The Food Medic - S8 E1: Setting boundaries and reclaiming time with Adrienne Herbert

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

This episode covers:How the pandemic has changed how we work.Hybrid working and it’s impact on our well-beingHow companies can support their employees health Setting boundaries with workWhy we all need white space in our diary How to prevent burnout when building your career.Busy vs productive : whats the difference? Adrienne herbert is a leading wellness professional, international TEDx speaker, podcast host, and author. Adrienne is a strategic advisor at the UK's leading fitness startup Fiit and is often invited to deliver talks and workshops for brands such as Apple, Barclays & Microsoft, to motivate and empower their employees to perform at their best. Adrienne is best known for her weekly self development podcast Power Hour that has millions of downloads and last year released her first book by the same title with Penguin Random House. If you loved this episode make sure to give it a review, rating (hopefully 5 stars) and share it with your friends and family. Thank you to our season sponsor WHOOP. Right now, you can get your first month free when you checkout through join.whoop.com/thefoodmedic@thefoodmedic/www.thefoodmedic.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hello, and welcome back to a brand new season of the Food Medic Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Dr. Hazel Wallace. I'm a medical doctor, nutritionist, author, and founder of The Food Medic. It's so nice to be back, and I can't believe that we're on season eight already. A big welcome back to those who have been here listening from the start and a big welcome to those who are joining for the first time. You've got a lot to catch up on. So since the last season, I announced my upcoming book,

The Female Factor, Making Women's Health Count and What It Means for You which is due for release on the 7th of July but you can pre-order it now. For those who are familiar with my work and my previous books you might be thinking why this book and why now? Nutrition will always be my biggest passion but as a woman and a doctor to many women I wanted to expand the work that I do especially when I discovered there was an unmet need within medicine and healthcare for women. And the more I shared female focused research, although it is limited, and content online, the more women responded, asking to be listened to. And it made me want to learn more, share more and empower more. I knew there was an unmet need here and I wanted to find some answers. And so for the past three years, in between COVID shifts at the hospital,

I've dedicated most of my time to researching how to help women live healthier, happier lives. And so the female factor was born. Okay, but that's enough of me plugging my book. Let's get to why we're really here today. And that's to hear from today's incredible guest Adrienne Herbert. I actually don't think I could have picked a better guest to kick off season eight and myself and the team in the studio were literally fist pumping the air during this episode because Adrienne dropped so many important lessons. If you've not heard of Adrienne before she is a leading wellness

professional, international TEDx speaker and podcast host of the Power Hour and also author of a book of the same title with Penguin Random House. Today we're going to talk about something a little different and chat about wellness in the workplace and avoiding burnout. Now this is something that I've personally experienced working in the NHS, especially through the pandemic and I know I'm not alone. I also very much feel like I'm on the brink of it now that I work mostly from home as part of the Food Medic so I'm really excited to speak to Adrienne today on the podcast. I'm also very lucky to have her as a close friend and someone who inspires me personally to do better. So without further ado here's Adrienne.

Today's podcast is brought to you by our seasoned sponsor Whoop. Whoop 4.0 is a 24-7 digital fitness and health coach that provides actionable insights to help you recover faster, train smarter and sleep better. And unlike most other wearables in the sense that it doesn't just tell you what you've done, but it tells you what you really need to know. Now, as many of you know, I've been using my Whoop for the last couple of years and I'm constantly impressed by how accurately it can quantify how I'm feeling so each morning when you wake up you get a recovery score from WHOOP and this is based on your sleep and other health metrics now that score can help guide your day and informs you how much strain you're ready to take on one of my

favorite features is the built-in sleep coach. It lets you know how much sleep you should be getting based on your expected activity level for the following day. Whoop can help anyone perform better. So whether you're preparing for a 5k, training for an event, or just looking to build healthier habits, Whoop can help you make smarter lifestyle decisions with data that is personalized to you. And right now, you can get your first month free when you check out through join.whoop.com slash thefoodmedic. Adrienne, welcome back to the podcast. Hazel, thanks for having me.

