Mindset that scales- Thea Brook on why calm beats hustle

0:14Hello and welcome to the Tomorrow Brands podcast where we explore what it takes to build a brand of tomorrow. I'm your host, Ruth Vitock, and today I'm joined by founder turned coach Thea Brooke. Today's episode, we ask what if the smartest way to scale is to slow down? We talk about the startup roller coaster, how to stay steady when everything else is up and down, and the mindset work that really changes outcomes, from retraining neural pathways to swapping dopamine spikes for steady joy. If you're winning on paper but running on fumes, this one's for you. Let's get into it. I'm going to start with a bit of a deep question.

0:45have you ever found yourself winning on paper but burning out inside or maybe scaling fast but losing sight of why you started in the first place i'm going to go back to my restaurant days when i was building the restaurant business because that's a business type where on paper or from the outside world it's very exciting and glam and interesting so we this is at the point we probably had two sites we had celebs coming and eating at the restaurant and the bbc doing documentaries on us said we'd want a timeout of what yeah all the things and i was like i was just sick all the time i had this whole bout probably for about six months of virus after virus and then i had like loads of antibiotics to try and figure i actually my viruses got so bad at one point i got a head lesion that we're really getting into it at the start of this that's the real thing The doctor was like, this is a sign of what people used to get back in the old days when they were really malnourished.

1:45And it was just because I just kept going and kept pushing my body with really long hours and loads of stress and all that kind of stuff. But nobody saw that from the outside world. So, yeah, I've definitely had a few of those times in my life. Well, let's talk about your background and your journey. So you started off as a founder. You've had your own businesses and now you have your own coaching business. Do you want to tell me where you started, how you got to where you are now and what triggered the pivot? I have such a weird background that it's always really hard to try and tell in a nutshell, but I'm going to attempt it.

2:17So I've had this interesting kind of backwards and forwards with entrepreneurship. I think I was born an entrepreneur for sure. I used to get my dad to like give me random jobs around the garden and the house where I could earn 10p, 20p, whatever it was. And I actually opened my first business when I was 20. I had a dance school. So I was that was the route I was going in. I was a trained dancer. I was going to be in dance and then was on the side earning money doing an office job that led me into doing finance. And then I went into a full on finance career and ended up working like initially in corporate, ended up working in the startup scene in finance as well.

2:50So then I've had this kind of backwards and forwards, which is weird, like the creativity side and being the founder and building something from scratch and then being the sort of finance and ops lead in some really quite like fast scaling and bigger companies like up to 40 million plus and then I came back around when it was like when sort of restaurant business era started that was about 15 years ago now I think and I really went deep into entrepreneurship more then and I think I was really surprised going back into it and building bigger businesses at that phase of my life because I had gone through the motions of building businesses when I was younger and then I had gone through helping scale so many businesses from the inside from that finance seat and op seat and being very structured and when I was then building again and building much bigger myself there were so many I just struggled in so many ways like mentally emotionally getting sick like I was just talking about and I spent so much of it thinking why am I why is this all so hard to learn and why am I learning it all for the first time in the hard way?

3:56I started to get very passionate about wanting to be able to pass that on. Coming around to where I am now, I think partly I've always had that kind of mentor, teacher, coach in me. I was building teams from a very young age through my finance career and I'd been a dump, trained as a teacher and those kind of things. So I always had that side of me of passing information on and helping other people grow. And then I also had this fire around, I've learned this the hard way now. Let's make something of it by passing it on in some way. So that's the two things I think that have culminated in what I do now.

4:27And I do coach and I have coached for the last few years, but I think that I really see this whole phase that I'm in at the moment over the last few years is much more, it's almost like an adventure into figuring out how all those pieces come together. I think coaching has been like the initial vehicle I've been doing it through, but actually my brain's always trying to figure out okay how do we put these pieces together how do I pull in the stuff from leading teams and complex roadmaps in 40 million pound businesses and tie that in with the startup stuff and then the mindset stuff and what do we really need to bolt together here to plug something into many more businesses to help them run better and help the founders feel better so yes I'm coaching but I'm also just in this interesting building figuring out phase I think and you're going to do some sort of mass coaching for us a bit later in the podcast as well and some of your tips so speaking of all that experience were there any mindset traps you fell into that you can now see reflected back at you through your clients so I I think people are my the founders that I work with in particular now often surprised when I say things about how I used to feel and operate because they're like I can't even imagine you being that person or thinking that way.

