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BERT MARTINEZ:
Anne Grady on the show today. She’s a resilience expert, an adaptability expert. Anne, welcome to the show.
ANNE GRADY:
Thank you for having me, Bert.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I think now more than ever, people need to be more resilient, and it seems like somehow we have maybe lost a little bit of our resilience. What’s your thought on that?
ANNE GRADY:
Well, we’re all born resilient. And, you know, resilience is the ability to get back up after you’ve been knocked down. Right. But that just gets us through life. I wanted to do more than just survive all of the hits I’ve been given. And so that’s really where adaptability comes in. Yes. We all have a certain level of resilience, and life can knock us down.
ANNE GRADY:
If you’re still standing and you’re listening to this and you’ve survived the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, you’re resilient. But now it’s time to do more than just survive. Now we get to try to thrive and create a life that we’re excited about living.
BERT MARTINEZ
Yeah. And I think that’s probably sometimes difficult for people because they. They get lost, and they’re not quite sure how to do that. You say grow forward when life goes sideways. And so let me ask you this. What’s the most sideways your life has gone, and what actually worked for you? Not theory, but real life.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, my son is severely mentally ill, autistic, and has developmental delays. So my life went sideways very early on with him. He tried to kill me when he was 3, was on his first antipsychotic by 4, in his first pediatric psych hospitalization at 7, and during his second pediatric psych hospitalization, I was diagnosed with a tumor in my salivary gland that resulted in facial paralysis and a whole slew of other health challenges because of it, as well as getting diagnosed with a degenerative back disease, disc disease, and needing several surgeries for that. So my life has gone sideways on more than one occasion. And the reason I write these books and the reason I wrote this one is because theory is great, but I wanted to help people avoid having to recreate the wheel and use the strategies that I’ve used to survive. And not all strategies work for everybody. So I’ve included a Ton of them. But yeah, life goes sideways for all of us and nobody has all of the answers and nobody lives their life flawlessly.
ANNE GRADY:
Like we see people’s highlighted version of themselves on social media and we compare our insides to everybody else’s outsides and wonder, like, why do they have it all together? Here’s a hint. Nobody has it all together. Nobody.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I think that most people, I let me say this. Younger people, when you’re in your late teens, early 20s, you think, man, once I get to this age, there’s going to be some.
ANNE GRADY:
So funny. My daughter’s 24 and she last weekend she said, once I hit 30, everything will get easier. And I didn’t mean to, but I laughed out loud and then spit out water through my nose. I could not stop laughing. And she was like, what? And I said, it’s the trap. Where we all have the trap. Once I have kids, once the kids grow up, once I retire, once I finish the project, once this. We don’t.
ANNE GRADY:
Things don’t get easier, we get better at doing hard stuff.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes. And I think that is something that some people forget. Life doesn’t get easier. We’re getting better. And to your point, I think as humans we were created to do hard things. And if you look at what we have done historically, humans have done some incredible things and it’s not always been easy. We’re talking about walking the plains and overcoming disease and getting people to the people to the moon and stuff like that. We have overcome crazy hard things.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And I think, and I want to get your take on this, it’s. Sometimes I get the impression to your point about social media that is it making us less resilient? Is it making us trying to look for the easy way out? What’s your thoughts on this?
ANNE GRADY:
Well, I think there’s two things. There’s our social media and there’s our device. So I think both are creating a challenge. So let’s start with the device. Right. Most people would rather leave their house without clothes than without their phone. Like our phone has become everything. The average adult spends over five hours a day on their phone.
ANNE GRADY:
The average 11 to 14 year old over nine hours a day. It’s more than a full time job. And with all of that time on this device, it’s become the relationship we devote the most attention to.
BERT MARTINEZ::
Yes.
ANNE GRADY:
Have boundaries in every relationship you have except the one you spend the most time with. Right. And so it’s not that I think social media is inherently bad or your phone is inherently bad, but we’ve gotten so habituated into not wanting to be still or bored. And so we fill it with every moment. So that takes a toll on your cognitive bandwidth, your working memory, your ability to regulate emotion. Like 80% of working adults touch their phone and check email and watch social and the news within the first few minutes of waking up. It’s one of the fastest ways to diminish your ability to regulate stress. It’s one of the fastest ways to make your brain prime toward everything that’s wrong instead of the things that are right.
ANNE GRADY:
And social media. The challenge with that, like I mentioned earlier, is we only post the great moments. Most people are not like, hey, I had a fight with my husband in the kitchen over how to load a dishwasher for the 10th time, let’s post that on Facebook. No, we don’t. We’re like, look how beautiful my redecorated, remodeled kitchen is. And then everybody else is going, well, my kitchen hasn’t been remodeled since 1986. Like, why is this person have it all figured out. They did a recent study where they found that people took Internet off their phone for just two weeks.
ANNE GRADY:
91% reported better mental health, better attention, better well being. So here would be my challenge. One, charge your phone in a different room. Don’t sleep with it next to you. And I know people are like, but it’s my alarm clock. They make those and charge it in another room and go 30 minutes in the morning without touching it. It will change the way your brain processes the world and it’ll change how you navigate your day. And don’t touch social for the first 30 minutes after you wake up or before you go to bed.
ANNE GRADY:
That’s when your brain is the weakest cognitively. And so you want to protect that time like it’s your grammy’s cookie recipe.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I tell you a couple of things that happened to us. So our two youngest kids are twins and twin girls. And for the most part, they’ve been tremendously fun to have as the last two kids. And so. But it got to the point at home where there was just tons of contention. And twins are this, what do you call it, that they can’t be apart and sometimes they can’t be together. So it’s this constant back and forth. But anyway, I had lost my patience and I took away their phones for two weeks.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And for the first three days it was like addicts. I mean, they were just begging for their phones back. And dad, I had a like 100 day streak on my Snapchat. You’re making me Miss my streak and all this just begging. I mean, just, I wish the house was wired for video. Would have been a phenomenal study. After the third day, peace fell over the land and there was now laughter. The contention had disappeared.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And we didn’t give them back their phones until the end of those two weeks. It never, ever got that bad. They were able to understand that they could live without a phone. And we, we talked about, yeah, social media can be good, but you know, to stuff that we, that most people know now, it makes things worse. It doesn’t make things better. And then for my own personal, I gave up social media for 60 days.
ANNE GRADY:
And what did you notice?
BERT MARTINEZ:
I noticed I saved a lot of time. I noticed that just like a lot of people, you’re addicted. You know what I got? I got two seconds of boredom. Let me check my social media. And so now I pick up my phone and go, nope, put it back down. And so I wish I could tell you, man, that my productivity shot through the roof and I did all this amazing stuff. I probably watched a little bit more tv. I know it’s not very, you know, what do you call it, leadership or growth oriented, but.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And then I actually spent more time with one of my hobbies. So that’s kind of what I started doing. But what I noticed was that really nothing happened in the sense that my world didn’t fall apart. There are some businesses out there that are very heavy social media oriented and that’s great. And if that’s part of your marketing and that’s part of the way you make your livelihood, well, great. Luckily you can farm that stuff out. But unless you have a massive following and you’re really making money off social media, which is a very small percentage of people, I think most people need to take a fast from social media and kind of maybe wake up and smell the roses again.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, and I don’t even think you have to cut it out completely. You just have to use it intentionally. So if it’s to escape boredom or it’s just a habit, find something else to fill that space or better yet, fill it with nothing. Our brain wasn’t designed to be bombarded and stimulated constantly. And there is very much a lack of, for our kids and for adults, this desire to not be bored. Your brain needs downtime. So if you’re using social media as a way to stay in touch with friends and families, to comment, to build connection, to use it as a way to help you stay close to the people you care about, that’s wonderful. That’s a self care strategy.
