Episode#34 - How to Create a Life You Don't Need a Holiday From with Helena Hamlet

Are you living for your next vacation? What if every day could be part of a joyful, fulfilling life that you don't need to escape from? In this episode of The Resilience Catalyst, I'm joined by Helena Hamlet, founder of the EatLife Academy.

Helena shares her powerful story of being diagnosed with cancer with two young children, a moment that stopped her in her tracks and forced her to re-evaluate everything. Her journey from burnout and exhaustion to creating a life she truly loves is an inspiring blueprint for any driven professional who feels like they've lost themselves in the hustle.

This conversation is for anyone who feels there's "more to life than this" and is ready to start living it.

In this episode, you will learn:
► Helena's 3-step E.A.T. framework: Empower, Align, and Transform.
► Why you must let go of old beliefs that no longer serve you.
► The critical difference between society's version of success and your own.
► How to view rest as a powerful strategy for reconnection, not a sign of weakness.
► Simple, daily practices to incorporate creative happiness into your life.

Connect with Helena for her free masterclass and community: https://go.eatlifeacademy.com/starthere | https://linktr.ee/eatlifeacademy

#WorkLifeBalance #InspirationalStory #FindYourPurpose #LiveYourBestLife #BurnoutRecovery

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you're feeling drained, exhausted, overwhelmed, or burnt out, this show is for you. And I want you to know that you're not alone. Millions of professionals are operating in a resilience deficit. On the Resilience Catalyst Show, you'll learn how to understand, rebuild, and grow the currency of resilience so you can restore your energy, think clearly on the pressure, navigate conflict with confidence, and sustain your performance without burning out. I'm Joyceon, your host, friend, and resilience catalyst. Let's get started. Have you ever been in a place where you just feel what's happening on the outside and what's happening on the inside of yourself doesn't align? Well, today's guest is going to help us to find ways to connect what's happening on the inside and on the outside. My name is Joyce Didison, and welcome to the Resilience Catalyst Show where we make resilience simple. We make it easy to understand and easy to apply in your life so you can get through life challenges and still have your mojo. I am so excited today to talk to you about getting your life back together. And I think this really is that optimism advantage. I think sometimes we go through life thinking, oh, it will never get better. It's that's the way it is. I'm stuck in this pattern. And we know it's not. So today we're going to call this show the optimism advantage. Let me invite our guest, Helena. Helena is the founder of Eat Life Academy. So listen up. Let's learn from Melina today as she shares with us. As she's coming to us from across the pond, and she helps her clients to live driven life, to navigate burnout and live compelling lives. So, Helena, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here to speak about such an important topic that affects so many people. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00 2:20

It is a very important topic, and yes, it is becoming more and more an issue for people all over the globe. Wherever I you tune in, you're hearing it's become more and more of an epidemic. So tell us what got you started in this line of work.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

So I developed Eat Life Academy. Eat Life stands for Empower, Align, Transform. And the aim is to just help people create lives that they don't need a holiday from, helping them create a life that is brilliant inside but also on the outside. And so I have I have a careers background. I've been working in the careers guidance sector for over 20 years, where I've been helping people overcome career transitions, overcome burnout, deal with personal milestones, whilst also navigating, feeling like there's more to life than this. And so I also overcame my own transition as also, which has contributed to where I am now. And that's helped me combine not only my personal experience, but also my professional experience to put it together to help clients understand how to align their lives both internally and outside, so they create a life that they truly love.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

Yes. You know, people are always thinking that they're going to live for the next vacation. But what you're saying, why can't your life be part of that vacation? And yes, you need time away, and yes, you take that, but it's you shouldn't be living your life for those moments. Every day should be part of that joyful, exuberant life that we we build around us, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Exactly, because what happens for so many driven professionals, they have to schedule rest or schedule a holiday when really when if they commit to making time for themselves and making time to create happiness in their lives on a daily basis, they're not only combining success but also fulfillment together. So they will they will then be able to build a career that is full of fulfillment in all areas of their life, and that's why I combined the Eat Life Reset program within the academy to help people to really combine what they're dealing with, but also create a life that they love.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

That's excellent. So tell me, what were you? How did you come up with this idea? What was the the pivotal moment that said I have to do this?

