High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 353: The Resilience Reset with Anne Grady, Bestselling Author & Two-Time TedX Speaker

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Anne Grady is a bestselling author, two-time TEDx speaker and a truth-bomb dropper. Anne has a master’s degree in organizational communication and has spent the last twenty years working with some of the largest organizations around the globe. She has become known as a leading expert on communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, and resilience, contributing to Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, FOX Business and many more. Anne shares inspiring personal stories, cutting edge, research-based content, and implementation tools to transfer learning into real life to improve relationships, navigate change, and triumph over adversity. And she’ll make you laugh while she does it. In her most recent book, Strong Enough: Choosing Courage, Resilience and Triumph, Anne draws from her personal life experiences that touch the hearts and minds of audiences helping them use adversity as a catalyst to grow "strong enough". In this podcast, Anne and Cindra talk: · Why now is the time you need resilience · How to reset your resilience · How she makes meditation part of her day · Why struggle is a human condition · Why gratitude improves resilience HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/annegrady HOW TO ENTER THE PODCAST GIVEAWAY TO WIN $500 CASH: www.drcindra.com/giveaway FB COMMUNITY FOR THE HPM PODCAST: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2599776723457390/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong   Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901

Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal, Minnesota nice as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your goals and dreams. So I'm over here following my big dreams and I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same. And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Ms. Pac-Man.

Yes, the 1980s game Ms. Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up, and let's go. This is the high performance mindset. Welcome to episode 350 with Anne Grady. This is your host, Dr. Sindra Kampoff, and I am pumped that you are here. If you know that mindset is essential to your success, then you are in the right place. Two quick things before I introduce you to Anne. We started a Facebook group to connect

with you, where we share behind the scenes of the High Performance Mindset podcast, and more tangible strategies and inspiration to help you be your best self. You'll also be able to connect with other people who listen to the podcast and connect with a great community over on Facebook. So head over to the High Performance Mindset podcast community on Facebook.

And if you haven't already, make sure you join our podcast giveaway. You can find more information at drcindra.com slash giveaway and we're giving away $500 in cash, a free coaching session with me personally, two subscriptions to the Beyond Grit Academy and 50 people are going to win a best-selling Beyond Grit book. So there's lots of different ways to win. Again, head over to drcindra.com slash giveaway. That's d-r-c-i-n-d-r-a dot com slash giveaway. In today's episode, I interview Anne Grady. She's a best selling author, two-time TEDx speaker, and a truth bomb dropper. Anne has a master's degree in organizational communication and has spent the last 20 years working with some of the largest organizations on the globe.

She's become known as a leading expert on communication, leadership, emotional intelligence, and resilience, contributing to the Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Fox Business, and so many more. As you will hear in this podcast interview, Anne shares inspiring personal stories as well as cutting-edge research-based content and tools that you can implement in your real life to improve relationships, navigate change, and triumph over adversity. And she'll make you laugh while she does it. She has two great books and we also talk about her upcoming book, Mind Over Moment, in this podcast.

So in this interview, Anne and I talk about why now is the time where you need resilience, how to actually reset your resilience, how she makes meditation part of her day and actually how she does it, why gratitude improves resilience, and why struggle is a human condition. Now, I listened to Ann deliver a two-hour webinar last month, and I absolutely loved it. The first part of the webinar, I was running, so I couldn't take any notes and I was bummed. So make sure you take out your notebook, take great notes while you are listening to Ann today. And this week's rating and review is from brie grapping to hope while seeking to feed my hunger to fuel my mind i discovered this podcast

listening has not only motivated me and has fed my soul i felt less alone hearing the various professionals share their stories and i've tapped back into the part of me who knows discipline and feels capable of accomplishing my dreams. My gratitude of these gifts are endless. Thank you so much, Bree, for heading over and leaving us a rating and review, and I would love to read yours next week. So wherever you're listening, head over and leave us a rating and review, and I can't wait to listen to it.