ANNE GRADY:
But if you’re endlessly just scrolling, looking at reels and videos and moving from one thing to the next, not only is it bad for your productivity and your mental health, it’s literally rewiring your brain. And so use it intentionally. Great. Use it as a way to escape, not so much.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Right. So I have gone back to social media to use it more intense intentionally. Just posting stuff from segments from the podcast and I’m like in and out and I’m actually training somebody to take over that.
ANNE GRADY:
I comment and reply to every single thing and I write my own content, but I have somebody else who goes up there and posts it and makes all the pretty pictures and does all that because the more time I spend on it, the more anxious I feel. So I love doing it as a way to stay connected. Yes, I use it as a marketing tool in my business, but I can always tell a difference when I stay off of it for a few days. It’s like a mental reset, a digital detox. It’s so good for you.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And what’s so interesting, I would say most people, I’m going to go on a limb and say like 97% of people would agree with what we’re saying. I feel better. I don’t know why. And it’s because I think the research, the science has, what do you call it, ferreted this out that it’s the dopamine. And all sudden you haven’t had a dopamine hit for a while and it starts scratching the back of, you know, the back of your mind or whatever and there’s this little tickle or whatever that needs to be scratched and that’s why we can’t be bored. And oh, look, I got, you know, I got 600 likes and that’s fantastic.
ANNE GRADY:
But it’s so bad for our kids. Like the thing that I’m so grateful for is that there was not social media when I was growing up.
BERT MARTINEZ::
Same here.
ANNE GRADY:
Because our kids are watching these 60 second reels over and over and over again and every single one triggers that dopamine hit. And so what you’re training your brain for is needing novelty and short pieces of information. So you’re losing the ability to, to focus for long periods of time. It’s not just bad for you, it’s like literally reshaping our brain. So if you’ve got little kids and they love the reels, limit it. Because that constant scrolling to new videos is really messing with the way our brains form. Especially that prefrontal Cortex and the frontal lobe where executive functioning lives. It’s making it really difficult for kids to not only pay attention but to stay regulated.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, yeah. And I tell you, in fact I just posted this the other day. I am shocked. I am shocked when I go out and in public and you’ll see a toddler, a three or four year old, on their tablet or their phone and to make it worse, sometimes they even have a big Frappuccino. Could you imagine? All I can think of is this child is going.
ANNE GRADY:
When they hit the teenage years, it’s going to be rough unless some drastic changes are made. But you see so many toddlers now on a device and you’re seeing it in the workplace. It’s translating into not communicating well. And like I said, emotional regulation and ability to maintain attention. It’s, it’s so tempting. I’ve been a parent of young kids and sometimes like you’re just exhausted and you want to give them something to occupy their time. And it’s not that, that is never okay, but when it’s in place of socialization and learning how to communicate with other people and how to solve problems and deal with stress, you know we’re doing our kids a disservice there.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Absolutely, Absolutely. Do you think most people are addicted to chaos without even realizing it?
ANNE GRADY:
I think we’re addicted to busyness and I think busy is a form of avoidance. The doing keeps us from feeling and as long as we’re doing, we don’t have to have tough conversations or we don’t have to feel uncomfortable emotions or deal with difficult problems. Some people are drawn to drama and partially it’s that level of cortisol and adrenaline that you get when you’re faced with a situation like that. And so it can become addictive that in absence of it, you, you feel like there’s something wrong. But in reality, your brain needs quiet, it needs space, it needs time to process and rest. That’s why the second you lay your head on a pillow at night, it’s like running a mental marathon. You haven’t given your brain any time to process thoughts, feelings, emotions throughout the day. And your brain needs it, so it’s going to take that time to do it.
ANNE GRADY:
So I like building in these little check ins with myself. I call it a mirror moment. Know the key is to check in with yourself regularly. So the. What’s the one room we’re all going to use multiple times a day?
BERT MARTINEZ:
Living room. Restroom.
ANNE GRADY:
The restroom doesn’t matter what building you’re in or where you Are you will always have to use the restroom at some point. Right. So when you’re washing your hands, take a minute and check in with yourself. Like, what emotions are running the show and how do I want to show up next? Because we react on autopilot racing from one thing to the next. Whereas if you just take a brief moment to check in with yourself and reset, take a few deep breaths, it changes things dramatically because you’re giving your brain time to process during the day, and it desperately needs it.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, I like what you said there about busy keeps us from feeling.
ANNE GRADY:
Yeah. The doing keeps us from.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Thank you. The doing. The doing. The doing keeps us from feeling. And I think that’s true. And I think one of the things that is. Chased me out of. What do you call it, out of social media is again, the level of contention.
BERT MARTINEZ:
You go to certain topics and it becomes so contentious. And people are not cordial or polite. And in some cases, they’re not logical. They’re just, this is the way it is. And if you don’t think the way I think, you’re dumb or they’ll use some other adjectives or whatever. And that, I think is. Is, what do you call it? Being exacerbated by social media where, hey, we don’t have to be polite anymore.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, that’s why one of the pillars I talk about in the book is versatility, like challenging yourself to think about things differently. And the example I gave was I was the president of my debate team in high school. I was not one of the popular kids, but we were given these resolutions, and we had to, regardless of our own opinion, we had to research both sides of the issue and be prepared to debate both sides of the issue. And I think we would be so much better off if people learned how to do that, because we look for evidence to support the way we think.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes.
ANNE GRADY:
And we will always find it. But there is also evidence to support other people’s way of thinking. And so we’re so busy focused on being right, we forget the goal is to get it right. Cognitive flexibility is the skill that lets you look at things from multiple angles. So the next time somebody says something you disagree with, instead of, you know, having your feathers stand up and get defensive, ask questions, Help me understand that. Can you give me an example of that? What does that look like in real life? What? You know, get curious. Because, I mean, worst case scenario, you keep your own opinion. Best case, you’re open enough to see there might be another way.
ANNE GRADY:
Right. And so it’s part of the reason we’re so divisive and social media perpetuates it is because there’s some feeling of anonymity. Even though your, like, name is attached to it, it’s easier to type on a keyboard than say it to someone in person. I don’t understand that phenomenon. But, like, my general rule of thumb is if I wouldn’t say it to the person, then I don’t want to type it and have there be proof of it.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Right, right, right. Reminds me of that Ted lasso, which is one of my favorite. You know, there’s that clip of him playing darts talking about be curious, not judgmental.
ANNE GRADY:
Yep.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And I think that we have lost a lot of our curiosity, and we just go to being judgmental because there’s evidence.
ANNE GRADY:
Because whatever way you believe we have confirmation bias, there is evidence to support any belief system.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes. And again, back to social media. You will find a group of people that will support your biases, no matter how unfounded or ridiculous they might be.
ANNE GRADY:
But nobody thinks their own biases are unfounded or ridiculous. Right. So, like, part of it is really reevaluating what you hold to be so true. Like, there have been so many things over the years where people were convinced they were right, and then they came out and found, wait, that’s not true at all. Like, I remember at one point we were, like, washing our groceries during COVID because we were like Lysol spraying everything because we were sure that if I touch this bag from my Walmart, I’m going to contract Covid. Well, people were 100% sure about it. I mean, they were angry about it. And posting on social media about it doesn’t mean it’s true.
ANNE GRADY:
But you often don’t know until hindsight. And that’s 2020.
BERT MARTINEZ::
Absolutely, absolutely. I. Okay, so. So let me ask you this. How do you think some people get stronger after disruption while others seem to spiral out?
