Transcript of Episode

Leah Gervais: Hey visionaries, welcome back to the Your Biggest Vision show. I’m your host Leah, and we’re doing something kind of fun today. I am doing this episode on Facebook and Instagram live. I had to record it anyway, so I thought, why not just go ahead and pop on live? So for those of you that are here live, give me a little emoji. Let me know that you’re here. Um, and let me know where you’re tuning in from. So this episode was actually highly requested. It was something that a lot of people on Instagram have been asking me about and he expressed that they were interested in hearing from me. And that is kind of the health hacks and habits that I’m really insistent on that I attribute a lot of my productivity and just health too. Um, and how that helps me as an entrepreneur.

And I was a little bit hesitant to do this. I’m not going to lie just because I’m not a nutritionist, I’m not a dietician, I don’t have any formal training in that. And I wouldn’t want to give anyone sort of advice that wouldn’t work for them or anything like that. But because it was requested, I thought it couldn’t hurt to kind of share what I do in hopes that it might work for you in some way, shape or form. And I really want to give you kind of the mindset that I have about this because I think that that is something that you can adopt no matter what situation you’re in or what kind of nutrition habits you want to follow if you have the mindset that I do. And, uh, also I just want to note that this isn’t like an extensive list of all the health things I abide by.

This is very specifically things that helped me as an entrepreneur because a lot of you are entrepreneurs and so I want to help you with the same thing. So I divided this up into four different kind of categories that I do daily. First are nutrition, things that I think really helped me next, our physical health things, then mental health and then simple productivity. And as we go into this, I want to share that I think it’s more important as if you’re an entrepreneur. You need to take your health more seriously than maybe you did beforehand or maybe you did otherwise. I guess I shouldn’t say more seriously cause like everyone should take their health very seriously. But if you are comparing your life and your habits with your nine to five friends, then that’s going to be a really tough road to go down because the truth is they don’t necessarily need the stamina that you do.

And I’m not trying to insult people that work at nine to fives. I understand how demanding it is. And I also understand, well I can’t understand cause I’m not a mother, but I can understand, uh, appreciate the additional complexity that being a mother or something like that would bring into this. So, um, and no way I’m saying that other people shouldn’t pay attention to their health. But I do think that if you’re an entrepreneur, you have an additional pressure to kind of be on your A game every day because you’re creating, when I was at my nine to five job, obviously I wanted to do well every day, but a lot of times I was just doing, I was doing what people told me to do. I was doing what my boss told me to do. I was doing what was on my to do list.

And now that I work for myself, you know, it all, it’s all me making all the decisions. It’s all me that is deciding what I want to say, how I want to handle things, what I want to create, how I want to launch things. And it just demands a higher level of stamina for me and kind of mental alertness than I ever at any other nine to five job. Not to mention you really need to feel motivated nearly all the time when you are an entrepreneur. Even when things go rough, even when you have bad days, even when you hear no’s, you really are counting on yourself to be, you know, your own best motivator, um, and to come through for yourself. And that also for me anyway, does not happen when I don’t take care of myself properly because I get really tired or cranky, et cetera, whatever. I’m sure we’ve all been there and I literally don’t have time for things like that because my goals are so big. So that’s my background. That’s where I’m coming from. That’s where I have decided to follow some of these things. So let me take a sip of water and we will hop in.

You’re struggling with sadness all, I’m so sorry to hear that. Um, I can completely understand how it can be really isolating when you are doing something on your own. I hope that these tips help. Thank you for sharing and let me know what resonates with you and anyone else that’s listening. I’d love to hear what your takeaways from these are as well. So let’s go ahead and dive in. The first section that I want to talk a bit about are nutritional things that I have found really helped me be a better entrepreneur. So the first thing that I do every single morning, 365 days a year without exception, I don’t care if I’m traveling, whatever it is, is I have a veggie packed smoothie first thing in the morning. I’ve been making green smoothies first thing in the morning for probably like five years now ever since I graduated from college.

