Ducks on the Pond
A podcast for rural women... by rural women. Hosted by Kirsten Diprose and Jackie Elliott, they seek expert advice and the stories of other rural women on issues such as succession planning, motherhood, starting a business...running for politics and much more!
Ducks on the Pond
Improving Your Focus and Wellbeing by Biohacking Your Nervous System - Rural Women Lead Collab Series
If you haven’t heard about ‘bio-hacking’ - it’s all about using our neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin and hormones to maximise our wellbeing. And you can do really simple things for a big pay off.
This is the beginning of a 3-part mini series on leadership: focusing on self, story and change. In this episode, focusing on ‘self’ speak to Jessica Fishburn, a women’s health physiotherapist and Director at Gen Health, in Hamilton, VIC.
Drawing on her expertise in pain science and neurobiology, she gives us a few tricks to help increase focus, productivity and overall wellbeing. Jess talks about ‘the flow state’ and how to work out what that is for you, plus what foods and simple exercises can give you a good injection from our natural chemicals and hormones.
Jess doesn’t believe in ‘taboo’ topics, so she gives some very frank and useful advice on how to reduce your stress levels and optimise your wellbeing. From a leadership perspective, this all comes from the idea that you need to look after yourself first to be a good leader.
This episode has been made in collaboration with Rural Women Lead - an initiative led by Leadership Great South Coast. It captures some of the insights shared at recent workshops, funded by a community projects grant, from Elders.
Would you like to collaborate with us? Or sponsor a full season? Get in touch! kirsten@ruralpodcastingco.com
This is a Rural Podcasting Co production
Over the last 75 years, our nervous systems have adaptively changed and we're producing a lot more cortisol and adrenaline than we really need in just those fight and flight responses.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to Ducks on the Pond brought to you by the Rural Podcasting Co. My name is Kirsten Diprose and this is the the first of a three-part miniseries that I'm bringing you in collaboration with Rural Women, lead and Leadership Great South Coast.
Speaker 2:And I'm sitting outside because I'm on the road and I'm actually in well near Darwin, and it's really hot and I can't record this inside because I don't have any air con, but isn't that kind of nice. This three-part series is really about getting you into the best leadership mindset, and in this episode we start with self, focusing on how we can optimize our well-being. Our next episode is about story from understanding your own story, from sharing a story, shaping your own brand and communicating with authenticity. And the third episode focuses on change. So how to create change for those wicked problems that are systemic and require that longer term leadership lens. And this entire series is really built on the premise that we, as rural women, are allowed to take the time to look after ourselves, to know what we value, to then set us up for leadership in areas that really matter to us. Rural Women Lead is a group of proactive women in the southwest of Victoria, but the message is for any rural woman, or any woman really. They've just finished running a series of workshops which was sponsored by the Elders Community Giving Project, and I'm so excited to have been able to sit down with a few of their expert speakers for this series. You're going to love them.
Speaker 2:So first up is Jessica Fishburne. She is a women's health and pelvic floor physiotherapist. She runs her own physio practice with a few others and it's called Gen Health in Hamilton, and she was actually on this podcast about a year or so ago talking about periods and pelvic health, and it was a really funny conversation. Jess doesn't believe in taboos and you'll definitely hear that today. You can tell she's a woman who spends all day talking about the female anatomy, but in this episode she's actually drawing on her other key area of expertise, which is pain science and neurobiology. She calls it biohacking your nervous system and gives us some really simple things to do that can optimize our well-being, reduce pain and stress and increase your focus and productivity when you need. It Sounds almost too good to be true, but it's not. So here's Jess.
Speaker 1:Well-being can be such a wishy-washy subject and it can be a little bit airy-fairy or it can be a bit woo for some people. But I think as a clinician, as a physio and a pelvic floor physio or a pain physio, I have now found myself in this position where I'm doing lots of education, community education, particularly with women, and layering in the hormonal aspect to it as well, around actually what we need to do to optimize our well-being and how we can biohack that nervous system to just improve our quality of life.
