Burnout to Bliss

0:00Welcome to Behind the Title. I was delighted to welcome Bianca Best, entrepreneur, leader and author to come and talk about some of the tips that she uses to help overcome burnout. She talks about some of these in her latest book, and I'm really excited that she came to share some of that with us today.

0:16Bianca Best: It's fantastic to be here having a conversation about being behind the title because I've certainly spent many, many years experiencing that performative mask that all too often we put on to survive and succeed in a corporate environment. The polished exterior of hitting KPIs is not without, inevitably, a lot of private work and experiences that take a lot of self-management to get to a place of soaring and thriving.

0:55Bianca, welcome to Behind the Title. Thank you so much for joining me. It's amazing to have you here, someone of your experience and your background. I guess for the people that are listening that don't know who you are, it'd be great if you could just give maybe a 60,

1:11Bianca Best: 90 second intro to you. And I guess really why being part of today was important to you, because I'm always eager to understand, you know, what's the draw for people to come and be a contributor and a guest on this show. Well, thank you, Danny. Thank you so much for having me here on the show and for actually stepping into this really raw, truthful moment that I really do fully support. Why am I here? I'm here because I care so much. I care about what you're doing. And my own experience has got me to a place where I believe truth needs to be told and we need to encourage and inspire others to ensure that they are walking their paths in integrity.

1:52Bianca Best: So who am I? So I am an author, I'm a speaker and an entrepreneur, a former global executive in our industry. So I have spent time in both independence and large hold codes. So I've had time at Dentsu, WPP, and most recently at Publicis. So I have a very interesting background in that it's varied in terms of an entrepreneurial focus on finding my own way in terms of learning corporate late and coming in without experience of having climbed a steady linear ladder. and I'm a burnout survivor. So I have learned the hard way how to recover from burnout and what we'll talk about today is how my mission is to eliminate the global burnout epidemic that the world is suffering with.

2:51Bianca Best: I run a clinic, I run a business called the Burnout Business, I write books, I consult with organizations on how we can get into the heart and meat of businesses to shift the culture. So we get into thriving organizations where individuals feel empowered to avoid burnout and to show up as themselves and do work that brings them joy. I'm a fully certified therapist in all sorts of integrative therapies from coaching to nutritional therapy to energy management, energy coaching. I'm about to start a four year healing science degree where I'm going deep into the anatomy and how we can ensure that we are mind, body, soul thriving.

3:36We got introduced and I'm surprised we didn't meet at our time at a mutual organisation. when we first spoke it felt very comfortable it felt like kindred spirits and you talk about that kind of energy piece there like it's it's it's a big part of my mo right is what i stand for before we dive in i'm i'm eager to know what well two questions like what motivates you every day to kind of i guess continually push the barriers to help people and what's the part of what you're doing at the moment that you love the most? Because there's quite a lot there that you talked about. Like what really kind of gets you up in the morning?

4:14You're like, wow, you know, I love that part of it.

4:16Bianca Best: I am super impassioned by the power and the potential that each and every one of us holds. I believe that you have gifts, talents, skills, and the right to sprinkle them out into the world. And I am seeing too much compromise where individuals are shrinking themselves to fit into some warped ideology of what success looks like. And there's this world of polarities that's bubbling up where I'm meeting women in my clinic who feel it's either a career or a family. They don't believe that they can do both. I'm meeting men in my clinic who feel they don't want a promotion because they don't want to take on any more.

5:00Bianca Best: And there's this absolute fear that more responsibility is going to break people. And because of my own experience and my own path of actually navigating burnout and leaning into ambition, but actually falling over a lot along the way, I've learned now how you can absolutely seize your dreams. You can absolutely step into your best self, but nobody teaches us how to do this at school. So what motivates me every single day is actually teaching the world how to learn to work again and to step out of this realm of frenetic productivity and step into a place of graceful productivity. Because I actually believe it's possible.

5:40Bianca Best: I'm exemplifying it. I've never been so productive in my life and yet I'm not burning out. So I'm so motivated to try and teach this at scale. And if you, as you've just asked, where do I get my my energy from it's actually watching that transformation happen it's individuals in my clinic it's people reading my book and messaging me and saying you've changed my life I've just made a decision I'm not compromised anymore and suddenly I'm thriving and that is just it's magic and so the more I can sprinkle that magic out into the world the better the observation I see is that because I'm I'm a prime candidate right I absolutely love my job I am And my other half would, she might use a few choice words around how much I give to my job.

