The Heallist Podcast
Heallist is on a mission to empower holistic healers, one story at a time. Join founder and serial entrepreneur Yuli Ziv as she connects with inspiring voices in alternative healing who’ve achieved true abundance, while also providing practical insights into building a conscious business. Whether you're deep into business expansion or looking to take your healing practice online, tune in every other week for new episodes and insights and visit Heallist.com to explore our tools.
The Heallist Podcast
Avoiding burnout among holistic practitioners with Lissy Alden
Join us for an invigorating conversation with Lissy Alden, the visionary behind MYNDY, as we unravel the mysteries of burnout among holistic practitioners. This episode promises to equip you with the knowledge to build mental fitness and foster resilience in your healing practice. Lucy brings her wealth of experience to the table, highlighting the unique challenges faced by healers who are constantly pouring their energy into others, often at the expense of their own well-being. Together, we explore practical strategies designed to help you maintain a sustainable practice, emphasizing mental fitness as a proactive approach akin to physical exercise.
Discover how to recognize the signs of burnout before they spiral out of control. We'll introduce you to the "Stop, Slow, and Go" framework, a groundbreaking approach to managing mental fatigue. Learn how rest can be a powerful tool for rejuvenation, how to cross-train your brain with new thoughts and feelings, and why celebrating your progress is vital for motivation. Don’t let the demands of your practice overshadow your own need for care; instead, embrace self-recognition and positive reinforcement as you navigate the complex terrain of mental health.
Check out Heallist.com for digital tools created just for holistic healers.
Welcome to the Healist Podcast, where we inspire and guide healers through business expansion. We give voice to incredibly abundant healers to share their stories. We dive into the quantum field to unlock the energies of conscious creation. We also develop digital tools to help you grow, which you can find on healistcom. I'm your host, Yuli, and I'm grateful you chose to join this space. Now let's go deep.
Yuli:Hello, my dear friends, and welcome to another amazing episode of the Healist Podcast. We are talking today about a big topic of how to avoid burnout among holistic practitioners, and we have amazing guests to share some really, really great insights with us. So we're joined today by Lucy Alden she's a founder of Mindy to explore today how holistic practitioners can build mental fitness and avoid burnout. With her practical, research-backed approach, a background working with organizations like MIT and Google, lissy will share simple strategies to help you stay resilient, focused and thriving in your practice. So good to have you with us. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having me, yoli, it's such a pleasure.
Yuli:So I like to set intention for each episode and you're welcome to do the same, and really my intention for this one is, you know, something that we're seeing in our platform and through my work with practitioners we do see quite a lot of burnout in this space and we do see people that just give up, right, and they just decide this is too much for them.
Yuli:They decide to have maybe more traditional careers and, just you know, maybe continue healing practices as a kind of a side practice with friends and family, but they really it takes a toll on them all the demands of this profession, right, being in service and being responsible for healing others and constantly giving, giving, giving. So my intention for today is really to inspire people and give them some really great practical tools and really kind of quick hacks Like I would love hacks in a tech space right, what can we give people to just kind of inspire more of a sustainable practice and how to really prioritize their own mental fitness, which is a topic you're an expert on and I would love to dig deeper into. But this is my very long intention.
Lissy :Well, I'm going to mirror that same intention. It's part of why I ended up building the company and doing the work that I do is that there's so much great stuff out there on the market to help us work on our mind, our body, our soul, and we just don't have enough time and money to do it all, and so my job today, but also every day, is to help bring this to you in a way that feels actually doable as a human and also as a healer who spends a lot of their time on other people.
Yuli:Amazing and I love the some of the definition that you told me right before we hopped on the on this talk, that you, that who you define as a healer or who you work with usually.
Lissy :Yeah, so we always like to say that we work with people who spend their lives helping others. So maybe that's somebody who defines themselves as a true healer, maybe that's somebody who defined themselves as a parent or a manager, but they spend most of their lives in such a beautiful way thinking of and dedicating their time and effort and energy to other people, but have very little time left for themselves. And so this is where our work and our heart kind of really comes in, and it's why I do what I do. Grew up always volunteering and I was a peer counselor and did a lot of this work and know firsthand that giving feels really good and it's like the coolest job in the whole world until you've got nothing left, like the giving tree. And so my job is to figure out how to do that in a sustainable way, and that's what I practice now at my company and with our products.
