Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Fleur Heazlewood on investing in Resilience Recipes

Starting point is 00:00:00 let me frame up resilience as your ability at the most simplest level to be able to positively adapt to change and adversity. And many of us have grown up thinking that resilience is something that you have or something that you don't. But actually, all of us are born with some levels of resilience. There are just people that are better at it than others. But resilience is also a set of skills. So one of the great things about resilience is you can learn and you can develop and you can become better at resilience. And one of the things that the research shows us is when you increase your overall resilience, it's easier to continue to do your best under pressure and to maintain a positive approach to life. So resilience recipes is very much around supporting

Starting point is 00:00:51 you to figure out what well-being means to you and then choosing the right resilience strategy that's going to best support what you need. From an investment perspective, from my own experience, is that when you are well, when you are looking after your physical health, your mental health, and you have strong relationships, you have more energy to go out and research and look at more options you're more creative you are more innovative when it comes to being able to look at the different kinds of things that are going to best suit your financial and and wealth wealth needs and so you will naturally find that when you're looking after your well-being and you're looking after your mental and emotional health you're going to make better decisions you'll have

Starting point is 00:01:44 the courage to, I guess, you know, take greater leaps of faith or courage, and you're more likely to branch out and broaden the different types of investments that you're willing to look at and potentially try out. Welcome to Get Invested, the leading weekly podcast to help you unlock your full potential and enjoy your version of sustainable success that lies at the intersection of your three elves, yourself, your health and your wealth. I'm your host and guide Bushy Martin and each week we go deep sharing great conversations with proven experts in all walks of life including the best investors, property experts, analysts, leaders, founders, sports stars and health gurus to uncover their secret know-how on where they invest their time, their skills and

Starting point is 00:02:35 their money and the benefits that this creates. To help you find out what it takes to break free from the grind and discover your flavor of freedom to create your freedom formula you see the truth is that everyone invests every second of every minute of every day we're investing our time our skills our energy and our money in something some of us are investing consciously some unconsciously sometimes for good sometimes for bad and sometimes for no impact get invested will help you start living by design not by default i'm going to help you to make it happen not let it happen you'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more work less and live your legacy by investing now you'll enjoy the stories and secrets of high performers

Starting point is 00:03:26 who invest for success in every aspect of their lives and discover the top tips on how to get started how to make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream not someone else's as you engage in each episode you'll glean the information inspiration and implementation that you need to get empowered and get invested in imagining and actioning the life that you've always dreamed about and get invested is proudly part of property hub your home for property investment insights and inspiration make sure you subscribe now on your favorite podcast player to get every episode of Get Invested and Realty Talk, which is Australia's leading and longest running online property show that's full of red hot property investing news and

Starting point is 00:04:13 insights direct from all of the industry leaders and influencers. You can also connect with me personally and join the Get Invested community of fellow freedom fighters at ushimartin.com.au or on knowhowproperty.com.au. Now, let's get invested. Hi Freedom Fighters. How's your wellbeing? And how resilient are you? Now, your ears have probably already started closing down at the mere mention of wellbeing and resilience because they've become two of the most overused yet misunderstood terms since the advent of the pandemic. And like many terms that get flogged to death in popular culture, the true meaning of

Starting point is 00:04:55 them starts to blur and meanings get misconstrued. So what is wellbeing? And what's it got to do with resilience and vice versa. And what has well-being and resilience got to do with investing in your success? Well, if you've been listening to Get Invested for any length of time, you'll know that I'm a firm believer that sustainable success lies at the intersection of self-health and wealth. And you need all three for your version of success to be sustainable over the long term. Knock out one pillar and everything eventually collapses. Because there's no point endlessly chasing wealth. If you haven't first got yourself and your health sorted, they're the building blocks and foundations of success in anything. And one of the best determinants of sustainable

Starting point is 00:05:39 success is resilience. But again, what's this got to do with your wellbeing? As you're about to find out today, just about everything. Let me put you in the frame. How often do you feel that you've lost sight of the wonder of your life as you focus all of your energy on the flaws that are stopping you from having more, progressing further or being better. Let me give you an example that I'm sure you can relate to. It's mid-afternoon and you're stressing at work because after a day of never-ending interruptions, you're behind on your day's deadlines. You eat takeaway lunch at your desk in a bid to catch up. You're writing a report for your manager and answering a phone call from a colleague who's been chasing you for two days when you see a text pop

Starting point is 00:06:22 up from your partner with a reminder that it's your turn to pick up the kids from school. You check the time and realise that you're underprepared and now late for your next meeting. You rush off and then find it difficult to concentrate or contribute in the meeting, despite it being something you care about and that will impact your workload because your mind's consumed with your overflowing to-do list

Starting point is 00:06:42 and rising stress levels. You race out of the meeting, hastily scribbling yourself some post-it note reminders and then sprint out the door. You cut a fine to pick up your kids from school and show for them to sport, playdates and buying them new sneakers before the shops close. All the while, you try to fit work phone calls and emails into the cracks.

