 seven six five four three two one all right there you go there you go so for those of you just joining us on the live stream and for those of you who just walked in I am very excited about this next speaker Dr. Sherry Walling for those of you who have come to a lot of word camps you see a lot of really great topics on development and business thing and all sorts of fun things this is a treat not a lot of people talk about these types of subjects we have Corey Miller in the community who does that we have a Sean Hesketh who who does a lot of good work in this area as well but what Dr. Walling is doing is absolutely incredible so she comes to us with over 10 years of dealing with entrepreneurs before that she held many numerous faculty pointed positions at universities and she's worked with PTSD folks coming back from service imagine for me I think that's the best qualification at all to deal with entrepreneurs because you know I can't I can't equate it to what happens when you serve our country but at the same time you get that feeling of I'm so alone and I'm so dealing with so much how can I do that so I'm very proud that she was able to join us today and very happy without any further ado Dr. Sherry Walling thank you Karim so I was here last year and gave a presentation in this room and I had all this like tech drama like I didn't have the right dongles and I just you know I was a little bit flustered and so I in my professional life help people who are flustered and upset calm down that's like sort of my job so I'm like okay I got this like I can do this so I got the microphone I stood here I took a deep breath and I sat down and sort of prepared myself except unfortunately this table is on wheels so my Zen moment was like oh okay try not to fall so I here we are again I'll try not to fall sometimes really good ideas don't work out so well sometimes we have a good sense of what we need to do or how we need to show up for our work but it doesn't work out the way that we expect or the way that we think it's going to work and that's a little bit of what my talk is today so as as Karim mentioned I'm a clinical psychologist so I spend a lot of time helping upset people calm down and in the past couple of years I've worked almost exclusively with founders with executives with freelancers with folks who are doing the very difficult job of carving out their own unique path in life and that path as you well know is entirely dependent on you if you're going to be successful in business it's because you have an ability to solve problems in a unique way to communicate effectively with others you have a set of expertise you have a set of skills you have something inside you that helps you get your work done you have a drive you have discipline you have all of the things that go into getting up doing the work shipping selling it to someone and repeating the next day so that is very much a psychological process so I get to talk to folks about the psychological process that drives their ability to do their work and my work has kind of two components one is I'm a doctor I get called in when things go wrong so when you have someone who is flaming out they're burnt out they are struggling with depression you have two co-founders who can't get along you have a team that's imploding so I help solve those problems but the other thing that I get to do and what we're kind of doing here today is I get to try to help prevent those problems because believe it or not we have pretty good information about human functioning and human flourishing we know what contributes to burnout we know what makes our brains fractured and inefficient and we can reverse engineer those problems and try to figure out hey what do we do how do we act what choices do we make so that we're optimizing for wellness and minimizing the chance that we are going to end our business career in flames so the premise here is that your business depends on you and this is a little bit of this sort of ten thousand foot view I'm going to invite you into the process of thinking about your own thinking we call that metacognition fancy words but when we develop the capacity to be self-reflective to understand our own patterns to observe our own emotional life we can use that self-reflective capacity as kind of a superpower in business because we need to understand of course our clients and the context of our work but we also need to understand our part of the equation so I want to talk through five seemingly good ideas that might not be good ideas five seemingly good ideas that might end with you sitting on the floor in the stage of word camp because you sat on a table that had wheels on it so the first one I want to talk about is the idea my business is my baby and I don't know if any of you have babies or have had a baby or knew a baby but they're kind of demanding and they really require a lot of attention really a lot especially at the beginning when your whole life is organized around keeping them alive and that's really not that different from what it's like to start a business in the first couple of years you're really just trying to like keep it alive feed it make sure it sleeps like make sure you just do all the things to keep it alive and so you know you might be thinking I clearly know the difference between a Kaliwali little baby a little mini human and my business but guys maybe not so a team of researchers in Finland did a research study where they asked the question is entrepreneurial love the same as parental love and they must know entrepreneurs to have come up with that research question so what they did is they used functional MRI scans they looked inside the brain while the brain was thinking about certain cues to try to see how well the neurological process of thinking about one's child mapped on to the neurological process of thinking about one's business and it may or may not surprise you to learn that they are strikingly similar in two particular ways so