Denise Pyles shares her remarkable journey from a life devoted to religious service as a nun to becoming a successful mindfulness coach and author. This transition was not without its challenges; after eight years in the convent, Denise faced health issues that prompted her to pivot into the corporate world, specifically at Microsoft. Her story is one of resilience, highlighting the struggle of submitting 44 job applications, with 43 rejections before finally landing her desired role. This narrative serves as an inspiring reminder that persistence pays off, and that one's past experiences—no matter how seemingly unrelated—can be transformed into valuable assets in new environments. Denise emphasizes how her background in service and people skills equipped her to thrive in a corporate setting, ultimately leading her to win prestigious awards at Microsoft.

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Connect with Denise

Denise’s authentic, compassionate approach makes her a memorable guest, delivering practical advice and unique perspectives on mindfulness that resonates deeply with listeners. She is passionate about equipping others with the mindfulness tools to thrive amidst life’s demands and is excited to bring value to your audience.

Contact Information

Email: denise@denisepyles.com

Website: denisepyles.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/denisepyles

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast.

I have with me today Denise Piles who has a super interesting story and journey and going to have lots of good tips for us on micro mindfulness.

So I'm super happy that you are here.

Thanks for joining me today, Denise.

Thank you.

It's great to be here and thanks everyone for listening today.

So Denise, you were a nun for eight years and then you left the order and you took a pivot, a big pivot, went to Microsoft and but in your bio you said you went to Microsoft and you got the job after sending out 44 job applications and 44 of them were rejected.

But you had an award winning career at Microsoft which we're going to talk about in a few minutes.

But now you are a author in a mindfulness coach and you have a book out called burn without burning out 7 micro mindfulness habits for Clear Thinking, Decisive Action and Recovery from Burnout.

Well, this is going to be a very interesting conversation and some interesting talk topics.

So let's get to it, my friend.

Just start with your story.

You are a nun, then you went to Microsoft and now you're an author.

How did all that transpire?

Thank you.

So let me just start briefly.

I was, I'm a from a family of seven and born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky and very Catholic family, Roman Catholic family.

So grew up in a tradition.

My parents were very religious but practiced their faith and religion in very different ways.

But both of them were very much about rerooted in love and service and that was very important and core value in my life growing up.

And when I grew I went to an all girls high school, went to secular college but I stayed in touch with nuns and priests who were really good adult mentors.

And so I started asking questions early in life, how do I want to live my life?

What does that make and how do I want to make a difference for others?

And so I wanted to love and serve and I was really drawn towards communities of women that could do that.

So I entered religious life and lived that life for eight years and meanwhile had been working in full time church ministry.

And part of that was eight years of being a nun and it was a great life.

And it was also challenges just as any life of living a committed life.

And I left for health reasons.

I just share a little bit about that in the book and I knew I needed to get off that train and then find something else.

And when I did that, I realized I could no longer sustain the life of service in non profit and church work.

And I needed to make a pivot at corporate.

And I did this at midlife.

It was not easy and it was hard and it was the scariest thing I've done in my life, I believe.

You know, I feel that.

And I just, I was working at the time when I decided to make that pivot.

It took a couple of years to make the pivot, but I was working in Redmond, in a church director of worship, and I had connected with some former Microsoft employees, had worked in the Bill Gates era.

And so I shared with them kind of this career pivot I wanted to do and said I would love to work for Microsoft, that because of the company values, et cetera, and they thought you, they saw, yeah, you'd be a great fit.

But they sort of smiled like very politely thinking, yeah, your chances are slim to none, but based on your life.

And I went in with no experience.

So it did, it took.

I applied 44 times to Microsoft, 43 were rejections.

And I kept thinking to myself, I just need someone to give me a chance because I know my work ethic, of how I was raised, how I do, how I work in church ministry, how I work with people.

I just need someone to give me a chance.

And I had confidence in myself that I could learn and do, but I needed someone to give me a chance.

And one manager gave me the chance and hired me.