And I try to put a lot of vegetables in them, especially spinach. I put tons and tons of spinach in there because it is something that I don’t need to think about then for the rest of the day. You know, it feels good to know that I’ve already had a big serving of vegetables very early on in the morning. So for me that helps me because it helps keep me focused. Um, it also puts me in a feeling of momentum. It feels like I’ve already kind of crossed something off my to do list first thing in the morning. You know, I’m sure some of you have seen that Navy seal video about how you should make your bed first thing every single morning just because it puts you in the mode of productivity, getting something done, doing something that is on your to do list. Now I don’t do that because I share a bed with my husband and he sleeps later than I do, so he is the one that makes our bed.

But the point is for me, what that, that same kind of concept works with a veggie packed smoothie helps me know that I’ve already had a really healthy serving of fruit and vegetables early in the morning. It makes me feel really great. I think it cleanses my gut before I start the day. Um, and it puts me in a, um, just positive and kind of productive frame of mind early on. The next nutrition thing that I do is I don’t eat gluten or processed sugar. Uh, pretty much the only sugar I eat is in fruit. Um, sometimes I’ll have a bite of chocolate and sometimes I will have natural sugar. Like, I’ll have coconut sugar that’s on granola or something like that, but for the most part, I don’t eat processed sugar. I don’t eat sweets and turns out gluten has a lot of processed sugar in it, like bread is very high in sugar.

This is obviously for health reasons. Sugar is the worst thing there is, but it’s also because sugar and gluten make me exhausted and I’ll be the first to say that I was very skeptical of like the gluten free by choice people for years. I thought that being gluten free was for those that had celiac disease and that was pretty much it. It wasn’t until I cut out gluten actually from a cleanse I did before my wedding last year, which was put on by one of my mastermind clients. Little Adapts by Jax. Jacquie Smith is her name. It was incredible. I talk about her a lot because she is a great nutrition coach. I did a free cleanse of hers, which made me cut out gluten and I noticed very quickly how much more energetic I felt from not eating gluten.

Like I used to when I would eat at home halfway through meals, I would kind of lay down. It would sound so un-normal and I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on it sooner that I shouldn’t be that tired after I sleep. But I thought like my body was just digesting and you know, I work all the time, so maybe I was just taking a break. I just didn’t think that much of it. Um, and I noticed very quickly that when I stopped eating gluten, I just didn’t have that fog anymore. It didn’t have that exhaustion. I didn’t need to lay down to digest or anything like that. I could kind of just keep going. So, uh, based on those two observations and how that worked for me, I no longer eat gluten or sugar. Sometimes I’ll have a beer. I love beer.

That was probably the hardest thing to give up for me for gluten wise. I’ll be honest. But even that I have just kind of cut out because I know how much better my body functions and my dreams are more important than a beer. So that is another health hack that has worked for me. I think the takeaway would be if you feel that something makes you tired, like if you feel like, I know for a lot of people for dairy or dairy is really hard on their digestion. Um, I don’t, I personally don’t eat dairy but it’s not for productivity reasons because I don’t think dairys that healthy. But the point is if you have something that makes you tired, red meat, dairy, gluten, um, sugar. Do you have sugar highs and then sugar crashes? It’s worth not eating them. If you really want to treat yourself like one of my mentors used to say that as an entrepreneur you need to treat yourself like an athlete.

Like your body needs to be in top performing condition at all times. So you need to take the ice baths, you need to meditate, you need to do the saunas you need to eat until you’re like a well oiled machine. So you can do with that what you will. But the point is it might be worth doing some sort of isolation diet, which again Jackie Smith puts on so that you can identify what, which foods make you more tired or are harder on your digestion that keep you out of the game. 

Okay. The final nutrition hack that I swear by is… I don’t know if this is like a prescribed thing, but I follow a big huge, big small meal pattern. So I eat huge breakfasts. I actually like three breakfast between having like my lemon water and then my veggie smoothie. And then I’ll usually have something like peanut butter or banana chia seeds, granola.

