How To Recover From Burnout (It’s Not What You Expect) with Pippa Grange #656

32:31so i guess my question to you would be how would you suggest we encourage our children to think to think differently about what their lives might be in the future well i think there's so much that can happen there um in the home and in the conversation between parent and child even though this is a cultural phenomenon the change starts with us yeah it's your inner landscape that you can actually edit, and the collective editing of that is what will change the culture. So when you have a conversation with your kid about their worth being much broader than the results, that's one step. When you teach them that time together is present time together, as in you are both present for that time together, rather than you take them somewhere, you're on your phone or doing something else and, you know, multitasking and they're at play.

33:26You know, how are you actually relating and engaging with each other? Because when you do that, it's not just about you being a great parent, it's what you're showing them is normal when you're with a person. It's also encouraging them that it's totally natural to have periods of big intensity and big challenge and goals that they're chasing and then periods of rest, back to the triangle, the pyramid of kind of, you know, there's renewal time and renewal time is play, laughter, things where you're not performing at all and you let go to it, but they're creative and they renew your energy. Teach your kid that, that renewal is as important as couch time and rest, right?

34:08They probably have a bedtime. They probably have, you're probably aware of them going too hard and them needing a break from that. But where is their playtime? Where is their renew time also? Can you build that in? Because this isn't about your kid not being successful, right? If I ask you for both of your children, you want them to be successful. It's about a different method or a set of different methods to help them understand how to do that in a regenerative way that doesn't deplete them or extract all their joy. Yeah, no, I love that. So far, we've talked about why it is that so many people feel burnt out.

34:54You've also kind of gone through a list of what are some of those things that people might identify in themselves, right, which might indicate that they're overperforming. you've got it here in the book as well you've mentioned self-sacrifice masking psychological scrolling side thinking having a fantasy finish line i really love that one that as you say in the book assuming that everything about that over performance will change once they have moved the needle far enough through their own efforts attainment or behavior i definitely know what that feels like from a former version of myself i'm happy to say um so let's say someone so far has identified Pippa that, yeah, you know what?

35:37I may not be burnt out, but life isn't quite going the way I want it to. Some of those symptoms, as it were, that you've just mentioned, I think I have some of them. If they're now thinking about what are the kinds of things they can do to start changing things, where would you have them start? the first thing i would have them do is press pause for a second okay right and that doesn't mean stop i'm talking about literally for a few minutes and literally check in there's a practice in the book that i talk about um the japanese word for belly is hara the japanese believe that that is the place in the body that makes meaning so they don't ask the head first they ask hara and that sort of practice of like hand on heart, hand on belly, what do I feel?

36:31What do I need? And just like it is literally a minute and just coming back to yourself. Another thing I would suggest, you know, this is one that I would love you to try out at some point, but like asking your nervous system for a midday status report. Sort of when you get to midday every day just in the way that you have morning practices and we might not check in again until the end of the day but when you if you can actually just ask your nervous system for a status report around the middle of the day like how am I doing you know what's my physiology telling me right now am I how much of my time have I been up here rather than whole and I think that's really really valuable.

37:18Another thing is to stop allowing your mind to override the signals that your body is offering you. So, you know, when you feel a bit parched or a bit flagging, we push through until the next break on the mechanical clock on the wall, not listening to your own body clock of like, oh, no, I'm done. Actually, I need a moment. You know, how many times have you been in a meeting and there might be five, six other people, the CO2 in the rooms going up and you just push through until the scheduled break, but actually you're flagging. Like, can we just get a little bit more in tune with those things?

37:59That's where to start because noticing is everything when it comes to this. One of the things I've changed in my life over the past few years is my morning so I've always had morning practices that's always been quite important to me but what I used to do because I had young children at the time I would go to bed super early I'd get up super early have my time to myself my morning practices and then I would write for a couple of hours before my wife or my children got up. And I wrote many books doing that. And there's nothing wrong with that. And I've realized I don't want to do that anymore. And so I don't.

38:52And I think this goes back to what I was sort of getting at before, which is to really make these changes, you have to create space for solitude. and the solitude helps you get even more solitude right but when you're stuck in this constantly doing you don't even know what it feels like to stop and i feel it's to do with for me i think this really relates to the content in your book pepper is this idea of the nervous system i want the first little period of my day to be running slowly yeah and i guess there's a wider point there for me, Pippa, are some of these strategies that we use to get ahead and to be successful, can we argue that they actually can serve a role at certain times in our life?

39:43It's just that you don't want to be doing it forever. That's exactly it, Rangan. My proposition here isn't that it's just slow. My proposition is that you know, we have these gears that we can move through and we need to be able to diversify our modes and speeds often. And when we get stuck in fast or even stuck in slow, like when we resist intensity because we're just really attached to slow, that's the problem. It's the adaptation that we're looking for, but you can't know what adaptation you need unless you actually tune in, you know, and you've got that little bit of psychological space. You are planful about the times that let you renew, let you rest and let you perform.

40:33And when they're not there, you can go, ah, something's off here. What do I need? I like the way you talk about rest in the book and you share that in your own life, you say, I have had to make rest a practice that is central in my life, not something I do after life happens that day. I love that. Can you speak a bit more about that? I am a generally optimistic, excitable person and I can be like ideas are pinging all the time. I can get really fast, quite mercurial in the way that I'm processing things and engaging things and I start things. And, you know, sometimes if I don't actually check in, that pace is a bit high.

