The Power of Sitting in Neutral - Interview with Tiffeny Parker

In this powerful episode of Success to Soul, Dr. Tanya Prewitt-White sits down with executive coach, former Team USA athlete, and functional health practitioner Tiffeny Parker for a transformative conversation about performance, burnout, emotional regulation, and the often-overlooked power of sitting in neutral.

Drawing from her experience as a Team USA track and field athlete, Team USA bobsled competitor, executive coach, and functional medicine practitioner, Tiffeny shares how high achievers can become trapped in a cycle of constant performance, productivity, and achievement while becoming increasingly disconnected from themselves. Together, Tanya and Tiffeny explore self-leadership, emotional intelligence, recovery, nervous system regulation, burnout prevention, and why true success requires more than simply doing more.

The conversation dives into the similarities between elite athletes and corporate leaders, the dangers of chasing constant dopamine hits through achievement, and why many high-performing women struggle to pause, recover, and honor their emotional needs. Tiffeny introduces her powerful concept of "sitting in neutral," explaining how learning to stay present with emotions, transitions, and uncertainty creates greater resilience, clarity, and sustainable success.

They also discuss functional medicine, hormone health, adrenal fatigue, nervous system regulation, mineral imbalances, menopause, executive performance, and the importance of treating the whole person rather than simply managing symptoms. Through practical insights and personal stories, listeners will learn how physical health, emotional well-being, and leadership effectiveness are deeply connected.

If you've ever felt exhausted despite your success, struggled to slow down, or wondered how to create sustainable high performance without sacrificing yourself in the process, this episode offers a refreshing and powerful perspective on what it truly means to thrive.

Connect with Tiffeny here:
Website: sidetrackpath.com
Instagram: @sidetrackedpath
Personal Instagram: @Tiffiep

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

If you're tasked on paper that it's tasked on the inside, if it's not that brought to the happiness you expected. If there's a quick little voice that keeps asking if this really all there is, then this podcast is for you. Here's your host, executive coach, and guide for high attributing women, Dr. Tanya Philip White.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Welcome to Success to Soul. I'm your host, Dr. Tanya. If you're new to our community, this is the podcast where we know success without soul is not success at all. And I'm super excited to invite our guest, Tiffany Parker, who I met while executive coaching. And every time I meet with her, I receive some wisdom. I'm always inspired by the ways that she moves in the world and how much she exercises, and I aspire to be as fit as you one day, but that is not the point here today, Tiffany. Welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:10

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here and just to be able to hold conversation with you because it's always magical. There's always some takeaways that just allow me to just reflect differently in the world. So I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Yeah, I always feel like I show up my truest self, and those spaces are oftentimes rare. So thanks to you too. Okay. So can you tell our audience a little bit about your journey that took you to the point where you became an executive coach and the work you do today?

SPEAKER_02 1:38

Yeah. So executive coaching kind of found me. I was working with a company that we have had the opportunity to like journey with together. And it was amazing because it originally started from executive coaching from the elite athlete point of view and being able to bring that same type of understanding mindset of as a high-level achiever and a high-level performer into C-suite and executives to help kind of coin that athlete mindset for them. From there, it kind of took a collage of different approach. That's where it started. But by the time it all evolved, it was something completely different. And yeah, originally I was the person to come in to teach high performance mindset. What I loved most in being able to step into that arena in executive coaching was it allowed me to learn to pause and to understand my true gift, which is giving people space. And I have a very big personality. There's a lot of life that I have lived from team USA tracking field to team USA Bobsled. I've coached in every industry you can think of, executive-wise, tech, emergency medicine, like the finance, the list can go on and on and on. And I've had amazing opportunities to be that, or to do that and to be that person to create space for people. But yeah, that's how it started. People just wanted my mindset and they needed to know how to hit targets and be consistent in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_01 3:05

A nutshell. So can you tell us what are some of the similarities that you find, and I know there are many between executives and the pressures that they experience to that of an elite-level athlete?

