Hello friends and a very warm welcome to Transforming Stress with Dr. Ash. Are you ready to turn stress into your comfort? For over 30 years now, Dr. Ash has worked and gained education across three continents. India, United Kingdom, and the United States in healthcare. He's witnessed firsthand how stress can impact our health and cause our happiness. But here's the exciting part. He's here to help you transform your stress into a powerful tool for growth and resilience. Each week he'll share practical tools and life-changing insights from his books, including The Boiling Frog, to help you manage your stress, find balance, and live a life of purpose. Please join us every Friday at 5 pm and let's start turning stress into strength together. Now let's dive into today's episode.
SPEAKER_00So Funella, welcome back. And uh we are going to discuss self-care. And self-care is empowering well-being with daily practices. Yes. And this is a very important aspect because self-care, what we see, what I have seen in the last several decades is very poor. And paradoxically, I've seen a lot of highly accomplished professionals. Yeah. And even in then, even in them sometimes I I'm kind of very surprised and amused at uh that it could it could be much it could be much better.
SPEAKER_02Do you find yourself thinking, how can you not know this? How how come you're not doing this? And that sometimes the thing that I get with my clients is people go and I've done this myself, you join a gym and then maybe you don't go or you go once in a blue moon. So you know that there's something there you should be doing, but somehow you can't attach to it. And if you feel you should be doing something, you're not really feeling it. You're not really attaching to needing it.
SPEAKER_00And uh it's common sense is not always common. Yeah, true. Common practices uh which by common sense should be a day-to-day practice, is not common because people are not doing them regularly. Yeah. So this is a foundation for everything. Because unless and until Yeah, please go ahead.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, can I just share the picture here? Because I yeah, I think this speaks really well.
SPEAKER_00So uh the this is like an Olympic ring, and I chose the Olympic ring because Olympians to me are the pinnacle of fitness. Would you agree with that? Yes. Yeah. No, the f the fitness uh in different five five rings as you can see, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, yeah, and social. Okay. In all areas, and they are all very much very much linked to each other. Okay. So with physical, you could see uh you could say regular exercises. Yeah. Whether it is walking, whether it is uh strength training. Yeah. But it is very important to have that levels of energy if you want to accomplish things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And if you want to have a healthy life.
SPEAKER_02So it sounds to me this is not not only reactive, it's something that's proactive. How can I start out from a good place? What can I do? Absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Then emotional. What are the what are the practices you do to look after your emotional well-being?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00What are the practices you do regularly for your spiritual well-being and connecting to your connecting to your deeper purpose?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Social well-being is very important. What do you do to connect with your family and friends on a day-to-day basis? So in the self-care section, self-care chapter, we talk more about what are the blocks. Okay. What are the challenges why people are not able to do it. Yeah. It helps them to take account and measure where they are at at any given point of time.