Yuli:And that's first of all. It's incredible that you built a company around this idea of helping servers right People who serve others and it's such an incredible mission, and I would love to learn more about how your company works. But before we dive into that, I would love to maybe define a little better what mental fitness actually means, because I feel like your company works, but before we dive into that, I would love to maybe define a little better what mental fitness actually means, because I feel like it's one of those words that has been recently introduced into our language and still a lot of people might get confused about it or curious about it.
Lissy :Yeah. So we define mental fitness at Mindy as the proactive practice of doing exercises that help build focused, boost mood and performance in your mind. So, in the same way, physical fitness is about these regular, ongoing behaviors that build strength in your body. We really are here to build strength, flexibility and endurance in your brain, and there are a whole lot of ways to do this, which we'll absolutely be getting into. But I think when most people hear the word mental fitness, they automatically go to maybe one or two buckets of those solutions like a mindfulness solution, meditation or even yoga, but there's actually hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ways to practice mental fitness. Many of you are probably doing some of this without even knowing it, and so our job was to then take that down a level and build a framework to help people understand what we like to think of as the food pyramid for your brain. It's what are all the things you can do in a really clear visual. That's something I'm sure, again, we'll be chatting a bit about.
Yuli:Amazing. So what are the sound essentials of this food pyramid?
Lissy :Yeah. So we like to say that there's two parts to the practice of mental fitness. We have a patent pending model. That's basically. Again, it's meant to be quite simple.
Lissy :So we've got daily mind movements that your brain needs every day to feel good, and there's three of those, and this is what we'll get into in just a second. These are mental fitness 101. These are the basics. We need them every day. And then you've got six mental muscles that you can activate whenever you want to achieve a goal or do something particularly challenging. Those mental muscles are what we call heart core focus. Heart confidence, optimism, resilience, energy and focus.
Lissy :So let's get into the three mind movements that your brain needs every day. You can think about these as stop, slow and go like a stoplight red, yellow, green if you're visual, like I am and these are the three things your brain needs every day to keep going on a regular basis and to sustain itself over time. So you can kind of think about our brains like a car. The first thing it needs to do is it needs to stop. If a car never stops, you can't gas up and you can't recover, and so we say stop is the practice of resting and building awareness in your mind.
Lissy :Now this stop practice can look as formal as mindfulness and meditation sitting on a pillow, maybe with a guided meditation but what we're a lot more interested in at Mindy are these informal moments of stop, which are really about doing things like taking five minutes to just write free form on a piece of paper whatever comes to mind, or going to the toilet without your phone, or taking a walk without your headphones in.
Lissy :For most of us, we spend our leisure time double screening, so in front of the television with our cell phones, and so we really are suffering from our sorry our sleep is suffering as a result of that, because our brains are trying to go a million miles a minute and then hit stop, and so we need to train our brain how to rest throughout the day. So for practitioners who are working all day back to back in these healing sessions with all of their energy going out, they need time to actually allow energy to come back in and their brain to remake these connections and recover. Your stop is the way to do that. So that's our first mind movement.
Yuli:Any questions there? Amazing. No, I'm thinking already. I'm trying to go through my day and see how many stop signs I have in that Exactly Super important.
Lissy :So our next mental movement is a fun one. It's called slow. It's the practice of expanding your perspective, or what we call cross-training your brain. So in this case, if you're a car and you need to turn a corner, you need to slow down. And, at Mindy, what we talk about is this idea that our brains think the same thing almost every day day to day. We also feel the same feelings on a regular basis as well, and if we don't interrupt those thoughts or feelings, then we tend to live the same existence over and over again. So if you love your mindset, we always like to say you may not need to practice mental fitness.
Lissy :Maybe you're already accidentally doing this, but slow is the practice of creating new thought and behavioral patterns, and you can do this through things like cognitive behavioral therapy, by journaling, a prompt to help you think about a situation in a new way. You can think about this through the practice of creativity. Instead of drawing or writing your thoughts, how about you paint them? You can do this through visualization, so picturing things in your mind's eye. Your brain doesn't know the difference between real and fake, and so it can be a really powerful way to get your body and mind in motion and aligned. Or you can do things like we always like to say.
