Constantly second-guessing your decisions or feeling overwhelmed? Have you been feeling burnt out, but you're unsure how to get off the hamster wheel of exhaustion and still show up in your full potential?

By the end of this episode, you will:

1. Understand the key role your nervous system plays in your ability to lead, create, and connect with your work and others.
2. Learn how stress impacts your decision-making, creativity, and overall business effectiveness, and how to shift it.
3. Gain practical, simple tools to help you regulate your nervous system daily, creating more ease and clarity in your work.

Join us in the upcoming Community Events

FREE The Ambitious Entrepreneur Regulated Nervous System Bundle: Claim your big dreams and desires, build a healthy bank account, and lead a soft, sustainable life—free from burnout. Click here

SOMAnifest Workshop Jan 27: busting common manifestation myths and creating your unique body-based map to take aligned action on your visions for 2025. Email sheridan@sheridanruth.com for the link. 

FREE Breakthrough group coaching call Feb 13: move past what's holding you back and into sustainable business growth, using nervous system regulation practices and practical business shifts you can start making immediately. Click here. 

The Academy begins Feb 27: where visionary leaders build their business and bank account without sacrificing well-being. Through nervous system regulation tools, body-based trauma therapy, and practical business tips, here you learn how to create a business that leaves a positive, lasting impact on the world.   Click here. 

This podcast explores the intersection of sales, money, and business success, offering entrepreneurial insights on overcoming the inner critic, burnout, and the unique challenges of ADHD and autoimmune conditions, while integrating polyvagal theory, Ayurveda, coaching, resilience, regulation, and trauma healing to support holistic growth and thriving in both life and business.

Your 📍 nervous system is the foundational way that you experience life, therefore it is the foundational way that you lead your dreams and the change that you want to see in the world. 📍 In today's episode, we're exploring how stress affects your brain and your body as a leader and how to shift into sustainable success with nervous system regulation.

On the other side of this episode, while when you get to the end, yes, you are going to reduce stress, but it's more about unlocking better decision making. More creativity, more innovation, and more connection to other people and your purpose. Because I think we can both be realistic about this. Sometimes leading something in the world and leading your vision or leading other people is hard, but you can do it with ease when you have the tools and you know that you can handle challenges as they come.

When I first hired My team members and had my clients and had these ambitions and dreams in the world, stress kind of began to take over. I tend to feel it with the tightness in my chest and I will have lots and lots of thoughts and I would second guess a lot of the choices that I was making when I would kind of opt into this feeling of like, oh, I can't do that.

Other people, you might experience it more as a heaviness or an apathy or a sense of disconnection. And there have also been times in my life and maybe in yours where we actually just feel it by going. And feeling like the world is against us being really snappy and defensive with other people. The things that I've just described are three main states of dysregulation.

One is the flight response, then there is the freeze response, and then there is the fight response. Once I learned to maintain more nervous system regulation more regularly and understand what the hell that actually means, because we talk about it, but I feel like it's not, I don't know, I think that people understand it as like, Oh, I feel really at peace and calm.

No, it's your ability to be resilient and bounce back and use activation to propel your work forward, but then use rest and deactivation to nourish yourself, find clarity in ways that you haven't before. When I started mastering that system, everything went so much easier. That's not to say that sometimes it isn't hard.

Of course it is. You're doing something new. It's always going to be unique. That's kind of why there's a part of you that likes it. Once I started that, decisions became so much easier. It's so much easier to be positive. It became so much easier to be innovative, to be creative, to be solutions oriented, to connect with other people, to have all of these like opportunities, quote unquote, I feel like I could actually really be myself in the world and it's completely changed how I show up in relation to my work and who I am in the world and the body of work that I have because when stress is taking over what's happening in your nervous system is this stress, whether it is.

