In this episode, Rachel is joined by Richard Husseiny, an ex-olympic strength and conditioning coach and the founder of the conscious life collective, an alternative framework for wellbeing.

We chat about his experiences working with Olympic athletes and the techniques they use to control their stress before the big event. Mild stress helps our performance to increase but pretty quickly our performance peaks, too much stress and our performance starts to dip. Activating the parasympathetic nervous system through simple actions such as breathing exercises can be incredibly helpful for bringing us back into a high-performance state. 

We talk about the concept of flow – the extraordinary state where time may stand still or speed up, we have adequate challenge and are being stretched and we are totally absorbed in what we do. This is linked with wellbeing protective factors – learning a new skill is a great way to get into flow. If you experience flow regularly then life satisfaction goes up and things are much better. 

We discuss strategies to get into flow more regularly and Richard gives his top 3 tips to stay resilient and manage stress. These are:

1. Access breathing techniques 
2. Focus on your deep work without interruption
3. Work out what is it that you actually WANT to do and eliminate the non-virtuous guilt

Podcast links

Sign up for the Beat Stress and Thrive online course and community here

https://www.husseinyperformance.com

Follow Richard on twitter @richardhusseiny

Bounce by Matthew Syed

The Breathing App Edward Stern

When the body says no: The cost of Hidden Stress by Dr Gabriel Mate

https://www.flowgenomeproject.com 

https://powerspeedendurance.com 

Sign up for downloadable CPD reflection forms plus more tools and resources

For more episodes of You are not a frog, check out our website You Are Not A Frog Podcasts and sign up to our mailing list here for loads of useful resources about thriving at work. 

Follow Rachel on twitter @DrRachelMorris or LinkedIn and find out more about her online and face to face courses for doctors on surviving and thriving at work at www.shapesfordoctors.com or for other organisations at www.shapestoolkit.co.uk  

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