In part 2 of our talk with speaker, trainer, and coach George Anderson, George delves into the significance of inner dialogue in controlling motivation, mindset, and resilience. He discusses how self-awareness and alternative responses can help individuals stay within their circle of control. George also highlights the importance of well-being for high performers, explaining that taking small breaks and looking after one's physical, emotional, and mental energy can enhance performance and creativity. He shares practical frameworks like the DASH (diet, activity, sleep, hydration) for improving well-being and performance.

Hello. Welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with

myself, Matt Best and Jonny Adams and part two of our

conversation with George Anderson.

George Anderson has got a great background within

personal training and all the way into business and how he

supports individuals grow both from the body side of things and

also from the mindset and the well being.

We talk a lot with our clients about that self talk

element of telling yourself and having that internal dialog

that's productive, as opposed to letting it be the thing that

kind of brings you down and preparing for that. And I think

it's a such an important thing, like what, what you telling

yourself, and how that impacts the way that you see yourself,

and then the actions and then the results.

All of this, whether it's motivation,

mindset, resilience, it is, it's nearly all controlled, or at

least massively influenced by that inner dialog. Like, what

are you saying to yourself, and just having some awareness of it

and having some alternatives. So what else could you say? What

else could you do? How else could you respond that then just

put you into the circle of control here, rather than the

things you can't control but are of concern to you. So when you

identify that. And the stoics would would have us believe that

the only thing we can truly control is our reasoned

response, right? So I think that's beautiful, because when

you come back to that simplicity, like, well, how can

I respond to this instead of react to it? Because maybe I'm

more programmed to, how can I get into into that step back

from it, and then actually decide what that response is

going to be like instead.

So the the people, the individuals and the

businesses that you work with, What benefit do they see of from

the work that you do with them in this and and what are those

kind of key leverage, or those, those key kind of levers, I

suppose, for individuals. I mean, we talked about a few of

them there, clearly, but maybe you could share an example of

where you've of a particular client or someone that you've

helped in in that situation.

Yeah, I think a lot of the work I do still comes

into the bucket of well being, well being and performance, but

it's still, it's still kind of well being, and one of the big

challenges there is, especially with high performers and sales

professionals as well. Within that is that well being has seen

some Well, I time for that, because I've got, I'm busy, I've

got big deadlines. I've got to do this, and I've got to do that

and and that the challenge there is that we miss this connection

between actually, when you can create this, this space, and you

can, you know, you can make even small amounts of time for

yourself, or take breaks or looking after your mindset,

looking after your physical, emotional and mental energy,

then that's actually going to increase your performance. So it

makes you more resilient. You make better decisions. You are

more creative. You can connect better with people as well, and

all your listeners and yourselves will will have had

the experience of when you've been really depleted and and how

much harder it is to go through the day and feel like you're

performing at your best. So if we allow ourselves to get run

down, not only does that put us at risk of burnout, and, you

know, doesn't really give us the most amazing experience of our

lives, but as as high performers, we can't reach that

potential. And a lot of people get frustrated by knowing that

that potential is there, but they just can't reach it. They

just can't they just haven't got the energy to do it. So then it

comes into a what are the habits, the performances, the

behaviors that they can put into practice that can, you know,

make that easier to reach that potential without it feeling

like an either or well being or performance?

Can I unpack the word well being quickly?

Because, because I we talk a lot to Chief Commercial officers,

CEOs about high performance, and a lot of our statement programs

that we've delivered for last 20 years is called High Performance

sales habits, or high performance leadership habits.

And the amount of people we talk to on this podcast about habits,

it's like, yes, we believe in it too, but well being, you know? I

mean, I'm going to be quite cynical here, and, you know, HR

own it. It's mandated. What is well being? I mean, I've worked

as one of my clients was, was a financial well being

organization, and I was like, I wish when I was 10 that that

business was around me, because I would have not made the

mistake when I was in my 20s and get myself into debt that then

took another three years to get out of debt. And I still talk to

my wife about financial well being, the stress that it brings

me. It's just, you can see already stressed well being.

What is it?

Yeah, it's actually this. This week I've

been working with four different groups, and the first thing I've

asked them in these, these day long courses as being like, what

does well being mean to you? And again, do a mind map, and to

spin off and work together in small groups, and to kind of all

the words that come up. And you get financial well being, you

get spiritual well being, mental well being, you get people

talking about, like, physical habits that they have, like

getting outside. But there's a, there's a, there's a word that

Gen Z and Gen Jenai are using at the moment to get into sort of

grounding, like feet on the grass, bare feet the ground that

are coming what it is now someone listening will know what

it is. But basically this is the latest thing right around well

being is just making sure you're outside, because people are

spending so much time. I'm inside, and people are

recognizing now how important it is to get outside as well. I

think that's the thing with wellbeing. It's very individual

as to what you need, and people are starting to realize what

they need when they have a lack of it.

