the bossbabe podcast - 18. The Energy Episode: Beat The Stress Addiction Loop, Build a High Performance Lifestyle & Managing Your Subconscious for Success with Daniel Thomas Hind

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

 In this week’s episode, co-founder of BossBabe Natalie Ellis is sitting down with Daniel Hind. Daniel is the Founder and CEO of Evolution Eat, a transformational health coaching company that helps high performers master their diets and build healthy eating habits that last forever. Together they talk all things stress addiction, avoiding burnout, routines and how to become a peak performer and set yourself up for success. Daniel shares insights into how entrepreneurs are energized by stress and how unhealthy coping mechanisms and habits have you upper-limiting your personal and professional growth. He also expands on how these unhealthy habits are invisibly preventing you from making more money, more impact and more good in the world. Natalie and Daniel dive deep on the importance of switching off, self-awareness and showing up as your best self everyday to allow you to build and scale in a way that feels good in the present. Get ready for an inspiring episode filled with perspectives as to how you can make decisions from an empowered and innovative place, how you can use your business as a vessel for your greater vision and how to avoid being on the perpetual hustle train. Get the BossBabe x Evolution Eat Master Your Diet, Master Your Mind Free Online Course at https://www.evolutioneat.com/bossbabe. Visit https://www.bossbabe.com/ig-growth to attend our free IG training on how you can grow your Instagram with your ideal client by 10k followers in the next 30 days.  

If you start sacrificing any single part of your health to accomplish things, that's a serious red flag. Your unhealthy habits, your unhealthy coping mechanisms have you upper limiting your personal and professional growth, and are silently or invisibly preventing you from making more money, more impact, more good in the world. Welcome to the Boss Babe podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance, and learning how to balance it all. I'm Natalie Ellis, your host of this week's podcast and co-CEO of Boss Babe. So in this episode, I interviewed a good friend of mine, Daniel Hind, and we talked a lot about stress and how you can start to deal

with it better. You know, even as a crazy ambitious woman who has 5 billion things on her plate, we also discussed all things routines, habits, and how to really set yourself up for success. But before we dive in, let's talk about what it might look like to set yourself up for success, and I can share what it looks like for me. I'm completely out of the office for the majority of June and July, and the majority of that is vacation, like absolute complete switch off mode. Yet I see very few entrepreneurs able to completely switch off for multiple weeks at a time for their businesses. Like it's really uncommon. And, you know, even the ones that appear to be laying by the pool with a cocktail in their hands, sunning it up, seeming like they've not got a care in the world.

You don't see the laptop prop down beside them or the stress of constant emails coming in and things falling apart. And I'm not saying that to discredit anyone. Look, not everyone even wants or intends to create a business that they can switch off from but here's the thing I am in this for the long run we are building a company that is already impacting millions of women and we truly do intend to change the world can we do this from a place of exhaustion and stress maybe to a certain extent but can I achieve my own personal goals if I work like that absolutely categorically not we are not building to sell we're not building to make a quick dollar to a certain extent but can I achieve my own personal goals if I work like that absolutely categorically not we are not building to sell we're not building to make a quick dollar and

we are not building until we find the next shiny thing sure if that happens and we do sell great but that's not our big intention we have a mission here that we are looking to fulfill in the world and we are building to create to create, fulfillment and happiness both for ourselves and for the women that we serve and I believe that the best way for us to do this is building and scaling in a way that feels good in the present. Truthfully, I really believe in showing up as my highest self for myself, for my husband Stephen, for my family, for my future children, my friends, my business partner Danielle, my employees, my clients, my community and I believe in showing up as her now. Not her when she's ticked off all of her

business goals, not her when she feels like it or when she's not too busy. To get here I got very very clear on what my highest values were and what my ideal reality really looked like and I made sure this was completely aligned to the way I live in the really looked like and I made sure this was completely aligned to the way I live in the present. Danielle and I both share values that life and love comes first before all else and joy and really living life with those that we love. So we set out to create a business to support our vision and not the other way around. We put in place efficient end-to-end systems across the entire business to automate both the operations of the business and the sales side of the business. We hired and continue to hire really talented, ambitious, intelligent people to help us drive forward our bigger mission in the world. We are

constantly cutting the fat from the business in order to run lean. We make decisions from an empowered and innovative place as opposed to the way we might get told things should be. I really don't believe in that. We are redefining what it looks like to create and run a multi-million dollar empire and we hope that by leading the way and creating a new path we'll start to see this become the reality of more entrepreneurs. So I really encourage you after hearing that to ask yourself the question, instead of being used as a vessel for your business, how can you use your business as a vessel for your greater vision? So how can you get really clear on what you want to