Like I’ll have an acai bowl or sometimes I’ll just have a breakfast bowl, um, or you know, like any kind of thing like that. Um, and then sometimes I’ll have avocado toast. Like I kind of eat all morning. I get very, very hungry when I wake up. I am a caffeine drinker, which I can’t really consume unless I have things in my stomach. So I just eat a huge breakfast and I don’t let myself hold back as much breakfast food as I want. I let myself eat because I eat healthy breakfast food. Um, and then for lunch I eat a big lunch, not huge like breakfast, but I still will be pretty generous with it. And then I, um, I eat a small dinner so I try to eat pretty early on in the night and then I just don’t need that much. Uh, usually I’ll have something like a salad or a soup or some sort of like quinoa bowl or something.

Um, and that’s just because I think it helps me sleep better if I’m not having to digest so much. And um, that is, you know, what works for me. And I also think it’s better to just wake up feeling more refreshed and not kind of feeling the aftermath of what you ate the night before. So that helps me to sleep. 

And now we are onto kind of the second section, which brings that up. Physical health hacks that have really helped me as an entrepreneur. And these aren’t really hacks. These are just things that I swear by first thing’s first is I drink an obscene amount of water and this has definitely helped my productivity. I don’t care what anyone says. Water is like the one of my mentors says that water is the secret ingredient to success. Like we just don’t drink enough water as a society. So I have this 40 ounce water bottle with me at all times. It keeps my water really cold all day, which I love because I’m always drinking water and you can notice if it isn’t, you know, as refreshing. Um, and I probably drink one of these an hour, which is so much more than the average person or maybe not more than the average person should. But it’s just a lot and it’s a lot. I’ve always drank a lot of water and this has even been a big step up for me. So first thing in the morning when I wake up, before I have my smoothie or anything, I try to drink a whole one of these in like 20 minutes. And at first it can feel a little weird. He might feel like it’s kind of just a lot of water, but you’ll get used to it. Um, and I really think water just keeps you hydrated.

It keeps you energetic, it keeps you clear headed. It keeps your food digesting better. It just keeps you so much better running. It’s such an easy thing. You guys get so many people don’t do it. And so you can even see on like Amazon now you can buy those huge, huge, huge jugs of water. I think they have something like 120 ounces or whatever, or maybe even more. Maybe you can do 240 and that’s like how much you should drink in a day. And you just keep refilling it and watching it go down all day until you’ve drank as much as you need in a day. I don’t need that because I am pretty, you know, clear about once I, once I drank this whole thing, I refill it. I’d say I wouldn’t do this every single hour, but I do while I’m working. So usually until about three or 4:00 PM, um, since when I wake up.

So yeah, like eight hours of the day I drink one of these an hour. And if you need to train your brain to be thirsty or like if you’re trying to up your water and take, but you just don’t think about drinking that much, just try to get in the habit of every time you look at your water bottle, take a sip of water and always have water with you. And the idea is to train your body. And one of my mentors says that it’s about like training your body to be in an abundance of water, to never be in thirst. And when you, it can take awhile to switch that. Once you do, you’ll notice your energy and your productivity levels, how you sleep. Everything improves so much. It’s almost to the point where like I need to stop drinking water and hour before bed because sometimes I have to get up in the middle of the night and I don’t want to do that.

So water is my number one physical health hack, super easy, cheap, free, couldn’t be simpler, don’t need any sort of fancy-schmancy organic thing for this. That’s all it is to it. 

Okay. Next. Physical health, extra next physical health thing I swear by is to do some form of exercise every single day. No excuses. And I have found that for me that means once a week doing like a restorative yoga class. So it doesn’t need to be that. I’m like lifting weights every day. Um, you know, you don’t need to kill yourself if you feel sore or anything like that. But it does mean just doing something with movement every single day, no matter what. No excuses. If you need to do it in your living room for 20 minutes with a YouTube channel, you know, clip, that’s fine. I personally do go to the gym every day, mostly because I work from home a lot and I like to get out of my house. But, uh, that’s something my dad taught me and it’s something that always stuck with me, which is just every single day. So you don’t need to work out intensely. But these people, like, I just don’t believe that you only need to work out three times a week. Maybe if you’re doing high intensity workouts like cardio or something that’s the case, but for your mental health, for your physical health should be a lot more than that. All right. Just one second.

