S4 - Ep26 - Unlocking Brain Optimization: Boost Energy, Focus, and Resilience for Entrepreneurial Success with Tanessa Shears

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City And thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevy, my co-host. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Today we got special guest Tanesha Shears. How you doing? I'm doing great, adam. How's it going? It is going Craziness today. Craziness Even on a Wednesday. I don't know what the deal is Supposed to be Mondays, but mine bleed over into Wednesdays. So, tanesha, you got Tanesha Shears consulting. Is that the name of it?

Speaker 3: 0:54

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Okay and you essentially help people kind of get their lives together in a way. Explain a little bit about what you guys do.

Speaker 3: 1:03

Yeah. So I help entrepreneurs specifically optimize the way their brain works so we can double the energy, double the focus. I find so often a lot of us just wake up feeling like we need a couple hours, a kick start, three cups of coffee to get going, and that really impacts our ability to do meaningful work and have the energy we need to enjoy our lives. And they, you know, we get to the work and we had that afternoon energy slump and we're just feeling like we could be getting more out of our time and more out of our life. So my job is I come in with some fun stuff, some biohacking, health optimization, working with sleep, food, stress resiliency, that kind of thing to really help us feel more energetic and be waking up feeling well rested. So we're ready to take on the day.

Speaker 2: 1:41

So, okay, my problem is I have too many things going on, like most entrepreneurs, i would say. And my just my personality, the way I roll is, you know, let me try a bunch of stuff and see what works, like, throw a bunch of shit at the wall and see what sticks, kind of thing, right. And you know, i spend a bunch of time playing around with a lot of ideas just to see what what works right, and I don't get a ton of sleep. And this is you know, if anybody's an entrepreneur and you're listening right now, you probably got the same story. Go to bed at 3am, 4am. you stay up, you're watching YouTube trying to figure out side hustles, like I do. I do it for a different reason. I'm trying to find side hustles for everyone who listens to the podcast here and what would be cool to try. And then a lot of times I try myself, like the Turro thing. I, you know this seems to be working out, but you know you, you end up. you're sitting at home, there's a bag of chips or whatever it is. you're smashing chips, you're eating frozen dinners, you're you know I'm thinking all the things that people don't do. You don't exercise because you go down the rabbit hole on YouTube or you're researching something on the internet and you just don't. you're not getting the right sleep, you're not getting the right nutrition. You're you're probably stressed because you've got a business, you got bills to pay, got employees to pay. I mean, does this sound familiar? I mean, is this? this isn't unique to me. I know that.

Speaker 3: 3:01

No, no, you are saying the things that everyone that's come through my world at some point says I mean, that's, that's what it is, and we have so much messaging about. Like you know, just just keep going until you get to that next milestone. You know, cross a hundred K, get the first team members, and we all feel like the thing, like it's okay, this is just for now. When it's, when I get that next milestone, then then I'm going to take back control. It's all going to be good from there on out. But I've never met an entrepreneur that doesn't have things that come after that. We like to keep that horizon moving right, like the. As soon as we reach the goal, we set the next one, and then we never really make that time to take care of ourselves. And so I always like to think like we, we're creating these businesses to create all of these assets that are, you know, bringing in money. But at the end of the day, your brain is your biggest asset And if it is not working properly, everything else is going to suffer. So I like to look at what am I doing in my life that's going to get the best return on investment when it comes to taking care of my brain, and that's the asset, and so I, like you were setting at the beginning, there's so many things to do. How do I even know what the heck is working? So I like to directly go in, find out what has the biggest impact, the biggest return on investment in our energy and our ability to focus, and then do those things, instead of thinking of all the things that we air quotes should be doing with our health that we just don't make time for.

Speaker 2: 4:21

Yeah, Yeah, So name some of these things like what happens, people come to you or you find them. how does your process work for getting these people kind of under your umbrella?

Speaker 3: 4:32

So are you talking about bringing my people into the business or what I end up doing with the bear Customers?

Speaker 2: 4:36

Yeah, yeah, and this could probably a side hustle that turned into your main hustle too. So how did you start out? How did you? how did you end up finding customers and getting them? Because you hear there's a lot of health coaches out there. There's a lot of these people out there Like what's your differentiator? And then how did you use that to bring people into your, to your brand?

Speaker 3: 4:58

Yeah, well, i actually started it, like you said, in 2014,. I was a personal trainer and that's when I opened my business And you know, you start bringing in clients over the time and a lot of them at that time just were in the environment. They noticed that you know the passion I have, the energy I have, and it really is true that you draw the people in who align with kind of the energy and the vibe that you have, right, and so through this and through, you know, being in that environment, i ended up transitioning online and a lot of my audience now comes in actually through podcast interviews. I've done almost a hundred of them in the last two years and so much of my audience comes in because they hear that and they're just like Oh, this is fun. You know, i related to what you said. I want tips on that, i want to know more about that, and so it's part of that journey is just creating a bit of that curiosity and genuinely showing up just to provide value. And my hope is always that you'll hear something today that you'll be like I'm going to try that and you try it and it works and you want to know more, and that's kind of how I've marketed my business over the years and it's worked out beautifully.