And as you're listening to this interview, be sure to share this episode with a friend. You can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening or take a screenshot, share it with a friend, and you can also share it on your Instagram stories and tag me at cindracampoff. All right, without further ado, let's bring on Anne. Anne Grady, I'm so excited that you are on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining us from Austin, Texas. Well, thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be here. I listened to a webinar that you did a couple of months ago and I loved it. And I was just like, wow, Anne has so much knowledge. I couldn't wait to have you on. So thank you so much for being on the podcast. And I thought I would start, just tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do right now. So I am really passionate about giving people more than just theory. So I did my work is both training

and professional development, and obviously keynote speaking and events and consulting. But I love taking complex ideas like neuroscience and psychology and breaking it down into digestible, understandable stories and practical strategies that people can implement right away. And I love to make people laugh and feel good while I'm doing it. That is one thing that I did really enjoy about the webinar. I was like, it was practical, but also really informed by research and science, which I really appreciated.

So cool. I could imagine that's one of the reasons that I was attracted to having you on and just learning more about you. Tell us a little bit about your journey. You know, where did you get started? Tell us what your degrees were in and then how you got to where you are now. Sure. So I majored in speech communication. I always knew from a very young age that I wanted to talk for a living. And so my mom was like, yeah, good luck with that, Ann. And I ended up making it happen. So I got my master's degree in organizational communication and really started in training and professional development in the space of leadership and communication and emotional intelligence. And then life happened. So in 2003, I had my son Evan and

knew something was not right. Progressively escalated. My husband left when he was 18 months old. He cried constantly. We were exhausted. And then when he was three years old, he tried to kill me with a pair of scissors. By the age of four, he was on his first antipsychotic. So my journey with resilience started just in the trenches, really trying to come up with ways to not just navigate what we were going through, but to get stronger and smarter as a result. And then in 2014, after his second pediatric psych hospitalization I was diagnosed with a tumor in my salivary gland a massage therapist actually found it a massage therapist at the airport and I was leaving for a keynote in Iowa of all places and and it turned out to be a avocado

sized tumor in my salivary gland that resulted in facial paralysis, which then two days after the surgery, I scratched my cornea because I couldn't close my eye, and we were waiting for my eye patch to come in from Amazon. And so then before my eye surgery to implant a gold weight into my upper eyelid and stitch up my bottom eyelid, I fell down a flight of stairs, breaking my foot in four places, had the eye surgery, then did six weeks of radiation. My face came back in that process, and I was in India three weeks after I finished radiation. My first book came out, and I was doing a speaking engagement in Bangalore. So that journey kind of taught me that there are not just this idea of resilience that seems nice to have, and it seems kind of touchy and fluffy and feely, but it's like concrete science. And I turned to the research

because I'm an academic and I needed to find strategies to help me get through that time, help me keep my mindset positive, help me stay focused on the future and not go into a giant pity party because I drooled and had a speech impediment and was missing half my face. And I got so fascinated because I learned that some of the things that I was doing already were cultivating resilience without me realizing it. But there were a lot of things that I didn't even realize I should be doing. And so as soon as I started practicing those, my life started changing dramatically. And I got really excited about sharing those tools with other people so that they can do the same, hopefully not having to go through those events first. But struggle is a human condition, right?

We all go through it together. And anything that I can do to help ease that. My other passion is mental health advocacy. So a portion of all my book proceeds go to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. My goal is to reduce the stigma of mental illness and to really focus on emotional health. So that's what I do and why I do it. I already heard that story, but I just got goosebumps everywhere. I think also just relating as a mom, you know, I could imagine there was some guilt, like what did I do, you know, and how am I going to handle this?