6:26But I love it. I enjoy it. I'm passionate. And I wouldn't say I've reached a point of burnout. I'm no way near because what I am really good at is spotting the signs and the signals. When enough is enough or I need to take a step back and pause. I think it's a real difficult skill to be able to learn and trying to understand what are those signals. And that probably brings me to my first question, which is, I talk about it quite a lot, like the backstage pass, you know, and was there a moment in your personal or professional life, you know, the two obviously entwined, where actually, outwardly, everything was great.

7:10You know, you had the material, you had the fam, you know, all that sort of stuff. But actually, inwardly, maybe you were crumbling. Was there a specific moment that you spotted or did someone spot that for you? No, it was a very big, pretty catastrophic moment in my life.

7:29Bianca Best: So preparing for this interview today and bearing in mind, I write about my own experiences, but preparing for this interview today took me into the recollection of a very, very bleak, deep, dark place in my life. and it was very much a moment where I was presenting polished, happy, delivering Bianca but inside it was definitely the lowest, lowest point for me. So it's a bit of a long story but I'll give you the context. We've got time so just as you go. I think it's important for listeners to understand the back story and what's important is that yes it was a bleak moment, a low, low, low point for me But actually, it was the most transformative growth moment.

8:19Bianca Best: It was the moment I needed. And I think that's an important lesson for us all to learn that in those moments of darkness, quite often, there's an escape that actually becomes a moment where you saw and you come out of the struggle. so this was a period where I had launched run and sold my own business so I like I said I was an entrepreneur for a decade and that was very much me learning how to work and realizing I could have impact and just making it up every day had a great ride really fun then I'd fallen into corporate which also seemed fun and different but I at that point was a woman in my early 30s entering corporate for the first time.

9:02Bianca Best: And I came with the confidence and self-assuredness that I'd literally launched a business from the seeds of an idea right through to growing an omnichannel personalized gift business that I'd sold. So I knew I could trust myself. I knew how to work, how to achieve, how to have impact. And I had done that whilst raising my young family, I had four children under seven. Sorry, four under seven and you launched the business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Just to be clear, I've got one. And I share that one with another parent and it's hard. Yeah, it's fun, but it was motivating. But across that period of entrepreneurialism and raising the family, I did keep cyclically burning out.

9:48Bianca Best: So I was chasing ambitions fueled by what was exciting every day. but I didn't know how to self-manage because we don't learn this at school. So I'd been learning a lot about how to actually function, achieve the impact, raise the family and keep going. And then I find myself falling into corporate. I'm now in a totally alien environment and I'm having fun because it's exciting, it's new, it's different, but nothing was familiar. And I'm in an arena where the majority of my colleagues have done the linear path, come out of school, university, come into corporate. So they've got over a decade of experience of being in this environment.

10:35Bianca Best: They've got the mentors. They've learned how to play the politics, how to play the game. And this was totally new and alien to me. So whilst I was excited by it, I was also very apprehensive and nervous and working out how do I show up in this environment I'm a firm believer in take an opportunity and if you don't know how to do it just learn it on the job just that's how we grow so I'd come into this corporate arena and I donned a mask because I had an image of well this is Bianca in corporate so I cut a fringe I was wearing a lot of black I was just trying to be the perfect corporate girl. And because I didn't really know or have any points of reference, it was all just stumbling and fumbling my way around.

11:24Bianca Best: But my very natural, good girl, people pleasing side of my personality was what popped up to the fore. So I was little miss, I will do everything I possibly can to make sure I hit my KPIs and I surprise and delight my managers, my colleagues. And part of me delivering in terms of that performative aspect of work is also how I show up. So I'm very much of the mindset that I want to look the part as well. So I, in moments of real test, I will almost over-index on how do I manage myself? That's what I'd learned through my burnouts during entrepreneurialism. So I was extra fit. I was doing extra meditation, extra journaling, all the stuff that I had learned to keep me functioning in the world.

12:16Bianca Best: I was bringing into this new corporate environment so that I could just bring my best self. But of course, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of effort. That's a lot of getting up and doing a run at 5am and then at 6am, making sure I'm putting the makeup on and curling the hair, then doing the two-hour commute to try and get into the office and be the early bird. You missed out probably looking after four kids. The four kids as well, exactly. But in that environment, that particular time, I was working in an organisation where the pace of growth was unprecedented. We were growing 30 % year on year.