Speaker 2: 5:55

And you've been doing this. It looks like for 15 years now. You've been a consultant, yeah.

Speaker 3: 5:59

Yeah, 2008 is when I actually started doing fitness, meaning like I was teaching a lot of classes and stuff. I entered into more the big box gym space And then it was 2014 is when I was like I'm done with the big box gym, i'm going to open my own business of this. So I can, you know, write my own rules, do this my own way, serve my clients the way I want, charge the rates that I want all of that.

Speaker 2: 6:19

So my personal trainer, i go to him on Monday and Friday and he never leaves our neighborhood. So I'm from the west side of Cincinnati and people on the west side never leave the west side, let alone just go downtown, like it's. Unless there's a sporting event, they never leave. So he has this kind of he's got a business. He does one-on-one personal training And that's kind of all he wants to do. I keep trying to tell him like you need to scale that up. You need to. You know he doesn't want to teach classes. He's like oh, classes, that's amateur stuff. I don't teach classes. I don't know what his problem is, but anyway he doesn't want to do that. He doesn't want to advertise himself. He doesn't. He seems he's afraid that he's going to sell out. Do you, do you have anybody like that in your world? He competes Like he does you know physical like competitions, like weightlifting competitions and stuff. He doesn't want to seem like he's you know, billy Blanks or one of these guys that are selling courses online and all that other stuff. But that's the way you scale a business like this And I don't get it Like do you ever deal with anybody like that Who's just kind of closed-minded about growth in that industry?

Speaker 3: 7:25

In the fitness industry in general. I mean, yeah, it definitely does happen. But I think there's a lot of fear that's underneath that of just like, oh, if I put myself out there and that doesn't work. But this is so familiar, what I know and what I'm comfortable and what I'm used to, right. And yeah, there was a point in my personal training career which I was seeing 33 clients a week, which is super intense. I was living, eating, sleeping, breathing, being in the gym to the point where I was like I don't even want to work out here anymore. I'm just like living here. But the interesting thing was, having transitioned to this business that is now fully online. I work with entrepreneurs all over the world. I've had clients in Africa, i've had clients in Europe, i've had clients all over the States. I'm up in Canada And the really cool thing about it is like I am able to impact the change makers. Now, like my primary clientile, they're usually six, seven figure entrepreneurs. These are people that have clients and they're impacting their lives. So if I can help them show up feeling more focused, doing better quality work, being better consultants, feeling more energized, then my ripple effect is so much bigger than just those 33 people that I was seeing every week, and so once I started seeing that, i was like all right, good, all right, this is a bigger impact.

Speaker 2: 8:35

And also you kind of feel like a psychiatrist sometimes. like I go in and he's just complaining about the last person or the person, somebody else that had all these problems, and he never tells me who they are or anything. you know he's good about that, but at the same time it's just like you could tell we're one of his last clients at the end of the day And he's just like beat up. He's heard all their stories. they're working out for half an hour with him. they're just complaining And it's just like you kind of feel like stressed out because you got your problems. Now you're taking on the burden of these other people's problems. Like do you ever feel like there's a struggle? I mean you seem a pretty chipper and like a good attitude And like I mean it seems like you may be able to overcome stuff like that. But I mean I'm sure at some point that kind of has to wear on you a little bit too.

Speaker 3: 9:23

Yeah, you know what? that was a lot more prevalent in personal training, I found, because I was working with more, just, you know, all kinds of people, people that had a regular job, Some people were entrepreneurs. the people that I work with now are really like, hey, life's all right, I'm ready to level up. But one of the things that I kind of developed in that process of spending so many hours a lot of them, I agree with you, were very much like okay, what went on in your day? all that kind of stress going on. I always use this analogy of I call it, don't getting in the pool. So if someone comes into me and they're like my husband this, my boss this, I picture them as like someone that's in the swimming pool, like, hey, drowning, my job's not to jump in and drown with them. So I always think of myself as, like, i'm the guy standing on the ledge with a pool noodle and I'm like, hold on, i'm going to pull you back in here. And so my job was always like how can I be the person on the edge that's pulling these guys back to land over here, being like, it's okay, you don't have to keep drowning, let's just focus in right here, you know, move your body, let's do what we were designed here to do and not spend it being stuck in our head the whole time. So that's kind of the analogy I like to think and that in that same breath, it really allowed me to step out of other people's emotions and seeing them as, like a lot of it are just really that's just the thoughts that they're having, and if I can redirect their thinking and their focus for an hour and I could take them out of that state, i won, like they won. That's a great session for me.

