How To Recover From Burnout (It’s Not What You Expect) with Pippa Grange #656

What if burnout isn't a sign that something is broken in you, but a sign that something needs to change? That's the question at the heart of this conversation – and it’ll shift the way you think about your energy, your career, and how you’re spending your one life. My guest is Pippa Grange, the renowned psychologist, performance coach, and author of Life Reclaimed. Pippa spent 25 years working with the highest performers in the world of business and sport (including her famous stint with the England football team). But her wisdom today is for all of us – particularly anyone who feels like they’re running on empty, or that the way they’re living isn’t working for them anymore. We begin by talking about why overperformance is so prevalent these days, and why it’s not a personal failing but a cultural shift. Pippa describes burnout as something that happens when life’s pace and pressure outweighs our ability to cope. We overperform at work, at home, even socially – and we’ve forgotten what balance looks like. The solution? Her framework of ‘regenerative performance’, built around a simple but powerful cycle: perform, rest, renew. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s happening right in front of us every day – in nature. For Pippa, nature is the most intelligent model we have for sustainable human performance. After all, we’re a part of the natural world – and it’s moving away from these instinctive, biological cycles that has led to our collective burnout. Fortunately, she’s developed four core principles to guide us from overperformance into regenerative performance. They’re all about listening to the intelligence of the body rather than overriding it; tuning into our natural selves to develop sustainable patterns. And she brings the principles to life with practical tools you can use straight away, including a simple midday check-in that takes under a minute – and that I’ll definitely be incorporating into my day. This is a really important conversation, which offers a valuable, viable alternative to giving up. Follow Pippa’s advice and you can reconnect with your natural cycles. You can make meaningful change from within your life, rather than trying to escape it. It’s time to stop pushing through and start reclaiming the life you were meant to lead. The Thrive Tour: Transform Your Health and Happiness, a live show: Book Your Tickets https://drchatterjee.com/live Thanks to our sponsors: https://dohealth.co/livemore https://thewayapp.com/livemore https://boncharge.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/656 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Burnout doesn't happen overnight. It is a very uncomfortable involuntary process of transitioning away from what's not working for you anymore. Your body and your mind just say, "Hey, we've been throwing up warning lights for months and months here, you're not listening, so you're handing over the keys and we're crashing." What I really want to do is change people's method so that you don't actually get to that point where you are straining so much that you're on the cusp of a crash.

• 0:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More.

• 0:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  What if burnout isn't a sign that something is broken within you, but simply a sign that something needs to change? That's the question at the heart of this week's conversation and it will shift the way you think about your energy, your career and how you're spending your life. Pippa Grange is a performance coach and author of a brilliant new book, Life Reclaimed. Now, you might know Pippa from her previous appearance on my podcast or as a psychologist who transformed the England football team. You see, she's spent 25 years helping the world's highest performers understand not

• 1:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  just how to succeed, but how to do so without losing themselves in the process. And increasingly, that message is relevant not just in elite sports and business, but in every workplace and household. We begin by talking about why overperformance is so prevalent these days and why it's not a personal failing, but a cultural shift. Pippa describes burnout as something that happens when life's pace and pressure outweighs our ability to cope. We overperform at work, at home, even socially, and we've forgotten what balance looks like. The solution?

• 2:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Her framework of regenerative performance built around a simple but powerful cycle, perform, rest and renew.

• 2:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  And if that sounds familiar, it's because it's happening right in front of us every single day. You see, for Pippa, nature is the most intelligent model we have for sustainable human performance. After all, we are a part of the natural world and it's moving away from these instinctive biological cycles that has led to our collective burnout. Fortunately, she's developed four core principles to guide us from overperformance into what she calls regenerative performance. And they're all about listening to the intelligence of our bodies and developing sustainable patterns.

• 3:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  This is one of those magical episodes that unfolds slowly but surely to reveal its relevant, relatable wisdom. So sit back, relax and get ready to reclaim your life.

• 3:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  To start off, why is it, do you think, that so many people are struggling with burnout?

• 3:30Speaker 00

  I think this is an absolutely collective problem. So many people are struggling, but that's not a sort of a large number of individuals who've randomly got there. I think it's actually a cultural phenomena as well. And I think it's because we're overperforming in too many places and in too many ways in our lives. We are living in a way that no longer suits a human being. It's too fast, it's too revved. It requires too much mental activity from us at all times. We've forgotten how to rest and renew our energy, to regenerate. And collectively, that's leading us to a place where we're,

• 4:13Speaker 00

  if not just strained, where we're on the precipice of burnout and crashing and burning.

• 4:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, that term overperformance is really the, I guess, the topic of the new book. And as you've just alluded to, this seems to be something that a lot of people struggle with these days. They've decided that they can't quite get their head above water. Right. And you say this right at the start. Are you addicted to pace and pressure? Do you regularly close off your feelings and ignore your body so that you can get more done? And is the internal narrator to your daily life critical of anything that doesn't add to your progress and betterment?

• 5:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's a lot of people, isn't it?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  That's a lot of people, yeah. That's what I'm saying. I think it's not just you. It's not just an individual phenomena for one person here. It's something that's really prevalent among everybody. Our pace is too high, basically. I think we have a mismatch between the way we used to do it, where grit and discipline and performance methods used to fit the way that the world was. And now we're in a new moment in the world where there's more strain collectively. There's geopolitical strain, there's wars, there's climate change, there's all sorts of things that are pressing down on us collectively. And I don't think we have worked out how to change our methods.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  And that's what the whole book, Life Reclaimed, is about, is how do we change our methods for this moment now so that we can regenerate our energy, regenerate our performances, rather than feel like you either have to put tools down and quit, or just keep going until you crash?

• 6:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting, you say there's a mismatch between the way things currently are and, I guess, who we are as humans. Yet you still, throughout your book and your, I would say, beyond this book, the entirety of your work, you still look to nature for solutions, don't you?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, we are nature. You know, it's one of the first things I talk about in the book, in the sort of, you know, how we learn who to be, is this idea that we have a view of ourselves as separate from everything out there. And when we can recognize that we are part of that web of life, and it is the most extreme and incredible form of intelligence that will ever come our way to tap into that, all the lessons were already there about how to excel, how to perform, how to stay whole. You know, ecology is whole, industry is not whole, it's compartments and efficiency and productivity and progress.

• 7:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  This idea that we're not separate from our surroundings.

• 7:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  I very much think like that. There's many people these days who think like that. But for someone who's pushing back against that, Pippa, who's going, what do you mean? Like, I'm an individual, I've got to earn my money and pay my mortgage to feed my family. What is the relevance of this idea that we're not separate? How does that apply in that individual's life?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  So the way I'm talking about it in the book is when we see ourselves as separate from all else, we also have this idea that we can override all of the signals from the natural world, all of the signals from our own natural landscape in our bodies, in our minds. Our bodies constantly give us signals that maybe we're a little bit strained or on the edge, and we ignore them. We presume that our mind, because we live largely from the neck up, our mind as the control centre is going to be able to push through all obstacles because we will it, rather than recognising, no.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  You know, when it comes to, when it comes to performance, we have to listen to the whole. And that's what's happening out here, what's happening in here, in and out of landscape matching. And I don't think we've, I think we've lost touch with how to do that, right? So it's not about whether you just need to go into the forest and, and, you know, find yourself again. It is genuinely, how are you responding to all of the intelligence, all of the natural intelligence in your life, you know, in your body, in your world, in the environment and the culture around you? Or are you separate and just living up here in your head, dictating terms and pressing override all the time?

• 9:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. As we have this conversation, spring has just sprung in the UK, right? And I've had one of the best weekends of the year, frankly, and which we could maybe talk about a bit later. But one of the things I've been doing this weekend is read your book while sitting outside. And it's interesting how a lot of the themes you talk about.

• 9:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  They actually become really obvious at this time of year, this renewal, this regeneration, this idea that actually the garden was quite damp and soggy and there wasn't much colour for the last few months.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  And suddenly, in the last week, it's as if there's a different signal coming in from the universe around, right? The birds are tweeting and singing at 5am. You're in bed, you can hear it outside. So this idea that there is this natural process, you've got this regenerative triangle, don't you? What is it? Performance?

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Perform, rest, renew.

• 10:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Perform, rest, renew. I kind of feel nature sort of has that, doesn't it, within it?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does. But if I take you back to that idea of everything not having quite so much colour in the winter, and I think we had like 45 days of rain straight or something this year. It's like you're pretty indoors psychologically when that happens, not just physically. But if you look to nature, it's resting. It looks like it's resting. The leaves are off the trees and you don't see as much animal life. You don't hear those birds tweeting as much. But it's doing something. It's just different. It's diverse, right? One of the things with us, our human nature, is that we expect the same homogeneous pattern of life from ourselves if we're not tuned in.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  And that, I think, is one of the problems that leads us to overperforming. Right? So nature's not, it might be at rest in some ways, but it's not inactive through that whole time. It's purposeful rest. And then it comes to renewal. But you were tuned in enough to notice the difference in yourself and the difference in the world around you as it's starting to spring.

