MSP Mastery: Ctrl-Alt-Deliver
Welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Deliver: MSP Mastery — the podcast for IT leaders, MSP owners, and service delivery professionals who want to elevate performance, improve processes, and stay ahead in the fast-changing managed services landscape.
MSP Mastery: Ctrl-Alt-Deliver
Why Sleep and Biological Focus are your Secret MSP Operational Advantage with Sally Duxfield
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Welcome to MSP Mastery: Ctrl-Alt-Deliver Podcast, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP; one that actually works for them.
I am Jeni Clift, joined by my husband and long time business partner, Nick Clift. Together, we unpack what is really working in thriving MSPs, including insights from the trusted partners who support them.
In this episode, we are joined by Sally Duxfield, a neurobiology expert and high performance coach who helps leaders understand the science behind their own decision making. Technical proficiency is vital, but if you are leading a team while cognitively depleted, you are creating an operational risk. We explore how to protect your "six second leadership window" and how to design a work day that respects your brain's natural energy waves.
Here is what we covered together:
✅ The Six Second Rule: Why leadership actually happens in a tiny window of time and how sleep deprivation turns a thoughtful response into a reactive flash.
✅ Sleep as an Operational Metric: Why running an MSP on adrenaline and late nights is a business risk, not a badge of honour.
✅ The Overwhelmed Brain vs ADHD: Understanding why many adults feel distracted and how "pressure" mimics neurodivergence.
✅ Gamification and Focus Sprints: Practical tactics to use 15 minute sprints and micro rewards to beat the distracted brain and improve team throughput.
✅ The Impact Model: How to use your "Activation" window for courageous conversations and strategic thinking before your energy battery runs low.
✅ Protecting the Triage: Moving low value interruptions to specific times so your high value brain power is reserved for what actually moves the needle.
We created this podcast to share the real conversations and lessons we wish we had more of while running our own MSP; practical insights from people who understand the challenges of this industry.
For more about Sally and her work visit: sallyduxfield.com
👉 Read more episode notes here: mspmastery.blog
👉 Watch the full video on YouTube: youtube.com/@MSPMastery
🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gftErFYrR8F80kthgvFbs
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Sleep is everything. We'll make poor decisions, and leadership really happens in six seconds. Poor sleep, we'll see really short, sharp answers. And we will trigger a downward spiral in our team. The really strong desire to change task all the time. This almost over-diagnosis of ADHD in adults that we're seeing is actually just a distracted brain that's under severe pressure. And so what it's doing, it's looking for dopamine, which is that pleasure response.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to MSP Mastery, the podcast for MSP owners and leaders who want to build a better MSP, one that actually works for them. I'm Jenny Clift, and alongside my longtime business and life partner Nick, we unpack what's really working in thriving MSPs, including insights from the trusted partners who support them. With more than 60 years of combined experience, we've seen it all from the first break fix calls to the sophisticated MSP tools of today. We've been early adopters of the tech and the strategies that shifted our industry toward recurring revenue and long-term success. Our goal with this podcast is to share the real stories and hard-won lessons that inspire and add genuine value to our industry, helping you build a business that is both profitable and fulfilling. This is MSP Mastery. Here's Nick, myself, and today's special guest. Sally Ducksfield joining us today. She brings a rare mix of grit, warmth, and real-world leadership experience. A former New Zealand military officer who served in both the New Zealand Army Aviation Unit and the Royal New Zealand Air Force. She's now an entrepreneur, speaker, mentor, and performance coach. Sally's known for helping leaders manage pressure, sleep better, and perform at their best. And she brings a strong commitment to ongoing education and research in leadership, performance, and well-being. She's deeply grounded, refreshingly direct, and will most likely be dropping a few F-bombs. Fortunately, we don't need to edit those out. But if you're sensitive, this is your warning. She has plenty of wisdom to share, and we're very glad to have her with us. Sally, welcome to MSP Mastery.
SPEAKER_02Hi Sally, good to see you again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, hi Ned.
SPEAKER_02I remember the first time I met you at a conference about three years ago. It was yeah, it was very good discussion. Got me deeply thinking about how I put myself in environments that impact me negatively. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, oh great. Yeah, have a think about that. Yes. Good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it would be about three years ago. We bet you on the Gold Coast at an EO conference where you were presenting. I think about sleep, which as one who does not sleep well, definitely hit home and makes me very aware of what I do wrong.
SPEAKER_01Oh, there's so much in that space. So yeah, we could go on for weeks about it, actually.
SPEAKER_00We could. We could. Okay, what I'll get you to do first, as an EOS implementer, I always start our calls with this. Please share your personal and professional best from the last six months.
SPEAKER_01My personal best for the last six months is I'm back into a really strong fitness routine. So building strength out there rucking with 10kg on, and I'm really enjoying that. You know, entering my early 60s, those things drop really quickly. So I prioritise that. And also, of course, acceptance into my doctorate programme. So my PhD work out of Monarch and Switzerland. So that's pretty exciting. And then professionally, I finally really worked hard at delegating all of my operational responsibilities to my leadership team. So I'm almost out of the operational part of the outdoor centre. And it's meaning that it's freeing me up time, obviously for my doctorate work and for my speaking and the things and my writing. So it's taken a while to apply myself to consistently train my who, so who's my who and getting my who's doing what they're meant to be doing.
SPEAKER_00And I think, did I notice on social media that you have just been, I know you were in Canada for your daughter's wedding, skiing for the first time in how long?
SPEAKER_0115 to 20 years, I think. Yeah, so it was great. I didn't die. Great.
SPEAKER_00No, I tried skiing once when I was in my late teens and spent so much time getting back up, I think I gave up and went to the bar.
SPEAKER_01So you're a little bit taller than me. Yes, you know, I'm a short person, so it's not far to fall. So I'm like a just a little angry snowball. I just bounce down, get back up, and shake myself off. So it's not traumatic for short people to ski.
SPEAKER_02And I figured out early in early in my time skiing is that big long line of people to get back onto the ski lift, they're your buffer to stop you going too far. So I would just ski straight into them and go, oh, sorry about that. Oh geez, I don't know what's going on, and cut the line and get like, you know, within five or ten people from the start of the line, and everyone's very, you know, because they look who is this idiot that can't even ski? They take pity on you a couple of times. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01They've got ropes to stop people doing that now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that doesn't help you cut the line though.