Speaker 2:Great, I love this term biohack. What does it mean?
Speaker 1:Basically it's meaning great question. Biohack means using our natural processes, or using processes that our body can naturally do to optimize itself. So we can produce. We produce neurotransmitters, we produce hormones, and these are chemical messengers that happen in our system, in our endocrine system, in our nervous system, and if we can actively produce them, we're going to get much better wellbeing. And so these hormones are things like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins.
Speaker 1:The first two are neurotransmitters, so dopamine and serotonin and neurotransmitters and endorphins and oxytocin are hormones, and if we can actually produce those on a really regular basis and even produce them all four of them at the same time, it's going to counteract the production of cortisol and adrenaline. So if I bring it back a little bit to talk about the nervous system, so we actually have three nervous systems in our human body, which is utterly fascinating. So the first one is the central nervous system We've got our brainstem and our peripheral nerves. The second one is our autonomic nervous system and the third one, kirsten, I'm going to throw to you Do you know where your third nervous system is? No idea, it's in your gut and it's called your enteric nervous system.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's just the women's intuition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when you gut and it's called your enteric nervous system, oh, it's just the women's intuition. Yeah, when you have a gut feeling like you genuinely have nervous system energy, you've got nerve cells communicating to make the gut work. And the enteric nervous system is fascinating, but I'm not going to talk on that one today. So the two nervous systems that we're looking at is very much the central nervous system and our autonomic nervous system. So our autonomic nervous system is what keeps us safe, it's what keeps us alive, it's what controls our heart rate, it is what controls our digestion, it's what controls our creative thinking. And if we talk about our autonomic nervous system, it's divided into two. It's divided into our parasympathetic and our sympathetic. Now that's starting to get a little bit more neurosciency. But if you haven't heard those terms, you've probably heard the terms fight and flight and rest and digest.
Speaker 1:At any given time, our body is trying to make a decision as to whether it needs to be in fight or flight, or rest and digest.
Speaker 1:And, for example, for context, I'm sitting in the clinic at the moment and if someone came through the door and they had an ax and they were coming at me, my autonomic nervous system would go into fight and flight and what that would do is I would need an increase in cortisol and adrenaline produced by the adrenal glands, very important hormones in this case.
Speaker 1:The adrenaline and cortisol will increase my respiratory rate. It will increase my respiratory rate, it will increase my heart rate, so I'm getting as much oxygen into my mouth and oxygen pumped around my body so that I can either fight or flight and run away, and in my case, I would fight. I'm not much of a fighter to safety, and so cortisol and adrenaline are very important there. However, we know that over the last 75 years, our nervous systems have adaptively changed and we're producing a lot more cortisol and adrenaline than we really need in just those fight and flight responses. We talk about adrenaline being really good. You get a pump of adrenaline when you're in labor or you do something great, and you get a pump of adrenaline.
Speaker 2:We've all had experience of something happens and you really have to, whether a car's pulled out in front of you or something, and then suddenly everything goes in slow-mo and you react and you're like, wow, I didn't know my brain could function like that. It's superhuman.