Speaker 2: 10:42

But you had to have learned a lot from that, like the personal training experience probably taught you a lot about people, a lot about motivations of people, how to keep them on a routine, how to keep them motivated, because you've seen people drop off, you know, and what's going on in their lives, what's going on in their heads when they're doing that? And now, on top of that, you're dealing with entrepreneurs who probably think they know everything And a lot of us are afraid to ask for help. you know, we're afraid to hire someone to do something. We want to do everything ourselves. you know, and I think you've got that burden, you've got all those responsibilities. Then, on top of that, you're asking us to work out, to be mindful of our sleep, to do all this stuff. I don't got time for that. So now you've got that attitude you're dealing with, like, how do you overcome that? How do you get people to understand that you know their health is the most important, especially when you're talking about mental health?

Speaker 3: 11:36

Yeah, it's a belief shift that needs to happen. We often think that like business first and anything we do with our health takes away from our business. We like to like that. That's almost the thing. It's like we need to do less sleep. If we stay up till midnight and sacrifice our sleep, we can be more productive. But the shift I always introduce is like no, you're actually not getting more productivity. What you're doing is you're taking away from tomorrow's productivity. And here's how I like to explain that. Think about the last time you woke up feeling tired. You were cranky, you were maybe a little irritable, your day felt like it went a little slower, your brain wasn't firing quite as fast, it took you longer to do the same amount of stuff because you were distracted. You got overwhelmed and stressed out a lot more easily. So what did you do at the end of the day? You probably had, you know, a beer, a glass of wine, something to kind of cope with the stress. Laid onto the couch, netflix, and then maybe got up and dove back into work because you felt so bad about having a day that wasn't so productive. And we get into these cycles, right. But when we sleep, so many things happen in our brain that make us better entrepreneurs, and I'm going to give you an example. I like to give REM sleep as an example, and that's when you're that time you're spending dreaming. That happens usually in the latter half of the night. I call that entrepreneurial gold, and here's why I don't mess with that. During this time, your brain's ability to solve problems and think outside of the box is enhanced. Now, as entrepreneurs, our job is to problem solve and think outside of the box, like how successful you are, how big your business gets, is directly related to the size of the problem that you can solve. So if you can solve bigger, better problems, come up with better solutions. You are going to be the person that stands out in your industry. And when you don't get enough dream or REM sleep, because we're sacrificing that for a couple extra hours of productivity, your time is not as well used the next day. And on top of that, when you don't get that REM sleep, your brain is not able to manage its emotions as well. So that's why we wake up feeling cranky. That's why we feel so overwhelmed and stressed out and we're telling ourselves I should be further along, i'm not doing this right. What's going on, that ability to manage your emotions and stay cool under pressure and be able to, you know, check yourself when you go into overwhelm That's all fostered during sleep. So sleep is not one of those things that's like yeah, yeah, and sleep. It's the foundation, i truly believe, on which everything is built when it comes to our brain, how we think, how we perform, how clear we are and our energy. Like I'm not showing up to my business, feeling tired, that's going to be, for me, poor quality work. It's going to take way longer to do it And I'm not going to love it. I want to love what I do and I want to feel good doing it, and if what I'm doing means I'm sacrificing the way I feel on a daily basis, i want to check in and see why.

Speaker 2: 14:20

Well, i literally watched a video, andrew Huberman I'm sure you know who Andrew Huberman is. A lot of people have been listening to him because you know he's got all these great videos out there. He was on Rogan and all that other stuff. But he said something about like your first hour of REM sleep in the way you go to sleep was really important, like how you prepare to go to sleep And then that first hour of sleep does something for your body. I don't know if you know what that whole thing is all about, but then he also talks about how you wake up. Like the first hour of waking up, what you do, is really important to. Can you talk a little bit about some of that kind of stuff?