Starting point is 00:07:02 Back at home, you're greeted by your partner who wants to share their day's challenges with you. You do your best to engage while also helping the kids with homework, putting on a load of washing and organising dinner. The house finally quietens, your partner's cleaning up the kitchen and you flop down on the couch to switch off for some mindless TV. And less than three minutes later, you jump up realising that the washing still needs to be hung out and your dog's scratching

Starting point is 00:07:27 at the door needing an overdue watering of the garden. Your invisible load just never lightens. You give in to the urge to check out your work emails just before bed and answer an email requesting urgent information for a morning deadline. You'll eventually fall into bed late and exhausted. You feel stressed about work and guilty about the lack of quality time you've spent with your family and you whip yourself again for not fitting in any exercise. Then in what feels like a second your alarm clock's going off at 5 30 a.m and after hitting snooze a couple of times you've missed your morning walk again and you're rushing to get the household prepared packed and out the door. And so the groundhog day cycle continues. You see in our constant race for more

Starting point is 00:08:12 we're reducing ourselves to less and for many of us our health and well-being is the less and the more is an endless cycle of business pursuit and stress but the reality is that well-being isn't nice to have it's a must-have necessity it's necessary for our health energy connection creativity relationships performance the list goes on but despite this essential need we aren't getting our well-being right. Lifestyle diseases like depression, anxiety and type 2 diabetes are skyrocketing around the world and they're affecting people like you and me. In any year, one in five of us isn't doing okay, to the point where we develop a diagnosable illness. And mental illnesses such as depression are actually outstripping cancer and heart disease

Starting point is 00:09:01 as the leading cause of global disability. We all desperately yearn for good balance, health and well-being, but stay stuck frantically peddling our hamster wheel and juggling multiple balls in the air as we vainly attempt to handle the ever-increasing deluge of change and uncertainty. So how do we reclaim and achieve well-being on our terms? And what, if anything, has resilience got to do with it? Well, that's exactly what today's special guest is going to help us find out. Floor Hazelwood is the founder of the Blueberry Institute. She's a proven leadership expert in healthy high performance, well-being, balance and as she says, balance without the burnout. With over 20 years corporate leadership experience, Fleur has led many successful

Starting point is 00:09:45 organisational turnarounds and culture transformations. She understands firsthand the challenge of constant change, uncertainty and stress and how to transform busyness and burnout into healthy high performance. Over the years she's trained and mentored over 2,000 people in Positive Leadership, Mental Health Mastery and Future Fit Resilience Building. And to help you master the maze, she's just recently published her third book, Resilience Recipes, which is about making space for wellbeing that works. So welcome and let's get invested, Flo. Thank you for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak with you. Excellent, Flo. And it's a great subject to be diving on because as I've sort of already

Starting point is 00:10:30 mentioned uh well-being and resilience are terms that have really been flogged to death at the point where no one really understands them and less still uh wanting to listen so it's a really timely discussion in terms of where we're at but before we sort of dive into that later in our chat i'd love for you to just to give us a quick rundown on what you do differently and most importantly, Floor, why you do what you do. Thank you very much. So I like to describe myself as a leadership expert in healthy as well as high performance. And this very much comes from, I guess, a background in being an overachieving, anxious, perfectionist high performer that wasn't so great at the healthy part. So within my corporate experience, I worked across a number

Starting point is 00:11:25 of businesses, both local as well as regional and global. I worked in manufacturing, textiles, health and beauty, and my specialisation or what I became known for was turning around either business units or businesses that weren't doing that well. I was known for being the person that put in the extra mile that could solve the unsolvable and would work back and would work the hours to make things happen. And so while everybody else was going home and having some semblance of a personal life, I was very much enmeshed in my work and work as being my identity. So when I talk about being a leadership expert in healthy high performance, it actually comes from a place where I wasn't healthy. So those stats that we were talking before around mental

Starting point is 00:12:16 illness and burnout and so forth, that was me around 12 years ago. So I actually experienced burnout before burnout was even invented as a term. And so when I have people in my programs now saying, wow, Fleur, you are so good at resilience, it actually comes from a place of not being good at resilience and having to self-diagnose and do the research and the education to slowly put myself back together again. Yeah, awesome. It's certainly a first-hand experience as our greatest teacher.

Starting point is 00:12:51 If we look back on that then, Claude, what have been some of the most challenging events in your life so far that's brought about your greatest learnings and best changes over that journey then? I've got two stories that I would like to share the first from when I was nine years old which put me on this track of resilience I just didn't realize it was resilience at the time and another one which is a work example so growing up I actually went to 10 different schools across four countries and with many of these experiences only being for six or twelve months at a time now not wanting to age myself or anything here but social media for connecting with people

Starting point is 00:13:33 and googling for information hadn't yet been invented so I kind of like needed to develop you know resilience and that extra sensory emotional intelligence at a very very early age having to sort of like start and stop and start all over again continuously and one of my pivotal memories was being confronted in a schoolyard I think this was my fourth school by this stage when I was nine years old on my first day in England and I got bailed up at recess by the two most popular kids in my new class and they asked me if I was a mod or a rocker. Now coming from Australia I'd actually never heard of either of these things and little did I know that this was predated me by about 10 or 15 years but what I did know was this was going to be a life-defining

Starting point is 00:14:21 question and so I did the only thing that any self-respecting kid who wants to fit in did and I asked what are you and the clear ring leader answered back that he was a mod so clearly I was a mod too and for the next six months I was popular and had friends and so my earliest I guess experiences when it comes to you know resilience and and and personal personal well-being and interestingly enough the number one determinant of our well-being is our social connections and our social supports around us and so I didn't realize that this is one of my first lessons in in resilience and well-being a fun a fun story but also something that that starts to to paint a picture totally it's interesting I hadn't thought about until you mentioned it but I was

Starting point is 00:15:08 also a gypsy as a kid I think up until the age of 40 I'd lived in 40 different places and a lot of those as a child and I actually hadn't put the two together in terms of its influence on on resilience so I've taken something out of the conversation already today. Thanks, Flo. That's awesome. What's the second story that you were going to talk to us about? Yeah. So, you know, often resilience is something that we just do and we don't actually recognise it for what it is and the skills that we do have. And I think one of the reasons why resilience has got such a bad rap these days is because, you know, it's almost as if people are doing resilience to us. If something goes wrong, people are saying, well, you know, just be