• 11:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just to finish off on this kind of idea that burnout is, you know, reaching epidemic proportions these days, which which really does say something about the state of society, right? But when I think about why is it that so many of us are, let's say, overworking?

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 11:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think there's many reasons, yes. There's cultural factors. There could be what our boss is expecting of us and they're sort of responding to what other bosses are doing or what their boss thinks they should be delivering for them. I also think about our individualistic culture, that, you know, we've moved away, many of us, from tribe and community. And so in the past, we would have always known the value we offered to the people around us. It would have been quite obvious, you know, in the tribe, in the hunter gatherer tribe, you know, if you had hunted and brought home some meat, you know, you would have been celebrated, you know, you would, you

• 12:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  know, people around you would celebrate you and you would know, yeah, I brought this home today. Or if you were digging the tubers up, or you were guarding the camp, whatever it might be, your value was obvious to you. And I wonder sometimes if some of this overperforming comes from the fact that we are living these separate lives now. So sometimes we don't know that we are being of value. So maybe the compensation for that is to go to the place where we do see our value being celebrated, and maybe that's work.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think this happens outside of work as well. Like, you know, you could describe how this plays out in relationships or in parenting. Same thing, that's like, how do you know when it's quite, when you're quite there, you know? And I talk about those narratives that set us up for this kind of overperforming and being sort of... The story of us needing to be special at all times is part of that, right? When you talk about the hunter gatherers, right? That that person would not have gone out and brought meat home every day.

• 13:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Right? The tubers would have come only at certain times that people would have dug up and been celebrated. There was a more natural rhythm to the things that we were doing. Now we expect that kind of performance constantly. We expect it to be special and we feel bad or guilty when we're not optimizing for performance at all times.

• 13:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Right? And that's for me, part of what I think drains the energy out of people and leaves them sort of feeling like, oh, where's the finish line?

• 14:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, this lack of rhythm.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 14:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Or the decimation or the erosion of rhythm from our lives. You see it everywhere, like you just mentioned, but it's also, you know, taking that analogy of the hunter gatherer, you know, the tubers or hunting for meat. We're even used to having the same foods now 52 weeks a year. And of course, because of, you know, the modern food system and the food supply, we can have bananas in December in the UK.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you can't in nature. And so I guess if we were living more in harmony with our natural rhythms, not only would the way we feel change, you know, spring versus winter, but also what we eat and how we eat would also change, wouldn't it?

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And I use this as a metaphor of not just our physiological sense of self, but our psychological sense of self does better when it's not a monoculture. So when it's a monoculture of food or a monoculture of activity, we get dull, you know, our gut gets dull, our sense of self gets dull. And it's just exactly the same with our mood and our psychology. It's kind of organic in the same way, you know? We need diverse inputs. We need shifts, changes, different speeds, more rhythm, more adaptability. And I don't think we're very good at doing that just yet.

• 15:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  How might somebody know if they are an over performer?

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Well, some of the classic things people do when they're overperforming, they generally mask what they're feeling. They find it hard to say out loud that they maybe are under strain or feel too tired or feel that, or might say, keep saying yes when they actually mean categorically no and do it anyway, bend themselves out of shape a bit. Typically, they're always in urgency. They are likely to be side thinking about, have some other mental tabs open while they're doing something and find it really hard to be present. They're likely to be psychologically scrolling, as I say, so they're in a conversation but looking around

• 16:26Speaker 00

  and thinking about who else is in the room that they need to have an outcome with in some way. They're never quite able to be fully present and spacious. And a lot of people are going to recognise that, right? And the problem isn't that we do it. The problem is that we do it chronically for way too much of the time.

• 16:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's okay to do it now and again?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  As long as it's balanced?

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Right, it's a, I think it's a very human thing to do that now and then. We all have periods of real stress and real strain. This isn't about being perfect. It's about recognising that we've kind of slipped into this as a chronic way of being. And we don't, sometimes now we, we don't know how to not overperform. It's happening in so many places in our life. It's seeped into places it doesn't belong.

• 17:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  How might this be relevant for you at this current moment in time, Pippa? So you've got this brand new book out, Life Reclaimed.

• 17:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  As part of launching a book, I guess you will probably do an element of publicity around it to let people know. So interviews and podcasts, those kinds of things. How does that or does it fit into your regenerative triangle?

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I keep that regenerative triangle right at the centre of everything I do. For me, though, at the moment, this is where my energy is in the book. And this is the stuff I'm loving. And if I listen to my energy, if I really tune in, I'm like, yes, please for that. That's a yes feeling. Whereas when I have other requests for other things, maybe things that pull me back into a former version of myself, that I think, oh, I could do that, or that might be quite interesting. I have to really watch carefully for the no, because actually my body might be saying, I don't really want to, but I should, or I could. And so, you know, I have to be quite specific about what I'm saying yes to.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  And that's about my own honesty with myself of like, I don't really want to do it. Instead of I could do it, I ought to do it, you know, not just saying yes because I can.

• 18:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  A big part of this book, to me, is about us getting to know ourselves better. I mean, in so many ways, it's very hard to turn the ship around, acknowledge that things aren't quite going the way you want them to go in your life.

• 18:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you don't know yourself, if you don't create space in your life to think. And that space is what is missing from so many people's lives.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  And I, I think, you tell me what your experience is in relation to this, Rangan. But I think there is a lot of story out there about us needing to fix something when we feel off kilter, something has, something's broken, something's wrong. What I'm encouraging people to do in this book is to give themselves permission to go back to reclaim what's already right. Sometimes we're just overrething rather than broken.

• 19:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, there's, there's so much I want to talk to you about, Pippa. Just relating to what you just said there, in chapter six, which is called Coming Home, you wrote that the hardest part of shifting from overperformance to regenerative performance may well be giving yourself permission not to try and immediately diagnose, fix and get back in the saddle.

• 20:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think that is so profound, this idea that you might recognise throughout this conversation that something's not quite right in your life. It may be that you're burnt out, it may be that you're unhappy, or that things aren't quite right and you know you need to change something. But what it doesn't need is people to listen to this, or read your book and suddenly go, right, that ain't working, I'm gonna do this.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  We need to allow time to sit with the, I guess, discomfort, the uncertainty, that maybe you don't know what's next, you know what's not working, but you don't quite know the solution. And I thought that was really quite evocative, and something that I think, again, the cultural narrative doesn't teach us. It's like, you know, as you just said, that's wrong, how do you fix it?

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And straight into fix too. And it's space, time is probably the number one thing that helps us really get to the nub of what's up and what we need to do next. But it's not always space and time. Sometimes you really know, sometimes it's just removing that sense that you ought to stick at it, that you should just grit it out a bit longer, giving yourself permission, you know, to reclaiming your own permission to just notice and be honest about what you really feel. And that's enough for you to make your next step. You know, it's not necessarily a new, a new something or other, a new direction,

• 21:34Speaker 00

  a new practice, a new method. A lot of the time, it's dropping that and just saying, what's here? What do I know about this?

• 21:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  You have dealt and coached, you know, so many of the world's high performers, music, sport, business, over many years. Many people will know you as the psychologist for the England football team for a period of time. I know you feel uncomfortable with some of the credit that's given to you, but you are widely regarded as someone who had a massively influential impact on changing the psyche and the mindset.

• 22:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Off the England football team. So you've dealt with a lot of people who have performed at a high level. In your last book, you had this most beautiful concept about winning deep versus winning shallow. You know, how are you winning? Are you winning from a place of lack or from a place of fullness? I guess is another way of looking at it. The topic of this new book, you know, Find Freedom From Chronic Overperformance. Do you think it's more relevant to people at a certain stage in their life? Like, is this your classic midlife moment for people where, you know, they did things a certain way, they got the job that they thought they wanted to get, they've, you know, maybe they

• 23:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  follow their passion and they, they, they sort of, they worked in that passion, realised, well, maybe it isn't what I thought I wanted. Is it the sort of thing that people tend to come to in their 40s and 50s? Or do you think it can also come at a different time in our lives?

• 23:17Speaker 00

  I definitely think it can come at a different time in our lives, too. I particularly worry about young people and thinking about how they're, you know, for this, this concept of schoolishness, where right from being very young, you're taught that being exceptional, optimising every moment, not wasting a second, needing to be ever more is critical in becoming in life, in sort of growing up and becoming successful in life. That's an enormous amount of pressure, you know, and I, and I think it actually leads to a great deal of loneliness in young people and older people. But your point is still valid because by the time we get to midlife, there's a lot of weight that we're carrying.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  And what I think the particular thing that happens at midlife is that we feel like, oh, we can't put all this down now. There's a lot of sunk cost in there. I talk about sunk cost mentality in the book of, of like, we've gone too far to stop now. And those old mentalities really can get in the way of us being honest because actually maybe it's burning you out, killing you, boring you, causing you a lot of strain and suffering. And it's, and you know, as I say in the book, not all sunk cost is buried treasure. You know, sometimes we actually need to have another look at that. And, and sometimes we actually have the opportunity to do that, but we don't.

