 James Swannick here, and today we are going to be talking about healthy habits. We're going to be talking about being an entrepreneur, talking about having healthy colleagues or healthy team members in your organization. We're going to be talking about productivity tips and some sleep tips. And today, our guest is Mr. Rex Miller, who is an entrepreneur and the author of The Healthy Workplace Nudge, how healthy people, culture and buildings lead to high performance. And Rex is known for turning what he describes as hopelessly stuck situations into transformation and growth. I'm assuming with not just organizations and companies, but on a human being individual level as well. Sure, it's clear. Yeah, if you can transform one person, you can transform an entire organization, right? Rex Miller, great to have you here, sir. Yeah, thank you, James. I'm a big fan and I appreciate it. In fact, I'll start out with these that I wear every single night when we do our digital sunset. Oh, nice. Why don't you throw a pair on now just so we can see just for a second? There we go. You got the fit overs that go nice and snug over the over your existing glasses. That's right. Yeah, I've had these for a little over a year and a half now. Oh, wonderful. Great. Thanks for showing those off. You bet. So just tell us a little bit about what you do, Rex. Well, I'm in consulting and I evolved out of project delivery, large construction projects and looked at the dynamics of teams. And then out of that began seeing the same dysfunctions in teams and companies and culture. So it was an evolution of being frustrated with just how terrible most construction projects are in terms of friction and conflict and that continue to evolve. So now our consulting firm works with personal performance, team performance and organizational performance. Yeah, wonderful. And if you're watching on Facebook or YouTube, just go ahead and type in where you're watching from at the moment. And if you have a question as we go along, please do ask that question of Rex, excuse me one second. Thank you very much. Just need to get that out over and done with early morning, where I'm recording this at the moment, Rex, Brisbane, Australia, seven o'clock in the morning, a little bit of chill in the morning. So yeah, if you're watching on Facebook or YouTube, please do post a question for Rex now as it relates to either your sleep or your performance or how to get the most out of team, that whether that be colleagues or staff in your organization. So what were some of the big things that were disrupting a team's performance that you identified, Rex? Well, primarily, it's the different viewpoints everybody has on the construction project. For example, the owner has one view of how the project should go, the architect, the contractor. They all speak different languages. They all have different contract and compensation structures. So when you bring all of that together, the system we determined is designed to create distrust, fragmentation. And then in the Bible, the very first construction project, the Tower of Babel, was the first project that was over budget and late. So it's been happening ever since. What we found is that most of the time it was communication, how your wire differently than me. And if we could begin there and begin to build the bridges in terms of the difference in the way you're wired and the difference in the way I'm wired and appreciate those two, then we can begin to move towards what we call being effective versus being right. And those are the choices. Do you want to be effective or do you want to be right? Because we all feel righteous about our position, but we have a very limited view of everything that's going on. So we need to build those bridges of trust to be able to work through and create early collaborative trust based teams was pretty much the shift that we took in the construction area. How many different personalities or different ways of looking at the same thing are there in the world, like human beings? If we break human beings up into groups, how many different types of viewpoints or personality types do we have? As many as there are people, you know, we use the Clifton strengths and what makes the Clifton strengths a little bit different than others. It's called a psychometric tool. It's measuring your strongest neural pathways and it's a proxy for your natural strengths or your talents. And and so in the top five, they measure 34 of them and they rank order them in terms of their strength. The philosophy is that you do better playing to your strengths than trying to fix weaknesses. And so the results focus on the top five. There's 33,600,000 combinations of those top five. And it matters, matters the rank order and matters the relationship between, for example, strategic is my top strength. Achiever is my second. If I had if somebody else had strategic is their number one. And let's say they had relator, you know, deep trust as number two. It would look completely different. In 2005, there was a company called Core Clarity that created a system that was a lot like a deck of cards, color coded system that help take all these varieties and make it a little easier to work with. And so we use those two when we work with project teams, companies and cultures. There's other ones out there like the disc profile and things like that. Yeah, they're all good. They all do different things. And that's where people really need to look at disc is really about communication style. Myers-Briggs is really about how you like to make decisions. Clifton Strengths is what your natural talent is and how to play to your strengths. There's the big five. There's lots of really good tools. The key is to use it for what it was designed to do and not over apply it. Is