Hello and welcome to today's podcast episode. I'm here with coach Heather and holding my new dog Hamilton that you can't see but you might hear him make a little guest appearance. So hello and welcome today, Heather. Hey, how's it going? Oh all is great and Heather and I just hopped off an instructor meeting that we do together with our instructors to talk about our clients and how we can support them.
And one topic that came up that we shared on Instagram live over a Dietitian Boss on Instagram is developing a meditation practice and what does that look like? And it's an important part of growing as a business owner and developing a level of self awareness and I would consider Heather an expert in all things mindset.
So maybe you can share a couple tips or like what does that mean? Why is it important? Just give us a little bit of a background on the topic. For those who are looking to find more peace in their life, it's everything right. If you want more peace in your life, learning to be introspective to see where your emotions or your thoughts are driving certain behaviors is critical for you to be able to one make changes.
So if you're seeing things going in a direction in your life that you don't like, you need to have that introspection and that awareness in order to make changes. And also, I find that cultivating that in meditation, they call it the seer where you're watching yourself take action almost as a third party watching something happen, that ability to observe yourself plays out so importantly in your business, in your relationships and in everything that you do with your clients.
I mean if you can't observe your own thoughts and you're with a client then you're usually in your own head instead of really being present with your client as well. So it impacts all aspects of business and life in my opinion. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. When you mentioned introspective, I think that's something that a lot of us struggle to do.
We don't know where to start or what that looks like or we weren't taught that in school maybe as dieticians as clinicians you mentioned, it's important when you're working with clients which is great. But what about those listening? They haven't gotten started yet. They don't have any clients and they're terrified.
They're like wait I have to do one more thing after I get clients. So what I like to develop a mindfulness practice even at the most basic level before you have clients, maybe if you're struggling to launch or you're struggling to ramp up. The most basic mindfulness practice is first becoming aware of your own thoughts so that can look like sitting still and closing your eyes and allowing your thoughts to just flow?
What comes to mind? Is it a to-do list? Is it a conversation that you had with somebody? Is it something about a relationship that's popping up like what is occupying your brain space. And so just sitting and closing your eyes and seeing what pops up is a very first step in mindfulness.
The other way that you can do this is free writing. So if you don't feel comfortable just sitting and closing your eyes, you can free right? Which is a journaling practice where you just take a pen or pencil and you don't have any intention behind what you're going to write about and you just allow your thoughts to stream of consciousness to come out onto your piece of paper.
And that is another way to practice mindfulness. So, those are two ways to approach the same practice of observing your thoughts. Thank you for sharing those. And I just want to say that doesn't have to be a long process. That could be a couple of minutes a day, which is a great start. Maybe it's a part of your morning routine or not routine when you wake up in the morning or before you go to bed.
Another popular mindset tactic that we teach is affirmations. So writing them down. I know we share a lot of them on social media and I really love that you build on that, right? So perhaps after an affirmation, it would be personalizing that with your thoughts and feelings and then linking them to a specific affirmation, such as, you know, I am capable of starting and growing my business and capable of showing my face on social media, I'm capable of building a life that's flexible based on my schedule and desires?
So those types of things that seem hard for us that are possible, but that take us a lot of reflection and steps in the process to get from point a to point b. Is there anything that you notice with our clients who are more successful than others kind of patterns? I can share two of what their mindset routine looks like.
Is it that they do it consistently? Is it that they talk about it? Like what do you see as trends? One of the things I see as trends is that in order to have a positive mindset, you have to recognize where a negative mindset is coming from. So our Dietitian Bosses that are able to reframe where they're stuck and able to create a positive growth oriented mindset, they can really quickly dive into what's blocking them.
So they're open and receptive to looking at that negative mindset and exploring it. And then through that exploration we can shift it and say, okay, well that's where this is coming from, and it was this event that triggered it when you were 12 years old or 16 years old or last week and let's talk about that and they're able to drop into it really easily and then once we come to the other side of that tunnel, we can reestablish the positive pieces of that for the growth mindset?
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. What I'm hearing is self awareness, would you agree? Yes. And such the same way to say it. Self awareness and self regulation, which is a form of emotional intelligence which if you want to grow in life and become a leader and create a successful sustainable business, it's important to master that to some most successful people.
Focus on that meaning that you're able to process your thoughts and feelings and reflect and practice the introspection that you're talking about regularly, not just sometimes and think about how you're able to collaborate and communicate and work with other people. And this is really serious stuff when you're working in groups and when you're working alone and you're trying to communicate with potential clients, your current clients and reach your goals.
So thank you for sharing that. It's such an important topic that I think we need to talk more about here at Dietitian Boss. Anything else that you'd want to share in our conversation about developing a practice, what successful clients are doing, anything else. You think we missed our mistakes that dieticians are making in this process.
The mistakes are mistakes. We talk about a lot in this podcast. So if this is your first episode, you're listening to make sure you go back and listen to Libby or Libby and I talk about comparison. So I think that the most common thing that we see in Dietitian Bosses, that comes up as a mindset block is when you're comparing yourself to other people in your niche or other dietitians or other influencers on social media, that comparison trap is just that it's a trap and it can really get in your head. So one of the important pieces of exploring mindset and practicing mindfulness is to notice when those traps are being triggered and to work your way through it.
Yeah, excellent. And yes, we do talk about that quite a bit and it's easy to fall into the comparison trap and I just want to reiterate that it's normal and identifying your mindset is a great first step. So we all can fall into comparing ourselves. It's about how we handle those feelings and thoughts that come into our brains and what we're able to do and develop as a practice to be able to work with them and overcome them and learn how to develop relationships and communicate both with ourselves with our internal dialogue and then with other so on that I think that we've covered it all.
Unless there's any final thoughts you want to share Heather, thank you for your expertise and support. I have one final thought when you are looking at your own thoughts and looking at some of the negative thoughts that might be trapping you into certain mindset loops that you're looking to shift. It's really important to practice self compassion.
So we're coming at this from a space of self love and self compassion and we are practicing gentleness with ourselves because it can be common when we have certain thoughts come up to be like, I'm so upset that I'm still thinking this thing and really kind of get mad at ourselves. And it's really important in reframing your neural plasticity, your brain function to come at it from a space of self compassion.
That was a great way to wrap up the episode. Thank you so much Heather. I look forward to our next episode.