Is there a feeling that I need to get to when I'm

when I'm that's what I'm trying to establish is because I think

there is, but it's hard to define it. Sorry, I just I want

to dig a little bit deeper, because you talk about that

feeling. About that feet on the ground, that's a lot about

energy. There's been a lot of written about having your body

connecting to the core of the Earth. But is there like a

feeling I need to get to to be in a good state of well being?

Yeah, you can have strong physical health and

physical well being, and still have all kinds of mental

challenges. And you can be in a really good mindset, mental

state, and have all kinds of physical challenges. So it

really is, if you're looking at positive well being, it's not

just an absence of ill health, mental or physical or otherwise,

it is. It's where you feel like you've got this real positive

like it doesn't have to be perfect, but you feel like

you're doing okay. You've got the resources that you need the

mental, emotional and physical resources to do what you need to

do, and still have a little bit of bandwidth left at the end of

that for yourself. And it's a state. It's going to be

different for all of us. I think that's what really came to me

from doing these workshops this week, that every group and all

the groups within each of the four days I did came up with

different understandings of what well being did was and and you

get people who are cynical about it as well, because you said

it's an HR function. It's something we would tell we have

to do. It's mandatory, and it sometimes it feels like it's

just being forced upon us, whereas really it's an inside

job. It's happiness, not just a hedonistic hahaha, joy, funny

cat videos, type happiness, but a sense of contentment, a sense

of the Greeks used the word Eudaimonia that eudemonic,

happiness, purpose driven. So do you feel like you're connected

to a sense of meaning and purpose with the work you're

doing with your family or other things that's all part of well

being as well?

Yeah, we've, for the last three years, we've

delivered a high performance client engagement program, which

is we, we dubbed it a world class program, but it took many,

many months of observing high performance in situ, and then we

pulled out all of the behavioral types, and then built this

methodology, and we talked a lot about higher purpose. And you

know, if you know your higher purpose, then actually you know

that state? Yeah, you know, it's more than just rolling out of

bed and going to work, right?

Yeah, exactly. And that's one of the great

things about that, where the science around workplace well

being is going at the moment, is looking at how, instead of

bringing in people to say, well, we need to look after your

resilience and your stress levels, because we're going to

take every, every ounce of energy that you have. So we need

something to top it back up again. It's actually saying, no,

what if the work you do was one of the things that fills you up?

What if work is a driver of well being? What if the sense of

purpose and the community that you have the people around you,

where you feel like you're supported, you feel like you

have that autonomy, you're given the opportunities to take

control and to use your initiative, and that's valued in

your scene. Then for some people, work is the only place

they'll have that. And rather than going to work for 910,

hours in a day and then coming home and then and getting it

elsewhere, I really like this from a team perspective and an

organizational cultural perspective, now all of a

sudden, wellbeing is almost a business imperative, because

people are and if you were to go to indeed.com, and search for a

job, they'll have the workplace wellbeing score on there. So one

of the first things you see, if there's enough data on there for

the company you're looking at. And so the early studies with

this have shown that people talent, who are looking to join

organizations are filtering out great companies with great

remuneration packages if they don't have enough of a workplace

wellbeing score.

I got off the phone this week to a partner who'd

moved from one wealth management firm to another wealth

management firm, and their employee engagement score is 89%

on this benchmark world employee engagement score against the 54%

and he said, You know, it's just a polar opposite from where it

was before. And I think that's definitely going to be, you

know, reason why people are going to be moving, I would

consider it, you know, in any future employment is the is the

environment.

Because beyond the certain points of financial

compensation, it money is not the biggest motivator for

people. In any study that's shown that.

It's all about the maintenance is the salary, and

that aspect, it's interesting. I was watching a program on Marks

and Spencers and in the 20th century where the individual who

originated Marks Spencers described actually where

people's well being and state of health outside of the their job

in Mark Spencer just wasn't very good in, you know, 1940s 50s,

60s. So what he did was he got to employees and say, you know,

you okay, I'm a little bit hungry. We haven't got enough

money to buy food outside of of work. So then he gave everyone

free breakfasts. But that element that when you hear about

their experience at Marks and Spencers, and why it's been such

a great place, is it was the best social place. They made all

their friends there. They were given food or provided food. And

guess what happened to Marks and Spencers? You know, just, just a

booming, booming business for in the 1960s and 70s. So, yeah.