5:46But all of the classic ones that I see in all the founders I work with, a key one would be comparison. That was crippling for me when I was first starting. I think having come from being a very important senior leader in fast growth businesses surrounded by peers and leading teams. And so then when you step out and you're doing that in your own business and leading your own business, those people that you're seeing around you become the other entrepreneurs and then you're only seeing their showreel the bit that's talked about out in the world and so you very quickly it's very hard to keep yourself out of that mental space I think until you recognize it and catch it so that was probably one of my big ones I had to work on LinkedIn is bad for that these days as well yeah it so much comes like with any platform I think it comes down to who you follow and I think it's so important to get very intentional about that and who you let into your world because there is so much rubbish out there and it's really damaging if you're letting it in all the time.

6:47Agreed. And how does your past in food and in founding shape how you coach today? I would say probably the most distinct thing about how it shapes what I do is, well, having this very strangely unique combination of the very tactical finance data-based brain that I have and then having the creative entrepreneurship side it's it enables me to really see things very broad but then be able to get very tactical with people but I think the main thing for me is I very much coach the whole human like I know from being through it myself and for the work I do when you are particularly at the early stages of a business if you think if you really think about it we're bringing something into the world that didn't exist before it may have existed in different forms or there's other similar things out there but we're creating right people entrepreneurs are creating and that's all coming from your mind which is wild to think about i love it right it's like doesn't you can't touch it and you can't see it and then somebody's just sat there and thought it up and it exists so then and that's very physical very real part of the human that if we don't look after the human and all the connected parts then we can't do all of that like creative thinking and we can't have the resilience and good decision making and all that kind of stuff so i think sometimes when things are a bit too tactical and framework oriented it can be great to learn that stuff but you're still blocked to be able to actually implement it i very much coach from that holistic perspective that we are we're dealing with a whole human here as well as the business world especially if you're the founder or the boss.

8:25It's you. And I think people, this sort of, again, more recent concept of bringing your whole self to work, it's like you always bring your whole self to work, whether you want to or not. Of course, your personal life affects your business life. Unless you're a complete robot, you can compartmentalize to an extent. But the blockers, the way you react to things, that's the task. And until you address that, you're not going to unlock what it is you need to do next work it's either going to benefit you the way you bring your whole self to work or work against you whenever I think of that whole concept of bringing your whole self to work because when I was in more of the corporate space in finance when I was in my I was only in my early 20s but I was already leading like finance team in central London and it was in construction as well so it was like 99 % men like very masculine environment and I was young blonde trying to talk about finance with people.

9:21So you can imagine you just, I had to bring that kind of masculine, or I felt like I had to bring that masculine energy to the table, which is not, which is really not who I am at all. And I think back to those days and I would literally like put on my suit and walk in the door and I was a persona and I didn't bring my whole self to work. And I can, in some ways that benefited me, but then the knock on effect down the line was that it just really didn't. And it wasn't until I moved to a different company and started to see different role models and a different way to lead and build I thought oh no actually it can be done in this way as well and I think it's like it means different things doesn't it because it's there's still professionalism is still helpful like you don't have if you're having a bad day like you don't have to tell all of your colleagues about it you don't have to tell everybody every single thing that's happening in your life but when it comes to if you're a founder and you're running a business and you have a mental blocker about something because of a mindset thing that's personal so thinking that's not going to impact on your work there's a difference it doesn't mean just say whatever you want at work to whoever you want and everyone needs to be fine with it it means just accepting I think that your personality and your the way you think and the way you act is going to impact on your professional life whether you want it to or not and actually you need to address the whole thing not just look at frameworks and toolkits like you said you do i i learned quite early on in terms of who it's right for me to work with if a founder is completely shut off to having those conversations it's just not going to work for us to work together and you know that it's there's other people out there to coach if you want to really just think tactical and ignore all that stuff but i know it's not going to get people where they need to go coaching is almost like therapy in a lot of ways isn't it it's like founder therapy even And like sometimes I do marketing workshops with people and they end up like therapy.