create and how can you make the present reflect that bigger vision? How can you get really clear on what your higher self looks like? How can you get clear on what your bigger mission in the world looks like? And when you've got that, just think about how you can use your business as a vessel for this greater vision. So with that being said before we dive in there are a couple of things that I would love to share with you. Firstly have you left us a review yet? If you've not simply screenshot your review and email it to podcast at bossbabe.com and we will send you a copy of the Boss Babe 25. This is the top 25 resources you need for personal and professional development. You honestly cannot miss this. It's packed with habits, routines, products and tips that are going to massively uplevel your life.

As well as that, if you leave your Instagram handle on your review, I will give you a shout out on the Instagram because I love when you all leave us reviews. It does amazing things for our podcast and allows other amazing, unapologetically ambitious women to discover it. So if you leave your handle, I'll give you a shout out to over 1.3 million women on Instagram. So hopefully that'll give you a bit of a profile boost. And then speaking of Instagram, I have a little gift to share with you. Only the best free Instagram training on the entire internet, if I do say so myself. I recorded a 90 minute training where I shared with you how you can grow your Instagram by 10,000 followers in the next 30 days. But not just any followers, your ideal clients as followers.

So if you want to get access, simply head to bossbabe.com forward slash IG dash growth. That's bossbabe.com forward slash IG dash growth. It's completely free and on demand, but you're going to want to remove all distractions, bring a journal, because if you've been to an online training of mine before, you know that I don't mess around. And the last thing I want to share with you is

if you are a six-figure female entrepreneur and you're in the growth stages of your business and you really want to build a scale with leverage, we actually have our mastermind open for six-figure female entrepreneurs and we're accepting applications now. If you're interested in finding more about that, just drop me a DM at IamNatalie, let me know a little bit about you and your business and we'll just hop on a call and see if it's the right fit for you. We're only actually accepting 20% of people that apply to us right now in the last month because it's so competitive and we only bring in women we know we can help scale to seven figures. So if you're ready to

scale from six, seven figures in the next three months, I think I'm your girl. Just drop me a DM anyway and we'll chat, we'll hop on a call and we'll see if it's a good fit. So with that, I would love to introduce you to Daniel. So Daniel Thomas Hynde is the founder and CEO of Evolution Eat, a transformational health coaching company that helps high performers master their diets and build healthy eating habits that last forever. A student, a self-mastery world-class coach and serial entrepreneur, Daniel has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs become peak performers while quietly building and selling a number of businesses over his career. This episode is going to be a game changer

for you and could really help you avoid the dreaded burnout that we talk about a lot on the podcast. Daniel actually taught at our Boss Babe retreat last year which was amazing. We brought together a number of women out of our mastermind. We lived in a house with them for three days and we just scaled their businesses like crazy. So with that let's just dive straight in. A Boss Babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself. Confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own version of success.

Welcome to the show. I am so excited to have you here. We've just been talking so much before the podcast about what we're going to dive into. So I know this is just going to be an epic episode. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me on. My pleasure. Okay, can we just dive in right at the deep end and talk about stress addiction. Just a light topic. Well, where to begin? It sounds insane, but for the vast majority of entrepreneurs that I work with, and you can include me in this category as well, for the vast majority of us, our success in business is directly tied to stress. In other words, we need stress to win. So when you live in survival, you live in stress. And let's take an animal in the wild, for example. So when an animal perceives a threat in its external environment, it has to mobilize enormous amounts of energy to either fight or flight. And this is incredibly taxing.

And it's only effective for short, isolated bouts of time. Human beings, we have this same mechanism. We see something or we think of something and we have that moment where we want to either fight it or flight it. But we have this unique ability where we can also think about our problems before they arrive, right? So it's not just the lion standing around the corner that's going to eat us. We forecast worst case scenarios, bring up memories from the past and turn on the stress response just by thought alone. So as it is, modern life is incredibly stressful, right? Like we live in a world where there's a ton of distractions, stimulations, demands, text messages, emails, notifications, all of it coming

your way at every given moment. We're always on alert, right? Like we're always on alert because there's so much input coming our way, just like an animal in the wild who is aware of the threats around the corner. But for an entrepreneur, somebody building their business, it's even more loaded because our ability to scan the horizon for danger, if you will, combined with our bias towards solving problems means that we're actually energized by threats and challenges, which is why this gets very complicated. Because to put it simply, that means that stress turns us on, right? Stress turns entrepreneurs on. It energizes us. And given that it's so easy to fashion your entire life around your business these days,

