I’m delighted to share with you a very transformative episode of our Rising Resilient series featuring women entrepreneurs I have the privilege to know and work with as business strategist, coach and friend. Join us today as we delve into the heart of resilience in the business world featuring the insightful Leah Grant.
You’re in for a treat as Leah uncovers her approaches to tackling the challenges of both life and business, which are both practical and mystical. With a breadth of professional experience and personal trials and tribulations, she gives us a masterclass talking us through how she supports her clients to build resilience.
PREFER TO LISTEN?
INTRODUCTION
Join us today as we delve into the heart of resilience in the business world featuring the insightful Leah Grant, who is both a consciousness catalyst and a business coach, and much much more.
While Leah is a Master Certified Coach through the International Coach Federation, the work she does with clients is way beyond coaching. She is a Certified Emotional Intelligence Practitioner and a Certified Neuro Linguistic Programming Practitioner. Leah is also a powerful intuitive and Certified Master Psychic which is balanced perfectly by her extensive experience in business.
Whether you embrace these aspects of ourselves as entrepreneurs, or resist them, I can tell you that Leah is as logical and practical as she is mystical and magical. This dynamic combination serves her clients by giving them a truly holistic experience.
Leah is also an engaging public speaker, presenting at conferences, seminars, and festivals. She leads retreats locally and abroad. Service-based business owners and seekers make up a large part of who Leah serves though she also coaches executives. Her management-level clients have worked for Google, Walt Disney, Morgan Stanley, and Microsoft, to name a few.
Leah exemplifies living as a multidimensional being. She expresses herself through art, vibrational singing, writing–both fiction and non-fiction, coaching, teaching, consulting, mentoring, using her psychic abilities, providing spiritual guidance, volunteering, philanthropy, applying her business acumen, being a lifelong learner, engaging in self-care practices, staying nutritionally aware, truth-seeking, and traveling.
How this all comes together is where Leah serves as a consciousness catalyst awakening people to their true selves mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. She assists them to expand into everything they can be, guides them to delve deeper into their own wisdom, encourages them to challenge their beliefs, and facilitates them in raising their level of consciousness.
So I’m absolutely delighted to have Leah on the show. Through our conversation, Leah opens up on how she personally has been able to embrace challenging situations with compassion, courage, and conviction. Key attributes for anyone looking to thrive in the world we find ourselves in today.
INTERVIEW
JAY: Today I have the lovely Leah Grant. Welcome to the Leveraged Business Podcast, Leah, and it’s so good to have you here.
LEAH: I’m excited to be here as well. I love the topic.
JAY: I thought it would suit you.
What came up with this rising resilient title. Because when I’m coaching people and when I hear about them coaching other people, it’s just one of those themes that keeps coming back and back at us. And with all that’s going on in the world, it feels like there’s even more kind of poured onto us.
My subtitle was tackling challenges and changes in your life and business with confidence, compassion and courage. So tell me what part of the theme spoke to you the most and why?
LEAH: Honestly, every part of it. So I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last 27 years and I’ve had multiple businesses. I’ve had some with business partners, some without business partners.
And so every single word in your title touched upon something that I’ve dealt with at some point in time in my entrepreneurial journey.
JAY: Were there any missing words?
LEAH: Oh my gosh. Flexibility. Adaptability. Those are two skills that I really found. If you don’t have the ability to be adaptable and flexible as an entrepreneur, you’re going to have a hard time being resilient.
JAY: Really good point. Yeah. Yeah. So, we’ll dive into your experiences in a moment, but just for context, tell us a little bit about the work that you do and who you help and how you help them.
LEAH: Absolutely. So right now my business is a combination of coaching, healing, and spiritual mentoring. I work primarily with high achieving women who are wanting to weave their spirituality into what they’re offering into the world so that their business is very purpose driven.
But at the same time, they have a high value on their health and want to make sure that as opposed to what’s been done in the past, perhaps by them and often by many of us as female entrepreneurs, is that our health takes a backseat to our success. And then we end up burnt out or sick and having to take time off to re-evaluate. And so when I’m working with the women that I’m working with, the idea is either that they’re recovering from that or that we’re organizing their life and their success to not have to get to that point.
JAY: Yeah, that’s very succinct and it paints the picture of a lot of people that I know, including probably both of us.
So, with your clients, what is it that shows up in terms of anxiety and stress and overwhelm. And I realize those are three different things. How does it manifest the early signs particularly?