11:12Group therapy for everybody. The amount of my clients who will refer to me as a therapist or like therapy. And I'm always like, oh no, it's not my field. So let's talk about how you can use mindset as a growth lever. We know that a lot of the brands, a lot of founders that you work with, that I work with, that I've worked in, that you've worked in. Fast paced, high growth. Everything is stretched all the time. So teams, systems, people. and the founder's own energy and clarity is so important for setting the tone for success for the whole business. So we have this sort of funny balance between internal work, like we've just talked about a bit, and then external scaling.

11:51One is very accepted and public. We'd say that the other one is as important. Why do we think that founders so often neglect that internal work, even when we can see that it helps with the external scaling? Partly because it is so intangible like you just said there like the tactical stuff around growth and scaling is more tangible and it's easier to talk about and to look at and figure out it's very clearly this and we need to tackle it the internal the mindset stuff is much more intangible i think there's also less and less so the more we talk about these topics which is good but there is still this feeling of of, oh, I should have this shit together.

12:33I should be okay. Does this mean I'm like broken in some way and I don't want to show that? So I do think we're getting better at not thinking that way. But I think people still, again, we see that like highlight reel from most people. And even though we know rationally that's not the whole picture for people, it's I think for our brains, they're just seeing those images over and over again. And obviously the flip side of that or the payoff to that, when it's not looked after, is that people hit ceilings, they burn out you can't you stop you have to get forced to stop you've had this experience with your health like often your body will just stop for you when you won't stop yourself what happens when someone's hit that wall what are the patterns that have led them there i think the key one is being pulled by the business and by the right i'm quite often drawing this like the early stages of business or startup world that you're on a roller coaster right people talk about all the time like the business is going to do this constantly.

13:29It's, oh, something worked, something went well, something was great, and I don't know, something's broken or something didn't go well. And it's not ever going to be anything but that. Hopefully it's trending upwards as it does it, but it is going to be going up and down. I think when entrepreneurs don't give themselves the space to really work on their internal side, they end up on the roller coaster. I was with the founder the other day, and they said to me something about, I feel like that startup founder again, who's like all over the place. And I said to them, but the startup founder doesn't need to be like that.

14:09The startup is going to be like that, right? The startup business is going to be up and down. But the goal, if we can really get into that internal side and control the mindset piece, the founder can stay like this really level all the way through and be watching. They're like, okay, I recognize that something up there has happened and that's great cheers and then it comes down and then they recognize oh yeah something down there has now happened and that's not great so let's figure it out but they're staying constantly on that line and I think that's the best way for me to like visually describe it is the difference between whether you are being pulled around by that roller coaster or not I completely get swept up by the highs and the lurch feel all the bumps in the road and it's hard isn't it it's because you care and it's because you're it's your thing and also So that's just a little bit like what I am like as a person.

14:58But there's a line in that Rudyard Kipling poem, If, where he says, if you can greet triumph and disaster and see them both as imposters, both the same. And it's, that's the key. Have not managed to achieve that one. And some of the best bosses I have been those people. So I remember thinking it's like being on an aeroplane and there being some turbulence and the air hostess looking terrified. Like that is not how you want to run a business. Whereas the best boss I've ever had, very steady down the middle, bit of turbulence. They keep that small smile, reassuring smile. And that is what then sets the tone for everyone else in the business.

15:37I think as well, it's not about, because sometimes I talk to people about this and they say, but isn't that just boring? I want to celebrate the wins and I want to get excited about all the good stuff that's happening. and I think the difference is between excitement and like dopamine there's really like big dopamine inducing like if you think about like passion excitement those kind of highs they're the ones that can be very short-lived and crash very easily and that gives us the opposite side which nobody enjoys versus more like joy and peace and I think those are very like calm great places to be in So you feel like when you see those highs, it gives you that kind of joy and peace and you can stay very grounded in that space.

16:24And on the flip side of that, you can see the lows and feel them, but you're not feeling the depths of them when they're happening. So you're just aware of them enough to then start thinking strategically about the next moves. You think those dopamine giddy highs that we all love so much that there's always a price to pay for them. There's like a flip side to that. That's what causes the rollercoaster. that's really interesting because i think a lot of people who work in startups and scale ups and again i completely speak to my own experience here are really addicted to that cycle and it's really hard to get out of that and feel comfortable with the like steady because it is addictive and especially if you've been in a business that's been broadly going up to your point like it's a roller coaster but it's going on then it's you haven't really felt the real flip side of that is when that all happens and it ends badly, which is devastating.