there an argument to say that if you are putting together a project that you would just hire people who have a very similar personality style to you and talk the same language and think the same way versus hiring people who are completely different personality style, completely different communication style? Right. Well, so the research shows that the particular wiring that you or I have doesn't determine what role will be best at. That's using the Clifton Strengths. Now, there are others that determine kind of role and function, but it determines how we will be successful. So you can imagine a very personable, outgoing doctor, but you can also imagine one that's very kind of analytical and reserved. So when we come to teams, first of all, it's just the luck of the draw. You can't predetermine who you're going to have an opportunity to talk to and pick. So good teams pick the best talent with the right values fit. And then you use the analytics of the tools to figure out how to best play to that team's natural strengths. And then you look at where the natural gaps are and you work around that. That's much more effective than hoping you get all the right perfect kinds of people with the right talents and strengths. That doesn't mean we don't look for just like any team. If you need a wide receiver in football or the equivalent specialty player in soccer or rugby, you look for that particular set of skills or talents. But in general, you just pick the best people you can. And then you do the analytics to figure out how to play to that team's natural strengths. And when you're talking about you do the best analytics, so as a matter of course, when you when hiring someone or even if entering into a romantic relationship of any kind, I would imagine as well, is it do you suggest literally going through one of these tests, whether it be Clifton or Disc, or it could be the five love languages if you're in a romantic partnership? Yeah. Yeah, very much so. I mean, we would avoid a lot of the, oh, I wish I would have known that before. Conversations, if we had a little bit of wiring. And so in my role in corporate, I am typically typically brought in when something goes sideways. The team's not functioning well, a project goes south. And then we begin to begin to do the assessment. We say, oh, that's why you really dial in on the numbers or the details. Or that's why you come in with an inspirational statement every every day. You'd like to work that out in practice ahead of time, just like a sports team. You know, you don't wait till the game day to begin working on stress or unpredictable situations. You practice that ahead of time so that when you're in that heat of the moment, you've got the playbook, you've done the practice, and now it's instinctive rather than chaotic. We're talking to Rex Miller about personality types and how to get your project running nice and smoothly, utilising the different personality and communication styles of the team members. Rex is the author of the book, The Healthy Workplace Nudge, How Healthy People, Culture and Buildings Lead to High Performance. And we're going to give away a couple of copies of the book. If you'd like to be in the running for the book, be in the running for the book, leave a comment or ask a question during the live. And towards the end, we'll pick a couple of people there and we'll make sure we get your details and we'll send you off one of Rex's books. Now, tell us a little anecdote if you would, Rex, of the worst or one of the worst organisations or teams that you saw. You don't need to name them, take your organisation, but an example of something that was just horrendously working or not working, dysfunctional, and then how they were managed to able to turn it around. Well, I'll briefly reference two. I'll go into detail on one of them. The first one, my son, who was travelling with me right out of high school for a few years. This was a start-up company in Southern California and there were five strong founders, I mean strong, strong founders. It could not get along. Around three in the afternoon, two of them stepped out and got into a literal fist fight. Now, it helped, this was start-up culture, so they didn't get up until 10 or 11 in the morning. They broke out whiskey about three or four in the afternoon. So the whiskey kind of helped get the truth out. One of the founders asked if I was going to break it up and I said, no, actually it saved me about six months of trying to figure out what the real problem is. So that was one. The other was a very large industrial project. It was budgeted at $350 million and it was $100 million over budget with about another eight months to a year to go. Wow. That was totally at odds and I brought one of my colleagues with me. We typically don't go into these situations alone because the consultant can oftentimes become the projected object of the anger. We become the proxy for whatever the issues are. So in that, we did one of the profiles and we found that the general, the project manager and the general superintendent were wired so differently that when they were looking at the same problem, the project manager, the head of the job was thinking that the general superintendent was insubordinate. When all that was really happening is he was very internal and cognitive, took a lot of time to think and come to a conclusion. The other person had none of the cognitive strengths and they were all the do it now kind of strengths. So it was really tough but we finally got them to see where the difference was and then the project manager just started saying when he hit him, he says, man, I've effed up and he just said it over and over and over again. They had a reconciliation that went to the group. The executive that flew in for this looked