SPEAKER_03No, that's right.
SPEAKER_00Let's get into some questions because I really want to uh make the most of your time today, Sally. So the first question and I think this question came to me because if I look back at when we had our MSP and the pressure that we were under. So when someone's constantly under pressure, how do they know when stress is starting to affect them? Even if they think they're doing okay.
SPEAKER_01Really great question, Jenny, because many people think they are doing okay. The first thing that will go under pressure will be your sleep. And that'll be the quality of your sleep. You'll have micro weights during the night. You'll wake up not being refreshed. And there's a pretty poor cycle that's happening within our medical world at the moment, is that we are dosing people with melatonin and a whole range of sleep medication. But in fact, what it does is it destroys the quality of the sleep. And melatonin, particularly, you wake up with a load of it in the morning because we only make 0.3 of a milligram of melatonin a night. And your doctors are giving you generally tenfold that. So in that seven hours of sleep, you would get rid of 0.3 milligrams of melatonin, but not three milligrams. So you'll wake up with a lag. The other thing that you'll see is you'll have headaches, probably stiff shoulders, your heart rate might be up, you'll be snappy, so your response will be pretty. Your patience will go down, your acceptance of people who are silly will reduce, and you'll find the brain fold will come in. So, and also the really strong desire to change task all the time. This almost over-diagnosis of ADHD in adults that we're seeing is actually just a distracted brain that's under severe pressure. And so what it's doing, it's looking for dopamine, which is that pleasure response. And so it will get you, you'll be working on something, and you'll look and you'll go, Oh, look, squirrels or magpies, or I think I'll just, or the dog needs to go out. And you will, your brain will have you changing tasks. You'll go to the doctor, you'll talk to someone that'll say, Oh, you've got ADHD. In fact, you haven't, you've just got an overwhelmed brain that's now chasing that dopamine tail.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's really interesting because I think that describes me and my life.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And there is this really interesting data that's come out in some studies that I can link for you, showing that other than very few people, so less than 2% of the population, are actually born with an ADHD-wide brain. The rest of us, it depends on all the brains are born with a neuronal bias for focus and a neuronal bias for distraction. So there's two really strong aspects. My generation, their 60s, we were taught focus, we were taught concentration, we didn't have distractions. So we fed that part of the brain. And we're much, much better at that deep focus work as a generalization. The last few generations, particularly, you know, the 30, 40-year-olds have been, and this new, the youngsters have been brought up where the distraction neurons in the brain, the ability to change tasks quickly, have been fed from a baby. You're now seeing prams with the front rails, got an iPhone holder. Yeah. So that child's brain is not an ADHD brain. We're just training the neurons and the neuropathways to grow really strong for that distraction part of the brain. And the problem with being medicated for those types of behaviors is that the medications that will be given out are about 20 years old. So something that's discovered in the medical world goes through peer review testing, and then it will go through FDA approval, then it will go through, and it'll be 17 to 18 years before it hits the market. So what's being prescribed today for this distractive brain was actually designed for a brain from 20 years ago. So it's increasing your dopamine and it's increasing your noreadren, your norepinephrine, which is a focus, excitement, hypervigilance, anxiety spectrum for norepinephrine. So it's increasing your anxiousness and it's increasing your seeking of pleasure on a brain that already has excessive amounts of that. And that's probably another whole episode. Whole episode, yeah. But that changing of task is what you'll be seeing, particularly in that lack of ability to work on one thing at one time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, because I remember I think it was last week. Like your dog comes into the office and he's uh he's a snuffling little Frenchie.
SPEAKER_00And Sally's met the the kids. Yeah, I met the kids.
SPEAKER_02Rocket was I don't know, he that day he was just annoying the shit out of me. Like he's sniffing my ankles and he's snuffling around again, will you just shut up? And I had that exact thing that normally he doesn't bother me at all, but that day he was really annoying me. And then I that day I now reflecting on it, I did have this changing tasks all over the place type of thing. Yeah, because I was getting frustrated and there was stuff I was trying to do and I couldn't do it, so I'd go find something else. So I I I can relate directly to what you're saying. So so rather than using 20-year-old medications, there's got to be a a different way of addressing this, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. And it's around that task focus. And I think we're gonna talk a little bit, Jenny, later about how to model a day, which we get to or steeped in neuroscience, but basically it's about decreasing that overwhelm. So it's the one thing at one time, it's being really short with tasks. So even set a little alarm or I have a 10-minute hourglass ridiculous. It's called an hourglass if it's 10 minutes. And I just have that in front of me. And once that's gone, I at the moment I'm running a WAZ-jig jigsaw just on the table next door to me. They're my favorite, they're my absolute favourites.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02They're my worst nightmare. Like you don't even know what the hell the picture is you're trying to build.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I don't even use the cover at all. So I don't use a box. I just tap it on the table and move the box away. So what I'm doing at the moment, because I am under pressure at the moment from multiple, like you, like every other business person, multiple businesses, multiple needs. My studies coming up, my books have been asked to be rewritten by a publisher, so I'm under a rewrite. And so what I'm doing now is I'm just setting that 10 to 15 minute alarm hop up. I place five pieces of jigsaw. That breaks my focus, my tunnel vision, pulls me back out, brings a little bit of satisf satisfaction, serotonin. So when I put my jigs for pieces in, I'm like, I'm a fucking legend. And I come back to my task and I do my task again. So it's just that segueing in and out is working for me on days like today when I've got 30 or 40 things that I'm sitting there going, and my VA team's going, Have you done this yet? Have you done this yet? And I'm like, this will. So I use I just go in and out.
SPEAKER_02So how does that work with the old adage that I've always heard and believed that it takes a human about 10 to 15 minutes to get into the deep thinking zone, and then you do that really productive work for 40 minutes or so. But what you're saying is if you're in a certain mindset, you need to break that cycle and get out and get that reward thing.