SPEAKER_02 3:18

Yeah. I mean, everything is the performance, and the performance is what matters most as the athlete. Like you step into the arena for the crowd, you step into the arena for your coach, you step into the arena to represent an entire country, you step into the arena to represent your community. And then eventually, if you're once you have been seated, you realize you step in the arena for yourself. And so that is the same red thread that I've seen every single time with executives that have its coach. And a lot of it is I have this kind of coined idea of self-leadership. They go into their arena of corporate space and trying to be the best that they can be, trying to lead teams and like make people effective, but it all starts with self-leadership and like how you show up. And so once I learned that as a professional athlete, and when I got seasoned into my career later on, I realized that was a common thread between myself as a high performer and high performance in the executive space. It's figuring out A, what is self-leadership? B, how do you take self-leadership, who you are personally, professionally, all the leaves, and how do you mold that into where you want to go as a human? And also how do you want to direct a team? And so, yeah, there's so many different common threads that I can like riff on. But self-leadership is definitely one and understanding that there's ebb and flows to performance. And that is probably one of the nails on the head that I try so hard to work with my executive high-performing women specifically, is you don't just go out and like try to have a gold medal race every single time you compete for an Olympic quad, which is four years long, broken up in between year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day. Like we have our own what we call a macro cycle, which is the big plan or whatever corporate plan that someone might have for where they want to go with their team. Same thing. We have a macro, they have a macro. We take that big plan and we break it into micro chunks, our year by year. That's their quarter by quarter. Then we break it up into smaller week by weeks. That's their week by week, their day by day. And so you learn that you can't have a gold medal performance 365 days out of the year. They can't, as women. Like you just can't, and as leaders, you can't do it. And so I give them the gift of understanding pause for themselves and what true recovery looks like. There's a reason why athletes have off days. There's a reason why we have like low impact training. Like we know what our personal performance cadence is. And my goal is to help others and like different leaders understand what their performance cadence is as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Yeah. Okay. So there was so much goodness there. First, the going into the arena for yourself. Woo! All right. I think that is a big one. And then this idea of that you can't win every day.

SPEAKER_02 6:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Okay. So tell us when you have a client, or maybe even yourself. Sometimes I think I can win every day. I'm like, oh, win the day. And it's like, well, today was in my day.

SPEAKER_03 6:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Has this very high expectation of winning every day? What are some of the tools that you've used or that you teach clients that help them understand that it's really the long game and that there's going to be these ebbs and flows, and it's important to take pauses. I find so often that high-achieving women don't give themselves the permission to pause, to reset, to periodize, right? Their success.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Yeah, I would say for that question specifically, in terms of just like what it looks like to find the wins in the day, we'll start with that. I did the heptathlon, which is seven different disciplines. Four events on one day, three events on the next day. 100 meter hurdles, high jump, long jump, 200, 800, javelin, like all of these things made up the heptathlon. So I had to learn the art of transition between seven different disciplines that ended up being one overall performance. And so, in my experience being a heptathlete and learning that if I had a great hurdle race, I had to give myself time to celebrate it. If I had a crappy hurdle race, I had to give myself time to be pissed about it. Cause like no one is harder on me than I am internally. And that is my also trend with the people that I coach as well. And we're our own worst critics. Like that's what makes us great, in my opinion. But absolutely, so yeah, I had to learn how to celebrate and how to be angry and how to transition to the next thing as quick as possible. Because high jump was gonna come. Like the order of the events are the order of the events. And if I put that into how I work with my clients, like most of them are moms, like most of them are running a household as well. So it's like, all right, once you shut your laptop or you walk out of that like door frame that is your office, what do you transition into? And so why I say I compared the art of transition with my clients, and that's really what like we drive home. That's so imperative and so important because everything is a transition. Like, if you don't know how you were before and whatever has happened in the heck of your day at the office and transition into mom life, transition into you. If it's like I want to get to the gym or I want to go to yoga or meditation, like I need to do this for me in order for me to transition into the next thing. You learn that you never leave the day disappointed. I always had multiple events that I worked on within a week. I didn't always do all seven events Monday through Friday. It's like Monday I would hurdle, Thursday I would hurtle, Tuesday I would throw javelin, Wednesday I would throw shot put. But I learned in my training for the hip sathlon, all three of those disciplines that I might have taken out of my seven that made me me as a hip tathlete. Two of them might have stuck, but one of them I was gonna do well in. And so I always learned to figure out and to find like what went well today. And I think that's the same thing that's exactly relative to high-performing leaders and especially high performing women is looking at like, all right, this door frame is your first event. Like you walk into the doorframe to your office, this is your corporate life, this is what you do. When you walk out of that doorframe, you transition into what you're doing next. Look at how many things you transition into a day. Are you trying to do a seven-event hephaft on in one day? And if you are, maybe it's like you should probably look at that and maybe pause. And if that's just what you are in that season of like your life cycle, okay, let's sit in neutral. You might not be someone that's gonna stop. My job is to not teach you how to stop. Like, I'm not here to press the brakes for you, but I'm here to teach you how to be able to sit in neutral so that way you can choose, transition, and see, okay, like what were my wins at the end of the day in all of this? So yeah, I would say sitting in neutral versus teaching clients how to stop and realizing like what are your cluster of events that you do in a day, and how can you find the wins within those events that make up who you are?