SPEAKER_02Of course. And in coaching, we always look at what are the obstacles and what are the resources? What can we do? Exactly. So we're taking a look at that. Also seems to me like you're taking a very holistic approach that everything in us, everything in our lives affects everything else. So how can we have some control over the environment that we're in with all of those different aspects of ourself? And I wondered, if you could tell me a bit about your own self-care journey. Um, because I've I've heard you speak about that over the years in our coaching relationship, and I think that that could really reveal something helpful here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I have to be I have to accept here that uh self-care is not easy. Yeah. If you are if as a doctor, as a in a busy work environment, even to have lunch at the right time, I've become much, much better. And across the profession, I'm talking about in healthcare, I've seen a lot many of my colleagues struggle with that. Yeah. Because uh people uh and professionals they have some deep-rooted habits of overwork, of course, of uh just pushing themselves so much so that it's become a part of their really deep-rooted habits.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So, you know, definitely I did not realize this earlier, like I would say a decade back, I was uh not very good at the self-care practices. Okay. When I came to realize, I would say in the last seven, eight years I've become much better.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm not going to go into the reasons of why to start with they were not very great. Uh as I said, one of the things is that the kind of people who are uh who are attracted to healthcare have uh have a kind of ingrained habit of really pushing themselves very hard. And I'm sure in other professions we have similar uh similar uh personalities. Yeah. Uh like we what we call A-type personalities. Now, what I've started doing, at least in the last six, seven years, that I take a stock every three months. Okay, so self-reflection. Self-reflection. Yeah, self-reflection about the self-care practices.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I use uh uh Institute of Functional Medicine Questionnaire at this point of time, which has um 10 questions in physical, 10 questions in emotional, professional, social um self-care, and you are able to give yourself a score out of 50 in each of these four different dimensions, and that helps us get a stock of where we are in all these different areas. Yeah. So the areas which you feel are slightly underdeveloped, okay, then you can work with uh your family or with your coach to find out why you are not doing so well in that area.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you can bring a bit more in. And that's the thing with an accountability partner. You're not gonna go along to your coach and they're gonna wag their finger at you and have a go at you. What they're gonna do is help you analyze well, if I'm not giving that what it needs for me, why? What's going on there? What can I find in myself that's going to help me?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Absolutely. I would add one more point to that, uh, Funela. Um I remember being in India in 2000, in two years, two years back in 2022, and I came to know about uh a a very rich businessman who was a billionaire and he died at the age of 64. Okay, which is not that old really. He's not that old. Yeah. And he mentioned that he lost the battle against his eating and drinking habits. Okay. Now, a very rich, accomplished, and a wealthy individual, a billionaire, yeah, high value on wealth creation, yeah. High levels of discipline in wealth creation, but having high levels of discipline does not mean that you have it in all the areas. And so he he acknowledged that I I was highly accomplished in wealth creation, but it came to self-care, I lost the battle with drinking, with addiction to alcohol, yeah, and and food. Yeah. And they developed diabetes and different complications. And I see myself in my patients, sometimes highly accomplished, that some areas are poorly managed. And when we are not able to do that, in those areas, then we set up structures, external structures. So it will come again with self-awareness that these are the areas I'm doing well, and the areas which I am not able to do well, what are the structures I need to put? And also there has to be an awareness that if I don't do this, there are consequences. What are the consequences? What are the costs? Yeah. Am I going to get a heart attack if my cholesterol is high? Yeah. And I'm eating all the wrong foods, and I see it happening, and people I know, somebody's had a heart attack, somebody's had a different health issue. Yeah. And if I am not able to do regular exercise or eat healthy, this is what is going to come to me. Yeah. So that awareness has to be there. And if we realize, if the person realize that he's not able to do it himself, then he can get some external support. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So it's about that self-regulation. And if that self-regulation feels hard, how can you be supported? How can you find support? Is it about having an accountability partner? That could be your coach. It might be a friend who wants to tackle some aspect of themselves that chimes with what you're missing. So maybe you'll go to the gym together, maybe you'll go for a run together. Um, it's about just, isn't it, reflecting on what's that thing? Who can help? Because we don't have to be on our own. We don't have a relative to be on our own. We're humans and we need other humans.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And it's about just finding what's the environment, what's going to help me. And it needn't be a catastrophic consequence we're thinking about. That there could be catastrophic consequences we want to avoid. Might also be that we're just not achieving what we think we can achieve. Maybe we just feel we've got more in us. How do I bring that out? How how much more creative would I be with eight hours sleep rather than six hours sleep? And it's not about beating ourselves up. It's just okay. What's gonna help me? What might help me feel a bit better?
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And having that having that energy levels to be able to accomplish what we want to do and have that creativity. Yeah. So, Funella, thank you very much. I think we have really taken a very holistic view of the self-care. We'll get back to this as and when needed. Perfect. And let's get on to self-discipline, which I feel is the number one skill of all the skills I'm talking about in this book.
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