• 24:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Often, in my experience at least, it takes.

• 24:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, a real low point or a tragedy or an addiction that's gone out of control for people to actually confront this and go, actually, you know what? My current way of doing this isn't working. I need to make a change. I think sometimes without that, people stay stuck. They know something's not quite right, but they don't change. And I know I can tell you this from, you know, I recently had a conversation with James Hollis. I don't know if you know James or not.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 25:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, just wonderful. This is my second chat with James and he talks about this idea at some point, you know, your soul will come calling, you know, what is your soul asking of you?

• 25:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you could ignore it.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Or if you really want to, I guess, live that life, find meaning, find purpose, you better start listening. And he had to do that. He talks very openly about how in his thirties, he, he, he had inverted commas, depression. But that depression was a consequence of him not listening to this inner voice.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  And he realized that the job he was in, whilst it looked great from the outside, it wasn't nourishing him.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 25:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  And in that first conversation I had with James, he also said to me that in his therapy room over the past forty years, I think he said 70% of lawyers and doctors who came to see him said, I never had any calling for this profession.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 26:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So it's really interesting and I've seen it in my profession that people feel stuck in their forties, that they probably shouldn't have been a doctor. They probably, you know, they were probably thought this is a good job, maybe parental pressure, whatever it might be, but they feel stuck.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  So for that individual, because I bet you there's someone listening right now who's in that boat, how would you advise them to think about their situation when they feel they have no other option?

• 26:37Speaker 00

  I talk about the sort of concept of psychological fire breaks that we need to put in along the way. So I love James Hollis's work and this idea of like, we've all got an appointment with life and most of us never show up, right?

• 26:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  What I really want to do with this book is change people's method so that you don't actually get to that point where you are straining so much that you're on the cusp of a crash, right? So there's a story in the book about, I call the guy Merlin in the book, about a surgeon who didn't have that feeling. He was never called to it, or he thought he was called to it, but when he got in there, it just wasn't what he expected. And then he went tech entrepreneur and just really still didn't find it. And then he was looking at himself, saying, there's something up with me because I've tried these two things and they're not it. So that's not how I was taught that life works. It's

• 27:30Speaker 00

  supposed to go in a more linear direction than that. I'm supposed to feel differently now. So in response to the question, one of the main things that we do is stop expecting yourself to follow somebody else's map and tune in to what's actually true and real for you, right? And that's where we broaden out the sense of sort of our own worth and our own choices. That's why I think young people really, really matter here. So, you know, maybe people don't have to get to their mid 40s to get to that point where they think, oh, God, I can't put it down now. You know, so it's if they are wanting, if they're feeling not quite right, they know they're not feeling quite right, either because they've got to

• 28:15Speaker 00

  the precipice of something being very wrong, like James Hollis with a depression, or they're in tune with themselves and they're listening. I'd rather it was the latter.

• 28:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So you're talking about a cultural shift, basically, in how we think about our lives and work. And, you know, I've got a 15 year old and a 13 year old. And I think about the narratives I picked up at a young age, completely understandably from immigrant parents of the UK, and how on one hand, they helped me. And on the other hand, you know, there was a hidden cost to me having my self-worth tied up with my success.

• 29:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I'm really keen that my children don't develop those narratives. So I guess my question to you would be, how would you suggest we encourage our children to think differently about what their lives might be in the future?

• 29:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  I am really excited to share that I am bringing my Thrive Tour Transform Your Health and Happiness to Canada and Europe this September and November. It's a live, interactive, uplifting show that over 20,000 people came to last year across the UK and Australia. I'll be sharing powerful stories, life-changing insights and simple tools that will inspire you to feel better, think clearer and live with more intention and joy. To get your tickets right now and see all of the dates and venues, go to dot to chat ag.com forward slash live. I really hope that you can join me.

• 30:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous

• 30:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a Free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers.

• 31:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends.

• 31:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I guess my question to you would be, how would you suggest we encourage our children to think differently about what their lives might be in the future?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Well, I think there's so much that can happen there in the home and in the conversation between parent and child. Even though this is a cultural phenomenon, the change starts with us.

• 32:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  It's your inner landscape that you can actually edit. Not, and the collective editing of that is what will change the culture. So when you have a conversation with your kid about their worth being much broader than the results, that's, that's one step. When you, when you teach them that time together is present time together, as in you are both present for that time together, rather than you take them somewhere, you're on your phone or doing something else and, you know, multitasking and they're, they're at play. You know, how are you actually relating and engaging with each other? Because when you do that, it's not just about you being a great parent, it's what you're showing them is normal when you're with a person.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  It's also encouraging them to, that it's totally natural to have periods of big intensity and big challenge and goals that they're chasing and then periods of rest, the try it back to the triangle, the pyramid. Um of kind of, you know, uh, there's renewal time and renewal time is play, laughter, things where you're not performing at all and you let go to it, but they're creative and they renew your energy. Teach your kid that, that renewal is as important as couch time and rest, right? You prob- they probably have a bedtime, they probably have, um, you're probably aware of them going too hard and them needing a break from that. But where is their playtime? Where is their

• 33:32Speaker 00

  renew time also? Can you build that in? Because this isn't about your kid not being successful, right? If I ask you, for both of your children, you want them to be successful. It's about a different method or a set of different methods to help them understand how to do that in a regenerative way that doesn't deplete them or extract all their joy.

• 33:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, no, I love that. So far, we've talked about why it is that so many people feel burnt out. You've also kind of gone through a list of what are some of those things that people might identify in themselves, right? Which might indicate that they're overperforming. You've got it here in the book as well. You've, you've mentioned self-sacrifice, masking, psychological scrolling, side thinking, having a fantasy finish line. I really love that one that, as you say in the book, assuming that everything about that overperformance will change, once they have moved the needle far enough through their own efforts, attainment

• 34:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  or behaviour. I definitely know what that feels like from a former version of myself, I'm happy to say. So let's say someone so far has identified, Pippa, that, yeah, you know what? I may not be burnt out, but life isn't quite going the way I want it to. Some of those symptoms, as it were, that you've just mentioned, I think I have some of them.

• 35:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  If they're now thinking about what are the kinds of things they can do to start changing things, where would you have them start?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  The first thing I would have them do is press pause for a second.

• 35:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Right, and that doesn't mean stop, I'm talking about literally for a few minutes, and literally check in. There's a practice in the book that I talk about, the Japanese word for belly is hara. The Japanese believe that that is the place in the body that makes meaning. So they don't ask the head first, they ask hara. And that sort of practice of like hand on heart, hand on belly, what do I feel? What do I need? And just like it is literally a minute.

• 35:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  And just coming back to yourself. Another thing I would suggest, you know, this is one that I would love you to try out at some point, but like asking your nervous system for a midday status report.

• 36:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hmm.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  Sort of when you get to midday every day, just in the way that you have morning practices, and we might not check in again until the end of the day. But when you, if you can actually just ask your nervous system for a status report around the middle of the day, like, how am I doing? You know, what's my physiology telling me right now? Am I, how much of my time have I been up here rather than whole? And I think that's really, really valuable. Another thing is to stop allowing your mind to override the signals that your body is offering you.

• 36:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  So, you know, when you feel a bit parched or a bit flagging, we push through until the next break on the mechanical clock on the wall, not listening to your own body clock of like, oh no, I'm done, actually, I need a moment. You know, how many times have you been in a meeting and there might be five, six other people, the CO2 in the room's going up, and you just push through until the scheduled break? But actually, you're flagging. Like, can we just get a little bit more in tune with those things? That's where to start, because noticing is everything when it comes to this.

• 37:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of the things I've

• 37:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Changed in my life over the past few years is my morning. So I've always had morning practices. That's always been quite important to me.

• 37:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  But what I used to do, because I had young children at the time, I would go to bed super early. I'd get up super early, have my time to myself, my morning practice. And then I would write for a couple of hours before my wife or my children got up.

• 37:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I wrote many books doing that. And there's nothing wrong with that. And I've realised I don't want to do that anymore. And so I don't. I've, and I think this goes back to what I was sort of getting at before, which is to really make these changes, you have to create space for solitude. And the solitude helps you get even more solitude. But when you're stuck in this constantly doing, you don't even know what it feels like to stop. And I feel it's to do with, for me, I think this really relates to the content in your book, Pippa, is this idea of the nervous system.

• 38:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want the first little period of my day to be running slowly.