41:18You You know, if I don't do that, then I actually am depleted by the time I even think about rest. So, and after my own burnout, that's particularly noticeable to me. So, I actually have to design pause times. So, like you, I have a morning routine, but I design pause times during the day, like my midday status report, you know, to actually go, okay, how's it going? How am I doing? just in the way that we would if we were thinking about how to help an elite athlete perform consistently where's the reflection point we tend to do it at the book end of the day or the week or you know the season um and it's integrating it into the way into the way that we're doing the day so i actually have to put pause points in and check in and come back to my physical body for the intelligence I need.

42:12One of the things I used to talk to patients a lot about is this thing, this idea about microstress doses. And a microstress dose is a little hit of stress that in isolation you can handle just fine. The problem is when those microstress doses or MSDs mount up one on top of the other and get you closer and closer to your threshold. Compound. exactly and when you're close to your threshold that's when the problems start to come in your life that's when you snap at your partner or your children or you get irritated by an email from your colleague it wasn't actually the thing that your partner said or the email your colleague sent to you it was the fact that you were very very close to your stress thresholds and when And I hear you talk about these check-ins throughout the day.

43:05I love them. And I love this idea because I think also what it does for people is as they're accumulating stress in their day, which is normal, if you don't take that break at lunch and you work through, you just keep accumulating, you're getting closer and closer, but you take that 20 minute break and walk around the block without your phone, you've just lowered, you've got much more headroom between you and your threshold, right? So it actually is a preventative step to stop things going wrong. But we don't do it. We think, oh, I'll chill out on Sunday. And Monday to Friday is like, I crack on from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed.

43:47That's it, isn't it? That's it. That's exactly it. It's like in the book, when I'm talking about sort of, you know, burnout as a process rather than an event. You know, I use the metaphor of wildfires and there's kind of like the understory fire, which is it's crackling and it's problematic, but it doesn't take the whole forest out. Or ground fires that are going to take quite a lot of the forest out, but you'll still probably have tall timber. Or you can have a crown fire, which decimates everything. Now, when we don't take those pauses or have those practices or come back to ourselves or when we're dishonest with ourselves and we're masking, we are creating a fuel ladder.

44:30You know, it's like old dead debris ready to go up in flames. It's tinder ready to set on fire so that when then there is more pressure than we can handle, woof, it's - It causes chaos. It causes chaos, yeah. And it's built over time. burnout isn't overnight it doesn't happen overnight right so all of those practices are actually removing the dead wood removing the dead old dry stuff to just refresh and regenerate regenerate means to start anew and it happens within your life not after it that's the whole point i imagine there are some people who are listening pepe right now who are thinking yeah that all makes sense you know i should have some solitude i should regularly check in with myself throughout the day not allow the the deadwood to start accumulating it all makes rational sense why is it do you think there's so much resistance within people to actually do it sometimes i think these practices sound like they you need an hour right um like that idea of sort of the slow morning, you know, if you've got three kids and you're trying to get them to school by 8.30, that's, you know, slow morning might be a tough ask for you.

45:50So when it comes to the triangle, the renew part of that doesn't have to be equal time by any stretch. It's equal emphasis, right? So it might be, you know, what is it that, are you going to put a tune on in the car on the way to school or the way back from school that's just going to lift for a second. It's like, how are you acting in favour of yourself, in favour of your life, in small, short ways? Sometimes it's a quick laugh. Sometimes it's a tiny moment of self-care. It might be literally a minute or two. It doesn't have to be a yoga class. It's, you know, how are you coming back to wholeness, coming back to feeling like you're caring for yourself for a second?

46:32Because the more we do that the less we build up debris that's going to set on fire you mentioned the parent there of young children who might be thinking well I don't have time for this right and I recognize that that is the case for many people and at the same time I think sometimes we I think you write about this later on in the book about we've got more choice than we think in terms of how we design our lives that with a few little nudges and changes you might be able to create some of that time it could be that because you're knackered and stressed there will be a temptation and i've seen this with many patients over the years to unwind in the evening with alcohol and or staying up late watching movies or Netflix.

47:29And so you're going to bed late. You're never going to get up early because you're already knackered and stressed out. So the morning starts at full pelt. Yeah. Right? I get that. And I ain't criticizing it at all. I'm saying, and I'm saying this because I have helped people through this in the past, there might be another way. It might be that you choose to drink less in the evening. Maybe don't stay up till midnight watching Netflix, if you can, and get up five minutes before your kids to go and sit downstairs with a cup of tea before they all come down saying, you know, what's for breakfast?

48:06You know, all this sort of stuff. Again, that may not work in every situation, but I just want to offer that it's very easy for us to tell ourselves stories that, oh, I can't change this because of. Yeah, absolutely. And it may be that case, but it may be that there is just a little thing you could do that would make an impact. Because as you say, it's not about the big change. Even five minutes of calm or renewal can be very powerful. And I talk about sort of the three levels, the cascading levels, you know, that I start the book with of the stories of how we learned who to be. You know, what we're just talking about there is behaviour, right?

