Episode 27--Unblocking Your Best Self through Energy Work with Energy Mastery Expert Kristen Brown

In this week's episode, Billy and Brian interview energy mastery expert Kristen Brown about how we can unblock our best self. 

Kristen is a "corporate hippie" who has worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet.  She is also a best-selling author, podcast host, energy mastery expert, work/life futurist, widowed mom, and a world-wide speaker.  Today's discussion topics include:
--Biohacking
--PowerShots
--WooWoo at Work
--The Happy Hour Effect
--The importance of helping business leaders develop soft skills within their work force
--Her "Night of the Dark Soul"

Like what you heard from Kristen Brown?  Contact her at:
Website: www.kristenbrownpresents.com
Instagram: @speakerkristen
Email: kristen@kristenbrownpresents.com

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Transcript

Thank you for taking the time to listen to The Mindful Midlife Crisis podcast. We hope you enjoy this week’s episode. If this episode resonates with you, please share it with your family and friends. We will do our best to put out new content every Wednesday to get you over the midweek hump. If you want episodes to be downloaded automatically to your phone each week, all you need to do is hit the checkmark, Subscribe, Like, or Follow button, depending on what podcast format you’re using. While you’re at it, feel free to leave our show a quick five-star review with a few kind words so more people like you can easily find our show. If you’re really enjoying the show and you want to help us out, feel free to make a donation to www.buymeacoffee.com/MMC podcast. That’s www.buymeacoffee.com/MMC podcast. You can also access the link in our show notes. We use the money from these donations to pay whatever expenses we incur from producing the show, but, ultimately, we record this show for you, so if you keep listening, we’ll keep recording and releasing new episodes each week regardless. If you’d like to contact us or if you have suggestions about what you’d like us to discuss on future episodes, feel free to email us at mindfulmidlifecrisis@gmail.com or follow us on Instagram at @Mindful_Midlife_Crisis. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to the articles and resources we referenced throughout the show. Thanks again for listening. May you feel happy, healthy, and loved. Enjoy the show.

Welcome to The Mindful Midlife Crisis, a podcast for people navigating the complexities and possibilities of life’s second half. Join your hosts, Billy and Brian, a couple of average dudes who will serve as your armchair life coaches as we share our life experiences, both the good and the bad, in an effort to help us all better understand how we can enjoy and make the most of the life we have left to live in a more meaningful way. Take a deep breath, embrace the present, and journey with us through The Mindful Midlife Crisis.

Billy: Welcome to The Mindful Midlife Crisis. I’m your host, Billy, and, as always, I’m joined by my good friend, Brian on the Bass. Brian, how you doing over there, man? 

Brian: I am terrific. 

Billy: Oh, with an inflection yet too. Why are you so terrific?

Brian: You like that? It was a lilt. Terrific. It’s what I call it.

Billy: Did you have a good week? 

Brian: Yeah, it’s been a great week, man. You know, just making things happen. Rockin’ and rollin’. 

Billy: That’s what you do. Speaking of rockin’ and rollin’, what’s coming up this summer in the next couple of weeks with any bands, any — you got a project that you’ve been quiet about. 

Brian: I do, I do, and we’re almost ready to take the lid off of that thing. Yeah. We had a rehearsal last night and we could we could do a show for an entire set right now. 

Billy: Nice. 

Brian: So, yeah, it’s sounding pretty good. It’s a little 90s project. 

Billy: Oh, I like that —

Brian: But it’s not grungy — it’s true, but it’s not grungy 90s.

Billy:  Even still, just as a child of the 90s —

Brian: You will know every single song. 

Billy: Oh, I like that. I like that. Is it one of those where you run the gamut of all the genres?

Brian: Everything. We’re doing country, we’re doing pop, we’re doing rap, we’re doing hip hop, we’re doing — we do do a few grunge tunes, just the big ones though because we only have room for a few. Pop. You know, there was a lot of pop and a lot of weird songs in the 90s such as like Len, you remember “Steal My Sunshine”? 

Billy: Oh, yeah, “Steal My Sunshine.” Are you guys doing “Informer” by Snow?

Brian: We are doing “Informer” by Snow. And I have to learn the lyrics. 

Billy: Oh, my god. “A licky boom boom dem.”

Brian: Yeah, it’s the, “Informer, ya’ no say daddy me Snow me I go blame, A licky boom boom dem,” right, so he doesn’t — that’s a really challenging song because you’re not even learning words, you actually have to learn the syllables.

Billy: And the syncopation of the delivery.

Brian: And the syncopa— it’s taken me a long time but I’m all the way through it except for the last verse. I could deliver the entire song except for the last verse right now. 

Billy: I am ready for this new side project. 

Brian: It’s going to be good. I mean, “Regulate” is another one we’re doing, of course. We’ve got a lot of good rap in there, yeah. We’re doing a lot of the like Deee-Lite, “Groove Is in the Heart.”

Billy: Oh, “Groove Is in the Heart.”

Brian: We try to stick to a lot of the dancey shit so I took all the top 40 stuff and put it in the set and it’s actually sounding really great. 

Billy: So what do you have for like rock songs and what do you have for country songs? What do you have for pop songs? 

Brian: I bet you could name them. Name the top five biggest country songs of the 90s. 

Billy: So I’m going to go back through like —

Brian: Number one is —

Billy: “Any Man of Mine,” I imagine.

Brian: On there. 

Billy: Okay. 

Brian: Shania Twain’s on there. 

Billy: Yeah. So, remember — I’m sure Garth Brooks is on.

Brian: Garth Brooks, “Friends in Low Places.”

Billy: Okay, of course, of course. Is “Sold”?

Brian: Yes.

Billy: The John Michael Montgomery?

Brian: We are doing “Sold.” We’re doing “I Like It, I Love It.” 

Billy: Oh, yeah.

Brian: By Tim McGraw. “I love it, I want some more.”

Billy: Oh, yeah.

Brian: Yeah, yeah.

Billy: Okay, so we’ve already kind of covered some of the rap songs, “Groove Is in the Heart” for a little pop song. Let’s see here.

Brian: “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Tonic.

Billy: Oh, my gosh.

