, you will be less efficient.

MICHELLE: Right. 

MARTIN: So, that's where you're coming in with “but you have to.”

MICHELLE: It should be a non-negotiable. There should be little things that you're doing that are non-negotiable. Just so that you get that little bit of oxygen for yourself.

MARTIN: Yeah. Super important.

So, in your face confrontation in a friendly way, to see the present and to imagine the future, and then turn it around. To design the future and then project it back to the present.

MICHELLE: Mhmm.

MARTIN: Yeah. All that. Very important teachings.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Okay. So, you're talking about burnout. So, you have seen the end result. I guess you mentioned your own world, right? When you had that pileup of negative stuff happen. You came close to,

MICHELLE: Totally. For sure. But most people will push through. "Oh, I'll just push through."

MARTIN: Well, yeah, maybe.

MICHELLE: Maybe you won't, though. Sometimes the answer is to listen to the flags along the way. That's a flag for you to say, "Okay, maybe I shouldn't grind it out. Maybe I shouldn't push forward. Or maybe I should take a step back actually."

MARTIN: Yeah. There's the theory that really sick people use, the 12 spoons. Have you heard of it?

MICHELLE: No. What is that?

MARTIN: I have 12 spoons of energy available. And this job takes three, and this thing takes four, and that's seven. What am I going to do with the five? Some people are so chronically out that they have to choose between taking a shower and washing their hair or doing the laundry. It's not going to be both on that day. Some people are really limited in what they can accomplish because of their low energy. Chronically fatigued people are like that. But even the not ill folks have to still deal with the finite amount of minutes and energy in a day.

MICHELLE: Of course.

MARTIN: It's the triage of it. What will not get done is also important. 

MICHELLE: Yeah. I also think we sometimes create our own stress by having unrealistic expectations. I'm one of those people that's like, okay, is there really an opportunity for you to give yourself grace and not try to overdo it. We have expectations we place on ourselves that maybe we need to relax a little bit. Bigger picture.

MARTIN: So, you say, okay, one-on-one. Well, that's easy, but that probably costs money, right?

MICHELLE: Of course.

MARTIN: Yeah. You need to take care of you.

MARTIN: And I'm looking on the website trying to see whether there is something like buy or not the solutions. Is that the place?

MICHELLE: So, it's a conversation. Everybody has different needs. Honestly, our programs are not designed to be codependent lifelong engagement. Here we have proven results in six to eight sessions. We don't want people for 6 months or 9 months, or a year. When it comes to our program, we see 30% reduction in stress just after the first three sessions. 50 to 70% after the full eight sessions. So, it's an investment that a lot of leaders in education are purchasing for their staff because they want to see them fully empowered.

MARTIN: Yeah, once that is done, when you have a boss that understands. I'm seeing it now. Resilience audit.

MICHELLE: Exactly. The audit is key. That's the first conversation that we have with them to really take a step back and take inventory on how they think and what they do for themselves or what they're not doing.

I have a lot of educators that are working two and three jobs, and they're working how many hours? They're shaving time off their sleep all the time. And I just literally take a step back and go, "is working 70 hours a week, do you really think that that's going to be sustainable for six months, for four months, I mean, think about it. If it wasn't you and you were talking to someone else, would you say, yeah, keep working 70 hours a week?” No, you're gonna crash. Your body is not a computer. 

MARTIN: Yeah, I get it. Been there, done that.

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: The only reason or the only way I was able to do that is because my wife supported and held the household together while I pushed extra hours at work. 

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: But the only way it was happening was because she was willing to become a full-time mother. I was willing to become a full-time provider. And we worked it out.

MARTIN: I can just imagine that if she said, "No, I'm going to work." I would have to say, "Well, either I'm going to work less, or we're going to hire a housekeeper."

MICHELLE: Yeah. Makes sense.

MARTIN: Of course, in today's economy, we have just so broken the system collectively, all of us. We have allowed ourselves to pay too much for our houses. So we are now in too much mortgage, too much payment, too much commitment financially. So we can't get out of it, and it's the competition somehow, there are more and more people willing to pay so much that they're up to here in obligation, right?

