In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about focusing on what’s within our control. If you’re like me, you’re worrying about the upcoming election, climate change, social issues, and much more. But, while it’s important to be aware of our macro-environments, it’s even more important to focus on what’s within our control. This week, I’m talking with Lissy Alden, the founder of MYNDY, a mental fitness company that helps people build better behavioral and thought patterns. Here Lissy shares her story of overcoming stress and burnout, then returning to school to study the brain. Lissy and I talk about the importance of focusing on your micro-environment and identifying small, repeatable steps you can take to stay in control of your life, better manage stress and more effectively achieve your goals.
About My Guest
Lissy Alden is the founder of MYNDY, a mental fitness company. Before MYNDY, Lissy built a proprietary, research-backed and quantitative framework to help change company culture and was a change agent fighting burnout for herself and others at large organizations. She specialized in working with companies (like Amex, NYTimes, etc) to measure and operationalize culture, improve service operations, and enhance workforce development. She is a graduate of Cornell University and received her MBA from MIT.
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Transcript
Kim Meninger
Welcome, Lissy, I'm so excited for our conversation today, I cannot wait to dive in. And I would love to start by inviting you to introduce yourself.
Lissy Alden
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on the show Kim. My name is Lissy Alden, and I am the founder of a company called MYNDY, which is a mental fitness company that helps people build new behavioral and thought patterns that lead them to feeling more focused, resilient, and high-performing every day. Or we like to say that help you win every day. My background is I worked, I was sociology major, love people and organizations and how they fit ended up working in JP Morgan right out of school. And I burned out. And then I went to an ed tech company that went from 40 to 1000 people. In three years, it was an incredible experience, I learned so much, I burned out again. And so I ended up going to MIT to build a quantitative research-backed model to fix company culture. I thought that so much of my stress was a result of the workplace. And so I did that work, I then brought that framework to Danny Meyer, the founder of Shake Shack during one of my internships, and then to a publicly traded biotech as a change agent, when I graduated biotech company at 15,000 people to kind of help them continue to grow and evolve really fast in a way that was in line with employee experience. So employees feel good, and therefore they can be more productive, and the company can continue to grow. And what I found was that even when we did everything, right, in terms of measuring workload, and work-life balance, and then staffing against, you know, really challenging work weeks, we were making sure we had the right people in the right place at the right time, and making sure leaders had the right training. And we were doing comp reviews and everything you'd imagine, everyone was still stressed. And so my thing was okay, if you have the right structures at work, and people are so stressed What else could be happening in our brains and our lives, that's leading to these feelings of stress, exhaustion, that lead to burnout, and you know, things like episodic depression and anxiety and all of this. And that's when I left to start studying the brain, and built the framework that sits undermining my current company.
Kim Meninger
That is amazing. I want to back way up if you're open to this, and let's do it. Because I really want to dig into your personal experience. And I'm sure that was a huge driver of, you know, everything that's come since what did burnout look like to you? How did you know you were burnt out? What did it feel like? I think that burnout, even though we talked about it more now than ever before, there's still a lack of awareness on the part of some people that they may be either in burnout or approaching burnout, like, a lot of times we kind of, I think in that spirit of you just gotta keep going, right? Or, you know, I don't want to show any signs of weakness. We plow through a lot of this. And so I'm curious, like, what was what was happening with you? And then how did you know it?