Brian: We’re doing Tonic. We’re doing — so that’s of course “If You Could Only See.” We are doing, for the grunge stuff, we are doing Nirvana, Green Day. I’m trying to think what else. Weezer. Just it really is a great set. 

Billy: I cannot wait to rock and roll to this. Any band that you ran is a lot of fun but this is — like when you’re in Space Needle, that was obviously you’re right in my wheelhouse so, you know, even just dialing back a little bit for just all the 90s pop and just, you know, like I knew all the words to “Sold” back in the day and I used to sing “Friends in Low Places” at karaoke. I mean, why not? That would bring the house down every single time.

Brian: And we’re doing the characters, so Kirk will be dressed as Garth Brooks. We actually got him the shirt. And the hat. He’s got the official Garth Brooks shirt and hat so he’s going to look like Garth Brooks when he’s doing the country stuff. 

Billy: Oh, that’s too good. 

Brian: I have to say, stepping back to Space Needle, this one’s called Gen X Jukebox. 

Billy: Oh, nice, okay. 

Brian: But I have to credit Space Needle with this idea because, arguably, Space Needle, obviously a great band and all the guys, I really respected them all as players. I mean, they’re all fantastic musicians and we were doing the grunge stuff arguably better than anybody was doing it. 

Billy: Oh, agreed. 

Brian: And, well, I look at bands like Wicked Garden.

Billy: Wicked Garden is pretty solid. 

Brian: They are great. They’re a great band.

Billy: Yeah, they’re very solid.

Brian: But it doesn’t seem like that music builds a big following, you know what I mean? It’s kind of nichy. 

Billy: It’s dark. 

Brian: It’s dark and nichy. It’s hard to dance to. 

Billy: Yeah, exactly. You mean, you’re going to rock out to it. 

Brian: Exactly. So I flipped the coin on this, I said, you know I’ve done that grunge stuff and rock stuff and I had a great time doing it. I mean, it was one of the most fun times at bands I’ve ever been in, as far as that’s my deal too, like you, kid of the 90s, but flipping the coin on this one to the pop stuff so people can dance, I’m kind of curious to see how the audience is going to react. 

Billy: I think the audience is going to love it. 

Brian: It’s pretty good. I did a lot of studying as far as what songs and I took only ones that were — we don’t have any songs on the set list that was out of the top 10.

Billy: Nice.

Brian: And very few are 3 through 10. Most of them are number ones and were number one for a good amount of time. 

Billy: Here’s Brian’s website that he’s working on. It says, “Brian on the Bass, congratulations, you have found Brian on the Bass. From now on, if you ever need a bass, you think, ‘I gotta ask Brian on the Bass.’ I will then hear your thoughts and tell you either, “Go away,” “Nice stuff. I’d love to play bass for that for free,” “Good stuff. I’ll play bass on it but it’s gonna cost you,” “Here’s the bass I’ll show you how to play it,” “Here is a bass player that would be perfect for that.” And the picture here is absolutely ridiculous. If you are interested in hiring Brian on the Bass, please reach out and I will send you this information. I think I’m going to post this on our Instagram in case anybody is in the need of a bass player. 

Brian: Just see how it does, it’d be funny. I did it for an internal band joke but it’s gone beyond that now. 

Billy: It looks great. It looks great. Okay, I feel like our energy is pretty high here today and that is very suiting because we are here with energy master Kristen Brown. She is a motivational speaker. She is a bestselling author. Kristen is a former corporate leader who has worked with some of the biggest brands on the planet. She is also a bestselling author, podcast host, energy mastery expert, work-life futurist, widowed mom, and a worldwide speaker. You can book a speaking gig with Kristen at her website, which is www.kristenbrownpresents.com. We’ll put that in the show notes. You can also follow her on Instagram at @SpeakerKristen. Thank you for being here, Kristen Brown. Welcome. 

Kristen: Thanks for having me. I feel terrific too. 

Billy: Well, good. We’re glad that you feel terrific as well. So, Kristen, we always like to have our guests introduce themselves by telling us the 10 roles that they play in their life. So, what are the 10 roles that you play in your life? 

Kristen: Well, I’m a kid mom of a teen daughter so you can all give me some sympathy via the airwaves right now. I am a dog mom. I am a wino, or maybe I should say wine aficionado. I’m a foodie. I like almost everything except ketchup and duck. I am a summer girl. If I didn’t have my whole family here in Minnesota, I would not live here in the winter. I like bacon, like in my foodie world, anything can come with bacon and I’m happy about it. Author, speaker, all the work stuff. That’s never as fun as the personal stuff. 

Billy: So why such a bacon lover? 

Kristen: You know, I think, and I hear this a lot, that I could be a vegetarian if I could still eat bacon. It’s the saltiness and the smokiness that comes together, because I don’t need to eat a pork chop, I don’t need to eat — I love a good steak but I could give that up. I don’t like chicken already. But something about bacon. Just —

Brian: How about stuff like foie gras? 

Kristen: Nope.

Brian: No? 

Kristen: No.

Brian: Oh, I just had a good one at Bazaar Meats in Vegas. It was —

Kristen: I’ve been there actually. 

Brian: It was a foie gras in cotton candy. Yeah, it was brilliant. It was really quite brilliant. Yeah, amazing meal. 

Kristen: Did they then have some sort of like puff of smoke come up as they unfurled it from the dish? 

Brian: No, these came on sticks, so it was like a little tiny stick with a big puff of cotton candy and in the center was the foie, so the foie was right on the stake and then it’s like they blew cotton candy around it. It was really good. 

Kristen: I mean, I’d try it. 

Brian: It was amazing. I mean, you can’t go wrong with it, yeah. That restaurant is ridiculous. 

Billy: Cotton candy —

Brian: Whose restaurant was that again? I forgot. 

Kristen: Is it Blazs? B-L-A-Z-S, I think. Andre? 

Brian: Andre, yes. Thank you. Yes.

Billy: Wait, wait. Cotton candy duck, is that what we’re talking about here? 

Brian: No, cotton candy — José Andrés. A cotton candy, foie is liver, so foie gras is like a liver paste, essentially. So that with cotton candy. 