Lissy :You can do things like a new type of breath work or movement exercise dance being one of my favorites whenever I'm kind of stuck in a thought pattern, so slow is the practice again of expanding your perspective. There's a lot of ways to do this and it doesn't take a lot. We do this with business. Often we're looking at our competitors, we're looking at the market, we're trying to understand different ways to run our business. But how often do we do that for our own thoughts? So that's our second mental movement and I'll pause there.
Yuli:I love that. This is like one of my favorites and I find it so fascinating and I've been practicing like habits changing actively in different areas of my life and I find it to be one of the most like, hardest and most fascinating and most impactful things that one can do. And you know, experimenting with different things from you know changing like eating habits to movement and it just I think this is also ties back to the subject of like longevity, right, and I feel like some point like I'm getting close to my 50. And so it's like I'm becoming you just realize how important it is because you just get stuck at this point of our lives. We all just kind of created those habits and it's scary kind of like sometimes to look back and see yourself kind of like repeating the same patterns over and over and how hard it is to break those patterns. So I've been experimenting with it, especially at the beginning of the year, I feel like always there's this new energy, new desire.
Yuli:I don't know, maybe we sold on it right, there's a lot of marketing around it, but I do find it to be very effective, like just in the last two weeks since the year started, I was able to really introduce some new habits that I'm seeing like tremendous benefits from, and it just so I agree.
Lissy :And this is like one of my favorite topics, so please continue. Amazing, amazing. I love it. And I think two small things that just came up for me that I think are important to realize, just in relation to creating new habits.
Lissy :When you are creating a new habit or behavior or a new thought pattern or a new feeling, it takes energy, and one of my favorite facts I learned about the brain is that your brain takes up only 2% of your body weight, so it's a very small part of your body, but between 20 and 35% of the energy you burn every day. So, again, 2% of your body weight, between 20 and 35% of the energy you burn every day. So if you're tired, if you're exhausted, it is really hard to think well, let alone create a new neural pathway or a new pattern. And this is why, for many of us, when we're at our most tired, it's really difficult. This is when we want to change absolutely everything in our lives, but the best thing you can do is take the smallest step, so small that you trip over it, the smallest step, so small that you trip over it. And this actually brings us to our third and final of these daily mind movements, which is the practice.
Lissy :It's called go. It's the practice of making and recognizing progress. So a car doesn't just you don't hit the gas and then it goes forever. We're clocking our speed, we're clocking our distance on our odometer, but when it comes to the way most of us live our lives, we're like a car without any sort of tracking mechanism. We just go, go, go, go, go, go, go. There's no time for oil changes. We have forced vacation twice a random year for holidays and things, but otherwise there's no way that we're actually recognizing the things we do every day. And what studies are starting to show is that we believe we get a hit of dopamine when we add things to our to-do list, but we feel pain when we remove things.
Lissy :So while most people say, when I originally say go, everyone's like oh, I'm good at that, you know like I'm really good at making progress. And as healers, of course you are. You know you work with people hands-on all day, every day. But how often do you recognize the impact that you have on those clients, the amount of hours and energy you spend working with these folks? Do you have a document, a piece of paper, a checklist, a celebration at the end of every day? Hell, no, most of you probably are like, oh okay, so care of everyone. On to taking care of my family or myself, my house, I have to go clean it.
Lissy :We are always on to the next and so go is a real practice around goal setting and recognition. And there's really really small ways to do this. I mean, I've got right next to me my paper to-do list. I used to have that digitally, but crossing that stuff off it just feels good. My brain loves it. Right? Checklists are amazing for this. Having some sort of tracker where you understand where your clients started and where they ended, feeling words, actually implementing some sort of checking in your practice so that you and your clients are really checking in on this progress together, can be meaningful.