when business owners are thinking about their business there's a part of the brain the striatum which is the reward center of the brain that's very active and this is the part of the brain basically that feels good when we feel like mushy and gushy towards our significant other or towards our child we have this little dopamine hit our brain lights up and it feels good that's what's happening in our brains when we're thinking about our businesses there's an attachment it's not unlike love the other piece of this or the other significant finding from this study the other part of the brain that is not activated but is suppressed is the posterior cingulate cortex and the temporal parietal junction which clearly you know those are parts of the brain that help with mentalization so when I am standing up here communicating with you there my brain is reading your faces and is anticipating if you're bored if you're interested and I'm adjusting myself to you social referencing so I'm getting inside your brain a little bit and adjusting so this is the part of the brain that doesn't function super well when it comes to founders entrepreneurs freelancers whatever word you want to use and their businesses it means that we are so close to our businesses that it is very hard for us to engage in critical assessment our businesses on a neurological level feel like an extension of us we don't perceive them as separate entities they feel like our like left arm so our brain is not well equipped to really engage in objective critical assessment so that's kind of a tough spot so you've built your livelihood on this thing that you love dearly and you really think it's like the cutest smartest child ever and you're really very biased so what that means is if you want to be able to kind of optimize your ability to be successful in your business to some extent you have to build in some mechanisms for critical assessment that honor the fact that you're biased that it's a very hard for you to be objective that can mean a mastermind group that can mean simply the awareness that you're gonna have a leaning when you look at your business data so there are strategies that you will have to develop based on who you are and who your business is and the resources that are available to you to make sure that you're getting as much objective data as you can the other thing to do to kind of mitigate this good idea that has the potentials to go bad is to diversify the things that you love because when you think about the deep attachment that you have to your business and how like a demanding little baby it has the potential to be there's the possibility for you to get really eaten up by your love for this business because as you know business is an up and down game sometimes it's going super well and you're riding high it's euphoric you feel super successful and proud of what you've made and other times you're really not sure if you're gonna make payroll and the ups and downs are part of the journey they are part of the entrepreneurial life but if you can have other parts of your life that you also love whether that's friends or family or community or a bowling league something else that helps to kind of buffer you from the ups and downs of that deep attachment that you might have to your business make sense all right number two hustle good idea sometimes goes bad and believe me I am no stranger to hard work and hustle and getting things done and making things happen so I'm not hating on those of you who are in the grind and are staying up late and getting up early because I know that that's also part of the game but sometimes it goes wrong for most of us it can be frenetic and a little chaotic and probably not super sustainable and when we hustle without being careful we are very susceptible to the mastery of the mighty squirrel which means that we can be all over the place so you combine this get there faster go go go hustle mentality with an inability to be very assessed like very objective or critically assess your business and you can find yourself really going full speed ahead in lots of directions all at one time which sounds like it could be good but it's actually not possible and it significantly damages the way that our brains function we are not our brains at least at this point in our evolutionary journey are really not like equipped well to multitask we think we are but essentially we're not we're fragmenting so one of the best books that I've read recently is a book called deep work which outlines this kind of problem and then outlines some great strategies and simple solutions that can help guide how to work well and essentially the premise of deep work is that if you're gonna do your best most creative most innovative whether you're coding whether you're designing whether you're writing sales copy whatever it is that you're doing in your in your work let yourself go all in on that task be immersive turn off slack turn off all the bells and whistles and things turn off your email turn off your Wi-Fi let yourself really focus on those higher order cognitive tasks that require your most complicated brain abilities because that is how you are going to do your best work innovative ideas genius those things don't happen when we're going a million miles a minute in lots of different directions so you save yourself mistakes you save yourself fatigue you save yourself time spent on things that really don't move the needle forward when you let yourself deeply focus and the other piece of this is course of course is choosing carefully how you spend your effort knowing that you're you are the resource and you are finite so carefully choosing what you give your energy to you can only do a couple things well and so being very shrewd and careful in the kinds of decisions that you're making about where you're going to give your energy to in your business because hustle is fine we're all going to have some late nights and some early mornings and sometimes when