So yeah. Exercise in some shape or form every day. Great for our mental health. Great for your physical health. Um, also just good to get you kind of like up and moving and not in front of your computer all day. Okay. Next thing in the physical health category is just sleep. It’s another thing that is free and so simple, but will literally change your life. I am very strict about sleeping eight hours every single night. I get up very early, um, which I’ll talk about in a little bit, but uh, that the sleep part is something that I am very protective of. So just sleeping eight hours a night and you know, you might not need to sleep eight hours. I do, but some people can do fine on like seven or seven and a half or whatever.

Um, it’s really just about finding what your body’s natural rhythm is. And I found that the best way to do that is to cut out caffeine and alcohol and sugar for a few days, hopefully a week. Um, anything that kind of like disrupts your energy level so that you can just feel what your body naturally needs to sleep. Um, that’s hard for me cause I am a caffeine drinker, but that is a good way to find out how much sleep you actually need and then really try to stick with it if you don’t sleep well or if you don’t sleep eight hours every night or if you’re an insomniac or if you stay up late, there’s obviously a million tricks and tools you can do for that. I would say number one is absolutely no technology in your bedroom, but if you need more than that, I recommend the book, the sleep revolution by Arianna Huffington. She has tons of tips. Um, and you know, I have talked to many very successful over seven figure entrepreneurs who would say that like, just the number one thing that helps their productivity is sleep. It’s not anything fancy. It’s not anything crazy. It’s not some insane workout. It is literally sleeping. Okay. Now onto mental health.

So I am, again, I just want to preface this. I know I preface the beginning of the episode, but I want to say it again. I am not a therapist. I’m not a mental health professional. I am not in any condition to um, or, or you know, I just would never uh, say that I could handle a mental illness or anything like that. That’s not my area of expertise and that’s not what I’m here to do. I’m just here to share what has worked for me in hopes that either inspires you to find what works for you or maybe some of my ideas will work for you as well. 

So being an entrepreneur is brutal. It is full of rejection. It is full of failures. It is full of people telling you no, it’s full of worry and uncertainty. A lot of things that we are taught are bad things growing up.

A lot of things that we’re not used to from nine to five jobs. You are in a completely different arena and it takes a lot of mental strength, which is why I emphasize mindset so much in my programs. And uh, it is probably the most important of all these categories. But without getting too much into that and why that’s the case, let’s just get into some of the mental health things. I used to stay strong, stay confident, and separate my own self worth from my business. Your business, your finances, none of that is your self worth. Um, you are worthy just because of who you are. Important to remember. So first things first is gratitude. You will change your life just by focusing on feeling appreciative all the time. It sounds simple and it is, yet so many people don’t do it because it sounds too good to be true or they’re struggling to be an appreciation.

So I do this at night before I go to bed. I don’t like doing it in the mornings, which is, I know what a lot of people recommend doing, but I’m such a morning person that I kind of like to get up, sit up, start working. So I don’t really like to like journals in the mornings or, or writing a gratitude journal is just, it’s just not for me. Again, you have to find what works for you. So, I do it the night before I go to sleep and I actually think it really helps me sleep well and in a place of gratitude. And I, um, write down usually about five things that I’m grateful for in that moment and in that day. And I really try to make a point to feel them in all five of my senses. So if for example, I write down my husband that he’s usually the first thing I write down, I think I really try to sit and how it feels to be grateful for him, not just write it down, not just do this on like an autopilot way, but really feel how does it feel to be married to him?

Like, what’s it look like? What’s our life look like? What’s it smell like? What’s it like, what’s it feel like? And it might sound like a little bizarre, but I feel like having your feelings in check like that and trying to associate all your senses with you while you are in a mode of gratitude helps them sink in more and it helps them in your subconscious more, which just brings you into more of a zone of appreciation more consistently and a lot faster. So that’s the first thing is just having a gratitude journal every single day. I like to do my before I go to bed, but whatever appreciation works for you, whatever way to be consistent works for you find it’s worth finding. 