So the last time you were on the podcast I checked this morning was season four, episode two, if anyone wants to go back and listen to. So that was four seasons ago. And a lot has changed. I mean, we're friends, so I know what's changed. But I think, why don't you tell everyone listening what you've been up to and how your work has evolved since the last episode? Okay, so the last time I was on the show, we'll be talking about the Power Hour, we're talking about the book was the book out then power hour yeah so the book came out I also host the power hour podcast and I suppose what's changed the most since then I guess having a global pandemic was

quite a big shift for all of us and something that I'm of course incredibly passionate about is people and well-being but more specifically performance and what that really means so to perform at your best in work and in life so if you're an athlete then of course we know what that looks like for them to perform at their best but actually for all of us for ordinary people for people going to work for people raising children teachers doctors you know we all want to be able to perform our best. So what I'm really on a mission to do essentially is to help people perform at their best. And so during the pandemic, I started delivering workshops, keynotes, virtual webinars

for the employees of organizations. So a company that was suddenly like, okay, everybody's working from home. Everybody is having to adapt really, really quickly. Maybe they're homeschooling their kids and that we've still got team meetings to run. We've still got work to deliver. People are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling stressed. They're feeling burnt out. We all knew that it was a really, really difficult time. And so when I was speaking to these employees of these different companies, different organizations, I was doing question and answer sessions and I was just hearing the same things, whether the organization had 50 employees or 5,000 or 80,000. The same questions were coming

up again and again. I realized that universally, we were all facing similar challenges, but in different ways. So that's led me now to, you know, I've done this now for so many organizations, so many businesses and brands, some that people will know. And it's really, yeah, it's really exciting to be able to A, speak to the individuals. And like, you know me, I love to give actionable things, like things that we can do ourselves to take care of our well-being, to perform at our best, to communicate with others, to essentially be able to deliver the best work that we can or share our contribution with the world. But then I also, I'm kind of holding these businesses and brands to account as well and saying to them, well, what can you do? Like as an organization, what can you do to create an environment that allows

people to thrive? So yeah, it's been a real journey. I'm now going in as things are opening up. I'm now going into organizations and working with them. I'm delivering keynotes on stages. I'm really fortunate that I'm getting to travel around the world to deliver this work. I'm getting to meet lots of different people. And yeah, it's constantly evolving, actually. And I think more people than ever, which is great, are really starting to embrace and accept the fact that well-being is not this nice thing on the side, this nice thing to have where we all talk in a soft voice and we have a green juice.

Well-being is actually essential for performance. It's not one or the other. If you don't take care of it, if you don't prioritise it, if we don't put it on our agenda and go, this is really important, we can't expect people, let alone talk about performance at your best and thrive, this is really important. We can't expect people, let alone talk about performance at your best and thrive. We can't even expect people to survive and to want to wake up in the morning and feel motivated to do their work or raise their kids or go out the

door for a run. You know, you know, me, I'm a runner. It's like for people to really feel their best, then we can start to do our best in work and in life. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I think, I mean, it's so interesting how your work has evolved. I think you were always on this path, as long as I've known you, and it feels like this is exactly what you should be doing. And even before this episode, we had lunch and Adrian was like almost coaching me unintentionally about my work. And obviously we've come through like two years of pandemic and how we worked pre-pandemic is very different to how we work now. What lessons do you think we can take from that?

Like whether they're good or bad? Yeah, there's so many. So I think the first thing to know is that it's not the same for everyone. And as we know, unfortunately, some people, the people who probably need the most support and then most help often get, they get, you know, the short straw, if you like. So it might be single parent households, or it might be young people who don't have a lot of access to funds, or they don't have a big space in which they live at home, they be you know flat sharing house sharing so it's very different for everybody depending on the work that you do depending on how much money you earn where you live there's so many things

that factor in but I think the biggest I guess I suppose shared truths are we used to have a set environment we used to have a set amount of rules and we used to kind of all know okay I leave my house at this time maybe and I commute to this place where I do my work and I meet with these people and then I leave and I go here and I go there and there was some kind of expectations that we all had about that you know we maybe were expected to be in the same place as other people that we worked with or we might have been expected to be online and at your desk and available at certain hours of the day. So I think when all of that went out the window and everything changed, when the kind of rug got

pulled from underneath our feet and suddenly it was like, okay, you're at home, you have complete autonomy and agency over your schedule. Your co-workers aren't there. Your boss can't see you. You know, like you could be working from your bed. You could be wearing your pajamas. You could be going out to the park to walk your dog in the middle of the day. And this, of course, has its pros and cons. So on the one hand, I know a lot of people are very pro hybrid working work from home, it's the best, it's the best, you know, I can get up early and do a yoga class, and then I can put a wash on and I can do these things and have focused time and they might have created a

wonderful environment in their home office where they can do their best work and they're like this is the best I'm never going back to the office you know those people they're like I don't want to sit on a packed train anymore I don't want to have to be in boring meetings where I don't even contribute like I just this is better for me and of course there are other people who are like this is not working for me I actually don't have a space in which I can work. I'm not meeting other people and I'm missing out on interactions. I feel lonely. I'm not meeting people who I can learn from. So my career, people ask me a lot of questions