you just have to bust your booty to get it done but if that's the way that you live you aren't going to last long in this world you aren't going to last long in this life of of being a freelancer or running your own business number three I love my customers and they love me so everybody loves to be loved that's how we're kind of wired as humans for belonging for affection for connection and the idea is that you develop some way of doing your business that people are just over the moon about and they are you know beating down the door to hire you or to pay for your service but that's not the reality how many of you have ever gotten some kind of critical feedback about your professional work yeah how many of you have 100% satisfaction for all customers ever that dude what you're doing well he's two for two satisfaction guaranteed so the truth is that we are going to hear very negative feedback from our customers about the choices that we make or the way that we do things and given our if we're honest our emotional attachment to our work to our business I mean when you are doing these things you're putting yourself out there right this is your idea your design your code your brain your unique sort of stamp on the world that you're giving to someone else and they're like could it be blue it's painful it's painful and you do it over and over you sell yourself over and over and over and over and over again that's what it means and hopefully if you do it more times more than two but you're doing well that's how you build a successful business but that vulnerability over and over and over we have to be honest about sort of the toll that that can take over time and someday we can do a roundtable of like all of the crappy things that customers and clients have said to us because I'm sure there are some zingers and how do we both protect ourselves from that but also learn from it those are the things that well again sort of help you be successful or not successful in your business so the first thing is that we really have to get as comfortable as we can with discomfort we have to be able to tolerate it and one of the reasons that this is important is because it's your unhappy customers that are your most powerful teachers your happy customers probably don't give you a lot of feedback except high five you're great here's the check those are great customers but if you want to get better if you want to expand your reach or your service if you want to be able to serve a broader audience of people it's the grumbly people who might have some actually really helpful feedback for you and it's not easy to listen to so how do we like you know kind of buffer ourselves bolster ourselves sometimes I actually have people visualize putting on a shield or like a suit of armor to go into certain meetings with unhappy people because it's okay you can take the feedback and not let it kind of penetrate into your soul but it does take some practice to be able to tolerate unhappy people and learn from them and listen to them without it it hurting you too much the other suggestion I have for minimizing the adversity of this is to really filter feedback right we have to choose who we listen to and rather than either shutting down critical feedback or only hearing critical feedback we have to be able to sort of take all of the feedback and balance it some extent so I really had to practice this recently I in the end of February I've released a book which I was very excited about and people began to review it on Amazon and there are like 20 something beautiful lovely reviews about how the book was helpful and then there's one person who is basically like this is all painful he's like this book is self-indulgent and empathy speaking and I was like I don't even know what you mean I don't like your review I don't like you yeah it wasn't my mom I don't think maybe it was her mom we're gonna talk later so I have to tolerate that and I have to understand that for some people who think they're gonna read a business book reading stories of people emotion people's emotional life might not be what they wanted might not be what they thought they were getting that's cool I can maybe think about how I can articulate what my book is about in a way that makes people have informed consent it has like a big sign on it it's like there's gonna be feelings here so people will know so it wasn't my favorite experience but you know you take the feedback and you sort of think about what you can do but the thing that I was tempted to do was only listen to that one and not let myself sort of sit with the 25 other ones to be overly biased in the negative interpretation and that's because the minute that happens the minute there's a critical tweet or somebody gives us bad feedback our our cortisol kicks in we go into this fight-or-flight response and we're really attuned to the potential threat of someone being unhappy with us but the reality is that probably most of our customers are happy enough or we would not be in business and to hold the negative with the full range of the positive and kind of hold them in balance to be like 85% happy and then allow yourself to integrate the critical feedback and see what you can take and if it's just like a really loony person who is not able to be constructive then it's okay to dismiss it but we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking like in order to be successful people love us and we love them because that is not a good metric guys that's not gonna happen maybe for that guy but not for everybody okay number four this is a nice positive statement I got this and I like it I like lots of things about this and sometimes I say it's myself right when I'm trying not to fall on the table but you know you sort of affirm I got this I'm okay I'm okay here couple little tweaks you might want to make the first is something that Pat talked about this is the we language even if you are a solo founder even if it's just you and the