MICHELLE: Right. And they don't realize the impact of that. Yeah.

MARTIN: So we need to undo obligation so we're less beholden.

MICHELLE: It's funny too because one of the conversations that we have with our group coaching is about the influences of society in terms of the perception of what we think we need because we're constantly being sold to. In our society, we're constantly being bombarded. "You need this, you need this. If you want to look like this, you got to do this." And it's when you can liberate yourself from feeling like you need to keep up with anyone or have what everyone has, it is such a beautiful simplistic way to live.

MARTIN: Yeah. I remember a big city and the houses that were built just after World War II, the 40s, they were 1100, 1200 square foot two-bedroom bungalows with basements. You don't see those built anymore. There are still people living in them, but whatever's new, it's two or three or four times the size, right? 

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: And you're paying for it. The way you're paying for it is more commitment to making more money, which is a bigger chunk of your life. Given away to the mortgage.

Which is the banker. So, you're just essentially trading your life, your days, and your hours.

For what? And the what, is it really worth it?

MICHELLE: Right. 

MARTIN: What are the priorities? 

MICHELLE: What are your priorities? I think but I also think that a lot of people aren't connected to themselves. I don't want to get too woo-woo or anything, but the average person is so consumed with the noise from the external world that they're not connected to themselves to know what they truly want for themselves.

MARTIN: Oh, yeah. I'm too busy to sit down and think

MICHELLE: Honestly, if we were more connected to ourselves, we'd realize how little we actually need.

MARTIN: Yes. I highly recommend a Viktor Frankl book, ‘Man's Search for Meaning.’

MICHELLE: Nice.

MARTIN: He wrote that after his concentration camp experience where he was stripped of everything other than the tiny little core within, the me that is me, that you cannot take away from me. Right?

MICHELLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: Everything else can be stripped away.

MICHELLE: Right.

MARTIN: Anyway, so when you redesign it that way, what does really matter? And it usually is companionship and friendship and relationships with people more than anything else.

MICHELLE: How about connection to self?

MARTIN: Yeah. That's the first one, the relationship one.

MICHELLE: You have got to connect to yourself. When we can learn to be present with ourselves, we can give the gift of our presence to the very people we love, but most people aren't even connected to themselves to hear and to be aware of what they need.

MARTIN: Yeah. That's great. You probably end up pointing that out to a lot of your clients, huh?

MICHELLE: My meditation is one of my power tools.

MARTIN: All right.

MICHELLE: Meditation is the opportunity to connect to yourself, to shut out the noise.

To turn off all of the external influences over us and just really understand and connect to ourselves.

MARTIN: Powerful stuff. What else? Okay, meditate, journal?

MICHELLE: Journaling is very good for clearing your mind. Meditation and journaling to kind of squeeze out all the noise in your mind. A lot of people come to me and they're like, "Oh, Michelle, I can't sleep at night. I'm ruminating all night long. I'm ruminating over what happened." And I'm like, "Have you thought about journaling? Have you thought about trying to do a meditation to clear your head?" Real important if that's going to stop you from getting a good night's sleep.

MARTIN: I put the gratitude vibration into those two. 

MARTIN: Meditate and write about, to appreciate what you have. I don't know if this is relevant to our conversation, but I find that most people don't understand that they cannot graduate out of where they are until they're grateful for where or what they are.

MICHELLE: They are.

MARTIN: You cannot move past so long as you're imagining lack. Imagining what you don't have.

MICHELLE: That's what your mind creates more of.

MICHELLE: Exactly. I like to use gratitude as the thing that can help us feel good because I try to remind people that the mind is not wired to make you happy. It's wired to protect you. So organically, your mind wants to worry and highlight what you don't have and highlight what's wrong and what's broken. And if we sit in that and we focus on that, we feel like crud. So if you were to redirect your thoughts to three things that are good, and you really sit in that, then you feel good. And if you want to feel good and it's a feeling universe, you have to spend more time feeling good. So you have to almost hijack the automatic thoughts that want to focus on the negative that feel like crud.

MARTIN: Yeah. We call it the monkey mind in my circle. The monkey mind wants to feed you all that is not right in your life.