SPEAKER_01Well, there's two different good question, Nick. So there's two different pieces I'm speaking to here. If we're going to do big focus work, and that's that 45 minutes sort of max, sometimes an hour and a half, it is about 11 to 15 minutes to really get into flow, to absolutely be deep in that space where nothing else matters. But that's setting up your environment. So it's locking the dogs outside, it's turning the phone on to aeroplane mode, it's making sure your staff know not to interrupt you. It's the closed door session and your desk is clear, like there's nothing out. Even your email is not minimized, it's turned off, it's closed, so that there's no distraction. So it's a really controlled environment. That's big work, and you're absolutely right. That's nothing else there. The piece I'm talking about for me going and doing jigsaw, where I've got all these multiple things that aren't necessarily deep thinking. It might be a quote, it might be really quickly doing a consultancy offering to somebody stuff that's not rocket science for me, but I just have to work my way through it. They're the things that I would respond to an email, do this, I'd do those in 10-minute chunks. I'll do emails for 10 minutes, I'll go and do five jigsaw pieces, come back, answer some phone calls or send some messages.
SPEAKER_02Split up between the tasks. So you're not just jumping from one to another. Okay, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01And if you have an ADHD bias, Jenny, like you talked about your brain since you were a child. Really good to gamify things. So set yourself an alarm for one hour. I use post-it notes. I call them stickies because I'm old, but little post-it notes, which is really old-fashioned. But I might go, I'm gonna work on each thing for 10 minutes. I'm gonna do seven post-it notes for 60 minutes. And so now I'm gonna gamify it because I'm gonna go like shit to get all those things done because I love to beat myself.
SPEAKER_02I like that. Like that.
SPEAKER_01So put those post-it notes visually in front of you and go bang, bang, bang, boom, bang, bang, bang, and then beat your time. And just keep it a record of your time if it's your gig. But particularly for that distractive brain, gamifying things makes it a lot of fun. You two could actually do it. You could declare an hour. There's a doctor called Dr. Sahai Yussif out of Barclay University, and she has a program called Becoming Superhuman. And her theories, these are called focus frints. And in a work environment, you would challenge your partner or your peers to a focus front. You have an hour or 45 minutes, you declare what you're each of you are going to do, and you push the timer, and you just go flat out till the first person stands up and rings the bell.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's like bingo.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, just like bingo, but you just get shit done. Like it's phenomenal.
SPEAKER_02I would definitely respond well to that. I don't know if I don't know how Jenny and I would go doing that. I remember a long time ago I learned a hard, hard lesson. We were playing squash, and I was hopeless at it. And it was like a social thing. But then I figured out how to Jenny had a weak spot, and I think it was her backhand in the left corner of the court. So I figured out after about three games, I could land that ball within about two centimetres of that spot every single time. She cracked the shits down to us and we've never played squash again. So hard lesson for me. You don't want to take advantage of weakness. Not with your partner anyway.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, not with your partner, no. Um that's why I don't do business with my husband of 33 years, particularly. But the other thing you could do is you could do it virtually. So you could jump in with three or four other entrepreneurs and just in your in your EO group, in your forum, and you could just jump in there and go, hey guys, every Thursday at 3 p.m., we're gonna have a focus sprint, jump on an hour. You don't talk, you just work in this virtual environment, but somebody goes, declares that I've won, and then right, I'm gonna beat you next week. And so you can actually build up quite a strong, competitive, fun environment if that suits the personalities of your team.
SPEAKER_02And that definitely worked in our MSP with tickets when we had.
SPEAKER_00If you think of Thursday night, like if when we got really snowed under, we would have Thursday night ticket. We had a name for it, and we'd do it every few months. We'd provide pizza, we paid overtime, and we learned that we couldn't just say, everybody stay back and get some work done, because they would spend half the time trying to figure out what to do. So our service delivery manager or coordinator would spend the day and use giant sticky notes and write down all the ticket numbers that we could do. We'd contact the customer, leave your machine on whatever we needed. And I think our service manager, who was on, he was allowed to actually do tickets that night, and one of our senior techs just went into full-on competition. And do you remember, Nick, was Prusty did 57 tickets one night in a couple of hours? Most of them did 10 in a day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's really helpful, right? It's really helpful.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna get this job to do, and I really don't know whether I'm gonna close it or not. But in that focus period, I don't know. It's the same. I I love that analogy because I I wrote an article the other day about going on leave, and those two days before you go on holidays are the most productive, can be the most productive days of the year, if you only have holidays once a year, because you just have to get shit done. No option.
SPEAKER_01And a segue to that is that when you come back before you go, you should already allocate in your diary, in your calendar for the two weeks after at least 45 minutes to an hour a day for catch-up emails. So you don't come home for 250 emails in your inbox and be overwhelmed. Your subconscious goes, don't worry about that. Every day for the next nine days, you've got an hour allocated and you're gonna just go to the bottom of your inbox and do them for an hour and then come back up and work on some current emails. And then tomorrow we're gonna go back to the bottom and do the next.
SPEAKER_02That's great. I love it.
SPEAKER_01Which means that while you're on holiday, the subconscious brain is going, it's all right, I've got my shit together. I've got I've got a plan. Just chill out. And you just make sure that on your outer office it says to your clients, I've been away on leave. So I have my out of office on the whole time. So every email that lands in my inbox says, I'm not available at the moment to respond. I will be responding. I read my emails at 9 a.m. and at 2 p.m. And I promise to respond within 24 hours. So I have set up, I've trained my clients to understand that I am not their puppet, I'm not available, I have really important things to do, and I promise to commit to coming back. But it also stops that I haven't had an answer in 20 minutes. But in that email, if I'm going away on leave, I'll say that when I come back from leave, there will be a backlog of emails, and I look forward to working through that with you. And if it's life and death, please text me or something like that. So it's setting up the protocol so that you have you decrease that overwhelm.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, nice.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And people have such a crazy sense of urgency. Our son Sam is now will be 29 in a couple of weeks. He was in ICU at the Royal Children's Hospital in or critical care in Royal Children's Hospital. We found out later that he that none of the medical team expected that he would survive. He'd been he was admitted on the Monday night. This was Friday, and Nick had a customer just chasing him down. And we'd just been completely off grid, of course. Sam was almost one. And finally the customer got hold of Nick and just gave him an absolute mouthful and said, you know, where the hell have you been? We can't print, blah, blah, blah. This is unacceptable. And Nick said, Well, actually, I'm in the Royal Children's Hospital with my baby. He's been in critical care since Monday. And they said, I wish you and your family all the best. You just let me know when we can get this resolved. All of a sudden, his urgent printing issue wasn't urgent anymore when it's put into context. Ring the office, like seriously.