How can I get through this? You know, why me? There's just like all of those emotions that go through. It's a, it's a grieving process. In fact, um, Evan's now 17 years old. And two years ago, we made a gut wrenching decision to put him in a therapeutic boarding school in Idaho. We just couldn't give him the round the clock therapy he needed. He wasn't safe. We weren't safe. We had to dramatically make changes to hopefully change his trajectory. And he was just here for two weeks. And it, you know, it's just a reminder

of grieving the loss of the life you thought your child was going to be able to live. Grieving the loss of the life you had imagined and what that looks like being a caregiver indefinitely. So it's, it's definitely been an emotional process, but I've, I truly believe that I'm stronger and smarter and more resilient as a result. Wow. I think about this idea. I think it's like a Katie Byron, Byron Katie, there we go, quote, and she says, like, life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you. You know, so I'm also hearing that it's like you're looking at this, you learned about resilience, there's some benefits that came from this. you were reading and implementing some of the ideas and the science of resilience. What did you see in terms of the impact that it made on you? And like, what did you do to start practicing it? So, you know, one of the things a lot of people don't know about me is that I was diagnosed

with clinical depression when I was 19. So I have been battling with some of the challenges of that since then. And the thing that really helped me that I couldn't even understand why it was helping me until I started digging into the research was gratitude. Gratitude has been found to be the number one predictor of well-being. It's a huge determinant of resilience. Just looking for something to be grateful for. You don't even have to find anything. Increases dopamine and serotonin and reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23%. And so I was really challenging myself every time

I went into a woe is me. It's not fair, which I'm human. I did. Right. But every time I went into that place, I also combined it with the habit of going, all right, what's one thing I'm grateful for and one thing I'm learning. And so I really started finding that the more I started looking for the good stuff, the more I was able to find of it. And it's because you can actually train your brain. It's experiential dependent neuroplasticity. You can change the way your brain functions by choosing what you look for and how you interpret it. So that was one example of something that I had no idea was generating these huge results for me. But then there were things like that I didn't even know. I didn't know like mindfulness, you know, which is the

topic of my book that's coming out my third book in October, because people used to tell me to practice mindfulness. And I would just kind of roll my eyes and go, Yeah, I know, whatever. It's like, you know, doctors telling you to eat right and exercise and get sleep. And you're like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Exercise was also one of those things that I had started doing to manage my depression that helped me tremendously. But, you know, the mindfulness part of it was the biggest surprise for me. Yeah. Why was it surprising and how did you start practicing it?

So I used to think that you had to sit like in a full lotus and eat tofu and find your inner Zen and that like you were just supposed to tune out the world and find this peaceful place and I felt like I was failing at it miserably right and I you know you have to fail in order to learn right so I kept trying it and then my husband was joking because I'm such an overachiever he was like you're not going to meditate unless you're the best meditator ever like Why am I screwing this up? And what is the difference between being mindful and meditating? And what I learned is that they're different, right? So mindfulness is just paying attention on purpose. It's being where you are because we spend an inordinate amount of time

worrying about what happened in the past or feeling anxious about what could happen in the future. And my mind, you know, is constantly playing dirty tricks on me going like, you're not good enough, or, you know, you're not smart enough, or why would you say that? Or why did you eat that? And what I found is that mindfulness doesn't, the goal isn't to change those thoughts. The goal is just to start becoming aware of your thoughts, emotions, and the way you engage in the world without judging it. And as a Jew growing up in New Jersey, we were taught to judge everything. So it's been quite the learning opportunity for me to learn, you know what, emotions aren't good or bad. They're just information, sending signals to your brain. And you choose how you interpret those. But first, you have to recognize them. And so at first,

it was like, I didn't want all of these uncomfortable emotions, anxiety and stress and sadness. And so we try to numb them. And we, you know, get unhealthy vices just so we don't have to feel crappy. Unfortunately, the research is clear, it increases and magnifies the intensity and duration. So of that negative emotion. So it's like saying, don't think about pink elephants, whatever you do, don't think about tacos, right? Like what we tend to think about those things even more. And mindfulness was a way to just be still, you know, with the information overload and digital stimulation, we've lost the art of being still. Now, part of that one way I practice that is meditation. And what I thought was so great about this is that it's not supposed to be calm and peaceful. And everybody kept