Lissy Alden
Yeah. Great question. I think a couple things. One, is I was so tired all the time. And everything felt big. So like, I would get another task at work, or I'd, you know, I'd spill something on my shirt. And I was like, oh, no, I've got more laundry to do, you know, and this probably won't come out, I think, too, is that everything felt quite negative. I'm not, you know, I tend to have a pretty positive outlook, but everything felt like I was just collecting these like negative experiences every day, you know, I go to Dunkin Donuts, to get my strawberry frosted donut. Yes, I was eating that at the time every morning for breakfast to make myself feel happy. And there'd be less sprinkles on the donut was like Aha, and there's less sprinkles and not enough milk in my coffee. And you know, then I'd go into the office and I'd get 12 emails, I have 12 emails. And it was just this constant, almost like I call it like collection of negative experiences. And frankly, when you look around, you can find them they're quite easy, especially as a human who's doing a lot of things at the same time. I lived in New York City at the time. And so things were busy. And then I think the last thing was just like, there became a lot of like, self-doubt about like my capabilities and my ability on the job. So I would do something, I would get a piece of critical feedback. And that piece of feedback would just kind of like sit with me. And I'd be like, well, if I'm not doing well, at this one task, you know, I mess something up on a spreadsheet. It's like, oh my gosh, do I need to triple-check my work? Am I even good at this job that I don't even you know, love right now, like what's happening? And so I think it's just this like, exhaustion meets negativity meets self-doubt, that kind of snowballs. And when you look at the definition of burnout, according to the World Health Organization, it's actually all three of those things. But I always say it sounds like those three things. It feels like crap. You know, you're just everything's just kind of heavy. And like that's the feeling I would say kind of encapsulate Get all of that for me.
Kim Meninger
And so you find yourself in that situation, did you immediately think to yourself, I need to leave like what was your thought process around? How do I fix this for lack of a better expression?
Lissy Alden
Well, there was like, there's like the part that I would love to share with everybody, which is like the, you know, I decided to switch jobs and get myself out of that situation. But before that, it was like a very, like, I started eating my strawberry frosted donut to help me feel better every day. And then I'm reading my horoscope, every day being like, there's gotta be something here that's going to change my life, you know. And I remember one day walking down the street in New York City, and there was a sign and it said, it's never too late to get where you're going. And it was on a block. I walked down every single day and never noticed it. And that morning, I had been I'm sure, you know, talking to my mom probably crying and saying, you know, this is like, so hard working so hard. Everything's so hard everything. Negative Lissy is the time is like, you know, heavy and tired and, and all this and, and she had said to me that morning, she's like, Lissy, everyday magic can happen. And I heard that. And I mean, I teared up when she said it because it was just like I like it was like what's happened? I know that to be true. And then I saw this sign, literal, a literal physical sign in New York City. And I was like, I need to I need I need to do something else. It's never too late for me to switch my job. You know, at the time, I'm 21, 22. You know, it's like, of course, it's not. And I started looking for new jobs. And I was looking for, I mean, it took me months and months, because I wasn't just looking for a job. I was looking for a career change. I met with like 100 people I haven't met before work and after work, I met with people in the food industry and nonprofit and all this. So I was trying to basically reinspire myself like what gets me excited about work. And yeah, I ended up finding this job at the Ed Tech company, which was amazing. But it took me, it took me a while and I had to find ways to bring that positivity and joy back. And a big part of it. Once I started looking for the job. Then I started running, like more seriously. So I was running and running races not to be confused with the real athlete. I joke I’m a mathlete. But I kind of started to snowball a lot of these positive habits to get my energy back to get my positivity back to get my efficacy my feelings of like I can do this stuff back.
Kim Meninger
And I'm sure that plays into what you're doing today. Right? Oh, I want to also ask you a little bit about because I thought it was really interesting the way you said that even with an nothing's perfect, right. But even with the right structures in place within an organization, people still feel a lot of stress. And so I wonder if we fast forward to where you are now knowing what you know, all the research, you've done the work that you've done? What are sort of the root causes of what we're experiencing right now? And like how much of it? And obviously, this is going to depend on lots of situational factors. But how much of this is internal versus external? And how do we think about this, right now.