SPEAKER_01And that also comes back to who's your who, because your who, as they would today, your who would have already gone out and put a out of office saying we are unavailable for a family emergency or whatever. But once again, it's that communication piece, right? But always, I always say act with grace. So if you can't get hold of somebody, act with grace as though something has obviously stopped them from communicating with you. Always look at the best side of it versus assume best intent is really what I like to say to people.
SPEAKER_00So my next question, staying on the sleep scene, we've kind of talked a little bit about this, but I know for me as a poor sleeper, I've always had this, you know, I'll address that at some point later. But what does poor sleep actually do to us day to day, especially as business owners or leaders when we're trying to think clearly make good decisions and show up at the office or at the client's site and be there and be present?
SPEAKER_01Great question again. What happens with poor sleep? So if I think about the first 90 minutes of sleep, so sleep comes in 90 minute modules or waves. The first 90 minutes of sleep is called glimphatic sleep. And what happens is the glial that surrounds the brain, I know this is slightly technical, but if you understand this, you're like, shit, this is actually quite important. So the glial surrounding the brain shrinks by about 40%. So your brain volume actually condenses in that first 90 minutes of sleep. It backfills that space with spinal fluid, and then 92% of the neurons get into synchrony and they bilge pump all the toxins out. So that's in the first 90 minutes of sleep. And it only happens if you've got no cortisol, no stress neurotransmitter, if you've got really low dopamine, your pleasure and motivation or foraging, and really good levels of melatonin. And melatonin is not a sedative, it's a signal to the body to cool its cool body temperature and to start the paralysis process. So if we miss that first 90 minutes of sleep, we are waking up. It's like an example that I've given you. The metaphor would be you have a party at your place out by the pool, and it's a great night. There's 50 EOs there, and it's a little bit feral, and there's glasses everywhere, there's bottles everywhere, there's a full bodies still floating in the pool. And you come in the next day and you try and have invite some other guests to come and have a very elegant luncheon around your pool, but there's all this debris, and you're stepping over bodies and bits of, you know, cigarette butts and all the rest. That's what it's like in the morning. When you hop up and you haven't slept, you're trying to operate at the high at a high level and be a peak performer, but you've got all this debris. And so you're managing all this stuff all the time. So sleep is incredibly important in the first phase. It's also where your BDNF, your bone-derived nootropic factor is being released. So that's all your bone growth and your strength, all those things. And then the REN sleep, which is the quality of sleep where you're uploading all your learning and you're uh putting context around things, happens in the last few hours of sleep. So if you're cutting sleep short, you're missing that. And if you're missing the front loading phase, what you'll see is you'll see a reactive person. So you'll be, as I said earlier, snappy, zero to a hundred really quickly. Tolerance for idiots decreases massively. You'll end up owning a planet, but you'll have the wrong set of rings to go with that planet. You'll have the rings for that planet, not for this planet. So as an entrepreneur, it's phenomenally important that we are sharp. And we've always had this sort of tendency to say, oh, sleep, well, I'm dead. Well, you'll actually be dead before you can sleep, or you'll have early onset Alzheimer's, or you'll but the correlation between sleep and neural dysfunction is without doubt one of the greatest risks to us from sleep. And it's got really strong evidence to show that as early as 30s and 40s, you're seeing an increase in Alzheimer's type behaviour, forgetting brain and perimenopause on top of that. And we're as mad as batshit if we're not sleeping. And you think husbands, if you say or partners, if you think that you're having it bad when a woman's under stress, you wait till she's m perimenopause and under stress. Good luck with that. Yeah, sleep is everything. We'll make poor decisions. And in leadership really happens in six seconds. It's the pause before somebody speaks to you. It's the reflection of what was said to you, and then it's the tone of voice of what you answer will be your leadership culture. And it's a six-second response time, basically. So poor sleep will see really short, sharp answers. And we will trigger a downward spiral in our team. So when I speak to you in a voice that's a little bit aggressive, I will trigger your sympathetic system, which is your fight-flight system. You will now become about 60% more cognitively stupid than you were about three seconds ago. And I don't know what your baseline is. You won't be able to hear me, you won't be able to see. And so it's just a cycle of doom.
SPEAKER_02What about these people that say, oh yeah, I only need three, four hours sleep? Are they kidding themselves, or can you actually train yourself to do that?
SPEAKER_01You can train yourself to operate well under sleep deprivation for 48 hours to 72 hours. And then you need to try and catch up that sleep debt. There are about less than 2% of the population can comfortably, and it's genetic, it's in DNA, and there's a great study just come out. I was listening to a podcast on it last week. There's DNA in people and their family lineage that can sleep for about six hours and are just high performances. Somehow, their lymphatic system and their upload system has increased in speed. So genetically, they're programmed for this five to six hour sleep, and they're operating functionally and culturally at the same level. But that's less than two percent of the. In fact, I think it's less than that, it's less than one percent of the population. The rest of us really truly need that seven to eight hours for the processes to occur. REM sleep goes through about a five to six and a half hour process. Deep sleep is about a 90 to 180 minute process. So before 2 a.m. is when all your deep sleep occurs. That's cellular brain.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm looking at my stats from last night.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, your stats.
SPEAKER_02One hour, 20 minutes of deep sleep, and that was all before 2 a.m. And then I had four hours of light, which is spread kind of across the whole night. And then my early morning was my REM for about an hour and a half. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Perfect. Yep, that's exactly right. I'd like to see your REM up about 2, 2.5.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, me too. But I'm I'm upset with because Sally put me onto the aura ring and I'm obsessed with my sleep deprivation. If I've got sleep debt on this app, I am going to bed at 7 o'clock, and I'm not getting me out until I've got that number back to either positive.
SPEAKER_00But you also mentioned, Nick, that after a a bit of a fight yesterday with LinkedIn trying to do a post, you were dreaming about or having nightmares about LinkedIn posts, like which is unusual.
SPEAKER_02I'd be obsessive about I don't generally look at the app any I used to be obsessed and look at the app first thing when I wake up and then decide if I'm gonna have a good day or not based on what the app tells me. That is absolutely not the right way to do it. It's like it's just data to look over a period of time, and that's what Sally taught me. But I yeah, I woke up seven times last night. Yeah, it was not a settled sleep. I'm my on a good night I'll wake up once. So yeah, it's good, just it's just data, and it's different for different people, but I feel much better when I get my seven hours, that's for sure.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So if you're in bed for seven hours, you're sleeping for six. If you're in bed for eight hours, you're sleeping generally for seven. So never think that being in bed for seven hours is giving you seven hours sleep, it's giving you about six hours, of which more than fifty percent will be light sleep, which is what it's meant to be.