telling me, no, it's finding your peace. And it's like becoming one with yourself. That's not what meditation is about at all. Meditation is brain training. It's simply repairing neurons in your brain damaged by stress, by controlling your attention instead of letting it control you. So every time you catch your mind wandering, which you do the entire time you're meditating, every time you catch it and come back to the present moment, that's what's strengthening that muscle so that when bad stuff happens, you can catch yourself before you get carried away on the runaway train. And you can just bring yourself back to the moment and observe it. What are you feeling? Where in your body are you feeling it? You know, meditation has been a way

to train my brain to regulate emotion, manage my attention and focus, and really just take back control. And it's just been incredibly powerful. So tell us a bit about your meditation practice. How often do you do it? And, you know, what would you recommend for people who are listening? And I'm, I'm also, I want to connect this to resilience. Right. But tell us a bit more about how you do it. Well, so the connection, let me start with the connection because I think that's important. So resilience is not just getting back up after you've been knocked down, right? That that's part of it. But the other part of it is, am I getting stronger as a result? Am I learning? Am I not just surviving, but am I thriving? Am I using that information? And so every time we get knocked down, face a setback, have an obstacle,

you know, anytime that happens, it's, it's a ding to our, you know, to our ego, to the way we see the world. And meditation and mindfulness allows you to catch yourself in that moment. The struggle is real. I mean, it really is. But struggle is not a competition. And so it brings you back to being present because you can't start going, oh, no, this is never going to get better. And what if the whole world goes to hell in a handbasket? Meditation and mindfulness have given me the

ability to take back control so that I'm making decisions about the habits that I cultivate, the belief systems that I allowed to perpetuate, the skills that I develop, the ability to regulate internally my nervous system and my brain. And those are all the skills that allow you to survive the tough stuff and learn from it and get stronger from it. So I meditate every day. And it takes different forms. So you don't have to sit in a, you know, crisscross applesauce position on a pillow with a candle and incense. It's some days like today I swam. So first the magic number to change your brain is between seven and nine minutes a day. And I always tell people, if you don't have nine minutes a day to meditate, you should be meditating for 20 minutes a day. Because it is nothing more than just being still and focusing on your breath or music, or it's anything

where you are directing your attention somewhere on purpose. So it could be, you know, like I swim and I look like a total nerd, but I have a snorkel because after radiation, it hurts to pivot my head. So I just kind of wear my snorkel and I got my headphones and, and I just look like I look silly, but whatever it works. And so I meditate underwater. I focus on my breathing and then my mind will race to a presentation I have to give or a slide I need to make. And I'll go back to my breathing.

And then my mind will race to, you know, I forgot to call my mother and then I go back to my breathing. And so when I'm swimming, I meditate underwater, but every night I meditate to go to sleep as well because it resets your nervous system. It gets you out of this fight or flight, constantly on alert, cortisol, norepinephrine generated frenzy that when we lay in bed, most of us are ruminating about the day and we're not focusing on the good things. We're focusing on the bad things. And so meditation was a way for me to get out of that fight or flight state and take back control. And it helps me fall asleep. It helps me go back to sleep. If I wake up in the middle of the night, it's, it's been really, really powerful. And so my process is I take a few really

deep breaths, three deep breaths breaths resets your nervous system. And most of us breathing correctly. So I breathe, I use diaphragmatic breathing for the first few breaths, which means like as you inhale, you put your belly out, filling your abdomen with air. And on the exhale, you bring it back in. And the exhale is the part of the breath that brings you back into the rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system. So I focus on a couple of deep breaths and then I do a body scan.