Starting point is 00:15:53 resilient or let's hire somebody who's resilient and you know one of the things that's really important to share is that resilience is not something that you have or you have not. Resilience is something that all of us have but we're sort of like building our resilience at any one time and we're drawing our resilience at any other time and so when we find that we're drawing down so this is our energy, our commitments, our workload, our challenges and our stresses but we're not putting energy and resilience and wellbeing back into our tank. That's when we start becoming, you know, perilously close to burnout. So my next story is very much around the incidents that led to my ultimate burnout experience. So one of the career goals that

Starting point is 00:16:38 I set myself was to achieve the role of CEO before the age of 30. I was going to say 30, I'm not that great before the age of 40 and I achieved my CEO at 37 just in time for the global financial crisis and so I had this role in navigating for a textile company that had a combination of local manufacturing as well as overseas purchasing supplied all of the major retailers in Australia from Spotlight through to to David Jones during that that period of time and of course being in textiles so cushions and napery and bed linen all these sort of like luxury and non-necessary types of items when the financial crisis hit literally our sales which have been flying along at 30% year on year at that stage dried up within a two-week period

Starting point is 00:17:33 and so I had the pressure of the parent company and the board around managing profit and also cost structure i had pressure coming from my workforce and i had a factory team who could see very visibly whether there was work coming through the factory or not that were petrified for their jobs i had a number of egos jockeying for positions of power during that that period of time we may have heard some people may have heard the term toxic workplace i definitely uh had had a number of those dynamics coming through. And so I actually came out of that experience having returned the highest profit to the parent group out of a group

Starting point is 00:18:24 of 10 companies. I increased my market share by over-delivering to what my customers needed during that period of time. And I returned the highest profit from the smallest sales base while still retaining all of the jobs of my labor force wow and the directive I'd been given from the board was that I needed to reduce headcount and I went back and I challenged the board and said rather than giving me a headcount target give me a number that I have to to manage to and as part of that process I was balancing people concerns I was balancing well-being I

Starting point is 00:19:08 was managing profit, I was supporting clients and I was battling directives from the board that said the only way that you are going to perform as a business is to cut people and to cut headcount. So I came out of that experience retaining my headcount, demonstrating that I could increase market share and returned the highest profit. I think my business at that stage was around $20 million and the largest revenue business in that group was $150 million. And I still return the highest profit. And it was by looking after people and working with people and being creative around how we manage the global financial crisis. And what personal costs though, Flora? Absolutely. That's sounding like absolute meat in the sandwich, up, down, sideways and every

Starting point is 00:19:55 other direction. How did you manoeuvre through that? Absolutely. So I got the company and I got the worried staff to the end of that period in good shape. And I was in the absolute worst shape of my life. So I had allergies that were out of control. I had ongoing flu. My anxiety was peaking so much I wasn't sleeping at night. My eyes literally were burning because I was so exhausted and my body literally started shutting down. So it doesn't matter how strong our mind over matter is at some stage, our emotions and our body and the rest of us are going to come along from the journey. And so very much what my business is about and what my personal mission is about is ensuring that people understand that burnout is no longer the price that you pay for

Starting point is 00:20:52 high performance and that healthy is the foundation for high performance. So I came out of the GFC with nothing left to prove from a business perspective but a lot of work that I needed to do to put my health back together again. And that journey back to health took close to two years between working on physical issues like leaky gut syndrome, gut inflammations, working on my mental health, coming back from the consequences of burnout and the emotional emotional issues that worked with it exhaustion things I used to be really excited about um I was struggling to you know to I think that probably the best way to describe it was probably I was in this this state a state of of apathy and of course my key relationships around me um suffered to to

Starting point is 00:21:46 the to the point where um my um my marriage fell apart so out of out of these I guess you know lessons you know came very much i like to think of myself as a as a fast learner but clearly in this instant instance i was a slow learner um came the not not just the realization but the belief that looking after yourself and looking after people is the key to success not the reward for success yeah yeah that's a a pretty key walk away after what you've been through. And I mean, what you've just described almost describes me to a T as well. In my early 30s, I went through the same exercise and ended up losing my marriage. And I've actually got some ongoing health issues that I've never been able to recover from since then. My adrenals

Starting point is 00:22:43 were way too active. And according to some of the health experts, it effectively ate my thyroid. and I've had ongoing thyroid issues ever since as a consequence of that flu. So you took me straight back to those times as you were talking through the challenges that you've had. How did your merge from that and what changed differently in terms of where you invested your time, energy and money from that point on?

Starting point is 00:23:12 From that point on, I re-looked at my priorities as part of that I spent time looking at what was truly important versus what wasn't important and a lot of that was around freedom to make my own decisions, freedom to live and work by my own values. It was very much around also conviction and belief that key to sustainable success is by putting well-being before the performance as opposed to having well-being being the reward for performance. And interestingly enough, from the reading and the research that I've done since, there's a fantastic study

Starting point is 00:23:59 by Sean Aker called The Happy Secret to Better Work and there's an amazing TED Talk on that as well. And he's proven across a number of countries, a number of companies and cultures, I think it's something like 40 000 um 40 000 sort of like employees strong corporations have taken part in these programs and one of the things that is proven is that when we put our happiness our health and our well-being first then all of the performance measures like creativity like innovation like our productivity like our relationships at work our relationships outside of work our ability to

Starting point is 00:24:37 problem solve. All these different metrics that businesses care about all improve by anywhere between 9% and 30%. And so my focus very much has been how do we create the frame where we can put in place the life skills, the resilience skills, the wellbeing skills, the emotional agility skills that we need to apply both in a workplace when it comes to dealing with uncertainty, challenge, change and still being able to perform successfully within such a tumultuous kind of environment, but also be able to go home with the energy and the space to enjoy our family, our friends, our hobbies, and do the things that we care about outside of work. And I really have a problem with this concept of work-life balance. Because if you think of