around career progression and saying, well, how can I get mentorship? How can I meet other people in my organization if I'm just at my kitchen table on a laptop and I'm a graduate and I've just started working for this company? So there's a whole host of challenges and I think what people have kind of accepted now is that it's not going back. I think initially

people thought this was a short term thing. Let's all figure it out for a couple of months and then we'll all go back to how it was. But I think that, you know, a lot of the research, a lot of the data, things coming out from government, UK, from LinkedIn, from these different think tanks that are saying, especially younger generations, they are not even willing to go back to the way it was before. They now when they search for jobs, they will search for jobs that allow them to work remotely, to work from home. And if a job dictates that they have to be in a specific city in an office every day, they won't even apply for the job above how much they'll get paid or the job title. It's that important to people. So I think when it comes to well-being, I think the pros for some people are this agency

of time. You know, they can create a structure that suits them. They can work maybe at a time that's better for them. They can maybe save money on the commute. Maybe they can feel as though, yeah, they can make a structure that works for them. But on the flip side, I think unless you're quite self-motivated, quite self-disciplined, unless you have a structure in place, unless you have boundaries, if there's no framework, then work from anywhere can easily become work from everywhere. And people feel like they suddenly live at work because their laptop is in their bed, they've got Slack on their phone, emails on their phone, WhatsApp on their phone, and they feel like they can't escape their work.

And that's where I think people are really starting to feel this overwhelming stress, this burnout epidemic that we're kind of witnessing, but then saying, oh, well, you know, everyone's burnt out. You know, people just go, hey, how are you doing? Oh, I'm really stressed.

I'm burnt out. And everyone goes, oh, yeah, me too. Carry on. You know, this is not okay. We have to I think it's 42 percent of millennials age 25 to 39 I think that's the millennial bracket said that they have experienced burnout in the last two years and I would argue it's probably

more than that and it's only going to increase that number is only going to increase if we don't start to look at okay what's changed what pieces of this puzzle have changed how we work how we live which ones are making it better which ones are making it worse and being open and honest about that conversation and saying okay you can't change one piece of the puzzle without expecting everything else to change our emotional health our social health our physical our mental it's all connected So there's pros and cons. And as I say, very, very different for each individual. Yeah. And like you mentioned, it's not just on the individual. It's also on the organization.

So I guess, what can we do as organizations? Or what can organizations do to support their employees? And what can we do for ourself? Okay, well, I'm going to flip it around. I'm going to start with the individual because I'm a big advocate of this, you know me, individual ownership. I'll always say that to people, not in a way that says, oh, it's all on you. So it's your fault. It's not about blame. But it's really about people understanding the mindset of individual ownership in an exciting way and saying, actually, you do have choices. You do have agency in your life. You do, no matter what your circumstances are today, there'll be something you can control. You can maybe not control, but influence. So maybe

you can influence your own energy and mood by simple things like the time that you go to bed, how much caffeine you drink, how much alcohol you drink, what sugary foods you eat and when, you know, things that we all kind of know, but then we go, oh yeah, but I really like having a coffee and I really don't want to go to bed early because I want to watch Netflix. So I do often start with this idea that actually individual ownership, so, so important. We have to take responsibility for our own well-being first and say what things can I influence what things am I listening to that feed my mind and body what am I what words am I saying when I talk to other people who am I what am I doing every day my actions have a look at your actions have a look at your routines habits I know you talk about habits a lot so start with the self

and start with okay what can I influence? Get excited and get empowered to say, I do have influence over my life, over how I feel today, and how I choose to show up. So that's the first thing. Can you, we're going to come on probably to talk about scheduling and, you know, creating space and reclaiming time, but these things are actually on you. So you're an individual and you do have some agency and power there. Then to the organization, I'd say, and I'll be honest, like I said, I'm quite candid when I speak to people about this. It starts from the top down. Often organizations, especially big ones will say, let's just do this for our junior staff members. But what about your leadership? What about the leaders and the managers? What about the C-suite, like the people who are making the decisions, if they're not doing these things, if they're not

showing up to the wellbeing workshops, the mental health seminars, if they're not taking time out of their diaries and schedules to have holiday. For example, if your senior manager is sending you an email at 9.30pm, and it says on the email, no action required, you know, you don't have to do anything just ahead of tomorrow. I just wanted to tell you this, this, this and this. If you're a junior member of that company, regardless of whether the email says no action necessary, you're being the example is being set that people are still working at 9.30. They're still sending you emails at 9.30. So you might be thinking, well, I need to do the same, I should be showing that I'm still online. And I'm still working because that way, you know,

whether you feel like you're going to need to impress them or whether you just feel like that is the standard that is set. So instead, I would say if you are that manager or that leader, schedule send. If you do your best work in the evening, that's fine. But schedule send that email for 8am or 9am for the working hours, which people are expected to be working for your company. And if you're a junior member who has Slack, you know, the Slack function, if you have that on your phone, take it off, you know, you can go onto your laptop and check Slack, don't be standing in a queue on a Saturday morning, getting your coffee, reading emails from work, reading Slack messages and then saying, I'm so overwhelmed, I can't switch off from my work.