SPEAKER_02Didn't a good friend of mine tell me bed's only for two things, sleep and sex?
SPEAKER_01She did, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And if we get more sleep, we'll get more sex. So Exactly, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02So all these people that read and scroll their phone in bed, it's not aiding your sleep.
SPEAKER_01Not at all. That's not adding your sex either.
SPEAKER_02Definitely not.
SPEAKER_01That's a really good segue.
SPEAKER_02It's a digital turnoff, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Let's segue into.
SPEAKER_00There's so many watches, rings, apps tracking your health now. Nick mentioned the Aura. We've been using the Aura ring now for a couple of years. I'm waiting on a replacement. Mine started playing up on me again. So one thing I do love about Aura usually jumping to their app. I came back and said, yep, definitely a problem. And it was shipped to me. It's actually waiting for me in Darwin. So we can't get it shipped here to Indonesia. But it was shipped, I think, on the Monday from the Netherlands and it arrived in Darwin on the Thursday, I think, which is crazy. But if we look at those watches rings apps, which ones are actually helpful? What should we be paying attention to without, as you said, getting a bit obsessed by the numbers?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's really relevant. I have a bias for Aura. I use the the other ring that's just come out, human. There's another ring that's just come out, and I did a six week trial, and I didn't like the ad. The accuracy of the heart rate variability, cool body temperature, and resting pulse was similar. Superhuman, is it called? No, it's called human. Yeah. I ran a trial with that and Gauman at the same time. The aura was more accurate overall, but what I love about the Aura is the ease of use of app. It's a very simple app to use. And one of the first phases of Aura users, so I'm in my Gen 4, I think I'm on my sixth ring. Like you, Jen, I had a little problem with my my version 4, and I basically it just went straight online and they said, no, they just I and I live rurally in the forest, and they just ran a test immediately and came back, said, nope, you've got a definitely got a systems problem. And within the same thing, within five days, I had a new ring arrived. And I didn't even speak to a human to get that done. So I love their service. Bias for aura and uh or bias for a ring because you're picking up a pulse line, you're picking up a much a full skin touch. So you're picking up, I think, more accurate data that the data will show you or the evidence will show you. However, it doesn't really matter about what the data is, it's about the trends, as you so rightly said, Nick. It's to look at, I use my data to look at my two hours before bed the night before. So what did I do differently? I don't use it to tell me that I'm gonna have a good day or a bad day. And that's something that you really have to coach people out of because they wake up in the morning, they go, I'm gonna have a shit day. I've got 64%, I'm gonna have a shit day. No, no, no, no. Let's step back from that and go, actually, I I ate late last night. I ate at 9.30 and I had two glasses of wine. So, you know, as much as I hate to harp on about alcohol, and I am an ex-military officer, so I'm a highly skilled drinker. And I'm not a quitter, so once it's open, but the data is really clear. And to give you some figures that might make sense to people, my resting pulse is generally about 55 to 57. I'm 62, and my heart rate variability is generally about 48 with spikes of up to 110. So it's a really good for my age. My core body temperature will always drop minus 0.5 to 0.7 degrees overnight. It's not quite as much as I'd like, but my body's always been the same. It's never dropped a lot overnight. Body's got to trick basically drop about 0.5 to 3 degrees Celsius every single night, and it needs to drop to enter glymphatic sleep. So I use my data to to help me with that. But when I have one glass of wine, and I'm not talking a bucket, I'm talking a pissy little 100 mil, 125mm amateurs glass of wine, and just the effort is not worth it probably.
SPEAKER_02I don't even get the taste, do you? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And my resting pulse will go from 55 and it won't drop below 75 all night from one glass of wine. My heart rate variability will go from around that 46, 48 and drop into the low 20s, if not below 20 from one glass of wine. And my core body temperature won't drop. It'll stay plus one, plus two degrees up, because my body is metabolizing poison. So the body can't actually digest or get through the liver alcohol, it has to turn it into another form of chemical. But it takes four to six hours to digest wine, a glass of wine. A little bit lower if you've got a great fit system, but it rapidly affects sleep. And I think I've said this before. I think we should all just drink at lunchtime.
SPEAKER_00Give yourself the whole day, too.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, but wine is basically fruit juice. So there's no reason you can't have a glass of red wine with breakfast. But we shouldn't even have breakfast. Let's go. We should only be having anyone over 60 shouldn't, in my view, shouldn't even be having two meals a day. So you pick which two, but yeah.
SPEAKER_01That and that's another concept. But basically, to be realistic, I would have one or two glasses of wine. I would enjoy them socially. I'd choose the evenings that I have them, and I'd have no shame or guilt. And if I go out at lunchtime and somebody says, Do you want a glass of wine? I go, of course. I'm not not drinking, but I'm not drinking on my own. I'm not drinking at home every night. I'm being really aware of for me for longevity and for my not my lifespan. I don't want to live longer. I want to live better for longer. So that last 10 or 12 years of my life in my 80s and 90s, I want to really still be skiing and climbing mountains and still doing more doctorate work. I want to keep using my brain. So what I invest in now, by the lifestyle I'm living in, decreasing my alcohol has had a massive difference on my data and my stats.
SPEAKER_00And I think, Nick, for you and I, probably the biggest changes we've made in the time that we've been that we've known you, Sally, and been looking at all of this is we rarely eat or drink alcohol after 8 p.m. If we do, it's a choice because we're out or something. But yeah, like you said, at home, we just don't do it. And because of the barley lifestyle, we're often in bed by 8:30 or 9 o'clock anyway.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think the main thing is for people is look at your trends, get some good advice. Most people don't even know where on their aura app or on their phone app to find their cool body temperature. They don't understand that it's really indicative of deep sleep. So it's a correlation with deep sleep. So it's really important you know how to use that app properly. I've got some tennis players that I coach, sleep coach, not tennis coach, sleep coach, and some athletes. And the first thing I do every day is when I look at their data as I'm looking at their cool body temperature and I'm looking at their resting pulse and their heart rate variability. Those three data points give me the starting point for my conversation, which is what the fuck were you doing last night? So generally that's the start of that.