17:15I've known lots of people, I have also experienced that, but I know lots of people who've been on the receiving end of that. So I think that's unfortunately is what working in a startup feels like, running one and working in one. I think the trap with it is that you always need more. It's the same as anything in life, isn't it? Whether it's having a drink or buying something fancy, it just very quickly becomes your norm. What was the pinnacle that you were going to reach to get the high? It's like, I've done that now. that's now the baseline so I need the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and so you're on a very unsustainable path with that.

17:47What happens when we don't work on our mindset how does it show up in the business? So I think it's important to maybe talk a little bit about what we're talking about with work on mindset as well here because there's different ways you can work on your mindset the two that I see as most impactful this is both through my own work now and when I talk about my own work so I was everything that we're talking about at the moment like I was I was always up here something happening and then I was like right down in the dumps when it wasn't and it was yeah I was all over the place and had all that like comparison stuff and all the bad if you get the like list of all the bad mindset stuff you could tick every box for me at that one point and I made a really intentional effort lots of active work not just reading your book but like really doing the work and the two sides that had the most impact for me and I see again now like when I work with people one is around the area of really understanding how your neural pathways work and therefore why you're programmed the way you're programmed so like the actual physical side of your mind like how it works as a tool within your body and understanding like genuine understanding that we can change that this blew my mind when I really properly learned all about it.

19:04Okay, so that's how it all fires and connects. And that's why I think that way about something. And it's like, we've all been through like a gazillion experiences in life to this point. And it's just formed all of this thinking patterns. That's why we're all so different. But really then getting the understanding that, okay, over time, I can break down some of those pathways and I can build in different ones. It's just incredible. And why are we not taught that at school so there's i think there's that side of mindset work the other side is and this is again it comes back to what's happening physically in your brain but it's much more maybe like philosophical or softer for me there's like a pretty much every human on the planet by the time we get to our age or adult age we really need to work on one forgiving ourselves and two loving ourselves like badly and I see this impacting every family that I work with that self-talk that we have around like not being good enough or not being fast enough or not doing things well enough like when we think about ourselves in that way and don't get to the point where we don't it's just no question about it I fully love myself I fully forgive myself for everything I've ever done in life and everything I'm going to do in life and if we don't get to that point where it just knocks on to everything else if we can't think of ourselves that way how are we going to then be able to trust ourselves fully and make these decisions.

20:24So I think the way it knocks onto the business is like, you're a decision factory constantly, right? There's so much pressure on a founder when you're building a business. Everybody talks about like, you have to make a thousand decisions a day. If you've got any of those like underlying chinks in the armor, which we carry, like we've all got until we do this work, you're always running on a little bit of mistrust of yourself, a little bit of questioning. And that's just a very uncomfortable place to be. And in the beginning, you can take it because it's okay. In the whole scheme of what I'm doing I've had these like couple of moments where I've not felt great as time progresses and you have more and more of those it starts to really take over the percentage of the chart and you're like I talked to founders who say like I just feel like now I'm making all my decisions based on like fear rather than joy and I'm like moving away from stuff rather than moving towards stuff and it's just what naturally happens because so we've just built up another one and another one of those I'm not quite sure about that I'm gonna do it anyway and then I'm gonna beat myself up because that result didn't go well and then on the brain retraining side you're bringing all those filters to the table and we're all going to do that to a certain extent we're talking about being our whole selves but when we realize we can we can control that or we can influence that and we can build a stronger version or more not stronger that's the wrong word more supportive for where we want to get to and where what we want to create in the world and the people we want to bring with us it's a very different picture if you've done that work to versus if you haven't I think people think that kind of negative self-talk can translate into drive right it's like what pushes you forward it's what keeps you going and that sort of total acceptance and forgiveness and I think people will be worried that you would lose that hard drive because you need to feel more content and then does that make you as good an entrepreneur I always my my go-to is always to look at the brands in the world or the movements in the world that have real impact and look at without knowing all the detail behind them do i feel like because you've the two sides either something's being pulled by love and magnetism and movement towards this like better place and one's being driven away from things they don't want right in themselves or in the world or whatever and you can feel that energy like humans can feel that energy and of course there's going to be some people if i probably think of i'm trying to think of off the top of my head like more of a hard cold brand it's not to say they're not going to do well is that on the thing that elon musk touches exactly so it's not saying not going to do well it's just going to come with a very different energy success but what what cost to yourself and what does that actually look like because there are plenty of examples of people who've built and sold successful businesses where they and they've had a terrible rep and they've treated people really badly and it's Then they sell and everyone goes, no, that doesn't feel very like karmic there.