Lissy :Celebrating at the end of every week, even at the end of every day, with a little something, is special. We think that this recognition, this celebration, can be toxically positive. I always say I grew up between the US and Asia, so I'm very sensitive to you know, the American form of celebration as opposed to everywhere else in the world. But it's not because it's what motivates us. I always joke can you imagine trying to teach a kid how to tie their shoe, and every time they tied it, you were just like, okay, no, we celebrate.
Lissy :You tied your shoe oh my gosh, this is big and, as a result, they get excited about that. They don't ask you to do it anymore, my nieces and nephews. They want to do it themselves, and our brains need that level of positive reinforcement in order to want to keep doing the things we do every day. Your clients may or may not be giving that to you, because they themselves are looking for some healing, and so you need to learn how to give it to yourself, and so that's what all of this is about Stop, slow and go. It's about finding these small moments of stop or recovery, slow, cross-training your brain again to have those new thoughts and feelings show up and then go, which is making and recognizing progress, so that, every day, you can refill your cup, make sure that your cup is full of the right stuff, and you can show up the next day ready for your clients and yourself to continue to do what you do.
Yuli:Now that's incredible and a very simple framework that I think is easy for many of us to follow. Thank you for sharing that. It's so generous of you too. I'm sure this took quite some time to figure out and put together so distinctly and it's yeah, I definitely I was. I'm taking mental notes on that. So I think this makes total sense in terms of maintenance and making sure that we are mentally fit. Well, what point do we experience burnout or when does that go wrong? I understand, if we don't follow this fitness routine. You know, eventually there's like the slow the slow burn, right, but what do you see? You know, eventually there's like the slow, the slow burn right, but what do you see? Are there any kind of like indicators or like red flags that that something is off, you in the wrong path? Because I think for many of us, especially people who go go right and overachievers, speaking for friends it's really hard sometimes to recognize those signs. So we go probably way longer than we should be on this burnout path.
Lissy :Yeah, so I could share the formal definition of burnout, but I want to actually just share the feelings that are associated with burnout, because I think they're a lot more important and relatable. So the first thing is that you'll typically just notice, when people ask how you're doing, you constantly, nearly every time, say I'm busy or tired. So just in a constant state of exhaustion, and whether or not you feel exhausted, you're just. That's how you're expressing yourself, like you don't even have the energy to give it specific words. Maybe it's to your partner, maybe it's to a friend, maybe it's even to your clients, but you just have this like very, very regular response because you just can't articulate yourself more clearly or specifically. And remember what I said about the brain, which is, when you're tired, you physically, it is cognitively expensive to find new words that you'll default to the same stuff over and over again. The second thing to keep in mind is that you tend to find more negative in your day than positive. You tend to find more negative in your day than positive. So when someone's asking you how your day was, you tend to talk about all the things that went wrong, which, by the way, as a healer, there is plenty of stuff. You know you've just got a lot of people coming in and out. You've got a lot of energies coming in and out. You also show up with your own sense of self and how you're doing, and so there's just like a lot of recipes for every day to be different. But instead of talking about the one to three to six clients that are fantastic, you're going to talk about that one person who was late and rude and wanted their money back, or the one vendor who accidentally charged you and you just couldn't get in touch with, and they must be faulty, and you're going to cancel your credit card. Like you're always talking about the thing that isn't going right in your day. And let me also just say this like I'm sharing this without judgment there is nothing wrong with being here. We all get here. I'll talk about that in a second just the frequency of this.
Lissy :And then the third thing to keep in mind of is you tend to feel less effective at your job. So maybe you're going through a period where you're just feeling like not particularly the term is efficacious but you're just not feeling like good at healing and maybe you're finding yourself with more difficult clients. Maybe you're finding that within session, it's taking a lot more energy that you may or may not have, but you're not able to handle your normal workload with the same level of confidence or excitement that you had before. So it's those three things to really keep an eye out for, this regular, repeated sharing of how you're doing and non-positive ways. It's this, like you know, constant focus on the things that aren't going right in your day, and it's also this focus on you maybe not feeling or doing your best. And what I will say also is that, from a physiological perspective, when you are in burnout this is why I said no judgments you're typically in a state of fight or flight when things happen. So we are.