Speaker 3: 14:58

Yeah for sure. So when we go to sleep, we experience a lot of deep sleep That's responsible for the physical restoration of our brain and our body specifically. So, like if you had a workout that day, you are getting the benefit from it during that deep sleep. That's that recovery phase, right. And when we're talking about going into sleep, what a lot of us like to do is stimulate our brain. And I'm not talking just about like the dopamine and adrenaline hits You're getting from social media and from Netflix. I'm talking about the light that's entering our eyes, the color and the intensity. It's information. It's telling our brain, like it's the middle of the day, we should be awake, right. So what we like to do is lay down and then our brains are like we should definitely think about work right now And our brains just love to go off and start getting busy and we have trouble falling asleep. And even if we pass out, you might be waking up at 2 am And then your brain goes off and you have trouble getting back to sleep. That's because there's different phases that your brain has to shift through in order to fall asleep. We don't turn our brain off Like it's not like a light switch. It doesn't go off, it has to descend through these phases. So, like right now, while we're having this conversation, your brain waves are likely at a state called beta focused, alert, attentive, right. That's a good thing. When we want to start winding down, we want to shift through the next phase, which is called alpha. That's kind of like when you're feeling relaxed and you're feeling a little more chill and you're feeling present and you're kind of hearing your own thoughts and your feelings. You want to shift through that And then further, your brain goes through theta, which is like a meditative state and daydreaming, into Delta, and Delta is that deep wave sleep. Now, notice, that was a nice slow progression. It's kind of like if you're driving on the freeway with your car and then you get off the off ramp and you slow down. You get on the highway, you slow down. You get in your neighborhood, you slow down, you're getting towards your driveway and you're parking your car. You're slowing down, right. We need to think of treating our brains like that before bed, because they're not designed to turn off. They have to go through that phase and that's what really fosters a good wind down in sleep. So that's to answer that first part.

Speaker 2: 16:58

Nice, yeah, so that makes sense. So it's like you can't just jump in. I mean it's. It's sometimes it takes me a while to go to sleep too. I need to, i need to chill out before, because your brain's constantly working. You're just thinking all these things and, oh, how can I you know, you know advertise better? How can I, you know, is there another channel I should be doing? You know how's this working? Let me go check out my Google Analytics. Like you're just like going and doing all this crap that you should have left at work, but you brought it home with you. And, yeah, maybe sometimes you sit down after work and you're beat up and you just eat a bag of Cheetos and you're watching Netflix, and then you feel guilty about doing that. It's like relaxation makes you feel guilty. So then you get up and you get back on the computer, like you said, and now you're doing more work and your brain's back in a beta stage, i guess. Right, you're paying attention, you're doing your thing, and then you got to phase back into Alpha And before you can even go to sleep. So then what do people do? They take you know what, melatonin or whatever or something else to get to bed instead of actually doing the right thing that, like somebody like you, would suggest.

Speaker 3: 18:46

Yeah, definitely, and that's that's one of the hard things, too is because we really just need to ask ourselves like, what are we feeding our brain in terms of information? And going back to that, one of the most potent sources of information for our brain is light, right, and so I always like to. In the evening, I like to think of okay, if you wind back to before, we had all this indoor electricity like what cued our brains that it was time to go to sleep. Well, think about this. The sun goes down and gets low in the sky, it gets really dim, and then the light changes color. It gets like reds and pinks and oranges, right, and that's actually what starts to cure our brain. Like, okay, we need to ramp up our natural melatonin, we need to get ready for sleep. But what do we do? We watch TV and look in our phones and stuff like this, and this is blue light. This stimulates our brain to wake up. So if you're one of those people that's like watching TV on a computer, on your phone, until the minute you go to bed, you can start working that back in 15 minute chunks and see how you feel. And one of the things that I always love to do is I call it an indoor sunset simulator. So how can we turn off all the overhead pot lights and turn on the table lamps? Naturally those are going to be a bit dimmer. And then what I actually love to do is I in one of my bedside table lamps I have an orange red bulb in there and the other one is regular, so I use the orange red bulb at night. It's dim, it's low and it's the hues of sunset And all those things are queuing my brain to get ready for really high quality sleep. That's just such an easy thing that you can think about when it comes to light in your house Is like how can I at least take all these overhead lights off, turn on some lamps instead and make sure they're nice and dim? This is just such an easy way to really help get into better sleep.

Speaker 2: 20:21

Hmm, well, my wife has this big sleep mask thing and I don't even know why she uses it. I don't think I've ever asked her about it, but it seems like it's got like other things going on in it, like maybe like LED lights or something like that. She's also an esthetician, so she's big into like the LED light and all that other stuff. But yeah, i don't know. Do you find that it helps to have a sleep mask or something like that?

Speaker 3: 20:42

Yeah, so is it something like a cosmetic thing for like skin, or is it actually to put on her eyes while she sleeps?

Speaker 2: 20:48

It's it. Yeah, it's something to help you sleep, i guess. Yeah, so for me, as soon as the light comes up, i'm waking up like I'm out of bed. So I don't I and I don't use the mask she got me, even though I breast. I probably should, but I just automatically, soon as, like, a crack of light comes through the door, like under the door, i'm awake. It's. Maybe that's what she's trying to avoid.