SPEAKER_01 10:50

Yeah, this concept, you said this to me the last time we spoke, and I was like, Oh, yeah, that's the power of sitting in neutral. And I often find, tell me if you have a different experience that even for myself and clients, the sitting in neutral tends to be sometimes the hardest part for people who have received affirmation, accolades, money, finances, all these things, achievement through always doing. And so then the neutral is like, wait, what's happening? What should I be doing? So talk a little bit about this neutral and what are the positives when someone's in neutral.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Yeah, I mean, this might get a little bit deep, but let's do it. Let's do it. I'm here for like so afraid of bring me back up uh through the depths of the water that I'm about to trickle into. But sitting in neutral for me was learning how to stay. And what I mean by that is as an athlete, just as a human, like we'll take me as a human and put the athlete in a different box right now. To your point, everything that I did was based off of a performance. I did X to get B, I did B to get, or X A to get B, I did B to get C, X to get Y, all of the things. And oftentimes I missed the emotional regulation that came with that and understanding what that truly looked like. I missed the celebration of the things that I did accomplish and realizing that, like, yeah, no, it's not that common where people do two Olympic sports in like summer and winter and like have three master's degrees. Like in my mind, I was like, oh, everyone does that. I was just like, this is what people do. Like, everyone's a high achiever. So learning how to stay allowed me to understand my own emotions, like the good, the bad, the ugly, the nothing. Yes. And oftentimes it's like our high performers, we say we don't have time for that. I'm just as guilty. I used to say all the time when I was competing professionally, like, I don't have time for emotions. Like, cool, we got 25 seconds. We're gonna get through what this means, we're gonna summarize it, we're gonna transition into the next thing. But I trained myself to be top 1% of people in the world to be able to do that. Yeah, people have souls and people have their own set of emotions. And if I truly do care about my relationships with people and what that means, and I realized if I truly wanted to not just have a performance of creating space for people, not in just leadership coaching, but just as a friend, as a partner, like all of the things that I aspire to be, I had to learn how to stay. And staying is sitting in neutral. It's the ability to be able to upshift if I need to go into motion or into movement. And if I needed to just pause or stop and take the keys out of the ignition and get out of the entire car and just sit with like what is going on around me and to notice it and to be present, I gave myself the option of that. And so for me, and what I try my best to help people with, especially when I'm executive coaching, is being that mirror for them when they're sitting in neutral. Because oftentimes you're sitting in neutral in the dark and you're like, what the heck am I gonna find here? And that's when you lean in on like souls need communities. Like you get to allow people to sit in neutral with you. That doesn't mean they need to press your gas pedal. That doesn't mean they need to unbuckle your seatbelt and turn tape keys out of the ignition, but they get to see and experience what you are experiencing without changing you.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

Yeah, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. You reminded me of I had my own epiphany as I was listening to you. When I worked as a sports psych, I would often work with injured athletes who would be injured for the first time in, you know, in college or in their professional career. And they would often say it was the first time that they even had any of these emotions. And so we would talk about, well, those emotions have always been there. But then as you were talking about it, I'm like, oh, why do I also see similarities when people are in transition, or if I've worked with people who've been laid off, and it's the same thing, they're in this neutral and they have maybe not in their life quite yet had to have this experience where they couldn't be in the doing. That is also sometimes the achievement is also the addiction. I always say like the achievement, that gets addicting the dopamine hit, absolutely grunning. Absolutely. And when you don't have that and you're a neutral and the feelings that come up, and we talk about how we can be so much better for the next season, because now we can also emotionally regulate, understand our emotions, and then you bring up show up for another human being in a way at a soul level we dismissed before. Yeah, wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

Oh, it's so true. I mean, I always ask people, I'm like, when's the last time you put your car in neutral? Like actually, your physical car. I was getting towed one day, and that's when I needed to put it in neutral. But outside that, like when I relate it to something that people often are in all the time, which is their car. Yeah, I let them really reflect on that. It's like, how many times in the 10 years you've owned your vehicle? Have you put it in neutral?