Lissy Alden
I'm so smart. There's like two, like, I mean, we could spend like years talking about either one of those pieces, I'm actually gonna take the second piece first, which is how much of this is this challenges stresses internal versus external. And then I'll talk kind of about what the research says is causing a lot of these challenges that we have. So I think with the internal versus external, listen, like the world is, is Is, is heavy, like, I wish I could say something else, you know, as a coach, you typically tell people to zoom out, look at the big picture. And these days I joke, I'm like, zoom in, make it really tiny, you know, look at your, you know, keep your eyes on your own paper, like, you know, take one step, but one foot in front of the other. And I feel like because, you know, between COVID and everything going on with you know, global politics and global warming, and you name it, we could our brains collect a lot of these really big things. Some of them affect us every day. Some of them don't, some of them don't, but do because they touch loved ones or things that we care about. And so I think what's really interesting and warning, I'm very tactical, and I'm really action-oriented as a person, like one of my favorite exercises to do, whenever I'm having a tough day and saying, Well, what's causing this is you draw a circle on a piece of paper, it's a really famous exercise they have you do in, in, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, and you write down all the things that are in control on the inside of your circle, and all the things that are out of your control on the outside of your circle. Like those things I just mentioned. So things in your control, a messy room, your to-do list, believe it or not, your to-do list is in your control, right? Like all the, the things that you've got on your list that you think you need to do this weekend, work, work stuff, and it's really about realizing that the things that stress us out, Yes, absolutely can be those big things. But when we look at a moment-to-moment basis of what is disturbing us, often it has to do with these things and can have to do with these things that are in our control. And so this is where, as humans, that macro and micro, we can kind of zoom out and zoom in. But it's really about making sure that the things that we're really stressing over, that we're exhausted, feeling negative over are… Ideally, we focus on the things that are in our control. And that's when we can kind of start to move through them over time. Taking time, of course, to be stressed, worried concerned about the world is key, but letting your brain spiral out on that, that's where like, you know, these things can get really challenging. So I always say our stress comes from both places, the micro and the macro. But it's really about kind of focusing on the micro, when the macro, especially those things sit outside of your circle, get too heavy. And then the second piece is what's causing a lot of this Well, obviously, there's all these world challenges that are happening and these big things in our society. But there's also a lot of other things we talk about. So how about technology, we were as humans in the nature for a very long time. And all of a sudden, we were in buildings. And now we're working in offices, we're seated all the time, we're in front of screens, which are actively activating to our brains. But we don't just sit in front of screens for four or five hours, we're in front of them for seven to 12 hours. Now we've got cell phones that extend screen time. And we're sedentary. And these two things the in front of screens not moving, are really, really detrimental to balancing our neurochemicals on a regular basis. So being seated all the time, is a challenge. Now people say we'll stand every hour, that's true, but you actually can't just stand you should be moving. And it's not about exercise, it's about walking. So movement is really key. screentime is really, really disruptive because again, it's activating, which leads to challenges with our sleep. Because we tend to spend even our leisure time in front of two sets of screens, we have the almost no time for our brain to encode the information learning and stimuli that we take in during the day. And so we end up our brains go to bed, but they're not tired. They're constantly working. And we tend to wake up in the middle of the night ruminating about that one thing we forgot or early in the morning. And then the last thing is really about taking breaks. We, I always say our brain sits behind our eyes, we forget it's there. We're not taking breaks in our lives because we're go-go-go all the time. Which means in between work sessions, we're doing laundry in between laundry, we're listening to podcasts, we're doing things all the time. And so it kind of you can see how these four things, the screen time, the movement, the sleep, the brakes, all kind of relate to getting us to a place where our brains are in overdrive and exhausted when we're tired. Just from a physiological perspective, we tend to sit in our brainstem, which is where our fight-or-flight response lives. When we're in our brainstem, we tend to not have access to our the top of our mind that really, really strong clear thinking parts, which is why when we're stressed, we don't necessarily remember to go to the gym, take a break, put on our phones, sleep. And so all these things kind of get wrapped up in each other. And yeah, we're in overdrive. [Oh, my Goodness.] It was a lot. I know.
Kim Meninger
But it’s going through my list of yeah, check it out, I want to go back to what you were talking about to, you know, control versus not in our control. I think that's so important because I am somebody who personally struggles with so much anxiety that it's very easy for me to take on the weight of the world. And so I have been going through this just this week, you know, something I have to constantly think about, okay, what's within my control is not reading the news app, like 10 times a day. I'm like, Yeah, detox, but I'm there at least a few days right? Or, you know, what's like, one small step I can take that addresses a larger macro issue even if I can't fix it myself. So that at least I'm feel like I'm doing my part, right. Things like that have a really are really important to me, because obviously anxiety is about feeling control. And I think like, even if I can just connect the dots between my micro activities and macro level fears that that makes me feel a little bit better.