Starting point is 00:25:32 work and life as a balance or you look think about an old-fashioned set of scales where you have one bowl which you put work in and one bowl which you put life in and somewhere there's this sort of like minute little point where the two will will even up but for 99 of your scales you're going to be out of balance you're either going to be over balancing on on work or you're going to be you know over balancing or under under balancing when it comes to life yeah and i like to think very much more about our what we need in terms of our well-being is more of a pie or a wheel of well-being because work is actually just one segment of our wheel of well-being or our wheel of life and so very much my journey moving forward is how can we get better at defining what it is

Starting point is 00:26:21 that we need to live our best life and to continue to achieve and have the energy that we need for for everything and what are the choices and the priorities and the boundaries and the trade-offs do we need to make to bring that bring that to life and bring that to fruition yeah i love it love it some some uh awesome learnings there and i guess the the challenge is and i will dive into this in a fair bit more detail shortly but the challenge we face is that the world sees it the other way they're not recognizing just how important personal well-being is to uh you know productivity and in uh or enjoyment in any aspect of our lives because it's all always the thing that that suffers at the end from an organizational perspective but also even at the individual

Starting point is 00:27:11 perspective you know we tend to put the things that are personal to us last on the list because everything else gets a guernsey so so i'm looking forward to diving into that in a minute but before Before we do that, Fleur, I'd love for you to sort of jump into the future for a minute and sort of paint us a picture of your life vision and what your ideal lifestyle looks like if you can. So my life is really governed by three core principles and it's around doing what I love with people that I like the way that i want and doing what i love for me focuses means really focusing on my strengths and my

Starting point is 00:28:00 interests and i've actually been building up a great team of people around me that are loving good and are good at the things that i'm not and it's also very much around the doing what i love is also um you know having enough time and space to create and to look after my own physical health and wellbeing. So, it's not jamming my whole, you know, week with work. It's around spacing it out. Now, I do have to admit that that is a work in progress at the moment. So, some months I'm better than that and not, but I'm very good at, I guess, you know, picking up and course correcting, you know, when I need to. What are you investing in and will invest in to to make that happen on a more consistent basis then?

Starting point is 00:28:49 Yeah, so to create that space, to do what I, you know, to do what I love and enjoy doing, I've invested quite a bit in technology, in learning platforms, in systems and a CRM. And what that's enabling me to do is to automate a lot of the administration around my learning programs. It's also enabled me to, I guess, you know, move my team from admin-related roles into project management and people styles of roles.

Starting point is 00:29:27 Yeah. And it's also enabling me, I guess, to create more space to do fun things like, you know, write books and also create videos to expand my online program offering. So I think around, at this point in time, around 15% of my turnover is in technology and systems. Okay. Yeah, love it.

Starting point is 00:29:50 Love it. That's awesome. In terms of the physical investment side of the equation in helping to enable and then sustain that ideal lifestyle, what part, if any, does property play in the equation? Fleur? Property is very important. to me, as a core foundation of my financial wealth. And for me, financial wealth means

Starting point is 00:30:17 independence and freedom. So freedom is very much around independence when it comes to choice and being able to do lifestyle things like travel or take time out or when I know I've been running too hard and I'm wary of sort of like getting to the burnout line, it means that, you know, I can take the space that I need to do. From a property perspective, I own most of my primary place of residence. I think like most people, the bank still owns a bit of a chunk of that. But I've actually just bought a new office. And I think when we're talking about building financial wealth and property as a way of achieving independence, my office is more than just a commercial space. So, for me, it's a combination of both investment and life by design.

Starting point is 00:31:12 So, it's within walking distance from home. So, it's the home office that's not actually in my home. It's in a great location. So, it's opposite the grounds of Alexandria that is very attractive to my clients to come in and do team workshops. And I'm also fitting it out to be a wellbeing hub or a wellbeing space that supports my preferred way of working and exercising. And what it'll also enable me to do in terms of, I guess, you know, future me, I think that was part of the question

Starting point is 00:31:43 that you asked. Yeah, yeah. Is it's also going to enable me to support the leadership teams that I work with with an experiential mental, emotional and physical skills for better managing their resilience and energy love it absolutely love that something that's sort of been sitting in my mind since you talked about the journey you've been on uh is your challenge with perfectionism and i mentioned that deliberately because it's something that is an ongoing challenge for me i'm one of those people that's 150 or nothing

Starting point is 00:32:16 And when I take stuff on, trying to not let things get way bigger than they need to be is a real ongoing work in progress for me. How have you managed to keep that in check? Well, my perfectionism journey has been a very imperfect one, and I think you'll appreciate the irony of that, even though the grammar's not necessarily that great. I love it. Yeah, so what we mean by perfectionism is, you know, setting ourselves, you know, either impossible standards or standards that are significantly higher than others or standards that are significantly higher than what the, you know, the people around us, you know, consider to be, you know, appropriate and good enough.

Starting point is 00:33:03 I guess you know KPIs or targets and it's really interesting because when it comes to I guess the top hijackers of our of our well-being there are internal factors and then there are external factors and we will often blame things like you know change or pressure or uncertainty or a restructure or you know even you know when the pandemic first you know hit how do we work out how to do work as the reasons for our stress but we sometimes overlook the internal factors like perfectionism that are actually within our control. So my journey around better managing perfectionism, I'm not sure if it's something that you can actually cure yourself over.