SPEAKER_03 16:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:17

Never. I'm like, so why are you doing that to yourself? Yeah, it's powerful.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

It's powerful. It makes me think about how we get disconnected. I think we get disconnected from our emotions and our bodies. Can you tell us from your perspective how women, especially high-achieving women, can get disconnected from their physical bodies and all of their achievement?

SPEAKER_02 16:41

Yeah, I mean, uh, that goes back to the original question about like performance and what that looks like and how it's defined for people. And I realized that I had there was the performance of athletics, like what people knew me as, how I was announced, how I was introduced, all of the things that people saw at face value. Then there's the performance of just like who I am as a human, which like was kind of there. It's like a there's a circle, here's the circle. And I learned as I got older and just more seasoned into my career that like I needed to leave space for both of those things to exist. They're kind of like a Venn diagram where it was like, I either operated in one performance or the other performance. It was either I was fully athlete, US flag, this is what you saw, this is who you knew me as, or I was like, I will never tell you anything about my athletic career. I freaking paint and draw and read books and like marine biology. Like there was, I don't know, maybe it was my own, like maybe I just didn't play in both of those kind of spheres for myself, or I don't really know. I'll de think deeper on that and get an answer for you. But I didn't even allow people, I would say, until like the first maybe three years to like see the middle of my Venn diagram, like that middle space that allowed me to take both of those performances that have made me me, but also like show up complete and not show up in either one or the other, like two halves. Like, I would rather show up as a whole of both of those things. And in times, as high-performing women, we chase the dopamine, like we chase the alkalades, we chase the achievement, we chase the what allows people to see me. And some people are great at what they do, as they should be. And they're just like, heck yeah, give me my accolades, like I absolutely deserve this because I put in the work and I did the effort and like everything possible to be who I am. The problem with that is people don't practice the pause, like they don't practice the this is not the gold medal performance. Like, this is just like you need to lead your team between like each quarter, not just get to the end of year and try to figure out how you're gonna do a whole like risk assessment or whatever else, whatever department they're working through. And it's like, here's your end of year report, like we all did great. This is our performance. It's like that's not gonna be successful, and it's not gonna be something that you can make, you can't have a continuous performance with that. And so when you're constantly chasing dopamine hit after dopamine hit after dopamine hit, your intrinsic body, very much literally your nervous system, your adrenals, everything will eventually shut down. Like that's why it's like the soft air, like adrenal fatigue or like burnout. And I'm like, they are real things, and I'm air quoting them because there's seven stages to adrenal fatigue. We're not gonna go through all seven today, but yeah, no, no, it's like, but people don't know where they are, and if they sat in neutral more, they would be able to assess where I am, where do I need recovery, and where and how can I build the consistency of the high performance that I want to achieve. If you pause or neutral, you have a greater opportunity and ability to continue to hit that high performance after high performance. And so it's sitting in neutral with intention, not just like let's go sit next to a tree and touch grass and like have no plan. Like that's important too. The most high-performing women don't typically like want to do that because they feel like it's a waste of time. And so I've learned when it comes to performance and helping high achievers and high-performing women specifically, I need to tell them why the nervous system um downshift, why the mineral support and all these little things that we're adding like gas to your car. Like I need to put it into an analogy that really genuinely and like visually works for them so they understand where they're going in their performance and how to sustain it, because they don't need me for the rest of their life. If they need me for the rest of their life as a coach, as a health practitioner, I'm not doing my job well.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Yeah, 100%. 100%. I'll say me too right there. So, for listeners who don't know, I mean, I remember when we were chatting, it might have been a year ago, and you had told me about functional medicine and how you're bringing this into your coaching practice. I remember being like, okay, how does this work? What are functional labs? What is Tiffany doing? So I'm guessing there's someone listening that is in the spot that I was. And I mean, can you explain what functional medicine is? Yeah, uh, how you use functional labs in your practice and help women so they have a better understanding?