Speaker 1:And so I definitely don't want to demonize cortisol and adrenaline because they are useful, they're needed, but on the flip side, if we've got too much of them, they actually change our other processes in our body. They change the way that our hormones are synthesized in our reproductive system, they change how our immune cells work, they change across all systems, they increase our pain. They it just basically has this big flow and effect. And so if we, a lot of the time, we can't change the amount of stress in our life For example, southwest at the moment, drought. We are in such a challenging time, covid we couldn't change what was happening in the world Obviously the state of the world in terms of war and genocide. There is so much stress. We can't, as individuals, change the amount of cortisol and adrenaline. There are things that I do encourage people to change. So if you're in a stressful job and there's an option to change, I think there's those aspects of being able to change. However, what we can do again I'm going to use the word biohack is produce those hormones and those neurotransmitters that are on the flip side of the coin, that are in the rest and digest phase, that can then really optimize our processes, ways that we can produce dopamine. There's a number of different things and I might send you a little incographic that you can add on to Instagram or put in the show notes with this, because I think it's really useful for people to visualize. But dopamine is the success chemical. So we get a hit of dopamine when we complete a task. We get a hit of dopamine when we eat protein rich foods. We get a hit of dopamine when you get a full night's sleep foods. We get a hit of dopamine when you get a full night's sleep. And now, a lot of the time, I'm working with women that are mums and they're in the busiest state of their life in terms of not getting sleep, and that can be really hard to hear. But if we're eating protein-rich foods instead of trying to focus on getting eight to 10 hours of sleep, you can't control it. When you've got a baby, you're not, and I sit here and say that and I did not get a good night's sleep last night because of my delightful two children, and yeah, so there's that way. I will often say looking at really optimizing our protein, and it's very trendy at the moment to be focusing on protein, and I think some of these things are trendy for a reason. There is so much research behind them that it's actually now getting traction in the media, which is fantastic. So that's dopamine.
Speaker 1:Serotonin is the mood stabilizer, and serotonin. We get serotonin, or we can produce serotonin when we're doing diaphragmatic breathing, when we are doing meditation, anytime that we are activating our vagus nerve. Again, a little bit more neuroanatomy. Our vagus nerve is one of our 12 cranial nerves. It is cranial nerve 10. And when I was at uni back in 2010, we learned the anatomy that the vagus nerve communicated from brain brainstem down, but we now know that it's actually 80 to 90% communication up. So it comes from the gut, the diaphragm, the larynx and the pharynx, skin on the chest and skin on the face up to the brain.
Speaker 1:So if we can do things to help improve vagus nerve tone, that can also produce serotonin. One of the most popular things to improve vagus nerve tone at the moment is cold water exposure. Now, when you're saying that you need to go and sit in an ice bath for three minutes to improve your vagus nerve tone, we can actually just start by splashing cold water onto those areas that I mentioned. So the abdomen, the diaphragm, which is that big muscle that sits at the base of your lungs, your chest, your neck and your face. I often will encourage my patients to stand in the have their shower normally and then for the last 30 seconds, turn the hot tap off to as cold as they can comfortably tolerate, to look warm, and then for the last five seconds, stand in as much cold water as they can or splash cold water on their face, and then we can build up and I will tell you it's quite addictive.
Speaker 2:Really, because I'm camping right now and I've had a few showers where that haven't been ideal, some cold sort of showers, and I've not found it calming at all.
Speaker 1:Not calming in the moment. It is not calming in the moment but it's calming to the nervous system overall. So that is a really good point to bring up. I often say that you can yell I hate you, jess Fishburburne three times in five seconds, vocalise at the same point. And interestingly, a little bit of a side story last year at Sheepvention, which is for the listeners that are not in the southwest of Victoria. Sheepvention is one of our big the rural expo show Field day, a couple of field days in our region, and I was speaking to a big group of people at Sheepvention and I used that example and out of the blue this person literally said is that why my wife yells your name in the shower, which was just priceless? So that is serotonin.
Speaker 1:You do also get serotonin by exercising in a green space or a blue space. So what I mean by that is not running on the treadmill in a gym. Any exercise is better than no exercise. But if you can actually go for a walk or a run in a green space, so in the paddock around a park, or a blue space near a body of water so a river, a stream, a dry lake bed you're going to get more serotonin produced as well. So they're the two neurotransmitters. And then, if we come under that, the hormones that I talked about is oxytocin and endorphins. So oxytocin is the love hormone and endorphins are the happy hormones. Now we can produce them in isolation, but you can produce them really nicely together. And so listening to music, singing to music and moving your body to music that you like will naturally produce oxytocin and endorphins. I often challenge people to identify their most stressful time of day, and if they've got young kids or trying to navigate, getting out the door or at the evening meal times, actually putting music on that you enjoy, listening to that, you can sing to, that will actually naturally produce oxytocin and endorphins. And doing it for a good 15, 20 minutes, having a bit of a dance party with the kids moving the body, will actually produce those lovely hormones as well.