LEAH: Yeah, the majority of my clients tend to be more in overwhelm than I would say in stress or anxiety. And part of the reason for that is because they’ve learned how to manage any kind of stress they’ve had in order to get to the level they’ve gotten to. Because most of the women I’m working with, they’re high achieving, they’re high earners, and they wouldn’t have been able to make it that far without figuring out, like, how do I deal with stress on a day-to-day basis? It comes with the territory.
However, overwhelm is something that can happen in a moment because most of my clients are working at what I would call their cup is full. And so you pour a little more in and it’s overflowing. And I’ve had the exact same experience given that I’m a manifesting generator in human design. I love having lots of projects going at once so I can hold a lot, but when you throw those extra two or three balls in for me to juggle, all of a sudden the apple cart is teeter tottering, right?
JAY: How do you recognize that your cup is already full? Until, you know, before that extra thing is added to it where it overflows and falls over or whatever metaphor we’re leaning into.
LEAH: Right. I don’t know that I’ve gotten great at that. I love my cup right at the edge, because I like to have the abundance and the fullness. And I’m actually okay sometimes if a little spills over, it’s when there’s a flood that it becomes a problem. Right. And so what I do recognize is when I’m not having fun doing what I’m doing anymore, because I love everything I do. I write. I have my own podcast. I have journals I do. I write romance novels on the side under a pseudonym. So I have a lot of different projects out there, and I love them all. But when I start feeling like I’m not enjoying them, that’s my sign. Like, I’m overloaded. I’ve got too much.
JAY: That’s really good insight. And it’s funny because, you know, sometimes it’s hard to separate that from the fact that when we run a busy business, there’s always parts of the business that we don’t like doing, you know, so it’s not always fun. But, what I’m hearing is if you’re finding the things that you usually should find fun, less fun than something else is going on and yeah, that’s the time to rethink.
So is that correct?
LEAH: Yes. Absolutely. Yes. Cause there’s obviously, and as a business owner, there are things that we need to do to make the business run, and run well and efficiently, that maybe aren’t our favorite things to do that we haven’t gotten to a point where we can delegate them yet, or hire somebody to do them for us. But having an awareness, like those are the things I don’t enjoy, but I always don’t enjoy them. Yeah. Right? Versus the things that like, I really love doing this, I love doing this, but then it starts to feel like a chore or a “to-do” item on your lists, that’s where my warning signs come up.
JAY: That’s really helpful. So those are the sort of danger signs to look out for.
LEAH: And I see that in my clients too, because they’ll say, I just don’t feel motivated to do X, Y, Z, even though I know it’s their passion. That’s when I know, like, okay, let’s unravel what’s going on here.
JAY: Yeah, yeah. And I think we’ve had some conversations around that because, you know, you’re one of these people that juggle 20 things at once. You kind of like it that way, but at the same time that you add the extra thing, as you said. And I think we all have that. I mean, I’m the same is.
I know that some family say oh, I don’t like to ask you ’cause you’re busy. And I said, I’m always gonna be busy. You know, I’m not a not-busy person. I’m not a person that wanders around saying, what can I do now? I’m bored, I’m always gonna have something that’s on my right, on my dance card too, that I’ve got some project going on or whatever. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t make space and like take time away. And that’s the flexibility and adaptability that you mentioned at the start.
In terms of your clients, then let’s go back to that. We’ve talked about the danger signs of when things aren’t fun. How do you start to broach that with them? You know, and this is something that I think entrepreneurs who are listeners to the show are likely to have their clients as well.
And I think sometimes it feels like a difficult conversation to say, Hey, I’m noticing that you’re, you know, you’re a little bit twitchy at the moment or a little bit this. And it feels like you’re telling me that you don’t like my mood today or something. How would you start to have that conversation, open up the conversation of what you’re noticing?
LEAH: Sure. So what’s funny about me is that I have several clients who have said things like, Leah has a velvet sword because I have that ability to just softly slide right into the truth of what’s going on with them. And I ask questions. It’s really all about asking questions to have them become aware of their own space of where they’re in.
And an example of that might be to ask, you know, what is it that if you could do anything today, what would you actually choose to do if there were no consequences? And oftentimes when my entrepreneurs are burnt out, I’ll hear things like I would just sleep or I would stay in bed all day. Right. And these are women who don’t stay in bed, right? They get up there, go, they’ve got a lot going on. And so when they’re at that point. I asked them, what does that tell you? If that’s your answer, what does that tell you?