SPEAKER_02 21:36

Yeah. So when I would say I was like maybe like year nine to 10 of executive coaching, I had women that were in their like mid to late 50s, a lot of them going through menopause, postmenopausal. Then I started getting some like mid 35s, mid 40s that were like perimenopausal. And I was like, I don't know what any of this is. I know I'm a woman, but I'm like, mmm, I just have women coming to me saying that like their husband's gonna leave them. They keep snapping on people, they're gonna get fired from their job. They feel disconnected to their child, they can't control their mood swings. And I'm like, I got hired for burnout and adrenal fatigue. Like, I don't know what my scope I don't know what to do with my hands with this. And what made it special is at that point in my life when I was like seeing this trend of these women that I was being exposed to, they were all high executive like medicine. Like I was in emergency medicine, clinical doctors, neurosurgeons, like women that were like chief academic officers as well as in practice, like dual. So like I had some heavy hitters where I'm like, okay, I came for burnout, I came for adrenal fatigue, and I came to help them understand self-leadership, but there has to be more. And so a lot of times women would always ask me, like, okay, well, like, how did you learn to kind of like chill and like be as emotionally regulated and in tune with your emotions and being the emotional, I really it's emotional equanimity. Like, how did you learn to have this level of emotional equanimity? Meaning like my ability to either shift up in how I needed an emotion to happen or shift down if I needed an emotion to kind of like chill, or however I needed to control what my action was. And so I started realizing it was cortisol control, which like as a professional athlete, your number one thing is like control your cortisol, like control how your warm-up goes, control your spikes. Don't put yourself in situations where you need to like have heightened awareness, step away if it causes you like any type of aches. Like, and that's my B type personality, where I'm just like, hmm, lower my cortisol. And I realize I can't tell an academic leader and a emergency medicine hype performer to just like go hug a tree and just kind of put your hands up and like sign some music that works for you. Yeah, let's chill. They're like, no, I have three kids under the age of 12 and like a full family to support and have a ranch and like a horse, and then all these people are coming to me and like women's healthcare is crappy. The list can go on and on of how I have listened to these women. And so I was like, all right, how can I take my understanding of cortisol regulation? How can I take my understanding of like actual adrenal fatigue and like how I've used it in performance as a professional athlete? And how can I bring traces of that into the medical space where they have been in the medical space longer than I have actually been alive? So, how am I about to hold a conversation with someone that for 37 years has devoted their entire life to women's practice and women's medicine? And I'm here, like, actually, there's the difference between your like cortisol, flight or flight, like adrenal glands, and like your sex hormones, and like depending on how you regulate, you actually are turning off your sex hormones. And I need to give them the science behind it. The one it was intimidating, but I was like, this is the only way that I can help them. Like, I have to be able to speak their language in a way that allows them to put action. Like, that's always my big thing is how can I allow the person to be actionable? So I was like, all right, functional medicine, it is like I had my own health things that I was working through, and I was like, people kept dismissing me and by people, my doctors, and I'm like, nah, I had like honestly, like health bias. Like, I would go into my doctor, and they were like, Are you fine? And I'm like, no, I'm not. And it's just like I've been top one percent of people knowing their bodies for I don't know, like 15 years of my life. We're really being honest, like 22. So, like, I'm telling you something's not right. And they're just like, feel things are normal, you're fine. And I'm like, no, I refused. I refuse for someone to tell me that I feel a certain way. So, in the curiosity that I have in just who I am as a human, I'm like, all right, let me go find the answer. And I started out pre-med in college, and I was just like, organic chemistry sent me. I was like, nope, I'm cool, don't want to do that. And when I compared these like hydrogen atoms to honeycomb cereal, I was like, that's how I knew it wasn't for me. I was like, this might not be for me. And I found functional medicine, and it was a way where I can bring a different perspective to women leaders. I could go in and look at their hormones and give them actual data with like, all right, I want to validate how you feel because I can't tell you how you feel or what is going on, or like this brain fog or these moody regularities that you're having. Like, you know how you feel. So, like, let's find some data and let's figure it out. So that's how this whole thing happened is I wanted to bring women a proof point that they weren't crazy. And I wanted to be able to help them understand that they can still be high performers while also the nature of life could happen as it was. Like, menopause is going to be a thing, but that doesn't mean that you need to have all of the symptoms that come with menopause. And so when I was able to develop the leader and help the leader develop their teams while also helping the leader understand this is what's going on internal with your performance in your body, when I learned to go back to this Venn diagram, take the performance of the person that was like this white coat and take the performance of the individual, like their health data and what was going on, and find the middle of it and present it to them. It changed the game fully for me in terms of just like how I truly bring the whole human and the whole woman to the performance that they want from the functional medicine side and the leadership side. And yeah, that's how I got here.

unknown 28:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

What are some of I mean, your work looks different from mine? And what are some of the experiences of the women you coach? What are the results? Or I guess even said, like, oh, women realizing they're not crazy. I feel like that just in and of itself that they're not alone must be incredibly powerful. But what are some of the experiences or results of your clients from having you someone in functional medicine, also while executive coaching them? Like, I can imagine it's mind-blowing for them.