ANNE GRADY:
They’ve done a lot of research on survivors. POWs, endurance athletes, survivors of, you know, traumatic events. And they have found that the main differentiator, they. They thought that it would be grit or mental toughness or even physical strength, but it was clarity of values. The people who come out on the other side are able to turn their mess into meaning. Values don’t erase pain, but they give it a purpose. So people ask me, like, how did you go from having this child to doing what you do now? Well, when I learned that I could help other people know that they’re not alone, that we’re all dealing with something when I could start talking about mental health when I could share my story in hopes that it would make other people know that they weren’t alone. It didn’t change my situation.
ANNE GRADY:
My son is still sick, but it changed the way I carried it. I went from being a victim to a volunteer. Right? So everybody’s given crud, and it’s not fair, but it’s what you do with that crud. You can let yourself get buried by it. And sometimes it’s okay to just sit in the suck for a while.
BERT MARTINEZ::
Right.
ANNE GRADY:
Yourself, feel it. It’s not like I woke up one morning and went, my son tried to kill me. Let’s go start a keynote speaking career and teach people about that. No, that’s not how it works. But while you’re in it, you got to give yourself permission to feel it and sit in it. You know I say sit in the suck, right? You got to give yourself permission. But then at some point, what do you learn from it? What do you do because of it? How do you help other people not have to go through it? That’s where we build resilience, strength, and adaptability. We all go through it.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s a matter of what you do with what you’ve learned as a result. But don’t rush through it like people think. If I’m going through something terrible, I should rush through it to find meaning. You don’t have the information yet. Just be patient and graceful with yourself while you’re going through it. But when it’s over, you look back with perspective and you’re like, wow, here’s the lessons I learned. Those are what you share.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes. And one of the things that I found out is that feelings. Sitting there with your feelings as you’re. As you talk about sitting there in the suck. Feelings are a way of thinking or meditating and asking questions. Okay, what am I feeling? Why am I feeling. Whatever. Whatever.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Feelings, to me is a way of thinking, and I think one of the other gifts that we have received, not only can we overcome hard things and. But our feelings can give us guidance. We all know we. We don’t have to be. We call it trained experts, but we know when people are generally lying to us, we get a feeling, right? And just like if you might be going down the. Let’s say a. A dark alley or, you know, you get a funny sensation, something’s going off here, Let me turn back around. So people sometimes overlook their feelings.
ANNE GRADY:
So interesting. You know, feelings are not facts. They’re data. And we tend to assume that because we Feel it. We have to dig into why we feel it. And we spend so much time going, well, what happened in my childhood to make me feel like this? It’s important to dig into that. But at some point, it doesn’t matter why. What matters is what you do with it next.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes.
ANNE GRADY:
So for me, the first pillar of evolvability is emotional aptitude. It’s learning how to read, recognize, and respond to emotions. And one of the most helpful things for me after I was diagnosed with that tumor in my salivary gland, my doctor said, look, Anne, you have to find a different way to manage stress. These tumors come back, they’re aggressive. It already was traveling towards your brain. You need to find a different way. Well, my situation wasn’t changing. It was an immovable object.
ANNE GRADY:
It is what it is. So I had to adapt. And the most powerful tools that helped me were how to deal with stress, anxiety, and worry, because we intertwined the terms, but they’re actually very different, and the strategies you use for each are different. So, for example, stress is physical. It’s a physical sensation. Well, you can’t think your way out of a feeling. So when we get all stressed and anxious and we’re like, why do I feel this way? It’s a waste of time because you can’t think your way out of a physical sensation, which is what stress and anxiety are. So you’ve got to feel your way out.
ANNE GRADY:
And one way to do that is just to pay attention to your tongue, pay attention to your big toe, pay attention to what your hands are doing or the air on your skin. Anything you can do to bring yourself back physically into your body interrupts that loop. Now, worry is the cognitive component of anxiety. They’re intrusive thoughts that you can’t control, but you can control whether you keep them going. Like, just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you need to give it a microphone. And so it’s, for me, I’m a worrier by nature. So I’ve had to learn some techniques. A few of the ones that help me most are one, just recognize that I’m having the thought, and you literally say to yourself, I’m having the thought that I’m going to screw this up.
ANNE GRADY:
I’m having the thought that this isn’t going to work out. That simple statement, I’m having the thought that creates enough distance so you’re not inside of the thought, you’re observing it. And then you can decide whether you want to keep engaging it. Another is a worry window. Give yourself dedicated Time during the day to worry on purpose. Like, set a timer for 10 minutes. Let yourself worry about anything and everything. If you can take action after you’re done, great.
ANNE GRADY:
If not, you’ll have another worry that day. Put it on a sticky note. It’s tomorrow’s problem. You think about it during your worry window, and what you’re doing is you’re training your brain to. To worry on your timetable, not whenever it wants. You’re controlling your thoughts and your attention.
BERT MARTINEZ:
It’s almost like what you had said earlier about the intentionality of social media, the intentionality of worrying. I know I’m a worrier or I’m going to worry, or I am worried about this, that, or the other thing. But to give it a window. I think it’s a great idea. That’s a wonderful idea. Okay, I got to schedule my worry time.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, and at night, when you’re trying to go to sleep, I use a technique called cognitive shuffling. And basically what you’re doing is you’re giving your brain a task that is engaging enough to keep you from ruminating, but not so engaging, it keeps you awake. So I’ll lay there and think of, like, things like animals that start with every letter of the Alphabet, and I’ll, you know, alpaca, anteater, aardvark. Why didn’t I send that email? I was supposed to send that email. Okay, go back, bobcat bear. I can’t believe I ate that donut. I was supposed to be on a diet. Okay, Dear Duck, like, the point is you’re going to get distracted, but every time you bring yourself back to it again, you’re just training your attention.
ANNE GRADY:
That’s a form of meditation. You’re going to have the thoughts, but you get to control whether you keep having them.
BERT MARTINEZ:
All right, so I got to ask you, since you brought it up a couple of times, your child, at the age of three, Evan, tried to kill you.
ANNE GRADY:
Yes.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And. And that’s literal. It wasn’t some kind of hyper. I mean, you’re saying that your child had the, I guess, the intention of hurting you, of killing you?
ANNE GRADY:
He could not have. I would not give him more ice cream. So he. He actually did stab me with a pair of scissors. But. But, yes, he chased me around with scissors. And, yeah, it’s not a great moment, but Evan, I knew in utero something wasn’t right. And he’s 22.
ANNE GRADY:
He’ll be 23 in a couple of weeks now. And mental illness and. And developmental delays, they’re hard. It’s not Something that goes away. So it’s a. It’s a journey. I get to practice what I teach every single day.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes, that. That is. That is a very heavy subject, very heavy experience. However, one of the things that I have learned is kind of on the subject that we’ve been talking about or the theme or one of the themes is we can do hard things. And I think the cousin to we can do hard things is it will give us experience. And you had pointed this out earlier, and this experience will help us help other people, because that’s really what it’s. That’s what a parent is. You know, by the time you and I started having kids, we had a certain level of experience.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And by the time Those kids are 3 or 5 or 10, our experience continued to grow. And so we can help them make these decisions. The same thing with your friends or co workers, whatever. You have a certain level of experience that they can. That you can help them with, and vice versa, because, you know, you might have a co worker that’s a. That’s mechanically inclined and they know how to do stuff on the car. That’s great experience. And therefore they can tell you, I’ll do this, that, or the other thing.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And I think that works with just about every aspect of our lives.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, I mean, it’s comfortable for someone to say, hey, I work on cars. If anyone needs help, it’s not comfortable to say, hey, I’ve been in therapy for 20 years, and I’ve got some great tools if anybody’s dealing or struggling. But that’s why I started this whole journey is to make mental health something that we talk about, not a stigma to be avoided. One in five adults and one in five kids are struggling or will struggle with a mental health issue. One in three adults will have an anxiety disorder within their lifetime. Like anxiety and depression are so prevalent, it’s as common as owning a dog. But people don’t like to talk about it. And there are tools.