Because again, it's the individual. But I think organizations need to lead from the top, lead by example, C-suite members, leaders, managers, they have to embrace this and show that it's a priority, not just talk about it. I also think that there's environmental things that they can do. You know, it doesn't have to be huge, radical things like putting a basketball court on the roof, but you could do things within your office and within your team where you say, okay, Tuesday lunchtime, we have a run club. Everybody on a Tuesday, if you come in, bring your trainers, bring your stuff. You could have two groups, you know, like a really fast group, a slower group, and everybody goes and does that. You could do walk and talks.

So some meetings do not have to be at a desk. If you're not looking at slides, if you're not looking at, we've all spent so long looking at screens, take your meetings outside and go and walk with whoever you're talking to. Think about things that you can do when you do social. So a lot of companies, they'll do like the team social or the offsite. And it's always based around alcohol and, you know, let's go paintballing and let's drink beer. And some people will enjoy that.

Some people won't. So how about when you do your next offsite, do something active, take everyone indoor rock climbing, take everyone on a hike, take everyone to do a cookery lesson. I don't know, but we can be creative and think about putting wellbeing

into the social things that we do and into our weekly schedule so that it becomes normal, it becomes part of our working week and life and that everyone gets kind of, if everyone's doing it, then you kind of don't have a choice. You're like, oh, we're all going on this hike or we're all going to do this as opposed to everything team building has to be based around beer and paintballing. You know, I don't want to do that.

No, I completely hear you and I think you said something really important there about not just kind of paying lip service to well-being and I don't know how many kind of burnout well-being webinars or like online courses I've been sent whilst working in the NHS right I don't have time to sit down and do that. And also, I don't find it exactly engaging when I'm sitting there going through slides on my personal time. Yeah. Like, that's not supporting your workers.

It's actually the kind of, like you said, coming from the top and coming through the system and what can we do, what environment changes can we make? How can we change the rotas to make them more flexible for staff. So I think it's a really important point that we just don't have organisations who are saying, we hear you, we acknowledge this as a problem, do this in your own time. It's really important that it's like a cultural change but I also agree with you on our kind of taking ownership of what we can change the power that

we have and you talk a lot about kind of making space and reclaiming time yeah and I want to hear what the secret sauce to doing that is yeah okay wow there's yeah definitely a lot I could say here so I'll start off with the concept of white space so i talk about this a lot anyone who listens to the power hour podcast or if you've read the book the power hour you'll know what i'm talking about but white space is essentially space that we all need within our day within our week in our life which is not filled with anything so if you don't have any white space if you look at your schedule and every hour of every day, there is something in it. I mean, we've all been there, especially Hazel, I know you and I are both, you know, A type people and we want to say yes to new projects and we want to do things. And, you know, I'm a mother as well. So you can imagine with my son's

schedule, it's very easy to fill every hour of every day. But when that happens, there's no space for spontaneity. There's no space for a long phone call that runs over at the time there's no space to maybe go oh my gosh it's really sunny today and I wasn't expecting it to be I'm just gonna head out for a nice long walk there's no space to just come up for air and go what was the last thing I was doing and kind of debrief and take a moment before you dive into the next thing and prepare for the next thing. So white space could be 20 minutes. It could be two hours. Again, for people who are working in meetings back to back, I say, does your meeting need to be an hour? Or could it be 50 minutes?

And then that 50 minutes, it ends at 1.50 and there's 10 minutes of white space. So in between meetings, maybe you want to grab a coffee, stretch your legs, or just sit and think or send a follow up email so you don't have to do it at 8pm. So add white space throughout your working day. But then in the context of your life, where's the white space? You know, is there a weekend coming up where you have no plans, so you don't have to get up and go to this thing or go to that yoga class or meet that friend for coffee? Is there white space even in your social life even in your holiday for example if you've got an itinerary for every day we don't have to I think we've been told we have to fill every moment to live our lives to the best and just to squeeze the most out of everything and it's kind of

contradictory I guess because I am one of those people. I love to encourage people and say, yes, you can do it. But white space has always been a game changer. It's changed my life. And the more I talk to others about it, and the more people do it, you know, again, I've delivered these talks, and people will say to me, maybe four weeks later, they're like, I have started to add white space every Thursday at 3pm, or every morning, I have 9.30 till 10 or whatever they do. And they just it's a game changer. I cannot tell you even if you're listening to this and think, Oh, yeah, there's there's merit in that. Listening to it is not going to make a difference to your life. Actioning it and actually looking at your schedule today, right now, what's coming up in the next seven days? Where can you create some white space? I love that concept. Like, I mean, I've only ever heard of white space from you today.