And I talk about that also in my book, in one of the chapters on micro mindfulness.

The manager who hired me, we're really good friends.

And he only told me this story a couple years ago that he said, denise, I almost didn't hire you because I looked at your resume and it had church lady written all over it.

Church lady from snl, Saturday Night Live for those who do not know that show.

And he said, and this is a time when I literally.

He says, I literally crumbled it up and threw it in the garbage can.

And then I'm sitting at my desk and then I heard this inner voice within me said, hey, you don't like that when somebody does that to you.

And he says, I'm rolling my eyes as if to my own inner voice.

And I thought, oh, okay.

So I take the paper out, uncrumble it, look at it again.

And I thought, well, she does have some skills in project management, all right, you know, like saying to quiet his inner voice, okay, I'll interview her.

And then he said, I interviewed you and then I knew I wanted to hire you.

And then from that journey, that sense of learning and having really good managers, the in the first couple of years of my career, I won the highest award of award for the company and had an all expenses paid trip to Monaco as part of that.

It was one best work week of my career of doing that.

But what was most important of not so much winning the award, but at that time too, what I've learned in my career and work in tech is who I work with and how I work with them is the most important part of my job.

And I really leaned on skills that I learned as a nun in working with people.

And so my people skills were strong and I leaned on those and I learned technical skills and project management skills and other skills.

But that to me what is I'm most proud of in my career, I still work full time at Microsoft and going on my 15th year at the time of this recording and I'm still most proud of that because the sense in fact one of my colleagues said, Denise, you're probably one of those networked people in the company.

She says, you know everybody.

And I thought no, I don't know everybody in the company.

It's pretty big.

But that's one of my strengths and skill sets.

And so how I work with people and the way I work with people matters most.

And I leverage a lot of micro mindfulness skills that I learned as a nun into my day job.

And in a way that is inviting and welcoming for everyone in corporate life.

I think as all of life, we have all walks of people who work with us.

And what I love about that is this is a company that honors that.

And it was the first company I joined where I received an equal salary for being a woman in role in corporate and in nonprofit.

And so that was just an incredible eye opening experience and wonderful experiences.

So how I treat other people, driving meetings or leading, working, interacting with either leadership or the local.

When we were working in the office with the cleaning staff, that was very important to me and of a core value of mine.

So that's sort of a high level of how I got from none to corporate.

It was not easy.

There's a Greek mythology story, I believe it's called burning your boat.

It was a burning boat moment for me.

And the story is one of the Greek gods was going into battle from one island to the next and they the his army rode over there in canoes or boats and when they got there he said burn the boats.

And everybody's Looking at him like, oh, my gosh.

And so then they went to fight the battle and won.

And they said, now how are we going to get home?

And the soldier, the general, said, it doesn't matter.

I asked you to burn the boats because I wanted you to be all in on the battle.

You had an escape and a way to get out.

And so you were all.

And so this is home now because we're here, you know, kind of thing.

I'm doing a contemporary version of an ancient Greek story.

But what that means for me, the decision to pivot at midlife with zero corporate experience was a burning my boat moment because I knew I couldn't go back.

It was a.

It was a matter of financial survival.

And so I had to do something different.

And so I decided to be all in on this.

And I knew within myself I could.

I would be okay no matter the outcome.

If I failed or if I succeeded, I would be okay with the outcome.

And my goal is, like, I would love to be hired and be in this ride for as long as I can.

And how can I continue to live and be my show up every day as my best self and present self and empower others to do the same.

Oh, that's a great story.

A couple of questions here.

So I love the.

I've not heard the burning the boat story.

So I love that because I think a lot of times that.

And I know for myself, like, I've got.

Got one foot in, one foot out.

So if you've got one foot in and, you know, you're not, you're not, like you said, you're not all in.

You've got that, like, whether it's, you know, a metaphorical, like, foot out thing that you're holding on to, you think I.

To me that says, well, if I.

If I'm not all in, I'm not going to go all in, you know, because I've got this thing that I can go back onto.