since modern technology, social media allows us to work and engage all the time, that means that we're living in a state of perpetual stress. And if stress becomes your primary motivator, then you associate stress with winning in that it mobilizes you to act and nets you more success. There's a whole world of issues that result from this. One, we become addicted to stress in order to succeed. And two, because stress is our validation for doing enough and for being enough. It's like, if we don't feel stressed, then you're not doing enough. So it becomes really hard to turn off, to take off. Once you pass a certain level of success in your business, it's even harder to say no to things, to allow yourself to not be working all the time. For some people, they just never learn. And they're always putting, putting,

putting, putting out, and they're never giving to themselves. And there's a whole mental, psychological, physiological hosts of problems that can result from living your life this way that I'm happy to dive into. But I've just said a lot right there. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all in one platform, Kajabi. You know, I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity, which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place. So it makes collecting data, creating pages,

collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students. So if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet, now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial. Go to Kajabi.com slash Boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial.

That's Kajabi.com slash Boss Babe. Yeah, so much of what you said, I can guarantee people are in a car or listening to this on their workout just going, yep, that's me. I mean, I can literally relate to last night. I was lying in bed and I could not get to sleep because there's so much going on at Boss Babe right now. My head is filled with ideas and I was literally lying in bed, putting together a strategic deck in my head of what I'm going to present to the team and how I'm going to do it. And it was this real excitement around, oh my God, this is an amazing idea. I really need to get it down, but I didn't want to pick my phone up. I'm like totally against phones in bed. So I

didn't want to pick my phone up. So I'm like creating this deck in my head. And I had to, at some point be like, Natalie, this is ridiculous. You need to stop. You need to sleep. This will still be there in the morning. And it's the same, you know, you could be lying in bed and then you think back to a conversation you had with someone that day and you're reliving the stressful conversation. For what reason? But how do we get out of that? How do we park our minds so that it's empty, you know, for going to bed and getting rid of those conversations that might be stressing us out or like park those ideas to the side? Like like do you have any ideas how we can do that yeah absolutely but before i go there i want to like lay out the context for all this so that it's like hyper clear and can make

it real for people of how this manifests in their own lives so we as a society you don't have to be an entrepreneur we haven't as a society have an addiction to stress but if you are an entrepreneur for all the reasons i mentioned before it's like we're tuned a certain way to be turned on by stress to solve problems to always be on alert to want to solve that stuff so our addiction to stress makes us identify with stress as our normal way of being it's normal to feel stressed out all the time. That's our baseline. So stress, though, causes you to suffer, causes you pain, whether that's emotionally, psychologically, physically, spiritually, all of the above. And suffering or pain manifests in a whole host of unhealthy habits, unhealthy beliefs, unhealthy coping mechanisms in order to survive the pain, to get by. So what are some popular coping mechanisms that we're all very aware of? Well, for me, my favorite coping mechanism is stress eating, right? Food is my drug. And that's the whole reason why I created my company Evolution Eat, because I grew up addicted to food and definitely an emotional eater, even if men don't typically identify as emotional eaters, I believe we all are.

So food is my coping mechanism, right? Sugar, caffeination. What are some others? Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, porn, masturbation, video games, late night shopping, chronic exercise, all of these things are popular coping mechanisms, things that we do to get by to survive the stress. And our coping mechanisms, this is where it gets fascinating. And I spent a lot of time thinking about this and writing about this. And this is the work that I do with my clients. I've had a lot of time to marinate in these ideas. Our coping mechanisms become our upper limits, meaning they create more problems. So we do them to get by, right? Like we eat to get by. We feel a certain way. We eat because we want to like, ah, just like take care of it or distract ourselves or whatever. But that habit compounded over time becomes an upper limit to our success because by engaging in it, it creates more problems

in one or many areas of your life, which now has you obsessing about that problem. For example, the next day I feel like shit because I ate a bunch of crap, or I'm really down on myself, or I exercise extra hard to try to make up for last night's sins, and then I'm exhausted for the rest of the day. It has you obsessing about yourself, obsessing about your problems, and it keeps you distracted from making progress in your business, for example. Because if you keep overeating at night, then you keep waking up the next day feeling a certain way. You try to make up for it. That shapes the way that you feel about yourself.