And already I'm like, where can I fit in white space? Because that was my dilemma when I came to you today. I was like, my time is not my own anymore. I need to find time to even wash my hair at the moment. And you were like, Hazel, you need white space. And I'm like, what's white space? I need some of that. So I love that.

That's so good. And I think if I could add one more thing, linking back to how we were just talking about, you know, how can organizations do it? How can we do it? One more thing that is super important for companies of any size, what's important in your company gets measured.

So output, you know, customer retention, OKRs, whatever it is. If it's important to your business, it gets measured. If it's important to you, then it gets measured. So output, you know, customer retention, OKRs, whatever it is, if it's important to your business, it gets measured. If it's important to you, then it gets measured. So if you're not measuring your own well-being, so it's like, well, how do I do that? This is a good example of doing that. Can you have honest conversation with people in your team and say, how are you feeling and how can we measure how you feel? So is that on a scale of one to 10? Or is that how much white space do you have? Or is that, you know, how much on a scale of one to 10, for example, if you're talking about something like burnout or sleep, or just general overall mood and energy, we can start to score

ourselves, even if you don't want to share it with anyone else. And if you notice that I'm consistently giving myself like a three out of 10 for energy, a three out of 10 for enthusiasm, a three out of 10 for creativity and ideas, that is a symptom or a sign, should I say, that you are burnt out and that you've neglected your own well-being. So I think that's something that we can all start to think about, but maybe companies could start to look at, okay, building well-being structures and strategies to measure this, and then they can really see which things are working as well. If they want to implement change after six months or even six weeks they can ask the same questions and see is this improving the well-being of our employees yeah that's a really important point

the other thing is you know if you fill your work day with meetings and other projects and things you can get to the end and feel like you haven't actually accomplished very much but you've been incredibly busy and I feel like there's some days where I get to that point and my question is like how do you know if you're being productive or you're simply just busy yes well as you know I sometimes get kind of asked questions or introduced as like this productivity guru. People are like, if you want productivity, Adrienne's a girl. And it's quite interesting because the first thing I'd like to say, I mean, the word productivity is essentially, you know, the Latin word, the origin is product, to produce, it's to produce. So often we think productivity means producing more.

So it's volume, more, more, more, more, more. But what I always want people to think about is the quality of what we're producing and the reason and the intention. So the difference between being busy and being productive is that you can be busy doing things all the time. You can be on a treadmill and you can just churn out another thing, another thing, another thing. So you're producing. But the difference between feeling like what you're doing is productive is what you are producing is valuable. It's great. It's a good contribution. So a really, really, really simple example would be if you wrote three books this year, you could say, right, I've been really productive. I've written three books this year. I've produced three. And maybe you've had to rush through them. maybe they're poor, maybe they're not your best work.

Or you could spend the same amount of time, the same 12 months to produce one book, and that book could be brilliant and insightful and wonderful and amazing. So how are we measuring which one was the most productive? Three books, more produce, or one amazing, fantastic book? So it's not always quantity and quality, it's kind of weighing up

the two and saying, is what I'm doing valuable? Is it important? And am I delivering my best? So it's firstly thinking about it in that way and going, okay, productivity isn't just more, more, more, more, more. I know that if I try and do 11 things, each one of those things is going to get however much percentage, I probably should have said 10 things. Let's go with 10 things, easier maths. 10 things, each thing's getting 10%% of me whereas if I'm doing two things really well each thing can get 50% of me and even better I'm doing one thing it's getting 100% of my energy my focus my attention my ideas you see where I'm going with this I'm like mind blown you see so I guess last thing to say on that is that produce less, but achieve more.