48:41And that's super critical. And that does not have to be huge. It's nudges, it's recognition, it's fire breaks, right? But there's also the stories that sit behind that, that we do need to stop and examine, right? The story that I've got to have more than I've got now, the story that I'm supposed to not waste any time, I've got to optimise every minute, even our leisure time, even our love lives have to be optimised, you know, with this market mind that we're always running towards doing it better and betterment. and then exceptionalism you know this it's like you're actually supposed to stand out when really what we want is to fit in and it's you know these things as well as the idea of being separate so you know all of that out there doesn't really matter all I'm focused on is me not I'm not connected to the next person or to the web of life and I can override my body if I want to you know when you get those things together and they they build those mentalities like I'll sleep when I'm dead or, you know, I won't drop the ball and all of the mentalities that keep us gritting it out, revving harder and getting more and more dead wood.

49:52So then when the last little bit of compound strain comes, we're up in flames and it's really hard to come back from there. And anybody who's burnt out will know that that's, we use the term lightly, but actually if you've had a proper burnout, you know that that's going to knock you for a good while physically and psychologically and spiritually. So it's, you know, it's, I would like for people to avoid getting there if they can through recognising the stories that they live in and the behavioural changes that are relatively simple and small that are firebreaks. When you were talking there, Pippa, about separateness and this idea that we're not separate, for some reason, Elliot Kipchoge came to mind.

50:40I know you're a fan of Kipchoge like I am. And I'm very fortunate to have two two-hour conversations with him on this podcast, which I feel very lucky about. The last time I spoke to Kipchoge, the day after the London Marathon, where I think he came sixth or seventh. This is really interesting. Someone who was regarded as the greatest for a decade, first person to run under two hours. I asked him something like, what was it like for you yesterday to come sixth? and he just had this beautiful smile on his face he was totally at ease with it he was just he was so happy that the youngsters are now coming up and it's their time it's not his time he's had his time he seems to be a sportsman who is not overperforming in in your language right he seems to know how to win deep and is happy whether he is winning gold medals or not because it's not about him and then as you were talking there Pippa I really reflected on Kipchoge and in our first conversation he told me how running is a team sport for him it's not about him he never ever trains by himself in Kenya they always train together and he goes yeah it's great because it means if someone's not showing up someone's on the phone said hey are you okay why haven't you shown up to training today whereas here in the west it's an individual sport for many people it's like i'm going to go for a run i'm going to go for this time do you know what i mean it feels it feels that he seems to be someone who understands that it's about we not i i mean what's your take on that um there's a couple of things that come up for me uh thinking about Kipchoge, the first is that I think as an athlete, he seems to me to be very whole.

52:31You know, so he's so much more than his results or his achievements. He seems to be really quite sort of non-compartmentalized as a person. Well, you know from your couple of hours of conversation with him, there's so much more to him than his running, right? The things he's involved in and his contribution to the world, his relationship with the world and with people in the world, feels very whole to me. You know, it's not, the measure of him isn't his results alone, even though he would be proud of that. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, and I talk about this in Better Reasons to Perform in the book, which is, you know, one of them is love, and he definitely performs for the love of it.

53:19He performs for the fulfillment of it, for the creative endeavor of seeing what's possible and for other people, for each other, you know, and I think now that's maybe why he, his appeal has been so enduring, you know, because you can see that he's, he's in it for more than himself. It's kind of like the essence of competing, the essence of sort of what we, the real origin of what it was to sort of, you know, be pushed to your very, very max and your very, very best because somebody else was running on your shoulder. You know, and he recognises that in a profound way. What do you think the true purpose of sport is?

54:04That's a big question. For me, I would say that the true purpose of sport is to seek more life. You know, sport is a place where we can go and see what's possible in ourselves, in each other. I hate to see it getting so narrowed to be about results and scoreboard winning. For me, sport is where we go test our mettle. It's where we go find out what happens when we're under pressure, how good it feels when we help somebody else out in a team, how we feel deep pride in having done something together or done something to represent, you know, and stand at our full height because we were able to and we challenged ourselves in that moment.

54:55So I think sport is just a phenomenally important and integral part of the human condition. And I don't like seeing it narrowed into a product, an entertainment product, you know, something that's just about winning. And, you know, it's just I just think it's important I think it's more than that it's interesting that you say it's more than just results and you're someone who worked in professional sports for many years and of course in professional sports certain people and coaches and players are actually judged on results aren't they so how might someone find their way through that so if sport is not about results it's about us testing ourselves seeing what we're capable of how does that fit alongside the fact that it is a big business these days and if you are hired to be coached for a top premier league football team you're probably hired to either win the premier league or get them in the champions league and if you ain't doing that you're probably going to get fired it's problematic isn't it it's an and right it's not it's not that um the ambition has to be taken out of it to be regenerative as in your performance or to find deeper meaning but the meaning the sense of your understanding of why you're you know what your reason for performing at that level is what why you put so much in what the shape of your ambition is that has to run alongside the outcome that you need, which is the result that, you know, the result on the scoreboard.

56:36It's not an either or, it's not a trade-off. It's a, you know, that's a factor of resilience. If you're coaching a Premier League team, your resilience will come from knowing why you're doing it and feeling the shape of those relationships around you as part of what allows you to regenerate week on week. Yeah, no, I love that. Going back to those chapters in the book where you've got an awareness over performances happening. And now it's about how do you sort of almost re-edit that story. And you've got two chapters there. One is coming home and one is getting honest. And I love every chapter in the book, Pepe, but those two in particular, I thought would be quite fun to go into.

57:23Coming home to yourself. I think a lot of people will not have a clue what that actually means. So when you say coming home, what do you mean?