Lissy Alden
I love it. And that's exactly so taking those like little tiny steps that you can control is really important. And I think a lot of folks can relate to that the challenges our brain loves more, right so it's, well if I just keep checking the news and I'm on top of it at least I'm aware and I can, you know, converse and be empathetic. And the challenge is you almost give away that sense of control when you're checking the news all the time, because all of a sudden, the information you're sitting with can't sit, it's always new. And you can't really take action. If you're checking 10 times a day, and you have a job. And you've got, you know, people, depending on you, and things like that. And so the same is true for the stock market. Research shows people who check the stock market on a regular basis, especially multiple times throughout the day, are feeling actively more unhappy, they can't change it. You know, they're not most people aren't taking big swings that are going to move the market. And so as a result, you almost give away this power over your psyche by doing that.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, and so let's connect this to where you are today, because I know you're doing really interesting work right now. And I want to hear more about myndy. And what you're thinking about now, given everything that we've just talked about?
Lissy Alden
Yeah, so I think the big thing for me was always how do you connect intention and action, or what I call inspiration and, the inspirations like, Ah, I just saw this amazing quote from, you know, Serena Williams, and I feel inspired, I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna move my body, I'm strong. And then like, we end up picking up our phone and life takes over and we don't go. Perspiration is sweating. It's doing the work. And when I think about why we're really here at MYNDY, and why we exist, it's to help people follow through on the best of these intentions when it comes to working on their mind. Now, step one was like, Okay, how do I figure out how to work on my mind so that it works for me on a regular basis? And I'll talk about that in a second the answer to that question. But then step two was like, How do I practice this every day when I'm like a busy, professional, you know, sibling, friend, family member partner, the whole thing, given that I don't have another hour in my day to go to, you know, a different kind of gym to do different kind of exercise. And so, at Mindy, I ended up spending over a year doing research on the brain that had been built off the research I was doing on company culture and leadership. That basically answered the question, how do I work on my minds, that works for me. And there are three mental movements that your brain needs every day to feel good, you can think about these like basic functional movements in your body, you need to stand up, sit down, push, pull, wiggle a little, so that you can kind of keep yourself loose. The second part of the model is what we call your mental muscles. These are muscles you activate when you want to achieve something, go somewhere, or essentially get anything done and feel a different kind of way. So I'll talk about what each of these are in a moment. But I want to just actually really talk about mind movements. Because if you take nothing else away from this conversation like this is this is been wildly impactful for me. So there are three mental movements, your brain needs every day to feel good. We call it stop slow and go. It's like a stoplight red, yellow, green. So stop is the practice of resting and building awareness. In your mind. There's a lot of conversations about meditation, mindfulness breathwork. But this is really at the end of the day about not bringing your phone to the toilet. It's about finding really, really quiet moments for you and your mind to just rest in code and think. And most of us don't have that time, not even intentionally, but because we end up putting in music or the podcast or listening to someone or calling a friend in between the meeting. And we're suffocating our minds. So stop is really about stopping your mind. And resting. Slow is about expanding your perspective. This is about really building new mental patterns outside of the ones that your brain defaults to. And remember, when you're tired, you tend to default to those negative patterns, why they believe they keep us alive, you hear a loud noise, you duck, you get an email that says we need to talk oh my gosh, my jobs in threat, right? I need to, I need to kind of step in here. But at the end of the day, slow is really about saying, Okay, those patterns are useful, but so are thinking about what I'm grateful for how I might actually do a great job at the presentation, what I'm actually doing well, at work, what my team is doing well at work. And people hear these things. And they're like, oh, okay, that feels like a little toxically positive. And I always say sure. But at the end of the day, it's about creating positive thought patterns to balance the negative ones to tell a more true story about your life every day. And