Billy: That all sounds terrible. 

Brian: It was the best mix of sweet and savory that I’ve ever had in my life, and I’m not a big foie person either. I mean, I can eat it, like I’ll eat liver but I don’t order foie and the guy I was dining with was like, “No, you gotta try this. We’re doing the meal. We’re doing the chef’s meal,” so I say okay and, yeah, José Andrés Bazaar Meat, just so good. 

Kristen: You know, the best combination of sweet and salty in my world is a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. 

Billy: Oh, that’s classic. Most definitely. You are a big fan of the Big Fat Bacon at the State Fair.

Kristen: Multiple trips to it each visit. Usually, it’s the first stop and then one to two more times throughout. Not the whole fair but the visit that day. 

Billy: If you have not been to the Minnesota State Fair and you have not had the Big Fat Bacon, I highly recommend it. I don’t like the state fair. I actually only go to the state fair when Brian’s bands are playing at the State Fair.

Brian: Which we are this time. 

Billy: Oh. Hey, if you’re a listener, we’re going to go see Brian on the Bass’s band at the Minnesota State Fair.

Brian: August 28th. 

Billy: On August 28th.

Brian: And we play at 7. I think we’re the last slot so we’re like 7 or 7:30 to 11:30.

Billy: And what’s the venue? 

Brian: Dino’s.

Billy: Yeah, Dino’s is a good spot too. 

Brian: Yeah, the Dino’s booth is awesome. That’s a lot of fun. 

Billy: All right, so there we go. So, Kristen, we can go, we can get some Big Fat Bacon and we can rock out to the 80s after that.

Brian: Plus, you can get a gyro. I mean, who doesn’t want to gyro at the Dino’s booth, man? 

Billy: Excellent. Very good point. Very good point. And they have the cheese curds right around the corner. 

Brian: Absolutely.

Billy: Very tasty. Very tasty. Since we’re talking about food here, you said that one of the three roles that you’re most looking forward to in the second half of your life is being a foodie. So, I mean, clearly, we’ve been talking about food here this beginning part. Why foodie? 

Kristen: I think my daughter is partially vegetarian, doesn’t eat cheese, doesn’t eat most meat except chicken. She’ll eat seafood. So that kind of limits the food that I can eat. So when she goes to college, I will just be indulging in cheesy, meaty dishes all the time. 

Billy: Just going to have a charcuterie board sent to you every day. 

Kristen: Yep. My fridge is only going to be meats and cheeses.

Billy: That’s fantastic. Oh, that sounds mmm. What are your favorite places to go for meats and cheeses? 

Kristen: Well, Parlour Burger, of course, if you’re in Minneapolis or anywhere in Minnesota, you’ve probably heard of the Parlour Burger. The Vine Room is downtown Hopkins and they make a pretty good charcuterie board. They’re pretty new. I think they’re only two years old. And they don’t have a full menu, they only have charcuterie and a couple of other little things with their kind of hand curated wines and wine flights.

Billy: You know, Robbinsdale is another little hotspot that people don’t — like you said Hopkins, I’m thinking oh, yes, you’d think you have to go to Minneapolis for these good restaurants but like Robbinsdale has — was it Revival over there? 

Kristen: Travail.

Billy: Travail, that’s it, yeah.

Kristen: And Pig Ate My Pizza.

Billy: And Pig Ate My Pizza. Oh my god. Both of those are amazing, yeah. I also recommend Marnas Eatery, which is right next to Pig Ate My Pizza. It is Costa Rican food.

Kristen: Yum.

Brian: Wow, what is Costa Rican food? Enlighten me.

Billy: Look at the —

Brian: Plantains and stuff?

Billy: I don’t know, look at the menu. I just go there and they say, “Hey, this is Costa Rican food,” and I’m like, “Okay, that looks good. I’m gonna eat that.”

Brian: All right. Good.

Billy: So, yeah, yeah. So you’re a summer girl as well, that’s another thing that you said that you’re looking forward to, and you alluded to the fact that when your daughter graduates that you’re going to enjoy maybe an endless summer.

Kristen: Probably float around. Luckily, I’m a business owner so I can work from anywhere and, yeah, I think I’ll do a lot of coastal traversing, and it doesn’t have to be — like Seattle is somewhere that I think I’ll spend a lot of time so it doesn’t have to be like hot hot but just somewhere where it snows and then it melts right away.

Brian: That’s what we’re all secretly wishing for Minnesota. You know it. Everybody. It’s like, “Oh, it snowed, now it can go away.” 

Billy: Yeah, but there are those nut jobs out there who live here in Minnesota who are like, “I like the seasons, I like going ice fishing,” and people who say they like going ice fishing, I kind of wish they would fall through the ice. 

Brian: Not me. Those are the people that don’t like their families. Okay, because look at this, look at this. A warm place with food and good company, or a desolate frozen wasteland that you drill a hole for sea creatures. I mean, come on. There’s got to be something bigger going on and the only thing I can boil it down to is they don’t like whoever they’re living with.

Kristen: Yeah. 

Billy: Oh, I think we have figured it out. Well done. Well done, Brian. 

Brian: Thank you. 

Kristen: You need to reach out to the Ice Castle’s Fish House people. You’re their new marketing person. 

Brian: There we go. Don’t like the people you live with? Get one of our fish houses. F them.

Billy: Oh, that’s fantastic. All right, so then the last thing you said was speaker. So, talk about why are you looking forward to continuing on with being a speaker? Because you’ve been doing that now for a while, so why are you so looking forward to continuing doing that? 

Kristen: Well, as my speaking career has evolved, I left corporate America about eight years ago or so, I’ve stuck pretty close to home, I do travel occasionally for it but I stay close to home because I have a daughter that needs me, and so when she goes off to college, I will definitely be pushing harder for some of the bigger speaking events, a lot more traveling, more worldwide stuff. Because right now I don’t really do worldwide stuff, I just stay close to home. 

Billy: So you alluded to the fact that you are a corporate speaker, so we’re going to take a quick break and then when we come back, we’re going to have Kristen talk about how you can unblock your best self. Thank you for listening to The Mindful Midlife Crisis.

