Yeah.

It's like-- But actually, if you can start to create that level of awareness for how you can do those things, like your thoughts, emotions, and physical, et cetera- And even intuition.

Then when those moments come, you really are in a much stronger place than everyone else.

And I really think that now with, you know, my co-founder on Stressful, Mo, he's like a huge talker on AI 'cause he used to run Google X, and I, I'm lucky enough to talk to him about those kind of things and sometimes see him in talks talking to people about, "What's next with AI?" And all these leaders are freaking out, right? And everyone wants the same question.

It's like, "Well, what's next? What's next?"

Yeah.

So that's the micro external largely.

And a lot of people...

Where do we start?

Yeah, totally.

I mean, in Unstressable, we wrote about this, that there's actually a side that you start before you even learn the skills.

So we look at something we call limiting the needless stress in our lives.

And a lot of modern stress is actually within our control.

Everything you said is not right.

That's the reality.

Any tips for parents in terms of managing our kids' stress or even just having conversations around stress and the children in our lives?

Yeah

... with the two MDs, and I could barely remember my own name in the morning.

I would wake up looking at the phone, being like, "Oh, my God, is there another bit of bad news from my family?" I had a breakup out of the blue from someone I'd, you know, thought I was gonna be with forever, and you know, it was during this particular time that I was like, okay, you know, I've...

I always say, like, I lost my sister once, but I lost my dad twice, and this first loss was he was just not present.

You know, he was so depressed.

He was so, so struck with grief, so ridden with stress.

And at this time, I was like, "Okay, everything's out of my control, and nothing is changing, so what do I start to do?" Like, I have to start learning about this to, like, help myself because I was not the person that I was growing up.

Mm

What were you doing at the time? What did this moment look like for you?

Yeah.

Gosh, it was, um ...

I always say to people, you know, it was kind of l- life, I believe, had to show me how calm life could be and then how stressful, so I could really see the polarity.

So I was lucky.

Like, growing up, I had a pretty stress-free life until about, like, age 18, 19.

Um, you know, except for my dad had cancer when I was three, but he recovered and, you know, everything was well in that sense.

Far out.

What does a regulated leader look like in practice? And how does that state impact the people around them, the team, the organization?

Yeah, so I call it regulated resilience because I truly believe that, well, first of all, being in a regulated state allows you to go from high stress to calm in an effortless flow rather than getting stuck when we're unregulated we can get stuck in a state of stress we can find it very hard to essentially shift gear and go back into calm whether that's emotionally or mentally physically um and so regulated resilience as i call it because i think the old you know the old term of resilience is so outdated now that push through toughen up keep going until that's how we saw it as this overly masculine sense of like that's what it means to be resilient and That eventually causes a breakdown in the end.

That's when people are having, you know, burnout later, or that's when they're having a breakdown years and years later.

They're like, I've just been carrying on, carrying on, carrying on.

So that resilience side, I think is finally moving away to the fact that that's not true resilience.

For me, true resilience, which is that kind of regulated resilience is being able to know, okay, when to push, when to pause.

when to regulate when to kind of basically be very very agile and flexible with your own system and move in and out of stress back to calm as and when you need for performance versus you know um burning out and so yeah that being a regulated leader is oh god it just it has such an effect because it's you know we know now from studies stress is contagious but You can feel it anyway energetically, right? If you go into a room at work, if you go into a meeting or if you go home and your partner's stressed, people will feel on edge.

And so... you know as we move into a period that's more uncertain where people potentially feel like they may become irrelevant and they may be replaced you know what would you suggest to them in terms of kind of practical tools for for managing themselves and becoming this regulated person in an ever more dysregulated um world

What was it that enabled you to manage that or handle that and come out the other side?

Yeah, I mean, for me, I really think I realized at that time, you know, I can give a quick brief synopsis to people, but it's, you know, I was going through a period of my life where I experienced loss in every aspect at once.

Like you said, I had, you know, financial family struggle when my dad died.

had to put his company into administration after the 2008 credit crisis that he'd spent years building.

He became very depressed, understandably, during that time.

We had a lot of illegal battle going on with that that was just, you know, it was awful.

And there was so much going on.

And that makes stress in some ways a predictable and therefore, in theory, preventable uh challenge that you face how did you kind of take what you had been through and turn that into the book being something that actually other people can can perhaps solve their own challenges with