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Well, interestingly, I had to go for my own transformation, and so let me explain how it all happened. So I am now eight years cancer-free, and so it all started eight years ago when I was diagnosed with cancer. And at that particular time, I had two young children, I was working full-time, and I was just struggling everything. And as a typical parent, you sort of tell yourself, Well, this is this must be how it's supposed to be. I'm okay pushing through my tiredness, pushing for exhaustion because isn't that what parents are supposed to do? And then along came the diagnosis, and it literally stopped me in my tracks where I had to let go. And I felt like, see it as juggling oranges, where I'm trying to hold everything together, and because I had to go through treatment and everything else, I had to let it go. I had to ask for help, receive support from other people around me. And it was only then through my transformation and my growth and my healing process I realized that wow, I was experiencing burnout. And it was the first time that I realized what I was experiencing because I was exhausted, I didn't recognize myself. I realized that I knew everything about my children, their hobbies, I understood sort of what they their favourite colour, their favourite food, but I did not know me. I did not recognize myself. And so the the healing process was a challenging one, I admit. And it took me a few years to get myself together. But over that period of time, I invested in coaching and I took that time to work on my mindset so I can move more intentionally and really focus on my priorities and what I want out of life. It made me really stop and think, okay, what do I want out of life in more detail? And so that sort sort of birthed Eat Life Academy. It took me a few years to overcome, but I realized now it was a blessing in disguise. And God doesn't choose the qualified, he qualifies the chosen, doesn't he? So I feel like that experience of going through exhaustion, burnout, feeling like I can't move forward, that helped me to understand what people are experiencing. And so I was able to combine my experience and my career experience together to form Eat Life Academy because I now want to help people overcome overcome burnout. And I've been there myself, so I know exactly what it like, what it takes and exactly what it's like. So that's where it's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

So eight years ago, you had that wake-up call, and good for you because some people have the wake-up call and they don't wake up, right? They go right back into doing the same thing. And not only did you have the wake-up call, now you say, How do I help others to not have to go through this situation so to wake up to really learn about themselves? So tell us some of the things that uh people learn in Eat Life Academy when they when they what you teach and who do you work with, and what are some of the results that people are having working with you?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Okay, so I I um I teach the Eat Life Reset program, and the program is defined between three main stages. So empower is the first stage, and that's all about awareness, being aware of all areas of your life the good, the bad, the ugly, what's happening, what's draining you, what's uplifting you, because clarity brings power. And so when we look at a client's life, we're not just looking at their career area, we're also looking at spiritual, their relationships, health, finances, because it all affects each other. And so once we have highlighted what's really happening, we can then look at okay, what do we need to let go of? Because so many times when we are transitioning through life, we pick up different beliefs and values, which may not always suit us or do us any values as we get older, and so it's about letting go of the things that do not serve us anymore. And so when we move on to the next stage is alignment, and with alignment, we're looking at our values, our identity, and how we want to show up. And once we become clear become clear on this stage, we can then move on to transformation, which is the last stage within the program. And at this stage, it's all about our behavior and our habits and making sure that we are we are implementing what we want to learn and we're recognizing that it's all trial and error. We are human beings, we are human beings. It's not like we're going to put a plan in place and it's going to work straight away. It takes more than 21 days, and so we work with the client in more detail to ensure that their plan going forward fits their current life and they are happy and they can make a few tweaks along the way. And I found that this program works because it helped me overcome what I went through, but also it helps driven professionals understand that there is a difference between success and fulfillment. It's not necessarily the same thing. And so I've worked with clients in the past where they've had the senior role, they are financially free, they have the beautiful life, but they feel like they're living somebody else's version of success. And so throughout the program, we are allowing them to create their own version of what success what success looks like. And with a society, I think over the years, people are told what success is, but I give them the permission to form their own version of what they want their lives to be like so that they can move away from the autopilot, being on the treadmill, so to speak, and create their own version of what they want to achieve in life.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

Great. You know, it's so important when we think about uh the advantage that we have to live this life because there is a slim chance that we couldn't be here, but to be here and to be healthy and to be well enough to make decisions and to have a career and to have a family and to be able to make choices. Some people don't have that, and I think sometimes we take it for granted that we have those choices, and we know that our body never lies, our body tells us everything, everything stays in the body as it shows up in the body, so it's very, very important for us to think about okay, where we are and where we need to go. And I love that you you have a framework and you're teaching the various stages, and um, because we do one of the things we do at the Resilience Catalyst is we make people resilience simple by teaching people the nine dimensions of resilience, right? Is the spiritual, the social, the emotional, the intellectual. We look at the environmental, the financial, the physical, and the interpersonal. Because if you just walk and you do one element, the others are going to draw energy from it because it's a system and they all need to be aligned and work well together. So it's so brilliant that you're doing that and helping your clients to move further faster. So, what is one thing you think is a challenge that clients are having, that keeping them stuck over the years you've been working with clients. What do you think is the biggest reason why they feel stuck in a cycle that's not moving them forward?