And it's just a pretty common mindfulness technique where you literally, I imagine this blue light starting at the tip of my head and just like slowly scanning my body, like as it relaxes your forehead. And then you imagine your eyes relaxing. And that's right about the time where I'm like, crap, I forgot to make an appointment at the vet for the dog. That's okay. I bring myself back and I relax. You know, you don't realize how much tension you're holding until you focus on relaxing. And usually by the time I'm done with that, I've fallen asleep. If not, I just go back to slow breathing. Awesome. Thanks for the details. I think that really helps people kind of think about how they might start this practice either in the morning or as they go to sleep. And your

book Mind Over Moment comes out in October. Is that right? Yes. It's called. So first let me back up just one second. I learned how to meditate using an app. So it is not like this. Um, for me, I couldn't figure it out. I thought, how hard can it be to sit silently? Like how hard can that be? Yeah. As a type a personality, it's freaking miserable. Because then your mind just starts starting. So I downloaded an app and there are a bunch of services out there. I use Calm. But I do guided meditations all the time, too, because it's, it's also a way to get great ideas and to learn because each of the guided meditations has like a couple of minutes of neuroscience and content and understanding,

and then the guided meditation, which helps. So my new book mind over moment, harness the power of resilience comes out on October 6th. I'm very excited. You can go to mindovermoment.com to sign up for free giveaways and pre release information. And, you know, I feel like I've been preparing for this one for the last 20 years. It's, it's my, you know, my resilience breeding ground. So it's taking

everything I've learned about cultivating a resilient mindset. And that includes your habits, your beliefs, how you view failure, how you, you know, deliberately create the story you tell yourself instead of listening to the one that replays automatically, right? And then it's the resilience skill set. So I always say your mindset is the toolbox. It's this place where everything is stored and all the tools in the world don't help you if you don't have a place to put them. But if you have an empty toolbox, that doesn't help either. So the skills are the tools. And those are skills like the emotional intelligence, like the session that you attended, things like the growth mindset, they are tools like self care, gratitude, mindfulness, social connection, humor, laughter,

all kinds of different skills. And then the third part is a resilient reset. It's this ability to get out of reactivity and to be deliberate about where you invest your time and attention so that you're controlling your body and your nervous system rather than let it control you. Yeah. Awesome. All right. After this interview, I I'm gonna go buy that I can't I can't wait so it's it's not even for sale yet it goes um it's available for pre-sale um in another month or two but you can go to mindovermoment.com and and we'll keep you updated as soon as you can get it and with all kinds of good stuff and and free gifts well when I attended your, I also like was looking for a book that discussed what you talked about. So I think this is exactly what you're, you're describing, you know, so that's kind of interesting that I was like, oh, where can work. That was like my survival guide. It's the first book that came out and it's literally a strategy a week over the course of a year. And

they're all strategies I practiced to awesome raising Evan. And then my tumor happened and, you know, all of the stuff that came with it. And so my second book strong enough, choosing courage, resilience, and triumph was the title of my TEDx talk. And it was really a way to identify your own self-limiting beliefs and what's blocking your courage and what you can do to cultivate it. But this book I'm really proud of because I read a lot and I had found so much good information, you know, Carol Dweck's growth mindset and, and your information on grit and Angela Duckworth and emotional intelligence and all of the mindfulness content and all of the skill building and self-care and sleep. And I wanted one place where I could go find all of it to help me really make it more simplified. And I couldn't find it. So I thought, all right, well, let's build it.

So it is a full-blown toolbox with everything you need to practice mindfulness, start getting out of reactivity and start taking care of yourself. And that includes your mind as well. Yeah. I like the way that you've combined these areas of expertise and then helped us really like through this book and through other things that you're doing, help us really understand the how. So one question that, and I think about all these topics like habits and beliefs and failure, creating your toolbox, like such powerful things. When you think about failure, tell us about what failure means to you and how does that connect with our ability to build our resilience?

