The Wellness Scoop - Checking In and What We’re Loving

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

A shorter episode focused on what we’ve been enjoying reading, watching and listening to during these strange times and how we’re trying to keep happy and productive. Poem: The Rainbow Children, Gemma Peacock    Books:  Playing to win, A. G. Larfley and Roger L. Martin Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, Youngme Moon When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi Any Human Heart, William Boyd  Educated, Tara Westover  A Monk’s Guide to Happiness, Gelong Thubten    TV Show: Unorthodox, Netflix    Podcast How I Built This, Guy Raz  How To Fail, Elizabeth Day Mo Gawdat episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/special-episode-how-to-fail-mo-gawdat-on-how-to-cope/id1407451189?i=1000469228528 The Dropout, ABC News  Can We Just Ask, Season 2, What’s the Good News  Gelong Thubten on Happiness as a Choice: https://podcasts.apple.com/sk/podcast/happiness-as-a-choice/id1428704212?i=1000444555778  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Ella Mills, and my co-host is back in action today Matthew Mills which I'm absolutely thrilled about. Thank you so much for your feedback on last week as the same as last week we are recording at home, we're recording in our bedroom just watching a few kids scootering down the street on little pink scooters which is a pretty nice sight and today we're going to be talking all about kind of how to be happy and things to distract ourselves and learn from in amongst all the craziness at the moment.

Hi everyone so I've reappeared and it's lovely to be back. It's been obviously the most challenging time that we've experienced as a business as the full effects of the coronavirus have hit our whole country from a health perspective an economic perspective and obviously with our business as well and so it's been incredibly busy period trying to make sure that we could get through this whole situation in the best way possible it's come with a lot of stress a lot of sleepless nights and ups and downs but we're now in good shape i think and the team are doing well and i think we're and we're ready to to tackle whatever's thrown at us however difficult this is and as much as just trying to be able to survive it we want to try and learn as much as we can from

from this period we want to try and help as much as we possibly can. We made the largest donation we've ever made as a company this week. We donated £150,000 worth of stock to the NHS, which is one of the prouder moments we've ever had since running the company. And we're just taking it each day as it comes. It's obviously the most peculiar and unusual and disconcerting time to effectively have what was our our normal days and our normal lives suddenly stopped all in one go but it's as human beings i think we are very adaptable we are resilient and there's enormous amounts of pain being felt in our country and all over the world at the moment and we're just trying to take it each step as it comes each day as it comes and do the very best we can to navigate it as as business people as a family as friends to people as colleagues and as just citizens I suppose as well

and I was listening to um I've mentioned it before um but one of my absolute favorite podcasts is um Elizabeth Day's How to Fail and we we had her on the podcast last season. She's absolutely brilliant. But she did an incredible episode before on an algorithm for happiness with this fantastic ex-Google exec called Mo Gowdat. I've linked it before. I'll link it again in the show notes if you haven't listened to it. It's absolutely phenomenal. But she actually had him back on her show talking about the uncertainty of coronavirus and how to deal with it. And there's

a little clip that I just want to insert because it really helped shape the way that I was thinking about this. Tell us about your algorithm for happiness, because I mentioned it briefly in the introduction, but it is about resetting expectations and recalibrating. So explain to us how we can adapt that for this particular moment. Happiness is very straightforward. Every moment in your life you ever felt happy is a moment where events of life met your expectations and wishes of how life should be. Every moment in your life you felt unhappy, it was because life gave you something that wasn't what you wanted life to give you. And I absolutely love that. I love how he breaks it down and how he simplifies it. And the other thing he said is that history has shown us again and again that

nothing ever lasts, no matter how bad it is, no matter how insurmountable the problem is, no matter how painful it is for a country, for a community, it doesn't last. I just think he's exactly right in the fact that this is undoubtedly incredibly painful and incredibly challenging. And our love and hugs and kind of any support we can possibly give goes out to absolutely everyone. But for those of us who are lucky enough to be safe at home, not stuck at home, are there ways we can just adjust our expectations and our ways of looking at life in order to try and find the positives? And that's really what we wanted to talk about today. By no means are we experts, but we definitely feel like

we're managing to find some joy in amongst the uncertainties and we wanted to talk a little bit about that. I think that's exactly right and in talking about this I don't want to downplay this for anyone who is going through undoubtedly some of the huge turmoil that this whole situation can throw at us whether it's through our health, through losing a loved one, through losing a job. But through this, we luckily are in a group at the moment where one of our loved ones hasn't been affected by this or a job hasn't been lost. And for us, what we've really just tried to do each day to try and get ourselves through what feels like the most and is the most bizarre time is one, it's always come back to this thing of presence. And I've talked about this before on the podcast, but when my mum was dying of cancer, there was a slight initial obsession initially to understand whether she had three months to live or six months to live or a year to live or three years to live and it was that uncertainty and that lack of presence that caused me most