Just hassles, like you, I don't know, you broke your eggs, and then you stubbed your toe, and then you can't figure out the dishwasher, and then there's this thing, and this is email, and this connection doesn't connect with that, whether it's little hassles, it's big stresses, such as boundaries not being crossed, or big things happening, and you're not really sure what to do with the purpose of your life, and what your focus is, and who you are in between the noise of the industry.

resolve them. You never relax after you stub your toe, you just keep moving. Or it's an imagined threat, like the imagined fear of failure. You can't really run away from failure, but your body will respond with cortisol and adrenaline and put you in a stress response, but you'll never actually get away from it.

So your body will never relax again. And what happens when we are in a stress response? Even though we think it's really good that we're rushing around getting things done, our brain has taken energy away from the prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex handles decision making and creativity. It is absolutely essential if you want to do anything that requires any type of strategic, critical, analytical thinking or any type of creativity in the world.

Instead of being unique and being bold and sending out and being magnetic and being authentic and connecting with people and doing great networking and having sales that feel easy, which are things that your brain is completely capable of doing when it is regulated, when you feel connected to yourself, your world, and your, and the people around you, your brain defaults to reactive survival based thinking.

And that's when you just like things fall hard. You just can't find the information in your brain. It feels like it takes ages to answer that question. You can't think of how to position your work correctly. And that's why you end up hiring all of these different people thinking that they're going to be able to, to fix it for you.

And I, yeah, they're going to help, you know, they're gonna, they are going to help. We, we always help each other. I help you, other coaches and freelancers, everything, but they help, but it doesn't, it's not enough. A lot of the time. It sounds harsh and bold to say it, but it's not. Whereas when you approach your leadership, your business, your life from regulation, you get to this sweet spot where you have prefrontal cortex activation.

So you have clear, creative, and aligned, thinking, but usually you have a little buzz in your body sometimes, not all the time, but it's a groundedness. It's like, I feel on fire. I feel alive, but I feel grounded. I feel ease. I feel confident. I feel strength. I can be creative about this conversation. I can think of ways when you look and you see everyone that you admire and what they're doing, there's something unique about it, but it didn't, that usually doesn't come.

In a sustainable way from them stress thinking about how to be unique. It comes from inspiration and creativity when they're in a relaxed state and then the consistent activation of that. Now, for some of them, it did come from. stress thinking, but the toll that that has on their bodies and their relationship is something that I know you have absolutely no, you will not have it.

You will not have a business that takes a toll on your relationships or your body. Maybe you've done it before. You will refuse to do it again. So for you, you know, maybe you have a chronic illness, maybe you experience fatigue. Maybe you don't know what it is that you have. Maybe you're just really sensitive or you have, I don't know, a busy life where you just don't want to.

It. You need to do it from regulation. You need to be innovative. You need to be different and you need to be a good leader from a grounded sense of self. So there are some things that we can do that are super practical and really easy, relatively easy to make sure that you're using regulation to lead.

And I'm going to take them into like super, super simple things that you need to absolutely make sure that you're doing today. Number one, daily regulation practices. So it's as simple as taking three minutes in the morning to breathe deeply and set the tone of your day. I'm really one of those fans of people who say, you know, there's this saying, I think it's like, if you don't have 10 minutes, if you don't have five minutes to meditate, you need to meditate for 20.

I wholeheartedly believe that I don't meditate for 20 minutes a day, but no matter the season of life, I can do three minutes to breathe or in the mid day, taking five minutes to go have a walk or look out at the sun. It's really good for your eyes to look out at the sun. Somebody taught me that you do 20 seconds, 20 meters away.

every 20 minutes and that actually helps your eyesight as well. So look for 20 seconds, 20 meters away every 20 minutes and that will reset, it will reset your nervous system. It will orient you back into the world where you're not so absorbed inside in the problem that you are. It expands your body's understanding of safety because it can see that it's safe.

We call this orienting. And in the evening, it might be a simple As reflecting on some wins that might just be reflecting in your mind as you wash your dishes and feeling that celebration in your body, ending the day on a positive note, or maybe it's journaling. And this is one that I know is really good for me, but I find it really difficult.