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If you’re listening somewhere safe and quiet, close your eyes and slowly inhale for four, three, two, one. Hold for seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Slowly exhale for eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Let’s do that one more time. Inhale for four, three, two, one. Hold for seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Slowly exhale for eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Go ahead and open your eyes. You feel better? We certainly hope so. And now, back to the show.

Billy: Welcome back to The Mindful Midlife Crisis. We are here with energy master Kristen Brown. She is a corporate speaker. She is here to talk to us today about unblocking our best selves. So, let’s just peel back a little bit here and get a better understanding of where this energy mastery comes from and your corporate speaking experience. You’ve described yourself as a corporate hippie so what do you mean by that and how do those two worlds overlap? 

Kristen: Yeah, well, I was in corporate America for 15 years, traditional corporate, I worked for vendors and people that sold to retail.

Billy: What were you doing exactly? 

Kristen: So I was developing product, doing — I call it corporate espionage because it sounds cooler than market research, but I would travel the world, I’d go to trade shows all before the internet, I would do trade show, booth scans of our competitors and cool stuff like that, and I had to take like secret photos with my PowerShot camera like secretly, and I loved it, and then, unexpectedly, bittersweet part of my story, I was widowed 13 years ago. My husband died when my daughter was just 10 months old, I was in this high pressure corporate job, and it shifted my perspective on how people engage in the workplace, because I saw people engage with me differently having had something rough happen to me and they didn’t know what to say or do, and I saw myself shift differently. And, at the time, I noticed the differences but I didn’t know anything like I know now. I didn’t know about energy and I didn’t know about self-help really at all back then. And so it just stuck in the back of my head as I was going through my grief process and I was still in corporate America for several years after my husband died but I got to a place where I was like, you know, I can see a difference in people’s interactions based on their mood, based on their physical state, if they’re hungry, and that was before the term “hangry” came out, but I started noticing these shifts and started noticing differences in how people behaved if they’re going to happy hour that night or not. And so it just got my brain working, and I’m a super nerd, I went to the International Science Fair in high school and my college career was all nerdy, researchy stuff, started my college career wanting to be in that biology space, then I got my business degree, which is a whole ’nother podcast, we don’t need to go into that after six colleges. 

Billy: Oh.

Kristen: Yep. 

Brian: So you were a professional college student.

Kristen: I’m a professional college student. And it was just I started to notice all of these things that people have control over in their bodies, minds, and spirits that they were ignoring, and it was before yoga became mainstream, it was before any of that was really mainstream, and I started pretty “safe,” air quotes. I was talking about stress management and I was talking about what can you do to be happier and healthier. And people in corporate America were seeing that as soft skills and they wouldn’t pay for that so I had to add some more hardcore corporate language. So I started adding in leadership and I ended up getting a master’s degree in integral theory, which I describe as the art and science of multiple perspectives in decision making. So corporate America likes those kinds of terms. 

Billy: Oh, yes, they do. 

Kristen: Yes, they do. And so as I started evolving my business and seeing what would turn people’s lights on and what would increase the numbers of zeros on my paycheck, it started to just all come together. And more recently, with COVID in the last year, there’s been a much higher demand for going back to my earliest roots of stress management and I literally have taught the same thing most of these years but I just use different language so corporate will embrace it and I’ve added a lot more of the hippie elements in the last year, like meditation, affirmations, Visualization, and things like that, that historically were kind of off limits in the corporate world because they didn’t see it as valuable. 

Brian: It was the flower power stuff, yeah.

Kristen: It was the flower power, hippie stuff. And, now, I would say probably 75 percent of my corporate clients are asking at least for some little bit of meditation, a little bit of affirmation something. 

Brian: Is that because of the shutdown or was that pre shutdown? 

Kristen: It was starting to become more acceptable before the shutdown. 

Brian: And that amplified it, I bet.

Kristen: And it amplified it. 

Brian: Yeah, sure. 

Billy: So, Brian, as a president of a company, how do you see soft skills? 

Brian: Oh, yeah. I mean, they are hard to measure, of course, but more and more, you realize that the people that are more developed with their soft skills are the ones that succeed and are able to adapt a little more. So, I mean, we’re not a big company so I don’t have the luxury of being able to do three-day seminars or two-week seminars for everybody. We definitely encourage personal development, but my company’s probably a bad example just because we’re small, we’re only in that $11 million range where — I’m sure the corporate clients you’re working with are the $100 to $500 million.

Kristen: Actually, the small companies are the ones that are embracing it most.

Brian: Really?

Kristen: It’s grassroots, because you guys have a little bit more interaction with everyone —

Brian: Yeah, that’s the case.

Kristen: — and you can really, not handhold but you can really customize what people need. So if you know that Jane needs to go to a yoga class on Friday mornings, you let her go to the yoga class. If you know that Brent in the warehouse needs to leave early because he wants to go for a run, you let him do that. 

Brian: We exactly encourage that. Yeah, you’re spot on. Yeah. 

Billy: So what was the feedback that you would get from corporate America in terms of branding the messages that you were sending? 

Kristen: Well, when I first started, stress was acceptable, low pay, when I shifted to leadership and sales and productivity and performance, they loved that, of course. And then as I started weaving in, I call it woo-woo at work, some woo-woo at work things and talking about body-mind, whole person, really developing your greatest assets, it was hesitant. I mean, there was definitely a lot of hesitancy. Some companies were like, “Yes, the whole person is amazing, holistic, we want it, we want it,” and others were like, “No, we don’t have a budget for soft skills.” And then I’d be like, “Well, how about this? How about a program on energy management for sales leaders?” “Yeah, we want that.” Literally the exact same program that I would have delivered if it was called woo-woo at work, exact same program. So it’s really the language and getting them on board with something they’re comfortable with and easing them in, because you can’t force feed. You can’t force feed or it doesn’t work so you have to find the entry point. 

Billy: So can you elaborate a little bit, what would you discuss in your woo-woo at work? Give us the elevator pitch. 