So I was, I had been allergic to failure my entire life. Like I was terrified. My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Rock, like wrote a note to my parents on my report card and said, if, if Ann keeps this up, she's going to have an ulcer by middle school because I was so worried about failing. And what I learned, I love the acronym for fail first attempt in learning, right? No great success story ever came without significant failure. I mean, you can Oprah, JK Rowling, Steven Spielberg, the Dr. Seuss, the KFC, you know, Colonel Sanders, like there's just no example of amazing achievement without a ton of failure. And so I started trying to think about different ways to look at it. And so it became a skill building exercise more than anything else.

What can I try next so that I learn from it? And I can't even count the number of failures that I've had, but it's also led to the successes, so it's necessary. So when you think about people who are listening, because I think that some people are allergic to failure, so I like the way that you describe that. It's just a fun example of, you know, how we really don't want to fail. What advice would you give people who want to practice that mindset, this idea that, you know, what can I try next, and it's okay to fail? So two things. One is to really start paying attention to what you're afraid of. Are you afraid of looking stupid? Are you afraid of being embarrassed? Because most of us spend so much energy on how we'll be perceived and how we'll feel about

ourself instead of what we'll learn from it. So this idea of, you know, failure is only bad if you're perfect, right? So it's this idea of, am I trying to be the best or am I trying to be better? Am I trying to compare myself to everybody else or am I focusing that energy on learning new skills? Am I setting self-limiting beliefs that are imaginary because they're just the things I've always told to myself? And then the second thing, and this has been super helpful for me, and it took years of therapy to figure this out. And if I can save somebody the expense and time, I'd love to, you know, we all have this negative self-critical voice. Every one of us has it. And many of us have more than one, right? And so we learn when we're younger about multiple personalities. And so nobody likes to think that they have all these personalities that we do. We have a ton of different identities. We have our identity as if you're a parent, if you're a daughter or son, if you're a sibling, if you're a volunteer, if you're a professional. And we also have these parts of our personality, our personas that are not supporting our success.

They're sabotaging it. And if we can separate that negative, self-defeating voice from reality, we take its power away. And one way to do that is to name it. So I view myself defeating self-critical voice as this mean, overweight woman named Helga. And she's carrying around a rolling pin and she's wearing a dirty apron and she's just running around giving everybody orders and telling everybody they're not doing good enough and telling me I'm not enough. And now I just recognize, oh, that's just Helga. And I like my husband laughs. Cause I'll be in the kitchen randomly. Shut up Helga. But it helps to like separate the, those belief systems from the truth because they're not

serving you. And if you view them, we believe what we tell ourself, right? So we have to start sending different messages, but you have to start separating the truth from just this self-defeating kind of habit that we've gotten into throughout the course of our life. Really powerful. into throughout the course of our life. Really powerful. I love the idea of naming it. I haven't named mine, but I love that idea. So you gave me something to think about and a good challenge for me, but I know mine sounds like maybe my mom. A lot of people say, can I name it my mother-in-law? Yes. You can name it anything you want because you don't have to talk to it out loud, right? You can just hear that, that

critical voice and go, wait a minute, that's just, that's just Helga or Bambi or whatever your, you know, assigned name is, but it, it takes some of that power away because most of us get in a matching, you know, a boxing match with ourselves. So we hear the self-critical voice and then we debate it, but then it, you know, it's like this constant conversation in our head and it can leave us feeling helpless, hopeless, exhausted. And the only way to take back control is to understand it and separate it. And that's where the mindfulness and the meditation comes in that you talked about earlier. Because you have to catch yourself when it's happening, and the only way to do that is just to be present. So mindfulness helps you get back to present, realize it's happening, and then you

get to make a decision about how to proceed. And if you want to listen to the voice and you want to believe it, that's totally okay. It's not going to serve you, but it's your call. But I wasn't even aware of it before I started practicing mindfulness. I didn't catch it in the moment. I realized it hours later or days later, and that's not helping to correct the behavior. Absolutely. So I know you just had like a four page feature in success magazine. Yeah. I'm like, my mind is blown because I love success magazine. So I can't wait to get mine in the mail. Uh, I have a subscription, but I don't think I've gotten your episode. It's the one with Elon Musk on the cover and, uh, and it's so exciting. And then like my article is right after an article about Simon Sinek. So now I can