dog in the basement doing your thing there's still a we involved you probably maybe have a significant other maybe you had a mentor maybe you have some subcontractors maybe you have people that said nice things to you when you were in fifth grade which gives you the courage to try to do something hard when you sort of understand yourself and your business as a community effort then I think that also feels like you have these other sources of support when things go wrong so the more that your eye focused the less buffer you have and the less support you have when things do go wrong so just this little adjustment in language I think can be helpful the other part of this statement that I don't love as you know like an affirmation to repeat to yourself is the the got this part it sort of implies this arrival and doesn't give quite the nod to ongoing continuous growth that I think is important when we think about how to sustain successful business over time so a reframe might be we're learning this we're growing in this way we're so excited about where where things are going in the future but the gut is sort of this final not very dynamic way of viewing your success one of the things that we do sometimes psychological researchers do is we look at semantic analysis we look at the way that people use language so for example people who are really struggling with depression use language very differently than people who are not struggling with depression they use a lot more singular like I pronouns and then they use a lot more negative emotion words as you could imagine I have a theory which I haven't tested but maybe someday that successful entrepreneurs people who really rocket in business use a lot of emerging active verbs growing learning climbing reaching running jumping climbing trees but instead of these sort of like finite static words so somebody I'll test that hypothesis but for now I would just say if you find yourself using the generally very you know helpful statement I got this maybe just give it a little bit of a tweak and remind yourself that the best thing you have going for you in business is your ability to grow and adapt and be flexible and keep moving and some of those active words can be a nice important shift and switch for you all right last one disclaimer we're gonna talk about feelings and I said that a little bit jokingly but I do think that there is some confusion about the parameters of what's professionalism what's business and understanding ourselves as whole beings so when we try to overly to make things overly objective we fail to take into account our own internal emotional experiences and this is actually quite dangerous from my perspective as a psychologist this is how people work in a job or work in a business for years and years on end and wake up one day and realize I have no idea what I'm doing why I'm doing it and I hate my life and those those moments happen to people maybe they've happened to you it creeps up on you though it creeps up when you're not paying attention when your heads down hustle and you're not asking the big questions of like is this meaningful to me do I enjoy this is this how I want to be spending my relatively few days that I get on this planet so I think this is one of the most important practices that that entrepreneurs can do is to really track your emotional life so there's lots of ways to do this and I just think that of this is another metric right you're looking at unique visitors to your website you're looking at downloads you're looking at all kinds of metrics you got spreadsheets and things numbers this is another source of metric where you're tracking the high points of your life the low points of your life you're looking at your to-do list in a given day and you're putting like a smiley face or a frowny face next to those activities and I'm being a little bit playful but I'm actually not because when you get a sense of your emotional engagement with each of the activities that make up your business life you're getting really important information about your sweet spots where you're excited where you have passion where you have energy and the kinds of things that are like sucking the life out of you and guess what you're going to do better work when you've got energy and enthusiasm and passion and ideas and not such good work when you're going through the motions and you're feeling exhausted and drained so when you get to the point that you are ready to hire and grow your team take all of those frowny face items and write that into a job description and hand that off because you want to optimize for your own well-being remember it all comes back to you and I think the whole point honestly of what I do and why I do it is to help remind people to pay attention pay attention to what's going on inside of you pay attention to what you're learning pay attention to what you love and what you don't love be curious about your own self so that you can be the best version of whatever it is that you do the best copywriter the best designer the best coder because there's a lot of genius in this room right if we look around like there's there's some interesting life stories some interesting experiences some folks who have innovative creative cool ways of thinking and when we fail to let our own selves flourish we rob ourselves of the satisfaction of a life that is congruent and authentic we we also rob the community so as a group as a community of people whether that's WordPress or Miami or however you slice your community we need the best version of you so be aware of the creep be aware of good ideas that have the potential to go wrong and give yourselves the space to really enjoy and love what you do so that you can do it for a long time and make a lot of money and be generous and helpful and flourish and buy a boat or whatever it is that you want to do with yourself okay I do a weekly podcast it's a lot of content and ideas about the kinds of topics that we talked