SPEAKER_02I'll I'll give you my stats and you trip if you can figure out what I did last night. So my resting heart rate was 55, variability was 20 milliseconds, core body temperature went down 0.2, and my respiratory was 13.6, which is probably average for me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, which is good. It's actually a good respiratory. I suggest that you ate earlier and you had a pretty early night. You've got a low HRV, and some people do. So that's another comment to people. Don't take your HRV absolutely seriously. Don't worry about what it is, worry about what it does. So if you've always had a low archiv, you were looking for a trender. Somebody, there was some data that came out from Rhonda Patrick yesterday. I think it was Rhonda Patrick, I'll look for the link, that says that really high-quality omega-3 is having a really strong correlation with increased HRV. So that's your vascular system. It's how your core fitness, as far as your vascular fitness. And I'd suggest omega-3 is making sure that there's a dilation. Same as nitric oxide, is really important for vascular dilation. So there's a couple of supplements that would help with the physiology, but you've got to put your body under that stress, that zone four, zone five training. For short periods of time, 13 to 18 minutes a week. So it comes back to training as well. You've got to stretch that vascular system to get that HRV going up. Otherwise, you'd average and we don't ever no one wants to be average.
SPEAKER_02No, well, 75% of people think they're above average, which is impossible because it's only 50%, you know.
SPEAKER_01I'd say about 50% of those are delusional.
SPEAKER_02Definitely. That is 100% correct. Yeah. I got an off-script question here because something that I'm researching at the moment. Peptides. Have you done any work in that space? Do you know any? I know it's all clinical trials and there's no human approved product yet, but it's getting a lot of um I know a lot of people that are trying it. I've been thinking about it myself, reading or listening to some podcasts from doctors and people around the world. What's the story? Because I'm still trying to learn it. About the wolver the wolverine sack stack and the Motsy and things like that.
SPEAKER_01I did a lot of work on uh BCP157 and a couple of other peptides about two years ago, so I'm not current on the last two years of work. Phenomenal. So sub Q, small amount, and that is going wherever it's needed in the body. So it's not as though it's being injected into. So for elite athletes, we'd inject it into a joint to deal with an injury. It's been taken off the FDA approved. I think it's just come back on to the FDA approved. So they're going in and out. There's actually the last two months, there's a really quite noisy pushback from neuroscientists around it, much more than there had been for two years. So they've been really curious, and now they've come back to the conversations I've heard in the last sort of four to six weeks with the Hubens, the Rhonda Patrick's, the Louisa Nicolas, be very careful about using the peptides because there's no real, there's no human clinical data to show what it does over a long-term period of time. So I absolutely believe they work, but I think for me, there's not enough data for me to be actually, and I'm not elite enough as a performance athlete, and there's other things I can do in my world with good supplements. You know, you can use berberine, which is great for longevity of cellular level. Urolithum A is one of the latest things that's showing a really strong neurogenerative outcome. So having a really strong supplement stack would be more important to me than going down the peptides. But do your research. It's a great question. As I said, I had a did a lot more. That last Asian tour I did a couple of years ago, I was deep into peptides and talking to people about longevity around peptides. I haven't been back into that space for that couple of years.
SPEAKER_02I wonder if they're still around. Those people who were taking it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, it's more than that. It's do we have data to say that's the c so it could be correlation versus causation. Because most people that are taking BCP 157, for example, will also be training, sleeping well, eating well, such and such. And it might just be the edge. So I'm not saying don't, just be really cautious of your service provider. Don't buy it on the black market, don't buy it on Amazon, go to a third-party tested clinic, that type of thing.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Last question. I've heard you talk about your impact model and the neurobiology of a day. Can you explain for us what that means? How we can work more with our natural energy rhythm instead of constantly pushing against it, which is what most of us do.
SPEAKER_01Dr. Andrew Huberman has, he didn't even know he did it, but he talked about a phasic day, a phase very creative, phase one, phase two, phase three. So I've added a little bit of creativity and done a lot more work on this. And the neurotransmitters in 90% of humans run with the same rituals and rhythms during the day. So in the morning, on waking, we would have naturally high levels of epinephrine, which is adrenaline, and naturally high levels of dopamine for motivation and foraging. So that is what I call the activations phase. So from zero hours from wake up to about nine hours later, you'll get really naturally high levels of adrenaline and dopamine. What that means is that your motivation and focus and ability for grit is generally higher first thing in the morning. And then you'll see a softening of those neurotransmitters in the afternoon. What we tend to do though, we tend to avoid hard conversations and we book them at the end of the day because we avoid and then we go, oh shit, I've got to do that. And now I'm actually under sympathetic response. So I've put myself into stress because I've delayed or procrastinated. And now I'm actually not in the best neurobiologist, not biological state to be doing that work. And the person, if I'm having a courageous conversation, nor are they. So arguments get bigger in the evening, uh in the afternoon, and they seem much bigger than if we'd addressed it in the morning. So the first phase that zero to nine hours is activation. You can increase performance by using caffeine, by using cold water immersion, anything that increases your cortisol and adrenal response. There's a lot on socials at the moment as cortisol is the evil monster of the world. It's actually not. Cortisol helps release sugar into the system. So basically, cortisol is associated, yes, with stress, but only because it's releasing sugar so that you've got energy to deal with that perceived stress or real stress. So we want high levels of cortisol in the morning, high levels of adrenaline and high levels of dopamine, and do big work. Deep focus, courageous conversations, hard weight training, anything that's going to increase our pulse, we want to get that done pre lunch. Then we've got our soft. Afternoon, which I've called consolidation. So I'd be looking in the afternoon to be now running at filing, easy emails, creativity, so brainstorming with my team, getting my delegations out, anything that's I don't really need to do, I've got no adrenal response. It's just comfortable for me to do and I can get it done. And then my 14 to 15 hours onwards, which was my overnight, is what I would call my embedding phase. And that's where I'm just making notes of my day. I'm making notes for tomorrow, and I'm physically doing them into a journal or into a diary so that when I'm writing, I'm doing electronic updates, but I'm also handwriting, which means that the brain uptakes because it hears the sound of the pen or the pencil on the paper, so it hears a sound, it physically moves. So the neuroplasticity is ingraining, and we now are remembering the prefrontal cortex is uploading that information to the hippocampus, which is just above our ear. And now we're remembering for tomorrow. We're also decreasing our cognitive load before we go to bed. So when you talk about waking up and or perhaps dreaming about LinkedIn things, like from your torturous episode, if you had sat perhaps for three to five minutes before you went to bed at the end of the day and just wrote down all the shit that was on your mind about frickin' LinkedIn and written it down and gone, what I do differently, it may have been enough to download it from the brain. And so it's a really great time of the night to think about what have I achieved today? Tick, tick, tick, tick, book in the day. And I use that term, sorry, Nick.