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I guess there's a wider point there for me, Pippa. Are some of these strategies that we use to get ahead and to be successful,

• 38:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  can we argue that they actually can serve a role at certain times in our life? It's just that you don't want to be doing it forever.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  That's exactly it, Rangan. They, it's, my proposition here isn't that it's just slow. My proposition is that, you know, we have these gears that we can move through and we need to be able to diversify our modes and speeds often. And when we get stuck in fast or even stuck in slow, like when we resist intensity because we're just really attached to slow, that's the problem. It's it's the adaptation that we're looking for. But you can't know what you what adaptation you need unless you actually tune in. You know, and you and you've got that little bit of psychological space. You have you are planful about the times that let you renew, let you rest and let you perform.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  And when they're not there, you can go, ah, if something's off here, what do I need?

• 39:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  I like the way you talk about rest in the book and you share that in your own life, you say, I have had to make rest a practice that is central in my life.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Not something I do after life happens that day.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love that. Can you can you can you speak a bit more about that?

• 40:09Speaker 00

  I am an generally optimistic, excitable person and I can be like ideas are pinging all the time. I can get really fast, quite mercurial in the way that I'm processing things and engaging things and I start things and, you know, sometimes if I don't actually check in, ooh, that pace is a bit high. You know, if I don't do that, then I'm I actually am depleted by the time I even think about rest. So I and after my own burnout, that's particularly noticeable to me. So I actually have to design pause times. So like you, I have a morning routine, but I design pause times during the day like

• 40:51Speaker 00

  my midday status report, you know, to actually go, okay, how's it going? How am I doing? Just in the way that we would if we were thinking about how to help an elite athlete perform consistently, where's the reflection point? We tend to do it at the bookend of the day or the week or, you know, the season. And it's integrating it into the way into the way that we're doing the day. So I actually have to put pause points in and check in and come back to my physical body for the intelligence I need.

• 41:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of the things I used to talk to patients a lot about was this thing, that this idea about micro-stress doses. And a micro-stress dose is a little hit of stress that in isolation, you can handle just fine. The problem is, is when those micro-stress doses, or MSDs, mount up one on top of the other and get you closer and closer to your threshold.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  Compound.

• 41:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. And when you're close to your threshold, that's when the problems start to come in your life. That's when you snap at your partner, or your children, or you get irritated by an email from your colleague. It wasn't actually the thing that your partner said, or the email your colleague sent to you. It was the fact that you were very, very close to your stress threshold. And when I hear you talk about these check-ins throughout the day, I love them. And I love this idea because I think also what it does for people is as they're accumulating stress in their day, which is normal, if you don't take that break at lunch and you work through, you just keep accumulating, you're getting closer and closer, but you

• 42:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  take that 20-minute break and walk around the block without your phone, you've just lowered, you've got much more headroom between you and your threshold. Right? So it actually is a preventative step to stop things going wrong. But we don't do it. We think, oh, I'll chill out on Sunday. And Monday to Friday is like, I crack on from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed. That's it, isn't it?

• 43:01Speaker 00

  That's it. That's exactly it. It's like in the book, when I'm talking about sort of, you know, burnout as a process rather than an event, you know, I use the metaphor of wildfires. And there's kind of like the understory fire, which is, it's crackling and it's problematic, but it doesn't take the whole forest out. Or ground fires that are going to take quite a lot of the forest out, but you'll still probably have tall timber. Or you can have a crown fire, which decimates everything. Now, when we don't take those pauses, or have those practices, or come back to ourselves, or when we're dishonest with ourselves and we're masking, we are creating a fuel ladder.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  You know, it's like old dead debris, ready to go up in flames. It's tinder, ready to set on fire. So that when then there is more pressure than we can handle, woof. It's

• 43:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Causes chaos.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  It causes chaos, yeah. It's and it's built over time. Burnout isn't overnight. It doesn't happen overnight. Right. So all of those practices are actually removing the dead wood, removing the dead old dry stuff to just refresh and regenerate. Regenerate means to start anew and it happens within your life, not after it. That's the whole point.

• 44:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  I imagine there are some people who are listening, Pepe, right now, who are thinking, yeah, that all makes sense, you know. I should have some solitude. I should regularly check in with myself throughout the day, not allow the dead wood to start accumulating. It all makes rational sense.

• 44:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why is it, do you think there's so much resistance within people to actually do it?

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Sometimes I think these practices sound like you need an hour, right? Like that idea of sort of the slow morning, you know. If you've got three kids and you're trying to get them to school by eight thirty, that's, you know, slow morning might be a tough ask for you. So when it comes to the triangle, the the renew part of that doesn't have to be equal time by any stretch, it's equal emphasis. Right. So it might be, you know, what is it that are you going to put a tune on in the car on the way to school or the way back from school? That's just going to lift for a second. It's like, how are you acting in favor of yourself, in favor of your life? In small, short ways, sometimes it's a quick laugh.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Sometimes it's a tiny moment of self-care. It might be literally a minute or two. It doesn't have to be a yoga class. It's, you know, how are you coming back to wholeness, coming back to feeling like you're caring for yourself for a second? Because the more we do that, the less we build up debris that's going to set on fire.

• 45:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  You mentioned the parent there of young children who might be thinking, well, I don't have time for this.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I recognize that that is the case for many people. And at the same time, I think sometimes we, I think you write about this later on in the book, about we've got more choice than we think in terms of how we design our lives. That with a few little nudges and changes, you might be able to create some of that time. It could be that because you're knackered and stressed, there will be a temptation, and I've seen this with many patients over the years, to unwind in the evening with alcohol and/or staying up late watching movies or Netflix. And so you're going to bed late. You're never going to get up early because you're already knackered and stressed out.

• 46:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  So the morning starts at full pelt.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? I get that, and I ain't criticizing it at all. I'm saying, and I'm saying this because I have helped people through this in the past, there might be another way. It might be that you choose to drink less in the evening. Maybe don't stay up till midnight watching Netflix.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  If you can, and get up five minutes before your kids to go and sit downstairs with a cup of tea before they all come down saying, you know, what's for breakfast, you know, all this sort of stuff.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 47:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Again, that may not work in every situation, but I just want to offer that it's, it's very easy for us to tell ourselves stories that, oh, I can't change this because of.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 47:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it may be that case, but it may be that there is this little thing you could do that would make an impact. Because as you say, it's not about the big change. Even five minutes of calm or renewal can be very powerful.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I talk about sort of the three levels, the cascading levels, you know, that I start the book with of the stories of how we learn who to be.

• 47:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  You know, what we're just talking about there is behavior, right? And that's super critical. And that does not have to be huge. It's nudges, it's recognition, it's fire breaks. Right.

• 48:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  But there's also the stories that sit behind that, that we do need to stop and examine, right? The story that I've got to have more than I've got now. The story that I'm supposed to not waste any time. I've got to optimize every minute, even our leisure time, even our love lives have to be optimized. You know, it's with this market mind that we're always running towards doing it better and betterment. And then exceptionalism, you know, this is like you're actually supposed to stand out when really what we want is to fit in. And it's, you know, these things as well as the idea of being separate. So, you know, all of that out there doesn't really matter. All I'm focused on is me, not, I'm not connected to the next person or to the web of life.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  And I can override my body if I want to. You know, when you get those things together and they, they build those mentalities, like I'll sleep when I'm dead. Or, you know, I won't, I won't drop the ball and all of, all of the mentalities that keep us gritting it out, revving harder and getting more and more dead wood.

• 49:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  So then when the last little bit of compound strain comes, we're, we're up in flames. And it's really hard to come back from there. And anybody who's burnt out will know that that's, we use the term lightly. But actually, if you've had a proper burnout, you know that that's going to knock you for a good while, physically and psychologically and spiritually. So it's, you know, it's, I would like for people to avoid getting there if they can through recognizing the stories that they live in and the behavioral changes that are relatively simple and small that are fire breaks.

• 49:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you were talking there, Pippa, about separateness and this idea that we're not separate. For some reason, Elliot Kipchoge came to mind.

• 49:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  I know you're a fan of Kipchoge like I am and I've been very fortunate to have two two hour conversations with him on this podcast, which I feel very lucky about. The last time I spoke to Kipchoge, the day after the London Marathon, where I think he came sixth or seventh, although this is really interesting, someone who was regarded as the greatest for a decade, first person to run under two hours. I asked him something like, what was it like for you yesterday to come sixth? And he just had this beautiful smile on his face. He was totally at ease with it. He was just, he was so happy that the youngsters are now coming up and it's their time, it's not his time, he's had his time.

• 50:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  He seems to be a sportsman who is not overperforming in your language, right? He seems to know how to win deep and is happy, whether he is winning gold medals or not, because it's not about him. And then as you were talking there, Pippa, I really reflected on Kipchoge and in our first conversation, he told me how running is a team sport for him. It's not about him. He never ever trains by himself. In Kenya, they always train together. And he goes, yeah, it's great because if it means if someone's not showing up, someone's on the phone said, hey, are you okay? Why aren't you showing up to training today?