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1:00:41so when you say coming home what do you mean can i ask you to share with me what you felt when you read that because i think you have a particular way of describing it that is probably pretty useful here okay so i've got a narrative in my head already going pippa thinks i'm going to say something i don't know what she thinks i'm going to say so let me just acknowledge that that was there. Okay, when I think of coming home, I just think of... Being present with myself. Right. That feeling when all the external stories and conditioning and expectation stops. And when I'm literally with myself and I know exactly what I'm feeling.

1:01:40so I said before to you that I had a phenomenal weekend I was reading your book in the sun with a coffee took my son to park run played with the kids in the garden played paddle at lunchtime and one of my best mates from school who I haven't seen in ages came and joined us impromptu he came around for lunch afterwards no plan at all we just laughed for three hours I would say this weekend in many ways was coming home. I didn't feel I had to perform or be anyone else. I was just totally me. And in those morning moments of solitude, I felt I got a lot of insight into my life. So that's what I think currently when you ask me that question.

1:02:22It's beautiful. That's it. It's like beyond labels, beyond tasks, beyond the to-do list. And I'm not talking about being on holiday for a couple of weeks. I'm talking about when you can just drop everything else and just like, oh yeah, just me, you know, just here. And that is what coming home to yourself is. And there's like various elements and aspects of it, but essentially it is when you can put down the massive weight of your own expectations of what you're supposed to be doing and where you're supposed to be and how you're supposed to be and just actually be for a minute. And that, you know, it involves so much of that presence, not as a practice, not as just a meditation or a, you know, something that resets you.

1:03:12It's letting go. It's just allowing yourself to just be you without the judgment. For someone who's stuck and do, do, do the whole time, right? Someone who may be currently suffering from burnout or close to burnout. This idea of coming home to themselves could seem quite distant and unattainable. For sure. Like if you think about the nervous system, let's think about it like a car, you know, with lots of five speed gearbox. Let's say your nervous system has five gears. And let's say you're used to running your life at gear four and gear five. Coming home is probably more a gear one gear too, I guess.

1:03:58That's not easy if you're used to being at high speed all the time, is it? That's why coming home and honesty go together, right, in this. But if you're burnt out, or if you're on the precipice of burnout, or even if you're just under a lot of strain right now, when you can ask, what's here? How do I actually feel? And just let your mind, body, and life answer that for you rather than automatically rev into fifth gear that's that's coming home that's being able to sort of say oh this is how it is right now and then then think about what next I guess one of the reasons being able to come home is so important it is something I guess you talk about earlier on in the book, this idea that the big questions in life don't get answered intellectually, they get answered when you listen to your heart.

1:04:58Yes. So opening your heart is a big part of coming home, right? Because we're so oriented to living from the neck up in our brain, we don't listen to the heart and the heart doesn't shout like the head does. You know, you have to be a bit quieter to hear it properly. It's more likely to whisper. And the gut, you need some space and some presence to actually pay attention to your intuition and to your instinct in those ways that are coming from gut, that are giving you different pieces of information. So coming home is about wholeness. It's about, oh yeah, it's a feeling I get when I sit on my yoga mat at the start of a class because I know I'm going to have an hour of time that is just about integrating and unifying mind, body, spirit for me in that moment.

1:05:50And it's like, oh yeah, this is me today. Wow, my shoulders are tight or head's very busy. Whatever it is, it's just like, drop it. Let's just drop it for a minute and just be here. And that is part of coming home but it's definitely heart based I love that idea of an open heart it's something I think about so much when I think about how to exist in the world and what is I want I honestly think I can boil most things down to can you live with an open heart and I can honestly say that

1:06:32and I'm sure this is the same for everyone if they actually pay attention when you live with an open heart everything in your life gets better you know I guess I love winning deep winning shallow right I guess winning deep you could say is winning with an open heart and winning shallow is yeah you're still winning but you're you're winning with a closed heart and to me an open heart means although very simply it means many things but but one of the things i try and do in life is to give without any expectation of return and it's something i think i got into maybe two or three years ago at new year i was reflecting on you know wouldn't it be nice if you could just give and do things for others with no expectation of anything if something comes back great but it doesn't matter if it doesn't you still gave because otherwise you gave and there was a condition to you giving you gave only because you were going to get something back and again I'm not criticizing anyone who does that I probably have done that for much of my life but I think to live from an open heart and with an open heart, you do need to slow down and you do need to come home to yourself.

1:07:55Yeah. You know, probably the best example of this sort of giving with no expectation of return that I've seen recently is in some of the work I've been doing over the last few years with my business partners and friends at Open House, which is a cafe and supper club and yoga studio and its sister project at Tentries Garden, which is all about whole being in our little village in Hathasage. So lots of people book onto the yoga or the Pilates or the workshops, and we have a music as medicine program, et cetera. And we've been building community for the last couple of years. It's beautiful. And at first it was, we started with the intention of generosity.

1:08:36We started with this idea of like, let's just give and see what happens as much as possible. And it's been a amazing to watch people come into that space and give themselves. So as part of the classes schedule, there's a pay it forward group. And the pay it forward group is for somebody who's booked a class. It's only 12 spots in a class. It's little. And if you can't go, you could cancel on the website and get a refund, or you can put it on the pay it forward and give it to somebody, gift it to somebody. And the Pay It Forward channel is just this whole phenomena in generosity. And people now, I've seen it now, people put other things that are nothing to do with open house on there, things that they want to give or offer to other people.