I love that story.

Thank you for sharing that or that fable or whatever you want to call it.

Right.

But so how old were you when you left the order to go to Microsoft?

45.

45.

So at least it's midlife.

If we're.

Maybe it could be a young adult if I wanted to live to be 120.

So, you know.

Yeah, no, it is, because I think that's when women start to go through, you know, like, perimenopause and kids may be starting to leave the house.

And for, you know, women, my listeners who are listening, you know, you're maybe taking care of parents who start to age.

So that's like a really, you know, pivotal time in a lot of women's lives.

But what really struck me, and I harp on this all the time, Denise, I talk about this all the time, is you have, by the time you get to be, you know, 45, 50, 62, my age, you have like a whole life of wisdom and strengths and skills and, and you're not stuck on this one pat path like you think you are, because, I mean, my gosh, you went from being a nun to being, you know, working at Microsoft.

How big of a pivot can that be?

You know, And I know that you can use some of your skills and stuff, but just going from, you know, that type of environment at the, you know, being a nun to going to being Microsoft is really a huge switch.

So I really want women to be encouraged by that and to know that you can teach an old dog new tricks, you know, for lack of a better phrase, because we have these skills, these experiences, these wisdom that we can, you know, lean into and use.

And then I also love what you said about learning skills.

So, and I know what my listeners are thinking, oh, my gosh, here she goes again.

But you can learn new things.

You can, you know, you can learn project managing, you can learn tech skills, you can learn how to podcast, you can learn how to write a book, you can do these things.

So I'm just so like, inspired by everything that you, you said because it just, it's such a great message to my listeners.

So thank you, thank you for that.

Thank you.

That's really important to me, learning.

I credit that to my mother and my, my father was a construct, was a sheet metal mechanic and construction worker.

He's a, was a World War II Navy veteran.

And my mom was, we, she was called, my dad teased, would tease and said she's the domestic engineer.

She ran the house as a full time mom.

But learning was always important to her.

She is still living.

She will be 98 years old at the time of this recording.

And, you know, this coming December and 98 is still thriving and still learning and reading.

And, you know, when I talked to her when I joined Microsoft, you know, 15 years ago, she read everything about us, like, well, what do you think of the new CEO?

And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, various conversations.

And I thought, wow, she's, you know, she doesn't have any stock or anything into the company, but that sense of desire to learn.

So I think that too is like, thank you for Empowering other women to say, yes, we can learn.

And also the other thing, having good mentors, for me along the way, that kept reflecting back to me, you are stronger than you think.

You have skills within you that you don't know yet, that you don't recognize, that you can bring to the table and you come now with.

And what I've also learned, colleagues tell me, Denise, is you have a great perspective because you're not embedded in the history of the company.

You have fresh eyes, you have a whole different experience that you bring.

And like my current work is, I mean, my work has been in risk management and controls and compliance.

But the sense of looking at that through a lens of not being, having this experience of business also can be a strength.

So it's a sense of empowering women.

And all of our lives at our 40s and 50s and 60s, but also we did this in our 20s and 30s, but we asked like, what?

What do I want to do with my life now?

What now?

What?

And as it continued to pivot, my mom was asking that question at 97 now, what you know and what's next?

So that's that questioning, that learning, that curiosity and the willingness to sit with and to be.

We have to know ourselves and love ourselves enough to be still with, with ourselves and really reflect on who we are and what we want, even if we may not like where we are right now, or it's.

It's a really bad situation or something like that, but it's that sense of self awareness, self reflection, and it's a.

It's a sense of moving.

It's not just the kind of this inward isolation, but it's the sense of then engaging with life and keep asking that question.

And, you know, I know the odds were not in my favor to pivot at midlife with zero experience and going after employment in one of the top 13 companies in the world.

And.

But the persistence and the sense is like, I'm going to.

I'm going to jump off.

I'm going to fly, defy gravity here and just jump off and do it.

And where I land, I'm okay with where I land.