• 51:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Whereas here in the West, it's an individual sport for many people. It's like, I'm going to go for a run, I'm going to go for this time. Do you know what I mean? It feels, it feels that he seems to be someone who understands that it's about we, not I. I mean, what's your take on that?

• 51:34Speaker 00

  There's a couple of things that come up for me, thinking about Kipchoge. The first is that I think as an athlete, he seems to me to be very whole, you know? So he's, he's so much more than his results or his achievements. He seems to be really quite sort of. Um, non-compartmentalized as a person, his, this, you know, if, if, well, you know, from your couple of hours of conversation with him, there's so much more to him than his running. All right. The things he's involved in and his contribution to the world, his relationship with the world and with people in, in the world. Um, feels very whole to me, you know, it's not, the measure of him isn't his results alone, even though he would be proud of that.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  So that's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, and I talk about this in better reasons to perform in the book. Um, which is, um, you know, uh, one of them is love and he definitely performs for the love of it. He performs for the fulfillment of it, for the creative endeavor of seeing what's possible. Um, and for, for other people, for each other, you know, and I, I think now that's maybe why he, his appeal has been so enduring. You know, because, um, you can see that he's, he's in it for more than himself. It's kind of like the essence of competing, the essence of sort of what we, the real origin of what it was to sort of,

• 53:01Speaker 00

  you know, be pushed to your very, very max and your very, very best because somebody else was running on your shoulder. You know, and he, he recognizes that in a profound way.

• 53:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  What do you think the true purpose of sport is?

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Whew, that's a big question. For me, I would say that the true purpose of sport is to seek more life. You know, sport is a place where we can go and see what's possible in ourselves, in each other. Um, I hate to see it getting so narrowed to be about results and scoreboard winning. For me, sport is where we go test our metal. It's where we go find out what happens when we're under pressure. Um, what, how good it feels when we help somebody else out in a team. You know, how we feel deep pride in having done something together or done something

• 54:00Speaker 00

  to represent, you know, and stand at our full height because we were able to and we challenged ourselves in that moment. So I think sport is just a phenomenally important and integral part of the human condition. And I, I don't like seeing it narrowed into a product, an entertainment product, you know, something that's just about winning. And, you know, it's just, I just think it's important. I think it's more than that.

• 54:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting that you say it's more than just results and you're someone who worked in professional sports for many years. And of course, in professional sports, certain people and coaches and players are actually judged on results, aren't they?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  So how might someone find their way through that? So if, if sport is not about results, it's about us testing ourselves, seeing what we're capable of, how does that fit alongside the fact that it is a big business these days? And if you are hired to be coached for a top Premier League football team, you're probably hired to either win the Premier League or get them in the Champions League. And if you ain't doing that, you're probably going to get fired.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's problematic, isn't it?

• 55:18Speaker 00

  It's an and, right?

• 55:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not that the ambition has to be taken out of it to be regenerative in your performance or to find deeper meaning. But the meaning, the sense of your understanding of why you're, you know, what your reason for performing at that level is, what, why you put so much in, what the shape of your ambition is, that has to run alongside the outcome that you need, which is the result, that, you know, the result on the scoreboard. It's not an either or, it's not a trade off. It's a, you know, that's a factor of resilience. If you're coaching a Premier League team, your resilience will come from knowing why you're doing it and, and feeling the shape of those relationships around you as part

• 56:05Speaker 00

  of what it, what allows you to regenerate week on week.

• 56:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. No, I love that. Going back to those chapters in the book where you've got an awareness that overperformance is happening. And now it's about how do you sort of almost re-edit that story? And you've got two chances there. One is coming home and one is getting honest. And I love every chapter in the book, Pepe, but those two in particular, I thought would be quite fun to go into. Coming home to yourself. I think a lot of people will not have a clue what that actually means. So when you say coming home, what do you mean?

• 56:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker. Everyone around you seems to be coming down with something. And suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement

• 57:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers. All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends.

• 58:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Lingo by Abbott. When glucose is relatively stable, you feel better. Day to day with steadier energy, mood and focus. But over time, unstable and elevated glucose can impair your metabolic health and increase the risk of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Globally, more than 760 million adults are estimated to have prediabetes, many without symptoms or a diagnosis. Now, the problem is that our healthcare system often waits until you get sick before taking action, when we should take a proactive approach. Now, most of us don't have access to our own glucose data and therefore don't have

• 59:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  clear feedback on how our everyday choices impact our glucose. That's where Lingo by Abbott comes in. Lingo is a biosensor and app that helps you see how food, movement and lifestyle choices affect your glucose in real time, so you can notice patterns and build healthier habits in the moment. With Lingo, you can get to know your glucose to build healthier habits for today and tomorrow. For listeners in the US and UK, Lingo by Abbott is offering an exclusive 10% off a four-week plan. Just visit hellolingo.com/livemore for more information. Terms and conditions apply.

• 59:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Again, that's hellolingo.com/livemore.

• 59:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  So when you say coming home, what do you mean?

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  Can I ask you to share with me what you felt when you read that? Because I think you have a particular way of describing it that is probably pretty useful here.

• 1:00:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so I've got a narrative in my head already going, Pippa thinks I'm going to say something, I don't know what she thinks I'm going to say. So let me just acknowledge that that was there. Okay, when I think of coming home, I just think of.

• 1:00:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Being present with myself.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  That feeling when all the external stories and conditioning and expectation stops. And when I'm, I'm literally with myself.

• 1:00:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I know exactly what I'm feeling. So I said before to you that I had a phenomenal weekend. I was reading your book in the sun with a coffee. Took my son to Park Run, played with the kids in the garden, played paddle at lunchtime. And one of my best mates from school who I haven't seen in ages came and joined us. Impromptu, he came around for lunch afterwards, no plan at all. We just laughed for three hours. I would say this weekend in many ways was coming home.

• 1:01:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  I didn't feel I had to perform or be anyone else. I was just totally me. And then in those morning moments of solitude, I felt I got a lot of insight into my life. So that's what I think currently, when you ask me that question.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  It's beautiful. That's it. It's like beyond labels, beyond tasks, beyond the to do list. You know, and I'm not talking about being on holiday for a couple of weeks. I'm talking about when you can just drop everything else and just like, oh, yeah, just me. You know, just here. And, and that is what coming home to yourself is. And there's like various elements and aspects of it. But essentially it is when you can put down the massive weight of your own expectations of what you're supposed to be doing and where you're supposed to be and how you're supposed to be and just actually be for a minute. And that, you know, it involves so much of that presence, not as a practice, not as

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  just a meditation or a, you know, something that resets you. It's, it's letting go. It's just allowing yourself to just be you without the judgment.

• 1:02:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  For someone who is stuck in do, do, do the whole time, right? Someone who may be currently suffering from burnout or close to burnout.

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  This idea of coming home to themselves could seem quite distant and unattainable.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:02:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like, if you think about the nervous system, let's, let's think about it like a car, you know, with lots of five-speed gearbox. Let's say your nervous system has five gears. And let's say you're used to running your life at gear four and gear five. Coming home is probably more a gear one, gear two, I guess. That's not easy if you're used to being at high speed all the time, I guess.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  That's why coming home and honesty go together, right, in this. But if you're, if you're burnt out, or if you're on the precipice of burnout, or even if you're just under a lot of strain right now, when you can ask, what's here? How do I actually feel? You know, and, and just let your mind, body and life answer that for you. Rather than automatically rev into fifth gear, that's, that's coming home. That's being able to sort of say, oh, this is how it is right now. And then, then think about what next.

• 1:03:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  I guess one of the reasons being able to come home is so important. It is something that I guess you talk about early on in the book, this idea that the big questions in life don't get answered intellectually, they get answered when you listen to your heart.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  Yes. So opening your heart is a big part of coming home, right? Because we're so oriented to living from the neck up in our, in our brain. We don't listen to the heart and heart doesn't shout like the head does. You know, you have to be a bit quieter to hear it properly. It's more likely to whisper. And the gut, you need some space and some presence to actually pay attention to your intuition and your instinct in those ways that are coming from gut, that are giving you different pieces of information. So coming home is about wholeness. It's about, oh yeah, it's a feeling I get when I sit on my yoga mat at the start of

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  a class because I know I'm going to have an hour of time that is just about integrating and unifying mind, body, spirit for me in, in that moment. And it's like, oh yeah, this is me today. Wow, my shoulders are tight or. Hmm. Head's very busy. Whatever it is, it's just like, drop it. Let's just drop it for a minute and just be here. And that's, that is part of coming home. But it's definitely heart-based.

• 1:05:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  I love the idea of an open heart. It's something I think about so much.