1:09:24And people have started interacting with care for each other if somebody's sick and they have to pay forward their class place. It's just become this really beautiful little vignette of generosity. generosity breeds generosity and it's not about how much money anybody has it's the open-heartedness with which people engage in that space because that's what they find there and it sort of just ping-pongs between people and it's suddenly it becomes then an open-hearted place goes back to something you said earlier on in the conversation that something i completely subscribe to as well is that the way we change society is by changing ourselves right so you start showing up with an open heart in your life that will ripple to the people around you and if enough people do that well that's how you change the world right back to the principles of ecology right everything runs on energy so the energy you give will be more often than not reflected back to you.

1:10:30If you bring positive energy, if you bring generosity, it will be reflected. And maybe it'll only be reflected in people opening a bit. If you bring negativity or closed energy, then people might withdraw a little bit. These things compound. In that section on Coming Home, you also talk about returning to the basics. Yeah. What does that mean? For me, returning to the basics is about, you know, you spoke about it before, if you are in a physical fog because you haven't slept well, you haven't fueled your body in a way that offers genuine nutrition and pours enough to digest something. If your stress levels are super high and you're not giving yourself any fire breaks, you know, it's that stuff as much as anything.

1:11:18And I add space into that, psychological space, I think is absolutely a basic. If you are on go mode the whole time and you don't allow some space just to let go for a second, the pause I spoke about earlier, that's integral to being able to come home, being able to be honest. So honesty takes a lot of energy. Coming home to yourself, living with an open heart is a particular type of energy and you want to regenerate that, right? So those basics are very fundamental in that, especially sleep. For that person who feels that they're right in the thick of it and they can't slow down, they don't know how to slow down.

1:12:04In fact, they probably are at burnout, so they don't even know that. Because, you know, real burnout is really, really severe. It takes a long time to fully recover from, doesn't it yeah it does but i guess it's a colloquial term now that that's used yeah a lot of the time i mean do you have a definition for burnouts i i think it is a um very uncomfortable involuntary process of transitioning away from what's not working for you anymore right and it's it's on multiple levels of physiology you know your biological responses and your psychological responses whole raft of symptoms but it's super hard to it's problematic to define it in the literature and people sort of argue ad nauseum about the official definition of it.

1:12:51But for me, it's a transition away from what's not working. And sometimes your body and your mind just say, hey, we've been throwing up warning lights for months and months here. You're not listening. So you're handing over the keys and we're crashing. That's the key, isn't it? The body was always handing out warning lights. Exactly that. It was always doing it. You may not have seen it. You may have been too busy to pay attention, but it did not happen overnight. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And that's why I talk about the core four principles of regenerative performance, of sort of like coming to presence, diversifying your modes and speeds, being able to listen to the intelligence of the body and recognizing your own wild clocks and rhythms, which we can talk about.

1:13:40But that listening to the intelligence of your own body is critical because it's throwing up signals all day. We just override it. So the chat's on getting honest is quite an interesting one, because when you say getting honest, you talk about not lying, but it's not only not lying, which I found really interesting, right? So not lying is, you know, you don't tell a lie, you don't tell a white lie, you don't tell a straight out lie. I want to ask you why you think that's important. But it was also about when we leave out important things. Not hiding, yeah. Yeah, because that's not actually, I guess it's not directly a lie, but I guess it's almost misleading because I guess when relevant, if we don't bring something up, we may not be lying, but we're also withholding.

1:14:29Why is this so important? Yeah. I'm not talking about this here from an ethical or moral perspective. I'm talking about what it creates for you, the individual who is letting out that little white lie or omitting or withholding or masking or covering up something. Because for me, what happens is a small ripple of inauthenticity in your energy, it's part of the deadwood that builds up, right? Because you're not quite being true to yourself. And the example I would give you is, let's say somebody calls you and says, hey, Rangan, can you come and do this thing for me next week? And you kind of think, ah, that guy did something for me.

1:15:16Maybe I should help him out, but you don't really want to. and maybe you feel next week is a bit crammed already for you. You know, if you were, if we looked at it from the lying perspective, you would make an excuse and say, no, sorry, I can't make because, you know, I've got something else on at the same time. If you were going to do it more honestly, you would be able to say, I feel too cramped next week. Or actually, I just don't feel a degree of motivation to do that right now. perhaps I can help you out next time. Right. But as soon as we hear that, we go, oh my God, there would be so many consequences to me.

1:15:54When you don't do that, the cost is yours. So you've made the path easier to make an excuse for somebody else, but you've been inauthentic to yourself and you get further and further and further away from what's actually true for you. And, you know, the question for me is like, why can't we actually say I'm too tired? I'm too strained you know I feel a bit stressed or I'm that's not really where I'm at right now you know perhaps I can help you on the next project it's you know it's that is really hard to do in our culture and the problem is we bend and then we bend ourselves out of shape because we're we don't want to have the friction or discomfort that goes with telling the truth and then we've as that sort of cascades then we start masking a little bit that like oh I'm not going to share all the strain I'm feeling because you know this I've got really it's really normalized for me to not tell the truth about myself yeah it's such a great point it is so so common I don't think it is in every culture you know I remember from when I did a couple of ski seasons in Chamonix and in the certainly in the winter maybe 30 40 percent of the population are swedes and again just my perception was that the swedish culture is a lot more direct and actually when you're not used to that it's uncomfortable but that discomfort only is because you're not used to it yeah but actually i've come to really value directness because it's like oh great i know how you feel yeah right there's no i guess you know born and brought up in the uk I think both of us there's the thing here about being polite right you say the right thing but that does come at a huge cost because half the time no one actually knows what you really think exactly that you know and I did spend much of my life being like that but but I have really changed that over the last few years well literally last week an example was someone contacted me to ask me to they you know they said wrong enough love your work I think you're really gonna like my new book i'd love you to read it and consider endorsing it and i'm sure it will be and it's a wonderful book and i don't have time and so i just sent a really nice email i didn't even i didn't even wait two three days i did straight away i said hey thank you so much unfortunately i'm over committed at the moment i can't remember what else i said but i was i told the truth basically yeah i didn't give any white lies so i'm sorry i'm not able to help you i hope the launch goes well or something like that.