And they’ll say, I’m burnt out. And I’ll say, when’s the last time you had a vacation? When’s the last time you took a true day off, not a day off to run errands or, you know, go take your kid to all of that kind of stuff. When is the last time you actually turned off?
JAY: Yeah. And it’s funny, cause we talk about that in self-care, and I’ve mentioned it in other interviews, is sometimes that you’re having that conversation with yourself, you’re at your desk, you’re super busy and like, really should go out for a walk today. But it feels like I don’t have time to go out for a walk today because I’ve got this big long list of things to do.
And I tell my clients certainly that, it’s counterintuitive but go for the walk, you’ll be even more productive when you come back. But actually you’re saying that not just the daily habits, but actually getting to the point where you just really do need to take a whole day just for yourself. Whether it’s staying in bed, whether it’s taking a day out to see friends. But it feels counterintuitive when you’re really busy. So is part of the answer planning for it before you have to do it?
LEAH: Well, I’m a big fan of putting yourself in your calendar first.
So go through, schedule your massages, your facials, your exercise routines, your whatever it is that you do that feeds you, you know, it, for some people it might even be your lunches out with a good girlfriend. Put those in the calendar first and then plan your business around those things. And then you’ll always have the downtime that you need because you’re giving to yourself in some way, if not every day, at least every other day.
JAY: That’s kind of like put your own mask on first.
LEAH: It is like that, but it’s, I think more strategic than that. Because as entrepreneurs, our time is often our money. We’re trading our time for money. If you, if you are a business where you’re a practitioner, where you’re a coach, where you’re a trainer, where you’re a speaker, even if you’re doing, you know, public relations or an attorney, where you’re billing out, you know, other people’s time as well, but you’re billing your time out. If you don’t actually value yourself as much as you value the time you give to others, you’re going to eventually break down.
JAY: That is so true. I mean, that’s an incredibly useful reminder for everyone. I mean, you are your best asset, so take care of yourself. Essentially. So yeah, I love that. I’m glad you came back to me on that one.
These things are stuff we all know we have to do some of these things, right? Whether it’s daily habits, whether it’s to take more time for yourself, et cetera. How do you start these resilience generating habits if you like, where do you start building them in?
LEAH: I am a big fan of what I call piggybacking. We already all have habits we do already. So, you know, what’s something you do every single day?
JAY: So brush my teeth.
LEAH: Okay. So brushing your teeth is a great one. What other habit could you stack on top of brushing your teeth? You could brush your teeth and do eye to eye with yourself in the mirror and say positive affirmations. You could brush your teeth and then when you’re done you could have your gratitude journal next to you on the counter and pick it up and say: these are three things I’m excited about today.
So that piggybacking on the habits that already exists make it really easy to pick them up quickly.
JAY: And especially if it’s right next to you as well and you’d make the habit of putting them together. I love that.
LEAH: It’s funny because I have a woman, one of my clients, she keeps one of her books on top of her coffee maker. So as she’s making her coffee, she starts reading the chapter in the book. As she’s drinking her coffee, she reads the chapter. Then she puts her book back on the coffee maker, and that’s her reading time for the day. Whereas she said, if my book wasn’t right there, I’d probably pull up my phone and start looking at emails, right?
JAY: Yeah.
LEAH: And so this way, it’s that, it’s that piggybacking onto something she’s going to do anyway, which is having her coffee and she gets in her motivational reading for the day. Wow. Well, yeah, it depends what book you’re reading.
JAY: I think I would struggle a little bit with that because you know, some of the books that I read, I want to sit down with them for an hour, so I need to piggyback something that is sitting down for an hour. And I think often I’ll go to habits like put yourself in front of the TV or you know, best go for a walk, but we’re often plugged in all the time.
And I think that’s also a bit of a problem is like actually just holding that space, and not filling it with things all the time and just having space and “quiet the noise” I think is an expression that people have used.
So how would you see that in relation to the piggybacking where you’re trying to be ultra-productive in terms of how you put these things together?
LEAH: Well, I’m a meditator. And I encourage meditation for people. One of the styles of meditation I really enjoy is Vipassana style, which is stillness and silence. And you literally get into a space where you sit completely still in silence for however long. An hour is It’s the appointed time to do it, but you can do it for five minutes. You can do it for ten minutes.
