Designing a calm start to your chaotic days

[MUSIC] In times of rapid acceleration, high pressure, and general uncertainty, the reality is clear. Professionals are struggling. They have become more mentally and emotionally exhausted, less curious, more stressed, and less giving. Adding to this is the complexity around solutions, with the overabundance of protocols, supplements, and so-called performance hacks. The end result is leaders are more distracted and have less mental agility, poorer performance, and struggle to be the belief builder and energy multiplier for their teams. We don't want to accept that. Our passion is to help professionals be more. These conversations help illuminate your thinking into sustainable human performance, learning real solutions to improve your energy, focus, and ultimately increase your impact. This is the TIGNUM Thought Cast. Today's episode, designing a calm start to your chaotic days with special guest Chris males. TIGNUM's managing director of the Americas and A-PAC. We hope you enjoy it. Hello everyone. My name is Scott. I'm one of the co-founders of TIGNUM and a bold, and I'm going to be our host today. And today, along with all of you, I'm sitting here with one of our TIGNUM performance specialist, Chris males. Chris and I want to explore today how you can create calmness in the chaos of your bold project. We're actually going to dig into your morning routine. Why does it matter so much? And what are some of the ways that you can make even small adjustments on your busiest days so that you can make sure that you're ready for what's coming at you? And for those of you that don't know, Chris, Chris coaches many of our senior executive clients, and in 2020, he was awarded membership into the 100 coaches community. And this community brings together some of the best executive coaches, authors, business thinkers across the globe. And Chris actually got his start into the performance world playing and then coaching in elite level sport. I think it was cricket, if I remember Chris, cricket. We don't know much about that in the US, but great sport. Before realizing his true passion that was bringing performance coaching to busy executives, he's helped many of our top clients at IBM, DeVartus Boeing, Abbey, many more to make sustainable, human performance an integral part of their leadership culture. And interestingly enough, as we're speaking to Chris right now, he's ready to embark on his own kind of bold project, which is moving his beautiful family back to Australia and expanding TIGNUM into Asia and India. So he's going to speak also authentically from the heart of starting his own bold project. And as always, we're going to start, Chris and I will start a conversation here at the table, but you all are totally invited to jump in with your questions. And remember, you can do that down at the bottom right. There's the chat. And if you click on questions, you can send your questions in and we'll jump right in. So let's get started, Chris, and welcome and thank you for joining me. Thank you, Scott. Thanks for such a wonderful introduction and a pleasure to be here. Yeah, so Chris, there always seems to be so much written in the media, social media. And now it's even become kind of a fringe topic about all the crazy things that billionaires and different people are doing to start their day and it's starting to feel like a little bit of a fat. Why do you think there's always such a fascination around these types of things? And is there something or maybe a few things that they often get wrong? Oh, I think there's so much of it right now. And if you look at social media, there's so many influences that are probably single without kids and their main drive to kind of get out that content is of course very self-serving. So there's so much of it, even as I was kind of like looking into some of the things that we'd hopefully touch on today, you can just get buried in so many hacks and life hacks and obviously that's something that I and the team around me within Tignament Least really pride ourselves on avoiding. In many ways, their bold project, if we talk about bold projects, is that 10 minute video that they may be creating for their TikTok, right? About their morning routine. That's their bold project. I think for us and our listener, is our bold project is a lot more than that. Our bold project is the big pitch that you've got later in the day or the huge town hall that you're running later in the day, whatever it is. I know for me, you mentioned my family at the moment, I have a four-year-old and a 11-month-old. And for me right now, the idea of having to get up in the morning to be fully optimized and get up at 4am and deadlift and then have a cold plunge and then you know, you know, meditate for 90 minutes and all these sorts of things. That is just not on my radar as something I want to start the day with. And I love this quote. There's a colleague of ours in the high performance coaching space named Brad Stullberg. He said that I think it was a tweet that I saw. He said, you know, "Being a real man is not about your intricate morning routine that starts with deadlifts at 4am. It's about repeatedly getting you four-year-old out the door while maintaining calm and balance." And for me right now, that could not be more true. Yeah. But I think at the same time, you know, you are doing something to wake up and be your best. Maybe even, you know, if you're getting up and want to be your best for your family, there has to be some kind of routine that gets us started, you know? So, although they might get a lot wrong and they could throw the kitchen sink at everything, what are some of the things that you think maybe would be right? Like, what would you do even in your crazy day to get started? Yeah. So there are a couple of must-do's. So please don't get my cynicism, you know, wrong there. But a couple of the must-do's are sunlight is huge. So for me, and I learned my routine and the the routine that I often share with my clients, actually through trial and error. So actually, I might go back a little bit more. And I'll say the number one thing that you can do is have a real astute level of self-awareness. And what I mean by that, positioning your own self-awareness higher than any other hack or table strategy actually means what works for me and what doesn't. And for me, this has changed a lot over the last couple of decades when I was younger and without kids, you know, I'm an exercise physiologist by trade. So I would get up and do the morning workout. So I would be up, you know, very, very early and trying to optimize my physiology so that I could have a productive day. And obviously, as I mentioned now, that's changed a little bit. I want to be as helpful as I possibly can to my family, to my wife before I leave for work. But some of the must-do's are movement. Okay, so we know that getting up and actually moving the body, you know, helps the brain just re-synagize, helps that left and right brain balance. Now I'm not talking necessarily about a sweaty workout. I think this is where the West has got it wrong for so long. I remember when I've gone and