• 1:05:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  When I think about how to exist in the world and what is I want. I honestly think I can boil most things down to can you live with an open heart?

• 1:05:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I can honestly say that.

• 1:05:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I'm sure this is the same for everyone, if they actually pay attention. When you live with an open heart. Everything in your life gets better.

• 1:05:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, I guess, I, I love winning deep, winning shallow, right? I guess winning deep, you could say is winning with an open heart. And winning shallow is, yeah, you're still winning, but you're, you're winning with a closed heart. And to me, an open heart means.

• 1:06:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Although very simply, it means many things, but, but one of the things I try and do in life. Is to give without any expectation of return. And it's something I think I got into maybe two or three years ago at New Year, I was reflecting on. You know, wouldn't it be nice if you could just give and do things for others? With no expectation of anything. If something comes back, great, but you, it doesn't matter. If it doesn't, you still gave. Because otherwise, you gave and there was a condition to you giving. You gave only because. You were going to get something back. And again, I'm not criticizing anyone who does that. I probably have done that for much of my life, but.

• 1:07:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think to live from an open heart and with an open heart. You do need to slow down.

• 1:07:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you do need to come home to yourself.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, probably the best example of this sort of giving with no expectation of return that I've seen recently is in some of the work I've been doing over the last few years with my business partners and friends at Open House, which is a cafe and supper club and yoga studio and its sister project, a ten trees garden, which is all about whole being in our little village in Haversidge. So lots of people book on to the yoga or the Pilates or the workshops and we have a Musica's Medicine Programme, et cetera, and we've been building community for the last couple of years. It's beautiful. And at first, it was, we started with the intention of generosity.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  We started with this idea of like, let's just give and see what happens as much as possible. And it's been amazing to watch people come into that space and give themselves. So as part of the classes' schedule, there's a Pay It Forward group.

• 1:08:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  And the Pay It Forward group is for somebody who's booked a class, there's only 12 spots in a class, it's little, and if you can't go, you could cancel on the website and get a refund, or you can put it on the Pay It Forward and give it to somebody, gift it to somebody.

• 1:08:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  And the Pay It Forward channel is just this whole phenomenon in generosity. And people now, I love seeing it now, people put other things that are nothing to do with Open House on there, things that they want to give or offer to other people. People have started interacting with care for each other if somebody's sick and they have to pay forward their class place. It's just become this really beautiful little vignette of generosity. Generosity breeds generosity. And it's not about how much money anybody has, it's the open-heartedness with which people engage in that space, because that's what they find there. And it sort of just ping-pongs between people and it's, suddenly it becomes then an open-hearted place.

• 1:09:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Goes back to something you said earlier on in the conversation that

• 1:09:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Something I completely subscribe to as well is that the way we change society is by changing ourselves.

• 1:09:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. So you start showing up with an open heart in your life, that will ripple to the people around you. And if enough people do that, well, that's how you change the world.

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  Right. Back to the principles of ecology, right? Everything runs on energy. So the energy you give will be more often than not reflected back to you. If you bring positive energy, if you bring generosity, it will be reflected. People, and maybe it'll only be reflected in people opening a bit. If you bring negative to your closed energy, then people might withdraw a little bit. These things compound.

• 1:10:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  In that section on coming home, you also talk about returning to the basics.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does that mean?

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  For me, the returning to the basics is about, you know, you spoke about it before. If you are in a physical fog because you haven't slept well, you haven't fueled your body in a way that offers genuine nutrition and pours enough to digest something. If your stress levels are super high and you're not giving yourself any fire breaks, you know, it's that stuff as much as anything. And I add space into the psychological space, I think is absolutely a basic. If you, you know, if you are on go mode the whole time and you don't allow some space just to let go for a second.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  The pause I spoke about earlier, that's integral to being able to come home, being able to be honest. So honesty takes a lot of energy. Coming home to yourself, living with an open heart is a particular type of energy. And you want to regenerate that, right? So those basics are very fundamental in that, especially sleep.

• 1:11:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  For that person who feels that they're right in the thick of it and they can't slow down, they don't know how to slow down, in fact, they probably are at burnout, so they don't even know that. Because, you know, real burnout is really, really severe.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  It takes

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  A year at least.

• 1:11:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  A long time to fully recover from, doesn't it?

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:11:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I guess it's a colloquial term now that's used

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  A lot of the time. I mean, do you have a definition for burnouts?

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  I think it is a very uncomfortable involuntary process of transitioning away from what's not working for you anymore.

• 1:11:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  And it's on multiple levels of physiology, you know, your biological responses and your psychological responses, whole raft of symptoms. But it's super hard to, it's problematic to define it in the literature. And people sort of argue ad nauseam about the official definition of it. But for me, it's a transition away from what's not working. And sometimes your body and your mind just say, hey, we've been throwing up warning lights for months and months here, you're not listening, so you're handing over the keys and we're crashing.

• 1:12:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. That's the key, isn't it? The body was always handing out warning lights.

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  Exactly that.

• 1:12:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  It was always doing it. You may not have seen it, you may have been too busy to pay attention.

• 1:12:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it did not happen overnight.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And that's why I talk about the core four principles of regenerative performance, of sort of like coming to presence, diversifying your modes and speeds, being able to listen to the intelligence of the body and recognizing your own wild clocks and rhythms, which we can talk about. But that listening to the intelligence of your own body is critical because it's throwing up signals all day, we just override it.

• 1:13:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  The chat's on getting honest is quite an interesting one because when you say getting honest, you talk about not lying, but it's not only not lying, which I found really interesting, right? So not lying is, you know, you don't tell a lie, you don't tell a white lie, you don't tell a straight out lie. I want to ask you why you think that's important, but it was also about when we leave out important things.

• 1:13:29Speaker 00

  Not hiding, yeah.

• 1:13:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. So, because that's not actually, I guess it's not directly a lie, but I guess it's almost misleading because I guess when relevant, if we don't bring something up, we may not be lying, but we're also withholding. Why is it so important?

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm not talking about this here from an ethical or moral perspective. I'm talking about what it creates for you, the individual who is letting out that little white lie or omitting or withholding or masking or covering up something. Because for me, what happens is a small ripple of inauthenticity in your energy. It's part of the dead wood that builds up, right? Because you're not quite being true to yourself. And the example I would give you is, let's say somebody calls you and says, hey, Rong, can you come and

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  do this thing for me next week? And you kind of think, ah, that guy did something for me. Maybe I should help him out, but you don't really want to. And maybe you feel that next week is a bit crammed already for you. You know, if you were, if we looked at it from the lying perspective, you would make an excuse and say, no, sorry, I can't make because, you know, I've got something else on at the same time. If you were going to do it more honestly, you would be able to say, I feel too cramped next week. Or actually, I just don't feel a degree of motivation to do that right now. Perhaps I can help you out next time. Right. But as soon as we hear that, we go, oh, my God, there would be so many consequences to me.

• 1:15:09Speaker 00

  When you don't do that, the cost is yours. So you've made the path easier to make an excuse to somebody else, but you've been inauthentic to yourself. And you get further and further and further away from what's actually true for you. And you know, the, the question for me is like, why can't we actually say, I'm too tired, I'm too strained, you know, I feel a bit stressed or I'm, that's not really where I'm at right now, you know, perhaps I can help you on the next project. It's, you know, it's, that is really hard to do in our culture.

• 1:15:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  And the problem is we bend and then we bend ourselves out of shape because we're, we don't want to have the friction or discomfort that goes with telling the truth. And then we've, as that sort of cascades, then we start masking a little bit that like, oh, I'm, I'm not going to share all this strain of, I'm feeling because, you know, this, I've got really, it's really normalized for me to not tell the truth about myself.

• 1:16:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. It's such a great point. It is so, so common. I don't think it is in every culture. You know, I, I remember from when I did a couple of ski seasons in Chamonix. And in the, certainly in the winter, maybe thirty, forty percent of the population of Swedes. And again, just my perception was that the Swedish culture is a lot more direct. And actually, when you're not used to that, it's uncomfortable, but that discomfort only is because you're not used to it.

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  But actually, I've come to really value directness because it's like, oh, great, I know how you feel.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, there's no, I guess, you know, born and brought up in the UK, I think both of us, there's a thing here about being polite.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:16:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, you say the right thing. But that does come at a huge cost because half the time, no one actually knows what you really think.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  Exactly that.

• 1:17:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, and I, I did spend much of my life being like that, but, but I have really changed that over the last few years. I mean, literally last week, an example was someone contacted me to ask me to, they, you know, they said, I'm going to love your work. I think you're really going to like my new book. I'd love you to read it and consider endorsing it. And I'm sure it will be, and it is a wonderful book. And I don't have time. And so I just sent a really nice email. I didn't even, I didn't even wait two, three days. I did it straight away. I said, hey, thank you so much. Unfortunately, I'm overcommitted at the moment. I can't remember what else I said, but I told the truth, basically. I didn't give it any white lies. So I'm sorry, I'm a hell year.