so our brains are really good at finding the hard. But this is really about expanding our perspective and also finding the good, which is where Wouldn't that be amazing if there was a news channel, and I think there's a couple of them that really talk about good news in the world today, because there isn't a balanced perspective. And so you have to work to create one and that's what slow is about and go is the practice of making and recognizing progress. So this is about humans have to feel like they're moving forward otherwise they feel like they're dying. aren't making progress. And this is Kim, we were saying about those big issues. What's the one small thing that I can do to help make progress, it's so huge. And that's something that people need every day when we feel stuck. We feel inhuman. It's why COVID felt so challenging. We were stuck in our homes, even our relationships didn't feel like they were moving forward. Because nothing moved from a handshake to a hug, it was just computer to computer to computer. So it's not just about making progress, it's recognizing it, which is why crossing things off your to do list is so impactful for people seeing a little bar with you know, if you're fundraising that that bar go up matters. But we always say you have to stop slow go to manage the rhythm of your life. And at Mindy we're building programs to help people stop slow, go every day in under 10 minutes, so that you cannot just practice these things, but also track your progress, meaning how you're feeling over time. And so we've built that system. And again, we've got these mental muscles not really worth going into today. But we've got the framework and we've got this again, place for perspiration. And that's really what we're focused on.
Kim Meninger
I love this so much because you're absolutely right, I think about this a lot the the lack of time, coupled with the negative thought patterns that are just so central to how we operate as humans and what that leads to in terms of something like impostor syndrome, right? Or other forms of self-doubt or anxiety or, you know, just, you know, all the burnout, everything that we're talking about, right? And so when you were talking about the risk of toxic positivity, I often think about the fact that our brains are automatically going to capture the risk. They're always, always going to be a threat, right? It's, it's that we don't, unless we're consciously doing this, we're not pausing long enough to balance that threat with what, just like you said, but what might go well, right? Well, you can do this in advance, or you can do it retrospectively to have I often recommend that people, because our first reaction when we come out of a meeting is I can't believe I said that, or I can't believe it didn't say that, or you know, all of the negative things is to then stop and say Yeah, but what did I do? Well, I like what am I proud of? Something that just balances out the negative and reminds you you're not, you know, you actually did belong in that room? You're not stupid, right? You're not You're not incompetent, all of the stories we tell ourselves.
Lissy Alden
Absolutely. And I think this is where MYNDY, you like one of the things I'm proudest of is we very quickly help people see their thoughts not be their thoughts, so they can. And it's the difference between, I'm stupid versus Wow, that was a really stupid thing to say. But I also said something really smart. And being able to notice that in yourself is the difference between being held as an imposter by your own thoughts and being able to free yourself, not for yourself with stupid moments or feelings of doubt, or negativity or criticism. But it's really about being able to say, Wow, okay, I could have done that better. That was a really silly thing to say, or even this morning, I woke up, I was tired. I was traveling, I moved. I just hit my car on something. There's 1000 things I could talk about, wow. Okay, it's Monday, you know, that's what we do is Monday, but I'm like, a deep breath. And I'm like, and I get to go to work. I had a delicious breakfast with my mom, which is amazing. I'm back here with her and my dad for a little bit. Like, it's sunny out, I'm going to take a walk today, like, but I had to consciously and even as a mental fitness athlete in training, you know, it's like, I constantly have to remind myself of those things. But it's, it's work, we call it mind work. But once you start doing it, it just becomes I caught myself almost immediately. In the oh, I'm doing the Monday thing. And if you can catch yourself in the oh, I'm doing the, you know, oh, I'm doing the pylon thing. And I always really have the title for the thing. It's a really powerful tool to then say, Okay, what else is true?
Kim Meninger
So, what's the first step? Right? Because I think that what we're talking about is so powerful, it makes so much sense. But I also know there are probably a lot of people listening that are agreeing conceptually and thinking like, when once the conversation is over, right, like how do they keep the momentum going? So that this actually becomes a practice?