We could finish now. Let's all take a break. We could finish now. White space. White space. That's so true. It's so true. And I think the last two years, especially people who've been mostly working from home,

it's very difficult to kind of have that kind of clock in time clock off time when you're not leaving a physical space you don't have the commute and so yeah you may still work the same hours but you might be checking in earlier or you might be opening up your laptop when you're like sitting in front of the tv because you need to get ahead of something or someone's emailed you and you think it's polite to email and reply for people who are still working at home or working that hybrid life where it's sometimes in the office sometimes at home how can you create like the physical boundary or almost like that buffer between work and home when working from home yes great question so I think we've all probably by now tried to we've probably tried loads of different things so you might have tried creating a space where you just do your work there and I used to say

that to people in the pandemic I'd say just do your work in one place don't take your laptop to the table and the kitchen and your bed and the garden but of course sometimes we do that so sometimes weather's good and you're like hey I can take my desk outside I can I can work from the garden so I think people have probably experimented with different things so what it's important what it's really important for them to do now is to look and go, which ones work? And be really honest with yourself. You know, we can all find things to do.

And you know, if scrolling on your phone helps you be more productive, then be my guest. But the reality is for most people, myself included, it doesn't. So I know that I have to police my own behavior when it comes to getting focused work done. My phone goes on airplane mode. I leave it in the kitchen and I go into my office and nothing's going to happen in one or two hours that can't wait so you know really kind of creating an environment that not only allows you to thrive but makes it impossible for you to fail you know

you know both of us work a lot with athletes and we have a lot of athlete friends and when you think about an athlete going into an environment, whether that's training, whether that's competition, there are so many meticulous things that they will have done and thought about to not only just thrive, but the environment that they are in is optimum for success

and it is impossible for them to fail. So I try to think about that. I'm like, okay, if I need to focus, I need no distractions. I need even just visual distractions. I try and keep my office quite simple, literally, you know, having natural light, having some plants, trying to make it calm. As someone who's busy and got a lot of energy, like I don't need more things to distract me. Or if you're working with others, what's the environment, for example, for the outcome that you want? So if you know you're

going to have a difficult conversation, maybe there's going to be conflict, disagreement, thoughtful discussion, what's the best environment for that? You know, you probably don't want a room that's really small and there's no window and the air condition doesn't work and people are already feeling agitated and stressed and you just can't wait to get out of that room. So try and think about the environment in a really simple way. Is it bright? Is it cool? You know, is the things there that are going to distract you? And then yeah, policing your own behavior, it's really, really hard. I know it's hard, you know, especially think of yourself, if you're a parent, you probably do it with your kids, you know, you set up an environment for them to do

their homework. And then you say, no more snacks, no going to the toilet, no distractions, you don't put the TV on and, you know, do all these things and then say sit there and do your homework so try and make a space for yourself that allows you to to thrive and to do your best work and then the buffer part a you could take the white space approach or you can have something that like a routine or something that symbolizes the end of your working day so it could be that you do a fake commute. I think we talked about this before people do this fake commute. So they have a cycle route and they'll just cycle one lap around the block at 8am and then they start their work and then they cycle around the block at five or six whatever time and then they know when they come back. Okay, my working day is

done. Or if you have a dog, you know, take the dog out or you could have something even like your favorite podcast or some music something that you put that on at six o'clock maybe take a shower you know take a shower and say right I you know you wash off the day and then emerge from the shower change your clothes and feel like I'm now starting the evening you know have something to to differentiate if you can because it's so easy otherwise for everything to blur everything to roll on and it's it's not good for us to just feel like you know our work and our life I say in the power hour book imagine a two different play-doh balls of play-doh a red and a blue roll it together into a marble and of course if you love your work

it's quite easy to say oh but I love my work so I'm always thinking about it and I'm always doing something and I jot down notes but then if I said you, extract the red from the blue of this marble of Play-Doh, it is so hard to do it. And that's what's happened with our work and our life. But unfortunately, I feel like work has, if it was a competition between the two, work is winning. You know, when people talk about work-life balance, work is the word that comes first because that is usually the order of priority.

So if you had that marble, is it all one colour? And how you can't extract the two, it's impossible for people to say, how do we have work-life balance? You can't cut them apart. But I think it's important for us to create boundaries, create space between the two and recognise when we're working and when we're living.

Yeah, that's so important. I do love the buffer idea. I used to, well, I still do, try to go for a walk after work, because it's like my kind of post, I call it my mental health walk, because I feel like it's that like, closes the stress cycle. And it means that I'm like starting my evening. But I think, you know, you just said something really important that resonated with me. And that was that, you know, some people really love their work. And so they just want to keep working or they're thinking of ideas all the time. And I'm one of those people where I'll wake up at 3am and write in my notes

that I need to do something tomorrow or like a podcast idea. But how, when you're kind of at that point in your career where you're growing something or you're building something, how do you avoid burnout in those situations? Like, how can you? Can you? Is it possible? Yeah, oh gosh, it's such a struggle for people