1:18:38And I got a lovely reply. And I think what we don't realize sometimes is when you are honest and there is a way to be honest and kind, it doesn't have to be triggered. You can be totally honest and kind. I think people like that. They respond to that. They're like, oh, I know where I stand now. Whereas the older version of me would have tried to fudge it or kick it down the road for a few months. It's still lingering in your head goes, oh, this problem is not going away. It's still going on because I didn't deal with it. And so I think a lot of the reasons some people can't be honest is because of a deep insecurity.

1:19:13And it probably relates to some of the stuff in your former book. There's probably fear there, right? There's fear of I need to be liked. So if I say no, will they like me? It's quite hard, isn't it? To be honest. It is quite hard to be honest, but it's the sort of quick rip of a bandaid of like, there's going to be, I'm going to feel a moment of friction for being straightforward and telling my truth, or I'm going to kick it down the road for months and, and continue to feel a bit uneasy. And that my point is that that costs you in authenticity, and it costs you a little bit too much in what you have to then carry as a mask.

1:19:57and you know the freer that we get the better that it is and the more able we are to regenerate energy that you have to carry that energy of small dishonesties where you're not being fully you and then you know people start loving the you that's fake or fake's a harsh word but that's not quite fully whole and true yeah this is really what charisma is surely right a charismatic individual, the people we feel drawn to, I guess some of the time I imagine that is because they are fully authentic. Sometimes, but somebody just, I just had a political figure pop into my mind that's very, very charismatic.

1:20:43So maybe there's, okay, what was it? Maybe there's deep charisma and shallow charisma, right? So maybe the deep real charisma is when you really are being yourself. And I think that is quite magnetic. Yeah. But there can also be a performance of charisma, I guess. There's a substance. There's a real substance to people who you feel are just comfortable enough in their own skin that they're straightforward. Yeah. And they say it as it is. And they don't mind not being liked, which I think is another one. Yeah, that's part of it. But as you quite rightly say, there's a respect that goes with people who are honest, right?

1:21:19So if you had actually said, or you or I or anybody actually said, I feel a bit too tired to take on anything else at the minute. Suddenly the impression that we put out to the world of a resilient performer and all the rest, it's like, oh, did I just edit that impression that I made on the world? But it's true. And so it's substantial because it's true. And you have that tiny moment of friction for saying it. I want to just go a bit deeper on what really is the cost to ourselves when we when we sort of lie or we have these white lies right because I imagine someone's thinking like you know I don't know my mate asked me to pick up their daughter from school today and drop them home on the way but I don't want to do it because then I'm going to get stuck in traffic or you know this is literally coming off the top of my head right it's easier to tell a white lie right because then there's no big issue you just say hey listen i'd love to have help but you know i've got a i'm taking harry to football right for that skeptic you're saying well why does that actually matter make the case then that it does matter i think it comes down to the energy so then next time you see your mate and they say well how was harry's football and you're like uh you know you put yourself in a position to have to mask and perform you know like you're over performing by doing that and and the essential point is can you be faithful to yourself and say what's true for you in a way to your point before about saying it kindly or generously you know how else might you have framed that if you didn't want to get stuck in traffic and and pick up his kid like how let's just roll with it like how else could you have said it well i guess you could just tell the truth say um i've got so much on at the moment and if i do that i'm going to get stuck in traffic i'll be home really late and actually i just don't have the bandwidth for that at the moment i'm afraid and you could just literally take two-thirds of that explanation off and leave the last bit i don't have the bandwidth today buddy that's it yeah and that's true for you because you don't want to be over explaining either right because you dig yourself in a hole And the point is, it's like, how do you have a tiny moment of friction, but be true?

1:23:46He hears it. You said it, you both feel good about it. Right. And it's, you know, you haven't said, I don't like your kid. I don't care about you. And so I'm not going to help. That's not the truth. Yeah, what's really interesting is if I think about that through the lens of burnout, in some ways you can think about burnout as a web of lies, right? I've never thought about it like this, but it's almost as if the reason you're probably burning out is because you're constantly lying to yourself. Yeah, I describe it as being unfaithful to yourself. Maybe you're putting too much energy into people and things that actually no longer move you or are not quite true for you.

1:24:30You know, but we lose our sense of how to say it out loud and stand in it, you know. And that's why the small ones are so toxic because you do it once. That's what I'm talking about with the ripple. It just continues. Yeah. So it's a small cost, right? But is it a withdrawal or is it a credit? When you say it honestly, it's a credit. When you are slightly dishonest, small white lie, or you hide because it's not always something that you lie about, it might be something that you just don't share. It's a withdrawal. In that chapter on honesty, at the end, you got some lovely questions. You say, here are some reflection questions that can help you honor your own honesty.