anxiety and caused me most upset because it just feels like a ticking time bomb and I think one of the lessons that I learned so much that period was just about presence and now although we're trying to very much plan for our business for what happens over the next three months the next six months the next year as we navigate this very turbulent time what we're also trying to do personally and within our day-to-day is just very much live each day and not to look too far ahead and not to think about all the what ifs of what happens if this happens or that happens or this scenario plays out because there is so much uncertainty at the moment. So I think just this sense of presence and just trying to, as much as we possibly can,

just wake up in the morning and focus on today, focus on what we can do today, the good bits of today and having this time with Sky that I never would have had otherwise had I not been on such lockdown. Just being present within that each day, I think is one thing that we definitely have a massive focus on. And I think that when the uncertainty of this started and we were slightly flapping about what it meant for each part of our lives, bringing it back just to this presence of, right, let's just try and handle today the best that we can has certainly been enormously helpful. I think the other thing that's been really helpful to me really in just the last week or so, at the time of recording this, the lockdown's now been going on for about two and a half weeks.

And I'm someone who I've been incredibly fortunate in my life to I've always felt like I've had a lot of purpose in my life and when I was a young kid and teenager and then a young adult that purpose came through sport and I was able to play sport to a high level and then in starting Delicious Fiala it was something that was absolutely riddled in purpose and I love the fact that we were a family business in a category in an industry that I think is very important and absolutely jump out of bed every day and love what we do so much. And I love the sense of purpose we have around growing our company. And when suddenly the company and all the plans that we had made for this year, we effectively

had to halve our assumptions on what we thought this year would be it was of course very demotivating and it was scary and it came with very incredibly difficult choices that we had to make but now that kind of what i suppose a bit more stability has landed upon ourselves now and we we're adjusting and renormalizing to this time at home i've suddenly taken up a new course of that's something that i've wanted to learn for for some time which is probably a bit geeky but it's a advanced microsoft excel course on something called vba and it's something that having that purpose each day and in any of the moments work it still is very busy and we're still working full days but in the outside time I have from it where any time that I may feel oh gosh you know I'm just

sat here and what I wish I could be doing something else I could be growing our company or it's something that bringing back into that purpose of learning is something that has really really helped me in the last week and I know that for however long this period lasts I think waking up and still feeling like you have purpose each day, however, sometimes hopeless this feeling and this whole situation can make you feel has something that's really, really helped me. of Delicious Cielo. It was when I was ill and I was in bed and I literally, I just spent all day watching terrible TV shows, if I'm completely honest, and refreshing Facebook. And although I wasn't really physically capable of doing very much, the sense of the fact that every day I had no sense of achievement, of learning, of growing in any capacity. And I felt that had such a fundamental impact on my mental health and my wellbeing. And as soon as I started to just do some really small things,

read some nutrition books and watch some documentaries and get a camera and start to learn, you know, to take photos and I could take photos of food and start to understand how a blog works. It was unbelievable, the change in my mental health. And I'm convinced I had a full effect on my physical health as well in terms of finding that sense of purpose and that sense of little accomplishment in every day. And so I think we're just really trying to do that in anything we do, whether that's trying to cook a new recipe learn a new excel skill i have to say i'm not doing that i'm focusing more on cooking new recipes um we set ourselves the task this week of mastering the ultimate vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe um if you're signed up to a

newsletter that would have arrived in your inbox uh last weekend of easter if not it's on our app we've got a bowl of them staring at me right now and they are absolutely delicious. Yeah, I'm five down. If I'm honest, I don't know whether I look like I'm a little bit pregnant or whether I look like the Cookie Monster. It is unclear, but there's definitely trying to find that joy. And we had this amazing moment at the weekend. We went for a really long walk on our kind of one walk a day for an hour and we live quite near Hyde Park in London and we've we've lived there for a while and we've walked around Hyde Park most days for the last five years and I've never really smelt anything in there other than dog poo

and car fumes and four times on that walk out of nowhere there was this really really strong smell of flowers and it was a really amazing moment of realizing again like we both were really missing our families and really missing that connection but then suddenly there was this moment where it was like wow look at look at that incredible good that is happening which was amazing and before we move on to some of the things we've then been doing in the books we been reading, I wanted to read a little poem that a friend shared with me. I don't know whether any of you guys also follow us on Instagram. We've been doing some live Instagram sessions for everyone for free on Instagram, just again, to give you a bit of inspiration. But a friend of mine who taught one of the classes read this and it was written by a lady in Ireland

