2331 - The Essential Guide to Understanding Your Nervous System and Enhancing Performance with Sondera's Kristen Boss

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it is Kristen Boss. Kristen, you are the founder of Sondera. You're found on the web at sonderalife.com. You are also a keynote speaker. You're an executive coach and a podcaster. So I always love shouting out our fellow podcasters that show up on the show. Your podcast is just called The Kristen Boss Podcast. Hundreds of episodes. You've had some very notable guests. And your personal website is kristenboss.com. I'm Kristen. It's great to have you from one of my favorite towns in the country, Colorado Springs. We go there frequently to go visit my daughter. But Kristen, it's great to connect.

1:38Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Before we get into your superpowers, I always love kind of finding out what our high-level guests, you know, what do you do for fun on the outside? What have you been into lately? Yeah, so I have a variety of eclectic hobbies. So in the winter, you can catch me skiing. We're in Colorado. Yeah. Can I just ask you, where's your, I've not been downhill skiing pretty much ever. And I live in the South now, so it's just not worked out. So if I go to vacation, go visit my daughter in Colorado Springs during the winter, where would you recommend I go skiing if I'm a total noob?

2:22Oh, that's a great question. So I am biased to Breckenridge. We have a part-time place up there. So we're there every weekend. It's a great family hill, huge, like Peak Nine has great beginner slopes. I recommend it for everybody. Breckenridge. Okay. Okay. I heard of Breckenridge. And I'm sorry. So skiing and - Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Skiing. I do paint by number. I love crafting. It is the thing that like quiets my mind. I get a great before and after result, a sense of completion, which entrepreneurs don't often get. And this one's weird. People might judge me. I love reading fan fiction. I just love it.

2:59I love reading fan fiction. So I'm either reading, crafting, skiing, or, you know, cheering my kids on the sidelines on the weekend. Paint by Numbers is very meditative. I've done it a little bit. And for someone who has absolutely zero artistic, or they may feel that they've got zero artistic inclination, you can finish a Paint by numbers and people will go, wow. Heck yeah. Wow. Did you see what I painted here? I also do it on my, I've got a, I've got an app on my iPad as well that I do that as well. And listen, someone might look at that and say, well, you know, do you mind just sharing the emotional or spiritual benefits that you get from activity like that?

3:46Yeah, it's huge. As a high performer, I, I tend to crave motion and activity and busyness. And so finding activities that slow me, that also put me in a quiet place is actually, it's, it's healthy for me. So my mind quiets, whereas if I'm in a state of business, like I can be, my mind can be running a hundred miles an hour all the time. So to find activities that slow my mind, it's, you have the brain body connection. It slows your breathing. It regulates your stress. So for me, emotionally, it helps me check out in healthy ways. And oftentimes I get great creative ideas with the stillness. So it's about creating safety around stillness when I'm used to being in motion all the time.

4:35I love this. I see this as an investment in ourselves. And I've been reading more about kind of meditation, although admittedly, I'm historically consider myself to be bad at meditation. And I think it's just because I get impatient. My monkey mind is going bonkers, which is part of, I think, the benefit I would get would be to get more comfortable and make it easier as I do it more. So I am probably persuadable to pursue meditation, but for me, it's playing music. And also, I've been learning and hearing more about intentional boredom, like going out and just sitting and staring at trees, watching fish, watching birds, and not having the device out, not forcing yourself necessarily to contemplate things or work out big problems.

5:31it's like getting, and you'll hear this frequently where people will say, well, I get my best ideas in the shower. Hmm. Let's get curious about that. I wonder what's going on there. I bet you've got some ideas on all this, Kristen. Oh, I do. I mean, this is kind of, kind of what you do. This is what I do, but I also want to say like, I'm a student of my own work. So this is, I never ask people to do things I'm not practicing myself. And so for somebody that is like a super high achiever, incredibly driven. I will tell you, I also struggle with any types of meditation, slowness, quietness. So to the point where I'm used to anxiety flooding my system, if I am not propelling myself in some way.

6:13So I actually had to learn to, I don't know how else to describe it other than micro dose, like moments of stillness and notice what was coming up for me or just what I might be running from? Like, what am I running from? What's coming up? Why is this so uncomfortable for me? And in a sense, kind of rewiring how my brain processes stillness and quietness because my brain for a long time registers as unsafe. Like, we gotta go do something. I can't be here. I can't feel this. So yeah. I am going through, I'm on your website right now at sonderolife.com And I'm going through, I want to figure out my stress type or learn my stress response.