Lissy :We tend to think, especially when we're tired, we tend to think in very extreme heuristics. Heuristics meaning like patterns, and those patterns tend to be things like either or thinking I had a great or bad day, catastrophic, thinking this was the worst. The news takes advantage of this particular pattern. You might have that negativity bias triggered. Meaning your negativity bias, like paying attention to the negative stuff in your life, is, from an evolutionary perspective, very adaptive. It's good because when bad things happen, then we can avoid them, we can deal with them.
Lissy :The challenge is when you're tired or you're nearing burnout, which is like a period of extreme exhaustion and emotional fatigue, in addition to these other things I mentioned again. Your brain is defaulting to these things, so it's not your fault, if that makes sense, that you're feeling this way. There's no shame. We all get there sometimes but it's just important to understand that these patterns are occurring and that if you don't like them, if they don't belong with you, if they're interfering with your practice or your feelings of efficacy for your job or your desire to even be a healer, I just have to say we need you, all of you, like every single one of you. We are at a shortage of you. Then that's when it's time to say okay, where to stop slow, go, fit into my life or how can I, you know, get some help from the people around me to get my energy back, so I can get my thoughts in the right place.
Yuli:Well, such a clear and brilliant definition. Thank you for sharing that. And, as you were speaking, I was thinking about periods in my life when I was doing those things and, yeah, it's an amazing framework to work with. And, as you were talking, I couldn't help but also think that, in addition, healers being mostly empaths by nature, right, how much of that they often take from their clients when they don't have strong boundaries, strong, just protection mechanisms, right, some of those things can trickle in from just the. You know the sheer amount of people that they're seeing and the fact that they're so sensitive. So can you talk a little bit about that? Is it something that also being passed like a virus?
Lissy :Yeah, so there is something in our brains called mirror neurons, mirror neurons and they're basically, we tend to mirror the people around us. So you know, there's studies that show. You know, you have someone sitting down with their legs crossed and then they uncross them and the person across them uncrosses them. And you know, again, from an evolutionary perspective, like we're pack animals, we want to be like other people, especially empaths. We are particularly attuned not only to people's emotions but their physical space. So if somebody is coming into your office with their you can't see me, but their shoulders slouched and they're feeling small to meet them, whether you realize it or not, you're probably making yourself a bit small. Or if someone's coming in and they're vibrating at a lower level, feeling like a little bit sad, in order to meet them, you're probably not going to meet them with your normal level of chipperness. You're going to try to again lower your tone of voice, and that all takes energy to match your clients. So, again, in addition to this energy expenditure, which we already know is taxing, now you're also trying to meet them where they are, which is maybe not feeling their best. And so, all of a sudden, you two are working on the same wavelength, which is super powerful, but again a challenge, not to mention many of us, until you consciously realize it, are absorbing these feelings Again, not just in your actions, but in the way that you feel, and so this becomes ever more important to come back to.
Lissy :This stops, slow and go, because if you have back-to-back clients energetically, you are whiplashed In many ways. You're attempting there's no such thing as multitasking, but you're attempting to move from one space with one client who feels, acts and does something, and all of a sudden your mind, body, soul has to shift to a completely new way of being. And so this is the thing we don't think about. It's not a cost that we write down in our book, because it doesn't take time which we can see on a clock. It doesn't take money, but it takes the most important thing in the world that we have, which is like our energy and, again, our feelings of our overall energetic feeling.
Lissy :And so when I think about even again, why I got into this work and why I do what I do, it's, you know, I have my mom used to say too much chocolate cake is too much chocolate cake. You could love helping people every day, and if you don't create these spaces to rest, to make sure that you are really again creating these new patterns and conscious of what's going on for you and your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors patterns, and conscious of what's going on for you and your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors and then recognizing the work that you do. You're at an inordinate risk again for for burnout just because of the emotional lift that you do, which makes you, by the way, amazing at your job.
Yuli:Right, right, no, this is so brilliant. As you were speaking, I was just thinking, oh my God, people are going to be listening to this and they're just going to feel so inspired and so full of insights. Because we have amazing, we always have inspiring speakers on this podcast, but we rarely have people who can really really feel the way you feel, the exact pain points that practitioners experience, but also give some really practical advice. So thank you for that. Just wanted to acknowledge to celebrate this moment.