ANNE GRADY:
I mean, there are illnesses where medication is absolutely helpful, I take it. But what I will tell you is there are also tools that you can use. If you’re not happy with the life that you’re in, you can craft a new one. It just has to be intentional, and it’s not easy, and it takes time.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, and I think those numbers might be a little soft. I. I think it’s more like two out of five. Especially now, again, we’ve been talking about social media and things like that. That’s not making mental issues. And what do you call it anxiety better. It’s adding to it at a staggering level.
ANNE GRADY:
Yeah. For adolescents, it’s. Seven out of ten adolescents are dealing with anxiety or depression. 70%. I mean, think about that. And we’re. It’s easy to, like, yell at your teenager, like, clean your room, or why are you on social? I told you to get off your phone. It’s an escape.
ANNE GRADY:
So for a lot of our kids, it’s, like, really hard to be out there right now. It’s hard to, like, put yourself out there. It’s. School is hard, life is hard, people are struggling. And so we use technology as an escape. The problem is when. When you try to escape a feeling or escape a situation, you’re telling your brain it’s actually dangerous. So I’ll give you an example.
ANNE GRADY:
Like, I speak at a lot of events. I work for all kinds of companies. I do training and professional development. I speak at large keynotes. And usually the night before I speak, when I get to the hotel, there’s some type of social gathering, cocktail hour or something. And I’m often asked, hey, will you come meet everybody? Well, no one knows who I am yet. I’m just this random person at an office party, and it causes me such huge anxiety. Like, it would seem like, oh, come on.
ANNE GRADY:
And you speak in front of 20,000 people. Yes. But being at a cocktail hour with a room full of people I don’t know causes me a ton of anxiety. So I used to deal with that anxiety by pulling out my phone and I would look very important and I would look very busy, and I would be, oh, hold on one second. Let me just finish up this text that I really probably am not even sending, or I’m sending to my daughter, just saying, how was school? What I didn’t realize is when you use your phone to avoid a social situation because the social situation makes you anxious, you’re telling your brain that social situations are, in fact, dangerous and should be avoided, making you more nervous and anxious the next time you’re in a social situation. And this is true not just with bad coping strategies, but with good ones. So if every time you’re anxious, you take three deep breaths to settle down, your brain is associating deep breaths with anxiety. You have to practice these techniques proactively when you don’t need them, so that when you do need them, it’s muscle memory.
ANNE GRADY:
So I practice taking deep breaths before and after every single call I’m on, or every time I get up to make a glass of water or go to the restroom or whatever. I take three deep breaths, just as a way to have it be muscle memory, so that when I am in situations where I’m anxious, it’s just happening naturally. I’m taking deep breaths naturally.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I love that idea. Let me ask you this from a brain perspective, if you will. What actually happens when uncertainty hits us? Right? Because we’re talking about anxiety and nervousness. So what’s going on neurologically?
ANNE GRADY:
Uncertainty after death is the greatest threat of all to the human brain. Our brain is a prediction machine. That’s why you finish people’s sentences before they’ve ever finished talking. Because our brain loves to make predictions. And when it can’t make a prediction, it feels like it’s in a state of threat. So for our brain, uncertainty is the equivalent of being chased by a tiger. We can’t get rid of the tiger and the uncertainty, but we can build our capacity to meet it, to adapt faster and recover stronger. So if you feel anxiety when something is uncertain, congratulations, you’re human.
ANNE GRADY:
I would worry if you didn’t feel some level of anxiety. And most of us assume anxiety is bad. Stress and anxiety are actually not only good or not only useful, they’re good for you. Right? Like, we avoid it. Stress is really good for you. In short, acute doses, it improves every measure of performance, cognitively, behaviorally, physically. It’s when it’s sustained and there’s no outlet that it becomes bad for you. So your brain registers uncertainty as a threat.
ANNE GRADY:
It gives you a surge of cortisol and adrenaline. These are designed to help your body wake up and be alert in case you need to protect yourself. Unfortunately for many of us, we’ve been in that state for so long, it’s become our default. Your nervous system and your brain are muscles. The places they spend the most time become their default. And so for many people, they just default to being critical and judgmental and frustrated because they spend so much time there. And then they wonder why people keep frustrating them. It’s like whatever you repeat, you reinforce, and that’s it.
ANNE GRADY:
The motions as well as everything else in life.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Right. I think Tony Robbins coined the phrase, and if I’m wrong, somebody can correct me. But repetition is the mother of skill. And that could be both on the positive or the negative side.
ANNE GRADY:
And it’s. But it could be repetition as the mother of poor skills, if you’re not practicing correctly, Right? So they say practice makes perfect, but only if you’re practicing correctly.
BERT MARTINEZ:
That’s right. That’s why I meant it’s both positive and negative. You’re reinforcing bad skills or you’re making. You’re reinforcing yourself to be more nervous, more anxious. It’s a skill. You’re developing a skill, or you learn to channel it differently.
ANNE GRADY:
So I speak on some of the biggest stages in the world, and people are like, how do you not get nervous? And my answer is, what makes you think I’m not nervous? I’m terrified? Like, in my TED Talk, I’m pretty sure you can see my knees sh. Shaking. I get terrified every time before I speak, and I speak multiple times a week. The goal is not to not be terrified. The goal is to recognize my body’s just preparing me. It’s like this internal excitement because I want to do well and I want it to have a positive impact. So instead of trying to avoid fear of public speaking, now I just recognize it as excitement.
ANNE GRADY:
Your body does the same thing when it’s scared or excited. The only difference is your brain’s interpretation. So next time you’re feeling anxious, thank your body. It’s keeping you alert. It’s doing its job. It’s not something to avoid. Embrace it.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And I agree with you that. I agree totally on that. Let me ask you this. When it comes to anxiety, is it really about the situation or is it about lack of confidence or lack of control? What’s your thoughts?
ANNE GRADY:
All of the above, I think. And it’s different for different people. So if you have, like, generalized anxiety disorder, often it’s not about anything in particular. It’s just this underlying feeling of anxiousness and stress and discomfort. I. There’s absolutely situational anxiety. If you’re getting ready to go into a big meeting or a presentation, there’s social anxiety. If it’s hard for you to manage social skills and social situations, right? Like, there’s lots of different types of anxiety, but it doesn’t matter necessarily what.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s where it’s coming from. You can’t think your way out of it. You have to feel your way out of it. And something that was very powerful for me to learn is that intense emotions like stress and anxiety and sadness and fear and any other emotion you might not want to feel, any emotion dissipates after 90 seconds if you don’t feed it with your thoughts. So when I’m.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Wait, say that again. Say that again.
ANNE GRADY:
So emotions dissipate after 90 seconds if you don’t feed them with your thoughts. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist. She wrote a book called the Stroke of Insight, and she did this great Ted Talk on the human brain. She was a neuroscientist who experienced a stroke. And because of the way the stroke happened in a certain hemisphere of her brain, she was able to recognize what was happening while it was happening, happening. And so she wrote a great book called the Stroke of Insight. And one of her findings is that when you have an intense emotional reaction, most of these intense emotional reactions will dissipate after 90 seconds if you don’t fuel it with your thoughts. So I like to imagine it as like a wave picking you up, sweeping you up off your feet.