Kristen: Well, it’s different for every company because it depends on if they want meditation, and I even do crystals at some companies, like this fall, I’m doing a huge conference of about 1,500 people down in Orlando and every single person is getting a little crystal energy power stone kit that helps with their communication, with their motivation, with their strategic thinking, with their visionary thinking skills, and so I’ll walk them through, like they’re totally on board with the hippie part of it and we’ll walk through all seven energy centers, how to use the crystals at work, when to use them to link up your teammates on projects. It’s pretty awesome and powerful when you get companies that are open that way.

Brian: Are the energies based on chakras pretty much? 

Kristen: Yep, but I would never say the word “chakra.”

Brian: Yeah, well, you couldn’t, yeah. Of course.

Billy: I actually want to dive into that at some point here. Why not say chakras then? 

Kristen: A lot of people see that as too spiritual or too flower power or too hippie or many people see it as anti-religion, you just have too much of a mixed audience in corporate America to say words that could be misconstrued as even like witchy or —

Brian: Magic, yeah, right. I get it. 

Kristen: Yep. 

Billy: I will tell you that, because we’ve joked about this before that I’m not on that end of things, so when you encounter people like me who are like, “Are you sure about all this?” what do you say to them? I imagine it’s not a matter of converting them to it. How do you approach that? 

Kristen: Well, I usually just approach it that, you know, you don’t have to hold a crystal, it’s all about your inner awareness and being aware of what you’re bringing to the moment so that when you show up to a meeting, you’re not carrying that conversation you just had in the hallway that pissed you off and letting that impact how everyone else in the meeting sees you. 

Brian: That sounds an awful lot like mindfulness. 

Kristen: Yep, totally. 

Billy: Everything that you’re talking about relates very much to what Tom Cody talks about in episode 10. Tom Cody, if you don’t remember, he talks about top 20 strategies and he really stresses that success is EQ times IQ and he would much rather have somebody with a high EQ than a high IQ because you can work with a person with a high EQ and you can train them to get them to do things and understand things and it’s interesting that you talked about how you would get resistance from your corporate leaders if you were using too much EQ language because it almost sounds like they were willing to fire somebody who maybe had a high EQ but a low IQ —

Brian: When you say EQ, are you talking about —

Billy: Emotional quotient.

Brian: Okay, just to make sure our listeners know.

Billy: It almost sounds like that they would fire somebody with a low IQ and a high EQ and keep on somebody with a high IQ who can’t really be trained, that sort of thing. So do you have those conversations or find that?

Kristen: Well, I could make a snarky comment about look at how people get promoted in corporate America. It ain’t based on their EQ usually.

Brian: That’s true. 

Kristen: But, yeah, I mean, it’s frustrating because there are many companies that are still so traditional, they’re so eight to five, which is okay if you’re giving people room within that eight to five to do what they need to do to become their best self, to unblock their best self, to show up as their best self, and that really does require allowing them to explore and experiment with what they need and many people have never done that. So you kind of have to expose them to it as well, especially, Brian, as a president of a company, what are some things you can just like throw out as like, “Hey, this would be fun if we did a little meditation yoga class all together,” and like make it not required but it’s just like, “Hey, this would be fun for us to do,” and you have to really expose people slowly, especially people that have not tried those things before.

Billy: So you had mentioned that when you were doing kind of your spy game work when you write that you could see people’s energy if you knew that they were even going to happy hour later and you wrote a book called The Happy Hour Effect so can you tell us about what is the happy hour effect?

Kristen: Yeah, so really early on in my grief journey after my husband died, 14, gosh, almost 15 years ago now, I couldn’t go to happy hour. I was in an industry where happy hour was the norm. Retail vendors, we were entertaining each other, we were entertaining our corporate office people coming from out of town, and our retail clients, of course. And after my husband died, my daughter was 10 months old so I wasn’t going to happy hour. I didn’t have time, wasn’t very happy, it just wasn’t something that was a priority. And then a couple years in, I was like, “I kind of feel like going to happy hour again,” and I knew it wasn’t because of the cocktails, because you can drink at home, another podcast episode to talk about, but I knew it wasn’t about the cocktails and my nerd brain, researcher brain was like, “Why am I missing happy hour then if it’s not about the alcohol?” So I started doing a bunch of nerdy research. I would do focus groups, surveys of hundreds of people, and I gathered all these nerdy spreadsheets and started looking at the data and found that it isn’t the alcohol why people enjoy happy hour, it’s because of these different elements that bring out parts of our body, mind, and spirit that make us feel like we’re at our best.

Billy: And so you also talk about power shots. That has nothing to do with the happy hour effect in terms of how many power shots make you feel good.

Kristen: Two power shots make me feel great, if it’s Blanco Tequila.

Billy: So what are power shots though in Kristen speak?

Kristen: Yeah, so if I’m on stage or I’m doing a training with a company, I have these things called power shots. They’re things that the group, either as a group or individually that you can do right now to make a difference, not that like, “Oh, I have this sheet that says I should go try this at home or I should go try this with my team.” Nope, you’re doing it now, like there are different — I’ll give you an example, like I’ll have people in the moment text someone right there, we’ll do a little five-minute exercise, they’ll text someone based on what we’re learning, one of the energy centers is communication, so we’ll do a little thing and then the person will message back and then we go around and we’re like, “Okay, what happened? How did that make you feel?” and they actually get to see and experience what that learning point did for them immediately. So that’s what a power shot is.

Billy: Is it somebody that they have been in contact routinely? Are they reaching out to someone that they don’t necessarily connect with? Or does it even matter?

Kristen: There’s a few different ones that I do based on the topic of the speech. So there’s one where I’m helping people connect with someone that maybe they’ve been disconnected from but that they like, not that they’ve had a fight or anything, they just haven’t talked to them in a while. So it’s like reach out. Not tomorrow, right now. And then they do it and they’re like, “Oh, my God, I feel so good and they were like so happy to hear from me.” So it’s those instant things. And I call a lot of that also, I talk about biohacking where you’re doing things that by taking an action that impacts you physically, it changes your emotional and mental state because of the neurotransmitters and things that your body starts to emit to change how you feel, so endorphins, oxytocin, things like that.