Yuli:We're already doing that. We're implementing your strategies, love it, but also but as you were talking anything else that they can do specifically to protect their energy from a neuro perspective, from another mental fitness exercise. Maybe that will specifically address that energetic shift that you just mentioned. That is so tasking.
Lissy :Yeah, so I'm going to be. I'll give you some example. I'm going to give you the one thing that you could do more than anything else that's going to help you. It's going to be the hardest to hear, but stay with me for a second, because my expertise, in addition to mental fitness, is actually organizational fitness as well.
Lissy :Before I did this work, I went to MIT to build a quantitative, research-backed model to fix companies, because I burned out at a bank, I burned out at a startup and I thought companies and my work must be the thing causing my burnout. So I go to MIT and I told you one of the single most important facts about the brain, about how small it is, how much energy it takes when it comes to building a business. As a healer, this is gonna be one of the single most important things you need to remember, which is that to build an operational system that works over time, best practice for capacity and utilization meaning the amount of time you should be booking yourself is at around 80% of your capacity. Now, capacity is difficult when it comes to hours in the day, because some people can work a 10-hour day, some people can work a four-hour day, but whatever your day looks like like a full day, you should be booked at around 80% of that. Because when you're tired, when you're sick, you should be booked at around 80% of that. Because when you're tired, when you're sick, when you have a difficult or late client, there's no buffer in most people's schedules because they book to 100% capacity. Now this exact same metaphor is true for our brains we book back to back to back to back to back and there's no buffer space.
Lissy :There are so many studies that show that if you just take a quick five to 10 minute break and you can do anything in that break and I will list a whole bunch of things We'll use that as our fun brainstorming. You know, slow moment for the call, but if you can take a quick break away from your computer, if you're doing any sort of virtual healing, or if you're in person just in a room in silence, you're going to find your ability to not only sustain yourself but, most importantly, feel good while doing that, and then do it without burning out is just immeasurable. And so taking breaks in your day between clients maybe you need to go back to back to clients, back to back Cool If you're doing like four clients, back to back whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is why the healthcare profession has such a burnout problem now, from surgeons to nurses I mean all over the hospital. It's because we staffed people without thinking about how their brains work. We staff them according to what the numbers need. And so, all of this said, take a break.
Lissy :In that break, do not look at your email. Do not put on a podcast on 2X. You can read with your eyeballs. You can listen to some light music. You can sit in a room, you can put your head on the desk. You can take a walk, you can stretch, you can have a snack.
Lissy :Chew slowly, right, mindfulness is a fancy way for saying be where you are. So during that break, just be where you are. And if you can do that, that's going to be an incredible thing for you. And if you are like Lissy, you must be insane. I can't take. My capacity is 10 clients a day and I have to do this. Okay, but I'm going to challenge you one break in the day, five minutes. Be five minutes late for a client. I guarantee they're five minutes late for you sometimes, but if you can't show up with the ultimate presence in these meetings, not just today, but over time, that's where the toll really starts to take hold. And so one break, start with one, see if you can put a couple more in there as time goes on, but one little break to do nothing really matters.
Yuli:Amazing. I couldn't agree more, and it's so funny that you mentioned that, because we literally on our platform, healist, which is a practice management platform, and we built this whole booking and scheduling system specifically for holistic practitioners and we just introduced this buffer feature that allows them to customize the buffer time between 15 minutes up to an hour. We we we give them so, and it's also something that's been actually requested by some of our users, but we felt that it was really important to allow them to have that custom time between each appointment actually, and so I'm glad this is scientifically backed feature, I laugh.
Lissy :So instead of taking a break, we'll say take a buffer time for the Healist community. No, totally, and you know and it's also.
Yuli:I was literally this morning I was listening to this amazing book If any of you haven't read yet, it's called the Essentialism and I literally was listening to a chapter about buffers. Today to protect your own you know essentialism mindset and you know your time, so it's all kind of like this message comes through a lot and maybe it's a sign that I need to create some more buffers in my life as well.