It shapes literally the way that you feel inside and it shapes the way that you feel about yourself. It then influences the behaviors that you take on and you're trapped in this loop. You're trapped in this cycle. So your unhealthy habits, your unhealthy coping mechanisms have you upper limiting your personal and professional growth and are silently or invisibly preventing you from making more money, more impact, more good in the world. We've all in one way, shape or form unconsciously designed our current lifestyle to keep us playing very small. And your addiction to stress is keeping you from being anywhere even close to being your best self. From that place, from that awareness, we get to actually look at, honestly, with full transparency inside, well,, and this happens way less now than it once did.

So I'll maybe speak about an earlier version of myself where this sort of stuff used to happen more regularly. Eating would be a way for me. It would always happen at night by myself. And I've always identified as a loner, grew up an only child, a creative, a writer, you know, being by myself was kind of like my secret weapon and also just the way that I found meaning in life. So there was a lot of good that came from that. But also because I had such an intense relationship with myself, anytime that I would feel stressed out or really tired or, God, like I just don't know how to turn off because

we're always stressed out. Don't know how to turn off. Don't know how to let myself turn off. I would turn to food because that would get me excited, right? I would get excited. I literally wouldn't be working while I'm eating. So I would create like a playful, joyous experience around that. Like I would only allow myself to watch a movie, for example, if I was going to party with food. And then it would cascade into eating more and eating more and eating more. And that sort of thing would happen frequently. And I realized that food was taking the place of intimacy. It was also a skewed way of entertaining myself, of actually giving myself permission to do something that isn't working. So the first layer is entertainment,

but the second layer, the deeper layer is intimacy. I would only do this by myself. I would never have a food fest with other people around. It was just me. And it would happen frequently over the weekend, nights where I could have been going out, being social, engaging in relationships, et cetera. And instead, here's me home alone, eating food late into the night until I feel so sick or terrible about myself or whatever. And that deep embedded shyness that I

developed as a little kid, food was a way to distract me from going out and making relationships with people. And then that kept manifesting over the years. And even if I developed all these healthy practices and very clean diet, these coping mechanisms, you know, they still show up every so often. So that awareness, right, has allowed me to know that that's a limit of mine. And from that place, be very purposeful about how I'm organizing my day, my time, my relationship with myself, and also knowing like, wow, that's a real edge of mine apparently. So purposely going out of my way to create plans on the weekends, for example, so that I don't fall into those old patterns because they're so easy to fall into. And that's contextually a segue into what we can do for ourselves, which is be very purposeful with how we're organizing our

days and designing our lifestyles. It's one thing to want to be peak performers. And it's another to really want to nurture and enrich your relationship with yourself while also executing at a very high level. So it's like learning how to design your life to have you being a peak performer, but also working on those deeper parts of yourself, those upper limits, so that you are really making the leaps and bounds that you desire. I love everything you've said. And in particular, you said, our coping mechanism has become our upper limits. And I just think that's so powerful and it's so so true and for me I don't really drink anymore but when I'd had a really difficult day I'd come home and just be like oh I want a glass of wine or I'd have like some bread with olive

oil and very European that would kind of be my switch off mode and for me now I try when I come home my phone goes away and I use cooking as a way to kind of segment me into the evening and kind of leave work behind but it's one of those things I think we can talk about it from that place but like you said we're all dealing with it all the time and you get out of it you identify what those upper limits are you work on fixing them and then there's more because I think sometimes deep down we're so addicted to the stress. And even now I find myself, I'm really having this kind of thing going on where I'm trying to only be at 50% capacity because I know if I'm at 50% capacity, there is room for me to

think, to create, to be a visionary, to be a good leader, to be a good friend, a good wife, all the things. But that's been a really, really hard journey. leader, to be a good friend, a good wife, all the things. But that's been a really, really hard journey. And I remember me and Danielle at our retreat together saying, okay, what would it look like Natalie for you to move to 50% capacity now? Because for me, I am such a driven, determined, achievement focused person. And so for me, I don't find it that hard to be at 100% all the time. And then I switch off when I go home. I don't work weekends. But during the week, I'm 100%. And so transitioning to that 50% has been really hard because you almost find yourself

sitting there like, oh, let me just pick up my phone and do this thing because I have time rather than, well, just because you have time doesn't mean you have to do it. And it's really hard. I suspect that during those moments when you're not doing something, you're like somewhere deep down, the impulse is I'm not doing enough, right? Like, am I doing enough? Am I being enough? Is this like, right? And so unless we're always doing something, then we're not enough. That's literally an endless cycle. There's no cap to that. So you can quite literally, and I've