literally say, I got your back, Simon. That's wonderful. So it is called Resilience Reset for people who want to go check it out. And I want to talk a little bit about like, what is Resilience Reset to you? And then how does it relate to the things that we've been talking about so far? So like when, before COVID, right, when people asked you how you were doing, most of us were guilty of busy, stressed, tired, burned out. You know, we, it's almost like we're competing for a busy badge. Oh, you're busy. Let me tell you about my busy, my busy is worse than you're busy. And I felt like we get caught up in like this wheel of just, we wake up, we check our phones. We look up from a meeting. We check our phones. We eat lunch. We check our phones. We go to bed.

We check our phone. It's just the same day. Each day becomes the same day. And if we're not deliberate about resetting that, then we end up a slave to the habits that we have, surviving the life we've got instead of crafting the one we want. And so a reset is how do I break out of that busy trap and be deliberate about where I invest my time, energy, and attention. And when you do that, you actually regulate your nervous system, which is what can get you out of that frantic, anxious feeling that most of us find ourselves in a lot. You can see my dog practices it. I know. I saw your dog jump up on the couch. I was like, oh my gosh, how cute. Snoring at my feet. So tell us about why it is so important right now during COVID and during this time period to have a resilience reset. And is this something you, you know, are you

suggesting we do like throughout our day is, you know, tell us a little bit about like how often we might do that. So it's more important than ever because our brain is on overload right now. Everywhere we turn, our brain views the unknown as a threat. It would rather have an outcome it doesn't like than one it doesn't know. And all you have to do is turn on the news and you don't need to even listen to it. You can watch it and immediately you can feel your blood pressure rise. Immediately you can start to feel like worry spiraling. And so the way that you can practice this is a simple thing you can do is for the first 30 minutes you're awake, no email, no phone, no social media, nothing except your thoughts and maybe music or your pets or your family, right? But you are sabotaging your entire day operating out of

reactivity. If you've allowed your attention and focus to be hijacked right away, the reset is literally, how do you get back to that sense and place of calm? And how do you do that? So I, it happens to me multiple times throughout the day. I actually started borrowing my daughter's Apple watch. Yeah. It's a reminder to breathe. And that has been helpful for me. You know, every hour I stand up, I take a quick walk, I breathe, I focus. So I reset multiple times throughout the day, Evan was just visiting. And, you know, part of the visit was incredibly stressful. And so, you know, I practiced it by allowing myself to cry and not beating myself up over a good mom

wouldn't do that, or I shouldn't feel that way, or it's not okay. You know, it could be something that simple, it could be, it could be something as giving myself permission to draw. Like, I mean, I literally did this yesterday while sitting at my desk. It's just a mandala or a mandola or however you pronounce it. Right. But it's just like something small like that. It just doodling for 10 minutes, resets your nervous system, anything you can do to get out of your limbic system in your brain, which is the emotional control center and re-engage the logical part of your brain is going to reset you. And it could be a walk. It could be deep breaths. It could be watching a funny cat video. I mean, it could be literally anything. It's just about taking back control so that you're not spiraling going,

it's 4 p.m. and I got nothing on my to-do list done. I've been living out of my inbox, fighting everybody else's fires and emergencies. I've been in meetings all day. When do I get to stop? And there's never going to be a time. You have to make that time. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think about how this relates to our everyday life and being parents, but also how it relates to our work. And I know you do some work with like sales teams. Tell us a bit about why that in particular, you know, like as an entrepreneur or in sales, why it's so important to have a resilience reset? Well, you know, I've been in sales for over 20 years. I, I sell me. And so be careful how you communicate that to your kids when