Speaker 1:We get oxytocin when we do something for someone else without any acknowledgement or idea of reward. Again, from a parenting perspective, I often have a lot of people say to me I always do nice things for my kids and they never say thank you. So it's not parenting, it's that paying it forward, doing something kind for someone else, without them even recognizing that it was you. Now, that doesn't have to be buying a coffee for someone, it doesn't have to be financial, but it can be thinking about how your action can impact someone else.
Speaker 1:The other way that you can get oxytocin is giving someone a long, extended hug, so hugging them for 20 to 30 seconds and not explaining why. The person will stiffen and be like okay, this is awkward and not a COVID safe or a flu safe activity. However, you'll produce oxytocin in yourself and in the person that you're hugging. And then, if we think about endorphins, are those happy hormones that we get when we exercise. We get endorphins when we have an orgasm. You don't need a partner to have an orgasm. That's something that I also really like to push.
Speaker 2:You get endorphins from eating dark chocolate small amounts of dark chocolate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I use the dark chocolate one probably too much. I'm unfortunately addicted to milk chocolate and that's not good for oxytocin.
Speaker 2:Oh really.
Speaker 1:It's a lot higher in sugar and it's not producing it. But also having a really good laugh and watching a series that makes you laugh, or visiting a comedian or doing something that makes you laugh and laugh out loud, you're going to produce endorphins that way as well, and then I remember and this would have been.
Speaker 2:I was a young kid, so let's say about 35 years ago my stepfather was recovering from a triple bypass and he was told to watch funny videos. So he watched a lot of Fawlty Towers and we all did, and it was part of his recovery. So this was a long time ago. The advice was rest and eat well and sleep and all of those things, but watch funny videos.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I don't know whether you've heard of laughter yoga.
Speaker 1:Like it is, laughter is simply, it's medicine.
Speaker 1:And in our current world and in our current busyness of our to-do lists and of meeting all of the requirements and all of the roles, of all of the occupations that we wear and I say that in terms of occupations of rural women we are nurses, we are nurses on farm, not actually qualified nurses, or we are board members.
Speaker 1:We are employed, we're employed on the farm, we're employed off farm. We're wearing so many roles your emotional support for your friends, your emotional support for your children, your emotional support for your friends, your emotional support for your children, your emotional support for your partner and we have stepped away from all of those things that we would naturally do as kids and that we would naturally do as when we were teenagers. So that leads me into my next step of biohacking. Your nervous system is that if we can produce all four of those neurotransmitters or hormones at the exact same time, we can access the endogenous pathways in our brain which mean that we can produce morphine 14 times stronger than can be administered in ED, and so we actually get these amazing pain relieving chemicals and pathways activated.
Speaker 1:Wow, I did not know that it's fascinating, and so this is where my pain sort of brain comes into it, and I liken fatigue, exhaustion, pain all together, because these things, these symptoms, can have big impacts. So if we can activate all four of them, it's when we enter flow state, and flow state is a sense of where you do something and you lose time. You do it and four hours go past and you think, oh my gosh, I was meant to pick up the kids or I was meant to put this in the oven for dinner. Flow state there is eight benefits of flow state, and I'm actually going to read them because, because so flow state was coined by a neuroscience researcher, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who actually only died in 2001. So he was Hungarian, which is you can look up his work. It's incredible. And so it's a concept, it's a state, a concept of state, and there that flow is a state of optimal experience, and that there is eight key components to it, and I'll explain what these are if they don't make sense. So there is an even balance between challenge and skillset. Number two there's clear goals and unambiguous feedback, and so the feel good feelings after flow state you actually get for about 28 days, whereas if you get feel good feelings after just isolating ox, you actually get for about 28 days, whereas if you get feel good feelings after just isolating oxytocin or endorphins, they usually go within 24 hours.