Billy: How does that then connect to, because you talked about like you like science, you’re a science nerd, so how does that sort of marry those two passions that you have with doing the speaking gigs but then talking about biology?

Kristen: Yeah. Well, usually I do all the nerdy research behind the scenes and then when I get on stage, I don’t do that. I don’t talk about it. I’ll tell them if you want to know the nerdy research, come find me later but I’m not up there like, “The Harvard Business Review says that there are…,” like that’s super boring.

Billy: See, I’m in the minority, I’d be sitting there eyes wide.

Kristen: Okay, what did Harvard say?

Billy: Okay, good. I like the science stuff. 

Kristen: Yeah, I do too. And some audiences are super open to it and I’ll always ask in all the pre interviews with companies before I speak, like, “Okay, what level of hippie do you want, zero to ten?” They’re like, “About a five or six.” “Okay, what level of statistics do you want?” “Two.” “What level of PowerPoint do you want? No PowerPoint, because I prefer no PowerPoint, the audience is my PowerPoint. You want no PowerPoint or do you,” we’ll dig into what their audience is and like, “Okay, we’ll do a little PowerPoint.” So you really customize.

Billy: Yeah, I was just going to say, I really like how you customize every single speaking engagement just by asking them, “Hey, how much of this do you want?” so that way they know what they’re getting from you.

Brian: But it sounds like that’s what you’ve learned through experience is to open up that palette to them so you can customize it a little better and fit their needs better so kudos to you. It sounds great.

Kristen: Yeah, because what I would do for a small company like yours, Brian, is way different than what I would do like for General Mills. You just really have to —

Brian: Absolutely, yeah.

Kristen: And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just you want to make sure that they get what’s relevant for them. 

Brian: Different requirements, yeah. 

Billy: What would be an example of a biohack that you would suggest to an audience or suggest to our listeners?

Kristen: I think a really good one, and it’s a simple one that people always hear and it’s discounted over and over is the breath. When you take a deep breath, instantly, your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate decreases, your brain, like if you’re in a heightened stress state, your brain will shoot out neurotransmitters that help clear out that fog so you can think more clearly and make better decisions. So, one single breath can do that for your body and people hear that and they don’t believe it, but if you start to build breath into your day, it changes the way that your body functions and then that impacts your mental and emotional state.

Brian: It really does. I’ve experienced that myself. It absolutely does.

Billy: So we’re actually going to take a breath right now and then when we come back, we will continue talking to Energy Master Kristen Brown about unblocking your best self. Thank you for listening to The Mindful Midlife Crisis. 

Thanks for listening to The Mindful Midlife Crisis. We will do our best to put out new content every Wednesday to help get you over the midweek hump. If you’d like to contact us or if you have suggestions about what you’d like us to discuss, feel free to email us at mindfulmidlifecrisis@gmail.com or follow us on Instagram at @mindful_midlife_crisis. Check out the show notes for links to the articles and resources we reference throughout the show. Oh, and don’t forget to show yourself some love every now and then too. And now, back to the show.

Billy: Welcome back to The Mindful Midlife Crisis. We are here with Kristen Brown talking about how to unblock our best selves and Brian just shared his biohack today because he is hyper focused. What did you do today?

Brian: I got an hour of yoga in on lunch, so I did a couple of sequences, just three different sequences that I do because I’m doing this core challenge so it’s just my daily deal.

Billy: Where do you go for your yoga?

Brian: I just went to the gym. It’s just down the street, it’s like two blocks away.

Billy: Oh, very nice. Good for you. Good for you. That sounds just like what Kristen was talking about, giving people an opportunity to reset somewhere along the day. It actually kind of reminds me of when I used to just go into my office at work and lie down and I would do a 10- or 15-minute mindful meditation and I always felt way more productive and I was more productive than had I just powered on through it. Like there were days when I would say, “I don’t have time to meditate,” and then I wouldn’t and I would be just worthless by the end of the day. But if I were to take that 10- or 15-minute meditation, I was way more productive and I actually had time to just kind of relax at the end of it all too. So, those are great ways to biohack. You had talked about those soft skills and a question that I was wondering is is there an underrated soft skill and is there an overrated soft skill? And I really liked your answer here.

Kristen: Well, I think underrated is energy mastery, which, I mean, sounds very self-indulgent to say that but over the years and all the research I’ve done and the education I’ve gotten and being in corporate, it is being aware of what you need to bring to the moment to be your best and what kinds of things can you do to help you get there. Before a meeting and you have to give a big presentation, you’re super nervous, that can really take a person down. Nerves can take a person down and not allow you to show up as your best. So do you need a little peppermint oil? Do you need to do a quick yoga move to activate your communication energy center? Do you need to open up your competence energy center? What is it that you need so that you can show up as your best to that meeting? And there’s hundreds of things that you can do but it’s that awareness of what you need in the moment that I think is really underrated because we get so stuck in the flow of life like, “What’s next? What’s next? What’s after work? What’s tomorrow? What’s this weekend? Oh, school’s coming here, what’s next?” that you forget to step back and say what you’re doing right now will impact if the things you want next will actually come to pass.

Billy: It’s interesting that you bring that up because I can tell if I am out of practice with my mindfulness, because then I will just slip back into that machine that just runs on automatic without pulling back and reexamining, like, okay, or reflecting on, okay, what is it that I need to do here or how am I feeling? Why am I so tired? Oh, let’s just take a break here and take an inventory on emotions, on your mental health, your physical health.

Brian: I want to talk to our listeners who maybe are a little skeptical about this kind of stuff. What I’m sitting here noticing is that we talk to multiple guests that have studied this stuff for a long time. Tom Cody comes to mind. Kristen, you’re obviously very well researched and everything. But the fact that you and even Tom and a few other books I’ve read reached the same conclusions really lends credibility in my mind to the stuff you’ve discovered, you know what I mean? I mean, you’ve had to go out and kind of manufacture this program on your own but the fact that you and Tom and a lot of other people are discovering that this stuff works, for those people out there that don’t think it does, just try it. What have you got to lose?