And I think that's the important point.

I mean, yeah, you went to work at Microsoft, a large company.

You were award winning, you know, employee there.

That's not the point of the story.

The point of the story is that, that you took that leap.

And I loved what you said.

Where I land is where I land.

And Microsoft was a goal and you just happened to land there.

So I Love that even if you're going to reach for the highest thing that you think you can reach for, you're going to land where you're going to land.

And that's fine.

I don't want people to be discouraged like, well, I can never get on Microsoft.

Well, that's probably not, probably not where you want, need to be or want to be.

That's not the point of this whole story.

So in your bio, you said you had like 35,000 hours, hours of mindfulness practice.

Yes, let's, let's talk about that a little bit.

I'm going to let you start wherever you want to start.

But you specialize in micro mindfulness, and I had not heard that term until I came across your bio and when I asked you to be a guest.

So let's talk about that a little bit.

So part of that is just trying to do the math for figuring out the value of what was like, you know, pivoting branding to as a layperson in, into as an author and writer.

But I looked back on my eight years of living a life as a nun and that the life as a nun that I lived, we were called, we were active in ministry in the world.

We were not like a cloistered community.

Some people may know that where you're behind a wall living in a monastery, we were, we were living in a house in a neighborhood.

Locally.

You weren't, you weren't Guinevere, like in King Arthur's days.

You weren't going to marry.

Right, Exactly.

However, the whole core of the life that I lived, which was and breathed every day, was as in, in the Roman Catholic tradition we call mindfulness contemplation.

And the definitions are really practically the same.

So contemplation is talking about observing like your reality, like all of life at.

And your reality.

And how do you embrace it all, love it all, let go of some of it or be present to some of it.

And so that was like breathing, eat, sleep, breathe that in practice and in being and in doing.

Now in mindfulness, like John Kabat Zinn, who's one of the, a doctor who's like one of the premier researchers on mindfulness, describes mindfulness as a way of paying attention without judgment.

And what is it and what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.

So, so then, so then thinking about mindfulness.

The other thing is, so, so in my day, like I would as a nun, I began my day with a sense of centering and quiet, setting my intention for the Day, morning, in distance of praying.

Like the rule was you to say pray an hour a day.

Well then it was like.

But for me it was like I was mindful, contemplative as much as I could throughout the day.

Now I wasn't doing that 24 7, but the sense of that was my mindset.

And so that's kind of where that 35,000 hours comes from.

Living and breathing in every interaction with people, from being on the street with strangers, to being in community or being in schools or service to the poor, all of that.

So then when I was writing, wanting to write my book about mindfulness practices, in working with some writing coaches and doing my own self reflection, I kept thinking mindfulness, most people understand mindfulness, that I can sit and meditate for hours and you sit a certain way.

Well, I thought my mechanics of my body, I can't sit a certain way like to meditate for hours.

And I thought, even in today's world, who has time for that?

So then I reflected on what I feel is that for the most part, especially in the US and in the western culture, we are living in such a distracted world.

It's like we're living in a ball pit within a bouncy house where there's so much coming at us.

It's, you know, and then how do you focus on the right ball at the right time or what you need to and let go of the rest.

So the concepts of mindfulness, that extended meditation.

I also read about science of high impact interval training physical fitness, which is hit hiit where it's like condensed, focused, intense physical fitness for short periods like 20 minutes.

And seeing science says there's long term benefits of doing that.

Then reading the science about long term benefits of mindfulness in Arianna Huffington calls her, she calls them micro steps.

60 second micro steps of doing one minute for some solely focused on one thing.

So I came up with the term micro mindfulness.

And it's like how do I habit stack short mindfulness practices that may take three to seven minutes at the most, or even a minute or 15 seconds.

And habit stack that in my day.

And I notice within myself I manage the day.

The stress, the stress didn't manage me.

I would go to bed exhausted and sleep and wake up energized and ready to go.

And I thought there might be something here that I want to share with other people because one person said, Denise, what are you drinking?