worked, and maybe even one of our listeners, you know, is on the call here working with his team in Japan. I remember looking out the window of my hotel room and seeing the Japanese do things like Chigong Tai Chi, these morning movement routines to turn on the brain, but in a very light fashion. And I think that for me right now is actually more attractive than the sweaty CrossFit workout, or something that leaves me absolutely exhausted for the next few hours. That is not my goal. So movement would be one. And then I mentioned sunlight briefly. If you can couple these together, I think it's fantastic. And there's great research out there about getting that sunlight in the eye. We have this, you know, super-tea-smatic nucleus that kind of tells our brain to kind of wake up or start, you know, heading towards bedtime. So really it came, these strategies came to me from my own trial and error, as I said. And in many ways, it was actually like, what's the opposite of my bedtime routine? How can I actually start my morning routine by thinking about all the different things that I do before my bedtime routine? So dark light, low light, decrease in temperature. You know, try to get rid of roomy-nating thoughts, so try to get the brain in the best possible state. And then when it comes to my morning routine, I flip those things. So when I was traveling for cricket, or even now for work, I might be up before dawn, but it might be having that kind of hot cold shower to get my temperature right. But also I might be looking up at the ceiling in the shower, not directly in the light, but trying to get as much light in the eye as I possibly can if the sun hasn't risen yet. So for me, it was just an opposite of what I was already doing of a bedtime routine. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't want you to park your cynicism because you wouldn't be bold if you parked your cynicism. So I love cynicism, just so I just want to point that out. But I like the idea of how important self-awareness, right? We talked about this previously. What does success look like? If I don't have a clear vision of why I'm doing my morning routine and who I want to become, then really I could do 100 things and they won't get me there. And it reminds me of, you know, when I was a firefighter, and we have this thing called shift change. So in the morning, you know, of course, we could have the most chaotic day, but you don't want to start your day chaotic. You need to start it with calmness. And, you know, we have a unique thing because everyone's coming off shift and everyone, a new crew is coming on shift. And so that shift is kind of symbolizes a little bit of that ritual that you develop. And the foundation of our shift change and the way that we approach it actually started around a thing called cockpit resource management, which was designed because there were so many airplane crashes. And so in 1979, there was a NASA psychologist, his name was John Lauber, and he had been studying communication processes in cockpit. And it actually grew out of a 1977 disaster where there were two Boeing 747 aircraft that collided on a runway and killed 583 people. So imagine about, talk about a bad start of your shift. They collided on the runway. So that's like, horrible, right? And the outcome of this was the development of a very systemized start of the shift routine that actually followed a checklist. And the Phoenix Fire Department looked at all this research and asked whether we should be starting our shifts with a standardized checklist actually to make sure that we knew that all of our equipment was fully ready. It's where it should be. It's in working order if we're going to need it. But this also meant checking out our personal gear. I would check my breathing apparatus by putting it on, making sure that the air was full, checking all my emergency backup equipment, make sure everything worked. But then I realized that we were missing something. And that was, how about me as the firefighter, or me as the fire captain, or the battalion chief, am I ready? So here I had this perfect checklist of all my equipment, and I started to wonder, am I ready? And so over the years, I really started to refine this. Am I fully hydrated? Am I in the right emotional state? Am I prepared for the worst calls I can imagine? Am I physically warmed up and activated for action? And so I would start to sit in the captain seat, and I would, every morning, visualize a couple of calls. I would see myself controlling my emotions, because it's very easy to be overwhelmed by the chaos of a dispatch. I would see myself communicating calmly with my crew. And I would see myself leading with clear and concise direction. And the funny thing is, once in a while, you would forget to do that. Or you would go, you know what? I want to get in and jump in on the kitchen conversation. So I'm going to skip this and sure as heck, that would be the day that would bite you in the butt. That would be the day that you got a three alarm fire right at 0800, 8 o'clock in the morning, and I'd realize, oh my God, I'm not quite ready. And I could feel the extra stress. I could feel myself taking up into the chaos and how much harder that was to regulate. And so it would remind me over and over that if you're going to deal with chaos, you better be prepared and you better start your day calm. Well, I was just going to say, you've hit on so many amazing things there. And one that I think about that came to when you were speaking was that there is no greater mindset killer. And then a brain that feels buried by the demands and it feels overwhelmed. And what you were saying about having a routine is helpful for giving the brain a little bit of a sense of control, so that we have the confidence that we feel more resilient to handle the tough challenges that are no doubt going to come in our busy day. And especially for our listeners, as we try to think about all that's in our busy days as we try to accomplish bold things, even as we try to lead boldly, even as we try to lead our families maybe boldly. The feeling of overwhelmed is quite normal. So you're having a process and you're having a set routine to help you handle that. I think is fantastic. And you've hit on so many little things that I think athletes do really well. I often tell the story of Steph Curry laying in the floatation chamber before a Golden State Warriors game. That kind of pre-game routine-- does it give him a physiological benefit? Yeah, look, it probably does. There's probably a relaxation. There's definitely a mental imagery that is using in that. But does it give him a psychological edge? Absolutely. He's doing something that sets him up with confidence for the day that in his mind, no one else is really doing. So it gives him this kind of performance edge. And I think that is the benefit of having a well-crafted routine is that it can give the brain a little bit of clarity amongst a lot of uncertainty. Yeah. So let me just ask you a question, Chris. What happens when you wake up and you look at your calendar and it's just chock full? And so already the chaos begins in your mind, because you see I have