12:52Bianca Best: So the expectations internally were super, super intense. so for me in my people pleasing okay I'm going to show up and I'm going to deliver this was extra pressure extra competitiveness I'd say in the actual landscape everyone was at their desks at 7 30 8 in the morning and I wanted to be there too so I'm putting myself under all this pressure to to show up and be this corporate Bianca not realizing the emotional stress and the strain that that's putting me under. So I'm doing it. I'm ticking the KPIs. I'm part of the board. I am absolutely making my mark. At home, the kids are happy. They're okay.

13:36Bianca Best: We're keeping this world spinning. At that particular point in time, we had decided to move home. I never do things by halves. so we were massively up leveling where we lived we were moving from a small semi-detached cottage into a giant hundred year old mansion and when I say it was a project it was a project there was a derelict swimming pool derelict tennis court acres of land and it was for me a dream my poor then ex-husband not so much a dream but along he came with the kids could see the vision so we had planned to move we had a two-week period where we were going to I was taking time off work to actually focus on the upheaval of moving children into this home as you can imagine maintaining my role my significant senior board level role in in the day job took a lot of balancing at home it was a blend of child care of me focusing on the kids in the home my ex-husband focusing on the kids in the home and it was a jiggle juggle.

14:44Bianca Best: We were literally hanging on by a thread. Two weeks before we're due to move and I've got this two week period of how we're going to move and settle into this mansion, the lovely au pair that had been part of our lives for a significant amount of time announced on Monday. She said, I'm leaving, I want to go back to Canada and I'm off and she left the next day. So without any pre-warning, I've suddenly lost one of the very, very major rocks that keep my life swirling. So then as we approach the move date, I was spending two weeks coming home from work, getting off the train, meeting and interviewing candidates for the childminder role in the pub, literally by the train station, interviewing desperately, desperately, desperately trying to solve this big, big crisis.

15:32Bianca Best: And of course, it fell to me to make sure I would find the right candidate. I'm getting up at four o 'clock in the morning, going on au pair sites, trying to find if there's anyone. I knew I had to fix this problem. So I did it. Somehow I found someone who agreed that they would start the day after we moved in because move day was crunch day. On that day, my mum was going to have the four kids. We were going to move in. The childminder would start the next day. And then we'd have the two weeks off to renovate the house and get settled. During that period, my husband and I sadly decided that the relationship was not working and that it was time for us to address the big elephant in the room and get divorced.

16:10Bianca Best: So we were going through the most brutal conversations that we'd had in our 20-year relationship at that time as well. So our lives were literally unravelling in such a significant way. We were just saying, okay, we'll move into this house, we'll sleep in separate bedrooms, and we will just manage this period and work out what divorce looks like. So if you think about what is identified as the most stressful points in life, it's death, it's divorce, it's moving. So I'm now dealing with divorce and moving on top of this very, very stressful job. The day comes we're moving into this house and um it's very intense and I'm sure you know that actual moving date the legalities and all the stuff that goes on and on and on it took hours it's 4 p.m we still haven't actually got the keys to get into this house we've now got the removal van saying wow an extra 50 pounds an hour per van and and I know the time the clock is ticking if we finally get into the house and we're just trying to unpack boxes, find, you know, what are the things that we need before it's nighttime?

17:29Bianca Best: 10 p.m., removal people have gone. We sit down. We have ordered pizzas. We sit down to eat pizzas. And I look at my phone. I have an email from work saying, because it's the impending Christmas campaigns, my annual leave shouldn't have been signed off. I'm not allowed two weeks. I can only have a week. I need to be in the office the following Monday. So this is Monday. So I've suddenly lost my two week window of stabilizing me and my family has cut down to now one week. The next email I read is from the childminder. Sadly, she's had a crisis and she's got to move up north immediately. Her father was ill.

18:05Bianca Best: She couldn't start either. So I've now lost the security I had that in the morning the childminder would arrive, I now know I've only got seven days to stabilize my home, my family, sought child care. And I, in that moment, the just overwhelm of the job, the performing, the being this boardroom Bianca, being the mother Bianca, being the wife Bianca, being the sorter outer of everybody's worlds. It literally, it came crashing down on me in such a way. I have, I've never collapsed like I collapsed in that moment. I literally crumbled. I went to the floor and I just started crying and crying and crying in the fetal position.