seen this time and time again, pretty much anyone who works with me in a one-on-one way has gotten to this point where there's no cap. And so they quite literally work themselves into the ground. And there's a lot of success and accomplishments and accolades that you can create from being a total killer. And that's awesome. But there's also a cost and the cost is you. And it doesn't have to be that way, but it definitely takes a lot of mindfulness and effort to not let it be that way. And especially the more you've accomplished, the harder it becomes to switch because it's a total paradigm switch. Yeah, you're entirely right. And it's so hard because for a lot of us, we grew up being really rewarded for achievement, which is great. And we should

feel good about achieving, but we shouldn't feel like we have to achieve all the time to be worthy of, you know, it all goes down to that, to be worthy of love, to be important, to be worthy of you know it all goes down to that to be worthy of love to be important to be needed and you're exactly right you'll be in those moments and if no one's needing you and your entire business is killing it without you great position to be in very privileged position to talk from but you then question well am I still important or all of these different things and it goes even before that before you might be at that stage, you don't have to be working constantly to be making things happen. Like a lot of magic can come from being able to take time out and have ideas and think. Oh my God. Yes. And what you see a lot is, and we see this too, is people like on the Gary V train, they're hustling,

hustling, hustling. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but they hustle so hard their business just starts getting so much traction and because of that they're then having to just work really hard to keep up with it and they're killing themselves but their business is working really really well but then they get so burned out they can't even bear to look at their business wake up and go to work in the morning they're just exhausted and they lose that passion they had. And then all of a sudden their business starts declining because it's very much tied to them right now. You know, they haven't got everything else in place for it to be running without them. So the business starts declining, the person's feeling totally burned out. And then because they're not making money, they're stressed and it's getting worse and worse and worse. And so

they just get back on the hustle train to start making money. And they keep saying, I'll be happy when, I'll be happy when. But actually, when will you be happy? Because if you keep yourself in this loop and on this train, how are you gonna get off? It's like, stop the ride. Like it's time to come out of it and pull out

and see things at a bigger picture and ask, well, what is it gonna take for me to get myself out of this stress addiction and actually create a business or a career a lifestyle around me that feels good and I think we have to be doing that as entrepreneurs you know every single quarter because we can keep pulling out but we'll pull ourselves back in because our subconscious is controlling our behavior and so it pulls us in and so you're saying you think the first way that we can do that and do that pulling out is like, notice the habits that we're starting to pull towards and identify them. Is that the first step? And then what do you think from there? So maybe someone identifies, I'm listening to this,

they're like, yep, when I'm stressed, I reach for chocolate. And that keeps me going. What's next after they start identifying those things? And they're like, okay, when I'm stressed, I'm not going to turn to chocolate. I'm not going to turn to food. Where do they turn? Okay. So I want to get to that in a second. I want to call out, cause I was so captivated by what you just said with like burnout being a conclusion of where your addiction to stress can go. In fact, it's like probably the only conclusion of where it will eventually take you even despite being successful. That's the worst thing, right? Is that you are addicted to stress in order to accomplish and to grow your business. And it's great. And it's great. It's great. It's great. It's great. But if you're burning yourself out and the business is dependent

on you, then where's it going to go, right? It's going to go into you not being able to maintain the thing that you love the most. And that's a real heavy cost. And I actually experienced this myself. And I love pointing to all of my mistakes and failures in the past to let everybody know, even though I coach and I teach these things, it's because it's so deep to me. And because I know firsthand what it feels like to go this way. So just to give you a quick picture, that was the insanity of my life between January and June of 2018. And without giving the whole thing, I was running two startups, Evolution Eats, which is my baby and has been forever. And this new company that is no longer called the Vanguard,

which was a digital media company that I was building with my good friend, my best friend, Daniel DiPiazza, where we partnered with LA Weekly, which is the second biggest newspaper here in Los Angeles. We were building a whole new digital media platform with them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, institutional investors, board of directors, all of the big, sexy startup stuff. And I said yes, because it sounded so attractive. It sounded like, oh my God, here's my ticket to success. This is going to be the next big thing. And we were promised all of these bells and whistles. And in six months, I went from having two employees and a few service providers to nearly 50 employees plus another 50 clients in two different programs and partners, providers,