you're an entrepreneur or a speaker. Cause my, my son, you know, they had the parent teacher day when he was little and they were like, what does your mom do? And she's like, well, she gets on stages at fancy hotels and then they pay her after she's done selling herself. No, Evan, that's not what mommy does for a living, but good to know that your teachers now think I have a pole. So the thing about sales is that you can take it as personal rejection, right? Especially when you're selling as an entrepreneur, a service or something that is yourself. And when you come at anything from a place of fear, rejection, or a mentality of lack, you operate out of fear and you cannot engage the creative, innovative part of your brain. If you're operating out of

fear, it shuts down that part of your brain. So, you know, COVID hit and all my engagements got canceled one after another, after another. And it was really easy to catch myself because I've been practicing mindfulness. I was easy to see when I, when I was starting to spiral. Right. And so for sales teams, it's a numbers game. That's all it is. That's all sales is. It's a numbers game. It's a ratio. And if you view it as such, and you start figuring out and people buy from people they know and like and trust and the connection there. Right. So if you get out of on the salesperson trying to sell a product or service and you get into, how can I help you make your life a little bit better? Is there something I can do, right? Like if you had the cure to cancer, you would want everybody to know about it. But if you have a new product or service, a lot of times people in sales are like, Oh, it's sleazy. It's self-promotional. It's uncomfortable. It is if you're focused on you, but if you're focused on how the solution can help

somebody else and you share with them, here's the problem I hear you talking about. And it's all listening, right? It's all connection. Here's what I heard you say. The problem is here's how our solution might be able to fix it. What can I do to help? And that's really the birthplace of trust. So that's what cultivates sales. And you have to come at it from a place of abundance because the second you start worrying about not having enough, you start looking for all of those reasons. And you can literally, I have a stop sign on my monitor right now so that when I go into that place, I stop and I reevaluate.

Awesome. Well, Anne, we could talk for a couple of place, I stop and I reevaluate. Awesome. Well, Anne, we could talk for a couple of hours, I think. You provided so much great content in this really short period of time and really given us a lot of practical strategies that I know are based in science and research, which I really appreciate. Tell us how people can find you, reach out to you, follow you on social. Okay. So social, everything is at Anne Grady Group.

Website, annegradygroup.com. Book information, mindovermoment.com. But the easiest thing, if you want some free resources, is to text the number 555-888, 555-888, and chat the word strength. And you will immediately be sent a link where you can sign up for a resilient self-assessment, a self-care sheet, a resilience poem, and then weekly resources to help you not just survive this stuff, but really make it through stronger. Awesome. That's wonderful. Well, I always do a recap at the end and your personal story, incredibly powerful, and I can see how you got to where you are now. So thank you for sharing that with us. I really appreciate what we talked about related to mindfulness and meditation, the difference and just hearing

how you practice mindfulness and meditation. I think that's really helpful for people who sometimes it seems like really abstract concepts for people. I also, when you said like gratitude is the number one predictor, I think that's the word used of wellbeing. And I thought about how I can even practice gratitude more and just really love the content of mind over moment. Can't wait to read it. And just this idea of like resilience reset, resetting multiple times throughout our day. And just the, you know, that failure is really an opportunity to continue to learn. And I liked your, your question of like, what can I do next to fail? So, Anne, way to bring

it today. Oh, thank you. This would be so much fun. And I would learn, which I, one of the reasons I do this podcast to continue to learn as well. So thank you so much for joining us from Austin. I'm grateful that you're here and I'm grateful that you're here and I'm grateful that you had an opportunity to positively impact thousands of people who are listening today. Well, thank you so much for having me, Sandra. It was a pleasure chatting with you. We'll have to do it again. And for your listeners out there, just remember like happiness is not a genetic trait. It's a skill. It's a skill. It's one day at a time. It's a skill. So don't wait to be happy. Create. Excellent point. Thank you, Anne. Thank you so much. Way to go for finishing another

episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.