23:15But actually, you can do it that way. But if you want to be thriving and happy in your life, there's a different way of doing it. And you can probably find less visible because they're not showing off about it on LinkedIn. Examples of people who have done it in a mall. And success is a really interesting word to bring up. because if you go out if you're in a room of entrepreneurs or probably lots of people but we're talking about founders now if you ask them what they are seeking you'll get some version of them saying they want a successful business or they want it to be a success or their mission to be excess and then you ask them what does success mean to them and they'll go and take ages to reply and try and figure something out and this is one of the things I find fascinating is I think part of that disconnect of people not being comfortable in the calm that we're talking about like you say like needing that drive, they need the push because they actually don't know what the pull is for them.

24:09Like people don't spend enough time sitting in. What does success look like? Not what does it look like in the world? Not what does it look like on LinkedIn or wherever, but what does it really look like to me? Like when am I going to be really in my core, happy and comfortable with my life and feeling successful? And then if you can anchor into that, then you can get really relaxed about that energy pulling you forward. I guess the problem is not so much for service-based businesses, but for FMCG and tech and anything else is it's other people's money, isn't it? So it's like the kind of growth, the demands of growth and like year on year growth.

24:47And you've got to be growing all the time. That's when it starts the job, because why do you have to grow year on year? What's wrong with building something that's sustainable rather than scalable? but there are like outside pressures. Yeah and that's why it's important to align who you bring into as you make decisions about how you're building your business. It's just a place people find themselves in is because they haven't understood that and defined it for themselves early on and then they found themselves with different partners and building in a certain way. It's later on that they realize those misalignments are in place and it's usually people who are building for the second or third time who come with that knowledge and then get it right from day one.

25:29And back to that sort of burnout that we were talking about, any early warning signs that people should look out for? Big one for me is just not really struggling to be present. And I think I probably had a good two years in my business where I could say that's how I was feeling. So if I didn't very often get time out to go and see my sisters or my family or my friends or do other things, but I would just be like, look, I could see their face in front of me, but there'd be a wall up and I wasn't even necessarily thinking very intentionally about other things there was just so much stuff swimming around and just couldn't really be present at all so I think that's one of the big ones the other one I try and get people to think about is we've got this side of the brain that just like never stops chatting and then we've got the side of the brain that's a bit more it's just a bit more calm and all-knowing it's that kind of subconscious that kicks in and just trying to be aware about which one you're absorbed by and being if you find yourself being very absorbed by the thinking i've got to think through this problem i've got to think through all this stuff that's gonna lead you definitely into that route of burnout and not operating from a great place that's very tiring as well isn't it that like constant ticking ticking brain problem solving yeah and it very rarely results in us getting to the great answer that we're looking for you always so it's not even it's not even very effective or productive you always get a great answer in the shower and that's the the lesson isn't it it's like you always get the best answer when you're not thinking about it and now when i do like brand strategy work that is that sort of deeper thinking like problem solving i will build in time to do nothing and go for a walk or a run nine times out of ten that's when i crack it that's just when you're not when you're actively not thinking about it and i feel like everybody knows this it's not new news this is it with all of this stuff though like when i'm talking to a founder about it and they say i know i can rationalize it and i know this i know that and it's not it's never the knowing it's the doing we've got to take the time to do the doing giving ourselves the space and time to switch the mode when i came out of my last business that was very operationally heavy so i had nearly 30 in the team and two sites and all the different moving parts like very busy noisy that was September and it was January that I started to feel like I could feel myself coming back to myself again that's mad that's I don't know three four months it took for me to really start to unwind from that busyness and burnout it's big yeah that's what they're saying isn't it there's a high price to pay for it you have to that's why it's important to manage rather Because when you do hit full burnout, it's months, weeks.

28:16It's not a couple of hours and you do a bit of yoga and you feel fine again. That's just not what burnout is. And so the price to pay, the cost to your business for that happening is huge. Let's get into some of your specific coaching tools. Let's talk about your top focus areas to the founders that you coach. Probably top one is this whole ethos I have or the way get try and get founders thinking is that slower is actually faster. And it's so against the entrepreneurial MO. And it was so against mine when I was back in all of these years of chaos. But it's the principle that we if we're just constantly next thing exists, we're never stopping to pause and really look at the landscape.

