Why working with a person as an ecosystem is a powerful approach to self development

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Welcome to Mindset, mood and Movement, a systemic approach to human

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behavior, performance, and wellbeing.

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How psychological, emotional, and physical health are all connected.

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In this episode, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience to help

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you overcome a challenge that you might be facing in life health.

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All work.

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Hello and welcome.

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Today's episode is a bit more of an education.

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I guess you could say about me, my philosophy, the work that I do and

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how it impacts the people I work with.

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So as you've probably guessed from the podcast name, Mindset, Mood and

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Movement, they are the spaces I work with.

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Um, but it could sound a bit weird and esoteric and you may not know.

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So I want to expand this.

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One of the things I want to share is that our world, whether we

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see it or not is really a lot of specialism, a lot of fragmentation.

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We've got people who might work on the body, say a physio.

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If you have a physical problem, you might have a need to see a

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doctor if you're not feeling well.

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You might think, well, gosh, I'm, I'm really struggling.

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I'll, I'll go see a therapist to help me.

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Um, what we've got is we've got these specialized fields and

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there's a place for them, but we've got these specialized fields that

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often don't talk to each other.

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They're not connected.

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They, they, they're working in the silos.

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And what I see is that this doesn't really serve people that well

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when we're working on growth.

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Personal development and and all the stuff that makes us being a human being how we

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think how we feel and what's happening in our body And this is the premise

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that that I've been working with now You most of us are used to the I guess

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the description of ecosystems with our current climate crisis Every day, we're

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hearing about ecology and ecosystems breaking down and these sorts of things

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And I guess I really, it's easy to think about ecosystems being as trees and

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plants and rivers and nature and so forth.

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But what I see is that our human system, you, me, everyone, we are

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actually an ecosystem of ourself.

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So we have our mind, all the think, thought, all that inner stuff.

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We have our mood, our emotions, our feelings, our sensations, and

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that then blends into our body.

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So how we move, how we're living, how we're acting, how we're moving.

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And these three elements are what I find fascinating to

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look at them as one ecosystem.

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Now, when we think about mind, let's elaborate.

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So mind is all the stuff that's going on with him.

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It's how you think it's the stuff you say to yourself in your own mind.

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It's your belief structure.

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It's who you say you are, your personality, um, it's your

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fears, it's your backstory.

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It's all that psychological, uh, structure.

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And we all have it.

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Some of us have got elements of it that need work.

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Some of us have got things that we can grow into, but that's a really big part

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of, of one system, the mind system.

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When I talk about mood, we're talking about affect is a technical word

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for regular, for emotion and affect regulation, regulating emotions.

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And emotions are.

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We can cross them over from the mind into the body.

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So we've got how we feel about something, but they're all built on

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chemicals, chemical messengers and signals and stuff around our body.

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And our mood is a really fundamental quality and experience that

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tells us how we're doing in life.

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Whether you're feeling happy, sad, stressed, fearful, whatever

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that is, there's an emotional charge to our thinking.

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So we have the emotional layer and then we have a physical.

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You know, a physical body itself.

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How well do you feel?

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How much energy do you have?

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How strong are you?

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How fit are you?

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Uh, how many aches and pains have you got?

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All the things that we, we all experienced a different degree.

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And can that be worked on?

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Can that be changed?

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And then the question is how is that physical structure creating an

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experience in our emotional structure?

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So is our body in a way that's helping our emotions be well

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or not or regulated or not?

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And then how does that affect our mind?

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The eye, the personality.

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So when we look at mind, mood and movement.

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And we look at the links.

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We can think of this as like a Venn diagram with the circles overlaying.

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They can be looked at in separate spaces.

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But we need to look at the connection and there is so much

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power when we look at the three.

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And to give you an example, um, how this came about.

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So I worked in, I've done a lot of different things.

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I've had business for 20 years or so.

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I've done lots of different things, but in the last decade, decade and a half.

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Uh, yoga was a big part of my life and I was teaching yoga, like a lot, maybe

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four or five classes a day and private clients and lots and lots of stuff.

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And I'd work with people and they'd come to my practice and we'd do a lot of

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physical work and I'd see great change.

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I'd see their facial muscles relaxed.

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I'd see their body change and become more supple and become stronger.