SPEAKER_02I was gonna say I probably should have done that, but I took the alternative path to jump in the pool and have two margaritas.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And how did that go for you?
SPEAKER_02I had a shitty night's sleep and I had nightmares about LinkedIn. Yeah. But I felt good in the pool.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, the pool was great. So it's just about that end of day is because one of the key things to remember is that melatonin signal, which is triggered by light, the angle of the light, melatonin cannot be released until such time that you have all that cortisol and that noradrenalin, that anxiousness or that overwhelmed feeling out of the system. So if we're coming to the end of the day and we're still worried about tomorrow and we're still hyped up, and we use alcohol as the, as the, oh, I feel better, it will definitely drag into our sleep because that melatonin signal won't have come on. So bookending that day and going, you know what, it's a shit day, but it's done. I have no control over some of the things that occurred to me. And I have control over these things, and I'm going to make sure that I end the day and I'm now planning for tomorrow. I'm downloading anything that's on my brain, getting it out and going forward. And then go and jump in the pool. But I always use that activity at night just to sit for a few moments. I do 10 to 15 minutes of meditation. I use non-sleep deep rest, N SDR, and that's part of my process. And I do the same rituals and routines in the same order every night to segue me in that embedding phase. What the impact model basically, if you think of Eisenhower's matrix, which we use for EO, right? So you've got urgent and important. Turn that to a vertical of value and a horizontal of control within Eisenhower's matrix. So now you've got high value work versus just important, and versus urgent, you've got the word control. So Q2 is high value, but I need control to deliver it. Q1 is high value, but I have no control of when it happens to me. Q3 is of not value to me, and they're fricking monkeys, and they come at you from the side all the moment and they go, have you just got 30 seconds? Can I have? They're the greatest cause of frustration. And then Q4 is you have complete control over it, but it's probably not of value if we are overeating on our reels, on our socials, and it's detracting. So all of those have sort of got a duck-duck-duck line through the middle. So if we think of Q2, which is high value, high control, but I need to be off-grid to do that. I need to shut down my communication with the outside. I could stay there all day, but the detriment of that is that my team now feel unsafe because they can't get to me. And I'm actually increasing my stress by withdrawing from communication. If I live in the Q1, which is what I would call hamsters, hamster will alive, if I get too much of that and it's overwhelming, then I've got high adrenaline and high cortisol and it's crippling. I end up not being able to, I've frozen, I don't know where to go. Q3, I'm just pissed off and frustrated. And now I start saying to people, just leave it with me. And you take their monkey and you put it on your back. The upper level of that is that if I do Q3 really well, as I go to my team, great question. I'd love to talk to you about that. I have time available at 2:30 p.m. and 4.30. Which time would you like me? Which look time would you like to speak with me? And now I have escalated it to a Q2, to a high-value, controlled conversation. So the key with the model is running your day. So we tend to arrive in our office in the morning and think, when I get to my desk this morning, I'm going to work on A. I'm going to work on D. As I'm getting to my desk, a monkey jumps out and says, Have you got a minute? Can I just have? And you're like, fuck off.
SPEAKER_02I don't need your shit in my life. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. On your inside voice says, fuck off.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And now your sympathetic system showed up. So now you've, before you've even got to your desk, your cortisol and your adrenaline is high and you're frustrated. And shit just happens to you. And you get to lunchtime and nothing's been done.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. I've definitely had those days. Not as bad now, but definitely had a lot of those days.
SPEAKER_01So if I say to every leader, invert your day, 180 degrees invert your day, arrive at work or to your desk with the premise, I am full of adrenaline, I'm full of energy. I am here to serve you. What do you need from me today to be successful? So delegations, talk to your team, get them on Zoom, get everybody online, make sure everybody's got what they need to be successful today, and then just disappear and go into a Q2, go off grid, shut your. But that's generally about 9.30-ish. It's about an hour and a half after getting to work because all your pedals are settled. Everybody's got their delegations. Everybody's asked their questions. You go off and work for an hour to an hour and a half in your Q2, and then you pop back out like a lemming and go, who wants what from me? Who needs a signature? What are and so you go back into the chaos and the shit and giggles, delegate again, answer questions, return those phone calls, do those immediate, urgent emails or important emails, and then go back in for another Q2. So you run the neurobiology of your day with this squeeze and then a release. Squeeze. And you can do that for a hundred hours a week. You can absolutely peak perform as long as you're giving this bot your brain about 30 to 35 minutes to decrease the cortisol and the adrenaline and then work in that softer space of deep focus, innovation, creativity, and then come back up to the squeeze again where there's people and questions. But if you stay like this all day, you will burn.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you're so right. Because I used to have this theory, and I know a lot of people say, oh, and that's because there's nobody else there. Yeah, like that's logical, but you don't have to do that. And I I think at one point when we had a lot of stuff, I I just gave up and said, I don't I don't plan anything in the mornings. The mornings, I'm like you said, I'm there for whatever you need. Right? Team meetings, blah blah blah. But work I need to do, I never ever tried to do it in the morning, always straight after lunch or just before lunch and try and break it up. And I think naturally I just got to that point myself. And I'd go to the gym in mid-morning on purpose to break it up and I and also to show to the team it's okay to go and invest some time in your physical and mental fitness, because when you come back from that, you're like on fire.