Speaker 1:Action and awareness merge. We have complete concentration on the task at hand, there is a sense of control, a loss of self-consciousness, time gets distorted and the experience is intrinsically rewarding. So flow state is something that we actually need to orchestrate and put into our day or put into our week, and it's often really hard to identify what that is for an individual, particularly in rural women and this is what I did in the Rural Women Lead Workshop and workshops is that finding what your flow is and reconnecting with that so that we can put it into our week, get the wellbeing benefit of it, so that you've got more time, more clarity, more sense of achievement, more purpose as well. So generally, flow state is something that is it's where you lose time, it's where your skill set you're not too bad at it, but you haven't mastered it. For example, I often encourage people to think about what they did as a teenager as hobbies For me flow state.
Speaker 1:I go into flow state when I present. So if I'm presenting on stage, I really I can lose time. I have to time check all the time, I have to have time keepers because I really get benefit and enjoy presenting and I haven't mastered that. I think that I'm relatively good at presenting, but I haven't mastered it.
Speaker 2:I think you're pretty good. I'm hanging on every word. I'm in flow state now just listening to you.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and learning can be a flow state as well. Thank you, kirsten, that's very kind. I also go into flow state when I bushwalk. I'm addicted to bushwalking.
Speaker 2:Me too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I know that if I am, I can lose my time in the Grampians for hours on end and again, I'm slightly challenged, but I'm reaping the benefits as I'm doing it. And another way that I found flow state was actually doing an adult dance class. So as a teenager I used to. I was a dancer and postnatally there was this dance class that I went to and as soon as I connected with the movement and it was outside my skill set, it was like grunge hip hop I don't know what you'd actually call it street dancing and I just actually felt in so much state and so much, such a positive state of wellbeing and even my husband could identify. He's like you're just a different person for the whole week after I'd come home from dance.
Speaker 1:I don't get to do dance workshops all the time. I don't get to bushwalk all the time. I don't get to do my public speaking all the time. However, what I do prioritize is if I get those opportunities, I take them or I make sure that I prioritize creating those opportunities. So, kirsten, what would you identify could be a flow state for you?
Speaker 2:Oh, I think we must be quite similar personality wise, because all of what you just said. So I love to dance. I danced throughout my teenage years and, yeah, anytime I dance I'm very happy. And we've done locally. We've had a few like line dance days where we learn the line dance and then do it and just have fun.
Speaker 2:You know bushwalking definitely, and I'm camping at the moment and it's great for lots of bushwalks. I've done Uluru, we can walk around that Flinders Ranges, so I've been on some epic kind of bucket list type bushwalks of late, which is great. But if I can't do that, because that often requires a bit of organisation, just going for a walk outside is big for me Because I've never enjoyed going to the gym and I just can never make myself do it to the gym and I just can never make myself do it. And the other thing is for me is writing or scripting a podcast. I very much, very much get into it, but I really don't like to be interrupted because I could just stay in that state for hours and hours.
Speaker 2:And the biggest challenge for me is because I've got children. I just often don't have long bits of time to get lost in anything and I miss that, like I can go for a walk for 30 minutes and that's great, or an hour even, but when I want to do a really complicated edit on a podcast or write a really researched, interesting article, I want that time and I don't get it. I still achieve it and I get the hit from getting the task done. But if I don't have the time, I don't get it.
Speaker 1:I still achieve it and I get the hit from getting the task done, but if I don't have the time, I don't get the full flow state. Yes, absolutely, and that's where I think that leads really nicely into. My next point is that we actually need to prioritize some of these things in the diary, as if it's an appointment with a mental health practitioner or an appointment with your accountant, and hold that weight in the diary for it, because the benefits that you're going to get after entering flow state is actually going to improve your quality of life. I'm going to read the five main benefits out. So you get heavy concentration, which equals increased productivity. You get a sense of clarity and reduce mental load due to less need for decision-making.