a crazy day because I'm doing this bold project and there's so many things going on. How do you manage that moment? Because I feel like that's an important moment that can you to be a trigger or the beginning of feeling in control. Yeah, great question. So I would move the moment to the night before. I'm doubtedly, I think the preparation the night before is what a lot of high performers that have a good morning routine and stick to it. That's where they start. They move that moment to the night before and they start that nightly review process. And I think if we talk about astute self awareness being the number one thing that listeners could do, this is where you could make it happen. The night before I like to look at my day, and I kind of mentioned tongue in cheek that I came in here and that really a lot of these kind of life hack routines, they just seem to be endless. And I'm just not in that space right now. But on my normal day, when I look at my calendar and it's a normal day, I do do a few of them. Some of the ones that you've mentioned, hydrating, some of the ones that I've mentioned movement, I try to cycle to work. So I'm getting just enough movement in. But in that night, the review process, I'm looking at the normal day or I'm looking at the kind of chaotic day. And I always remember a story that you shared with me, Scott, about a conversation that you had about, you know, you're either on or off the wagon or someone had said to you that they're either on or off the wagon. And your response to that person was, you just need more wagons. You know, you need a normal day wagon. And that normal day is when you've got more control over your morning, you can choose the time where you do maybe a little bit of movement. You maybe get a break, you maybe have a high performance breakfast, David. You know, what a luxury. But then there is the tough day where things are back to back, and you don't know where your pit stops are going to be. What are the things that you can do in your tough day wagon? And then there might be a travel wagon. And then you might even have a plan D for things that come in from the side, which happens to all of us. We have a set plan. And then those things kind of come in. Those unexpected meetings, we have to jump in and firefight somewhere else, not like you, Scott, but, you know, metaphorically firefight. And I think if we can have a series of plan A, plan B, plan C, maybe even plan D scenarios, that helps. So I think about starting the night before, and is it going to be a normal day? Is it going to be a tough day? And where can I find my little breaks in the day to do whatever? I think I need to help me feel like I've got more control in that morning. So it might be a movement break. It might be just a little bit of autogenic relaxation. You know, mindfulness is something that's so important. If I've got the time, it might be waking up earlier. If the kids are asleep, which is hardly ever in my mornings at the moment, but I might wake up before them. And I might just take a moment for myself to do some breathing and to maybe even have that first cup of coffee just sitting outside in the backyard. So that's what I would say, starting the night before. I love that you're what you're really focusing on again, is the benefits, the outcome. And then what you just did was create four different plans to get to the same outcome. One that may take a little longer, but if you don't have time, I can go to the shorter one. And so that way, you've already pre-programmed your mind so that you don't need to freak out if you don't have time for your first plan. Like, let's say your alarm doesn't go off or one of your children wakes up at four in the morning and you're like, oh my god, I just cut my sleep short. Now I'm tired. I'm starting this crazy chaotic day already behind. You're like, nope, I already had a plan just in case that happened because I know that happened. And one of the reasons I think benefits are so important is that we know that all human behavioral changes motivated by the benefits you want to achieve. And at the same time, we also know that you have to build these new behaviors into your self image or your habits will creep backwards. And what you just did was you could see yourself as part of you, I'm starting every day prepared, no matter what. I'm not letting all these alternative things throw me. Off because I'm going to have a plan for it. And so I think that some of the benefits of a morning routine that our clients have shared with us, you know, besides starting their day in control is they felt like they had more cognitive capacity. They felt like they had more mental agility. They felt calmer even if they were encountered, like bad news right out of the gate. And many shared that they feel this deep sense of gratitude because they invested in themselves. You just talked about starting the night before. And they actually started with some gratitude because they're like, I'm ready. I invested in myself. So now I feel like I can invest more in others throughout my day. And this may became from getting their exercise in. You mentioned riding your bike or I might get up and I pull a sled up and down the street. That's one of the things I love to do to get my heart rate up and to get moving. And so I know I've invested in myself. And so I know now I can invest in others. And when you think of the challenges that come with a big reorganization or a merger, you could pretty much anticipate some chaos in your day. It always amazes me. I thought maybe you would find this also useful and familiar. How many people act surprised that they had to fight a fire that day? And then you ask them, well, how often does that happen? And they go every day and you're like, well, then how Can you be surprised? Because you know this is coming. You know chaos is coming. And so why did you not start your day being clear and calm and being in control so that you knew that it would come, that it would happen? And so I would love for you maybe to share a little bit over the years. You talked about your life has changed. Now you have kids. You didn't have kids before. Now your morning routine maybe has evolved but how you still stuck to some ritual that works for you. Yeah. Okay. And I'd love to just pick up on something that you said before Scott and ask you a question yourself because I'd love to get your take on it after this. But yeah, look, I think as I've transitioned to having a family and in this particular moment that you mentioned, we're getting ready for a big move in the next couple of months. You know, I've transitioned to I guess being a little bit easier on myself in terms of what does even, you know, the cliche of what does success look like in terms of a morning routine. Okay. I used to have a long list of things but I think when we look at the lifehackers and when we look at the influences on social media and those sorts of things, it's nearly like if you don't do those things, you're actually more fragile. Right? That there must do is in our search for endless optimization, we go a little bit stir crazy with these endless hacks. And I know for me, even