29:06zoom out are we still headed in the right direction are we making decisions for the right reason are we working on the things that we need to like the mindset stuff alongside everything else are we actually stopping to get the data and look at where things are going and make sure the foundational pieces are in place because it very quickly business just becomes unsustainable when that happens and it can happen at all phases right it can happen from the beginning but it happen at like much bigger growth phases as well so i think that really embedding the feeling that slower equals faster is key to the work that i do and very interesting because it's not what anybody ever wants to hear or do the second one is making sure people are operating from a place of absolute customer obsession which you will probably love because it's your world but it's so missing in so many businesses.

29:59I see different elements of it on different levels. What I find fascinating is quite often people will initially want to work with me because of my finance background. They're like, this is a missing piece of the puzzle. We really need to have that financial and data heavy eye on our business. And quite quickly, one of the first things we end up working in is much more around like customer insight and marketing. And it's because if I'm looking at a business from a how are we resources being used in general how are we leveraging the resources within the business which are always tight in the startup world and it's the biggest like one of the biggest leaky bucket areas is working on assumptions rather than speaking to people and then maybe we are speaking to people but maybe they're not leveraging that data in the right way so I get entrepreneurs to focus on eight pillars in the business and one of them's called customer obsession and i think people find that really interesting we have marketing we have sales separate but customer recession is like its own pillar i think that's really obviously i love this and i completely agree and it should be embedded across all areas of the business i also love it what you basically said that is that marketing is more important than finance so i'm just gonna make you feel better by saying yes number three i think comes back to what we've been talking about and that's that you are the most important asset in the business and it needs to be really thought about that way as opposed to I'm this machine that I can run into the ground and I just have to keep going and do more and be better at us now actually if you think about any other asset in any other business and if you think about the most important one which you are because if you stop ultimately we don't want businesses to stop if the founder stops to an extent in the early days we need to treat it the same way it needs maintenance and he's looking after it needs downtime it needs all the right things to fuel it that's it entrepreneurs just generally don't think that way they put themselves to the bottom of the pile and i was gonna say you could say you wouldn't treat an employee like that but unfortunately people do treat their employees like that you shouldn't some places as far too many places still i'm sure it's weird It's been so long since I've been in the corporate world that you must find this.

32:09You get into a conversation with somebody you know, like a friend or somebody who's in that world, and you're like, what? I do think corporates are generally better in a lot of ways because they just have better HR and more structures and systems. And they're not better at everything. But in terms of that, people getting wrung out a bit, they don't tend to hear burning out. Obviously, people in big corporates, especially in other industries, but I feel like it's more common in fast growth businesses because when people at the top are moving that fast, they forget that not everybody has as much vested in it as they do.

32:45Well, that's just not. Model it, don't you, yourself. And I think it's quite an easy trap to fall into of, well, I can do it. Everyone else around me should be able to, too. But basically, you're saying, no, you shouldn't do it to yourself and you certainly shouldn't do it to other people. Exactly. I love this expression. I'm not sure if it's I've seen it in some of your writing or if it's something I saw elsewhere but anti-fragile so a mindset is anti-fragile so it's not just resilient but it can grow stronger through challenge which I guess is another way if you're familiar with the term growth mindset how do you build that and why is it important I really like this because there was a lot I did so after I you know all about this and I think a lot of people if they know anything about me know about this but a couple of years ago was a bit poorly so I had I lost a business which I lost a lot of money in the process of and then four months later had a brain hemorrhage so lots of things happened in short space of time and I was really good through all of it surprisingly like obviously had a lot to work through and ups and downs and everything else but I had a lot of people coming to me in the sort of six months particularly like after the brain hemorrhage after I come back out into the world again and saying like how are you so strong and how are you so able to be so brave and all these things and it just got it made me think about it a lot because what was actually happening underneath was so much softness and that it made me realize like we can think about resilience especially when we are going through all these challenges of building a business of I need to be like hard or put on a shell and then that's what's going to help me like push forward.