I find all of that really, clearly, it's

increasingly important, I guess, as a leader. And if you think

about the people that you're working with, how do if your

leaders are listening to this, and they're looking at their

team and thinking, you know, we're under the cost. We've got

high targets, we've got everybody's, you know, we've

fully emptied the emotional bank account, as it were, across our

employee base. What advice might you get? I mean, obviously it's

contextual, but what are some of the things that those leaders

could be thinking about? Is it about, is it through great one

to ones? Is it about offering things? I've worked in

organizations before where it's like, oh, here have a well being

day, and it's like, just felt so token. It's like you don't get

choice when you take it. It was just like this sort of random.

Everyone just gets a random Monday off, and it just sort of

it. It was a nice idea and principle, but it really didn't

execute well. And if I think, if you're thinking as leader,

listening to this, you're thinking, how can I find

something that's kind of executable with my team that

helps me tap into that. And I think there were some things

that we would say around understanding the real core

motivators and the motivations of those individuals in your

team. But what would your advice be, George?

There's a number of frameworks and models

actually around what it is that creates that culture of

engagement versus burnout. And Christina Maslach, for example,

is probably one of the world's most preeminent researchers into

this. So she's retired now. She was actually on my podcast a

couple of years ago. I'd read up one of her books, and she looks

at six different drivers of engagement, the opposite of

which is burnout. So to avoid burnout, drive engagement. So if

you're a leader and you're looking at, what are some of the

things we can or the areas we can look then it's things like,

not just workload, because, let's say, as you said, You've

got high workloads. Can't always do anything about that. But

that's not the biggest driver. It might also be control. Like,

are you allowing asynchronous working are you allowing people

to work remotely? You know when they want that again, that might

not always be feasible, but how much control and autonomy do

they have? What about their values compared with the values

of the team? That the lived values, not the written values

on the wall in the office? And it's around fairness. It's

around reward and recognition. And in some of the companies and

teams that I've done consulting work with on this, and looking

at what is that gap culture like? Actually, reward and

recognition and fairness come quite high as being some of the

drivers that are creating this disengagement and increasingly

perceived pressure and stress. And that might be that somebody

seems to have been given better conditions than someone else.

They're allowed to work from home, and I'm not, so, even

though it might be a legitimate reason, when it's not explained

or transparent, that can start to imbue this sense of distrust

and or just the recognition. Like, if you're a leader who

just has the belief well, like, I just get on with my job. I

don't need any extra reward or recognition. I just do it and

then go home at the end of the day and feel like, Alright, I've

done it. But if your team need to have that recognition and you

don't see that, then they might just that might be all they need

in order to get that sense of connection and engagement again.

So it's about understanding what it is that your team members

need, and where that mismatches between what they're getting and

what their needs are, but, but again, a bit like with a

mindset, it's a case of cultivating it. You can't just

snap your fingers and do it overnight. It has to be, has to

be real, and that has to be something, I think, quite

practical as well the workplace well being days where you just

have a day off or free fruit Fridays or that sort of thing,

it you're still going back into the same environment. So a lot

of it's about changing that culture, change that

environment, but small steps that are meaningful make the

difference.

I was working with a group of leaders recently and on

one of our high performance leadership habits programs, and

we were talking about motivators, and we were talking

about and how to message it, and a couple of sort of comments

from the team around everyone's kind of find this a bit weird.

When I go back and start asking about what their motivations

are. I've been a leader for 30 years. I haven't asked that

question before, and I think it's to your point there. It's

not expecting this to happen overnight with the click of the

fingers, but it's that journey, but recognizing it is the first

is the first point.

One of the things that I found to be quite

effective in when I say effective, that when I gone back

to teams after delivering they say that they've embodied this

into their meetings. They've already integrated it. And

that's just asking people like how you doing today, but not

give me an adjective to describe how you're feeling, to measure

it on a scale of one to 10, and if one is struggling and 10 is

thriving or flourishing, like how you doing today, and people

seem much more willing to just give you that number five. Out

of 10 today, because then that opens up the conversations as

to, okay, what have you got on at the moment? Is there anything

like we can help with? Because it's probably going to be stuff

that's outside of the workplace as well that's contributing to

that. But you're having those open conversations a lot more

readily than if you're asking someone how they're feeling, and

they go, I'm fine. And then you ask them again, and they say,

Don't patronize me. But you know, which is, we're told we

should ask twice, right? But it still doesn't really work,

asking someone what their number is, and even having that as

that's how we start every meeting. And a lot of teams I've

worked with have started to do that, it starts to create this

culture of trust, and it's okay. As a leader, wouldn't you want

to know if you've got some of your team members who actually

need a little bit of support and a little bit of space, and

because if they keep on pushing themselves, then you might find

yourself in a real stroke where they need to take more time off

so it benefits the leader as well as the the individual

members of the team as well.