However, if you’re not a person that likes to sit still -because a lot of people aren’t- I designed a form of meditation called ecstatic meditation and ecstatic meditation is movement and mantra. So you are dancing through a bunch of different elements and you’re releasing anger, and you’re releasing sadness, and you’re releasing disappointment, and shame and blame, as you dance through this meditation.
Now, yes, it’s active, but your mind is not in this, right? It’s all very somatic. It’s very embodiment work.
JAY: There are so many people that can’t sit still and find meditation and even journaling even though that’s a doing thing, it’s too much stillness. So I like that there is something else for those people.
There is this tension, isn’t there, between doing activities and being activities where you’re looking inside yourself a little bit.
LEAH: Yeah. The reason most people actually can’t sit still is because they’re afraid of what will come up when they do.
JAY: Interesting.
LEAH: Yeah. I mean, when we actually are not busy, we feel. And feelings can be really, really scary if we’ve done a lot of repressing of them because they can feel more powerful. They can feel like they’re overtaking your body. And for a moment they do. But if we keep holding on to them and keep holding on to them, that’s when they actually metaphysically turn into illness.
JAY: Yeah, dis-ease, I mean, that comes up a lot.
LEAH: Dis-ease, right?
JAY: Exactly, yeah, yeah. Tell me a little bit more about this, because it’s not something that we’ve touched on in other conversations, and I think this is actually really important, that fear of what will come up if we stay still.
And it’s partly because what’s come up is that internalization that we do where we’re trying to show up strong, we’re trying to not show weakness and all that stuff, particularly in the workplace. And we go outside of the workplace for our support system.
So there’s that that’s come up, but this is different. This is kind of like just for ourselves and being in that quiet moment could be scary. Tell me a little bit more about that and maybe a couple of examples of people’s breakthrough.
LEAH: It really does go actually back to when we were between age zero and seven is when we learned how to navigate our emotions. We learned if how we emote is okay or not okay. We learned whether it’s all right to express fear. It’s all right to express sadness. And in many cases, it wasn’t right.
Even if we look at just traditional gender rules back when you and I were growing up, I know they’re different now, but men were not supposed to cry; women were not supposed to get angry.
And so we have a bunch of women ending up with cancers because cancer is what happens in your body when you hold on to anger for long periods of time.
And we have a bunch of men who are essentially walking around so sad, but unable to express that. Then they become distant from their partners because their fear is if I open my heart, all of that sadness is going to pour out because I was never able to actually release that.
So, we’ve got this kind of environment where the body is holding on to an energy that was really just meant to flow through it. Emotion is e-motion in motion. So you want your feelings to come out, you want them to be expressed. Now there’s obviously emotional intelligence. There are ways to do that that are not hurtful to other people.
I love journaling as a way of expressing emotion, and if you are somebody who hasn’t, one of the exercises that I will give my clients to do is you just take a piece of paper and you start writing: I am so angry that … And you keep answering that question. I am so angry that my parents did not allow me to be angry. I’m so angry that I never got the love I deserved. I’m so angry that, you know, the guy cut me off in traffic.
Whatever it is, just express it, allow it to come out, allow it to be felt. And then you can do, I’m so sad that… I’m so disappointed that… I’m so scared that, and you just allow yourself to really be honest about those feelings and feel what they feel like.
JAY: So the opposite of internalizing; it’s a way of externalizing Like journalling, you’re externalizing it.
LEAH: Yeah. And there’s programs too. If you feel like you have a lot deep inside of you and you’re afraid to actually explore that by yourself. Because some people are they know like I have some deep stuff repressed, and I don’t think that you know journaling on a piece of paper is going to help me.
There is a program that’s been around for years and years called Hoffman, and they physically have you get this stuff out. So I went through the Hoffman program because I don’t ever recommend things to my clients that I haven’t done. And I kept hearing such great things about it. I decided, all right, I’m going to go see what this is about.
And they literally give you a baseball bat and a pillow. And you, like, beat all of your anger out of your body. Yeah. And it’s not even anger management. It’s literally like expression and you can scream and yell, and say all the things that you didn’t say in the moments that you wanted to say them.
And I’ll say like I was sore afterward. Cause you get so much out that you’ve got all these toxins that then get released into your body and you’re drinking tons of water to get them out. Because when you think about it, all that’s like just forming these little nodules everywhere in your body.