Lissy Alden
Absolutely. I think the big thing for us one is like we're literally building a tool for this that'll be available in September we can talk about it's a daily mental fitness routine builder for I usually suggest the morning, but I think the at the end of the day, the real goal here is to pick one thing, stop flow or go and I don't suggest the thing that feels most exciting to you. I actually think you need to be The thing that you do the least. So if you don't ever pause, or you don't ever shift your thinking, or you're never ever clocking your progress, like really recognizing the work you do, especially as women, we like do 29,000 things. And we're like, but I still have three things on my list today. And today it was wash, you know, it's like, pick one of those things stops over go. And then do it every morning, when you sit down to start your day in whatever capacity that is, or stand up to start your day. So if you are sitting down to do work, can you take one minute, and just you can put your head down on the desk, you don't do anything? And just pause and let yourself B. Can you take a minute and write down everything that went well the day before? Or can you take a minute and write down the three things that you accomplished yesterday, not the things you didn't, not the things you want to do just the things you did? Like that's that's where this stuff starts. It doesn't start with all three movements, it starts with one. And it starts with a commitment to that repetitively over time. I always say the gym is crazy, we go we pick up weights, we drop them every day until we die, you know, and it's like, and then the Jive is we have different music, whatever. And so your mental fitness exercises, you want to get to a place where you are a little bored. And then you can find a way to spiff it up but start with one and start really small.
Kim Meninger
I think that's a really good point because otherwise it feels too daunting. And we're just not going to do it. But I'm hearing you say one minute is one minute, literally enough to get started.
Lissy Alden
Absolutely. I always say like you can't run 10 miles without running one. You can't run one without taking a step. And this is where we, we fall off. It's like, I'm gonna meditate. It's Jan one, we meditate for 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes is a lot for a brain that hasn't sat still for a long time. It's like, why don't we actually start with one minute of silence, and then work your way up to two. Our brains love progress all sudden, we're like, but now I can do five. It's like, but why don't you just say it's two and then do five and you surprise yourself and then you get to extra celebrate? Right? We do this all the time we move the we say we move the goal line, and then we can't win. And so I'm like, let yourself win with a minute. And once you do a minute for two weeks, not a week, two weeks, then mop it up and pick another movement or try something else or do that thing for longer. But it's it this is where to create any sort of habit habits are really just repeated actions over and over and over, you're basically creating a new path in a forest that's never been moved before. And so you need to wear that path down if your brain is going to find that new behavior every day, especially when you're tired. Because when you're tired, you're like, I don't even know where I am in the forest. I don't know what to do. So we're basically trying to really set a path for you, even on your worst day is to be able to find those moments of stops logo. And really like I hate to be cheesy, but it's fine herself, you know, and she's in there every day. And she's great. And she's doing an amazing job. And there's things she could be doing better. But like let's focus on the amazing job because you already know what you could, could be improving on like you said,
Kim Meninger
Yeah, and I want to tie this back to the macro to going back to what you were talking about of organizations. There are some organizations that are doing better than others as it relates to work-life balance, et cetera. But what do you advise people to think about when they're working on this in the context of forces that are outside of their control and work environment? Right? So it's like, I can, I'm just anticipating that there are people that are going to say, Are you kidding me? There's no way I'm gonna be able to find one minute, I've got more on my plate than I can realistically accomplish. Right? So we're, where's the power here? And does that mean they need to change jobs? Is that mean? Like, what? What's realistic in a situation like that?