and said, how in the world did this turn around? And again, it was, we're so wired to think and take for granted that the way we see it is the way everybody else does and in the heat of the moment, we double down on that and we had a moment of being able to show visibly the difference. And when you can show something visibly or tangibly it can sometimes build a bridge. That was one of the most dramatic turnarounds that I was involved in. Rex, when you were out at a dinner party, for example you were just meeting people for the first time, acquaintances. Yes. Are you running a little personality or communication test in your mind with that person? It's an occupational hazard. And I typically go one step further. I say, hey, I'll send you a link to take the Clifton Strengths, send me your five strengths. One of my strengths in the Clifton Strengths is called input. And that's kind of the collecting, just collecting everything. It's the geek strength. So over the years I have worked with and workshops are coached over 15,000 people. So yeah, it's an occupational hazard. Do people pick up on it if you don't communicate it to them that you're doing it? Like is the story going on in your head? A lot of the times they think it's a magic trick. You start asking questions and I come at it asking certain questions about tendencies or certain phrases they might use or how their closet might be organized or what TV show they like to watch. And part of it is just my, it's just, it's like an athlete just continually exercising and trying and seeing if it works. I've got a question here from a viewer on Facebook, Mia Bianca, who asks, any advice on how to choose a business to start with? So I'm assuming that question is based on your personality and your communication type. Would you choose one business or a style of business over another? Yeah, I'm not sure I'm a great one to answer that because I didn't go after chasing this business or the entrepreneur. In 2000, when the dot com crash hit, I was a newly minted vice president having moved my family from Washington, DC to Texas. We lost 70% of our revenue within three months. And then one day I come in the office and the owner says, it takes my tenure contract, rips it up and says, we don't need a vice president, we need sales. So you can either leave now or go back into sales. So that began, that opened an opportunity for me to pursue something which was writing my first book. And I began a parallel track, kind of a side hustle back in 2000, which then opened new doors, which then opened other doors. And so I think it's a little bit of the hero's journey. I don't know if your audience is familiar with kind of that classic model where you're minding your own business but you're not fully living to your potential and then you get hit upside the head with life. And then you got to go through the struggles of figuring out what's next and trying to find out that next better version of yourself. And fortunately for me, part of my model of success has always been surrounding myself with a strong network of colleagues, friends, tight friends that I could take some of these journeys together with. So I would say the most important thing is have some really good colleagues around that can either hold you to your best or if you take the risk can help you navigate through that risk. If we turn our attention to mental mindset in general, irrespective of your natural communication style or your natural personality, I see here that you did some improv back in the day. Is that right? You did improv. Yes, I took an intro course, eight weeks of improv. And I wasn't great, I learned a lot. I was the oldest person, the only business person and it was really uncomfortable, but I learned a lot. So mentioning that, referencing some improv and maybe a few other things, what are some, I guess, mental exercises, personality exercises, communication exercises that someone can do irrespective of what their natural style is? Well, so the big thing I took away from improv was primarily in the workshops and especially the conflict resolution workshops. In those workshops, your anxiety can amp up because you're not sure what's going to happen. You're not sure it's gonna be a success or failure but if you can be what they say in the moment, not trying to think ahead or try to come up with a solution but being that respond or play into whatever the other person is coming up with, not trying to resist it but trying to use it as material in the conversation. Be present, in other words. That's the hardest thing that I had in improv but it really, really helped in the workshops. You tend to go in very prepared but over time I learned to go in prepared so that I could go off script comfortably and be comfortable with it to not try to control it but try to create whatever comes out of it. And that's called being present, being in the moment, the yes and, that sets kind of a mindset of playing with or being playful with, curiosity if someone's really angry, I learned to be curious about it. I wonder, instead of being defensive and those were some of the things I picked up out of improv. When you referenced yes and, that's as opposed to yes but, correct? Correct. Yeah, as soon as I hear the word but, it seems like we're in combat then, doesn't it? Yeah, and what you're really referring to is it shifts the energy. And that's one of the things I learned in improv is really try to feel the energy in the room. Where is the energy? Is it quiet? Is it dead? Is it agitated? Is it anxious? Is it restless? And then learn how to work with that energy and experience that energy instead of just going into content. And you're right. The energy is everything, whether it's with an audience or a presentation, but it's really hard to be in that