6:59I've only answered the first one so far. And maybe you could talk about why this is important for us to understand this. I generally don't mind historically that opportunity where a major stressor comes out and I'm cool under pressure and I live for this stuff. I love being that superhero. Like I am just going to take charge and not bark, but organize and, you know, gather people together and try to figure it out. It's interesting when, and I suspect, you know, all of us have been to an escape room at one point. Escape rooms sometimes can be great laboratories to figure out what type of stress response you might have.

7:45And my wife and I definitely see our patterns emerge when we're in that. And to date, I think we've done close to 30 escape rooms, not as much anymore. But when they were hot, we were going to one at least a couple of months. I love that. That makes me want to try that with my husband. But yeah, so understanding your stress type, I think, is actually going to be this. We're still early to the conversation. People may have heard about emotional intelligence and why that's important in leadership and business owners. But what ended up lending to this pursuit of understanding people's stress types was understanding how we operate under, under pressure.

8:20And with, and now oftentimes when people think of stress types, like the four types of stress, fight, flight, fawn, or freeze, they often think of emergencies or personal crisis or trauma. They don't think of micro stressors or micro aggressors that their nervous system has to take on every single day. And I'm talking about like when your kid has a meltdown in the grocery store, when you get an email at the end of the day, uh, marked urgent that you weren't planning on somebody dropping the ball on a project, a client, one of your biggest clients deciding to go elsewhere, like all of those trigger a nervous system response in your body.

8:57And so depending on how you are wired, and that has been shaped and conditioned from childhood, often from our, from our, how we perceived to secure or feel safe. That's always what our brain is seeking. So your stress type is really how you automatically default to trying to create safety on some level for yourself when you feel out of control. Yeah. And it's amazing that even our enemies, our nemesis or someone that's really stressing us out, and I use enemies in air quotes just as a perception thing, they all want the same thing too. They want safety. And so if they are acting out, if they are being unfair with you, I believe, and you point this out, 95 % of your decisions are made by your subconscious.

9:46This is just programming. They feel my, the way that I feel like I've, I've, I've learned to, you know, both set boundaries and also try to be a little bit more compassionate or empathy around difficult people is they're struggling with something. And if they act out, and you see this a lot on social media, if someone is acting out in kind of a rude way, usually it's they are carrying, or the way I see it, and you probably have a much better view of this, the way I see it is they are carrying a lot right now. And that stress is getting so overwhelming for them that they're trying to share their yoke with other people.

10:27And then therefore they can offload the work that they have not done on themselves because they haven't figured it out yet. But all they know is it's a lot. And if I can attack this other person, then they'll carry some of the burden I carry. That's my take on it. I'm sure you've got lots of thoughts. Okay, you brought up some really powerful things. one of the things that you mentioned was that you access curiosity and empathy when you're observing people in what we can call a stress response. So they can be, they could be lashing out, acting out, having a meltdown. I mean, just be on social media for 30 seconds and all you're watching people do is react to stimuli.

11:05And Stephen Covey says between stimulus and response, we have this amazing thing called choice. So why aren't more people pausing to choose differently? And it's because most people are living their life in a reactive state, constantly reacting to stimuli. And I want you to think of like, if you have constant stimulus and triggers and microaggressors on your system every single day, think of it like a pressure cooker. And at some point the pressure has to let off. And if people haven't been taught the skills to offload the pressure in healthy ways, they will default to what I'm going to call your survival response.

11:41And you said something quite profound. You said they're looking to share the yoke with people. I actually say sharing the yoke is a healthy adaptive response to stress because that insinuates community. When we aren't in a fight-flight stress response, we are able to access community and raise our hand and say, help, I'm in over my head. But when we're reactive, we actually, the very thing that often feels threatened is the sense of community. And so we end up kind of cutting our legs off from under us because we're in that, we're in a survival response. And one last thing is to circle back to curiosity and empathy is you actually can't access curiosity and empathy for others while you are actively in a survival response.

12:30Your survival response is in the back of your brain. Your ability to empathize and be curious and think what could they possibly dealing with happens in the front of your brain. So if you're in a fight-flight response, you're freaking out or you're shut down, that part of your brain that accesses, I wonder what they might be carrying. I wonder what they're going through. That part's offline. All you're going to do is react to their reactions, and then we have a dumpster fire of people kind of clashing based on their stress responses with each other. Two things that now you got my brain going. So two things.