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Well, I would definitely say the main challenge is stopping, allowing themselves to pause and come off autopilot. And I say this because many driven professionals um they are so used to being productive and they value productivity. So when you tell them, okay, let's just pause a minute, let's just stop, they feel so uncomfortable pausing. They feel like when you take a break, they're they they feel guilty for it. And so you're having to, I'm having to explain to them that you have to view rest as a strategy for reset, for reconnection, and not necessarily something that is going to hinder their growth because they're on such a momentum to achieve and they're on autopilot to move, move, move, move, move all the time. Telling them to stop and take a pause and reflect is something that they're not used to doing, and they don't celebrate their milestones, they're so used to pushing through discomfort, pushing through um burnout, pushing through feeling uncomfortable because they view it as I must be on the right path. If I'm tired, it must be part of the career. And what I'm going to do is I'll rest when I finish. I'll treat myself when I get to the end. I can't celebrate now because I'm not even there yet. And so it's acknowledging these key things within their patterns of behaviors and highlighting it to them and giving them the chance to rest. And I also say to my clients, if your phone battery was on 5%, you wouldn't keep scrolling through the apps, you would definitely charge it and take a break. And so I always use that analogy in that example to help them see it from an and reframe it to help them see it from another example.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

Brilliant analogy, right? Once we see that five seconds, five minutes down, the button goes down below 30%. We're like, oh, where's my charger? Right? But we don't think about charging ourselves. You start looking, oh, my phone is below 50%. I should charge. How many more hours? When it was my daylight time, right? How am I gonna charge? But you see what happens though, and I and this is why I do this work and why we this podcast exists, because we don't have any way to measure how resilient we are. We don't have anything that gives us a quantifiable, this is where I'm at, and this is why we created the Wiz Resilience platform so people can measure all these different areas and they get a resilience score so they know where they are and they can actually start measuring. Because you need that when you get that signal, otherwise your phone would just die. You wouldn't know that it's low, right? We need to have those signals, we need to have them in, and that is what I bring to the market. That's what I bring to my clients and the coaches and consultants that we work with. That's why they they join us because they want their clients to have that, because people just get into autopilot and they forget that they have to recharge until they have something. And so clients are saying, Joyce, I love being in the platform because I can go and focus on myself. I can see what's happening in my head, what am I doing, and that gives me the motivation and that helps me build my momentum to okay, I need to I need to schedule, I need to take time in the weekend to to have just time just for us to hang out instead of trying to do everything. So they need that. We need we will not socialize to do that, as you said. We need now to create that structure for it to happen, and I think it's brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Excuse me, and one thing I would add is that resilience and breakout. Sorry, excuse me. I'm gonna say resilience and burnout have a push and pull relationship. This is something I always point out to the clients because if they're experience high level of burnout, they are less likely to be resilient in overcoming what they need to, and vice versa. Excuse me. Go get something. And the other side of it is if their burnout, if their resilience is high, their burnout is likely to be low. So it's like recognizing these key factors to helping them realize where they're at. So I definitely agree with you.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

It you know, it's really important because once we understand how our system works, once we have that process, it's easier to stop and say, What am I not doing? What did I miss? What where am I where is it off? And not everybody gets those signals. Some people, as you said, it's a diagnosis, right? That's when they get it.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