mindset. One of the things that I read recently was that all communication or all persuasion is really only 7% what you say and 93% how you say it. Is that your understanding? And if it is, can you just clarify and explain that? Well, I've heard the same, but I'll refer to a new field called neurocardiology. It's the science of the central nervous system. And we have the sympathetic side, which is the on button and it's part of the vigilance, the fight, flight, perform, and then the parasympathetic, which is kind of the rest. That signal, they're considering it another form of a brain in intelligence. It is so intuitive picking up on people's energy, whether you're safe, whether you're happy. And it's all nonverbal. So tone and texture and timing, your central nervous system is picking up on all of that. And it's a hundred times stronger than the signals that your prefernal cortex sends to the heart. And that's why in that agitated state, you start losing clarity and if you're amped up, you know that you don't think clearly. You lose your keys. If you're in a hurry and you lose your keys, it's even harder. That's that central nervous system overtaking the brain. So I don't know where the number comes from, but I get at it through a different means and I would agree that tone, posture, all have more impact over the content. And I would argue that there are personality types that are very logic-based. So they will try to fight battles or make a point with logic. But as anyone who's been in a romantic relationship, well no, trying to fight any kind of battle with logic is often a losing battle. And then even if you win, if you quote unquote win in your mind, you still lose because the other person feels hurt that they've lost. Right. So a win becomes a loss. So in that sense, I guess there's an argument to say, let's try to get out of winning logical battles or trying to be logical. Or there's a time and place to be logical, but that's not necessarily the only modality that we have in order to resolve disputes. Absolutely, right. Yeah, and that gets back to do you want to be right because we feel right or do you want to be effective? And again, if you're stressed or amped up, you'll go to that default mode. So if your default mode is logic, stress will drive you even more to it. If your default mode is to kind of chit-chat your way out of it, talk your way, you'll go that way as well. So we were referencing the Swanee's blue light-looking glasses before, and you said that you wear yours at nighttime, just on sleep and best practices in sleep. How important is sleep in terms of staff or colleague happiness or wellbeing or clarity? How important is sleep to workplace functionality? Well, in current research, we just finished a book that's called Whole, What Teachers Need to Help Students Thrive came out in March of this year. It really looked at the phenomenon on stress and lack of sleep and the impact stress has on disrupting sleep and what that does to you during the day and at least in the United States, they project somewhere between 65 to 70% of people are sleep deprived. So that sleep deprivation means that you're functioning, not only are you functioning in a more stressed mode, but also your cognitive load, your ability to take on more load is compromised as well. So stress leads to disruption of sleep, disruption of sleep leads to kind of a vicious cycle of stimulants during the day and your back at it. The research shows that lack of sleep compromises your immune system. Compromise immune system leads to unhealthy coping behaviors. Those unhealthy coping behaviors lead to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome leads to chronic disease. So I think sleep's kind of the silver bullet, the secret weapon and it has been for me too. In 2016, I was one of those individuals that prided themselves in going to bed 10, 30, 11 at night, getting up 5, 30 or six, and then working out, going through the day, and then I started reading about athletes and the sleep they were getting in something called overtraining syndrome. So I got two devices. I got a whoop strap and an aura ring and it just opened my eyes. I had adjusted myself. I had accepted being tired as optimal. I was suboptimal, but thought it was normal. And after a few nights and then weeks of seeing what full recovery felt like, it was transformational for me. So we've been on that road ever since. In fact, last week I gave a webinar on examining sleep and making sleep a key habit and so it's central to all of our executive coaching now. So what is your sleep routine, Rex? My sleep routine. So around six, 30 or seven, my wife and I will watch some episode together using my swanis and we'll watch it on a computer screen because the intensity of a TV is much higher. And then we'll shut it down around 8.30 at night. I will do some journaling from about 8.30 to nine. And we call that a digital sunset and we adopted that from Brian Johnson who has his own. He's got a website called optimize.me. So I picked that up from him and then I go to bed. I got my Bose earbuds. I have my eye shades, dark room, 68 degrees and get into bed. And I allow my bands to tell me what the optimal time and I really try to hit within the nine to 9.30 range each night when I can. And with the quarantine that we've had in the United States it's been easy to do. And then my optimal sleep, the amount of sleep is seven hours and 23 minutes. And then you add to that your strain for the day, any sleep that and you subtract your naps and that comes up with how much time you need to be in bed. So I'm very disciplined about going by that. And every day I get up around six o'clock in the morning and that's the routine. Alcohol, I help people quit alcohol in one of my other businesses. Not necessarily