I advocate that as a leader, the need to important

imperative that you have a healthy team, because the health

team is going to be, hopefully, as close to 100% versus maybe a

team that's feeling quite diminished in their resilience,

or some type of energy that's lower than normal, actually,

then you only get 60% out of them. And your scoring bracket

there, I've actually used that my personal life with my wife,

as we've been recently expanded our family, and and we use a

score rating on maybe on a daily basis, but you know, throughout

the week, because you know how you feeling, yeah, I'm fine. No,

out of 10, how you feeling today, I'm feeling it too. Okay,

right? What can I do to take off your plate and vice versa? So

it's been really helpful outside of work as well.

Yeah, it's, and it's useful just as a quick

personal check in, even if you're not sharing it just to

say, actually, how am I feeling today? Instead of plowing

blindly in today, when you're feeling a little bit out of

sorts, you can maybe analyze that and think, Well, why do I

feel for today? Well, I didn't speak great last night, but also

haven't exercised, or I haven't really been outside for two or

three days. I need to make sure I prioritize those things, and

it gives you a little bit of control back as to what you can

do. Or if there's no real reason why you happen to feel like

this, then just maybe try to protect yourself from things and

jobs and tasks and people who might just tip you over the edge

a little bit there. So you can do something to be more self

compassionate as well this. But there's control. You can take

back and actions you can, you can, you can deploy.

So obviously, we're talking a lot about well being,

motivation, mindset as a whole. But what are those practical

frameworks or tools that you would provide to your clients or

anyone that you talking to in that context?

Yeah, it's actually really straightforward.

I mean, there's loads of things you could do around wellbeing,

physical well being mental, well being spiritual, well being just

getting outside and getting into natural environments. But when

you think about physical well being, you can really break it

down into four components, which I call dash, or dash for

performance. So you've got diet, activity, sleep and hydration.

And I'm almost apologetic there that it's nothing more

revolutionary than that, but it really is. It is

straightforward. I'm saying, well, eat better, move around a

little bit more, get more get more sleep and make sure you're

hydrated, just like the of course. But the real question

isn't what's the information that I need, but how do I

implement that? And one of the things I've done with a lot of

clients is what I call an energy profile. So if you imagine, you

could do it now, and listeners can do it as well. If you

imagine what your day looks like, a typical day, if you're

maybe working from home, or a typical day, if you're working

out of an office or visiting clients. So might be different

per day and and what's your energy like at the different

parts of the day? So if you imagine an X and a Y axis, x is

the time, why is the the the energy you have? Is it low in

the morning and then it takes you a while, maybe a couple of

hours, to ramp up? Do you get a dip in the afternoon? What's it

like in the evening? Like, where do you exercise? Do you get you

ready to go for a gym workout or a run, to get that exercise in?

And just getting an idea of what that energy profile looks like

means that you can start looking at, well, where do I need more

energy in my day? And then you can go to these dash components

and think, Well, okay, what could I do in the morning to

give me a bit of the boost? Because actually, it takes me a

couple of three hours to get up. What would give me a boost? And

actually, what am I doing that's draining that energy right now?

And is it about having a better breakfast or maybe pushing

breakfast out till later in the day and having maybe a slightly

longer fast am I on my phone first thing in the morning? And

that sets me off at the back foot, because I'm looking at

where everyone is demanding of me today before I've already set

myself up. That's a very common one, as I'm sure you can

imagine.

Yeah, I winced as you said, though.

But seriously, it's things we do that are just

our default behaviors, and we don't always connect them to how

we feel. And so part of this with the energy profile is

thinking, well, if I don't feel as high energy here as I ought

to, or I know I could do and that's frustrating, what could I

do? And it might be something simple, like doing a going for a

10 minute walk in the morning. A lot of the groups and the

individuals that I've worked with who have told me that as

soon as they started putting a little bit of movement into the

front end of their day. Even sort of full on workout, what a

difference it makes to that, how energized they feel. And when

we're talking about energy, remember, this is that

foundation from which we can adopt more of a high performance

mindset. We can be more resilient, we can be more

optimistic and make better decisions. And all of those

facets of performance that we've spoken about already, you can

create that foundation of energy just by doing two or three

simple things that don't have to take too long. Then that's worth

looking at.