Speaker 1:Lack of obstacles, including reduced stress, pain and fear, and it plays an integral role in creating a meaningful life, using virtues and strengths for something that's much larger than us. And then, finally, happiness. You actually just feel bloody good for, on average, 28 days, and so if we can prioritize, for example, putting some time in the calendar to actually research, if you can spend, put that three hours in the calendar, bookend it as a non-negotiable the rest of your week is actually going to flow better. You're going to have an ease of making those decisions. It's going to have an ease of making those decisions. It's going to have an ease of your resilience to adapt to change as well.
Speaker 1:And so that's where I really challenge people to think outside the square and outside the box of what flow state might be and really start to put it in as a non-negotiable in the diary for your mental wellbeing. I know at the moment in the diary for your mental wellbeing, I know at the moment resources are really stretched across Australia, particularly financial resources, and while we've talked about doing dance classes and line dancing and jumping on mountains, that's not always accessible but things I encourage you to think outside the box of what could be flow state, because it could be learning a language, it could be learning to crochet, it could be learning guitar or learning a musical instrument or something where you enjoy doing it. But it is just outside that skill set and while I don't suggest you spend three hours one week trying to learn the guitar, if you spend 30 minutes, you will still actually then start to build those foundations and the building blocks to be able to take it to that next level.
Speaker 2:I really like the idea of thinking about what you were good at or what you enjoyed doing when you're a teenager which is and when we did hobbies, and it's sad that we've moved so far away from realising that these are integral parts of our lives. I know for me, I really enjoyed school because I think it was like a blueprint for life. Like we got a mixture of things. I was surrounded by friends and community and I know some people had horrible experiences at school, but honestly, that structure and then when that was removed and my life all became about achieving whether that was achieving a university degree, getting the job, doing whatever it lost some joy along the way.
Speaker 1:It did, and that's so true for everyone, regardless of whether it's actually achieving in an academic sense or achieving on societal pressures of what is put on us that we should get married and have 2.4 children, or that we should get the next promotion, or that we should be buying a house, or that we should be buying a boat or all of these things.
Speaker 1:We've forgotten what is play, and then the impact of that is actually our nervous systems are really hardwired to be in fight and flight and, yeah, the more that we can actually do and relate it back. I also encourage people to think of something that they've looked at someone else doing and going. I just really want to learn to do that, whether they had the opportunity as a teenager or not. But it's so true. We have lost the ability to actually have hobbies and do something for ourselves, and here I am giving you permission, and your autonomic nervous system and your central nervous system will benefit from it, and those people around you will benefit from it as well your workmates, your family members, your pets everyone will benefit from you being in a better mental state.
Speaker 2:I always think it's funny when we look back at different societies or we look at different cultures, who have often been doing this stuff innately, or meditation, and that meditation could be as part of religion or it could be just a cultural practice. There are a lot of these things that different societies have always done, like we've always understood on some level, and then western societies just become this hyper-focused and I think that kind of economic mindset that we've lost all of the other parts of life or we don't value them as much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and it's just as important, if not more important.
Speaker 2:If you can remind us, because there's a lot in this podcast which is great. If you need to go back and listen to a bit, do it. I love now that podcasts if you're listening on, like Apple, you can see the text, so you can go back to something if you found it really important. So I recommend doing that. But I wanted to recap all of that benefit the highest amount of good hormones in once. Is it the flow state?