Speaker 3: 21:12

Yeah, well, you just might be like me. You're light sensitive. So where the kind of sleep mask comes into play is it does block out light, because light does go through our eyelids and when the light starts coming in, our brain's like, oh, it's morning time, let's, let's go, let's wake up. So where a sleep mask might come into play is if you do have a night that you are sleeping a little bit later and you need to sleep in a little bit, the sleep mask will help just extend the sleep on the other end. So that's kind of a way that you could use that. We are definitely more sensitive and easily woken up during those early morning hours. So if it's something that is waking you up, it's a, it's a tool that you can use to prevent you from being woken up if you don't want to be, if you need that little bit of extra sleep. But if you want to wake up with the sun, then that's a great way to wake up too.

Speaker 2: 21:56

Yeah, yeah, i mean that's, that's what just wakes me up. I don't even need an alarm as soon as it like light shows up, and that's kind of what a little hesitant to wear the mask, maybe on the weekends or something. I'll try to do the mask or something like that. So there were some things you sent over that you really like to talk about, and I thought this like unshakable three strategies for building resilience in your business. That seemed like really interesting to me. Can you go through that a little bit and and talk about what that's all about?

Speaker 3: 22:20

Yeah, so this concept of resilience, i think, is something that's not talked about in entrepreneurship. I think if you scroll Instagram for five minutes, you'll tell. You'll see someone saying you're too stressed out, you need to work less, you need a bubble bath, you need a yoga class or something like that. And I feel like when we signed up as entrepreneurs, this is part of the game. It's not about eliminating stress, it's about building your capacity to tolerate stress. Right, because there are going to be links that don't work, there are going to be launches that don't go well, there's going to be products that flop. This is going to happen. So we're not over here trying to eliminate stress, but we're looking at how can we build our capacity with it. And then one of the things I love to look at is how long does a stressful event wipe you out, like if you have something that comes that is a like a holy moly. This is a big stressful event, even if it's like family drama, work drama, whatever it is. Does it take you a couple of days to get back on track? or are you the type of person that is losing an entire day spinning out in like brain drama because something went wrong? and this means this, and they're never going to succeed. So I want to build our capacity to be resilient and positively adapt to stressors and I like to break that into three different strategies, because I I mean, bubble baths are a thing, but that's not going to work when your brain is going crazy because all of your links are broken and a newsletter went out and something went wrong and nothing aired, when you all the things that go wrong. Yeah, so in the moment we have something called real-time strategies and these are things that you do with your body to bring your brain back in the game, because as soon as your fight or flight gets triggered, your brain doesn't work. You can't journal, you don't want to do a yoga class when you're in full-on like fight or flight. So there is a type of breathing called a physiological sigh and it is designed. It will lower your heart rate and disengage that intense fight or flight response. And I'm going to show you what it is. But it's a deep inhale. Do the nose as much as you can. You're going to do a slightly smaller intake of inhale at the very top and then a very long exhale through the mouth. So it's basically big breath into the nose, small breath in and then a big exhale, and by extending as long as you can the length of that exhale, it acts to lower your heart rate and pull you out of that fight or flight response. I like to do three to five of these cycles. Usually takes three to four minutes and what that does is it brings your brain back online so you can start thinking clearly again. So real-time strategies that's my favorite one. Beyond that, we have what we call reset strategies. Reset strategies are designed to be things that like when you've had a stressful event, how do you recover from something like that? and, honestly, things like going for a walk. This is where you would see more of the traditional um stress coping techniques, meaning like, are you going to do some self-coaching with your brain that's going on here? do you need to go get a massage? do you just need to have an hour where you're curling up with a book, that kind of thing where you're turning your brain off? is it a nap? the third set of strategies are what I call resilient strategies. So we've talked about what do I do when I'm totally freaked out in the moment. How do I recover? what are things I can do to like reset my nervous system. To take some time for me to focus on me, sorry. The third type of strategy, the resilient strategy, are looking at increasing your capacity. So let's say, you know a certain event would normally trigger a full on stress response. I want to increase the amount of stress that you can tolerate without having a full meltdown. So, for example, what this would look like is directly putting your body under certain types of stressors so that you can increase that capacity. Here's some really good examples. Exercise is a wonderful way. Exercise is a stressor on the body. It induces adrenaline and fight or flight. When we exercise, it improves our stress capacity and our ability to tolerate stress. Another really good one is deliberate cold exposure. Having those cold showers. It's a shock of adrenaline and a stress to your system, but it makes you more resilient, it allows you to have stress in your environment and your life and it teaches you to cope with that. And one last one I'll give you here if you like to do any type of really high intensity workouts, whether you're sprinting, whether you're on the bike and you'll notice that you will get your breathing, the fight or flight is going, your heart rate is up. There's this really cool thing and this actually I learned from Andrew Huberman that you were talking about his podcast earlier. It's called gaze dilation, so normally when you are in fight or flight you get tunnel vision Right, you're like your field of vision narrows. Now what you can do is, when you are in a safe or flight, like you are running, you're, you know, on the bike, your heart rate is up start, without moving your head, to start seeing other things in the room. And you can do it right now, like without moving your head. Start looking around the room without moving your eyes, like I can now see the window, I can see the door over here And I can see, you know, the light in front of me. And what this teaches you to do is maintain control of your brain when your body is fully engaged, and so what this helps do is, when you are in that place of having a stressful moment, you are better able to keep your brain online. So when we talk about those three strategies, we're looking at, all right, what do I do in the moment, what do I do to recover And what do I do to build my capacity? And I call that, like the three R framework, right, it's real time, reset and resilient strategies.