what society might seem to be an alcoholic even just occasional drinkers or modest drinkers. Have you seen any research to suggest that reducing or quitting alcohol can also increase work performance team performance organization performance? And so I measured with the whoop strat and it showed me that in five occasions of having alcohol before bedtime, my REM sleep dropped 41%. So those were the numbers. Now the research, if you read Matthew Walker's book or Smart Sleep, they recommend no alcohol prior to two hours before bed. And for me, it seems like I can have one glass of wine two, two and a half hours before bed. My experience for me, now this is just for me. If I have more than one glass of wine, even if it's before two hours, it'll affect my sleep. So I have to be very careful. And if I have a glass of wine, I will measure and see, okay, how did I do? And so anyway, that's my experience with it. Have you ever gone into an organization as a consultant and you ask questions about specifically around their alcohol intake and asked or invited people to either reduce it or quit it and that they've seen a dramatic impact in their performance, anything like that? So there was a company in Florida that I discussed making sleep, their number one professional development habit for the leadership team. And that evolved because they were moving towards a health and wellbeing culture. And I introduced them to a wellbeing consultant to help them change their benefits package, mandatory vacations, cutting work, cutting emails out on Fridays till Sunday. But people were not adopting the habits. So with the leaders, I just went around the table and asked how many hours are you working? Are you working on Saturdays? And had each person tell me when they went to bed, when they got up, and that was the problem. They were all working still 60, 70 hours a week, working on weekends. And then we asked about alcohol consumption. So we got all of them a whoop strap for a period of time. And I was allowed to put them on a dashboard like you would for an athletic team. And I monitored their sleep, their recovery, the quality of their sleep, their exercise for several months. And we saw a dramatic improvement in their heart rate variability, in their resting heart rate, in their shift to how much time and their consistency of when they went to bed. You almost need to have something like that, those commitment devices, and do it collectively. Or there's just too much pressure on the outside of other people and peers to get in the way. So this particular company really cut, they were known for having a really good time when they came together. And they didn't cut it out completely, but they cut it dramatically. Is there evidence to suggest that taking at least one day off of work per week, or two, or three, or a half day, or one night, dramatically improves the performance of a human being in the workplace? So you mentioned there that people were still working over the weekends. There's a lot of people that say that they love their work, they've built their work into their lifestyle, their lifestyle is their work, they don't need to take time off, they enjoy working, is there anything to suggest pros and cons to that? Well, absolutely, so I'm a certified tennis professional. There's no athlete in their right mind would play and work hard every single day. You've got to have recovery time. And even the top athletes like Roger Federer or Tom Brady in football or Justin Verlander or LeBron James are now, they're sleeping 10 to 12 hours a day during competitive season and they all take breaks. We've heard of the word sabbaticals. Sabbaticals are there for a reason so you can recharge and refresh. In our household, we take all day Sunday. We start Saturday evening to begin shutting down, getting our minds shifted and then all day Sunday we just take it easy. We read, we reflect, we talk, we share, we have some family time and it took time to build that in but it's become the thing that we look forward to the most that we're recharged the most and I don't have direct research on that but I know it's the rhythm, the people that I follow the most have some kind of either weekly or quarterly just get away, break, reflect. Today, this afternoon, I spent three hours just thinking and journaling and out of that things and creative thoughts come that I would never have because I'm crowding it out too much by calendar and checklists and the drive to productivity. We put a link there in the YouTube comments there. There's a free webinar that focuses on sleep and Living Younger, it's at rexmiller.com and you can go and check out about rexmiller.com but there is a free webinar there that we've posted in there and we've also popped that in the Facebook chat as well. Rod Villarje has actually posted a comment here in Facebook saying, prioritizing sleep is the way to get results. He hasn't asked a question but I guess you could confirm that Rod's on the money there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's step number one. In fact, that's the very first step in that webinar when I recap value sleep, make it a priority. The badge of honor in James, I don't know if you were growing up and the badge of honor was how little sleep you got, bragging that I pulled an all-nighter or I worked on this project and changing what we reward is part of shifting that priority to sleep. Just on the productivity element again, you said that you start to shut down on a Saturday evening. So does that mean that you're giving yourself 24 hours and then you're starting to think about work again on Sunday evening? Or do you shut down on Saturday and you don't even think about it again until Monday? No, I start thinking, I don't get into productivity mode. I start thinking, imagining