The next thing I do is, this is somewhat new for me and it’s been absolutely incredible is I pause my email inbox all but about one to two hours a day. So I found at the end of last year that I was spending hours in my inbox every day hours, responding to people, hours, reaching out to people, hours with my clients, hours with potential clients, hours with people reading my newsletter. And I was just always replying. And I’m one of those people that likes to have my inbox at zero. So I’m usually very quick to reply and it’s just something that I want to do very quickly. Um, and you know, have, have checked off my to do list. But this resulted in me having, uh, you know, hours a day spent in my inbox. And it also took away from me being as creative because I was constantly in reactive mode. I wasn’t in creative mode as much, so it just wasn’t really helping my business grow that much. And it also was making me feel like I was at the mercy of the people emailing me, not my own boss.

I was their boss. So I started pausing my inbox for about one to two hours or all for all, but about one to two hours a day. Um, and it’s made a world of difference. I feel so much more free. I feel much more able to create. I feel much more just not liable. It’s just, it’s a great, great thing. And I do that with an app called boomerang. I use it on Google Chrome and it pauses it both on my phone and on my computer. And so I just cannot receive any emails until I unpause it. And you can still send emails during this time. So if you kind of want to get caught up without a new email coming in every 20 minutes or five minutes sometimes or one minute, then you can still like send emails and they’ll go out and you can still check them off your to do list without you needing a flood of them in. So that’s helped my mental health a lot because it just makes me feel less reactive, less like I’m at the mercy of people. Less like I need to put out any fires. 

Okay. The next thing within mental health, this is so huge you guys is I pay attention to my wins every day. Every night before I go to bed, I write down what went well that day. I wrote down what the winds were and just focusing on that. Again, I really think it helps rewire my subconscious mind to focus on what works. Being an entrepreneur, as we said, is not for the faint of heart. There will always be things going wrong and what makes or breaks entrepreneurs is what they choose to focus on. Are you focusing on what’s going wrong or are you focusing on what’s going right? Are you focusing on your opportunities or are you focusing on your obstacles?

And a very easy way to be more passive about this and not have to actively decide is to rewire your subconscious mind so that you are always shifting in the wins, shifting into what’s going right, shifting into what’s going well and not focusing on what’s not going well, what could go wrong, et cetera. And that has come from writing down the things that have the winds of the day. 

And then the final mental health thing I make sure never to miss is to meditate five minutes every morning. It just clears my head. Um, I’m going to be really, really honest here. I don’t feel like I’ve seen a huge change from meditation the way so many people rave about, but I trust the research. I trust the literature and psychology. I do not get that stressed out, so I feel like it must be working, but I don’t. Um, I don’t know. I’m more, I’m more do it because I trust how much it works then because I feel amazing after. I’ll be really blunt about that. But I do do it every day. I make sure not to miss it. 

Okay. Final thing, just one sec. Let me take a sip of water. All right guys. Final thing is productivity hacks that have really helped me and I made sure not to miss pretty much every day. First things first, get up early. This, if any of you have followed me for any length of time, you know, this is like my jam. I’m a huge early bird and I attribute it to a lot of my business success. This was especially true when I was side hustling when my business was not my full time job. And I was building it around my nine to five. I got up at 4:30 in the morning pretty much every morning in order to build it and be really productive before I went to work. This meant that I started going to bed at like 8:30 or 9:00  every morning. Um, and I didn’t just go from like waking up at 6:00 AM to all of a sudden waking up at 4:30 AM I did it in increments of like a half an hour.

If you’re not a morning person, I would do it in increments of 15 minutes where you’re just going back. You know, like if you wake up at 6:30 and you want to start waking up at 5:30, so try waking up at 6:15 for awhile until you get used to that and then set it back even more til 6:00 and then 5:45 et cetera until you’re at your ideal moment. But, uh, mornings are like everything to me. I attribute so much of, so many things to getting up really early. Uh, I am very honest about the fact that I think my husband and I don’t ever really fight because of mornings because he’s a night owl, so he stays up late. I get up early, we have like this built in two or three hours of alone time every single day. So I think having that space and just knowing that, you know, we can enjoy our time together after work.