Lissy Alden
And I love that you asked because my work I say that I found a minute 40 years ago, but I actually have been solving the problem for 10. Because I started with workplaces thinking that was the big hard problem, like what's harder than a system, you know, like that to change. And then I ended up going to the individual. So there's actually two parts to this one is it's the it's the conversation with yourself, which by the way I have with myself, which is I don't have a minute. I wish I had a minute, I don't have a minute, which means that work is a priority over you. We always say knowing what you need is not selfish, it's strong. An athlete who decides not to drink water because they don't have time just passes out and can't perform. You know, it's like, if you think about a teacher who doesn't have time to write lesson plans that they're not teaching. And so it's there is the stop, or the slow or the pick your life is is that is happening. It's happening in different variations, whether you're controlling or not. And so, step one is like do you give yourself permission to be the talent in your life meaning the talent on the field, the person that needs to actually take care of themselves so that they can take care of other people and do their job their best? And do you believe that that matters? And then the second piece here is can you give yourself permission? This is why I say a minute, not 10, not 20. Because frankly, I know you, I've been you, I didn't have 10, I didn't have 20, you certainly don't if you can't carve out one. So that's just like on a personal level, that becomes a prioritization piece, a permission piece, like all of you have permission out there to take a minute. And by the way, that minute doesn't have to be anything I mentioned, it could be, you know, sitting eating a spoon of peanut butter, staring at the wall, it could be, you know, stepping outside, and literally just breathing fresh air, it could be anything. The second piece of this is companies. So the framework that I built, and we've actually gone into companies and use this with them, it's really powerful, because stops logo is something every team needs to be doing to a team needs to stop, regroup, build awareness, how are we doing? You need to slow down, expand your perspective, how are we in the context of everything happening at the company, and we need to go we need to make and recognize progress. I always say teams are amazing at making progress. But do they recognize it too, they clock it, do they say hey, we did this? So that's how companies really need to think about this. Now, if you're in an environment that doesn't necessarily understand the stops, logo, respect the stops logo, even possibly know that stops will go is like a thing, then that becomes a place where it's really about you at the individual level, speaking up for what you need, hey, I'm gonna be five minutes late to a meeting. Everybody's late. Cool, how amazing that that five minutes you're taking is really about a bathroom break and a one-minute breather in your capacity, or one minute to write down some positive thoughts because you're finding yourself getting stuck on some negative ones. But I think this is where we started the conversation with the circle, what's in your control, and what's out of your control. Now, if you're a leader at a company, you may have more control in the macro environment of stress that you're in, and pace and workload and all of that. But even if you don't in your micro world, the things you can control your breaks the bathroom break, not bring your phone in there, right, taking up a true beat, like it's the taking a minute to start your day. One minute early, it's the you know, making sure that you're actually stepping outside at some point or wiggling your body and not seated for, you know, six to eight hours a day. Like these are the things taking a call as a walking call, instead, right? These are all things that are going to help you feel better. But it's about drawing that circle and saying what is actually in my control when it comes to my mental fitness. And it's a lot more than you think I pushed you that there should always be over five things in that circle. And if there's not, you can feel free to reach out to me anytime, anywhere. Truly, I know sometimes it's hard to think of them, but I got you.
Kim Meninger
I am already thinking about not bringing my phone…
Lissy Alden
By the way, or the shower, no podcast and there's no music in the shower. What I do.
Kim Meninger
Every morning, I turn on my podcasts I listen to it in the shower, and it's like, automatically My mind is dominated by something else that somebody else is talking.
Lissy Alden
And by the way, I bet they're amazing. And like nourishing in their own way. But then are you finding that silent time somewhere else? That's right. And for some people answer's no.
Kim Meninger
Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And oh, my goodness, I could talk to you all day. But in the spirit. Or the interest of time, I should say, you mentioned people can reach out to you how can people find you if they want to learn more about you about myndy?
Lissy Alden
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find us at www.MYNDY.co It's m-y-n-d-y-dot-c-o and then also, we're on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn, you can always reach out to me just shoot me a message. And we're now on also Instagram and Tiktok. So you can find us there and we have a waitlist for our program coming up. It's an app, it'll be ready in September. And like I said, it's going to really help you build those daily mental fitness routines. With SOPs logo in mind, in addition to those four behaviors, we mentioned around tech use sleep movement, and breaks all in under 10 minutes a day. So you can find our waitlist on our website. And I really look forward to hearing from some of you, and especially the skeptics if you're like I heard you and but I don't know, I'd love to chat cuz yeah, I was you for a really long time. And still am sometimes.
Kim Meninger
Thank you so much, Lissy. Yeah, this has been fantastic. I so appreciate having this conversation with you.
Lissy Alden
Thanks, Kim for having me. It's really a pleasure.