what the next week will be like, thinking about certain individuals that are important to me throughout the week. Large goals, so I don't get into very specifics but I start putting that together on Sunday evening after dinner. So we work, we kind of chill through the day, we have a nice dinner together and then around six, 30 or seven, I spend about an hour, hour and a half just thinking through what the next week is going to be like. It's a little bit of a visualizing exercise and I find that helps me get prepared, not get so far in the weeds where it's gonna keep my mind active at night but enough to have a visual roadmap and feel at peace about what I'm going to do that next week. We've got a couple of questions that are coming in here on Facebook and YouTube but just before I get to those, I'd like to ask you about journaling. You've mentioned that you journal for about 30 minutes. So what are you actually writing down? Do you have specific questions that you're asking yourself and that you're answering or are you just writing whatever comes to mind? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. Sometimes I'll just stand there and the journal will be open for 20 minutes or so and I'm thinking, okay, what can I write? But usually something triggers. It may be a comment from my kids, especially during this time of the pandemic and the social unrest and something they might say, maybe something that I read, maybe a conversation from the last week. I also do sketching and I learned to do sketching an individual by the name of Kathy Hutchison really got me involved in doing kind of graphic journaling. So I do a lot of that as well. And I find that getting into that sketching, cartooning mode, taking ideas and concepts really loosens my thinking up and helps me connect the dots instead of just doing linear journaling. Elena Frederick says on YouTube, thank you for your comment, Elena says, I find that after a day or two off, I'm so much more productive. Thank you for the reminder. And then has a question for those who are workaholics, do you have any quick tips for making sure you get the me slash refresh time? Yeah, that's a great question because having coached with the Clifton Strengths, everybody recovers so differently. Good example is that my son is wired to be very social and I'm wired to kind of go into my head. We did a workshop together several years ago. And so he was behind the scenes, not talking or interacting. We get in the car to go back to the hotel room. I was engaged in giving the workshop all day and I was silent. So I was in that recovery mode and Nathan says, dad, why do you go from engaged dad in the workshop to boring dad in the car? So it was a reminder to me that the way he recovers was in conversation, connection, joking around. And so some people may recover by cleaning out the cupboard, something that's totally discretionary, but it makes them feel productive or they may go into their head or they may wanna go and see a show or an entertainment. So that's what I've learned in coaching so many people is that there's not a one way to recover mode, but find what works best for you and then make it sacred. Whatever it is, get some commitment devices or ways that you just do it. Is there anything to suggest that taking a week off or a month off or two weeks off or it can be beneficial to someone as opposed to, I'm imagining probably myself quite frankly as an entrepreneur who finds it very challenging to just completely and utterly shut off. I seem to build in little breaks throughout my week. So I'm not necessarily working nine to five. I might work nine to 12 and then not work from 12 until five and then work from five until nine at night. And so I tell myself, oh, I'm not working all the time because I built blocks of four or five hours of rest in between. So is there anything regarding what might be optimal in that sense? Yeah, again, I think depending on how you're wired and if you feel rejuvenated, there's an energy part of this too, which I'm sure you find is that on rhythm, off rhythm, Cal Newport talks about ultradian rhythms. We have these peaks and valleys of energy throughout the day. So I try to manage my energy. What I find though is that when I do go away and there's a couple of places I go for retreat, it'll take me a couple of days before I feel completely unplugged and the anxiousness will go away to feel like I don't have to do anything. I'm not driven by anything in particular. So I think it's healthy. I don't do it enough in terms of those longer retreats, but it does take me two plus days to just kind of totally unwind. So the idea of going away and taking a full week off to most entrepreneurs who own businesses would be like, I can't do that, what are you crazy? Like I got a business to run here, but it seems to be that the evidence suggests that doing that, quote unquote, forcing yourself to do that probably is gonna be more beneficial for you in the long run. Absolutely, it's the difference between going deep or wide. Those times off allow you to go deep and reflect why you're doing what you're doing. I don't know how you find it, but I get so pulled into the activity of delivering work, creating new content that I just get caught in that momentum. And then unless I pull back, like the whole COVID pandemic, I assumed that my way, my business model was to get on a plane every Monday, fly to a client, do a workshop, do a keynote, do something like that, all that disappeared. In March, I mean, 90% of my revenue just disappeared. Without the time to be forced to stop, I wouldn't have created the studio that you see now. The considering, oh, I can do things differently. I can create my service into content. You can't think like that if you're always on the run. And so