And just to confirm dash stands for...

So we've got diet, activity, sleep and

hydration and sleep. And to be honest with it comes to

performance, I'd say activity and sleep are the two biggest

levers to pull on. And if you are currently pushing your

bedtime routine out till late because you're busy, you're, you

know, important work to do, good emails to send and receive, and,

you know, catching up on a bit or getting a jump on the next

day, and that's compressing that time frame you have to sleep,

then you're probably doing yourself a disservice there, and

that's going to be having a negative contribution to what

how you feel the next day. And as I said, we've all had that

experience of having a bad night's sleep, and then the next

day you just feel run down, depleted, low people tolerance,

right? It's just harder to get through a day and feel good, let

alone performing well. So activity, sleep, they're two

real big ones, and you don't have to be perfect with it

either. Now think about what would be a bit better, that's

way more sustainable, and thinking, right? I've got an

hour ago, from five hours sleep at night to eight hours sleep.

Ain't gonna happen. So you're not in a sustainable format. But

how could you just build a little bit of progress and

improving into that.

As you're talking about that, and you mentioned

this sort of the exercise in the morning, when I'm out visiting

clients. Obviously, I'm out visiting clients. I get that

activity. That activity early on in the morning. If I'm working

from home on a Friday, I've got a couple of early calls, which

means I don't get to take the kids to school, and sometimes I

can find myself sat at my desk having not been outside at one

o'clock in the afternoon, and I noticed the difference. I'm

eating exactly the same breakfast. You know, I've had

exactly the same amount of sleep, but it's so, it's so kind

of point, and it has such an impact on, like you said, you

know, your effectiveness and your performance and and, yeah,

I can see sort of first hand how you sit down in front of that

email at two o'clock and you're like, Oh, I just just can't do

this right now.

But it also brings up that really important

point that so many of us have more than one sort of rhythm of

the day. So if you're on visiting clients, you're going

to have this is your a routine. If you're working from home and

you've got a bunch of meetings in that's your B routine or

structure. So you've got to figure out the routines and the

habits and the behaviors that work for each of those but still

coming back to diet, activity, sleep, hydration, taking breaks.

A lot of people will say they're either better at taking breaks

and being more active when they're working from home or

when they're working from an office, but very few people will

default to being really good in both of those environments,

unless you pay attention to them. So if you're occasionally

going into town, you're occasionally doing this, and

then all of a sudden that becomes more prevalent and more

more frequent. Then it makes sense to figure out some

routines for for when you're doing those things.

I love that as a kind of final point of thinking about

that different, because I think so often it's like, no, every

Tuesday I'm going to go to the gym, and the practicalities of

that, you know, impossible. And then all of a sudden that habits

just broken week two, the second Tuesday that you tried to do it,

and it doesn't work.

A habit should serve you, not enslave you.

Having creating habits that are working for you, you can change.

And this goes back to something else, which, you know, I know

we've spoken about offline previously, which is the idea of

creating an identity based habit rather than a goal based habit,

right? So if you're trying to do something, I go into the gym

because I want to lose weight, tone up and get fit, get

healthy. That was what people came to me for and when I was a

PT, and it's not uncommon now, but if you can embody these

habits of I'm the kind of person who exercises regularly, then

doesn't have to be the gym. It might just be that you do a

little 20 minute circuit in your front room at 10 o'clock in the

morning. I went in between some of your meetings, but you find a

way to do it. But it doesn't have to be the same go at the

gym first thing on a Tuesday, because that's not always going

to be possible.

I knew I was going to enjoy this conversation, and

I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Thank you, George.

It's been absolutely fantastic. The frameworks is exactly what

we like to provide the audience. There are some phenomenal things

that I think we could all take away, and I can definitely take

away, and it's about action and activity. And you've enthused

me, so I really do appreciate your time and effort.

And I look forward to some higher

performance mindset scores.

Are you going to text me in six months? Do it

again. Let's see how we go.

Brilliant. Yeah, to echo, Jonny's points there.

George it's been fantastic and a load of really great practical

stuff for the audience and for us. So thank you so much for

coming along and joining us on the Growth Workshop Podcast.

Look forward to seeing again soon, hopefully.

Thank you for having me.