another dozen crew members and partners. It became very quickly an impossible situation. And I said yes to it because as much as we're addicted to stress, I'm also addicted to success, right? And so I said yes without really thinking about what the impact on my life would be. And because I've always been a high performer and I spend a lot of time on maintaining a healthy lifestyle, I was like, oh, I can do this until I couldn't do this. I could go on and on and on about that time in my life, and I'm happy to talk about it, but I don't really want to because I don't want to glorify the hustle. But I do want to highlight that if you're listening to this, then you're probably the

sort of person who would take on doing all that stuff too, that I said yes to. And that's the point, right? As a high performer, you're hardwired a certain way and there's no off switch. And as an entrepreneur, when all the pressure's on you, it's even more extreme. And for me, it's even more embarrassing to admit all this because I run a health and wellness company and I started sacrificing my health, my sleep in order to deal with all of the responsibilities of running two startups at the same time. So if you want to talk about being out of integrity, that was me. I turned my back on my own principles and on my

own teachings, all the things that I was teaching my clients, I completely turned my back on because I'm Superman and the rules don't apply to me. But that's a bunch of bullshit, obviously. And by the end of the summer 2018, I totally burned out. And the same time, our partners decided that they wanted to take the company in a different direction. So they ended up buying us out. And the shame I felt was one thing, but also the relief because I could finally just give my body what it was dying for, which was sleep and health and rest and restoration. But man, it didn't have to be that way. And I learned a lot about myself during that time, first and foremost, just how critical maintaining your health is And especially as young people, we think that we can get by, but it doesn't matter how young or old you are. It makes no difference. The second you start sacrificing your health, nothing works as well as it could and nothing is worth it because

you're basically telling yourself that you don't value your own life over whatever the thing is that you want to go build, right? Or this idea of success and or that success. You're also confirming this untrue bias that success requires you to steal from yourself effectively. Also, which is totally not true. There's no law in the universe where that's true, right? That's just a belief that we have, especially culturally in the entrepreneur space. That's a belief that we have, but it's not true. So what I learned from that experience was just how important keeping and holding and honoring your health is and creating a lifestyle that

reflects that. I don't just mean your physical health. I mean, your emotional health, your mental health. And so before we identify the coping mechanisms and how to work that at a individual level, contextually, the best way of addressing all of this is to devote yourself to something greater than just trying to fix the thing. Instead of trying to fix the thing, let's honor ourselves, right? So how do you do that? Well, creating a lifestyle filled with habits and routines and practices that you're showing up to every single day, no matter what. That's honoring what you care about the most. So for me, my health, that means now getting enough sleep. That means at least getting seven hours of sleep every day. That means I'm eating, I eat what I call an

evolution diet because paleo diet means something now, but I effectively subscribe to a paleo diet. I have this beautiful, gorgeous morning routine where I live here in Santa Monica and I run down to the beach every morning. I wake up at 4.45 and I meditate under the stars. And then just as the sun starts peeking up a little bit from behind me, as I'm done meditating for 30 to 40 minutes, I jump in the water. There's nobody around. It's freezing cold. And it's this epic experience that really puts me in my body and has me connected to something bigger than me and bigger than this physical world that we exist in. Like, it sounds profound because the experience is profound,

but I really come in contact with God or the universe or whatever you want to call it every single morning when I'm in the water, just freezing my ass off and splashing around like a little kid. And, you know, honoring that routine is my way of honoring myself. And it also helps me preemptively make choices that supports my honoring that sort of routine, which then protects me from doing the other stuff, the coping mechanism stuff. So for example, if I'm going to wake up at 4.45 and I need to get seven hours of sleep, well, shit, I better get to bed. I can't be up eating a bunch of crap well into the night because that would be dishonoring

my routine, right? So it's like, how can I create a life that preemptively has me locked into my power and has me elevating myself from a place of not trying to fix what's broken, but from empowering me all the more. And which also, I call it the backdoor strategy, but also prevents those unhealthy coping mechanisms from happening more and more and more. And so when you design your life, it's when you work on it every single day, God, you feel so much better. And you really do come in contact with your power. And from that place, you can create whatever the hell it is that you want to create. And you're positioned inside of your body, inside of your mind, inside of your heart to do that and to be the person who can do that because you're experiencing yourself as that person. It's not just, oh, I can do that because

now I feel good. It's after I'm complete with my morning routine, for example, I'm being the epic leader who has committed to that and I'm being him. So now I don't have to pretend that I'm going to go conquer the day. I'm already being that sort of person. Does that make sense? And so when you can experience yourself being the sort of epic hero that you've always aspired to be, first of all, you don't need to overeat late at night to try to fix something that's broken because you're not that person anymore right and so that's what I'm trying to teach and and help my clients create is these lifestyles and these honoring certain routines that have them being the person that they want to be which has them stepping into a whole new paradigm altogether.