I’m certified as a medical intuitive. And so I can actually see in people’s bodies when the energy is starting to formalize into matter. So for example, if I look into somebody’s field, if I see gray, I know they’re six months to a year for developing cancer. And so there’s something they need to really move out of their field or that grayness is actually going to turn into a nodule or a tumor.
JAY: Wow. And would you tell someone if you saw that?
LEAH: I usually I would much rather give them ways to not have that happen. So what I’ll say is I’m seeing some really trapped emotions, that if they stay in you are going to cause problems because I never want to tell somebody what their diagnosis may end up being.
First of all, I’m not a medical doctor, so I cannot do that legally. And second of all, I don’t want them to create it. So if I say, Oh, you know, if you don’t do this, you’re going to get cancer. And then they, in their mind go, Oh, I didn’t do it. Now I have cancer. I don’t want to contribute to that. But what I can do is give them positive things to do, you know, do a lot of emotional release techniques.
You know, there’s so, there’s so many things that we have at our disposal these days to be able to work with this. But it is a commitment. And a lot of people are really afraid of what lies within them.
JAY: That’s kind of scary, but also, it’s also quite refreshing in the sense that we’re all the same. We’re all carrying these things around. It’s like, sometimes I think we feel that we’re the only one that’s got all of this and we all carry our own stuff.
There’s a couple of things that’s coming up. I want to come back to resilience. Because some of the things you’re talking about feel like long term preventative measures, right? You know, don’t hold on to all of this stuff, start learning how to release it, and so you don’t build up that disease, those problems, and that makes you more resilient over time, right?
In the short term, if we’re rising resilient, it’s often because there’s an incident, something’s happened, maybe you’ve been given a cancer diagnosis, maybe you’ve lost somebody, maybe a business initiative failed, and so something’s happened. How do you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, that kind of thing, so that you can rise resilient?
I feel that there’s a long-term habit or way of thinking, and there’s also some short-term things that you can do. So help us navigate a little bit that whole package of stuff.
LEAH: Sure, absolutely. So first of all, the best way to be more resilient is to be prepared to be resilient, which is what I’m talking about. The more stable and aligned you are when something crashes down, the easier it is to get back onto center.
Now, not everybody starts from that place, you know, so what do you do if something crashes down and you weren’t strong in the first place?
And oftentimes, that is what happens because there’s a process that I’ve seen with a lot of my clients, and I’ve seen it for myself and I call it clues, warnings, and crisis.
So we first get clues that our foundation has cracks in it. This might be something like a check bouncing or a couple of clients leaving that you wouldn’t have wanted to leave, or an assistant not doing what they said they were going to do.
Those types of things are kind of clues that there’s a little chink in the armor. And a lot of times, people will write those off. They’ll ignore them and they’ll be like, Oh, it’s just this, or she was just having a bad day, or whatever. Right?
And when you ignore enough of the clues, you’re going to get a warning. A warning might be an IRS audit. A warning might be your biggest client leaves and you’ve got, you know, 40 percent of your income to make up then.
Sometimes what people do when they hit the warning phase is they go into denial. And they say things like why did this happen to me? We don’t create solution from that space. Because we’re essentially denying our responsibility to what’s happening in our field.
If you don’t, at that warning point, make a shift, make a change, or start stepping deeper into that, kind of leaning into the responsibility of how do I change this? How have I created this? How have I contributed to this? Then it goes into what I call crisis.
And when crisis happens, that is a big breakdown. That’s when I see the cancer diagnosis. That’s when I see somebody getting in a massive car accident. And having repercussions from that. I had a client who had a major flood and toxic mould and sickness and illness from that.
And, you know, those types of things, you’re in crisis. And to me, crisis is a huge invitation to rework your entire framework and to say: what is my life trying to tell me right now? Sometimes an accident is just an accident.
But if you look back and you’ve got clues, warnings, and crisis, it’s not just an accident. It’s a culmination of you not paying attention at a deeper level to a message that’s being given to you.
And it could be [telling you to] go in a different business direction, start serving people in a different way, stop and start taking care of yourself, live your values.
JAY: How do you hear those messages? Like those specific messages? How do you know what is the message that’s coming out of that?
LEAH: It’s all about going within, it’s about asking, it’s about getting quiet and saying, what is this telling me? And I have to tell you, the many people that I’ve worked with, they know, they know already. They’re like, I’ve known that I needed to stop doing XYZ, but I kept doing it. I’ve known that I needed to give my health more attention, but I’ve kept putting it off.