18:52Bianca Best: Like I just, I can't do it anymore. I can't do it anymore. I felt so broken, sober. My poor, poor ex-husband who's, you know, things have been fraught between us anyway. And he's like, are you okay? I literally couldn't speak. Inconsolable, inconsolable. I got myself up to a mattress on a floor somewhere and found a duvet, pulled it over my head. And I went to sleep absolutely sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. I didn't know how I was going to get my way out of this new level of pressure. It just felt unprecedented. And that really was the lowest, lowest I've ever been emotionally, physically, mentally I was just utterly broken I slept the next morning I'm on a mission organized Bianca okay project one find childcare immediately my amazing dad says I'm coming I'll move in I'm going to help you project two acknowledge the fact I've got to be in the office next Monday okay so I can't decorate that room unbooks that you know cut cut cut cut cut from the plan and I start getting myself back together I get on with it and um the next Monday morning I'm eight o 'clock in the morning.

19:59Bianca Best: I'm in the boardroom. I'm polished. I'm in my suit. I've spent the Sunday night going through the numbers. And there I am. I'm delivering. I've got answers for everything for the CEO. I can explain everything. And so I show up. Now, nobody in that room, in that boardroom knew that just seven days prior, I'd been in the fetal position, just literally thinking, I can't do this anymore. And for me, that was such a moment of actually realizing only I could change quite how desperate and forlorn I'd felt in that moment. And that all the work I'd done previously experimenting with how to manage burnout and manage my ambition and where I'd started to modify things, where I felt more physically in control, I felt more mentally in control.

20:49Bianca Best: What I'd never actually done is the work on emotional stress. And that for me was the turning point. And that was really where I started all my work around training, around inspiring others and teaching others how to address emotional unrest. Because I was in an unhappy culture. I was in an unhappy marriage. I had too much on my shoulders. And only I could actually change that. So I stepped into a place of empowerment, realized I was just in the wrong cultural environment. The pressure was wrong. It was wrong for me. And I started to make decisions to change. And that is what has empowered me through the past decade or so.

21:31Bianca Best: And I can honestly say I've never felt that flaunt again. And I've never burnt out again, literally never burnt out again, because I absolutely honour the emotional integrity that I need to sustain. So it took that bleak low moment for me to then come out and actually recognise what it is, what the key is to actually thriving at work. I took that mask off. I started to become more me. I got my control back, my power back, my inner power and life got a whole lot better. that wow um thank you for being so honest um I think it's hard enough to be honest with your nearest and dearest but to sit in a room with arguably what I guess you could call me a stranger we've met you know only a couple of times and to to be so honest and I think that's what this is all about right was there a moment and and and it could have been again personal professional shit you wish you had said like so whether that was you know with your husband at that point or whether it was walking to that boardroom, you know.

22:37Bianca Best: Yeah. Or was there another time in crisis in the workplace where something happened either for you or someone else where you could have spoken up, but you didn't? Yeah, it's a great question. There's a couple of examples. One was where I was asked to get into the office at 7.30 in the morning. And I come in early for this meeting with the CEO and the chief of staff. and they take me into this meeting room, shut the door behind them, and they ask why I formed a relationship with the global CEO who was a woman. And they said to me, we've noticed you've been speaking to her. What are you speaking to her about?

23:17Bianca Best: You don't need to talk to her about that. You talk to us. We don't want you discussing anything that's going on in this agency with that particular person. And like I say, I'm learning to play the game. I didn't know that that was totally, these two men should not have put me in that situation and had that conversation. And they obviously felt threatened. And so in that moment, I was just silly, naive, little subservient me just going, oh, I'm so sorry. She's she was just offering to mentor me. And so we've become friends. And, you know, I didn't know that was a sin. But I wish I wish that I had gone into that meeting with the knowledge of this is how corporate works, with the knowledge that, of course, I can have conversations and relationships with anyone in an organization, especially senior leaders who I can learn from, and that nobody has the right to say who I can and can't have relationships with.

24:12Bianca Best: So I wish, I wish that I had known that and argued my place instead of just being little Miss People Pleaser as I was. And then the other example is in a boardroom meeting where I was trying to make a point and a man actually put his hand over my mouth and said, shh, yeah, three of us in this meeting. That's astonishing. Yeah, but again, at the time, it was a heated discussion and I was expressing something that clearly didn't. And was the action in a jovial way? as in did you have a warm relationship and therefore the person or was it in a yeah we were close because we were both very senior leaders together working very closely to address a business agenda and close enough for him to feel like he could just be like but still still yeah i think back in retrospect why i didn't go what are you doing you know just but i didn't I didn't react because I didn't know that I had the right to say that's wrong.