who's a mum of two called Gemma Peacock and I just thought it was absolutely beautiful. The history books will talk of now, that time the world stood still, when every family stayed at home, waved out from windowsills, at those they loved but could not hold because they loved them so, yet whilst they did they noticed all the flowers start to grow. The sun came out they can recall and windows rainbows filled they kicked a football in their yards until the night drew in they walked each day but not too close that time the world stood still when people walked straight down the roads that once the cars did fill they saw that people became ill they knew the world was scared but whilst the world stood still they saw how much the whole world

cared they clapped on thursdays from their doors they cheered for the brave for people who would risk their lives so others could be saved the schools closed down they missed their friends they missed their teachers so their mums and dads helped with their work they helped their minds to grow the parents used to worry that as schools were put on hold their children wouldn't have the tools they'd need as they grew old but history books would talk of them now adults fully grown those little boys and girls back then the ones who stayed at home they'll tell you how they fixed this world of all they would fulfill the rainbow children building dreams they dreamed while time stood still which is just yeah if you are lucky enough to be safe at home

then you know it is a beautiful way of looking at things so we're going to move on to a few book recommendations and things that we've been enjoying reading and learning and listening from for anyone who is looking you know to maybe spend a few evenings a week reading something different taking their mind elsewhere having that kind of positive sense of distraction uh so matt is going to do the kind of learning and development side of things because matthew mills loves business type books more than anyone i've ever met and i'm going to do a bit more fiction yeah so i typically spend my spare time i'm a bit of a politics geek as well and current affairs geek so i have been reading lots and lots and lots of news and papers and everything that I could try and find and understand about the current situation because it obviously has a profound effect on our lives, our family lives, our business lives, the lives of our whole team and our friends and family. And so

I've been trying to stay as informed and up to date as I possibly can on all of that. But other books that I've read in the past that, as Ella says, I'm a complete kind of business nerd. I love business. I love reading about it. I love talking to people in it. I love the exploration and the fact that it really is a marathon. It's a journey. There's really no finish point in it. It's just a constant evolving thing. And so two books that particularly within our space and in kind of consumer goods that

I think have been really, really helpful to me and I would definitely recommend is one called Playing to Win, which is written by two former executives from Procter & Gamble. And they talk a lot about building brand, a lot about strategy, formulating strategy, the various choices that you have to make, and how good strategy is very much about not appealing to all, but deciding who it is that you want to appeal to them too, and then winning within that. And then another one is, is a book by a Harvard marketing professor called Young Me Moon, which is a book called Different, which was written a while ago now, but it basically starts to kind of strip back brands and show that there's been, as innovation has grown and competition has grown, there is a big lean

towards a kind of herd mentality of offering as many benefits to products as you possibly can, which basically makes everything look the same. And so had the brands that have actually, brands like Mini or Ikea have been some of those companies and those brands have really stripped things back into much simpler, more clearly defined offerings. And so that was another thing that when in starting our products business and starting delicious yellow two books that i know had had a big effect on me and i still take lessons from each day in in running our company yeah and you're also obsessed with the podcast um how i built this yeah how i built this i absolutely love and so i listen to that frequently

and i actually hurt my knee last week so I haven't been able to to do much at all I've just been I've just been stuck inside but in a free hour that I've had I love to listen to how I built this they always have great guests from completely varying industries and love hearing their tales and picking up anything I can. There's some particularly interesting ones for anyone who's interested I guess in kind of quite of the moment businesses. If you know of the business Glossier, which is a really interesting cosmetics business. Emily Weiss, the CEO, her one is brilliant. But I think the most interesting one you've listened to that I then listened to as well is the founder of Five Guys, which is obviously such a fundamentally different business to what we have.

But it's an amazing story isn't it yeah i love the five guy story it's a very much kind of all-in approach of he offered his kids to either pay for them to go to university or to start the business together and they they did and they had such an eye on quality the whole way through their whole process and it's just a great business but that one's absolutely fascinating and just shows I guess how things come from nowhere quite often if you want a little bit of distraction I think my top five that I've read recently are my one of my all-time favorites which I actually got Matt to read while we were on holiday last year and I've read again recently

it's just the most beautiful book and it's called When Breath Becomes Air. And it's written by a neuroscientist and then finished by his wife after he passed away. And it's the most beautiful, heartbreaking, completely compelling story of human life and adversity and death. And there's an amazing comfort in the pain and an amazing sense of human togetherness. And I guess that sense of togetherness feels quite appropriate for now. And it's a really interesting thing. And his wife says at the beginning, you know, of course it's a tragedy, but he is not a tragedy. And it's just a very, it's really, really worthwhile, incredibly compelling story of human emotion. And on a fiction side of the same sort of thing, it's probably my favorite book ever