ANNE GRADY:
You feel like you’re trying to struggle to get your grounding, and then the wave will eventually set you back down. But we spend a lot of energy trying to numb it or fight it and not feel it. And that only serves to increase the intensity and duration of the discomfort.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, I think that’s some great insight. One of the things that you talk about in the book and you’ve already mentioned is values. And, you know, when it comes to anything really, but values and decision making or when you’re under pressure. And I think you said something that decision that your. Your decisions to be anchored to your values. And I think that most people lose sight of that, or maybe they’re not really sure what their values are. But I love this idea of. Of anchoring your decision or your situation to your values.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And I think that’s something that people sometimes forget.
ANNE GRADY:
And this works not just individually, but as a team. So I’ll give you the example of where I really learned this. So when Evan was 15 years old, we live in Texas, and there was not a single program in the state that could meet his intense needs. So we had to look for a program for him. And the one we found was 2,000 miles away in Idaho. And this decision weighed on us. On the one hand, he wasn’t getting better at home. We weren’t safe.
ANNE GRADY:
Our daughter wasn’t safe. Our marriage, like everything was struggling. On the other hand, I felt like if I were a better mom, if I found a better doctor, like I felt like a failure for sending my child away and using our entire life savings to do it. And we vacillated. We went back and forth. We made lists of pros and cons. This decision kept us up at night. And then we asked a different question.
ANNE GRADY:
What value is most important to us right now? Well, in that moment, it was family. Not just Evan, but our daughter, our marriage, our health, our entire family. Second question. Which choice reflects it? In the end, we knew that the answer that Hurt the most was the one that saved his life. Because when we went back and asked what value is most important and which choice reflects it, it didn’t make the decision easier, but it made it clear. Because when you have this filter, you stay true to what matters most. Now, you can use this as a team as well, or a family. Decide on what’s most important in this family and how we treat each other.
ANNE GRADY:
For example, let’s say it’s respect. Okay, that sounds great in theory, but what does that look like from a behavioral perspective? How would I know you’re demonstrating respect? You might say, well, I let you speak without interrupting, or I don’t raise my voice, or I ask your opinions and listen to you as a family, as a team. Decide on your top three most important values that you want to guide your decisions and define what they look like behaviorally. Like your litmus test is, if somebody could observe you for a week, would they know what you value based on your actions, not your intentions? And then you use that as your litmus test for everything. So if, for example, your personal value is balance, when the question comes, do you want this promotion? It depends on your value. If your value is balance and the promotion is going to mean more time away from your family, then what choice reflects that balance is your most important value? If it’s achievement, then that’s another thing altogether, right? So different stages in our life and different areas of our life can call for different things, but when you’re clear on what’s most important, it takes the guesswork out of decisions, how you treat each other. And by the way, in times of change and chaos, it’s not rules or policies that keep people grounded, it’s the values they share. So whether it’s how you replace the toilet paper roll over, obviously, or email response times or how decisions get made, when everybody has the same set of behavioral expectations and values, everything gets easier.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, I think that is one of my favorite quotes that I’m taking away that because it, it makes sense, but it’s not one of the. At least for me, I haven’t heard it. I haven’t heard values a lot. When it comes down to, you know, pressure situations or leadership situations, you know, they touch on integrity or they touch on, you know, certain things that are kind of around that, but they don’t. Again, this is the first time that I’m connecting the values to the. The behavior that you want to. That you want to demonstrate in your work. Have you seen people’s lives change when they get clear on their values.
ANNE GRADY:
Absolutely. I mean, last Friday I took a team through an exercise where instead of the managers hand or the leaders handing down, here’s what we value and here’s how we expect you to value it. I worked with the team for them to co create it together. Because once you do that, you don’t have to hold people accountable. They choose it, rules people tell people what to do. Values empower them to choose for themselves. Personally, it’s changed my life because I’m very indecisive. And so sometimes I’m like, should I do this? Should I do that? I stopped asking, should I? And I okay, what’s most important right now? What choice reflects it? What kind of parent do I want to be? What would that kind of parent do in this situation? What kind of friend do I want to be? What would that kind of friend do in this situation? So sometimes it’s easier to.
ANNE GRADY:
Not sometimes, always. Your decisions become more clear when you’ve identified what’s most important before you try to make them.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes. And I like what you said earlier. Let’s see if I can misquote it. Values don’t erase the pain. Finish that. Values don’t erase the pain. But they what?
ANNE GRADY:
They give it a purpose.
BERT MARTINEZ:
They give it a purpose. I just think that’s extraordinary. But it’s true. When you look at people who are grounded and happy, you know that they’re. That they’re grounded and happy because they live those values. You can’t knock them down.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, and another example for us, we lived in chaos for so long that one of my values became peace. And we were tasked with. We went camping one weekend. Like, the whole book is framed around me not wanting to go camping. Like, I literally would have rather had a cold colonoscopy than go camping. Fast forward 10 years, I live on a ranch with donkeys and cows, and the first thing I do every day is muck donkey stalls. And I love it. And the whole point of me learning this journey was that sometimes we wear labels.
ANNE GRADY:
I’m not an athletic person. I’m not a math person. Well, I’m just a creative thinker. Those labels form our identity. And we stop questioning it. We just assume that it’s true. Like, I had a coach in the fourth grade tell me I wasn’t athletic. I’m 51.
ANNE GRADY:
I haven’t joined a sports team since. What was it about the way that he gave that comment that made it sting and stick? And so this whole journey for me has been learning to embrace discomfort because it means you’re growing. Wisdom comes from experience. Experience comes from failure. Failure is the price of admission for growth. And we avoid it because we get to an age where we’re tired of not knowing things. Like, when you’re a baby, you take naps because everything is new. Could you imagine when your little girls were twins, when your twins were little, if they had tried to walk and they fell down? Can you imagine if they both said, screw it, Walking’s not for me?
BERT MARTINEZ:
No, no.
ANNE GRADY:
But that’s what we do. We try something once, we suck at it, and we’re like, I guess I’m not good at that, right?
BERT MARTINEZ:
I don’t want to experience that again. And it’s an adult thing. It’s a learned behavior, because, again, to toddlers, your toddlers will fail all day long. And they love it at everything. Drawing, coloring, you know, whatever you want to. I remember at the gym one day, and I was doing deadlifts, and my son must have been five or six, and, you know, there’s a bunch of weight on the bar and, hey, dad, can I try lifting the bar? Sure, buddy, go ahead. And he tried, failed completely. But he didn’t give up on working out, didn’t give up on, you know, going to the gym.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I think that it’s.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, and that’s a great analogy, Bert, because when you lift a weight that’s too heavy for you, it actually tears down muscle fibers. That’s how you build back stronger muscle fibers. Right. So we learned it at the gym. We just have to apply it to our lives. Just because it’s uncomfortable doesn’t make it bad.
BERT MARTINEZ:
But it seems like as adults, we’ve embraced that totally. And now with. Again, with the Internet and social media and, man, we don’t have to interact with other humans ever again. I can just hide here in the house, and I’m good to go get delivered to my house.
ANNE GRADY:
You know, that’s the bad thing about living out in the country. We don’t have Uber eats or doordash. We actually have to go socialize and see people. It’s a whole different way of living out here.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Oh, my goodness. Okay, so let’s talk about this real quick. Since we’re talking about values, what’s a red flag that someone is living out of alignment with their values?
ANNE GRADY:
Well, if you feel shame, guilt, fear, those are usually pretty good indicators that you’re not in alignment. I think it’s helpful to just take a step back. You know, in the book, I walk you through all of these exercises to figure out what they are and how to clarify them. But really, the first step is. And you can go Google, give me a list of values, or ask ChatGPT, give me a list of 100 values, go through that list and pick out one that is really important to you, and then define, how would somebody know that that value is important to you? What would that look like? And the next time you’re confronted with a situation where that value’s in question, it becomes real clear. And so it’s not about not ever feeling like you’re not sure what to do, but it is getting really clear on what matters most to you so that you can then make decisions that are aligned with it. And if you are living out of alignment, you feel it in your gut, you feel it in your health. It’s just a weight that you carry because you’re making decisions based on convenience or fear or pressure.