before children, I never wanted a strategy, especially as it pertains to high performance, to ever be a crutch. You know, I had a client that would, you know, I would advise about taking power naps. They took it too far in my opinion. They would have a power nap every single day, you know, at about midday. I said, what happens if you have to actually be on at that moment? You're a team leader. What happens if you're leading a meeting and, you know, your natural bio rhythm is down at that stage. So I think what I've learned is to never let some of these routines think of it as a toolbox. And, you know, we've got many tools even on the bold kind of the digital hub here that people could go into. You know, a couple of the movement tools though that are on there are perfect for what I'm talking about. If I don't do a workout, can I get the same benefit from just doing three or three to four movements of, you know, a no excuse workout, which is not going to ever leave me in a pool of sweat is going to prepare me for, you know, the day it's going to give me all the same mood benefits. It's going to help me with things like anxiety. It's going to shake off some excess cortisol that might be building up as I look at my busy day. So I think I've learned to just be a little bit easier on myself and when it comes to that. And then, you know, as I mentioned before, having this idea of plan B, plan C, you know, that's my wagon's analogy. The thing that I will say with that, with the wagon, if it is a tough day, I try to have a if then scenario up my sleeve. So just the other day, it doesn't happen every day. It might not even happen every week. But there's all what, you know, everyone experiences this. A meeting gets pulled from your calendar last minute. The urge to jump in and answer a few more emails in that unexpected 30 minutes or that unexpected hour that you've got is strong. The pool of the inbox is always strong. But I've already created it if then scenario was basically a rule that I can follow that like if if something like that does happen, if my calendar just cleared up a little bit, I'm going to take that opportunity. Knowing that right now morning workouts are hard for me to fit in with the kids, you know, sending them off to getting my son off to school. I'm going to take that opportunity every single time that I can. It might be that I listen to something, but I go for a quick walk. It might be that I get out in the sunshine. I'm not, I'm going to resist the temptation to just fill that with more work. It's a gift that that meeting got cancelled. You know, so that plan is already there for me. But Scott, I'd love to come back. You mentioned before and I know, you know, I know you well and I know that you've coached a lot of people through those transitions, through those mergers that you mentioned. And I know you spoke already a little bit about some of the benefits, but could you get maybe more specific on some of the benefits that your clients in the middle of those battles, in the middle of those acquisitions, those mergers? You know, I know you coach a lot of, you know, athletes right now as well. What are they doing specifically? And there might be different to maybe what I've shared, what you've shared already. I think there's a lot of foundational things. We try to build rituals, but I like what you just said about not turning a ritual into a crutch. So the idea of rituals is something that I can repeat. And as soon as I start it, my brain already knows what the outcome is that I want. So that really helps me because it feels comfortable with me and that helps me a lot. I try to help everyone create a reset ritual. So when they're in the middle of the chaos, how do you get back to neutral? I picture myself in the fire, you know, in the middle of a fire ground incident and something goes wrong. A Mayday gets sound of meaning that we have a firefighter down. And I immediately have practiced that reset of getting a hold of my breathing, that long slow exhale, that changing myself talk, you know, so, so important, you know, having a pre-frame already ready that tells me, it's okay, you got this. You've been here before. And so I like for them to build that in and I start them with that in the morning. So as they look at their calendar and they're looking, what kind of self talk might you have throughout the day or throughout this situation? And then what, how can we change that self talk? How can we already load in your pocket a couple pre frames, which are nothing more than a predetermined reframe that I can plug in? And I try to tie it always back to their self image, something we talked about previously with Brian Wade, the importance of developing their to be vision of who they are at their best, being able at that moment to say, if chaos hits me right here, or if I'm in this meeting and I'm feeling uncomfortable, who am I at my best? And the more that we can reiterate those simple, I call them the most important fundamentals. And the more they can do those fundamentals perfectly over and over, the more they can be calm in the most chaotic situations. I love that. Yeah. And I think that when I mention the self awareness piece, what better way to get it than quickly thinking about your thoughts in the morning or the night before, reading that self image statement that you create, these sorts of things, I think, are just a great way to be at a higher level compared to some of the life hacking advice that we see out there. I might not be feeding your brain the right nutrition or I know Angela Walker is on here and we'll probably talk about that in a moment. But it is definitely about feeding your brain the right sorts that you've mentioned there about this kind of preframing. So I think that's what I mean when I talk about this astute level of self awareness. Yeah. So let's jump in a little bit and let our members kind of join in the conversation. Speaking of Angela, do you have any questions from some of the other members that we can bring into the conversation? Yes. I certainly do. I've got some good questions coming in. So there's been a few around this and I'll sort of go together. So the whole thing around travel, I mean a lot of people, we're starting to travel a lot more, a lot of people don't have the sort of the same routine every day. So how do you help people to keep that morning routine when the schedule is always being disrupted? You talked about wagons and rituals, but how do you use those for those kind of different rituals, whether it's travel, whether it's just different schedules? Well, I was just going to say, you know, in a former life, my wife and I owned a gym and we own this gym in the bottom of a park royal hotel back in Canberra, Australia. And it was amazing to me to see the people that would come in and do a workout and I would talk to them about it and they would never work out at home, but actually on the road, they had a little bit more time. They had a little bit more control over their calendar. So we always think right now that like travel is like that wagon that you put on and it's going to be messy. Actually, sometimes, and I'm sure our listeners can