But so many professionals are so used to pushing through. They acknowledge the inner signals, but they're rewarded for pushing through, they're rewarded for showing up, they're rewarded for keeping and meeting the targets no matter what. And so even though they acknowledge that something's not right, that I'm tired, that I'm overwhelmed, that I'm I've rested all day, but I still feel like I'm exhausted, even though they recognize that I have a headache, I I realized recently I was working with a person, a client of mine, and she was saying that every time she was driving halfway to work, she had a headache. And she went to see medical care, and all the results came back clear, but yet she couldn't put the link together towards having a headache on the way to work. And so we looked at these small indicators that highlighted that hold on, you're in burnout, you're in survival mode, and that ability to reflect and pause is so powerful in helping somebody be become in tune with the inner self and recognize their inner signals because burnout does show up differently in different people, but when we talk about burnout, so many people think that it's going to be somebody on the floor collapsing low energy when really it's the tiniest signals, the smallest things were that show up within us.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Yeah. And we don't know. I mean, I I know for myself, I was teaching wellness, I was I was running wellness summits, I've been I've had interpersonal wellness for 28 years, and um I passed out on a plane from burnout. Spent five days in the hospital, did all kinds of invasive tasks, very expensive US hospital, only to find out, oh, it's stress-related. It was like, oh, it was burnout. And um, and so thinking we were on our way to have a bit of a downtime before I ramp up again, but my body just did not take me there. And so having a signal, having that thing to see, and that's having that place to go and actually visualize in it. I was like, what's my resilience index in here again? Oh, okay, that reminder, that visual reminder to connect back, right? That's why we see and we have the visual, and then we know. So it just does uh a stronger push for us to compel us to say, hey, I need to pause, I need to stop. Or you just close down and say, That's it for the week. I'm done, I'm done for the day, and setting those parameters in our lives so we can we can do that. And I think we have to have overall that optimism about our life. We have to believe that there is a better way. Because if you think that's all there is, you're not going to be motivated to do anything, you just think this is the way it is.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

I agree because success is motivating until it becomes our only metric for worth. And I say this because there's so many people feel like, oh yeah, I'm burnt out, but it's okay, this is how it's supposed to be. And it took me to having cancer that melt that helped me to stop and realize that wow, there's more to life than this. Yes. And then I started to realize that wow, life is so short, and we owe it to ourselves to create a life that we truly love every single day. Now I know that every single day cannot be brilliant, but we should be able to combine our careers and happiness together. And so within the Eat Life Academy, I also encourage creative happiness, incorporating happiness every single day, doing something that you love, as it lowers your cortisol levels and it helps you realign with your values and your beliefs, and so combines and contributes to you being living a happy life. And that's why I said life should be good enough to eat, it should be amazing.

SPEAKER_00 21:53

You know what it's true though, because it's so short when you face with your mortality, you realize if. Is precious. Life is too precious for me to just let it blow away, for me to not pay attention to every moment, stop and you know, smell the the lilies because it is so very short, right? Yes, and we don't realize that until a critical moment, and having it younger in life gives you the beauty of enjoying the rest of your life, right? It helps you to see, but some people they just drag on for the rest of their life, and life comes to the end of their life, and they're just miserable.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Yeah, and that's why I feel like workplaces need to do more, they need to encourage their employees to take time out for themselves. I know like many employees, employers are trying to incorporate more well-being and mindfulness. But I feel like if they did more for their clients to help them, so the employees to help them really embrace a life that they're happy with, so they can work towards autonomy, but doing it in a way where they are grounded, they're supported. And I think so many people would spend less time on sickness leave because that's what happens, isn't it? Where you you work through, you push through, you push through to a point where you're having to take sickness for months and months and months after the company. But if they taught how to overcome burnout on a regular basis, taught resilience and build up in their everyday work life, it would encourage people to go to work and know that they're supported and they're happy within it. So I feel like it's not just a a wee individual problem, but I feel like if we are if employees and companies came together and promoted it within their company, it would then have a have a had a downward effect on everybody else.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

It would be um, you see, it takes both. It takes the employee and the employer. Many organizations, because we've been doing corporate, we do corporate uh training and corporate well-being and resilience, that's where we spend our time. And for the last 28 years, I've seen the change in the market. Everybody has an EAP program, but there's like less than 30% uptake, right? And then the people who go to EAP are the employees who are aware, those are the ones they go and they go when they have an individual crisis situation, but then the rest of the team is over here. That person goes off. I mean, a team of 20. Okay, I went to EAP, but how does that support my team, right? And so we come in and we close the gap between EAP and wellness program. So organizations we they've been using the same tools for so long to solve those same problems, and it's a different world we're living in now. And having the same tools to solve the same different problems doesn't make sense. So it's a workshop, it's a training, um, oh, we get a wellness program, we get a nap, we get some yoga, we get some meditation in. But we this is not enough to build lifestyle habits and transformation. These are just piecemeals and they're not integrated and and interconnected. So we come in and we close the gap between the EAP, which is hardly ever used, and the wellness workshops and so. So we come in with resilience, where we're now teaching and providing an immersive experience for employees to step in to look at themselves, create that deep awareness, reconnect with who they are, and build the resilience anchors uh month after month so that it now becomes autopilot. It's it's it's challenging for employers to even know if somebody goes to EAP and get help because it's meant for rescue, it's after the problem. So you have a toxic team, and what we find out, what the research is showing, is that most of the burnouts, it's not even so much what you do, it's what you tolerate. The negativity, the uh favoritism, the conflict, the sabotage, the toxic culture, the leader who doesn't know what they're doing, or not performing healthy, the team that is without a proper structure. These are the things that the the irritations that employees continue to tell us over and over again that's wearing on them. Choice is not my work, it's the people, right? Or the structure or the system. And if we could really create a way to help the whole team to come together and get that insight and have that common language and start working, that's where we sit because we know just getting one person help does not solve the problem when it's when it becomes a toxic team culture, and we don't have to wait for it to become a crisis. We can do more and be proactive before it becomes a crisis.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