Kristen: Yeah, and that’s what I tell people is life isn’t a grand experiment. Don’t take it so seriously, and get stuck in your own ways and block yourself. That’s why I say let’s unblock your best self. And just because you try meditation doesn’t mean you have to do it forever if you don’t like it. Just try it.

Brian: Yeah, you’re not signing a contract here, people. 

Kristen: Exactly. 

Brian: And this isn’t the Columbia House. 

Kristen: Yeah. 

Brian: I’m going to date myself there.

Kristen: I mean, it is The Mindful Midlife Crisis.

Brian: You’re right.

Billy: Exactly, exactly. I feel like when we, because I actually talked to you when we were in the beginning stages like years ago, I said, “I kinda wanna do this thing and I don’t know exactly what it is but I wanna call it The Mindful Midlife Crisis,” And I remember you had said, “If you don’t do something with that title, I’m going to.”

Kristen: 100 percent, and I was going to do, like in my mind, I’m like, “I’m going to steal that from him if he doesn’t do anything,” and I would have gotten an okay from you but I believed in it so much way back then. I knew that it was going to be something good for you.

Billy: Oh, I’ve actually — I think I’m blushing now. I’m flattered a little bit here.

Brian: Wait a minute. Guys, maybe we’re approaching this wrong. Maybe we should do the Columbia House, maybe we should be like, “You subscribe to 12 sessions of mindfulness, you’re gonna do it.”

Kristen: And then suddenly, they’re billed like $400.

Brian: It could work. 

Billy: You could get 12 sessions for 99 cents apiece, shipping and handling $20.

Brian: And then we send you the $400 ones afterwards, right, exactly, yes.

Billy: Send you a new one every month times 12, which I’m sorry about that, you forgot to cancel. You forgot to cancel in time.

Brian: And you need to cancel 12 months in advance. 

Kristen: Yes.

Billy: So, I asked you what soft skill is most underrated and which one is most overrated?

Kristen: I don’t think any are because everyone is so different and needs different types of soft skills so I think they all have value, I think none should be discounted. Sometimes, you hear words that sound kind of overused, “communication,” that’s a soft skill that is so broad that it can feel like it’s overrated, but it’s not, it’s just digging into what part of communication is the most important for what you personally need.

Billy: So you’ve talked about unblocking energy, so can you dive deeper into that, like particularly when we are going through a difficult time, we’re feeling unfulfilled in our day-to-day lives, like what steps do you prescribe in your programs to unblock your best self?

Kristen: Yeah, well, it completely, of course, depends on what an individual is going through, but like, let’s say, you’ve gone through a breakup or a divorce or something like that and you’re heartbroken. When that happens, your relationship energy center is crushed. Your heart is crushed, you’re so sad, because something that you thought was going to be important to you has ended. So your relationship energy center really need, it’s either going to be blocked, closed off, and so that energy center then needs to be reopened so that you can be open not just to love again but, oftentimes, when you’re heartbroken by a romantic partner, it will shut you down and cause you to put walls up to other people in your life as well. Kids, co-workers, people that you meet in general. So figuring out, okay, well, what do we need to do to open up the relationship energy center? It often also will hit your confidence energy center, because if you think something was going to go somewhere and it doesn’t, it’s like, “What’s wrong with me? Was I not worthy of that person?” and your confidence, it’s in the toilet so then you have to figure out, okay, what do we do here for your confidence energy center, and there’s different yoga moves, there’s meditations, there’s affirmations, there’s essential oils, there’s crystals, there’s actual work that you can do emotionally to help reopen those energy channels and then, of course, depending on the situation, there’s other energy centers that could be impacted as well based on why a relationship maybe ended.

Brian: A thought occurred to me as you were saying that. I think, and I’m kind of stuck on this because we’re coming up against the hippie stuff now, I think people don’t realize that it’s not the crystals that hold the magic power. 

Kristen: No.

Brian: It’s your brain and that is merely a physical manifestation or a tool you’re using to get your brain to do what you want it to do.

Kristen: Yep, and that’s exactly what I tell people when — I write an article every month for the Brain Health Magazine on a crystal tied to whatever the magazine’s theme is that month and I always tell people, so I’ll do a live video for them oftentimes, it’s like the magic isn’t in this green rock. This green rock is the visual reminder of what you want to happen, what you intend to happen, what your goal is so that you can stay focused on it. It’s like a vision board. You do a vision board at the beginning of the year and the more you see the vision board, the more those opportunities come to you. I want to see white Camrys today. You’re going to see white Camrys all over the road. So it’s — the magic, you’re right, Brian, it’s in you. 

Brian: Yeah, absolutely. 

Billy: I read the book You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero and we’ve recommended it multiple times on here and she talks about energy in that book and like being kind of a skeptic of that and always thinking that is kind of hokey, the more I think about it, the more I think that we all do have an energy that we put off and we attract that energy. And I know that, years ago, when I was not in a good space, I knew what energy I was giving off and I knew what energy was coming back to me and I feel like, even with this podcast and I’ve talked about this before how I feel like creating this podcast has been a form of therapy for me, it has drawn in this new energy and I think it’s been summoned a lot of times by the people that we get to talk to.

Brian: Oh, absolutely. 

Billy: Like just having these conversations with people, especially when we get to have them in studio, there is an energy that is built up in the room and it’s empowering, it’s uplifting, it’s motivating. So if you’re, like Brian was saying, if you are feeling like, “This is too hokey for me, I don’t know,” I think I was so skeptical in that way and that’s what was blocking being my best self to kind of bring that back around.

Kristen: Well, and if there was a camera in this room, you can actually see people’s energy fields. If there was a camera in this room around all of us, you could see literal energy being emitted from all of us. Your heart cells have a different frequency than your brain cells than your fingernail cells, like they’re measurable by science. This isn’t like made up. Your body is energy. Every cell, every molecule, every atom is vibrating at a different frequency.

Brian: According to quantum mechanics, that is the case. 

Kristen: Yeah.

Billy: So a few years ago, you experienced what you had called a night of the dark soul. So, can you explain what you mean by that and how you pulled yourself out of that?