ANNE GRADY:
And that’s not how you grow. It’s how you end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and burned out.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes, I totally, 100% agree with that. Let’s kind of switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about performance and get your thoughts on some of this. Because, you know, we have become this society of pushing harder, pushing through. I gotta consume a crazy amount of caffeine. And in fact, there’s a lot of media, there’s a lot of TV shows out there that always shows the hero just, again, pushing through and tons of more caffeine. Why does pushing harder actually backfire?
ANNE GRADY:
Because it’s not a motivation problem. It’s a clarity problem. Like, it’s not that people don’t want to perform well. I don’t know anyone who wakes up in the morning and they’re like, wow, I can’t wait to piss off Bert today. Like, nobody wakes up wanting to fail, and we fail or we feel overwhelmed because there’s not clarity around. What’s most important. Like, the leader’s job is not to erase discomfort, but to build the team’s capacity to meet it. And part of that is getting real clear on what is most important right now.
ANNE GRADY:
Because if everything is urgent, nothing is. And I think so many leaders right now. You said Ted Lasso earlier in the book. I say, like, today’s leaders are expected to inspire like Oprah, lead, you know, execute like Elon and coach like Ted Lasso. But they’re also responsible for doing their own work and managing their employees. Chaos. And everything else. And we.
ANNE GRADY:
We want our leaders to be therapists, and we want them to be coaches, and we want them to be workers. And That’s a lot to put on one person. The greatest gift leaders can give their team is to hang a lantern on the problem. Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, here’s what we’re still figuring out. Because in absence of that, people fill in the blanks, and they usually fill them in wrong. So without information, I’m operating out of the assumption AI is going to take my job, they’re going to go do layoffs. This is going to happen, then that’s going to happen, then I’m going to be homeless, then everything’s going to go to hell in a hand basket. And we take ourselves down these rabbit holes where if the leader says, hey, we know that 20% of the workforce is going to get reduced, I know it’s scary.
ANNE GRADY:
I want to make sure we’re aligned on our three most important priorities this quarter. They’re this, this, and this. What support can I give you to help make that happen? It doesn’t take the fear away. But when people know that it’s being discussed and that the leader is being forthcoming or sharing, like, I can’t share everything right now, but I’ll share what I can when I can. That’s what makes people perform for you. Not because you’ve loaded them down with more work, but the challenge. I see a lot of companies, you know, I work with great companies, but a lot of them are reducing workforces and saying, you know, we gotta do more with less. The goal isn’t to do more with less.
ANNE GRADY:
The goal is to do what matters most with the time you have. So get real clear on what those priorities. And I, for me personally, I use a focus filter. So every week on Sunday before I go to bed, I think, what are the three most important things I need to do this week? And then every day, what are the three most important things I need to do this day? And then when I’m overwhelmed, what are the three most important things I need to do in this moment? Right. What are the high payoff activities? The activities that are generating the greatest return on my investment? How do I get those done first so that everything else feels easier?
BERT MARTINEZ:
One of my favorite strategies that I learned from Grant Cardone, who is a sales and real estate guy, he says that when he would get discouraged or when he would get overwhelmed, when he would get down, he would read his goals.
ANNE GRADY:
See, here’s where I disagree with that, though. Because goals are based on an outcome. Values are based on how you show up along the way. And I have been Incredibly goal oriented and achievement oriented my entire life. But sometimes we chase the goal for the wrong reasons. And that’s where values come into play. Because if your goal, for example, if you’re a manager and you’re emailing your team at midnight and you’re spouting out during the week how you want them to focus on their well being, well, if you’re emailing them at midnight and it’s not a global team, you’re not showing the value of well being, you’re showing the value of availability. So it just helps you put things in perspective.
ANNE GRADY:
The other thing I would say, and I don’t know where I learned, someone said this one time and I clutched onto it so tightly, it’s become my own mantra. Your resume and your eulogy should not be the same document.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I like that a lot.
ANNE GRADY:
I mean, think about it like we were, I, I was a straight A student and then I was goal oriented. I’m going to go to grad school. Went to grad school. I’m goal oriented. I’m gonna get a job, got a job. Now I’m goal oriented. Now I’m gonna get mar. And have two kids.
ANNE GRADY:
Got married, had two kids, one of them off the rails. Everything crashed. We have to value. So for example, let’s say your goal is to achieve an outcome. I’m not as concerned with the outcome as how I showed up along the way to achieve it.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes.
ANNE GRADY:
Did I act with integrity? Did I stay true to what mattered? Did I treat the people that I work with and live with well, then I can celebrate the accomplishment and the goal. But if I achieved the goal and my health and my family and my sanity were lost in the process, then did I really achieve it? So at the end of the day, instead of thinking, did I check off everything on my to do list? Did I respond intentionally instead of react, Did I take a deep breath before I sent the angry email? That’s just as important as the goal.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And I agree. And I think one of the issues that I see and I, and this goes back from when I was in high school, you don’t hear people saying again, they’re not talking about values. They’re talking about, you know, go get the big career or go get the big, what do you call it, education, so you can have the big career, so you can have the big house and the big car and you can, you know, grab the American dream. Nobody talks about, oh, family and values and health and well being. They’re now we talk about it more now than ever. Before, but look what’s happened in order for it to become a thing. I mean, Covid definitely was hurtful, but it was also very helpful. I think people said, you know, maybe I don’t need to work 80 hours a week.
BERT MARTINEZ:
You know, maybe I could spend just a tad more time with the family and. And things of that nature. And unfortunately, so a lot of companies said, oh, wow, we can cut back on our customer service. So that’s happened, too. I think the world would be so different. I know that my world would be different if I was focused from the very beginning on values. And, hey, you want to go get that big job? There’s no problem with that. But why, you know, do that?
ANNE GRADY:
That’s the thing, right? There’s nothing wrong with chasing a job or. Or wanting achievement. That’s. Nothing is wrong with that if you’re doing it in service of a value that is important to you. If you’re achieving for the sake of achievement, you’re going to be full of trophies and very lonely. Right? And so I think it’s just important. Like, my daughter in the eighth grade had to write down what she was going to study in college. She had to make a choice in the eighth grade to go the biomedical route and the science route versus some of the other routes.
ANNE GRADY:
And so she made that choice in the eighth grade. I didn’t even know myself in the eighth grade. I didn’T even know myself till I was over 30. But then that one decision stressed her out so much throughout high school, and instead, I was like, what’s most important to you, honey? She was like, right now, my mental health. Because I feel like crap all the time, and I always feel like I’m failing. I’m like, okay, is this coursework, is this career path bringing you closer to that?
ANNE GRADY:
No. Okay, what decision would. Right. And we. We tell our kids, you’re going to stick with it. You’re not quitting. You’re going to stick with it. Well, there’s something to be said for figuring out this isn’t my thing.
ANNE GRADY:
Right. It’s not to say you have one hurdle and you give up, but it’s also okay to go. You know what I kept thinking? This is what I wanted my life to be, but it’s not actually bringing me joy, contentment, or fulfillment. So why don’t I reevaluate what’s most important and then make choices aligned with that? And sure, you still need to make a living and put food on the table and pay for prescriptions and do all of the things. I’m not suggesting you have a lofty value without any actions behind it, but I just think we can get so lost in the busyness and the chaos and the drama and the grind and we look up and we’re like, well, if I just get to retirement, everything will be easier. No it won’t. Then you’ll be bored, right? Then you’ll be looking for other drama to fill that cup. So instead find things that fuel you, that bring you joy, that give you meaning.