Most people know. Like intuitively they’ve known, and they’ve just been pushing it aside, pushing it aside, pushing it aside. Or, you just do some exploration around what might it be. What could this be telling you?
JAY: The big message out of this is that resilience isn’t something you put a band aid on. It’s major care, continuous care of yourself and finding the things that work for you, and not ignoring the warning signs. Those are the key things that I’ve got out of this.
LEAH: Yeah, yes, absolutely. And you know, to the words that you chose for this, courage, compassion, confidence, it comes down to having the courage to really look deep into yourself, and at your situation, and allow it to show you what’s next.
And then having the compassion with yourself to say, okay, I know I had some hand in this, but it’s okay. Like I did the best that I could in the situation that I had. And so I think that compassion is really important because when I see people not being compassionate toward themselves, they can’t get back in. They don’t bounce back because they’re in self-blame. They’re in self-hate. They’re in self-loathing. And you don’t create solutions and you don’t see possibilities from that standpoint.
That compassion, it’s really compassion for self that is so important. And from that, you “birth” your confidence to say: you know what, I built a business once, I can build another business. Or, hey, this didn’t work, but you know what, there was a reason it didn’t work. So let me figure out that reason and try it again.
My first business failed miserably. I did not know what I was doing. I had a graphic design business. I’d left a cushy corporate job and thought like, Oh, I’ll just, you know, hang out my shingle and people will just come use me. And my old company actually contracted me back and I did some great work for them. But then after that, I was like. Well, where are my other clients coming from? Like, why isn’t nobody coming to me? Right.
And I had to go learn that, you know, there’s a whole other piece to marketing your business that has nothing to do with being great at your craft. And out of that was actually born my marketing consulting firm, because I went and learned how to do it for myself. And so then I started teaching software engineers in the dot com boom, how to do it for themselves because they were engineers. They were not marketers, but I understood their plight because I’d been through it.
So my failure became my next success or informed my next success.
JAY: A lot of the time, we put our armor on and what I’m hearing from what you’re saying is that, like, we need to go deep in us, inside, and I think certain industries that you’ve just mentioned, and guys in particular, as you said earlier, they’re taught, big boys don’t cry. They find that really hard, and they’re like, no, I’m not doing that fluffy stuff, I’m not doing any of that, and obviously there’s some females who are a bit like that too.
So that armor that we put is, what you’re saying is blindsiding us to the deeper, like, connection inside ourselves that we need to do to find the possibilities.
LEAH: Yeah. Powering through will only get you so far. And at some point, the powering through is breaking you down. The women I see that have done the most pushing, cause I have some female clients that are financial advisors, which is a man’s world.
And I know this sounds very genderistic, but I mean, look at the numbers. You can just go in and like, you can see there’s very few females in that business at the higher levels. And the ones that are at the higher levels really like pushed and pushed and pushed. And a lot of them they’re burnt out, they’re ill, they’re overweight, and they’re unhappy. But they can’t stop because they’ve created this engine that keeps them in the space that they’re in.
So this is where I say, you’ve got to slow down and step back enough to say, what is the message that my body is giving me? The body is so intelligent. It’s so intelligent. It knows. It will tell you, like, eat this. Take this road. Don’t take that road. But we have been trained out of listening to our own intuition and our own inner guidance, and been told that experts or people outside of us know better for us.
JAY: It’s true and there’s a whole post-industrial movement that we’re very much led by that more mechanical way of doing and structuring and process, and we’re leaving sight of that intuition. There was a wonderful program which was around getting back to that intuition. And a lot of us, I think, have lost sight of that.
LEAH: Completely. Our brain works like a computer, which means that it can be programmed by anything coming into it. So if you’re watching TV, if you’re listening to the news, if you’re listening to educators, if you’re hanging out with a certain group of people, if you’re reading certain books, if you’re, it doesn’t matter what it is, anything that you’re inputting is programming you. So you want to be very, very selective as to what you allow to be downloaded.
I personally stopped watching all TV. Yeah, I rarely even watch a movie because there’s so much predictive programming in it. There are so many messages in it. We now have advertising like layered into all of our programs, you know, here, eat cereal, you know, there, you see the name, they’re driving a car. Oh, yeah, this has great features. I’m like, what does this have to do with the show? I’m watching, right?