about today it's free lots of free resources at the Zen founder website so if you are in the early process of starting a business or you're in the middle of the slog or you're thinking about it my husband Rob and I have attempted to come up with a lot of material and resources to help you do that well and stay sane and be happy and all those things all right thanks guys thank you thank you very much don't go anywhere don't go anywhere you're not done yet okay hold on guys so Sherry brought with her today five copies of her book keeping your stuff together I would just like to say that my son who's 11 named the book right I don't know where he heard that kind of language probably from his father so word camp rules we can't give it away but I can make you work for it so I really highly recommend this book it's incredible I know a few audience members who already read it and I think they'll tell you the same so here's what we're gonna do hopefully everybody here either has Twitter or Slack from word camp Miami so please if you can ask a question that we can get to in the panel that refers to anything you've heard so far or Josh when he comes up on stage next we will go through those questions in our panel and the questions that get picked will get a copy of the book so please in Twitter if you're using Twitter hashtag WCM I a hashtag MBA two different hashtags or if you're in Slack in the general in the general channel please tag Ryan our eye and Kenny and we will get your questions clear I need to repeat it nope got it cool those of you watching the live stream I will make the commitment that if I get one of the questions from you that I can use on on Twitter I'll get you a copy of the book up up to one or two so we'll see which ones I use all right so that's the book so so far let's talk about where we we've been so far we have talked about everything from how to think about starting the business then we went to how to start dealing with the first customers and clients and then we started talking about how you're gonna actually work through some of these things and these five tips that you came up with are absolutely amazing thank you I I actually was taking notes because you know I tend to try and make sure them paying attention and I love the Eddie is a quote running jumping climbing trees can you tell us a little bit about what is it about staying active that will help your growth or what is it about that part that just will help the entrepreneur expand what they're doing because I read an article that you tweeted that talked about rough housing what does rough housing have to do with running my business I mean you you all know very well how dynamic changes in WordPress or in markets can threaten the well-being of your business or can be opportunities to expand I think the thing that gets dangerous in many ways is when we we are stuck or we hold still too long that's kind of true in business and true in life so the more that you understand yourself and your business as an active dynamic malleable adaptable entity I think you're less jarred when the thing that you have built has to shift because of these external forces I don't know if that makes sense answers your question yeah absolutely you have to stay agile right so another thing that a lot of folks don't realize is the basic building blocks can you give us an idea of what it takes to actually come to work every morning and like be present yeah so sometimes there's a couple of different talks that I've given and one of the talks that I've given a couple times you know I ask people like would you take away or people will say at the end of the conference what's the thing that you took away from from what Sherry presented and they're like that I need to sleep more and like yeah like your mom probably told you that but I'm gonna tell you again so if we want to show up to our work with our brains functioning at their best capacity there are a couple of things that really have to be in place and we call these the building blocks of sanity yeah have to get enough sleep there's really compelling amount of science that looks at what happens to our brains when we don't sleep well or sleep enough one of the highlights is that our neurons start to die another highlight is that our hippocampus which is sort of one of the mechanisms for maintaining memory doesn't have time to practice new information so if we're not sleeping we're really actually not learning so sleep is one of the building blocks that really have to be in place the other is you have to fuel yourself well so you know donuts and coffee don't work for three meals a day every day of your life it's not going to work for your brain and then the last thing is movement is exercise and this doesn't have to you don't have to like go sign up for CrossFit in order to help your brain function optimally you have to move 30 minutes three times a week and that means an elevated heart rate and sort of some glistening sweat beads so if you're not a gym person and you don't want to be a gym person that's fine but your ability to move regularly is is a really significant predictor of how well your brain will function therefore how well you'll be you know you'll be able to do in your business okay thank you now last question if I wanted to know more about this where do I go that's what I got Zen founder.com I wrote it down I talked about it Zen founder.com yeah alright thank you very much alright three down two more sessions to go next we're going to be hearing in a few minutes from Josh Strebel founder and CEO of Pagely hosting awesome story a couple of reminders as we give people a few minutes to take a bathroom break or just you know stretch before we do our our panel we will be doing a quick exercise warning you right now but nothing deep nothing hard and it's going to be an absolutely incredible afternoon I thank you all for working with us and being here and listening to all this and I hope you find it valuable thank you