ANNE GRADY:
And if you can’t do those things at work, find ways to do them outside of work so that you’re at least feeding that part of you.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes, I agree with that. My father in law was a great example in that area. He was one of those guys who offered a big raise. He was in the banking industry, he was the president of bank and they had offered him a big raise and more trappings if you will. He turned it down. It wasn’t a value that he really aspired for or it wasn’t a value that, that he wanted, he wanted to spend more time with his family.
ANNE GRADY:
Right.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And so by, you know, one of the things that he loved about banking industry, it’s a 9 to 5, I mean you’re, you’re walking out the door right at five. And he was at a, he’s at a kid’s game by 5:30 or 6:00′. Clock.
ANNE GRADY:
But he was there at most of the games because of, think about the discipline that takes to say, like for my ego, this would be great for my checkbook, this would be great for my quality of life. Not so much. It takes a lot of courage to do what your father in law did and it’s not something most of us do. And then we get in debt and then we need a job that pays as much as we were making before to keep paying off the things we purchase.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Right.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s like live below your means, figure out what’s important to you. Spend your time there without apology or guilt, you’ll have a meaningful life.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Absolutely. And I think that is again something that it’s not really taught. You have to figure that out on your own, like you said in your 30s or for you’re starting to figure out, well, this doesn’t really make me happy. Oh you know, it’s so well.
ANNE GRADY:
And if somebody had taught you that as a kid, it wouldn’t have worked anyway because you have to experience it and learn it firsthand. Right. It’s like I tried to tell my daughter all of the dating pitfalls so that she didn’t get her heart broken. She had to get her heart broken to learn what I had said all along was right. And it would be so much easier. Just go. If you would just listen to me. But we have to experience it.
ANNE GRADY:
That’s how we learn.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And that’s true. But my whole point is, what if we were more value focused from high school on versus achievement focused? Because, again, there’s so many people who are high achievers and they’re lonely and they’ve been married and divorced four or five times, and their life is just horrible and their health is wrecked. But yes, he or she is super wealthy and they have this, you know, according to Instagram, they have this great social. This great life. But behind Instagram, their life is terrible.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, and I, you know, I joke that I use resilience and stress management tools way more than algebra, like I do. To your point, think that we should be adding curriculum in school to talk about dealing with hard feelings and dealing with stress and balancing a checkbook and a lot of the basic things that we don’t do because we’re so focused on testing. But that’s a whole other conversation for another day. I think the biggest takeaway for me throughout this journey has been there’s a lot of things that you cannot control. And we spend so much time and energy being frustrated, angry, resentful, disappointed, when that energy could be going toward things you do control. You know, you can’t control what politics are doing right now. You can’t control the economy, you can’t control the traffic. But you can control how you react to it and what you allow into that space, and whether or not you let it make you angry and disgruntled or whether you use it as fuel to live your values.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Reminds me of. And I’m gonna. I’m gonna completely butcher this, but it’s probably the most famous line from the 12 steps. Give me the knowledge or.
ANNE GRADY:
Yeah, something about power to accept the things that.
BERT MARTINEZ:
That I cannot control. And the knowledge to know the difference.
ANNE GRADY:
Yeah. The wisdom to know the difference. Yep.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, it is. And that’s.
ANNE GRADY::
Grant me the serenity.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes.
ANNE GRADY:
Yeah. Yeah, Greg. Grant me the serenity. Yeah. The serenity prayer.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes. I think that’s so applicable. I think that everybody should really take that to heart. And because we do worry about stuff we can’t control and. And we get it. We get anxious and. And excited about stuff that is just so far away from us. Let me ask you this.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Nervous anxiety. What’s the difference?
ANNE GRADY:
Your brain’s interpretation.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Oh, give me an example.
ANNE GRADY:
Well, the same thing happens to you physically if you’re afraid for your life or if you’re getting ready to give an exciting presentation or speech or go play a basketball game or whatever it is you’re looking forward to. Right? Your pupils dilate, your breathing gets shallow, respiration increases, blood rushes from your brain to your limbs. Same thing happens whether you’re terrified or excited. The only difference is the story you’re telling yourself about it. So your brain. We tend to think our brain likes us. Our brain wants us to be happy. Your brain could care less if you’re happy.
ANNE GRADY:
Your brain wants you alive. And so to do that, it’s trying to protect you at all costs. We just have to teach our brain that email isn’t a tiger, Right. Or that the speech you’re going to give isn’t a tiger. The only difference is your brain’s interpretation. Physically, they’re exactly the same.
BERT MARTINEZ:
That is awesome. All right, I want to talk a little bit more about. Again, we’ve been talking about performance and high achievers or achievers. Have you seen in your work, have you seen high performers burnout because they misunderstood effort versus energy?
ANNE GRADY:
I see high performers burning out because they so desperately want to fit in, show, prove to themselves they can do it, not want to disappoint their boss. Burnout happens when our emotional needs are not met. So it’s not just chronic overwork. It’s losing joy in the things that used to bring you joy. It’s being critical and skeptical of people. It’s feeling like no matter what rest you get, it’s never enough. And our desire to achieve and win and make more and do more certainly leads to. To that.
ANNE GRADY:
I think it goes back to the question, right? What’s most important to you? And what choice will reflect that?
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, no, absolutely. In your book, you talk about clarity and how clarity fuels momentum, but you also point out that pressure kills it. So why do you think so many leaders default to pressure? Is it just. Again, it’s a learned behavior.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s a learned behavior, and they have pressure. Right? So if my boss is breathing down my neck saying, Q4 results are not where we want them to be, I need that, and I don’t know how to regulate, then that goes down to my team. So we teach. Most leaders were never taught to lead. Most of them were never even taught to manage. They’re just put in that situation.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Right?
ANNE GRADY:
And in a time when I can think faster than us and process data faster than us and look at patterns more quickly than we can. The skills that are most important right now are the human skills. And so leaders, when they’re feeling pressure, put pressure on their team. It’s not that there doesn’t need to be a goal or an outcome, but I think sometimes it gets messy because we forget what’s most important. And you have a lot of people who are being busy but not productive. So the goal to create clarity is to go back to what are our most important priorities? What are the values we’re using to guide our decisions? What’s most important today? So here’s an exercise. If you have a manager, right, who you feel like is putting a lot of pressure on you, let’s pretend, Bert, that you’re my manager and I’m your employee. So I’m going to go to you and I’m say, hey, Bert, can you please write down what you think my top 5 high payoff activities are? What are the top 5 tasks in my job that generate the greatest return on investment? The 20% of tasks that generate 80% of my results.
ANNE GRADY:
What are they? Now? Independently, I’m going to write down my own and then we compare our list because we’re either going to find out we’re in alignment, which is great, there’s just a lot going on and it’s busy, or we’ll find out we’re not in alignment. So I’m spinning my wheels being busy but not productive. But it gives us an opportunity to say, okay, if these are all the priorities, which ones are most important? And to make sure that when your leader hands you another task and says, hey, somebody’s not here anymore, I need you to take their stuff too. Sure, I’m happy to. Can you help me reprioritize what’s on my high payoff activity list? The leader’s job is to help reprioritize when everything’s urgent. Like I said, nothing is. So clarity is getting drilling down, like, here’s what’s most important this week, this month, this quarter, this year, whatever it is, and the employee needs to permission to say what needs to fall off the list. So I make room for that.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah. I love this idea. Clarity is such an important thing. In fact, I want to ask you this. Do you think that in a case like this, the example that you gave is confusion, more dangerous than failure? In a situation where somebody doesn’t know what the top priorities are 100% because confusion, at least with failure, you tried it.