SPEAKER_02 28:40

Yeah, I try to keep it simple because I'm a bit of a nerd and I can like deep dive into like, yeah, your sodium and potassium levels are off, and that's causing your like adrenal strain. And I'm like, all right, that's too much, Tiffany. Like they don't need they don't need to know that. But a lot of it is they're not getting the nutrients that they need. Like a lot of what I see is based on gut dysfunction. Okay, like you, gut brain barrier is a thing. Like what happens in your gut biome, which is how your body regulates itself and fights inflammation and bacteria and diseases. All of that has a direct correlation to your cognition, how you think, brain fog, clarity, focus, dopamine, serotonin, like all of the neurotransmitters that allow you to actually have a response to the world that you are leading. 10 out of 10 times is related to having an imbalance gut and imbalance minerals. I would say 10 out of 10 times. So I start showing them like these are where your imbalances are. It's no different than me taking or me being an athlete and my coach being like, this is where your technique is off, and this is how we fix it. And so I start with the basis of like, let's look at your minerals because your minerals, your calcium, your magnesiums, everyone's like, I'm taking magnesium because that's what everyone else in the office is doing, and women should take magnesium. And I'm like, Do you know why? Do you know what type there's there's like four, there's multiple types. Like, do you know what type you need to take for you? So I would say some of the biggest, I would say case-wise, one of the most interesting cases is I have a lot of women that are that come in already taking magnesium, like recently, because like there's the rage of like magnesium is good for women, muscularly, night sweats, like all the things that are that come with symptoms of perimenopause, menopause, brain fog, all that good stuff. They see a lot of great results with magnesium. But they're taking the wrong form. I know they're taking the wrong form for what they need. If there's someone that needs like brain fog and cognition, and they need to like cross that blood barrier from their gut to their brain, because that's the biggest connection and system your body has, like, you need like magnesium truonate. And a lot of people are like, What? I just take citrate or oxide, like, or they don't know, they just take magnesium. And I'm like, you're taking the wrong form for how you want to perform. And so that is like the pause where it's like the effort was there, but let's sit in neutral and let's kind of shift over so that way you can like get back on your way and go into the fast lane if you want to go into the fast lane. So looking at their gut and looking at their minerals, minerals is a simple test, it's a hair sample test. So I have them like do a little hair sample cut. It goes, I do at-home labs, it goes back to the lab, and we get to see everything how their body oxidizes. I can look at like glimpses of how their thyroid is functioning, like so many different things from that one test. And when I can show high-performing women like this is what's going on, they will automatically listen. It's different than me saying, like, this is what I've experienced, or this is what client cases have experienced. It's like, nope, this is what you are experiencing and this is your body. And so helping educate women in what it looks like to make their performance sustainable and how they balance their minerals, how they balance their hormones, and like just allowing them to advocate for themselves. That's the biggest thing is I do a lot of work teaching women how to advocate in their careers, especially as leaders. And I'm like, yeah, you got to advocate for your health as well. Like who you are in your personal life is exactly who you are in your professional life. Like, there's no difference. So, yeah, I would say that's the biggest thing is like really looking at the imbalances in high-performing women, and there's just more, like, we have a cycle, we need more minerals to like go through all of the phases that make a woman a woman. It's completely different than being a man, and so you have to support that.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, my mind's blown.

SPEAKER_02 33:03

I know, sorry.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

Yeah, are there minerals that generally you find women need to be taking more of, or what food should we be eating? And yeah, what are you finding?

SPEAKER_02 33:20

I would say I will always die on the hill of test before you guess.