Yeah, I love that a lot. I love about honoring your routine. And that's something that I also do and really means a lot to me. So, you know, regardless of how busy my day is, when I wake up, I'm not on my phone, I have a specific morning routine. And I have to I have like a luxury routine if I have tons of time. And then I also have a shortened routine for traveling or I have an early start because my sleep means a lot to me. Like I don't want to wake up too early and just do a routine if I know that I'm actually going to then dip in energy because I did that.

So I love that you said that. I love the self-love and self-worth piece of like really being who you want to be so that you feel, you know, really worthy whether you're working your ass off or not. And just like for me, having those little sticky notes around that really reaffirm that is important. And then I'm also hearing, you know, setting boundaries so that you can honor your routine and you can stick to something that feels good for you. Something you mentioned, which I would love to kind of touch on a little bit, you mentioned you're spending a lot more time now leaning into your relationships on a weekend and planning events and different things. For me, I also really identify as a loner. I love to spend time on my own. I get a lot of energy from it.

And I don't always feel a big need to socialize. I spend a ton of time with Stephen because as you'll know, when you're in a relationship, it's kind of like an extension of you. That really works for me. But I don't fill my weekends with social things. I love to just create space. And I think sometimes when you're so busy and you're on all the time, even socializing can become one of those things that can burn you out. How do you manage your energy around that? It's a great point. And you know what? I love that you shared that about you, Natalie, because I know you pretty well. And I'm sure all of your listeners and readers and fans feel like they know you really well. And from that place, I would have never guessed that you identify as an introvert

because you're just so out there, right? And you share so much of yourself. Nobody would suspect that. That doesn't seem obvious. So I just really appreciate you letting me know that. And it's also just a good moment for everybody to reflect. People are so much more complex and have so much more depth than we project them to be. It's just a moment to step back and to really honor the depth that each of us have and how much somebody can surprise you. But to get to your question, it's knowing your limits, knowing your boundaries, and knowing what the thing is that you're working on. So to now kind of go more granular based on your question before, you have this coping mechanism and you want to overcome it. Try to combine these two answers. So to overcome any sort of coping mechanism, which just to be clear, is any sort of unhealthy habits or behavior that you repeat regularly, you want to first

identify what is that emotional need that you're trying to satisfy. There's probably a first layer and then the second layer to any sort of habits or impulse that we have. So for example, like eating food, the first layer is, ah, that's going to taste awesome. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be a lot of fun, right? Maybe that's distracting me from working or whatever. So the first layer is fun, excitement, novelty seeking, taste, you know, all that stuff. The second layer is, like I said before, intimacy. I eat because I am trying to fill that void of intimacy of a deep relationship. I've been single for a while now, and I'm trying to get that through eating. And it doesn't have to be romantic necessarily. It could just be spending time

with somebody, right? And that sounds funny. Like you're trying to get something out of food. Like, of course that doesn't make sense, right? But we're not talking about a rational thought. We're talking about a deep emotional need that we have mistaken whatever habits or coping mechanism that we're doing to try to satisfy. And so obviously eating food is never going to help me feel connected to another person and feel intimate in that way. So to identify what it is that you're looking for, because from that awareness, what you need, I need intimacy. That's critical. From there, I can realize, well, let's not demonize what I'm doing. I could get really upset with myself over and over and over again and call myself stupid and say, I shouldn't do that. Or I could recognize, well, I fundamentally need that in my life.

I need more intimacy. I need that as an individual and realize, oh, okay, well, I'm not going to get it from food. So how else can I get it then, right? And to start devoting yourself to practices, habits, engagements, environments, whatever the thing is that has you moving towards that, right? So it's very purposeful. And you're really being clear about what it is that you want. So now you can build new habits that get you that, right? Or engage in new relationships that have you moving closer to that. And so for me, what I've done now is make my either Friday or Saturday night non-negotiable. I'm going to hang