Starting point is 00:33:45 If anyone has got a cure, please let me know. I'm definitely in progress on this one. I'm right with you. Yeah, yeah. And so one of the things around better managing perfectionism is around recognising when the standards that you are working to are more than the effort that you need to put in. And taking a step back and saying, hey, is this incremental or this extra effort that I'm going to spend on this

Starting point is 00:34:11 coming at the expense of something else that I also care about? And it's around understanding that with your perfectionism, there is always going to be a trade-off for something. So one of the things that we know, one of the key causes or one of the key, I guess, personal factors that contributes to burnout are those people like us who are more susceptible to perfectionism. Yeah, that's good. That's very good. I love that. I sort of want to pivot a little bit and get you to share with us what has been your best and worst investment today. And I'm not talking about physical investment. It can be time, energy, money, resources, you name it. what have been the best and worst and what have you learned from them?

Starting point is 00:35:01 Well, my worst investment was a financial one. It was in my early 20s when I didn't trust enough of my own intuition, I guess, and relied on experts when it came to investment advice. And so my worst investment today has been a tax effective effective in air quality marks in timber and I don't think I need to go any further than that. And my best investment has always been in, I guess my best investment was buying my first property when I was 25 years old and continuing to leverage the equity in that to buy subsequently

Starting point is 00:35:48 more expensive or better positioned or more supportive lifestyle pieces of property. Yeah, love it. Love it. Thanks for sharing that, Flora. Love that. I now really want to get into the meat and potatoes of the conversation today because it's a subject that's close to our hearts, but as we've mentioned already, does get buried in a lot of misinformation. And we're talking about wellbeing and what would be considered to be a sometimes unobvious bit of resilience in that regard. You've written a fantastic book on the subject called Resilience Recipes.

Starting point is 00:36:27 Can you talk to us firstly about why you wrote it and who's the book best suited for? The reasons, a couple of reasons why I wrote the book, And the first one is around providing some good, quick, curated strategies to help over-busy people, particularly overwhelmed managers and leaders who have been trying to balance all the changes, look after their own well-being, the well-being of their staff, and still deliver business at the same time. We know, particularly over these last few years, that more and more of us are feeling the squeeze on our wellbeing, but we have less and less time to figure out what it is that we need and how to do that. And as you said earlier, wellbeing and resilience, both in terms of labels, have received a pretty bad rap of late. And part of the reason for that is we're trying to fit sort of like

Starting point is 00:37:31 square pegs into round holes. So particularly with wellbeing, wellbeing is, you know, something that should be the way that we do things. It isn't something that should be added to our never-ending task list as another project. And so when I hear about wellbeing projects and wellbeing programs, that concerns me because for most people, they look at it and go, So, you know, how is offering lunchtime yoga going to help me reduce some of my, you know, 60 hours a week of work and reduce my stress? How can I go and do this activity that is supposed to reduce my stress when I've got this never-ending task list when I come back again? Yeah, beautifully said. Let's dive into right there.

Starting point is 00:38:18 Because there is such a plethora of applications of the word wellbeing, can you start by defining what wellbeing really means? So the challenge with improving wellbeing or focusing on wellbeing is that there actually isn't one universally agreed definition of wellbeing amongst the academics or the medical profession or any kind of governing body. So when it comes to improving wellbeing, it's actually pretty hard to do something about it if we can't define it. And so the definition that I use, which is the simplest one, and I often think the simplest definitions are the best, is feeling good, functioning well, and being able to live your life the way that you want. Yeah, I love that definition. The depth is in its simplicity. It pretty much covers everything in that sentence. in a way that all of us can relate to which is sensational so why is it then do you think so

Starting point is 00:39:20 many of us struggle with attaining and maintaining a state of well-being under that definition many of us don't take the time to think through what it is that makes us feel good and we're also not tending to focus on the functioning well bit those things tend to be And I guess this is part of, you know, our cultural paradigm at the moment where we see wellbeing as a reward for completing our never-ending to-do lists as opposed to understanding that investing time in how we feel and how we function is actually going to be the enabler for us to have a great life and for us to perform well. And so in terms of our biggest mistakes, the first one is that mental shift. And so I encourage people to look at wellbeing as a foundation for performance and a foundation for a good life, not wellbeing as something that we, you know, deserve after we've done all of our other obligations. and one of the things that we that i think we can find really challenging about that as well is that we're actually not wired to view well-being as our default priority or our default

Starting point is 00:40:36 state so those of us who continuously beat ourselves up for you know falling off the wagon when it comes to our exercise new year's resolution six days later or you know start something new like eating well on a Monday and we've like fallen over at the first hurdle on a Friday I think you can take a little bit of the pressure pressure off we've got to got to do something a little bit differently here because what happens is is our brains are automatically looking and scanning for patterns that are going to keep us safe so you may have heard of this negativity bias where we're continuously looking out for the risks the challenges what's wrong what are the threats and even if you think about this in a work context what our meetings are about you know

Starting point is 00:41:18 where's this project is it on track or if it's off track okay if it's off track what do we need to do and we very rarely talk about the things that are working well that are going well that we enjoy doing that we're good at and um you know reward the successes for for ourselves in our and our teams and so we actually need to support our brains we actually need to rewire our brains to start looking for the positives to start understanding that investing in our strengths and investing in the things that are going to increase our capability and our capacity is the best way for us to move forward. And so when it comes to our well-being, things like creating a morning well-being routine that we actually just get up and do and we autopilot into our brains

Starting point is 00:42:05 that don't require a lot of effort and willpower are going to be a lot more successful and we're going to be able to sustain them for longer than trying to fit wellbeing. For example, at the end of our day, when our brain's been in firefighting mode, when we've used up our willpower resources, and we're kind of like feeling guilty because of the things that we haven't completed on our to-do list for the day. Yeah, I love that. And what I'm hearing here is that each and every one of us has got our own definition of wellbeing based on what's important to us and what what makes us happy so it's not a not a prescriptive thing and and hence i guess why you've got the book is titled resilience recipes because you can use different ingredients