I want, I want to buy what you're drinking, you know, in the sense of that and.

Or what's in your water, kind of.

I think that was the question.

Yeah, yeah, but that's.

So that's.

I came.

So I.

Then I reflected on my day and like, how I get up, set my intention, and for example, as a micro mindfulness, what is my core value?

Like, I grew up, my core value was love.

As a Christian, it was, you shall love as the first commandment and you shall love your neighbor and serve.

And so my family bought into that as Catholic, as the Catholic thing about how to love.

And so that's rooted in my core being.

So in the morning when I set my intention, I said, my core value is to love.

How will I love and serve my colleagues, my work, my family, etc, and that may pivot on different variances of each day.

And then like the mindful pause, set my intention.

How do I pause when I pivot between that?

Or I.

Some of the.

One of the tips I say carry a symbol of meaning because we're sensual people.

And it's like, what's something tangible, even if it's a sticky note on your monitor that says breathe just as a reminder or pause.

And then there's another story in the.

In the book that I use as a mindfulness practice.

I call it listen to frogs before you eat them.

And what I mean by that is we all hear about.

I think it's David Tracy's book or Brian David Tracy's book, eat that frog.

Yeah, about, you know, you eat the most difficult.

You do the most difficult, hardest tasks first, and then to be productive out there.

The day.

Well, there's another fable that I learned in theology called the Song of the Frogs.

And it's like, maybe you need to stop and listen.

Like, be still.

It's a story about a mother.

It's an adaptation of a story that I have.

It's the Song of the Frogs is an adaptation of a Mother Abbess, the leader of a convent.

Every day she would get up from the.

Go out of the convent and then walk down the country road and sit by a pond every day.

And then she come back and do her day, go through her day.

And at the end of her life, she was on her deathbed, dying, and one of the sisters asked her, what did you do, Mother Abbess?

You know, was it when you walked every day down to the pond, was it to.

To find wisdom, to seek God?

What did you do?

And she.

In her dying days and breath, she says, no, I went to the pond every day to listen to the Song of the frogs.

It's a sacred song, and it Takes a long time to learn.

And that metaphor for me is that sense of can you practice stillness listening to frogs?

Whatever that sound of stillness is for you, within yourself and within around you, finding that moment of stillness first before you go out and kind of do your productivity.

So I say listen to frogs before you eat them as a kind of a micro mindfulness step.

It's a way of practicing stillness in your day.

And then another step is extra exercising, gratitude.

And all throughout the book, another micro mindfulness practice.

I focus on like deep breathing or breathing exercises.

But I am a.

I love to journal and I've been journaling since high school daily, weekly.

But I've also thought about how do I make that a micro mindfulness step.

And I call it one sentence journaling.

And that could be a sentence, it could be a bullet point throughout the day.

And people ask me, well, how does that, how is that effective as.

And I thought, well, if you do this with intention and reflect on what that word is over time, if you do it consistently and you look back, you now have a pattern of your thoughts and insights, see what emerges.

And someone said, well, I don't like to write.

I said, you don't have to.

We have technology today that can help us journal in many ways.

Audio devices on our phone, we have a camera on our phone.

We.

You can take photos if you like to sketch, you can sketch one of the nuns I lived with.

We made a 30 day retreat as part of our way of living.

And she.

English was not her first language.

So she, on her retreat, she drew on a 9 by 12 in chalk and colored pencil, a photograph, a picture.

Every day it was like this beautiful work of art.

Looked like Van Gogh every day.

And that was how she expressed her insights of her.

How she was living and paying attention to God and how she was serving.

And so I'd say to people, you can sketch, you can draw the great thing.

On my phone I use an app called the Day One Journal app.

And I don't use it to write, but what I do is I take photos all throughout the day.

And so I use it, I call it my one photo a day journal.

So at the end I pick one of my photos.

What was the photo that says the most about how I lived my life?

The best part about this app is then I did that for a full year, one of the most stressful years I had at work.

And I thought, gosh, it's been such a hard year.