relate, when they are traveling and when they're just in control of their own schedule and their own day, and maybe that first meeting when they're on the road isn't quite as early as some of the meetings that they have when they're at home, they actually feel like they've got a little bit more time to optimize their routine. They know that they can go to the gym, they know exactly where it is, they checked it out the night before. They know that they can go down and grab a buffet breakfast with lots of different options. It actually becomes a little bit easier in many ways when we travel. If we have a bit of a plan to have those things in place before we leave, before we hit the road, which we encourage all our clients to create this travel wagon of finding the opportunities in your day. But that's how I would answer it. Scott, I'm interested to hear yours. Yeah, I like to, I have a travel routine that I do. So when I'm on the road exactly like you said, Chris, I know that my morning routine is already set. I pack a resistance tube in my band so that if the hotel doesn't have a gym, I do try to always make sure that I stay at hotels with gyms that I have a plan B. When I get there, I look for places I can walk. I use the stairs as part of a quick routine where I could just, I stayed at a hotel I was on floor 42 and my morning routine was going all the way down to the bottom of the stairs, grabbing a cup of coffee, running back up 42 flights of stairs. I was ready to go. So For me, I'm like you, I see travel is actually easier for me than harder. Yeah, so more questions coming in. What about, you know, you get, you do the morning routine, you start the day feeling calm, but then kind of something happens mid-morning and it sort of seems to disrupt all of that. So how do you get back on track? What do you do then? I think that's the, the reset that I've already visualized. In my morning routine, I believe it or not, I prepare for that. And this probably comes from being a firefighter, you know, when you pull up on a firegram, you do a quick assessment of the situation. And then you give an on-scene report. And in my mind, I learned, and a lot of firefighters learned to do this, I already saw what could be the first thing that could go wrong, the second thing that could go wrong, the third thing that could go wrong. And I was already preparing a plan for each of them. So in other words, I knew that we're going to go through the front door, but if we get to this point and there's more fire than I anticipated, I'm going to do this. And that started a process where you realize that when you pre-load the brain, we call it priming the brain, with these options ahead of time, when you run into this situation, you don't have that "oh no" moment where kind of the brain is just spinning around in circles, looking for an answer, literally like my Mac computer with the little wheel going. And now there's no other response that the body can give you other than fight or flight panic. And some people literally feel that anxiety. So I've already tried to prepare for it all the way down to if I do feel that anxiety, what's my plan for that? How do I shift my breathing? What do I tell myself in my mind? Do I maybe add a little bit of movement? Because sometimes when you're in that situation, you want to freeze, maybe a quick little walk and a do a reset. So I've really prepared for all those moments mainly because of where I came from probably, but also because I realized the value in that. Yeah, and I think this is why morning routines are so often spoken about because we do have control over our own early hours of the morning, but then as the day goes on, more and more noise comes into the system. So people are wanting our help and there's more load of the email and all these sorts of things coming into the system. And we start to feel like we started the day in control because it was just us, an hour and routine, an hour and plan. And now we have to have some give and we have to have some give for other people. And there's a lot of things that we've spoken about before Scott is like taking this analogy of firefighting and actually having a firefighting hour. So that maybe it's 2pm to 3pm. I find myself getting pulled with lots of noise from other people wanting my help and I do want to serve. It's being a servant leader is absolutely in my, you know, in my self image of who I want to be as a leader. But if I go and I actually kind of put out every little spot fire throughout the morning or mid morning or lunch, I can find myself totally derailed. And it's very hard to then get the train back on the right tracks once it's derailed. Instead what we encourage our clients to do is actually have a firefighting hour that everyone knows about. 2pm, 3pm come to me between those, you know, the open office hours and I will help you and I really do want to help you. What we often find of course is that most people figure it out. Most people take a risk and they, you know, and they built capacity in them in the meantime. But that would be my answer to the question as well, you know, try to get back a little bit of control through the middle of your day by maybe just having a space for that. The other thing that I've seen people do is treat their day like two half days. A CEO that I used to coach would often have, you know, I mentioned before that power now in the middle of the day. As I said, I didn't want it to be every single day. But it actually afforded him the chance to wake up after that 10, 15 minute nap, whatever it was and nearly feel like he was going again in another day and his afternoon and that gave him a sense of control as well. So just a couple of things that I thought of there. Brilliant, thank you. So you've mentioned movement as a key part of kind of the morning routine and Chris, you took that cycling, Scott, the sled. How do you help people find the right type of movement? There's a couple of people who've asked, like, what should I be doing? What's the evidence? What kind of things should I be using? And someone also asked, what is no excuse workout? That was mentioned earlier. Yeah, great. So I'll quickly jump on that one, Scott, if I can, because I mentioned it in the bold digital hub that every member has access to, there's a set of resources. And they're all designed for bold professionals doing bold things and it's all designed for very busy people that need the minimal effective dose. And I think right now, as I mentioned in the Western world, we often judge the success of our movement. We judge the success of our workouts on being in a puddle of sweat. And I think movement's so beneficial for the brain, especially as it relates to anxiety and depression, especially as it relates to feeling good and feeling resilient throughout the day. But we can't just think of it as a workout. We need to actually think of movement as a performance enhancement tool that can get myself prepared for that next meeting, for that next, whatever it is on my calendar. And it might only be doing something for five or ten minutes. So I would encourage everyone to explore those different things. What I will say, I get