MICHELLE: I call it the itty bitty shitty committee.

MARTIN: Not bad.

MICHELLE: Funny, right? You laugh at it.

MARTIN: Yeah. Beautifully rhymed.

MICHELLE: But most people aren't aware of it. They just go, "I don't know. I'm always negative." No, you're not always negative. Listen, the mind wants to protect you, so it's going to point all that crap out.

MARTIN: Yeah. We talk about the amygdala, which is the sensory organ that sorts the safe, not safe, and it always looks for patterns of not safe because there's nothing to worry about safe.

It's always looking for what's wrong. What’s wrong here?

MICHELLE: Always.

MARTIN: Yeah. All right. So, that's another tool. What else do you teach?

MICHELLE: Well, I do the meditation. If somebody is curious about meditation, I say go to Deepak Chopra's YouTube video, it's called Deepak Chopra's three-minute meditation and just try it on for three minutes. Don't feel like you got to sit in the lotus pose for 20 minutes and try something you've never done, just do three minutes and it'll refresh your mind, and you'll listen to his direction. That's powerful.

MARTIN: Do you teach breathing?

MICHELLE: We do box breathing in our cohorts. We talk about box breathing. Wim Hof breathing.

MARTIN: Yeah, for sure.

MICHELLE: It's important.

MARTIN: Also super important, right, on the physiological we talk about the autonomic nervous system, the fight or flight versus the rest and repair. And if you're stuck in fight or flight, you're not going to create anything worth having. You're only preserving what you have, but you're not growing or able to think out of the box.

MICHELLE: The falling into the day was probably in the data from all the educators that we have worked with. The falling into the day was probably one of the biggest things that we were able to learn and also shift their experience. Because the average person hits snooze, hits snooze, catapults out of bed. They're immediately at the effects of life. There's high cortisol, there's stress, then they get in the car, and they're in traffic. Then they get,

MARTIN: Which is stressful.

MICHELLE: And it's a domino effect. So when I say don't fall into your day, I just say take some time for yourself in the morning, and it could be 10 to 15 minutes, because that's going to set the day off on a completely different trajectory than if you just boom, you're at the effects of the day, the first thing you do, that's huge. Questioning how you look at stress and adversity. Are you a victim? Is it a chronic victim narrative whenever something comes up that you didn't plan for? Because that's your experience, too. And to understand that you do that is huge, because then you can take a step back and go, "okay, well, maybe not. Maybe I could be curious about how this is here to serve me?"

MARTIN: Very good. I can just feel how much help you can be for so many people when you present all these important things, and you're coming at it from a place of experience. Been there, done that, seen it, lived it.

MICHELLE: Yeah, for sure. We honestly, Martin, we just want to help people. We want to help people not feel like they are victims in their life. Everyone deserves joy. And I feel like with our society, people have moved so far away from just feeling fundamental joy because they're so overwhelmed.

MARTIN: So good. All right. Well, do you have any sort of a parting gift that you can offer here? Is there something on the website that people get as a meet me, try me, request something?

MICHELLE: I'll tell you what, if your audience reaches out to me on LinkedIn, Michelle V. Dickinson, I will have a complimentary call with them and step them through a mini audit. How's that?

MARTIN: That is fantastic.

MICHELLE: It's like a few questions, but it's going to get them present to opportunities for themselves, and I'll give them a few personal suggestions.

MARTIN: I do that also for my people. I tell them the first 15 minutes of your consultations are on the house.

MICHELLE: Nice. 

MARTIN: That's great. All right. So, go to resilienceasalifestyle.com, meet Michelle Dickinson, that’s Michelle V Dickinson, find her on LinkedIn. All of you professionals out there who do use LinkedIn, stay the heck away from Facebook. It's a nightmare.

MICHELLE: I agree. Thank you so much for having me, Martin. It's been nice.

MARTIN: Yeah, that's great. I was enjoying the fact that I'm able to introduce you to our audience because I can visualize just how much value you can be to people. That's great. All right, thank you very much. If you're listening to it without pictures, this is Martin Pytela. You find me at life-enthusiast.com, come by the website and subscribe. Thank you, Michelle.

MICHELLE: So welcome.