who are ambitious people, people who are driven. And that is so many people, let's be honest. People that tune into your podcast, my podcast, they are high achieving people. They've got ideas. They've got a lot of get up and go, which is why they want to achieve so much. So I do think it's possible, but not maybe all at the same time so again I want to use this like

athlete analogy so we know that athletes they train they compete and they recover each one of those things is equally important it's not all about the competition it's not all about the training and it's not all about the recovery they each have an equal spread so when we think about ourselves and our work and okay how can we do our best work and not get burnt out because we do love it. We want to do it every day. We want to do it all the time. You never would say to an athlete who loves to run, well, I'm a sprinter and I love to sprint. I'm just going to sprint every day, all day, keep sprinting. You're never going to stop. They have to have training. They have to have recovery. They have to have competition. So the recovery part as well isn't just sleep.

Often when we think about recovery, people just think it's sleep. That's it. Recovery can be rest, it can be deep relaxation, it can be fun, it can be joy, it can be socializing. So again, looking at your whole schedule, when are you work? When are you training? When are you competing? What's the big thing you're working towards? What's the deadline? What's the goal? And when are you recovering? And if the recovery part is one day, every three months, it is not enough. You know, you imagine a Formula One car with no brakes, going fast, going fast, doesn't matter how fast it goes, how far it goes, it's only going to end in one way, it's going to crash and burn. So the recovery could be that actually every week, you have something that you do that you enjoy that has no outcome burn. So the recovery could be that actually every week, you have

something that you do that you enjoy that has no outcome attached. So again, someone like you and I, if you're an entrepreneurial person, so much of what we do has an outcome attached, you know, how many downloads, how many views, how many sales, whatever the job is you're doing, there's an outcome that people can measure, and we become addicted to measuring it. But actually doing things that have no outcome attached, like baking, or I was actually doing a Minions puzzle with my son. Minions puzzle, you can imagine.

All the pieces are yellow. It all looks the same. And he's gone to bed and I'm still sitting there doing the puzzle because I'm like, oh, this is good. And you realize, why are you doing this puzzle? Because there's no outcome attached. No one's going to rate it or review it or like it or tell me that I've got to do it again i just you could just do the thing and we've lost that i think a lot people have lost their their hobbies if you're good at something you should

sell it you should do it on youtube you know you can just have something that you do for joy and for fun something you share with another person maybe you've got another friend who is a geek who likes puzzles or who likes to pay you know so yes back to train recover compete when are you recovering what does that look like it's not just one early night self-care have a bath you know there's things we need to do regularly every week every month in order to recover and to avoid the inevitable crash and burn of burnout which so many people have experienced yeah I also think that word self-care tends to come after burnout but it can feel a little bit I don't know like it's not enough um but I guess I mean I want to

know what your feeling is on the word self-care what it means I think it's definitely been I think it's been taken out of context and I think that that it's diminished, you know, have a bath, self care, that isn't self care. I think self care can be lots of different things. I think one way, a more, maybe an unpopular opinion, I don't know, let's see, is that for me, when people say self care, they often say to people, they think it's self compassion, or they think it means don't do something difficult. For example, you know, I talk to people a lot about rise and shine, bright and early. I'm an early riser. And sometimes people go, but what about self-care?

If you wake up tired, surely you should just stay in bed. If you're exhausted, you don't want to drag yourself out of bed and go and do that Pilates class or go for that run. And what I say to that is there's self-care in the moment and there's self-compassion in the moment and there's self-compassion for your future self. So, you know, we might have discussed this. It's definitely thinking about, well, what's going to be good for me in the long run? The ultimate outcome that I want.

What's going to be the best thing for my physical health, my mental health? What's going to be, for example, if you're someone like me, if you're training for a race, what's going to be the best thing on the start line of that race is knowing that I did the training, knowing that I I did the work knowing that I put in the miles what's going to be the best outcome when you sit down to sit an exam medical students tuning in knowing that you've done the work you've done the research you've put in the hours you've put in the time so self compassion and self-care isn't saying you know what don't read any more books don't do any more

study you've you know what if you don't feel like it don't do it we all have to know what, don't read any more books, don't do any more study. You know what, if you don't feel like it, don't do it. We all have to do things we don't feel like doing. And that's where I think it gets difficult because people think that it's, as I say, choosing the easy option or choosing the most comfortable thing in that moment. And that that is self compassion. And I really challenge people actually to think about that deeply and go, is this me being kind being compassionate to myself now and in the future is there a world in which actually doing the hard thing today is is self-compassion because it's setting me up for success it's setting me up for