Starting point is 00:42:48 to get different results depending on on what you're looking to achieve so that's that's brilliant so i and i you know i love reading the book and uh you've come up with a really helpful framework that helps us to understand what contributes to our individual happiness health and well-being and also four really good steps to help us get there. Are you able to whet our appetite with just a taste test on that for us? Absolutely. So the book is deliberately a short book. So it's very much around providing everyone with just enough information to get started and figure out what's important to you and give you one or two strategies that you can actually put into place straight away but not give you the extra reading time that that you don't have so the four-step framework to

Starting point is 00:43:42 helping you understand what well-being means to you and where you're sitting at it is really quite a simple one and the first one is simply to identify what is important to you so well-being to me particularly at the moment is around focusing on my physical health coming out of the flu and COVID a couple of months ago, and probably reducing my focus on work. And so when we're talking about what's important to each of us when it comes to well-being, it's things like our health, our family, our friends, our career, our finances, our hobbies, learning, growth. Most of us will have somewhere between four and eight areas or domains of our life that are really important to our well-being and so it's really important

Starting point is 00:44:34 that we actually list those down then on a rating scale of one that says i'm not doing very well at this all through to 10 which is woohoo this is a source of stress rate how well you think you're doing for each area yeah and when we look at how well we're going we will notice that there will be some things that will be closer to one and there will be other things that are closer to 10 and that's actually okay because what we're actually doing here is we're bringing awareness to what it is that we're doing well and we're not generally going to be able to do equally well in all let's say eight areas that we've defined as important but by taking the time to identify what those are and rate what they are we can then make some conscious choices around where we will invest

Starting point is 00:45:25 our time and our energy and money and where we might deprioritize for a particular period of time and so what this is doing is is putting us back in the driver's seat and it's giving us our control back over our well-being because many of the people that i speak with at the moment are talking about how they're feeling out of control i'm too busy to do that or i've got to do this or this person wants that and of course you're out of control because what you're doing is is you're leaving your well-being choices to the mercies of other people yeah and so what we're doing here with these four steps is we're actually taking our control back and we're defining what's going on and it's actually okay not to be so great in well-being in one area as long as it's a deliberate

Starting point is 00:46:04 choice so for example if you've got small children you might choose to deprioritize your physical exercise program on a Saturday because it's more important for you to take your kids out to Saturday They sport and engage and like socialise and have family bonding time over something that they can show you that they're doing well or they're participating or they're enjoying. So it's not to say that we're not going to have trade-offs. We will have trade-offs. It's around making those active ones.

Starting point is 00:46:34 And then as part of our ratings, it's important that you clarify where your sources of wellbeing strength are and where your sources of weakness are. And when it comes to choosing what you are going to focus on, I encourage you to focus on your strengths because strengths are actually where we gain our confidence, we develop our capability, we get momentum, they give us energy, we get motivation and then only just choose one weakness or one gap to fill. Our natural default as human beings is to sort of like focus on the gaps and gloss over the strengths but you'll actually find that the

Starting point is 00:47:11 strengths by focusing and leveraging your strengths it'll actually give you the energy and the joy to look at your one gap and go oh yeah i can knock that over yeah i love that it's it's a a simple mind flip in terms of where our focus is but it's something that very few of us do well so really appreciate you drawing attention to that um i sort of want to sort of shift into the resilience area now because i i'm wanting to sort of help us understand why increasing our resilience is one of the best boosts for our well-being if you can yeah absolutely so let me frame up resilience as your ability at the most simplest level to be able to positively adapt to change and adversity and many of us have grown up thinking that resilience is something that you

Starting point is 00:48:06 have or something that you don't but actually all of us are born with some levels of resilience there are just people that are better at it than others but resilience is also a set of skills so one of the great things about resilience is you can learn and you can develop um and you can become better at resilience and one of the things that the research shows us is is when you increase your overall resilience it's easier to continue to do your best under pressure and to maintain a positive approach to life. So resilience recipes is very much around supporting you to figure out what wellbeing means to you and then choosing the right resilience strategy that's going to best support what you need. So for example, all of us will have strengths and weaknesses when it

Starting point is 00:48:52 comes to resilience. So for me, I'm absolutely fantastic at coping under pressure. And I think that CEO experience during the GFC illustrates that quite well. However, I'm not so great at energy management. And I think that CEO experience during the GFC and my subsequent burnout illustrates that quite well. Whereas other people can be very good at managing their energy and their physical health and exercise routines, but crumple under pressure. So there are different aspects to to resilience and each of us are going to have strengths as as as well as our as well as our weaknesses and something again there is no universal definition of resilience so some definitions talk about bouncing back others talk about coping with um stress and so the model of

Starting point is 00:49:45 resilience i work with is very much around developing our coping skills to be able to manage pressure developing our mental adaptability skills to be able to focus and shift and i guess you know flow and flex through change and challenge as opposed to go down for the count and then that third part which is around energy management this is the sustainable success part making sure we have the practices in place to sustain our energy for the long term as opposed to getting ourselves into this boom and burnout bust type of cycle. I love it. I just love the situational approach that you're adopting

Starting point is 00:50:28 so that it's reflecting the individual's needs and the environment and the situation they're in and then choosing a strategy that's responding to both of those. Are you able just to, again, sort of whet our appetite with some of the approaches, actions and activities that the book is full of, by the way, that's so easy to read and so you can sort of hone in on things that are immediately doable and don't take a lot of time

Starting point is 00:50:54 that can have a massive impact. And if we look across those three key ingredients that you talk about in the book of emotional agility, mental adaptability and optimising the energy, can you just give us a quick example that will sort of bring that together for us? Yeah, absolutely. So emotional agility is very much around supporting us to act rather than to react when we're faced with pressure and we start to feel our stress temperature gauge rising within us.