• 1:17:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  I hope the launch goes well, or something like that. And I got a lovely reply. And I think what we don't realize sometimes is when you are honest, and there is a way to be honest and kind. It doesn't have to be triggered. You can be totally honest and kind. I think people like that. They respond to that. They're like, oh, I know where I stand now. Whereas the older version of me would have tried to fudge it or kick it down the road for a few months. You know, it's still lingering in your head. Oh, this problem is not going away. It's still going on because I didn't deal with it. And so I think a lot of the reasons some people can't be honest is because of a deep insecurity. And it probably relates to some of the stuff in your former book. There's probably fear there, right?

• 1:18:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  There's fear of I need to be liked. So if I say no, will they like me? It's quite hard, isn't it, to be honest?

• 1:18:41Speaker 00

  It is quite hard to be honest, but it's the, it's the sort of quick rip of a Band-Aid of like, oh, there's going to be, I'm going to feel a moment of friction for being straightforward and telling my truth, or I'm going to kick it down the road for months and, and continue to feel a bit uneasy. And that, my point is that that costs you in authenticity. And it costs you a little bit too much in what you have to then carry as a mask. And you know, the freer that we get, the better that it is, and the more able we are to regenerate energy. That you have to carry that energy of, of small dishonesties where you're not being fully you.

• 1:19:25Speaker 00

  And then, you know, people start loving the you that's fake. Or fake's a harsh word, but that's not quite fully whole and true.

• 1:19:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. This is really what charisma is, surely, right? A charismatic individual, the people we feel drawn to.

• 1:19:44Rangan Chatterjee?

  I guess some of the time I imagine that is because they are fully authentic.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  Sometimes, but somebody just, I just had a political figure pop into my mind that's very, very charismatic.

• 1:19:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  So maybe there's, okay, what was it? Maybe there's deep charisma and shallow charisma. Right. So maybe the deep, real charisma is when you really are being yourself. And I think that is quite magnetic.

• 1:20:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  But there can also be a performance of charisma, I guess.

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  There's a substance, there's a real substance to people who you feel are just comfortable enough in their own skin that they're straightforward.

• 1:20:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  And they say it as it is.

• 1:20:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  They don't mind not being lied.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which I think is another one.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's part of it. But as you quite rightly say, there's a respect that goes with people who are honest. Right? So, you know, if you had actually said, or you or I or anybody actually said, I feel a bit too tired to take on anything else at the minute. Right? Suddenly the impression that we put out to the world of like a resilient performer and, you know, all the rest. It's like, oh, did I just edit that impression that I made on the world? But it's true. And so it's substantial because it's true. And you have that tiny moment of friction for, for saying it.

• 1:21:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  I want to just go a bit deeper on what really is the cost to ourselves when we, when we sort of lie or we have these white lies.

• 1:21:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because I imagine someone's thinking, like, you know, I don't know, my mate asked me to pick up their daughter from school today and drop them home on the way. But I don't want to do it because then I'm going to get stuck in traffic. Or, you know, this is literally coming off the top of my head. Right? It's easier to tell a white lie. Right? Because then there's no big issue. You just say, hey, listen, I'd love to have help, but you know, I've got to, I'm taking. Harry to football, right? For that skeptic who's saying, well, why does that actually matter? Make the case to them that it does matter.

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

  I think it comes down to the energy. So then next time you see your mate and they say, oh, how was Harry's football? And you're like, uh, you know, you put yourself in a position to have to mask and perform. You know, like you're overperforming by doing that. And, and the essential point is, can you be faithful to yourself? And say what's true for you in a way to your point before about saying it kindly or generously. You know, how else might you have framed that if you didn't want to get stuck in traffic and, and pick up his kid? Like, how, let's just roll with it. Like, how else could you have said it?

• 1:22:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I guess you could just tell the truth, say, um, I've got so much on at the moment. And if I do that, I'm going to get stuck in traffic. I'll be home really late. And actually, I just don't have the bandwidth for that at the moment, I'm afraid.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  And you could just literally take two thirds of that explanation off and leave the last bit. I don't have the bandwidth today, buddy. That's it.

• 1:22:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  And that's true for you.

• 1:22:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because you don't want to be over explaining either, do you?

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  Because you'll dig yourself in a hole. And the, the point is, is like, how do you have a tiny moment of friction but be true? He hears it. You said it, you both feel good about it. Right? And it's, you know, you haven't said, I, I don't like your kid. I don't care about you, and so I'm not going to help. That's not the truth.

• 1:23:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, what's really interesting is if I think about that through the lens of burnout, in, in some ways you can think about burnout as a web of lies, right? I've never thought about it like this, but it's almost as if the reason you're probably burning out is because you're constantly lying to yourself.

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I, I describe it as being unfaithful to yourself. Maybe you're putting too much energy into people and things that actually no longer move you or are not quite true for you. You know, but we, we lose our sense of how to say it out loud and, and stand in it, you know?

• 1:23:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's why the small ones are so toxic, because you do it once.

• 1:23:56Speaker 00

  That's what I'm talking about with the ripple.

• 1:23:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  It just continues.

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's a small cost, right? But the, is it a withdrawal or is it a credit? When you say it honestly. It's a credit. When you are slightly dishonest, small white lie, or you hide, because it's not always something that you lie about, it might be something that you just don't share. It's a withdrawal.

• 1:24:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  In that chapter on honesty, at the end, you got some lovely questions. You say, here are some reflection questions that can help you honour your own honesty. And they include, where did I say what I really meant this week? Where did I feel the tug to avoid honesty this week? That's a good one, isn't it? You know, because you may not have done it, but you just felt that urge. Where did my nervous system feel calm and harmonised? And where did it feel at a sink this week?

• 1:24:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Who did I feel most real with this week? Where did I say yes when I really felt no?

• 1:25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  I mean, that's a big one for most people, isn't it?

• 1:25:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And also when some people say no when they really wanted to say yes. You know, imagine journaling those once a week. You know, those questions, just to sort of put yourself in touch with what honesty means for you.

• 1:25:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. I don't think people sometimes realise just how powerful that is. I think sometimes there's a tendency to think you've got to overhaul everything.

• 1:25:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's like if you, every Sunday, if you literally, with a cup of tea or coffee, spent five minutes answering those questions, and you did that week on week, you would know yourself so much better. And you would start to make different decisions.

• 1:25:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just from that self-inquiry.

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And I really make the point strongly about not judging yourself. This is not a time to judge yourself. If you've been brave enough to do something like that, like, it's not time for criticism. It's like, ah, there was one. There was one. Oh, yep. Didn't quite say what I meant there.

• 1:26:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because, you know, I firmly believe that awareness is maybe 80, 85% of all change. And it's my belief. Someone may have a different perspective. And the reason I believe that to be true, A, I've seen it in my own life. I've seen it in many patients. But once you know, let's take that question. Where did I say yes when I felt no? Right? Let's say you reflect, so you're like,

• 1:26:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's say it was picking up Harry and taking him to football when you didn't want to, right?

• 1:26:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Once you know that and you've registered that in your consciousness on that Sunday, when you next get asked to do the same thing, you now can't pretend to yourself that you didn't know. Do you know what I mean? There's now, it's even more heightened in front of you that, oh yeah. Now, you may do it again, but each time you do it and then you reflect on it, you're like, you're bringing it up to the surface. You're taking it out of the shadows and bringing it into the light. And it will lead to a change. It's just a matter of when, once you start asking yourself those questions.

• 1:27:19Speaker 00

  And alongside not criticizing yourself while you're being brave enough to do that, you also have to recognize that like, if you just catch one winning, right? If you kept yourself doing it once, you don't have to wholesale change this all at once. Regenerative performance is about practices and methods that are, where you can change within your life rather than have to create something entirely different. Right? So it's nudges and small behavioral shifts. And I really encourage people to think of it that way, right? If you catch yourself with one where it might be, huh, I could have added a bit there that would have been even more honest. It's not a criticism or a shame, you know, there's no need for a dose of shame that goes with it or like something to fix. It's like, oh, there was one.

• 1:28:03Speaker 00

  Beautiful. Caught it. Next time.

• 1:28:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  That idea that you can make changes within the context of your life, I think is really powerful, Pippa, because as we both know, sometimes when people feel that they're struggling and that they're overly stressed and they've got too much to do, they feel that the answer is to escape.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  I need to quit my job. They might need to quit the job, okay? But they might, I need to quit my job. I need to sell my house and move out to a village in the country and just paint all day.