this question a lot, Angela, and it's like, should I sleep more or should I get up and do movement? My answer is always like, what's the biggest energy leak for you? Is it sleep? You know, is it getting more sleep going to actually fix some of the resilience issues that you're facing or some of the energy leaks that you have throughout the day? Or are you someone that suffers from low back pain and doing some kind of movement in the morning is going to alleviate that? We know from studies, you know, there's a great study done by the Cornell University Institute for Health and Productivity Studies. We know that low back pain can either weigh three hours of an eight hour day. Anxiety and depression that movement modulates so well can either weigh two point two hours of an eight hour day. So if I'm looking at my day and I'm thinking, you know, and maybe it's a way of thinking short term over long term. So longer term, you know, I am going to prioritize my morning movement because I want to avoid some of those conditions. Short term, the night before I'm thinking about my day and what I need. Maybe that next morning it's about sleep rather than this extra movement session. Scott, I'd love to hear your take. I try to look at it in a couple different angles. I like that you brought in sleep. So am I sleep deprived or not? So that's going to go into the equation. And then I'd like to look at, you know, what intensity should the exercise be? We've all seen people that get addicted to high intensity. And so they do a high intensity workout in the morning, but come 10 or 11 in the morning when the adrenaline rush wears off from that workout. They have a huge crash. So one of the things we've tried to help call the or help clients look at is, let's look at your day and whether you can afford to have that dip. So first thing they should decide is how intense should it be to get to the state that I want to be? The second question is what type of exercise? And we tend to fall into the same types of movement every morning. I like to mix it up, but I always try to do something built off of some of the research we did here in our lab at TIGNUM. And that was built around, how do I maximize cognitive performance? And one of the things that we learned is that movement that was just high intensity gave me a short energy boost, but it didn't necessarily improve cognitive function as much as it could. Movement that required balance and multi-dimensional, meaning that I did cross-body movements, that I did legs and arms. So it was more functional, more complex type of movement. Those movements actually awoke in the brain the most and created the biggest cognitive gains. And so if that's what I need starting my day, then I want that. And then of course you need to look at the duration. There's nothing worse than your person that thinks if I can't do it for an hour, then it's waste of time. We try to show people that we can make it an hour if you have an hour and if it's meditative for you and helps you ground yourself, an hour can be fine. But wouldn't it be great to know what you can do in five minutes? And in fact, there's more and more equipment and research coming out around how you can get an amazing workout in five minutes or ten minutes. And so I have a lot of clients and me myself. I do a thing called, "I just do 50 body weight squats every morning." And that sounds like super simple, 50 body weight squats. But you'd be amazed how challenging that is in the beginning and then how good you feel once you start to master that. And then I may be fall that up with a little bit of balance work and I can find that in five quick minutes, I could do movement that has me energized, turns my brain on, has me calm at the same time and has me feeling like I'm ready to go. The term we use in the Fire Department is a coiled spring, ready to take on anything that may come that day. So that's kind of the way I like to look at movement. And. No, brilliant. And someone has asked Taylor, "What's your favorite workout?" like where a few more specifics on where we can find no excuse and other things on the hub. And so just very quickly, if you go into the hub, look for the B-more section and then look under resources and you'll find movement resources, you'll find videos and explanations on no excuse workout, which has got some of that balance work in there that Scott talked about. You'll also find Daily Prep, which has also got the balance and the stability and mobility piece in there. So there's lots of great resources there you can find. So there's also this question that's come up, which is about breakfast and what time, they've heard that they should fast, but they've also heard that breakfast is the most important. So I maybe put this to Chris first. What is the right answer? Should I eat or not? - Well, I think it'd be remiss if we didn't fire it back to you, Ann, trying to put the nutrition expert that you are, but let me take a quick stab at it. So again, this comes back to my idea of reviewing my day the night before and I'm thinking through like, what, so I like to be quite flexible. There's mornings that I will fast and then there's other mornings that I won't. So I come back to the night before and I'm looking at what is the cognitive load required of the morning? If I don't have a lot of movement, if there's not a lot of physical load, but there's a pretty high cognitive load, that might be the morning that I choose to just have coffee. I like to use the kind of bulletproof coffee, a little bit of butter, a little bit of coconut oil. So it gives me some, a little bit of energy and a little bit of good fat in my morning, but that might be the morning that I choose to fast. Okay, so I'm fairly sedentary. I've got back to back meetings. I know I can be productive in a fasted state there, but if I've got a high physical load, that's what I'm presenting for four hours in the morning, which we often are, right? We're running a half day workshop, whatever it is. I need to assess the risk of what would a blood glucose crash cost me? What's the risk of me being up on stage or up in front of a crowd running a workshop and my blood sugar failing? The risk is too high. So those mornings I absolutely go to a predetermined breakfast. It's a breakfast that is high in fat. There's some carbohydrate, it's high in protein. It's very much my kind of go-to pre-plant breakfast for my critical moments, my peak performances in my calendar. Again, like Steph Curry in the Flotation Chamber, is there a physiological nutritional benefit to that meal that I'm choosing? Yes, but there's a psychological benefit to me already have taken the thought away. I already know exactly what I'm going to choose. I've done it for close to 15 years now. So that's how I would answer the question. I'm kind of assessing the risk of being in a fast and state or not, yeah. No, brilliant. And Chris, what is that breakfast? What is your go-to breakfast in that situation? Yeah, yeah, great. So it's eggs. So it's scrambled eggs or maybe poached eggs. If I can get them, which would be my preference. There's often one piece of toast under that. I try not to overdo it