13:05Number one, and I love the idea of if I am carrying a burden, like I remember listening to a long form conversation about the power of secrets. And when we hold a secret by ourselves, it can be very overwhelming. So sharing that secret, even if it means that the other person doesn't need to do anything other than listen, is just such a relief on us. Now, that presupposes that consent was made. And I see this shared burden being pushed on other people in maybe an aggressive way. And there's no ask for consent. And so I think that that's where we have an interpersonal violation. And then why that feels so bad to the other person.

13:51listen, you're going to need to, you know, so I would probably, I think if I were able to access my right mind, I'd say, listen, you sound like you're going through, it sounds like I'm not saying this perfect, but in my mind, I'm thinking this person's going through a lot right now. Okay. But you need to compartmentalize it. Like you've got, you know, it's trying to identify what is stressing the other person out. Now, one skill that I'm trying to get better at this is I heard from Jefferson Fisher, who I think does phenomenal work online too. He's how to have difficult conversations. But, but he says, you know, that let your first words in response always be a pause and a, and a deep breath.

14:33And just that small interruption usually allows you to bypass the first thing that you might want to do and say, to keep yourself safe or to protect yourself or to, how dare you kind of response, you know, like people don't talk to me that way. How do you do, you know, that sort of thing. But just with a pause, then hopefully we get to a little bit more of a measured or thoughtful reply about, wait a minute, what's going, what's really going on here? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I, I don't know if you have listeners that love to understand the why behind a certain action, but for me, I'm like, don't just tell me to pause, Tell me why, what does a pause actually do?

15:13And so scientifically, what a pause actually does is it helps you regulate your own nervous system and brings your, get you out of your rear lobe, your amygdala and your, where your survival response is happening. So when you pause and slow down and take a deep intentional breath, what it actually is doing is signaling to your body that you are safe and you can actually access your frontal lobe where you are able to respond from a place of curiosity and empathy. So your breath actually signals safety to your nervous system because when you're being chased by a grizzly bear, what is your breath like?

15:48It's fast. It's rapid. Your heart rate's elevated. So when you're, when you have a slow breath, your brain automatically interprets that as safety. And from safety, we're able to say, wow, it sounds like you have a lot going on right now. Can you tell me more? This seems really important to you. Say more. I love this. Tell us about all of the work that you do. There's the Kristen Boss podcast, obviously, for our friend that's in a podcast app right now. Go search for that. Go for search for the Kristen Boss podcast. I suspect you talk about these types of topics, Kristen. What else do you talk about?

16:24And then let's also encourage people to connect with you and in all the places that you're connectable. Yeah. So let me share with you a little bit about why the nervous system became such a big focus of mine, because it didn't used to be, I used to be a heavy strategic and consultant coach. I would, and I'm also a certified mindset coach. And so I could, um, help people rewire and reframe their thinking. I could, you know, we would give them a strategy and all those things. But what was happening was, as I was teaching people, the strategy of high performance and good leadership in business. I was noticing that despite having information to strategy, people were continuing to default to patterns that wasn't serving them.

17:06And I would be like, why? You're holding the playbook. Why are we defaulting to these things? And when I actually understood that it was how people's stress response or how their nervous system was actually interacting with their environment and whether they were able to regulate themselves under pressure became the key differentiator between those that were able to take in the strategy and implement it and have resilience and grit versus the ones that would consume information and, uh, fall flat or freeze or overwork themselves and perpetuate themselves into burnout. So the, I, I sense made a pivot because when I understood that regulation, like being able to regulate the nervous system was the key to high performance and good leadership in all areas of business, that's where I knew this is where we're going.

17:57Because honestly, I think with the use of AI and education out there, strategy, there's no shortage of having access to that information. You can put anything into AI and be like, tell me how to build a funnel. It'll tell you. But learning to optimize what I call our internal operating system, the invisible driver behind all of your behaviors, that is where the real work is. And this is still a newer conversation. Nervous system intelligence partnered with a high performance is, is newer. So that was kind of the pivot we took. And that's what Sondera is about. Um, because I was like, we want to help.

18:31And I will say this, it's not when somebody learns to regulate their, their stress response, I don't care if it's in work or at home. We have found that it bleeds into every area of your life, how you parent, how you engage with your community, how you show up in the online space, how you care for your clients. Like this isn't just about leading your business and driving your revenue, although it has profound impacts on that. This is about elevating your entire life in the way you lead. So that's a little bit of the picture of why the pivot and why such an intent focus on this work. Well, Kristen Boss, you are the founder of Sondera, your executive coach, keynote speaker, podcaster, the Kristen Boss podcast.

19:15You are available on the web at sonderalife.com and kristenboss.com. Kristen, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. This has been great.

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