25:19Bianca Best: And that's me as a 35 year old woman letting somebody silence me literally physically. It's mad because, you know, you talk about kind of having access. You know, I remember one of my CEOs, I think they joined a business and I basically messaged them like four weeks after they joined just saying, hey, it'd be great to meet. yeah i don't think i said like this but i i'd observed something i'd love to chat to to them about it yeah and we joke about it now because they still say to me like i remember that first email wow sent because because i'm a firm believer of you should be able to access anyone in your organization yeah i have uh connected and and been in conversation with my current global ceo about uh potentially being involved in an event before with us now a lot of people be like how dare you not not how dare you but like yeah yeah like wow like what and i'm like well it's just one email to another email like to another email that's how we grow right isn't it there's new value and we connect i just i just feel like i want to empower people to know that it's okay to not be okay it's okay to speak up it's okay to call me out if i've not necessarily done something absolutely right and i and i've had those conversations before not in anything in a serious way but you know i might have had a disagreement with someone and they said i didn't feel comfortable i'm so sorry yeah that was not my intention absolutely um and so i need to create the conditions you know we all need to create the conditions to allow people um yeah to be able to have a voice it's that psychological safety isn't it and inviting your team to know that they can comment so that's how i used to run my weekly team meetings you know it was always a very open invitation criticize critique me yeah because that's how we learn and grow and feedback is a gift and let's have this fluidity of helping each other become better i think i struggled a couple of years ago with that whole phrase of feedback is a gift um because every time i have a career conversation or a 360 the same thing comes up consistently but it's not in a negative way because i'm slowly eroding at it you know and i'm more aware so how i carry and hold myself but in my early career it was like oh god you just took it you felt just these people you know you read through and then you try and discern who said what yeah like oh you know maybe and it's like it's just that you have to you have to you read it and apply it as a blanket to everything that you do yeah um but often i found that my behaviors in the workplace and you might be able to identify with this there was normally a trigger yeah there was normally something which made me behave act communicate in a certain way are there specific triggers that you either think are quite generic for just people in the workplace?

28:03Or are there personal triggers that really kind of push you to either make bad decisions or push past that point where you achieve that burnout? Sometimes being aware of what those triggers are, I think is really important for people.

28:16Bianca Best: I think you're right. But quite often the triggers bubble up and slap you in the face and you suddenly realize you're experiencing something that's triggering you. We all struggle with loneliness. Loneliness is something that, I mean, we know that actually it's more likely to kill you than obesity, actually. It's that harrowing a statistic. But loneliness in the workplace is something that fascinates me from a sociological perspective, but also really disheartens me because it just shouldn't happen. But in my experience of the past 10, 12 years in corporate, I've seen how it's possible for teams to be really fostering a culture of loneliness.

29:00Bianca Best: Even very, very recently, me as a mature lady who knows how to navigate life and has a lot of friends and knows how to create good, strong relationships, I've observed myself feeling lonely at work. And that's a very painful place to be, and it doesn't need to be. And so I've always looked at it and thought, well, why is this happening? Because I've had periods where I've been running global teams. I mean, goodness, during lockdown, where we were properly disconnected from each other for almost 18 months, in that period, I never felt lonely. I still had this vibrant connection with the team. And then I've had periods where we're in the office, but feeling very lonely.

29:42Bianca Best: And I really think that that comes down to a lack of connected purpose, but also a lack of humanness and of seeing each other wholly. And that's something that matters so much to me because I believe that leaders, our responsibility is to bring the infectiousness of positive relational energy. I mean, it's been proven in Harvard study after study that positive relational energy is what it takes to drive a motivated workforce. If you have leaders that are not interested in the people, that they want machine-like productivity, you are alienating people in such a way where they start to shrink. So I've observed to your question around the triggers, if I've felt triggered in that way where I'm unseen and disconnected from colleagues that I'm working with, despite sitting in an office, despite sitting in a busy bustling office where everyone's come back to work, but I'm not feeling a connection or that anyone actually sees me and who I am, then I noticed the behavior that I have becomes shrunk.