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:28

Because most times people aren't taking enough magnesium, and then if you overtake magnesium in correlation to how much you need, you end up with anxiety attacks and like all nervous system. And I'm like, well, we could test this, we don't need to guess, and then we could see how much you actually need. But magnesium, super important, zinc, super important. But the thing is, minerals work in a yin and a yang. So magnesium isn't absorbed and utilized without calcium. Like both of those two things need to be yin and yang. Zinc is so important for inflammation factor, for like skin, for immunity. Like, so many different things in your body require zinc and magnesium. Zinc specifically is yin and yang with copper. So I have a lot of women that like all of a sudden just like go gray. Like they're like, why is my hair gray? I have no idea what I did. What the heck? I'm like, Well, we can check your zinc and your copper ratios. I would give or take it's probably very imbalanced, and your copper is probably extremely low. Your copper is extremely low. And like nine out of 10 times, that's exactly what it is. Because zinc and copper also help with your hair. And so, yeah, so many things. But magnesium is extremely important to take. Zinc is extremely important to take. And I would say an adaptagenative that allows the body and the nervous system and the adrenals to calm down. Like there's only so much breath work you can do. There is only so much like sauna that you can do, so many like EBSM salt bass that you can do. All of those things are extremely important for nervous system recovery. But if you have a high performance output, you got to do more. And you have to do more with intention. Like, I would never, nor did I in my career say, I want to be an Olympian and I need to go on 15 mile runs 365 days a year. Cause like I need to be the best, and like I need to do all this equates to that. I would never do that as a professional athlete. So why would I just go take random supplementation as like a high-performing woman who a woman that is like having nervous system regulation issues? Like my mind can't compute that.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

Yeah. Oh, I'm so with you. This is what's going on in the back of my head. I'm thinking about, and I don't know if your clients share the same narrative, is for clients to even sometimes get on our sessions every other week. That's like the extent of their time. I have clients who are like, I haven't gone for my mammogram in two years. I haven't seen the doctor. I try to go to the dentist. I mean, their lives are so full that a lot of times between all the people they're leading, all the things they're doing, their own care during a season of their life, if they're a professional woman and they're mothering or caring for adult parents, that they come last. So my mind is going there. How you combat that, or what is it? Do you have a talking point or a talking track that you remind women that they are also worthy of their own care before they crash? Because then I see like women will absolutely crash, maybe have a panic attack on the floor, or they have a health crisis. And I don't want women to get that far, but that's sometimes where, like, okay, now I'm gonna put myself first. So, what is your experience with that? And what do you tell women?

SPEAKER_02 36:53

Yeah, well, first I acknowledge it because it's true. There are a lot of women juggling a lot of different things, and oftentimes I get, especially with mothers, like mom guilt, they're like, I can't do this, like I feel guilty. And I'm like, what cost are you willing to pay to continue the guilt that you feel? And I really sit with them in that, and I'm like, all right, let's look at all the costs you have. And they're just like, I'm not gonna survive this. I'm like, do you can you? Can you survive exactly with the same output of performance that you're doing right now? Do you think you can survive the next 15 years of your life? It's usually absolutely not. And so it's how do we integrate it into what their lifestyle is? Like, I have some people that are gung-ho, that are single, that are just like, nope, I'm here to like do longevity and optimize myself. Like, I'll do whatever you tell me. I'll put 15 hours a week into this if I need to. And I have some women where I'm just like, all right, if we need to get all of our minerals in a smoothie, if you don't like taking supplements or pills, open them, put the powder inside the smoothie, wham, bam, boom, walk out your door and go. It's like I try my best to create the space to meet the person where they are, and I allow them to see what costs are they willing to surface. What costs are they willing to surface as they look at like what they should do versus like what they actually like need to action. And so I normally get the people that are already at that like kind of crash out space. And I'm like, all right, so now I got a course correct and like we got to start over, and it's okay, but I teach them how to keep it manageable in their life, and that's the piece that I love is I don't want women to get to that. Unfortunately, if I'm being fully transparent, which I'll always be, some people they need to crash out in order for them to understand how bad it really is. And my hope is that women learn to not do that more, and the more communities that we're involved in, the more people that are doing preventative care, the better. And we get just exposed to more people that are taking care of themselves. But I also want the people that do get to that like back against the wall in the corner, have tried everything, nothing's working, say they don't have time for themselves. Like, I want them to have the opportunity to live life on their terms, just as much as they give life to everything else that they manage in their day to day.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

Yeah, it makes me think about sometimes I'll share with a client when they say it it feels hard to put themselves first, and I'll say, Because you're becoming a new person. You know, you're you're literally becoming another version of yourself, and that's labor. That's labor.

SPEAKER_02 39:41

Yeah, so work is hard.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Sometimes it's just easier to keep working or to keep in the same cycles, and that that's also true, yeah. And and holding them both. So, what has your own body taught you about success?

SPEAKER_02 39:57

My own body taught me about success. That's a great question. I would say that's a really great question. Like, how do I want to answer that? Um I am capable of getting myself out of any situation, and what I mean by that is I have had like I've been untouchable, like Superman status, where I'm just like, I'm gonna go eat McDonald's french fries, which like as a health practitioner, I do love McDonald's french fries. I believe in balance, that's just my thing.