Lissy :Well, today, most of us need to create more buffers in our lives, but I think step one is being aware and step two is committing to at least one.
Yuli:Amazing. Well, this was really an incredible advice and I think you started touching a little bit about your journey into all of this and all this incredible discoveries, and I'm sure at this point, our listeners are really craving to learn more. Yeah, sure.
Lissy :So I always wanted to help people. Growing up, I mentioned this, but I grew up all over the world. My family moved every two to three years. My dad was in the auto industry, and so what was really cool is like volunteering was a huge part of my life growing up, no-transcript. So I went and worked at a bank after school and I always say I did not learn how to run a company, but I honestly had set my career off to do exactly what I'm doing now. I've been.
Lissy :I burned out at the bank. I was just not able to be myself. I was working all the time. It was just a very uncomfortable experience for me, and the time it was just a very uncomfortable experience for me. And so I talked to 100 people around New York City and ended up at an ed tech company that went from 40 to 1,000 people in three years. It was an incredible job. We worked with the C-suite at a whole bunch of Fortune 500 companies, but my physical health, my mental health, all just took a total nosedive. I was working all the time and trying to help my team and trying to figure out how to run a business and ended up going to MIT to build a quantitative, research-backed model to fix companies. Because I was like we're all talking about company culture and how to create great workplaces and my question was who's holding people's hands to do it? It's really easy to look at a leadership team and say this is what you should do, but most of them are trying their best. It's really hard to make these decisions, which tend to be cross-functional decisions, that end up getting deployed in silos, you know, in these very narrow departments, and so often you know a good decision at the top ends up filtering down in the wrong way, and so that's when I started my work on organizational fitness. So I worked for the founder, shake Shack.
Lissy :For my internship I then went to a publicly traded biotech company as a change agent. So the CEO hired me to improve everything from work-life balance to helping with things like career pathing and making sure that we had the right management and data systems to manage our people population. But I ended up leaving to study the brain because I realized that even when work is really great for people like for all of you like you probably got into this work because you love it People were still stressed and so I left. I started doing research on the brain. I brought on my professor from MIT to oversee that work and ended up building a quantitative, research-backed, step-by-step model to manage your mind, which is the minding model.
Lissy :So we've talked about kind of the three mind movements that your brain needs every day. There's then the mind muscles that you can activate, which is, like we always say, there's three stages to mental fitness get fit, stay fit, cultivate high performance. So mental muscles are about high performance and I started teaching it and the number one piece of feedback I got was hold us accountable. So kind of like the culture work.
Lissy :It's one thing to write a book on this stuff, but I'm obsessed with follow-through, accountability and outcomes, and so that's why we built Mindy, which is a gym for your mind, and so we've got the consulting side of things, which is organizational fitness, where we work with companies, and then we've got mental fitness, where we've been working on these products and services to help people do these mental fitness routines every day, and right now we're in beta for that. So I freaking love what I do and I have to practice these things every day too, both for my company, when I think about you know, we staff and how we think about things, but also for myself as a leader. You know this, yuli like you don't get to turn off and like just go, go, go. You have to practice these things every day, and so some days I'm amazing and other days I'm human. And then you know, rinse and repeat over and over again.
Yuli:Amazing. Well, you inspired us so much and your journey just so amazing. It seems like you were born to do this, and thank you for for creating this system and also sharing with us again so generously and, yeah, it's been really, really insightful and I can thank you enough for being here and if there's anything, any words of wisdom you would like to share with our listeners at the end, please do.
Lissy :Yeah, I think the big thing for all of this mental fitness is I think a lot of people hear this and they're like, oh, simple framework, I'm going to stop. So go every day. Don't pick one just like. Pick one mind movement and one thing within that mind movement that you want to do for one to three minutes a day. Just start there. Our brains like big things but we discount small things and so start really small when you're thinking about mental fitness, especially if you're feeling a little what we call toasty, tired, exhausted, overwhelmed, burned out, and yeah, and go from there and I can promise you'll start to feel better quite quickly.
Yuli:Amazing. Well, thank you again for being here with us and please come back anytime we can talk about brain and mental fitness. I think it's just such an important topic for many of us. Thank you again, thank you.