Um, and when we’re out together and sometimes during the day, but we always have those few hours to just, you know, do what we need to do and be by ourselves and, and we never really fight. And I think that this is a huge reason why because we have built in alone time business-wise, I couldn’t even begin to list the reasons why mornings have been good for me. It helps me get ahead of the day. It’s when my mind works best. It’s when I can be creative. It’s kind of when my clients aren’t necessarily emailing me yet because it’s the beginning of the day. It’s very early. Um, it’s just when I feel the most motivated, they’re the best. So I will always be up early, always up early nowadays. I, I’d say I’m closer to 5:30, sometimes 5:00. Um, I don’t really do 4:30 anymore, but uh, never past 6:00, mornings are my thing. 

Okay. Next productivity thing I do. So this is like the best piece of advice I’ve ever heard and I honestly only have heard it somewhat recently, but I wanted to share it because it has been so powerful for me. And this is about taking a day off. So we all have those days where you don’t want to do, I heard this from a Navy seal YouTube video, I believe. So it wasn’t directly given to me, although I wish it was. But sometimes you feel like you need a day off. Right. We all have those days where you’re just exhausted. Life has caught up with you. You haven’t time off, you are sore and you don’t want to go to the gym. You’ve gotten too many rejections. You haven’t had any time for yourself. You need those days off. And I am all for having days off.

I think one of the huge benefits of being an entrepreneur is being able to set your own schedule. And why should you torture yourself with, you know, not being able to take time off if that’s really what you need. So take your day off if you’re really feeling like you need a day off, but take it off tomorrow. So if you’re feeling like you’re just having one of those days where you just are going through mud, you’re trudging through the motions. 

So when you’re having those days where you just don’t want to do things or you’re just going through motions and you’re just not feeling great, then the best thing you can do and you need a day off is give yourself a day off the next day. So don’t give into yourself and have a day off that day. Don’t give into your exhaustion or anything like that. Keep pushing forward until you are done with the day. Even if it means going through the motions, even if it means you’re not excited, even if it means just going to the gym for the sake of going to the gym and feeling like crap, feeling exhausted, go through the motions and take off the next day and then like 90 or 95% of the time you won’t need it. You don’t the next day, and this has been so powerful because I think it is a great and if you do, if you do, if you need the day off, by all means the next day, take the dang day off like that’s fine, but don’t do it the day that you really need. This builds a lot of self discipline. This builds a lot of self confidence and honestly it will just build in more productivity time to your life because more often than not you won’t actually take that day off. 

Alright. Final productivity hack that I swear by is I only let myself have around eight to 10 things on my to do list for the day. It depends on what the two dues are. But I used to have a really bad habit of working off like a whole page of a to do list and I would just get as much done as I thought I could. Um, that I would always feel perpetually behind. I was always adding to it. It wasn’t helpful. Do not put more on your to do list then you actually can get done. I think that that is really good advice for everyone because it sets you up for a momentum. It sets you up for wins and if you’re done early, you can actually take time off instead of feeling like you’re always behind, always having more to do. That’s not what this is about. This is about enjoying your life and being productive. 

So those are my personal health productivity and nutritional hacks that I swear by they have really helped me become more productive. Um, and they really helped my business grow. So I hope that some of these help you, if they don’t hope that just understanding why they helped me might give you a framework for what you could be looking for in your own life. A diet that gives you more energy, productivity tips that might be against the norm, but that would give you more time to get things done. Mental health, things that keep you in momentum, mental health, things that keep you paying attention to your wins, physical health, things that keep you consistent and keep you going and keep you on your game. So I hope that you guys enjoyed this. If you did shoot me a DM on Instagram, let me know what your favorite hack was or a hack that you have that you love, that maybe I should be incorporating into my routine. And here is to your biggest vision. Bye guys.

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