Speaker 2: 27:39

Okay, oh, wow, that's that's. that's a lot to take in. I'm trying to figure it all out. I'm about to come back and like listen to it another time, like to kind of like fully understand what all, what all just happened. So, essentially, like you're saying like one easy way to do it. Now I've actually heard other things too, like when you're watching, when you're looking at the computer all the time, like your eyes you don't blink, like sometimes, like people don't blink and your eyes end up like drying out and everything. So like sometimes you just need to stare off into space for like 30 seconds, like find something kind of far away and focus on that for 30 seconds And then you go back to doing your work or whatever. It's a what you were saying about, kind of keeping your body still and looking around the room. That just reminded me of something like that.

Speaker 3: 28:25

Is that something else that you've heard about, or Yeah, that's a good strategy for actually just resetting your focus And that the other really good thing about taking that little bit of time to get your eyes off the screen is like I didn't even know this, but did you know that the the light that's coming from a lot of our LED lights in our screens it's not actually a constant light, it's a flicker, like if you've ever tried with your cell phone? yes, yeah, we tried to film your screen and it's all like grainy and weird. That's because light doesn't come at you constantly. It's pulsing on off, on off, on off And your pupils actually have to dilate, contract, dilate, contract over and over again, causing a little bit of that eye fatigue. So I mean one strategy to help with that, like you said, is look off 20 feet in the distance or and to stare for 20 seconds and then bring your focus back. But it also is a great argument for, like, let's get out of our chairs every once in a while to give our brain that break from processing all that flicker light. So, if we have to look at our computers a lot of the time, but I think it's also important to incorporate those breaks- What I like that you're talking about here is these are not things that are super difficult.

Speaker 2: 29:25

Like I know my wife, she takes her cold showers too, and I don't know if she's thought of it in the way that you explained it, where it's getting your body used to stresses. But working out is obviously a stressor on your body. Taking the cold showers obviously would stress me out. I know that I'd be upset, but but these are. These are things, the stuff that you're talking about. You know, looking around like this, it's just stuff you got to be reminded about, is it some? and they're not hard. Is this something that in your program or what you do? Is there something you supply people to kind of keep them on track?

Speaker 3: 30:03

Yeah, you bet I give all my clients or rings. Do you know what we're ring is?

Speaker 2: 30:07

No.

Speaker 3: 30:08

Oh, so I'm wearing one right now And, essentially, what is? it's a ring that it has a built in. Oh, i know what you're. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, i know what you're talking about. Okay, right, it's a ring that monitors all of my body stats. So, like I'm talking, everything from temperature or breathing rate to sleep phases I was into activity level steps it monitors everything. So what I do is I actually teach my clients, i send them the rings and I teach them how to interpret the data, one section at a time. So I really liked because I said at the beginning, sleep is the foundation, it's not just a pillar of health, it's the foundation on which so many other things are built. I like to teach them how to read the whole sleep category first. Are you getting enough sleep? What's the quality? like you know, looking at all of these factors. But beyond that, the ring actually is able to tell you. There's a neat variable on there called your heart rate variability, and it's a window into how much fight or flight your body is under. So when that score drops, your body's under more fight or flight, and that just doesn't have to come from work stress, it can come from family drama, it can come from over training, it can come from eating inflammatory foods. So we're able to directly look at these metrics and see what am I doing that has the best positive impact and that goes back to that return on investment conversation we had. We don't have the time to do every health thing we see on the internet Think we should be doing. Some friend is doing, i directly like to see. Okay, here are the things that are of the highest value. Let's start with these. Let's watch how your stats change. If they change for the positive, we keep them. If it doesn't affect your scores and you're not seeing you're getting more sleep and you're not seeing you're recovering better, that's not an effective use of your time. So I kind of look at it just like running a Facebook ad, for example. If it's not working, do we change the headline? Do we change the copy? Do we change the image? Do we change the landing page? That's what we're going through. It's like it's nothing's not working. Change one thing at a time and watch the metrics. Are the metrics giving us feedback that is indicating this is a good use of our time?