the win in the long run and it will pay off so I think it's a I think it's a mixed bag for me when it comes to uh self-care I'm not saying that's the right answer I think some people would probably say that's my a-type uh you know high achiever coming out I think and I think you're right I feel like self-care means so many different things to so many different people and there's there is the time for it and I think being compassionate to yourself is absolutely possible whilst also taking the hard option and because you are being compassionate if that's what you want in the future and sometimes you have to be uncomfortable for a short period of time in order to have the comfortable thing that you want in the future right absolutely and one last thing on self-care is that also I think people associate

it with self in terms of self-indulgence or selfish actually again looking at what the meaning of words it's not selfish and self-indulgent I think often people do think of it in that way you know as I said it's that that picture that we see of somebody with a face mask on it's like these things are again going back to well-being as essential. Taking care of yourself is essential. How can you give to others what you don't have yourself? So it's not, yeah, self-indulgent to think, oh, wait, you're going to spend a whole Sunday, you know, in the bathroom or wherever you do your self-care.

But actually it is essential. Yeah, I completely agree. So I wrap up the podcast with three questions. this is a new season I've rotated the questions so but I've kept the first one which is what's your number one takeaway that you want people to take from this podcast episode one one I mean I wrote down like five that you said I think it's gonna have to be white space think it's gonna have to be white space. Yes, it's gonna have to be white space. Because now that hopefully people are listening to this and thinking, oh, I don't have any. I want people to own it, embrace it, enjoy it. Tell me what you're doing in your

white space, or don't just enjoy it. I love that. What's the most important lesson you've learned over your career? Oh, this is a deep one. The most important lesson, did learned over your career oh this is a deep one the most important lesson did you say yeah I've learned over my career and I've learned this quite recently is that if you are someone who is ambitious and you are someone who has big goals and big dreams I will always be the person that tells you life is limitless there is nothing genuinely if you want to do it go for it I will always encourage is nothing genuinely, if you want to do it, go for it. I will always encourage people to say if she's going to do it, if he's going to do it, if anyone can do it, why not you? But what I've learned is that if you always want more,

if you always want the next thing, you're never going to feel satisfied, happy, rewarded, whatever the word is. So have one eye on today and have one eye on what you've achieved. What is the impact? What's the reason for you doing the work that you do as well as one eye on the future? Because if you're always just looking ahead, nothing that you do today is going to be enough. You could write a bestselling book. You can run a new PB in your your marathon you can be interviewed or interview your your absolute hero and icon and you'll go okay what's next and that's very unfulfilling so it's the lesson that i've learned probably the hard way probably still learning it

but i think look at your career as a long um endurance event and think every step of the way focus on that step as well as looking at the finish line yeah and it's not a sprint it's like you don't have to achieve everything tomorrow yes just lesson to myself there um and what's your motto in life oh my gosh well I can't wait no I can't wait to share this with you because it changes every year okay and I would encourage people to change their motto every year because we're not the same. You know, what you want when you're 21,

probably not going to be what you want when you're 41. I don't know. So my motto changes every year. And on my birthday, I have a think about it. I'm like, what am I leaving behind this year? What am I stepping into next year? And so my motto this year is, I am ready to see just how good it can get.

And what I mean by that is after two years of a pandemic, working from home, homeschooling, not being able to travel, COVID, having COVID myself and feeling so, so ill. The motto this year is my health, my career, my relationship, my friendship, how I'm ready to see just how good it can get. Give it to me. The energy, the energy. We love it. Thank you so much, Adrienne. Thank you. I can't believe it can get. Give it to me. The energy. The energy. We love it.

Thank you so much, Adrienne. Thank you. I can't believe it's over. I'm like, that was so quick. It was really quick. Where can people find more of you? Because I know that everyone's going to be flocking in their hundreds

to find out more from Adrienne and how they can create white space in their life. Yes, well, I guess you can listen to the Power Hour podcast. You can find me on Instagram. It's Adrienne underscore LDN. And you can head over to my website, AdrienneLondon.com to inquire and find out

if you want to get me in to come and speak to your manager and help them to create space for you to thrive, then you'll find me. Just look. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks, Hazel. What an episode. If you did love it as much as I did, you know what to do. Leave a review, a rating, hopefully five stars and share it with someone you know will love it too.

Thank you so much for tuning in today. Make sure to subscribe so you're the first to hear about any new episodes. And again, in this season, we're going to continue with our mini episodes of Ask Dr. Hazel. If you would like to submit a question to the podcast on any topic related to health, fitness, nutrition, women's health, please send your voice recorded questions to lindsay at thefoodmedic.co.uk.

That's all from me. See you again next time.