30:47Yeah. I noticed that actually the triggers as a self uh self-imposed so I used to find earlier in my career I'd come in I'd have my headphones in yeah and I'd leave them in yeah and it was a sign of just I don't want to talk to you yeah and it wasn't a uh a point of you know hierarchical trying to impose myself I I just didn't want to talk to anyone I felt like I just want to keep my headphones in and leave me till 10 o 'clock right and I think that is really important and I talk to my team about it I'm like when there's an appropriate moment keep them in but when there's lots of people around it's really important that you you create the openness for someone to be part of you and I remember interviewing someone uh for a role and I was at home I was I think cooking food for my stepson Harry yeah it's fish fingers chips peas whatever I think it was like you know Harry you know what do you want and you know be down in five minutes here whatever it was and and we joke about it because that person found it bizarre we work together now we have an incredibly strong relationship but it is that humanness right because I believe it's about disarming people letting people know you know I am yes I'm driven and I have purpose and I'm focused and I want to achieve but that human connection you have to create you have to foster it at the same time those triggers I think you can create them it can be hard to recognize them sometimes and you talked about it before fetal position yeah being cold up um did you did you stand yourself in front of a mirror or something and have a chat with yourself did you you know proper pep talk Bianca

32:21Bianca Best: well I have always been obsessed with personal development and I think that's why I've been able to achieve success from very early on in my career because I've always been very self-aware I have journaled since I was eight years old and you still have all of them I still have all of them Stacks and stacks of them in the loft and I still regularly journal. And so I've always had that self-reflection. And what I teach in, you know, the mastery of self comes from having that deep self-awareness and making the time to self-reflect. And this is where a lot of us get swept downstream and we become passive because life's happening to us.

33:00Bianca Best: And part of the sustaining success with Grace is around really being subjective with attention, where you're directing your attention, because if you don't direct it, the world will, and it'll be stolen from you. And then you start to slide into, damn, I'm busy. And, you know, this never-ending task list is never going to end, but it's up to you to decide where you're going to focus your attention and connecting that into what gives you most energy and what gives you the buzz. So I've always been very self-reflective and throughout my cyclical burnouts during running the bespoke gift company, the personalized gift business, because I kept leaning into all my ambitions and I believe in reaching for the stars and I don't believe ambition's a dirty word and we've all got the right to just seize our dreams but because I realized actually seizing my dreams I'm really breaking myself.

33:50Bianca Best: I'd spent a lot of time trying to hone and hone and hone and manage myself physically, okay, I've got to have a different relationship with sleep i need to exercise mentally okay more meditation journaling but it was that sort of emotional piece so yes i looked in the mirror at that really broken moment the next day of just metaphorically or an actual mirror um i do believe in the mirror the mirror stuff so there's a lot of uh sort of spiritual gurus whether we go back to the louise hay realm of affirmations, but looking yourself in the eye is incredibly stirring, especially if you've disconnected from self.

34:31Bianca Best: So I'm already very self-aware, but for a lot of people, a lot of my clients, they are not necessarily. And so that moment of intimacy with self, where you do look yourself in the eye, absolutely stirs the soul because any protective mask that has been donned literally falls away and there's a rawness and I certainly have clients who when they go through that exercise of gazing at themselves softly compassionately lovingly in the mirror they cry because it's a memory of this is who I am this is my soulful self and too many of us especially in corporate have got armor on there's that protective personality and that's actually exhausting us and taking us too far away from the soulful self.

35:16Bianca Best: So part of my mirror experience was waking up to emotional unrest and starting to trust this flow of intuitive energy. When you feel a niggle, when you feel that something's not quite right, you're absolutely onto something. And it's about leaning into those niggles and going, well, what's there? What can I do to remedy this because a niggle is a stirring from the soul so really learning to trust my intuition as a guiding force and what the energetic vibes feel like is absolutely transformational for me my clients and and I believe for all of us yeah I have a routine that I carry out every day which is every morning I pause for it's about 10 minutes where I just sit I gather my thoughts for the day I play some guided meditation.

36:06Perfect. I don't have a word with, you know, myself, just around slow down, don't chase, you know, keep my side of the street clean. Just really try to, I guess, ground myself before I go out into the day and either cause chaos or bring calm. Like, what can I give rather than what I can take? Perfect. And then at nighttime, I tend to reflect.

36:31Bianca Best: I tend to write down, you know, the things that I'm grateful for. But at the same time, if I've not been writing how I've carried out my day, you know, what do I need to course correct? What do I need to address? And I think I wish I could bottle it and give it to people, you know, because I don't I think sometimes it just builds up and up and up. And then you have to have the mirror moment. You have to have to like just shake yourself. And I'm like, it doesn't need to be like that because actually I can, you know, spot things in the moment. rather than letting them drag on. But I know that's easier said than done.