34:29But the strongest I've seen comes from that softer side. It comes from that proper, as I was talking about earlier, giving yourself and loving yourself. And that is hard, deep work. Like when you really get into it, it's like, it's a lot of, I spent a long time like in lots of tears. And even if you try and get most people to sit in a quiet room in front of a mirror and look at themselves, and see themselves as another human, not themselves, and tell that human that they love them and how great they are and all the things that they've done that are brilliant, they really struggle or it makes people very emotional.

35:06So we're all carrying this stuff. But I think it's, if you try and compare it to, if you think about another human in the world that you really trust and you really, you've got that unconditional love for trust for, I'd like to be able to say people can think of a parent. I know not everybody's fortunate in that sense, but hopefully if you've got somebody like that in your life, that's something that you would think of as like anti-fragile and resilient, right? It's like we can weather anything and I know like we can get through things because I've got that. If we don't have that with ourselves, we can't do it with the things we're going through.

35:39So if I know with me now that I've done all this work and I've gone through all of this, if I massively mess something up or if somebody says something horrific to me or does something horrific, right? It's just, it doesn't, I don't even feel like, I don't sense it anymore. So that's where the anti-fragility comes from. It comes from that kind of calm resilience. It's not a hard resilience. if I think there's a line there's me and then there's a line and then there's the world and everybody else and I if I take care of the bit between me and the line all the other stuff that happens is fine but it's when I but if you don't take care of the bit between you and the line all of that stuff can get to you constantly it takes like confidence doesn't it and the right again mindset so someone sends you some like negative feedback the first human thought is I'm stupid I've done this wrong then you can start a spiral shame everyone else is going to know I'm stupid if you can stop take a breath and then go oh what can I learn from this this is actually going to make me better and we probably a lot of people probably can do that on small levels and as you get older and a bit more experience that comes quite naturally you can deal with the lower level stuff but if you can do that with everything even the big important stuff I just feel like that would be so liberating and that you it energy you're keeping all your energy in versus responding all the time yeah and again it's that the power in the pause so i think humans are the only creatures on this planet that have that ability somebody's probably going to correct me for that yeah so some something happens and then how we respond to it so all animals in the world like it's like instant they don't have the ability to pause and contemplate and make a choice.

37:30It's very reactionary. And it's recognizing that power that we have in that pause and really intentionally working on extending how the pause is. So, you know, there's going to be situations where somebody does something, can you instantly react because it's triggered something, right? But the more we can be aware of that and go, okay, I didn't use the pause then. How can I use the pause in that situation? And really playing with that's where that power comes from. Love that. I'm going to do a few rapid fire ones now as we're about to wrap up. One belief you've had to unlearn. The success of me is not tied to the success of any business I build.

38:07If you could say anything to fear 10 years ago, what would you say? It's all working out exactly as it's supposed to. Go to grounding ritual in two minutes or less. So I have two actually. One of them is randomly I will lay on a hard floor and that always sorts me out. It's just amazing. I think everybody should do that, try it at least. But the main one I use is to whack on some music up loud and dance around my house. And Hall of Notes is one of my go-to that we were talking about earlier. Book or podcast that changed the game for you? My number one I always recommend is The Power of Now. My desk and you told me to get it and I read it first, bought it 15 years ago.

38:44It's the important thing to say about this book, which I now say to everybody because I've realised it's a thing, is the first time you try and read it, you're going to think it's that shit crazy and you're not going to want to continue with it and you're going to put it down because that's what I did and then I went back to it and I was like oh I'm actually already doing most of this stuff and now I've listened to it like five or six times best piece of advice you've ever received one always that comes to mind for me is when I so I'd done I spent years getting my accountancy qualification I'd built my career up in finance and I just I knew it wasn't the right path for me and I wasn't in it but it felt so wrong to step away from all of that and And I remember being on a walk with my dad and I said something like, I just, it's so not sensible to be thinking this way.

39:26And he just stopped me and he said, can you just have a think about what the word sensible means and what sensible in life actually is? Is following your heart, like not the most sensible thing you can do? And what's your heart telling you now? And it was just this beautiful conversation that made me quit my job and become unemployed and then figure out what I did next. which yeah I think that was a great piece for us and should we ask everyone in your opinion what makes a brand of tomorrow I would say one that is genuinely in touch with properly in touch with a tribe of humans they've really understood that there is a particular tribe of humans gathering around something and what's driving that and that very internal emotional human need or instinct that's happening more and more so I think as we get more AI driven that's becoming more and more important.

40:23Thanks so much for coming on Thea. Thank you for having me.