Starting point is 00:51:28 So it's a set of simple skills that are going to help us to better manage pressure, stress and the situational, I guess, you know, roadblocks that turn up on a day-to-day basis. So it's very much around better understanding and managing our emotions and creating space between what's going on and how we react to that. Creating space being a key word there. I love that.

Starting point is 00:51:57 It's not reacting blindly based on habits we've born but just going, let's stop and prop here. observing and then making a conscious choice is what I'm hearing from what I read in the book. Oh, absolutely. And I think a nice way of describing that is learning to see our emotions as data points and not as directives. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:20 And that comes from Susan David's book, Emotional Agility, and it's such a simple concept, but I think it's such a powerful concept to learn. Yeah, love it. Yep, go on. That's a good example. What about mental adaptability? You've got some approaches and activities that are going

Starting point is 00:52:43 to help us to address that. Mental adaptability as part of our resilience skill set tool is a great way of being able to manage change and challenge and uncertainty, things like restructures at work or changes in family circumstances in a way that's going to be healthy and helpful as opposed to being consumed with anxiety and worry and rumination. So within this skill set, things like being able

Starting point is 00:53:17 to take multiple perspectives around being able to determine what's in your control that you should focus on and what to let go of that might be out of your control. things like mindfulness and meditation practices sit in here because they help us to work out the facts from the fiction within the stories that our minds make up when when we're concerned and and worried about things that we don't have a lot of information on yeah brilliant and the the final piece of that triangle the optimizing energy yeah what are some actions and activities that can help us in that area optimizing energy is very much around

Starting point is 00:53:56 making sure that we have the daily practices in place, the small things that are going to ensure that our emotional, our mental, our social and our physical well-being are being looked after. I'm tending to avoid the term self-care now because that's getting bandied around quite a lot are things like, you know, people sort of like saying, oh, what have you done for your self-care in terms of like a massage or something that's a Band-Aid-y type of thing. And I think self-care is becoming almost as overused as resilience and wellbeing is a term now. And optimising energy and making sure that you are fuelling

Starting point is 00:54:37 your wellbeing is very much more around creating daily sustainable habits, the one percenters that are going to add up and make sure that you are well on an ongoing basis. and it's very much around putting boundaries around the things that are important and enforcing those boundaries. So for many people when they think about burnout they're going okay well you know burnout is a result of not being in balance but I'd like to share the insight that managing your energy and managing your well-being is very much around boundaries and where we tend to find ourselves getting closer to burnout is is when we are managing too much of others expectations

Starting point is 00:55:21 and we're not supporting our own energy needs yeah beautifully said and i'd like to put a little bit of an investment twist on it now given that a lot of the listeners are looking to invest whether the property equities crypto you name it how do you think in the context of what we've talking about, how can improving wellness and resilience help investors in that sense? From an investment perspective, from my own experience, is that when you are well, when you are looking after your physical health, your mental health, and you have strong relationships, you have more energy to go out and research and look at more options. you're more creative you are more innovative when it comes to being able to look at the different

Starting point is 00:56:17 kinds of things that are going to best suit your financial and and wealth wealth needs one of the things that we know is is that we're under when we're under stress and we're not sleeping well and our personal decisions are sort of like squeezed into the cracks of of life what we find is that our brain moves into fight fright fight fright actually it's a good one fight flight or freeze mode i think i just put flight and freeze together which is probably another way of talking about overwhelm i think when our brain is in in survival mode which is fight flight or freeze our actual ability to think and reason and to consider options outside of the here and now and our survival are significantly reduced. And so you will naturally find that when

Starting point is 00:57:09 you're looking after your wellbeing and you're looking after your mental and emotional health, you're going to make better decisions. You'll have the courage to, I guess, you know, take greater leaps of faith or courage, and you're more likely to branch out and broaden the different types of investments that you're willing to look at and potentially try out. Yeah, I love it. That summed that up beautifully. Fleur, I'd like to shift into what we affectionately refer to as the ambush bushfire lightning round where we ask the podcast

Starting point is 00:57:46 fast-forward questions that you always get a blindfold and a cigarette to jump through. So to kick those off, what's your favourite quote and why? My favourite quote is you are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream so that's from c.s lewis and it's very much an expansive place of of possibilities and i think the more that we can create that independence of health you know wealth and options the better the life is that we're going to be able to create us for ourselves yeah that's a great quote that's an awesome quote um if we switch into the literary field for a

Starting point is 00:58:31 its rest to please what's the other top book that you'd recommend we have a read of and why well one of the most pivotal books for me um was eat move sleep by tom roth um it's a short practical evidence-based um book which actually shares small incremental steps and tips that you can actually take each day to improve your health so particularly when it comes to that optimizing energy bit. This has been my bit of a go-to Bible, and it's perfect for busy people trying to fit everything in because it's short and tight and well-written. Yeah, beautiful. Just like resilience recipes in the same approach. Switching back into the investment arena then for a second, what's been both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received so far,

Starting point is 00:59:23 floor well the best piece of advice i think is to start by investing in your own home and then focusing on paying down the you know the the basically the equivalent of non-deductible um non-deductible debt and then leveraging that that equity to invest in in other things so like my commercial office that i've just bought um now for example is is leverage from that Probably the worst pieces of advice I've had has been very much around, you know, tax-effective share schemes or, you know, things that are hot at the time that don't have a lot of rigour and expert advice around them.