37:04Bianca Best: It should be a priority. That self-awareness, it's the most important thing. It's the oxygen mask on first. And if you don't start there with yourself, how are you ever going to expect the outer to ever be any kind of different reality? So congratulations for doing that. And, you know, lead by example. Tell your team this morning in my morning reflection, lead by example. Tell them we did that meeting. and on reflection, I think we could have managed it this way. Keep the conversation, reflective conversations, keep it going. I'm definitely an advocate. It was funny you just said there, tell them about your morning reflections.

37:39I felt, oh, can I do that? You know, just is that a comfortable place to be? It's actually given me food for thought. Like, could I be giving, you know, my team a positive affirmation for the day, you know, rather than think cringy about it.

37:54Bianca Best: And that reaction, that resistance, that niggle, there's gold there. So lean into that because that's what you need to do next and then you're going to grow and then your leadership will become more impactful. Amazing. Before we close out, I want to ask one question. And this is this is really pertinent, I think, for for anyone that's listening to this. You know, I want to make sure that we give people permission. Yeah. You know, permission to speak up, permission to reach out for help, permission for support when they need it. You know, is there is there something that you would say to people?

38:25is, you know, is there a permission slip you would give to people, make them feel more empowered, make them feel more encouraged to either improve or change or better how they carry themselves in the workplace if they want to grow and develop and succeed?

38:41Bianca Best: Well, you're asking an author who's on a book tour. We're going to come to that in a second. You know, buy the book, but it's a very, very simple life principle and it is follow your bliss so Joseph Campbell if you haven't read his historic book it looks at mythology and the correlation between psychological and spiritual evolution and how we can find joy and it's around following our bliss because when we follow our bliss the universe opens doors that we wouldn't previously have assumed will open and we when we become more comfortable following our bliss, following what excites us most and being in an energized state of that's fun, that's interesting, I'm curious about that and we don't let ourselves be consumed by fear and anxiety and all that, oh I can't, but we follow our bliss, life just expands beautifully and it's so much more fun.

39:44Tell us about the book, like what can we expect to read or what can you put to take from it when we read it?

39:48Bianca Best: Well, it's eight strategies around how we go from struggling to soaring. And really, it's a recipe guide for how to learn to work again. None of us have learnt how to cope with our lives expanding. And this is eight simple strategies to get to a place where we go within, to really understand what our inner foundations look like and how we solidify ourselves. So we're grounded, we're powerful, we're intentional, we're energized, what that inner work looks like. So then we go forth and go out into the world and have this gorgeous expansion phenomenon, as I call it, where our work is abundant and bolder and brighter, where our relationships and connections deeper.

40:31Bianca Best: and we learn how to treasure the important people in our lives or build our networks where wealth is redefined and we actually understand what success looks like and ultimately how we can get to a place of fulfilment by honouring our integrity. And just so personal, how does it take to write a book? I've always thought to myself I'd love to write a book, but I just struggle to write. Well, maybe that's not your thing. No, but... I love writing and this, I've written several books, But this is definitely a simulation of decades and decades of learning, of research, of experience, and of a lot of holistic training.

41:12Bianca Best: So this particular book, I mean, I got the book deal in summer 2023, and it was published in March 2025. So there's a very long lease. Oh, wow. Yeah. But I'd say it took me around six months of focused effort to write the book. and available i assume it's available uh everywhere books are sold amazing um bianca thank you so much for joining today like it's been a pleasure to have you uh someone who's i guess had a seasoned career that you've had um i love i actually i didn't realize it when we first spoke but whilst our journeys are or perhaps our careers have been different we actually went on a similar journey because I had a business of my own before I joined the corporate world and I felt exactly the same that you did.

42:02And it's been fairly similar since. So I feel like maybe by chance you're sitting in this chair to just give me a little bit of a reckoning as to what I need to be doing over the next three, five, seven years to make sure that I can maintain and still grow without burning out. So...

42:22Bianca Best: Well, you're clearly here exemplifying how to take a look under the hood and a show like this is a magnificent step in the right direction to inspire others and you're doing all the right things. And thank you so much for inviting me onto the sofa today. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me and get the book at every available outlet that it is. Thank you so much. Thank you.

42:51Thank you.