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And they'd normally leave the studio, uh, feeling great and they'd come

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back the next week looking stressed.

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I'm like, wow, did you not, could you not take some of this forward?

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Um, but then of course on speaking to people deeper, what I found was so much

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of what was going on was in the mind.

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So the yoga practice was brilliant.

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It was helping in a large extent, but it wasn't the totality.

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There was some stuff missing in how people saw the world.

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How they thought about themselves, how they dealt with problems and

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pressures and that sort of thing.

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And some years later I then got involved in psychotherapy.

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It drew me and I did an amazing postgrad in contemporary psychotherapy.

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And that led me on the path of the mind and perhaps more into the emotional space.

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So I set up practice and was working in that for a good few years.

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And what I'd see is that we work on stuff, people come in with anxiety, they come

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up with stress, come up with, pains and traumas that needed healing of some kind.

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And we wouldn't necessarily talk about the body.

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We wouldn't necessarily get movement involved so much.

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We wouldn't look at how the, the, the two were related.

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We did a lot of talk and think, work, but we wouldn't really go into the

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physical, like the actual movement and creating a program around that.

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So over the years I've been looking at how these things weave together.

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Now let's segue into a little personal story.

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, in terms of my mind, I used to be all over the place.

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And really struggle with, how I thought about myself, what I believed,

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all this, uh, internal narrative.

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And then the more I looked at how that internal narrative

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was, whether it was doubt.

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, whether it was, low self esteem, the, these kinds of things that was

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happening for me, imposter syndrome, I've had the law, basically working

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through them started to change how I fell, hence the emotional realm,

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but also started to change how I felt about my body and how I would move.

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And then, when we look at the emotional side, so another piece of this, which

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changed my world was getting into yoga and then breath work, because as I started

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to learn about how breathing affects us, how breathing directly affects.

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The, uh, the conversation in the autonomic nervous system, like what the body and

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the brain are talking to each other.

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Then I started to understand I could change my mood by using things like

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breath work and yoga to some degree.

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And that changed how I was thinking.

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So I started getting more and more interested in this

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weave of thinking and feeling.

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And then I got into yoga big time, really got into a lot of movement and

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I hadn't been doing this years before.

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I've been in a photographer for many years.

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I got really into the body and movement of all different natures.

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And, and I started to see how that was affecting how I felt, how I thought.

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And then I took that further on and went to strength and conditioning work and

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the whole palette of physical movement to see how they all come together.

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Now, what I found over the years, and this is a personal story, is that, so much is.

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built on misunderstanding.

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So I have an autoimmune condition and this autoimmune condition is, you could

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look at it as a medical condition.

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And that's often what it's called.

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, it's called ulcerative colitis in the medical community.

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We'd call it inflammatory bowel disease.

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It doesn't work for me because I understand how things work together.

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So yes, I have a specialist.

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mostly I'm in what's called in remission and things are pretty good,

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but this whole physical expression of the autoimmune condition.

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isn't physical only.

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Now, when I was looking at work from people like Gabor Maté

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who's done loads of it, decided to look at its origins.

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Like where did this start?

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How did my immune system learn that it needs to attack itself?

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That's a crude analogy, but it's what we say in autoimmune.

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And it all started back in a traumatic event when I was a

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teenager in a very difficult time.

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And, and the therapeutic work helped me track that back to

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that place when I felt helpless.

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When I had no other option and when I, of course, I didn't know, but my

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nervous system decided to encode that as a traumatic experience, one where

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I had no choices and I had to freeze.

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And that was the start of this autoimmune condition.

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Now there's a lot of stuff around this.

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There's a theory, so we need to be careful and I would never suggest that

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you don't have a medical professional.

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But what I do invite you to do, this is an example that's mine and it's worth

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looking at how the physical expression of this disease or this ease, was built

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on a psychological, emotional platform.

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And now I've dealt with the physical through health, fitness, uh, nutrition.

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Uh, I've also dealt with it from psychological, emotional,

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generally, I'm in a very good state.

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So this is the interesting thing that interests me about how we

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can look at these places together.

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Another example, again, I'll keep it very personal.

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So it's undeniable.

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I used to have a lot of anxiety and struggle with, uh, you know,

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really worrying about things and really anxious and hyper.

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And I just didn't realize that I was also dysregulated.

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I was mouth breathing.