with the toast, but there's one piece of toast under eggs. And then there's some kind of protein. So it could be bacon. It might be salmon. Salmon again, my preference. But I've come to learn here that in the US, there's a lot more bacon on offer than there is salmon. If I'm in Europe, there's probably a lot more fish. But in the US, I think a couple of slices of bacon to be alongside those eggs is great. And then I'll just try to choose whatever vegetables I have. So if it's cooked mushrooms, if it's cooked tomato, and a cup of coffee, and I'm good to go. Cool. And Scott, what about you? How would you answer? What's your take on the breakfast or fasting? I personally like to make sure that every day I have a minimum of 12 hours with no food in my system to allow my gut to repair, to allow my cells to reset themselves from insulin sensitivity. So I find that to be really beneficial. So again, depending on the morning, when I get to eat, will fluctuate a little bit. So it's funny, earlier in my career, I was married always having to have a breakfast or I was afraid I was going to crash. And I've trained my body now that I'm much less dependent on that. You could explain the science better, probably and whether my body is learned to adapt and to use ketones as an alternative fuel source. That's possible. But I found that not relying so much on breakfast and actually making my breakfast smaller so that it's something that just kind of sustains me a little bit. And then maybe around 10, 11 actually eating something that's higher protein and that kicks off my metabolism works so much better for me. But I'd love to get your take on it, Angie. And I'd also like to throw in one extra question to you. Caffeine in the morning. Because I know there's been some research about not having caffeine within 90 to 120 minutes of waking, which goes counter to what most of our cultural processes are. And I'd love to get your take on the science of that. Yeah. Well, you both picked out on the breakfast or fasting thing. Picks up exactly where I always start from. That there is no right or wrong answer. It depends on the context and it depends on your situation. How do you need to prepare that day? And the thing I always ask clients is, what time did you eat the night before? Because that 12 hour overnight fast is like the housekeeping for the gut brain connection. So late dinner, postponed the breakfast. And I think it's a perfect example of where what can seem like contradictory information that's sort of circling there on nutrition. It actually makes total sense once you understand kind of what's going on underneath. And you understand the context. Because there's no shadow of a doubt that, while fasting is a simple, very easy to follow way to help restrict the amount and the type of foods that we eat. Because as a general rule, we all overeat and overeat kind of in the time frame. We for too long of a 24 hour period, that's a general rule. But at the same time, our brain and our physiology has an absolute requirement for these nutrients, these resources, which are only going to come from food to kind of set them up for success. So I love how you had the kind of the flexibility and the individualization, both on a day by day basis. That's what helps people to figure out what to do. And then coming back to this eat field performance. So how do I assess what is the right breakfast for me? And I think what you've all both done there is really looked at. What do I eat? How does it make me feel? How does it impact on my energy leaks? Does it help me to stay focused through the morning? Does it give me the energy I need? And how does it impact on my performance? So again, just helping people to kind of find more information on that, you go into that, be more section. If you look under strategies and look under the nutrition strategies, you'll find a lot more information there on eat field performing. You can kind of map through that. No, sorry, Angela, you mentioned some of these things. And I was just going to add-- and sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I just kind of think so often that action gets taken out of context. And often what we need to think about here when we look at all the different strategies that we have available to us is what are you actually stacking that strategy or that action with? What are you stacking with that habit? So yes, it might be out there that coffee should be. Optimal time to drink it is 90 to 120 minutes away. But if I think about what I'm doing when I have that cup of coffee in the morning as well, what are the benefits that I'm getting from the gratitude that I have when I'm sitting in silence having that first cup of coffee that I actually get-- I create a moment where I am thinking about my intentions, where I am actually checking in with myself. So often these strategies are out there isolated by themselves. And we don't often think about what's going on in the brain as we're doing that casual walk rather than the big workout. On that walk, I might be getting my mindset on 100% aligned for my day. It might not be the optimal thing for my fitness. But that's just one thing I wanted to kind of throw into the mix here. No, I think it's so true. It's so true. It's kind of putting everything into real context. What is important for you? What do you need? What is your body and brain need at that moment? And how can you do that? And how are you stacking those habits to kind of give you what you need and set you up for success? And sort of on that coffee piece-- because again, coffee kind of gets-- it has its fans and it has its detractors. And sort of answering Scott, your question about the 90 minutes. I mean, it's based on a sort of a simple understanding that one thing coffee does do. We know it stimulates dopamine acetylcholine, all these helpful brain neurotransmitters, but it's also stimulating cortisol. And again, cortisol has a super important role. It can be seen as a negative, but it's actually how we garner all our resources together. But our cortisol is already at its highest, or suddenly should be at its highest, right at the start of the day. We are rhythmical creatures, and so many of these habits for the morning are about working with the body rhythms and encouraging those natural body rhythms. And the idea is to let the cortisol rhythm work on its own to encourage your cortisol to be at its highest first thing in the morning. And then to use caffeine a little bit later, maybe 90 minutes after waking, to support the cortisol so that it kind of helps to sustain you, rather than using it as a crutch, as a substitute for that morning cortisol peak. So that's the sort of what's going on with some of the science behind that belief scot. You said something about eat, feel, perform, which maybe I'll just come back to this idea that we experiment. And I think Chris is alluded to that a little bit, that for all of us it's going to be unique and different. And so please feel free to experiment and find out what makes you feel the best. I started with a habit of always needing breakfast or freaking out. And then I learned as I experimented, actually my brain felt better when I stretched myself a little bit. The same thing happened with me with caffeine. I learned that exactly what you just said, Angela, that when I postponed my caffeine, my coffee for two hours, I started my day stronger and felt better. And kind of when I started to have my first little morning dip, normal in my circadian rhythm, that coffee at that moment had much more of a benefit to me. And but again, I had to play around with that to find out. And maybe that's not true every day, but it's helped me a lot. So, Angela, maybe we have time for one more question and then we'll wrap up or summarize a little bit and we can wrap up. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think this final one, I think it sort of covered in some way, but I'd love to just hear a little more on it. You know, what do we do? Do we prioritize getting extra sleep or do we prioritize having the morning routine? And like, how do I make that judgment call on which is right for me? I'm going to say and if you're sleep deprived, all the exercise in the world is not going to benefit you as much because your body can't recover from the exercise. So from a fitness perspective, you're not gaining fitness, you're actually losing fitness. The mental parts of it, the cognitive improvements, you probably still get some of those and you might get a little burst of energy, but you may pay for it later. So the way I think of it and I'd love to get Chris' take on this, I make sleep my biggest priority. That is the foundation of everything. So I already know that if my sleep is short or if my sleep was hugely disrupted the night before or because of my circadian disruption because I'm traveling across time zones and I wake up and my sleep was horrible, then I'm going to go to my plan B morning routine and so my movement is going to be a little bit different. It's going to be less intense, it's going to be calmer, it's probably going to be more similar to a yoga Tai Chi type movement which is more grounding, more a little more subtle energy, a little more waking my brain up and it's going to be less about intensity. And then the day after that, I might come back and get the intensity. So that's the way I like to look at it. Sleep is the most important. Yeah. I would agree, I just think one thing that adds to the equation would be like is this a long term or is this a short term benefit that you're after from potentially getting up and having some kind of morning routine. So you might be sleep deprived, you might be traveling, you might be jet lagged and you could argue that staying asleep right up until the moment that you can no longer sleep any longer before that event is the best way to go. Or you could argue that you've gone over there, you've traveled, you're on the road. Yes, you are tired, yes, you synchronization is totally out. But you're getting up and actually doing something to make the body feel like you've got control that you're confident that you're ready to go for that 30, 60 minute pitch or that meeting. Like I just think there needs to be a short, verse long time element to this answer. But now in many respects I agree with you that sleep should be a priority, recovery should be a priority. Adding more load to an already stressed system is never a good idea. And we see that a lot with people that want to force the 4 a.m. wake up and that are going too hard and doing all these things. I just think sometimes we're adding an extra stressful burden to an already exhausted system. And that's a problem. But as I said, if I'm on the road and I just need to feel energized and good, I might just go with it. Adrenaline will get me through in that short term. And I think that's something that I've learned, Scott, I think I was always worried that I had to have 8 hours of sleep before a big presentation or whatever it was. I've realized now that I'm going to be just fine. And you know what comes with that? A relaxed brain the night before when I'm struggling and tossing and turning. And I'm relaxed about the outcome the next day knowing that even if I don't fall asleep, I'm going to be just fine. I can get up and do some movement or whatever and feel good and feel like I'm good to go. What often happens is that I fall asleep because the brain relaxes. So that's my two cents worth on that one. Thank you. So, Anne, I know we probably have some more questions, but we'll get to those in our Q and A session. So we'll make sure to post that. Maybe just to summarize a little bit of this concept of a morning routine. And one way to look at it is the way we wake up, right? We wake up dehydrated, our energies low, we have low cognitive function. And yet our day may be full of chaos because we have a bold project. And so these two things don't match. And so we create a morning ritual to try to reverse that, to prepare for that chaos. Because I know that I need energy, I need focus, I need calmness, I need mental agility. And so a few of the things that we talked about was the importance of mindset, this self-awareness, doing something that improves my self-awareness, having a clear vision of what success would look like, seeing myself at my best, showing up, dealing with chaos, dealing with the complexity of the day. And one of the things that helps with that, of course, is sunlight, waking up the brain. Chris talked about that, resetting our circadian rhythm every day so that my normal hormonal shift can occur. And I use my body's physiology to be fast. Another thing that helps with that is movement, right? Activating my brain, waking up my left and right brain, creating some synergy, improving my cognitive function, movement can be great. And it doesn't need to be highly intense, but for some of us, we love that intensity. And if we're not sleep deprived and we have the adequate recovery, go for it. That would be awesome. Hydration probably needs to be at the foundation of it all. We wake up dehydrated, we know the brain is 80% water, so if we're dehydrated, we're going to be in trouble. So we have to make sure we do that. And then of course, and we talked about it preparing for our critical moments, looking ahead to our day, being ready for all the what ifs. Chris mentioned that if then kind of thinking, if this happens, what am I going to do? And I even mentioned pre-programming our brain with pre-frames, the right thoughts at that moment to put in and even thinking and visualizing the reset moments I may need in my day and making that part of my morning ritual. So we covered a lot. I hope this was helpful for everybody. Thank you Chris for joining me in this deep dive. I hope everyone found this interesting. This is just the beginning of the conversation, so we'll continue it. And we look forward to seeing everybody in Chris. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Thanks Scott. Thank you for listening to the TIGNUM Thoughtcast. If you've enjoyed this or any of our other Thoughtcast episodes, please subscribe so you don't miss out on future releases. If you'd like to get in touch with TIGNUM, please email us at [email protected]. Until next time, be bold, be more, and keep ruling your impact. [MUSIC]