called Any Human Heart by the author William Boyd. And as I said, it's fiction, but it's an incredible human story of life and death and marriage and heartbreak and all the kind of things that humans go through. He goes, lives through the war. And again, there's some interesting comparisons, I guess, to the challenges and adversity of the time that we're in now, but it's a really distracting page turner and massively, massively recommend that. And for something completely different, it was a massive, massive hit last year. So you may have read it already, but Educated by Tara Westover is the most unbelievably mind-blowing story of a girl who was brought up in an incredibly rural mormon community in the us and who effectively escaped and how education became her key to

building a new life and her kind of quest for knowledge and what power that brought her so again a really kind of brilliant distraction. And we actually watched a quite similar show this week on Netflix called Unorthodox, which we've been telling everyone about, which is just absolutely brilliant. The main actress, she's called Shira Haas, is absolutely sensational. And it's about a young girl who grew up in an ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn in America and was married when she was very young. And again, her journey is based on a true story to escape that and find a sense of kind of freedom and her exploration of the modern world. And it's just a really interesting insight into a community that maybe some of us aren't as

familiar with and really really really really fascinating but my final book recommendation for anyone who is maybe struggling a little bit at the moment with finding that sense of happiness which is completely and utterly justified is by a friend now friend of ours we met him through the podcast but he's there's a phenomenal buddhist monk called galang tukten and he wrote a book called a monk's guide to happiness and we had him on the podcast before but he is absolutely brilliant and i'm just going to read a quote of his about happiness because it feels again incredibly relevant for now and just helping to reframe our thoughts. When we're searching for happiness there is a sense of hunger, of incompleteness. We're wrapped up in the expectation

of getting what we want and the fear of not getting it. We feel trapped by uncertainty. We think we can only be happy when our goals are completed which means that life is always about the future rather than the present. Thoughts and emotions create a storm inside us and we easily become their slaves. Moment to moment we might find ourselves in an argument with reality, constantly wishing things were different. Happiness involves mastering these thoughts and emotions and embracing things just as they are. It means we relax and stop trying to manipulate our circumstances. If we can learn how to rest deeply in the present, even when facing difficulties, and we trained our minds not to judge, we can discover within ourselves a tremendous source of happiness and satisfaction.

And again, that just feels incredibly appropriate for now. And then the final thing that I just wanted to recommend, if you're looking for things to listen to, if you didn't listen to the podcast, The Dropout, it's again, a really brilliant distraction. It's done by some journalists at ABC News, uncovering a very interesting case around fraud of the youngest female billionaire ever. And it's just a very intriguing, interesting story. I've been really enjoying that on my daily walk with Austin, our dog, re-listening to that. Just again, it's just a very intriguing, interesting story. I've been really enjoying that on my daily walk with Austin, our dog, really listening to that. Just again, it's a really nice distraction, something completely different and just kind of blows your mind a little bit.

And actually, my friend Annie has just started this really lovely little weekly podcast. It's really short. It's just 10 minutes or so. It's kind of perfect where you're brushing your teeth. And it's just short it's just 10 minutes or so it's kind of perfect where you're brushing your teeth and it's just about good news um so her and her boyfriend will have just been rounding up good news of the week there was one brilliant one of a man in his 20-foot garden has raised over 26 000 pounds for the nhs by running a full marathon in his 20-foot garden just back and forth back and forth back and forth so back and forth, back and forth.

So there's just some lovely little pick me ups like that. It's called Can We Just Ask Again? I'll put all these things in the notes below, but both of those are really brilliant listening. So thanks so much for listening, everyone. And as we go through this incredibly unusual, challenging time, if there is anything that we can do as a company to be more useful to help people then we absolutely want to hear i think one of the things that's reassured us most and has provided such a sense of hope is these clapping outside for the nhs and the amount of community spirit that has come towards this thing 750 000 people in the uk volunteer and the celebration that we've seen of our amazing people that we have in our nhs and anything that we can do as a company to support people through this difficult time we are open at every minute of every hour of every day and we want to play our role as much as we possibly can

to help people through this and if you have any ideas or if there's any things that we can do as activities or things that we can publish or or help with and please do just let us know so we will be back again next tuesday um as always we so value your feedback. The plan at the moment for next Tuesday is to do a podcast meditation, which hopefully you can all enjoy at home. And again, will help just create that sense of peace, of calm, maybe help you sleep a little bit better if you're struggling with that. Really hopefully help to support people who are having quite a stressful, uncertain time or who are working really hard on the front lines at the moment as well. And in the meantime, there are lots of meditations on our app as well. So otherwise, we will see you back here next Tuesday

and stay safe and we are sending you all lots and lots of love. Okay, bye. Thanks. Thank you. or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.