out, be social with people, started dating recently and not nearly as much as I would like, but I'm working on it. And also protect my time as well, because I am somebody who relates to being an introvert. Obviously, that's already abundantly clear. So my Sundays are my no tech days. I do no tech. I do no social engagements. I do basically create a retreat-like experience at my home where I do whatever it is that I want to do, but I'm removed from all the distractions and stimulations and inputs of the outside world. And often what I end up doing is writing because that's my love. That's my passion. So I'll often engage in a long writing project. And this is a smaller contained version of what I do once a month, where I go to my cabin at the bottom of Sequoia National Park in the woods in the middle of nowhere by myself, no technology, no cell phones, no internet, no time. I make it a timeless experience. I literally put sheets on the clock so that I don't need to know what's going on. I'm just there by myself working on something that I really care about. It's often a creative project and I don't have to work. I'm not working every second, but that fills me with something when I engage in long bouts of writing. And my God, during those, you get to experience your brilliance

when you don't have all these distractions and things demanding your time and attention coming your way. I now understand how philosophers in the 19th century, for example, wrote these tomes, these massive multi-volume works because their brains could connect to these ideas and synthesize all these stray ideas. And they could just commit their attention to something because there wasn't anything else to do. There was no Netflix. There was no Instagram, no text message. There was literally nothing to do other than being a person in the physical world. And it's not to demonize the internet and all of that. I mean, what a big topic. It's just to say that if we live in that world all the time, then we're robbing ourselves of something else, which is that time apart. So I do that once a month and I have a three or four day experience and I do that once a week on my Sundays,

unless I'm traveling, I'm not like a robot, but I try to maintain that when I'm home on my Sundays where I have that time to fill my cup. And so I'm filling my cup and working on my heart by making sure that I'm being social at least once, if not two times a weekend. I'm also filling my cup and filling my heart by being totally by myself and honoring that experience, not doing it from a disempowered way

where it's like Friday night at 11 p.m. and I'm trying to complete some sort of marketing funnel and then beating myself to oblivion. There's that way of trying to fill myself or it's being very intentional about it. No, I'm creating this entire day, this luxurious space to be with myself, to nurture my creativity, to not have to respond to anybody or anything, literally, no internet, no cell phones, and to recognize that both are equally important to me and to not make one right and one wrong but to honor both and to devote myself to that it's a it is devotion what better to devote yourself to than to yourself I love all of that so much and it's been a game changer for me to just have no communications on a Sunday very much airplane mode get out in nature

I always tell people I'm working with like you're not performing heart surgery like no one is gonna die if you just like take a day off so put your phone in airplane mode and just get outside and like do something that's outside of work and realize that you don't need to be addicted to your phone so I love all of those I love how actionable it all was too I feel for everyone listening I would love for you to maybe you have a full revamp of your routine or you find something that's a non-negotiable for you every weekend and if you do I would love for you to share this just a screenshot of this podcast and tag us with what that's going to be so we can share it out to our audience and hopefully just really give some people really positive ritual ideas so with that I'm going to wrap this up because I feel like we could talk for hours and hours and

we'll have to do this again but I would love for you to tell people where they can find you and how they can find out more about all of the different concepts you've been talking about. Absolutely. I just want to say thank you, Natalie, for creating such a luxurious space. I feel so zen right now speaking to you. And that's a testament to just who you are and the way that you show up to your work and as a person. So thank you. So my company is called Evolution Eat. And the scope is obviously health and diet and wellness.

We really emphasize that word, like your total wellness. So we do all of this work, helping people create lifestyles that reflect and amplify their greatness, that help them overcome their coping mechanisms, and really that practice the skill of health, creating a life system of health so that you can go off and accomplish anything that you want. So evolutioneat.com, you'll find all of our stuff. I've actually gone ahead and created a special link for all of your people. If you just go to evolutioneats.com forward slash boss babe, I've made a free seven day course. It's like seven hours that has some of our best teachings and principles entirely for free. So you can run through that and check that out. You'll know if you're one of our people as well, if you go through that. So that's my gift to you and I hope you enjoy it. And you can always find us on social or shoot us an email of what you really got out of this. I love

learning what people do to source themselves. I really nerd out on people's habits and routines and like the deeper meaning of what it is, of why that's important to them. It's like one thing to just have a really cool morning routine, for example, but it's even more important to them. It's like one thing to just have a really cool morning routine, for example, but it's even more important to me to know like why you created that for yourself, why this thing means so much to you, why you've put time and attention into that. So yeah, feel free to shoot us a message on the socials or the email list and I'll try to reply back. Thank you so much for doing that for our audience. I know they are going to absolutely love it because there's so many takeaways from this episode.

And I feel like making sure that we don't burn out is so, so important. So massive thank you for that. And thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. You are such an awesome human being and I'm very, very grateful how close we've gotten over the past year.

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