Mindfulness got me through it.

But when I printed the book, made the booklet and showed flipped through all the photos.

I thought, wow, I had a more meaningful year each.

Even even though it was extremely stressful, that stress happened.

But the meaning emerged in the photographs that I took.

And so now I have a tangible book to see, to hold from that day.

One journal app.

So again, those are small.

Like all of those activities that I do, they're done with intention.

But I haven't added one more thing to my calendar to do.

And that's what I call micro mindfulness.

That you can do various steps of with intention on like on purpose and spending time to reflect.

You're waiting in line and how frustrating that could be.

But what if you use that time to really reflect on your day?

Or thought what are some insights if they come to you, record it.

Just pretend like you're talking to somebody on the phone, you know you're not, you know, and there's a mindful moment as an example.

So.

So a couple of things here.

I loved everything you said and I want to go back a few steps.

And first of all, I love the habit stacking.

So I love how.

And I'm very familiar with it, but so how, how do you practice the habit stacking during your day?

So you start in the morning with your stillness, and then that stillness reminds you to then do what.

So if you could just talk for our listeners.

Just explain the habit stacking a little bit.

Yeah, the moment I get up in the morning, I know I use my phone actually as alarm, which is really hard because it's also easy.

Then you start scrolling through your phone before you get up out of bed.

I confess that's a really struggle.

However, I really work on.

Once my alarm goes off, I'm ready to get up, I sit up and I just sit for a moment before I get out of bed and I just take a moment to breathe and exercise gratitude and then focus on my day, which also started the night before, thinking about my day ahead and then say, what is my intention today?

And these past couple of weeks moving into the end of the fiscal year has been like, just focus on one task at a time as an example.

And so just one task.

So then I get up and get ready, you know, the sense of readying.

And then I usually sit and have a cup of tea in the morning as and again with a notebook, my everyday notebook.

And I just, I hold my cup of tea and I just take some deep breaths just to be here and now in this moment to get before my day begins.

And so that intention, whatever that intention was and then when I at my calendar, during my meetings, sometimes we really try to start like say for example, a common practice that we have at Microsoft is we start our meetings like five after the hour or five after the half hour and then try to end on the hour.

So you have like at least some time now.

It usually doesn't work a lot.

You're going from back to back meeting, back to back meeting.

But the moment I get that break, it's a pivot.

I pause and I just take a deep breath.

Or if it's been really stressful, I work remote, fully remote from home.

I go outside and just either walk around the house or just taking a deep breath of the fresh air and just being intentional saying, just let it all go and let's go back at it again.

So those.

That's like.

And so then I'm habit stacking that intention throughout the day.

I also just make journal bullet points in my commonplace journal from.

I have one, you know, that I carry with me all the time.

It's not all about work, but just personal, what I'm feeling, what I have an insight or writing.

It's like a.

Being a writer as well.

It's like I'm writing all the time in some way and have make it accessible to do that.

And then the one habit that I love doing that works for me.

I especially do it at the weekend.

But even at the end when I'm finished with work, it's like that sense of shutting down my laptop before I do that.

I just, It's a mini ritual.

I'm.

I just make a note or a cat calendar, everything I have to do tomorrow or the next week, what's not undone, what is left undone today.

So make my list and then say, okay, I can let it all go.

So when I shut that, because I work remotely and I still do it, if I go into the office, I just take a moment, I shut my laptop and then I put my hands on my desk, just my fingers on my desk.

And then I just sit and take a few moments to breathe and say, I can let it all go.

It's going to be here.

It's not going to move.

Nobody's going to take it away.

It's still going to be there.

I know exactly where it is.

I let it all go.

And now I can pivot and go home or be present with family, friends, life.

And this will be here, the neck the minute I tomorrow when I open my laptop.

So it's that mini ritual of intention.

And then I go home you know, spend my day, dinner, exercise and then evening get ready for bed.

I write down my in just a mini notebook at my bedside of the gratitudes for my life the day.