Kristen: Yeah, well, it was a culmination of — I was speaking a lot for really big companies for really big paychecks but it was starting to feel less authentic to what I wanted to talk about. I was having to use way too much corporate language when I knew I wanted to be talking about this hippie stuff. So I had this massive burnout happening workwise and I was like, “Why am I feeling this? I’m getting paid well. I’m getting clients,” and this was in 2019 and I just — something didn’t feel right. And then I had a heartbreak that hit me and a health thing with my daughter and it’s like all these things came together at once that it started to make me, even though I was very self-helpy and very hippie, it started to make me question my purpose. I mean, it was a midlife crisis. I’m 44 and — I mean, I’m 25. I don’t know why I’m on this show. I’m 44 so at the time, I was just 41 or 42 and it was a dark night of the soul that made me say, “Is this what I want? How do I want to move forward?” and it really opened up some new ways of being authentic to who I wanted to be as opposed to what people were paying me for. So it was a really hard transition and, admittedly, when I started talking more about some of this hippie stuff, my paycheck and my pay for the year went down. I mean — but then, as I started to shift it from the corporate speak to using energy centers and some of that stuff that was sort of a hybrid between hippie and corporate, it started to come back, it started to come back, and then COVID hit, and companies started to see that people were their best assets and those people needed that deeper support. So, the dark night of the soul was sort of the impetus to something that I feel so much momentum for now and like, now, there’s the marriage and the magic of what do I actually want to do and what are people willing to pay for.

Billy: It’s good to hear that someone who, (a), was successful and it sounds like you were doing something you really enjoyed but you went through this crisis where you just were feeling unfulfilled and I think it’s important for people to hear that even someone who has the knowledge and the experience goes through these things and needs to work through them. That’s an everyday situation. And from that came namaSync. Do you want to talk about namaSync?

Kristen: Sure, yeah. NamaSync is a passion, it started as a passion project. NamaSync, it’s an energy, I say studio but I don’t have like traditional yoga classes and stuff there yet because I have more of a vision that it’s going to be more of a corporate retreat center, if you will, where a team would send, “Here are 5 or 10 of our employees that are gonna come in for a half day of energy mastery work,” and we do fun stuff, we have some wine at the end of the day, but we also do some really deep reflective work for companies that are wanting to expose their teams and their people to that. So, yeah, could I do, because I’m a certified 500-hour yoga therapist and RYT yoga teacher but I don’t have a vision of like teaching in a yoga studio, it’s more to complement this other work that I do, so namaSync is the evolving arm that will be that.

Billy: And I like too that even though you’re not going to do yoga teaching, you’re using it as a compliment, because you see that, well, this is a component of this greater vision that I have and like Brian’s already said, hey, he went and did yoga for an hour today so we know that yoga is something that people do in order to reset so let me get that knowledge in order to be able to lead a session thoroughly and to lead it well with other people.

Brian: It’s another tool in the toolbox. 

Kristen: Exactly, exactly. I’m thinking about getting my PhD and I would really love to do my research on looking at how some of these, air quotes, “hippy modalities,” practices like yoga, meditation, how it measurably changes someone when they go back to their desk, like literally hooking people up to electrodes, measuring their blood pressure, heart rate.

Brian: That would be — and then you could cross reference that with their productivity too.

Kristen: Totally. 

Brian: Yeah.

Kristen: So then it becomes measurable. Like you said earlier, you can’t measure soft skills very well. I want to measure it.

Billy: Well, we were just talking about this yesterday, Brian, that you have seen increased productivity since you have let people work from home.

Brian: Absolutely. It was very interesting because this company was started in 1983 by a gentleman now who’s — he still owns the company but he’s retired and it was more traditional, as you were — yoga never would have gotten — working out of the office was strictly forbidden. Everybody reported every day at 8 a.m. and if you weren’t here ’til 5, there better be a darn good reason. When I took over the company in 2016, I kind of started switching out of that to work at home a little bit and toying with that idea and then the shutdown happened and, I mean, that changed everything, of course. That changed the entire paradigm. And it was a good way to just kind of force that on the culture and, sure enough, I saw, obviously, after the shutdown and all those effects were done being felt, we kept the, I’ll call it less rigid time structure each day, people will have time to, if they have a dentist appointment, go do it, it just doesn’t matter. What’s most important is that the customers are taken care of and that if you make a promise to a customer, that better not be — so we started focusing on that rather than, “Hey, you gotta be at your desk at 8 a.m.” All we focus on now is am I where my customer needs me, am I where my team needs me, and am I doing my best work, so it’s the traction —

Kristen: 100 percent. Yep, I love it.

Billy: So one thing that cracks me up about you, Kristen, is that you have this natural flair on stage and you’re very personable but you are also a fierce introvert. 

Kristen: Yes. 

Billy: So can you talk about how that coexists?

Kristen: Yeah, so if anyone sees me on stage, I’m high energy, high energy, and I’m in the crowd and I’m working the room and I have a lot of humor and a lot of storytelling, woven into the learning points, of course, but high energy, like there’s not a single person that would ever say, “Oh, that was boring.” Even if they didn’t enjoy the content, they’re never going to be bored. But I am a massive, massive introvert. And that doesn’t mean I’m antisocial or that I don’t know how to speak or that I don’t know how to interact with human beings. It just means that — and not even that I’m shy, it just means that I need the time to myself to recharge after I’ve interacted with big groups like that and like the night before a cocktail hour, I usually skip those, but on stage, I’m the one in control of how the communication is flowing. I’m the one that decides like, okay, am I going to go talk to that guy in the front row that looks like he wants to share something or am I being forced to talk to this guy to network that’s only talking about himself? So I’m the one in control when I’m on stage, which is super energizing for me.

Billy: Well, this conversation has been energizing and we want to thank you for your biohacks and your power shots and your unblocking of the energy in this room here today just with your very presence. You can find Kristen at www.kristenbrownpresents.com. You can access that in our show notes. You can follow Kristen on Instagram at @SpeakerKristen. Thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate it. 

Kristen: Thanks, guys. It’s been fun. 

Billy: So with that, for Kristen, for Brian, this is Billy, thank you for listening to The Mindful Midlife Crisis. May you feel happy, healthy, and loved. Take care, friends.