it was a blessing in disguise for me and for my business to have this. And I probably wouldn't be doing it this way if I wasn't forced to have to stop. I have a question here from Meg Rivera, who says, I'd love to get eight hours of sleep, but I always wake up before my alarm. What can I do about that? Well, first of all, some sleep experts would say it's a good thing because you're waking up according to your body's rhythm. But what I would suggest is that maybe you look at the front end to see if there's an optimal time, if you should be going to bed earlier. So one of my questions would be, what time are you going to bed? Dr. Royzen, the Chief Wellness Officer for the Cleveland Clinic says that the sleep you get before 2 a.m. is your best and healthiest sleep. So if you can get one or two cycles, and cycles are typically about 90 minutes before 2 a.m., that's your healthiest sleep. So I would look at the front end and let yourself wake up naturally like that without an alarm. You mentioned before that you like to watch an episode of a television show before you then go in journal. Is there anything to suggest that watching a television show or scrolling through your phone in the minutes before you go to sleep is detrimental or effective? It kills sleep. Absolutely kills sleep. And James, I already know you know this, but the blue light from your computer or from your TV is telling your body it is noon time. And that's peak flow of cortisol in your body. That's again, that sympathetic nervous system that fight flight on peak performance hormones. It takes about two hours once you shut it off for the night crew, so to speak, to go away and for the melatonin to begin coming in, to begin making yourself sleepy, to slow your heart rate, to lower your body temperature. So even looking at your phone, your phone shouldn't even be in your bedroom at night, even looking at it, we've all read that email that just amps us up. There's social media is another evil too, in terms of good sleep. So the whole digital screen world we're in kills sleep. One of my clients, and it's in that webinar I give on living younger, he recorded that when he doesn't wear your glasses, the swannies at night, his REM cycle goes from 15 minutes. When he wears the swanee, it jumps up to 45 minutes to an hour and a half. That's the difference that he's experiencing between wearing the glasses and not, blocking out that blue light or not. Just throw your pair of swannies over the top again for me, Rex. Yeah. So just to describe how you, how and when and under what circumstances you put your swannies on each night. Well, so we'll, there'll be over, my wife and I'll say, hey, what do you want to do? Do you want to read together or watch something together? And we'll say, okay, let's see what's on Amazon Prime or the Disney, whatever it is. And we primarily do it so we can be just sitting next to each other. And then I'll take my laptop and we'll put it on a little pillow in between the two of us, put on the glasses, and then we'll watch an episode and only one episode because what I found that even with these on, if we watch 90 and they're typically 45 minutes, if we, if I'm watching 90 minutes of anything, it does affect my sleep. I will get amped up. Now, here's a bio hack that I learned too. There's a book that came out in the 1980s, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. And one of the arguments is that the brain waves when you're watching shows is similar to theta waves. Those are sleep waves. So I started measuring with my aura ring and my whoop what was happening if we watched a show and I just got very relaxed. And guess what? It registers as a nap, not the whole time, but a good bit of it. So that's a little bit of a bio hack that I ran across in terms of, gee, if you let your body get in that relaxed state and you're watching something, those theta waves that you're generating actually slow your heartbeat enough where it's where you're in that parasympathetic mode. So what you're suggesting is it might actually be okay to watch some television like a drama or something for 30, 45 minutes at the end of the day. As long, of course, if you're wearing a pair of blue light blocking glasses, yes. Yeah, but also realize we shut it off at 8.30 and then we go to analog mode to wind the mind down, journaling or conversation or whatever it is. We'll just kind of relax, breathe, not discipline breathing, but we'll just relax and breathe a bit, talk, but no digital stimulation, a good hour before we're actually in bed. Yeah. Well, we're just about to release our swanis. Let me just grab here. There we go. We're just about to release our anti blue light LED bulbs for better sleep. Wonderful. And I've been trialing them out this past week or so. And you have a very impressive lighting behind you at the moment, Rick's. This is the upcoming swanic light bulb and my partner and I put them in our bed lamps and it's a complete game changer. Instead of having this nasty, big overhead light that's just kind of shining down on us, this is a very calming light that comes out and puts us into a sleepy kind of mode. There's no blue light in there, so it's not gonna be affecting melatonin production. So, obviously we're wearing the swanis glasses here, so we know the importance of blocking the blue light. This actually gives you an ability to sit in light without any of the blue light, so. Wonderful. Yeah, so I'll just go here, just as we start to wrap this up here, just a reminder that you can check out all of Rex Miller's wonderful stuff over at rexmiller.com. He has a free webinar there that focuses on sleep, just a reminder that Rex is the author of the book, The Healthy Workplace Nudge, How Healthy People, Culture and Buildings Lead to High Performance. Thank