JAY: Absolutely. Don’t even start on social media. There’s a whole other avenue that you can explore in subliminal messaging that we get. And we’re exposed to it so, so much.
LEAH: What you just said is really key. Social media influences our resilience because we see people on social media that seem to be like way up here in their lifestyle and what they have, and it’s all a facade. And so it gives us the message that either we have to be here or we’re a loser.
This is why I think we’ve also seen so much depression, so many suicides in people that spend the most time on social media, because it’s teaching them not to be resilient. It’s teaching them there’s this way or this way and if you’re not these, you’re, you’re out.
JAY: So what I’m hearing from that is we are actually a lot more resilient than we think if we remove some of those things, which is blindsiding or blinding us to our own, like, intuition and way of dealing with things. It’s showing us a bigger gap than there actually is.
LEAH: How long have humans been on this earth? We are intensely resilient. We have endured floods and dinosaurs and, you know not having plumbing and not having vehicles and pandemics. And we are intensely resilient.
JAY: I was going to say that’s a great note to end on because that, how true is that? But I actually want to ask you, what’s the one positive superpower for rising resilient for yourself and for your clients that you would point to -your go-to thing? What would be that one kind of zap that you would say to rise resilient from a setback.
LEAH: Reframe, and it’s both a tool and a skill is to reframe because we live not from reality, but we live from our perspective of reality, our perception of reality.
So you can perceive something as being the absolute worst thing that’s happened to you, or you can perceive it as the best thing that’s ever happened to you. How you choose to perceive it is going to impact what you do with it, whether you learn from it and grow from it, or whether you let it bury you.
So reframing is what I would say would be the superpower.
JAY: Brilliant. As one of my mentors from way back, Jim Rohn said, there’s two things you can be certain of in life, that’s opportunity and obstacles. And sometimes they’re the same thing, it’s just how you see them. So that’s absolutely the point. Yeah. Yeah. I love that.
This has been fun and I could go for another couple of hours talking with you. You’ve got so much brilliance and insight and expertise, and experience of these things for yourself and your clients. So thank you so much for your time.
LEAH: You’re so welcome.
This has been amazing. And thank you for your input.
LEAH: Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate being included because it’s definitely been a couple years of resilience for me with taking on the care of my mom, who’s now blind.
And this morning was a perfect example. I get up this morning, I go downstairs, her smoke alarm is going off, just because the battery is low. But I didn’t hear it from upstairs. So the dog has been going crazy. So the dogs peed all over the floor. My mom is like exhausted because she’s been up for like however many hours this thing was going off.
And I walk into this disaster area knowing that in 45 minutes, I have a client and then I have this interview on a podcast. And I’m thinking, okay, I’ve got a beeping, I’ve got to get a ladder out of the garage because we have big extra tall ceilings. I’ve got to get her fed. I’ve got to get the dog taken care of. They’re both shredded. And so I’m also trying to calm them down, and I’m running a business, right? So, I’ve got to get myself ready.
These are things that, you know, business owners deal with on a daily basis. And how do you, do you let that go? Oh, I have to cancel everything because this disaster happened in the morning. Or do you say, you know, what, this is my life today. Let’s get the ladder. Let’s get her cereal. Let’s get the coffee made. Let’s get the dog out, and you just do it. And for me, I just do it.
JAY: You do it brilliantly. And it’s amazing when I know that everything that you’ve got going on and I think it’s a testament to the techniques you apply to yourself, and the attitude as well of like how you like keep calm with, you know, all of those crazy things going on. You do what you can, right, and give yourself compassion as we said earlier.
LEAH: Yeah, acceptance. And surrender. Two of the other tools I use. Let’s accept what is, and surrender to the process, and then see what unfolds and how I can make this work.
JAY: Well, I’m glad we included that. I told you, if we just keep recording, other things will come along. It’s hard to know where to close off because I think we can carry on for hours.
Thank you so much. Probably talk forever, but I really appreciate you including me in this.
LEAH: It’s been a pleasure and I can’t wait for it to come out and share it with my listeners as well, because they don’t hear this stuff from me.
Awesome. I think your perspective on it is so clear. And all of us are just like figuring out how do we make sense of all of these things and you’ve got this very clear way of putting it all in its place, whilst juggling lots of things at the same time. I admire that entirely.
So thank you, Leah, I will see you soon.