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Uh, I was chest breathing and learning about how, if we breathe

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through the nose and diaphragm and all these effects from the physical

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effect of breathing affects our mood.

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Studying things like polyvagal theory by Steven Porges helped me understand

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that if we are dysregulated, i.

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e.

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the nervous system's in a stress response or a shutdown response, and you can't

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move out of it, Then of course your thinking is going to be one of, uh, I'm

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not safe, I am uncertain, I feel anxious.

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So by working on the breathwork side and the body side that came to that, could I

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start to then understand that my anxiety situation needed the emotional regulation,

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it needed things like breathwork, and needed my body to function well.

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So that my mind could regulate the thinking as much as my body

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could regulate the emotions.

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So that's a really, really showed me so much about those connections.

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And then physical.

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Well, um, I'm not a young person anymore.

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I'm north of 50.

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I train pretty much most days and I do heavyweight training,

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sprint training, plyometrics.

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I do lots of sport and And this hasn't always been like this.

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It's taken quite a long way to be able to get to this, this level.

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And it's, it's an ongoing process.

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But what I've found is that as a midlife adult, my body is stronger,

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my muscles work well, my connective tissues are feeling robust.

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Obviously I still do yogas that keeps you very subtle and mobile.

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And all of this physical, let's say shape and structure of the body is allowing

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me to think and feel in a different way.

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It's nothing worse than your aches and pains where you feel

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tired and you don't have energy.

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And boy, if you run a business, you don't want any of that

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because it's just draining.

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So it's not about some utopium, like it's a perfect place, but understanding

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these pieces, mind, how it affects us, mood and what we can do, and worldview.

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We are an ecosystem.

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So if we want change, we want confidence, we want to overcome

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anxiety, problems are difficult.

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Backstory working on all three, looking at all three to the right measure is

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a powerful way of really dealing with personal change, personal development.

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And, and then when you think about if you're working on you knew you get your

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own internal ecosystem working well.

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That affects the wider ecosystem.

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So your family, partner, children, friends, family, whatever you have there,

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your work, your business, your community.

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So it's, it's sort of a fractal, what they call it in fractal dynamics.

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Um, this sort of expression of things that, that repeat and replicate

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in wider spheres and expressions.

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If we look at that, that's a really wonderful way of seeing

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ourselves as connected to ourselves, mind, body, all the way through.

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Uh, families to our communities and perhaps to the world around us.

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So that's a little journey through how, uh, I see the world, how I

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work with the world and a lot of my own personal, my own experiment

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all the way on my own experiment.

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But a lot of people I've worked with have also benefited from this process

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in many, many ways, which of course I'll share stories in the forthcoming

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episodes, but I hope that's giving you a clearer picture of how mind, mood

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and movement work as an ecosystem.

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Help.

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It can affect us in different ways and how it can be worked as a totality and I hope

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it stimulates your thinking if you've got challenges, whether it's mental, where it

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feels more emotional with it or physical, wondering and questioning like, okay, so

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if we, if we put that lens on yourself for a second, how might that help you?

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How might that help you see the world a little differently?

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Rather than thinking I've got a back problem and I'm feeling tired and grumpy.

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Can you look at it all?

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Can you see if there's an emotional connection or physical

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or is there a belief connection?

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And as you start to see them, then see how they're affecting each other.

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So dear listener, I hope that was useful.

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Um, it's a, it was a short dive into what's a very long journey in my

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life, but I trust it's giving you some clarity on, on, on how I work.

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And the premise of the podcast is to share this worldview.

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It works for me.

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It works with people I work with.

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It may well work for you.

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So this is vibing with you.

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Then do listen to forthcoming episodes.

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And, uh, as always, if you want to reach me, uh, I'm always welcome

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to connect with people and to, to share thoughts and ideas.

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Thank you so much for listening If you enjoyed the episode

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please subscribe and if a friend would benefit from hearing this do send it on

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to them as well If you would like to get in touch yourself then you can go to my

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website which is sal jeffries.com spelled S A L J E F E R I E s sal jeffries.com

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Hit the get in touch link and there you can send me a direct message If you'd

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like to go one step further and learn whether coaching could help you overcome

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a challenge or a block in your life then do reach out and I offer a call where

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we can discuss how this may be able to help you Until the next time take care