you for the questions that we've had coming in so far. We've got a few comments here. Elena says, I love the idea of drawing versus writing for journaling. Awesome, Rex. I never thought of cleaning as that me time. That is very me. I like to have silent tasks that I clear in my head. We've got, Melanie says, I've got four kids and they also take my weekends. I'd love to get some of that me time. Any advice for parents? For parents of young ones on getting real relaxing time, have good friends that will help you with your kids. Yeah, and especially now, I'm coaching people and finding that sometimes they have one of their little ones on their knee while I'm coaching. It's really stressful to be 24 seven with all of your family and kids. So I don't have a good solution for you. I wish I did, but you really do need those breaks. And if family can help, man, make a deal with your family to help you out. Yeah, I wanted to ask you a couple of quickfire questions if I may. Actually, there was one other question there I wanted to get to, which I may have skipped over. Gentleman was asking, saying that I think he was in his fifties and wanted to start a business, but it was asking, did you feel that maybe it was too late for him? Is it advisable to start at that time? Everything, well, almost everything is now online. So I started my business at 58. So I'm 65 now. And, you know, I would never look back at it. You know, it was the right thing to do. And, you know, there, who's to say when is the right time, but having the right idea, having the right network, if you can build kind of a side hustle to prototype and test your concept. I consult with a lot of startups and a lot of times they have a great idea, but they don't have it market tested. They haven't tested whether it's a really validated need, even though it might be a great idea. So that's the biggest mistake I find with the entrepreneurs to try to launch. They don't have enough cash flow or capital for runway. They don't have a team of people who know what they're doing or have done it before. The e-myth is a great book. If you're thinking about being an entrepreneur before you go out and do it, read the e-myth, revisited and think twice. But I started mine more, mine was a eight year side hustle, you know, writing a couple of books, testing, getting an audience, and then I was ready to go. You said you're 65 Rex, is that right? Yes. Well, you look like you're in terrific shape, at least the way that I'm seeing you on your camera here. Do you feel that way? I am, yeah. There's an assessment you can take called the real age assessment that was developed by Dr. Royzen. And it'll measure, you put in some biometrics plus your lifestyle, it measures your chronological age versus your biological age. And that's where that whole living younger title came from. It came from taking that assessment about 10 years ago and determining that I would continue to do the things to help me live younger. Yeah, I'm in the best shape that I've been since my 30s. I'm playing the best tennis I've played since my 30s. And what do you attribute that to? I mean, I'm sure it's a number of things, lifestyle choices, but if you could just summarize some of them, what would it be? Doing a little bit every day, so shifting the habits away from the things that were killing me, like sugar, lack of sleep, not exercising, that was kind of the early part of it. Then learning how to do things that made me healthier and stronger, but taking kind of that incremental approach, doing one physical life change habit a year and one emotional, mental life change habit a year at the first of the year. And then I set January aside as a reset. It's a dry January, it's a media, no media during January, reset priorities, pick one habit, and that kind of sets the tone for the rest of the year. Now, I'm not perfect on those habits, by the way, but that's been the goal and incrementally over time, I've continued to feel better. And I think the three things were the sleep, the low sugar diet, more plant-based diet, and then the consistent exercise. I have, I think my two biggest health concerns at the moment are I have lower back pain and I am prone to gout attacks, which is ironic because I don't drink alcohol and many people who get gout attacks from drinking alcohol, but I have a high amounts of uric acid in my body. In relation to my lower back pain, do you have any flexibility, advice or tips or anything that you, have you experienced any pain? How did you overcome it? Well, I've been extremely fortunate. I did have rotator cuff surgery about 25 years ago. In high school, I did injure my back, but that was kind of a long recovery period. I've had friends who've had back problems where yoga has helped them. And I'm not a specialist in back areas, but some chiropractic I know is helpful. So I'm not sure, James, what you've pursued in the past, but it could be chiropractic, could be yoga, and that's kind of outside, it's above my pay grade in terms of recommending on back pain. Well, Rex, thank you so much for your time. We so appreciate you giving us your words of expertise and thank you to all those who left comments and asked questions. Elena and Maya and Rod and Melanie and Meg and Mel, thank you so much for leaving your comments. And just a reminder, you can go to rexmilla.com to learn more. Rex, thank you for rocking your swanese glasses. Thank you for giving us your words of expertise and guidance on today's call. Anything, any final kind of sentiment to leave to our viewers here? No, thank you so much. A little bit every day, well, it's kind of like compound interest. It'll add up, it'll make a difference, it'll transform you over time. Rex Miller, thank you so much for your time. Your bet, thank you. Take care, James.