Starting point is 01:00:04 Yeah, flow over the month stuff, totally. Now, this is an area that's going to fit beautifully into what we've been talking about today. What's a personal happy habit, rewarding ritual or daily discipline that you employ that's contributed most to your success today? My morning routine that is very much around, I guess, supporting me to optimise my time and feed my energy, which I think is also directly contributing

Starting point is 01:00:34 to my overall commercial success, is very much my yoga practice. And it's a combination of meditation, movement, and very intentional goal setting for each day. And certainly the commercial success that I've been able to create, particularly over the last 10 years on my own, is triple where I was at in a corporate perspective prior to taking the time out and setting up my day the way that's going to best nurture me.

Starting point is 01:01:11 Yeah, okay. What sort of flavour of yoga do you practise just out of interest? So my branch of yoga is Anahata Yoga, which is of the heart, and it's a yoga therapy style of tradition, and it's very much around self-diagnosis, so tuning in and actually understanding what's going on for you from an emotional and mental perspective, and then choosing the tools from a suite of strategies that are going to best support what you need,

Starting point is 01:01:41 And then from a physical perspective, interestingly, it's the same thing again. There's a short diagnostic routine. It's like, where am I stiff? You know, where am I flexible? What's flowing? What's not? And then applying a sequence of movements to unblock the blockages

Starting point is 01:01:59 and strengthen the areas that are going well. Love it. Love it. I'm going to talk to you more about that. I love the self-diagnosis piece. and the intention-setting piece of that rather than just be a physical set of movements. Final question then, Floor, and really just to summarise

Starting point is 01:02:23 our great conversation today, what are your key takeaways and immediate actions that we need to take revolving around the resilience recipes? The first is to take the time to define what wellbeing means for you. so well-being to a new parent with a brand new baby is probably going to involve more sleep and greater support around the house versus well-being for an empty nester which is probably going to be more focused around financial management and lifestyle funding you know kind of kind of priorities yep and so if you don't define your own well-being then you are going

Starting point is 01:03:05 to end up being, you know, at the mercy of the busyness treadmill. And then the second thing is to just choose one or two small things to build into your morning routine that is actually going to give you the energy and fill your cup with joy and the kind of positive emotions that mean every day you're going to start with the intention and feeling that you're going to have have a good day and from there you'll have this expansive place where you can make some of the decisions whether it be around where you invest your money or your time or your energy or your focus on on your relationships to create the life that you want as opposed to being at the mercy of this busyness um treadmill love it love it beautifully said um uh what's new and next for

Starting point is 01:03:58 you then, Flo? So I'm working on a program at the moment that takes us beyond mental health and wellbeing and into strong and spacious leadership, which is going to be incorporating a combination of a positive leadership toolkit. So actually, how can we enjoy going to work again? How can we enjoy leading and come from a place of our strengths, which will incorporate some yoga yoga philosophy as well to make sure that we have space in our days and not just taskless and and and busyness so really really really looking forward to to um you know taking our resilience and well-being beyond the current boundaries that that we're finding ourselves in coming out of these last three years of challenge and change and certainty and stress yeah i love that uh for those

Starting point is 01:04:49 in the audience like myself who really resonated with your message today flora how how can they find out more or get involved with you so encourage you to connect with me personally on linkedin fleur hazelwood or on instagram at fleur hazelwood if you're interested in a copy of the book resiliencerecipes.com or blueberryinstitute.com for my corporate programs Love it. Now, we talked up there about a little challenge that you're going to give to the GEN investors today. Can you share that with us?

Starting point is 01:05:26 Absolutely. So to encourage you not to just think about your wellbeing but do something around defining your wellbeing, I'm going to invite you to write in to me and share what is your biggest wellbeing challenge. So write it in to hello at blueberryinstitute.com and for our top three challenges we will send you a resilience recipes book pack which includes a well-being planner and some other tools to actually get you started and take that well-being

Starting point is 01:05:55 prioritization and put it into into action that's going to to work for you absolutely love it flora it's been a great conversation to really put some reality back into the situation as far as wellbeing and the importance of resilience in that regard goes and some of the quite simple actionable steps we can take, but we all overlook them because we allow that busyness side of things to get in the road of the important as we chase the urgent. So we'd really appreciate your time on the show today and looking forward to staying in touch. Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity to chat. Thanks, Flo. Talk soon. Bye for now. thanks for getting invested now here's three easy ways you can take action to start making it happen

Starting point is 01:06:47 to ensure you build momentum and start living by design not default so that you're following your freedom formula firstly subscribe to this podcast if you haven't already and keep the weekly inspiration coming secondly get a copy of my book get invested for free and find out what it takes for you to invest in living more and working less. Just visit bushymartin.com.au forward slash books or knowhowproperty.com.au or click on the links in the show notes. And thirdly, join me and the Get Invested community. Each month I send a free and exclusive email full of practical self-help and wealth wisdom that our current Freedom Fighter subscribers can't wait to get. Just visit bushymartin.com.au, scroll to the bottom of the page and sign up.

Starting point is 01:07:36 And there you have it. In three easy steps, you're on your way to dusting off your forgotten dreams and making them a reality. Get Invested is proudly part of the Property Hub, your home for property investment insights and inspiration. When you subscribe to the show, you get all of your Get Invested episodes, along with Realty Talk, Australia's longest running and leading online property show for red-hot property investing news and insights, direct from all of the industry leaders and influencers. And finally, feel free to connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, as I'd love to hear your feedback, your inspiration, your ideas, and your questions and queries anytime. Thanks for listening. Hear you next week. And as always,

Starting point is 01:08:24 dream as if you'll live forever and live as if the days you'll last. Thank you.

Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Fleur Heazlewood on investing in Resilience Recipes

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