I find I like do it for a couple of days and then I'll stop. It's really, really hard for me to get specific if, if, cause my brain gets tired and I'm lazy. So maybe you can get specific, but maybe it's more, actually I resonate with just kind of like feeling a sense of, I just choose to feel really proud of myself for doing whatever I did without getting specific about it.

And I'll find that feeling of pride and gratitude inside, even if I don't feel like doing it and I'll find it. And I'll feel it. We have an episode on the reticular activating system, which is a part of your brain and your nervous system, which says why it is really important to, to do these things.

Number 177, it's called the hidden nervous system filter that shapes your reality. So this is kind of the intersection of manifestation and neuroscience. And it's kind of like this episode goes into a Kind of how to install new patterns inside of your nervous system to help you see where you're doing really well so that you don't have to be so hard on yourself.

Your inner critic doesn't have to be so intense. Your self doubt can dissipate and you can live more regulated. Then there are little things like in high pressure moments, take those three slow, deep breaths. Ground yourself by noticing three things you can see, hear, and feel around you. These come from pillar one of the body based business.

Methodology where we talk about nervous system regulation in the moment. There is a limitation to this and that you're going to get really tired of having to regulate yourself all the time. You can't do that. You have to come to pillar two, which is trauma healing, meaning that we have to look at the unconscious.

Nervous system based patterns that are causing you to rush about or to have trouble being kind to yourself and have more cortisol inside of your system all of the time, or to people, please, or whatever it is that you're doing, that's causing your stress. Then we orient out of so much internal focus and we orient to external focus and we create systems, protocols, and practical change so that you don't have to think about regulation.

It just happens. You don't have to remind yourself to reflect on your wins. It's just a part of, it's a part of your protocols. It's built into your business and you don't have to think so hard to support yourself. Your systems are the thing that either supports you and gives your nervous system capacity to go and do things in the world or spend and just spin your wheels, trying to like stay above water.

And all of these pillars come together, regulation, trauma, healing, and protocols. They all come together to free up energy, because you have good shit to do in the world and you need to go and do it. Because your leadership isn't about avoiding stress, it's about responding to it with regulation, with clarity, with calmness, with creative.

And it's about setting you up for success so that you can lead with ease and creativity and confidence, even when things are challenging, because if you're going to do anything in the world that is worth doing, there's going to be an element of it that's going to be challenging. People are going to have opinions about it.

You're. You're doing something worthwhile.

If you would like to take this deeper, please make sure that you come and you join us inside of the Academy. This is the place where visionary leaders, just like you who are ambitious, but want to leave the soft girl life, build their business and their bank account without sacrificing their wellbeing.

We use nervous system regulation tools, body based therapy, and practical tips like these and more so that you can create a business that leaves a positive lasting impact on the world. We cannot wait to have you inside of it. The first manifestation, the first workshop of that is actually going up live tomorrow.

You're still welcome to come and join. It's called so manifest. It is how to get your, your vision out into the world without falling into spiritual bypassing or delusion. And then after that, we're doing a free coaching call, which is going to help you move past maybe some blocks that you're having. If you feel, yeah, like you're.

I don't know, it's like, I'm having this problem with a client, I can't figure it out. Help bring that to the coaching call or I noticed that I keep waking up and I'm really tired and I'm just like sluggish. Help bring that to the coaching call. I'm going to help you get past it. It's totally free. I can't wait to connect with you, learn more about you.

And of course, the book is coming in February. Oh my God. Somatic Intelligence to Success. You can support me in In creating all of this up by please just taking this episode, sharing it with a friend or sharing one of the other episodes with a friend and getting this work out into the world. Because you and I both know that the world needs a little bit of support.

People like you and I have something to contribute and it's going to be a better place when we all support each other. I appreciate you deeply so much more than you know.