SPEAKER_01 40:46

But can we talk about that for a minute? They have gone downhill, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 40:49

They've used everything's gone downhill. That'll be the second part. What my body has taught me about success is I'm capable of anything, and being able to stay, like going back to that theme for me. I think that's been my overall like overarching year theme of like how I've redefined success for myself because success for myself was very much performance-based. And I love the performance element, like I love being able to just like do great things and to do dope shit and like to be dope. Like, I love being better. You are, yeah, I love being better personally, professionally, spiritually, mentally, all of the leaves that is success to me. And I just had to sit with the hard and with my own emotions. And so, how what my body has shown me about success is I am a way more emotionally in tuned individual than my performances have led me to believe in my past. I am very empathetic for people and like in situations, but my performance like always came first. Like I can compartmentalize like the best of them. And I realized that I never fully gave all of myself by doing that. And so I never going back to that Venn diagram is like I think my kind of fear of success in me as a human is like I never want to be half, like I want to be a whole person, and so I need to blend that Venn diagram and like get really good at this center. And that center is what my body has shown me for success. It's like sitting with the emotions, sitting with like just the idol of just like all right, the win today was like my latte art came out cool like that this morning. Just fine God, and I'm like, okay, cool, it's alright. Like, that's it. So my body has, I would say, respected my emotional empathy, and that's that's most successful for me.

SPEAKER_01 43:06

Yeah. So I don't know if you just answered that. So is this what success to soul means to you? Is embracing the empathy and the emotions in your journey and not just the outward physical performances.

SPEAKER_02 43:21

Yeah, because that emotional journey internal also has a cost. And that cost is exactly what I saw in my own functional medicine labs when I ran them. And I'm like, I can't do this performance anymore. Like, actually not physically capable. And for me, like I said, I am capable of anything. And for me to have gotten to a point where I wasn't capable of just like waking up in the day, I was like, something's wrong. Like something is not right. And yeah, I don't want to ever get to that point. Again, I'll be on my deathbed. Hopefully, that happens and I'm on my deathbed. And even then, I'm hoping I hope I'm like looking out a window and like used to be like and like the French President McDonald's finally got better. Like whenever whatever that conversation looks like, I just want to be whole. Like that's it.

SPEAKER_01 44:20

Yeah. Well, and I think along your journey, what a perfect human being to take women on a journey to as a coach to help them be their wholeest self. So, what are some of your offerings? How do they find you?

SPEAKER_02 44:33

Yeah. So I have a 12-week mineral rebalance program that it's foundational. I start every executive woman there, anyone that I work with, client case in my practice, because we got to see like your body is an electric thing, your chemical, an electric being, and your minerals, those are your electric currents. So, like, we got to make sure those are dialed in first for you. Like, you can't have performance without no gas in your car. Can't go anywhere. Yeah. None. So yeah, I have start a new cohort of women. We'll be starting in June. So we have signups open for that. And yeah, we just love to bring women in, teach them what's going on with their internal body data, walk them through how we like get them into the performance that they truly want to be at. And so yeah, that's what lights my soul on fire is being able to look at what's wrong and fix it.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

I love it. Okay, and how about your social media handles?

SPEAKER_02 45:30

Oh, yeah, you did ask me that.

SPEAKER_01 45:32

Nope, I want to remind you.

SPEAKER_02 45:35

I was like, I want to read labs and help people. Um my social media is at Sidetrack Path. And you can find me there at Tiffy P is my personal if you actually care about how I make latte art in the morning. But if you need tips and tricks on what's going on with your body, how high performance functional medicine and high performance health actually allows you to get back on path to this person that you want to become in self-leadership journey, in your teams that you lead, just as a whole, as a high performer. You can find me at ZidetrackPath. And Zytrackpath.com is my website. And that's basically all the spaces and places you can find me in.

SPEAKER_01 46:19

Amazing. Tiffany, you are incredible. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. And everybody go follow her today. Thank you, Tiffany.

SPEAKER_02 46:27

Thank you, Tanya.

SPEAKER_01 46:28

All right.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

So that's it for today's episode of Success to Soul. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance to win a grand prize drawing of a value of $10,000 with Dr. Tanya herself. Be sure to visit SuccessToSoul.com to pick up a copy of your free gift. You can ask her any question you like in your voice, and she'll answer you back personally in her voice. Then join us on the next episode.