1:25:21And they include, where did I say what I really meant this week? Where did I feel the tug to avoid honesty this week? That's a good one, isn't it? You know, because you may not have done it, but you just felt that urge. Where did my nervous system feel calm and harmonized? And where did it feel out of sync this week? Who did I feel most real with this week? Where did I say yes when I really felt no? I mean, that's a big one for most people, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. And also when some people say no, when they really wanted to say yes, you know, imagine journaling those once a week, you know, those questions, just to sort of put yourself in touch with what honesty means for you yeah i don't think people sometimes realize just how powerful that is i think sometimes there's a tendency to think you've got to overhaul everything yeah it's like if you every sunday if you literally with a cup of tea or coffee spent five minutes answering those questions and you did that week on week you would know yourself so much better and you would start to make different decisions just from that self-inquiry yeah exactly and it and it's um i really make the point strongly about uh not judging yourself this is not a time to judge yourself if you've been brave enough to do something like that like it's not time for criticism it's like oh there was one there was one oh yep didn't quite like to say what I meant there.

1:26:54Because, you know, I firmly believe that awareness

1:27:00is maybe 80, 85 % of all change. And it's my belief. Someone may have a different perspective. And the reason I believe that to be true, A, I've seen it in my own life. I've seen it in many patients. But once you know, let's take that question, where did I say yes when I felt no? right let's say you reflect it you're like let's say it was picking up harry and taking him to football when you didn't want to right once you know that and you've registered that in your consciousness on that sunday when you next get asked to do the same thing you now can't pretend to yourself that you didn't know do you know what i mean you there's there's now you it's even more heightened in front of you that, oh yeah, now you may do it again, but each time you do it and then you reflect on it, you're like, you're bringing it up to the surface.

1:27:54You're taking it out of the shadows and bringing it into the light. And it will lead to a change. It's just a matter of when, once you start asking yourself those questions. And alongside not criticizing yourself while you're being brave enough to do that, you also have to recognize that like, if you just catch one winning, right? If you kept yourself doing it once, you don't have to wholesale change this all at once. Regenerative performance is about practices and methods that are, um, where you can change within your life rather than have to create something entirely different, right? So it's nudges and small behavioral shifts.

1:28:31And I really encourage people to think of it that way, right? If you catch yourself with one where it might be, huh, I could have added a bit there that would have been even more honest. It's not a criticism or a shame. There's no need for a dose of shame that goes with it or like something to fix. It's like, oh, there was one. Beautiful. Caught it. Next time. The idea that you can make changes within the context of your life, I think is really powerful, Pippa, because as we both know, sometimes when people feel that they're struggling and that they're overly stressed and they've got too much to do, they feel that the answer is to escape yeah i need to quit my job they might need to quit the job okay but but they might i need to quit my job i need to sell my house and move out to a village in the country and just paint all day yeah it's a form of escapism right that possibly doesn't get to the root of what's going on some people may want to do that yeah fine but i think what one of the beautiful things about this new book of yours is that you help people make these regenerative changes within their life.

1:29:40They don't need to do all that big change if they don't want to. Exactly that. Exactly that. Because a lot of people have got lots of things that they do like and it's what they plan to do, but it's just feeling overwhelming. They can't get their head above water. Right. So how do you change it so that you can properly evaluate before you have to feel like you've got to completely withdraw from it and tools down and escape or you keep going to the point of you know burning burning up and sort of burning out that's they they can't be the only two options yeah let's finish off talking about these core four principles of regenerative performance because ultimately that is where you want us to get to away from over performance and all the way over to regenerative performance?

1:30:27So the first one is coming to presence, which, you know, your podcast, your work has talked about lots and lots. And we all know that it's really, really important, but it's hard to actually remember to do. So, you know, the moment of pause, a girlfriend sent me a, when I, after I'd burnt out, a girlfriend sent me a mug and it just says pause on the front of it. And every time I go and make myself a drink during the day, I use that mug and it's like, oh yeah, that, oh yeah, pause, right. So it's like give yourself behavioral prompts that allow yourself to just come to presence and pause for a second.

1:31:02And that beautiful practice I spoke about before of hand on heart, hand on belly. What do I want? What do I feel? What do I need? And just allow yourself a moment to listen and listen wholly, not just what your head has to say. So coming to presence is a really important first one. The second one is about diversifying your modes of operation and your speed. So a lot of people are stuck in one gear and that gear is usually pretty fast. Doing a lot there, it's always intense. There's a sense of constant scale and intensity that means that we're just hanging on for the weekend. Right. In ecology and actually in real elite performance, especially in sport, you really have periods where it's intense, but also periods where it's slow.

1:31:58You have periods where it's fast and shallow and periods where it's deep work that you're doing. You have periods of renewal, periods of performance, periods of rest, periods of performance. And so actually properly diversifying your modes of operation and your speed is really essential. I have a client who wrote a diversity matrix for her working month where she started with a week and she just had all the things that she might like to do across the week and what pace and what mode she would need to be in to do that. And she scheduled it. And so she had to schedule it in her diary for the first little while until she got used to it.

1:32:46And it completely radically changed the way that she operates at work. And she felt like she had so much more mental bandwidth at the end of the week to be able to do that. Because she'd planned for the different speeds. Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes she's in, you know, there was a lot of it where she was going to have to be responsive. so she didn't it wasn't like between nine and eleven I will do deep work and between but it was across a week so it was like I need at least four hours of deep time deep work time I need at least um you know six hours of communication because she was working running a project team so and some of the things that were in every day were how often she would go outside the office and get fresh air, for example.