Speaker 1:So if we now have given all of the information, if we can primarily focus on hitting flow state as number one, so doing something once or twice a week that is going to put you into a flow state, so that hobby type thing where you lose concentration, where your skillset is there but not quite there to be mastering it and you really enjoy it. If we can prioritize that, you don't need to do the others. However, if you can't find that or you're working on that, what I would suggest is trying to hit something in all four of those boxes of serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins. So if we strip it back to two options for each. So if we go dopamine, so if we strip it back to two options for each. So if we go dopamine, trying to tick things off our list or getting a full night's sleep or eating protein-rich foods sorry, that's three For serotonin, I would say doing some diaphragmatic breathing and breathing right into the base of our lungs rather than just shallow breathing at the top and cold water, exposure to face, chest and stomach, and then coupling the oxytocin and endorphins together. Singing, dancing and moving your body to music on a daily basis. Now, that doesn't need to be a dance class. That can just literally be a Yui boom in the kitchen during the stressful part of the day, trying to get everyone out the door or getting everyone ready for bed and cooking dinner, and then finally doing something kind for someone else.
Speaker 1:Thinking about a bigger purpose rather than just intrinsically thinking about the next thing that you've got to do on your to-do list have an orgasm. As a pelvic floor physio, I'm telling everyone to have an orgasm and that you don't need a partner to have an orgasm. I'd really do want to normalize masturbation, because we have been raised to think that masturbation is disgusting and that it is you know we shouldn't be doing it Immoral, when in actual fact, I liken it to hopping before running. As a physio, if I'm getting you back to running after you've had a calf injury, we need to be able to hop before we can run. It's the same thing with masturbation we need to be able to know what we like before we can have partnered sex. So, having an orgasm and eat some dark chocolate and laugh.
Speaker 2:Great. And the exercise is not workout hard cardio for 40 minutes and then lift some serious weights. It's doable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so I use this in my education sessions. When I do leadership education or well-being education, I get on a population level if I'm doing it in a group of 25 women or 50 or 100 women, and or I do this one-on-one with patients, so it might be with women's health patients or it might be with persistent pain patients, and so that may be men and women, and a lot of the time I'll be sending them home with their homework and it's eat more yogurt, play the guitar, watch something funny, and they're like what? This is my actual homework, yes, and it's going to be more beneficial than the three sets of 10 repetitions of the calf raises that we were prescribing you.
Speaker 2:Jess, what's next for you when you're looking forward to this year? What are you looking forward to? I think?
Speaker 1:my. I've got two young children, two businesses, a husband. I sit into the over-committing and trying not to over over commit balance all the time. So I'm just actually really working on finding my flow state and what that looks like with children. And what that does look like is I started aerial hope because it was an on option and I did a trial and so now I'm doing some acrobatics and, yeah, I've got a few more speaking gigs lined up for the year, which is nice, and just generally managing my patient load as well.
Speaker 2:I love the frankness that not even the expert has got it mastered and has to constantly remind herself that it's important.
Speaker 1:Absolutely and to be fully transparent, I actually catch up every three months with two friends that are not in the health space at all and we keep each other accountable to this, and it's one of the best things that we do when we're catching up on Sunday for three hours to look at what the next three months are and what flow state looks like and what wellbeing looks like, what mental boundaries look like, because while I am the expert in the area, it doesn't mean that it's easy for me either. So I want to extend that compassion to everyone that when you're leading into this and when you're actually doing it, it's okay for things to get busy. Just make sure you set some timers to come back to it, and that's it for this episode of Ducks on the Pond.
Speaker 2:Thank you to Jess Fishburne. And that's it for this episode of Ducks on the Pond. Thank you to Jess Fishburne, physiotherapist at GenHealth, who is part of the Rural Women Lead Project, and thank you for listening. In the next episode, we focus on story, so how to share your story, build your personal brand and communicate in a really authentic way. A big thank you to Rural Women Lead and Leadership Great South Coast for collaborating with us here at Ducks on the Pond, and also to Elders for sponsoring the overall workshop series. If you'd like to collaborate with us, then please get in touch. This is a Rural Podcasting co production. Thank you for listening and I'll catch you again very soon.