• 1:28:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:28:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's a form of escapism, right? That possibly doesn't get to the root of what's going on. Some people may want to do that, fine. But I think what, one of the beautiful things about this new book of yours is that you help people. Make these regenerative changes within their life. They don't need to do all that big change if they don't want to.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  Exactly that, exactly that. Because a lot of people have got lots of things that they do like and it's what they planned to do, but it's just feeling overwhelming. They can't get their head above water. Right, so how do you change it so that you can properly evaluate before you have to feel like you've got to completely withdraw from it? And tools down and escape? Or you keep going to the point of, you know, burning, burning up and sort of burning out. That's they, they can't be the only two options.

• 1:29:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Let's finish off talking about these core four principles of regenerative performance. Because ultimately that is where you want us to get to. Away from overperformance and all the way over to regenerative performance.

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  So the first one is coming to presence, which, you know, your podcast, your work has talked about lots and lots. And we all know that it's really, really important, but it's hard to actually remember to do. So, you know, the, the moment of pause, a girlfriend sent me a, when I, after I'd burnt out, a girlfriend sent me a mug. And it just says pause on the front of it. And that's every time I go and make myself a drink during the day, I use that mug. And it's like, oh yeah, that, oh yeah, pause, right. You know, so it's like, give yourself behavioral prompts that allow yourself to just come to presence and pause for a second. And that beautiful practice I spoke about before of hand on heart, hand on belly. What do I want? What do I feel? What do I need?

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  And just allow yourself a moment to listen and listen wholly, not just what your head has to say. So coming to presence is, is a really important first one. The second one is about diversifying your modes of operation and your speed. So a lot of people are in stuck in one gear and that gear is usually pretty fast. They're doing a lot there. It's always intense. There's a sense of constant scale and intensity that means that we're just hanging on for the weekend. Right. In ecology and actually in real elite performance, especially in sport,

• 1:31:08Speaker 00

  you really have periods where it's intense, but also periods where it's slow. You have periods where it's. Fast and shallow and periods where it's deep at work that you're doing. You have periods of renewal, periods of performance, periods of rest, periods of performance. And so actually properly diversifying your modes of operation and your speed is really essential. I have a client who wrote a diversity matrix for her working month where she would, uh, she started with a week and she would, she just had all the things that she might like to do across the month, across the week. Um, and, um, what pace and what mode she would be, need to be in to do that.

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  And she scheduled it.

• 1:31:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  And so she had to schedule it in her diary for the first little while until she got used to it. And it completely radically changed the way that she operates at work. And she felt like she had so much more mental bandwidth at the end of the week to be able to do that.

• 1:32:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because she'd planned for the different speeds.

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So sometimes she's in, you know, there was a lot of it where she was going to have to be responsive. So she didn't, it wasn't like between nine and 11, I will do deep work and between, but it was across a week. So it was like, I need at least four hours of deep time, deep work time. I need at least, um, you know, six hours of communication because she was working, running a project team. So, uh, and some of the things that were in every day were how often she would go outside the office and get fresh air, for example.

• 1:32:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I guess it's going to be, it's going to be different for everyone in whatever profession they're in. So it could be, I don't know, a teacher, for example. It could be that their holidays or the summer holidays. Or the Easter holidays, or maybe the summer holidays after the exams. Maybe that's a time where they really try and switch off and go, you know, it was in a fast paced year, but now I'm going to rest and renew. An accountant, maybe December, January, February, March is the busy, busy time of year because of end of year tax returns. So maybe they plan in, okay, that's great, that's part of my job, but maybe I structure a big Easter break.

• 1:33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Or April and May, I must make sure that there's a slower pace to compensate. That's kind of what you're talking about, right?

• 1:33:33Speaker 00

  And it's that sense of then feeling that you're across the whole thing. So for the accountant, maybe they're really trying to get that moment to design a system that's going to improve how much rev they have to have for the rest of the year.

• 1:33:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  They use the downtime to design the system.

• 1:33:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:33:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  So it might be a more creative type of work, or it might be a more structural piece of work, rather than just a transactional piece of work. So how do you diversify and plan for it and respect the plan that you make as much as possible, whatever the work is? And then there are some things that always mean, always need to be in the day, especially the pauses and the get outside for a minute, you know, because they deplete us enormously.

• 1:34:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Principle three, reconnect with your rhythms.

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  Yes, rhythms and wild clocks. So the wild clock idea is straight from ecology. There's a guy called David Farrier, who wrote this beautiful essay about how pollinators and flowers and other kinds of ecological meetings that keep everything thriving and flourishing are not meeting anymore because of the change to the climate, et cetera. So he was talking about wild clocks in an ecological sense of things being mismatched. And I think we've got the same issue with the way that we see our lives and our stage. So in nature, no living being behaves the same way throughout their whole life cycle,

• 1:35:02Speaker 00

  but we expect the same from ourselves through our whole adult life cycle at least. We don't recognise the changes that happen in adulthood. We recognise them through childhood and adolescence, and you get to be a grown up and it's the same then for the next 40 or 50 years, right? And of course, it's not. So you were talking before about feeling like maybe there's a change of foot for you or an adaptation to a...

• 1:35:29Speaker 00

  New phase, that's exactly it. That's a, that's a wild clock in some ways, looking at, why would, and menopause is another example for women, right?

• 1:35:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 00

  Expecting the same from yourself in perimenopause or menopause as you did previously and just gritting it out, that's not it. That's not what nature does. It evolves to meet the time. It adapts to meet the time. And then, of course, there is winter, dark nights, dark mornings, summer, longer daylight. How do we adapt to those things? Or are we ultra-processed and homogeneous and mono all year?

• 1:36:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:07Speaker 00

  Right? With expecting the same thing. And there's only a few creatures in the world that actually have a menopause, you know, for example, toothed whales also have a menopause. But once that whale has been through menopause, they have a different role in life, you know, because there's a recognition that something shifted. It doesn't mean you're not productive, doesn't mean you haven't got a valuable role, but something has, needs adaptation. How can we talk about that?

• 1:36:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:38Speaker 00

  So that's so wild clocks and rhythms, you know, and, you know, I ask people the question, are you, do you have rhythm in your life or do you have pace? You know, and how do you know the difference? Because rhythm, you know, it's kind of like a performance rhythm, like you come up to the crest of the circle and you come down the other side before you go again. It's whole.

• 1:37:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:03Speaker 00

  It's not a straight line. It's not a straight linear thing.

• 1:37:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. And the fourth one is embodied intelligence.

• 1:37:10Speaker 00

  Hmm. So this is like, can you reconnect your mind and your body? You know, we treat our body like it's an Uber for our head, you know, control center. And we treat it like, sometimes even like a burden, something needs fixing or something's not right, or we have to improve something. It's like the machine that carries the intelligence center around. But this incredible thing that is your body is alive with intelligence from your gut, from your heart, signaling to you all day what you really need and how you're really doing. And can you actually connect those things a little bit more and respect your whole intelligence rather than just your head intelligence? Because that is a massive, massive piece of not getting to that burnout phase.

• 1:37:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love that. Such a clear way to think about the difference between overperformance and regenerative performance. It's something that's, I guess, very practical, actually, in terms of a map to help those of us who need to shift and make changes in our lives to get there. Looking back on your time working with the England football team, how do you think about it now?

• 1:38:21Speaker 00

  I think that was an amazing little moment that encouraged me to really think about how these principles apply to people more broadly. You know, that's, my time at England was sort of the culmination of 25 years of working in elite sport, which I thoroughly loved. But it was time for me not to be on the bus anymore and in the organisation, in the thick of it in that way. I still coach people, still coach high performers from sport in that way. But it was an extraordinary moment and it has given me so much opportunity that I am very deeply grateful for, that is about me being able to have conversations like this to help more people.

• 1:39:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Pippa, you know how much I love your work. I thought your first book Fearless was amazing. This book is just as good. I love the content in it. Life reclaimed. Find Freedom From Chronic Overperformance. It's a wonderful book. I'd highly recommend people check it out if they resonate with the ideas that we've spoken about today. To finish off, Pippa, you've shared loads of practical tips in this conversation today, and there's plenty more in the book. If someone, whilst listening to this conversation, connected deeply with this idea that actually

• 1:39:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  their life is slightly off track, it's not going the way in which they want it to go, perhaps they feel stuck or close to burnout, but until now, they felt that there's no way out. What would you find the words be to that person?

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  I would suggest that firstly, they start with a big dose of generosity and care for themselves and take a moment to look at whether they actually need a way out or they need to change within. And I would encourage them to be thinking about matching that inner landscape with the outer landscape and the world that they're in, and finding more wholeness. That's the essence of it. And as you quite rightly say, the book is full of, it's a map really, for how people might be able to do that. But first, slow down, pause, ask yourself, and respect the answer.

• 1:40:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Pippa, great advice. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today. The book is wonderful, Life Reclaims. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me, as always.

• 1:41:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life. And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I be consuming, and quotes that have caused me

• 1:41:45Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:42:30Rangan Chatterjee?

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