SPEAKER_01Oh, and that's your big work, right? Your pre-lunch, if you go to the gym mid-morning, say serve your clients, go to the gym, come back. I would use that chunk of time then to do my big focus. Lunch, same again after lunch, we'll get a decrease in energy. So, really important to go for those high protein, good fats, that avocado, that olive oil, low carbohydrate at lunchtime, because as soon as we get that high loading of carb, we're going to get that really chronic insulin drop, that glucose drop after lunch. So lunchtime is always this big fat, big protein, so that it keeps our, we stop that caffeine, you know, that dip. And not using caffeine either. Caffeine after lunchtime is really detrimental. It's got a six to ten hour half-life. That means sort of in good in some bodies, six hours later you've got 50% of this of the amount of caffeine. Some people it's up to 10 hours. So 10 hours of half after having a coffee, you've still got 50% of that caffeine. So I wouldn't be using caffeine after 12 pm. I'd be using water and I'd be using probably ketones, actually, exogenous ketones. So an IQ ketone, a ketone drink that's basically just fueling the brain with ketones. You can use creatine the same as this. So on those days where you haven't slept well, if you are using a creatine supplement, a high-quality third-party tested, on the days that you've had a shit sleep, you can increase your creatine to 20, 25 milligrams. Once again, go and look at Rhonda Patrick's work. She talks about this. She was just on the CEO podcast yesterday talking about her how she monitors your creatine. So generally 10 milligrams a day for brain. Muscles are really greedy. They take up 5 to 7.5 milligrams of creatine a day. So the brain's actually not getting creatine unless you're loading above about 10 milligrams. But if you have a shit night's sleep, wake it up to 10 milligrams for the day and you will see brain.
SPEAKER_02I'll take you up on that. I'll report in. I'm going to go and have a juice after this and whack 20 grams in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, do that and see how you feel. I think you'll find that you'll have that mental acuity for the afternoon.
SPEAKER_00And when you were talking about, you know, organizing your day in waves, it's interesting. I had that sort of almost a feeling of like, oh, you know, that actually sounds really nice being able to sort of, you know, to do that. And I think there's two parts that come into it for me. One is training ourselves to do that. The other, of course, is training our staff. Because if you've trained your team that they can come in at any time and just throw that monkey and run away before you can give it back to them, you've got to retrain them on these are the windows of time that I'm available. And the rest of the time, you're going to have to sort it out yourself or wait until I'm available. So I think there's really it probably take time, but absolutely worth it.
SPEAKER_01That's Jenny. And the first thing you do is I have what I call a tailgate meeting. And it started from my day's consultancy with farmers and forestry teams, where you get a Ute and you drop the tailgate of that truck, and all the farmers would have a meeting around a tailgate. And if you think of farmers on stations, they work in isolation, but they need help from other people on the station at set times of the day. So they'll tailgate and they'll go, I'm moving the cows from block 16 to block 32 into the yards. At 11:30, I need four people to be there. And so they share what their needs are for the day. And then they go and work in isolation. So for me, a leader, when they tailgate, they go, I'm going to be off-grid today between this time and this time. Who else needs to be off-grid to get a piece of work? So if you've got a proposal that's got to go out, you can say to Marianne, you've got to get that proposal out by 2.30. Would you like to be in Q2 after lunch? And we'll just cover your telephones. So Marianne goes, Yep, that's great. So we put on the whiteboard or on a chalkboard or whatever or in the calendar. Marianne's in Q2. Q2 is sacrosanct. Unless the house is burning down, no one can get to her. And I always say, if somebody's having a heart attack, if they die, don't interrupt me. Dead is dead. But if they're fitting, I'll come out of my office. So it's just, you've got to give the criteria for escalation so that people are psychologically safe. But it's a really good comment, Jenny, is that that morning telling people when you are or aren't available is gold. But that remember, we're all terrorists and we don't negotiate with terrorists. So if somebody's you've got a glass window and they put their bloody face up it like this with their nose squished, tell them to feck off because as soon as you answer them, you've just patted the dog and it's the realm dog. You've patted the, you know.
SPEAKER_02You've got that damn thing licking your ankles all day.
SPEAKER_01Yep. So it's very much about communication. So that book is one of the books that's being rewritten in the moment for publication, republication. So I look forward to sharing that with people when it's newly published.
SPEAKER_02That impact sounds good. So where can we get more information about impact now?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Impact right now, you can go onto my website and I've I've got books and programs I've also got on my YouTube. I've got some videos on it, and it's just Sally underscore Ducksfield as my Insta and my YouTube. Or email me and I'll send you the big training videos which come with the books. I've just been blessed, a beautiful woman that I've been coaching for years and years. She's in Darwin, in behind in that mining industry, and out the back of the backdrops there. She's just introduced, she's just given 30 impact books to her whole team in the mine, and they are now going to run their whole rhythm of the day because they are stressed, they're overwhelmed, very masculine environment, a lot of punch-ups, and we're making sure that we decrease that stress, and they're using the model to do that. So it's a really effective model.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. That's great. Yeah, I think that routine, as they say, routine sets you free, and having a routine, whatever it is, is super important. And I remember I had a team member that would um and I got back into this habit myself, I call it interrupt driven. So I'm doing something, I need some information from somebody else, and I just go and annoy them until I get what I need to so I can move on. And one of my our team was just constantly annoying and said, Look, I can't do this. You've got to you're gonna ask me 20 questions today. Can we batch them up and like just book a time, come see me for 15, 20 minutes and let's just answer them all. It took a while, but it actually worked a hell of a lot better for both of us. So yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_01I give my uh team members a notebook and it's just got boss written on the front of it. And it should have Queen, but it's got boss, and they've just got to write their questions, and they come to me once with seven questions, not seven times with one question. And in the morning, I set up exactly what you did, Nick, which you did intuitively. But if we do it as a system, then it works so much better. Then everyone's psychologically safe. They know that they're just gathering questions, they know that I'm gonna be available, and I ship my laptop and I'm a hundred percent in the room of them for 15 minutes. I'm engaged with them, I can segue into coaching, I can segue into mentoring, and then I can release into the wild and they come back again. So it's just vital to set up those systems.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. What a great chat.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. As always, we've run out of time way before we've run out of conversation. So I suspect we might be recording another one with you, Sally, before too long.
SPEAKER_01Delightful. No, hey, thanks for the opportunity, guys.
SPEAKER_00Oh no, thanks very much for joining us. Because one thing I didn't talk about today was lighting, and I know you have a lot of information on that about you know how to set up the lighting as before you go to bed. So that's for next time. But yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Really appreciate your time and you always just blow me away with you make my brain hurt. Wait till I'm a doctor. Oh, exactly. Thanks again to Sally Ducksfield, and as always, thanks to Nick. If this conversation hit home for you or got you thinking, head to mspmastery.blog and keep the conversation going. And for this episode, we'll be sharing Sally's details and any links that she makes available to us there for you to go and find. You'll find all our episodes there and more wisdom from the peers and partners who are shaping the future of our industry. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. We've got plenty more great guests and stories coming your way. Until next time, this is MSP Mastery.