1:33:32And I guess it's going to be different for everyone in whatever profession they're in. So it could be, I don't know, a teacher, for example. It could be that their holidays or their summer holidays or the Easter holidays, or maybe the summer holidays after the exams, maybe that's a time where they really try and switch off and go, you know, it's been a fast-paced year, but now I'm going to rest and renew. an accountant maybe December January February March is the busy busy time of year because of end of year tax returns so maybe they plan in okay that's great that's part of my job but maybe I structure a big Easter break yeah or April and May I must make sure that there's a slower pace to compensate that's kind of what you're talking about right and and that it's that sense of then feeling that you're across the whole thing.

1:34:23So for the accountant, maybe they're really trying to get that moment to design a system that's going to improve how much rev they have to have for the rest of the year. They use the downtime to design the system. Right. Yeah. So it might be a more creative type of work, or it might be a more structural piece of work rather than just a transactional piece of work. So how do you diversify and plan for it and respect the plan that you make as much as possible, whatever the work is. And then there are some things that always need to be in the day, especially the pauses and the get outside for a minute, you know, because they deplete us enormously.

1:35:00Principle three, reconnect with your rhythms. Yes, rhythms and wild clocks. So the wild clock idea is straight from ecology. There's a guy called David Farrier who wrote this beautiful essay about how pollinators and flowers and other kinds of ecological meetings that keep everything thriving and flourishing are not meeting anymore because of the change to the climate, etc. So he was talking about wild clocks in an ecological sense of things being mismatched. And I think we've got the same issue with the way that we see our lives and our stage. So in nature, no living being behaves the same way throughout their whole life cycle, but we expect the same from ourselves through our whole adult life cycle, at least.

1:35:52We don't recognise the changes that happen in adulthood. We recognise them through childhood and adolescence and you get to be a grown up and it's the same then for the next 40 or 50 years, right and of course it's not so you were talking before about feeling like maybe there's a change of foot for you or an adaptation to a new phase that's exactly it that's a that's a wild clock in some ways looking at why would and menopause is another example for women right expecting the same from yourself in perimenopause or menopause as you did previously and just gritting it out That's not it. That's not what nature does.

1:36:33It evolves to meet the time. It adapts to meet the time. And then of course there is winter, dark nights, dark mornings, summer, longer daylight. How do we adapt to those things? Or are we ultra processed and homogenous and mono all year, right, expecting the same thing? And there's only a few creatures in the world that actually have a menopause. For example, toothed whales also have a menopause. But once that whale has been through menopause, they have a different role in life. Because there's a recognition that something's shifted. It doesn't mean you're not productive. It doesn't mean you haven't got a valuable role, but something needs adaptation.

1:37:21How can we talk about that? Yeah. so that's so wild clocks and rhythms you know and you know i ask people the question um are you do you have rhythm in your life or do you have pace you know and how do you know the difference because rhythm you know it's kind of like a performance rhythm like you come up to the crest of the circle and you come down the other side before you go again it's whole yeah it's not a straight line it's not a straight linear thing yeah and the fourth one is embodied intelligence so this is like can you reconnect your mind and your body you know we treat our body like it's an uber for our head you know control center and we treat it like sometimes even like a burden something needs fixing or something's not right or we have to improve something.

1:38:13It's like the machine that carries the intelligence center around. But this incredible thing that is your body is alive with intelligence from your gut, from your heart, signaling to you all day what you really need and how you're really doing. And can you actually connect those things a little bit more and respect your whole intelligence rather than just your head intelligence? Because that is a massive, massive piece of not getting to that burnout phase. yeah I love that such a clear way to think about the difference between over performance and regenerative performance is something that's I guess very practical actually in terms of a map to help those of us who need to shift yeah and make changes in our life to get there yeah looking back on your time working with the England football team how do you think about it now I think that was an amazing little moment that encouraged me to really think about how these principles apply to people more broadly.

1:39:17You know, my time at England was sort of the culmination of 25 years of working in elite sport, which I thoroughly loved. But it was time for me not to be on the bus anymore. and in the organisation, in the thick of it in that way. I still coach people, still coach high performers from sport in that way. But it was an extraordinary moment and it has given me so much opportunity that I am very deeply grateful for that is about me being able to have conversations like this to help more people. Peppa, you know how much I love your work. I thought your first book Fear Less was amazing. This book is just as good.

1:39:58I love the content in it. Life Reclaimed. Find Freedom from Chronic Overperformance. It's a wonderful book. I'd highly recommend people check it out if they resonate with the ideas that we've spoken about today. To finish off Pippa, you've shared loads of practical tips in this conversation today, and there's plenty more in the book. If someone, whilst listening to this conversation connected deeply with this idea that actually their life is slightly off track it's not going the way in which they want it to go perhaps they feel stuck or close to burnout but until now they felt that there's no way out what would your final words be to that person?

1:40:51I would suggest that firstly they start with a big dose of generosity and care for themselves and take a moment to look at whether they actually need a way out or they need to change within and I would encourage them to be thinking about matching that inner landscape with the outer landscape and the world that they're in and finding more wholeness that's the essence of it and as you quite rightly say the the book is full of it's a map really for how people might be able to do that but first slow down pause ask yourself and respect the answer. Pippa great advice it's been such a pleasure talking to you today the book is wonderful life reclaimed thank you so much for coming back on the show.

1:41:41Thank you for having me as always.

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