Speaker 2: 32:05

Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. So you're able to use that and then dial it in for people. So I mean, because a lot of times, like I'll you know, i was actually amazed at how much health information I'm collecting from my little watch here and from my phone and all that other stuff. And my wife, when she sleeps, she's got the, she has some app on her phone that tells her if she snored at night or if she rolled around too much, and it gives her like a sleep quality score And I don't know how you change that. I mean, if you're a snore, you snore. if you're you know, you flip around at night, you probably flip around at night. but it tells you you know all that stuff. And I'm guessing, and you would know it more than I guess I would if, if you had a low score, a low sleep quality score, it sounds like there are things you could be doing in your life that could improve that.

Speaker 3: 32:58

Yeah, definitely, and depending on what metric it is that's falling short, there's different strategies for it. There's different strategies for if we're not getting enough sleep, like duration wise. There's strategies for if our deep sleep socks, or we're rolling around and our quality socks, or we're not getting enough REM. So that's kind of what we look at. I don't know if there was a specific stat or like metric that you think would be useful to go over and get some ideas on, but yeah, it was more like a quality.

Speaker 2: 33:27

It just gives her like a quality sleep score And I think it's. you know, maybe she woke up in the middle of the night or she was rolling around too much, but yeah, i think those are like. I haven't actually looked at the metrics, but it sounded like from talking to her those are some of the things that she ends up getting.

Speaker 3: 33:44

Yeah. So like, if we're looking at just those two metrics of like a wakeups in the middle of the night, there's a certain amount of time awake that we spend every night And I think this is one of the big like aha moments that I feel like a lot of people have is we think like, oh, you know, i go to bed at midnight and I wake up at six. That's six hours, i'm getting enough sleep, it's fine. But I have looked at a lot of data from a lot of horror rings And I can tell you, the average entrepreneur that I've worked with spends between an hour and an hour and a half awake every night because our brains don't remember we said our brains don't turn off, they fall asleep. And then there are the times that you know your kids wake you up, the dog barks, the neighbors are loud outside, those kind of wakeups. There's the wakeups that you don't intend, like if you have to use the washroom, and then, of course, there's time in the morning you're waking up. So I often find that like I'll have people say to me like my sleep's fine, and when we'll look at it, they're actually getting five hours, five and a half hours of sleep because they're not counting for this awake time. So the first shift I like to look at is like are you giving yourself enough time to account for this awake time that we are getting? And, of course, after that we then look at how can we reduce the amount of time that we spend awake each night. But I think that shift is like I'm probably not accounting for the awake time. Therefore, that might be contributing to why I'm so tired, because I might not be getting the sleep I think I'm getting.

Speaker 2: 35:03

Wow. So talk a little bit about the business. You growing your own business. Like, you started this consulting thing. You know there's other people out there doing it. You had to find your niche. You know working with entrepreneurs, talking about sleep, having the experience you have. You know how did you start to structure things? Like, when did it get to the point where you were like, hey, i'm working with these individual people, I need to create a system, i need to create a platform, i need to do this podcast. Like, how did you come to the conclusion that that was necessary? Like that that had to be done and I had to start building a scalable business?

Speaker 3: 35:41

Yeah, it's because I couldn't be as impactful as I wanted to be in the time I had with my clients every week. It used to be like I can see people for an hour of a week but I can't communicate everything that I need to communicate right. And I mean having started out as a personal trainer, i was like, yeah, it's all about the fitness. And then, as you grow and evolve and pivot because that's what happens to all of us I was like, oh wait, food plate is a huge factor in this. And so because of that, i went and got you know, precision nutrition just designation and nutrition and start building my education and knowledge base and incorporating it in. But it actually wasn't until I had my first baby that I was like, oh, the sleep is a real thing, like I'm sleep deprived right now. But I guarantee you that my clients are on a low level of this right now And my brain is just not performing the way I wanted. So it was actually and she's three and a half now but when I started incorporating sleep and really beginning to bring in this more of this biohacking element that looked at all of these pillars, that's when it kind of all started to come together right And because after a while, i found like, hey, i am saying the same thing over and over to everyone during these sessions. How can I package this up into a way that is, like, you know, a back end program, and then I can just come in during the sessions and go okay, what's working with, not, what are we doing differently? And it's such a better use of time spending our time together, problem solving instead of re explaining information that I now have in a back end program. So it was a very slow involvement over time of like realizing no, this is what my clients need. Oh, they also need this Now they need this. And it's building that over time And I think that's the beautiful thing about being in business a long time is you get to experience the pivots that make the next iteration of your business so much better.