Absolutely, because it's a mindset problem and it's a group problem, isn't it? It's it's for everybody to chip in and work together because it's everyone in a team will have different values, different beliefs and how they want to work. And so it's being able to manage those differences but also overcome what people are what each person is feeling as well. And so it's it's something that it needs to be worked together over a long period of time to make sure that the team is is collaborating like this, and they don't feel like, well, I've been to training, I'm okay. Why are you not okay? I've been told to do this, but you're not doing this, and then we start pointing fingers, don't we?

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Yes, we they start pointing fingers, but if you have an overall team culture, you have a stable team culture, you already know you have people um that who has enrolled into the team culture, you you have a clear outline, a team charter, you have a culture design, a culture map. Everybody has to be part of building that in the organization. And if if you impose a team culture, it doesn't work. But when you bring your team together to work on a team culture, then people have common language and they're now speaking the same language. And when things happen, they go back to that agreement. Well, I thought we agreed this was the way, so that reduces the conflict, it reduces the confusion, it helps people to remember what they agreed to do, it creates more accountability without the friction, right? And then we now have people working in an environment where we know what to expect of ourselves and each other, and we know how to address the issues when they come up. So we find that many times these conflicts are not addressed properly, and they result in more frustration. So not only do I have more work to do, but now I have more frustration because we're all now doing more with less, right? The the way the work is. The workplace has changed drastically from when I started working 28 years ago in workplaces, it's far different than it is now. So the the reality is as leaders and as organizations, we have to ask, what do we need to do differently for the workplace culture that we have today? And that requires a different approach. It requires the individual support and the team support. They have to go together. Because if if I go off and do my stuff and I'm going away and I'm all well and I come back into a toxic environment, as a conflict analyst, I couldn't understand how organizations will say, Oh, these two people have conflict. You mediate them, but what about the other people who've been drawn into this conflict and who have been distracted and and overwhelmed and vicarious trauma from what they've experienced? How they need help too. They need a place to be able to bring closure, uh, reframe their way of looking at things so that everyone can come back and be on the same page. So this is this is a great conversation in terms of helping people to work, live, and play well. Because life is all about that.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Absolutely. And it's just helping people to adjust their mindset, adjust how they behave and the things they do on a daily basis to incorporate it all together, and it doesn't happen overnight, but by bit by bit, as they continue to work on improving their lives, being clear on what needs to change, it definitely is possible.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

Absolutely. So, Alina, if someone wants to get in touch with you, where would they find you?

SPEAKER_01 31:13

Um, currently on Instagram, I have my link tree that will direct you to a free plat a few platforms, including my free masterclass, where you can start your first steps to overcoming burnout and exhaustion. I also have an Eat Life community group where we come together on a weekly basis and we it's a safe space to come in to feel seen, just heard. You take off your corporate hat, your mask, and just come in as you are, and we have conversations and and teachings on how to overcome burnout on a daily basis on a weekly basis.

SPEAKER_00 31:46

That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for being here. And uh, if you're looking for resources on burnout, um, Helena has been doing this, and she has a beautiful life story of uh survival overcoming and rewiring her own resilience and um dealing with burnout. So check her out. Thank you for being here. My name is Joyce Dennison, my guest Helena Helmet, and we were talking today about the ability to live life more optimistically, to eat life, right? Eat the eat life academy, that's what she is. So if you are thinking your life is tough, you need to know that life can be sweet enough to eat. My name is Joyce, and this is the Resilience Connelly Show. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you on the next episode. As you go back into your work and life, remember that success and sustainable performance don't come from pushing harder, it comes from building capacity. Your resilience can be rebuilt, strengthened, and sustained, but it takes one intentional step at a time. Thank you for spending this time with me on the Resilience Catalyst Show. I'm Joyce Davidson, your host, your friend. Until next time, take care of your energy and your resilience.