Speaker 2: 37:24

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think a lot of people listen to this, can feel that like they understand where you're coming from And you know you have kids, that's going to obviously throw things off. If you don't have kids, like why aren't you doing this? Because if you ever do have kids, like it's going to change the game. Like, if you can't, if you can't get quality sleep now without the kids, if you can't eat right now, if you can't find time to work out now, i mean imagine what that's going to be like for you down the road And it's you know, it could be really scary. And for you, i mean are you in Vancouver? Is that what I read? Yep, i'm in Canada, so I mean you're in like a beautiful place. I mean this is. I got a friend in Kelowna and it looks awesome there too And it seems relaxing. But like, if you're down here in the States and you're in a place like this, we're just like craziness always, like you know you don't have these beautiful mountains or whatever to look at. Does the environment you're in? does that really change? Maybe, maybe it's even like get granular. Maybe it's like your house, the like the feng shui in your house, like do those things you know, does that hurt you? I mean, i've heard of having TV in your bedroom is bad.

Speaker 3: 38:37

Yeah, well, you know what? So there is a, there is a segment in the program that I have and I call it the limitless mind, because I really like to look at the component that our brain plays in this, from the thoughts we think, because I honestly think the biggest single skill that you could ever develop in your life is your ability to direct your thinking and your focus intentionally, because if we can't control our thinking and we can't focus, we can't create any results in our life. And so, to tie in what you were saying, i think that the city that we live in and I think that the houses that we're in and the what's in our room and what's not, i like to call those just neutral circumstances. They're not good, they're not bad, they just are, because I can guarantee you that if you're thinking like it's this house, i guarantee you there's someone in a worse house that might be having a better experience than you. So where I like to tie this back to is like, if we can refocus our mind, what about your brain? What are the sentences that are happening in your brain that is creating this experience that your brain is like you're at a deficit? you can't do this now. It's because of where we live, it's what your house looks like, it's how much money you have, it's how many hours we work, because we all know that there are situations in people that have it worse than us or better than us that are having the complete opposite experience. So I really like to look at if it's our job to focus our thinking and if it's our job to direct our mind. How do you want to think about your life? And our thoughts are choices. They don't feel like it because we've been thinking the same things for 20, 30 years. Of course it feels like it's automatic And of course it feels weird and phony to think something new, but that you also didn't feel authentic thinking the negative thoughts in the first place. They just came habitual. So I really like to think of like if we think it's our. I'll frame it as this the best piece of coaching that I have ever been given in my life was that as long as you believe that the problems are outside of you like it's your house, it's the city we live in you will believe that the solutions are outside of you and you will always be helpless to your environment. But the day we decide that the problem is my thinking. This is the best news you've ever gotten, because that means your thinking is the solution. If you're thinking is the problem and you have all the control in the world over that, and that is when you really start to get to make moves where we don't say I have a kid, it's my house, it's where I live, it's literally just I'm thinking things that aren't helping me here. How can I change that?

Speaker 2: 41:02

Man just broke it down. It's awesome.

Speaker 3: 41:08

Yeah, limitless mind is important too. It's not just all about the health, it's about how we can control that asset right, Our brand, about how you use it And that's perfect.

Speaker 2: 41:16

Well, tanesa, this has been awesome. I need you to tell me, like, how do people get a hold of you, how do they find your stuff? Tell us about the podcast, like give us some links and some information that people can reach out and learn more about you.

Speaker 3: 41:28

Yeah, so I have a podcast called Becoming Limitless and every episode is a specific hack whether it be how to manipulate caffeine, what you can do with light, and I give you breakdowns on how you can change it and how it will impact your business. So every episode is like a deep dive on that. It's all science backed. So that's Becoming Limitless. But beyond that, i mean, if you're like, okay, i like all these things, but it'd be nice to have them in one place because we talked about a lot. I have a I call my entrepreneur's playbook. It's 12 ways to biohack your energy And it's my 12 ways that I found that over the years myself and clients these are the things that have the biggest impact on our energy focus and productivity in the morning And they're all in one place And you can find that on my website at tenesashierscom.

Speaker 2: 42:09

Awesome, and we'll put some links in the uh in the description so you guys can find these things. So that's awesome. Well, i really appreciate it. I'm I'm glad you came on here. You actually motivated me a little bit. I was going to go eat some Cheetos and now I'm not So and I'm going to try to get your brain is going to love you for that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 42:27

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 42:27

There we go. Well, tanesa, i appreciate it. Thanks so much, and uh, and congratulations on all the success and and I keep it going I want to see you up there. I want to see you on Andrew Huberman's podcast or Joe Rogan or something like that.

Speaker 3: 42:40

Oh, i like that.

Speaker 2: 42:41

Yeah, you need to be on those, all right, thanks, yeah, thanks a lot, tanesa, see you. Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests. Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.