ANNE GRADY:
Confusion, you’re just spending a lot of energy and you’re not clear on where to direct it. So it’s futile. Like, think about right now, I’m working with several large organizations who are going through major restructuring. New software updates, new team formations, like, everything is up in the air. And I can tell the difference between the leaders who are saying, here are your top three priorities, here’s what’s clear, here’s how you know whether you’re meeting our objectives or not, and the leaders who are like, I don’t know, people, figure it out, get it done. And you can see the difference in their team’s well being and performance and energy level and all of it. You know, the leaders who are the ones that are going to be most successful are the ones who go, I get it’s hard.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s all, we’re all dealing with it. The leaders who are vulnerable, who say, look, I’m frustrated too, I get it. The leaders who are grateful, I appreciate you showing up every day with a smile on your face. It makes it easier for the rest of us to get through this. The ones who are curious help me understand where this went off track instead of, I can’t believe you didn’t meet the deadline. The leaders who create safety, psychological safety, are the ones who have teams that feel better, perform better, and just do better. So it’s about making it safe to be human. I hate the idea of leave work at work and home at home.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s not work life balance, it’s life balance, right? Work is a big part of that, but the second it becomes your identity, you’ve lost yourself. And I learned that from like last year or two years ago. I had double fusion back surgery. I’ve got this degenerative disc disease and I have lots of rods and metal in my back and I’m about to have to have a whole another round of it done. And I went for like two or three months without checking email. It was such a painful recovery. My doctor was like, you really need to give yourself the gift of healing. And so I couldn’t not work.
ANNE GRADY:
But I did cut back a lot. And what I noticed when I was laying in bed in all of that pain, with no inbox chirping and no to do’s, I started to question who I was. If I’m not a successful professional, author, speaker, trainer, then who am I? And I think a lot of us have fallen in that trap. We’ve become our career and that identity is not serving us. So it’s okay if work stopped tomorrow, what are the things that would bring you joy? Good now find time to do those during the week. Integrate it into your life. Don’t wait till you retire to start enjoying your life. Integrate joy into your day.
ANNE GRADY:
It makes everything a whole lot easier. I met a woman the other week who said, I only have 12 more years till retirement with the state agency and then I’ll be fine. I’m like, 12 years is a long time to stay miserable in the hopes that someday you get to cash out and retire. So. So people talk about happiness. Happiness is not a constant emotion. It’s just like every other emotion. It happens in blips.
ANNE GRADY:
Our job is to savor those beautiful blips when they happen and know that the not great blips are going to pass. Life is just a collection of the moments we choose to focus on. You talked about social media earlier. Social media has an algorithm. If you watch one cat video, you are going to be bombarded with thousands of cat videos. If you click on one ad, you’re going to get 10 more of that app. Well, your brain has an algorithm too. Your brain shows you more of what you focus on, think and feel.
ANNE GRADY:
So if you’re not happy with the inputs, with, you know, with what’s coming in, you got to change what you’re looking for.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, it’s interesting that when you said a bad leader is going to tell you, I don’t know, figure it out, make it happen. I’ll probably get some nasty comments on this, but it reminded me of Pete Hegseth, right? I mean, that seems like his management style. People are quitting left and right. The leadership there seems to be dysfunctional. But I think that comes down to him not having the maybe figured out the values or is it the priorities or whatever. But something’s going on there. I think they had like 10 or 15 people in the high ranking officers quit yesterday or day before.
BERT MARTINEZ:
So to me, that’s a, an environmental slash leadership issue, right? There’s something going on that’s driving good leaders away.
ANNE GRADY::
And I think that’s the real key with the, you know, attracting, developing and retaining great talent is very difficult and it’s very costly if you don’t do it well. And so if you’re going to find great talent and put them through the whole process of getting hired, then give them a chance to succeed. Tell them, you know, not just what are you measuring on from an outcome, but how you achieve it. Tie values into your performance reviews or team behaviors into your performance review. I mean, somebody can achieve a goal and if they do it because they burn out or are mean to their co workers, then it’s not the goal you wanted. But we’re not measuring how you got there on the performance review. What gets measured gets managed. So if you want to have people behave in ways that show they’re practicing their values, measure those along with the output.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I like that a lot. What’s one simple way someone can create clarity immediately, like today? What tip would you give them?
ANNE GRADY:
Oh, wow. If I could boil it down to clarity, I would say ask yourself, whatever situation you’re in right now, two questions. What’s most important? What choice reflects it?
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, I think that’s. I think that’s a great mantra to have, because every day you’re hitting these situations. And so I think having that as a mantra, just as a habit, everywhere you go, you know what’s most important and what decision reflects it. I think, man, that’s an amazing way to go through life. It’s going to make things so much easier.
ANNE GRADY:
It doesn’t always make it easy, but it does make it more clear.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes. Well. And again, that clarity. To me, clarity does simplify things sometimes. You know, you’re right. It’s not going to make it easier. It’s going to make it. It’s going to simplify it.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Okay. I got to take this hard road. I don’t want to, but this is the path I must go.
ANNE GRADY:
And, you know, I had to experience that with my son. We didn’t know if the program was going to work, and it didn’t fix him. But in hindsight, here’s what I learned from that. The thought of sending him away was terrifying. The thought of spending our life savings to do it was equally terrifying. But what ended up happening with Evan, you know, we’ve been on a list in Texas for 20 years to get him services in Texas, and we’re still 30,000th on the list. There are no services here for him. We made that decision to send him to Idaho, even though it was incredibly painful, but because he went to school there, he’s considered a resident.
ANNE GRADY:
And the day he graduated high school, he qualified for more services than he could have ever gotten here in Texas. So do I love it that I live 2,000 miles away from my son? No. Could I in any way, shape or form get him the services that he has to make his life as enjoyable as possible? There’s no way I could have done it for him here. So it all goes back to. And I like to think of it like this. When I ended up with facial paralysis, I Thought my whole career was over. I thought my whole life was over. Like, I drooled.
ANNE GRADY:
I had a speech impediment. I couldn’t close my eye. And I swore to God, like, if you just let my face come back, I’ll never worry about the little shit again. And my face came back, and I found myself worrying about the same stuff over again. And so, for me, one of the ways that I have shifted my mind is I practice gratitude. Every day when I brush my teeth, I say three things I’m grateful for in the morning while I brush my teeth, and I use the word because. I’m grateful for this because the because is important, because it forces you to get crystal clear. The brushing your teeth is important because I already do that.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s not another thing on my to do list. And for me, that has been such a powerful practice. When I. My doctor, I asked him for physical therapy recommendations, like, help me fix my face. And he said, start a gratitude practice. And I’m like, no, no, no, you don’t understand. Like, what am I supposed to be grateful for? That my son just got out of a psych ward, that my face is paralyzed, that my career is over? And he looked right at me without missing a beat, and he said, be grateful. Your son could get the help he needs.
ANNE GRADY:
Many can’t be grateful your hearing didn’t go because you almost lost your hearing with your ear because of the tumor. Be grateful that you have a message that could help other people not feel alone. And when I thought about it, I was like, you know what? He’s right. I was feeling sorry for myself. I was having a pity party. And our brain is naturally geared to look for what’s wrong. It’s a protection mechanism. It’s built in.
ANNE GRADY:
But you can offset it by also looking for what’s right.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, I. I think gratitude, again, is one of those skills that we forget to build on. It’s. And it’s. And it’s easy to be grateful when things are going great, right? Hey, my life looks just like that life on Instagram. I should be so grateful. But the reality is we need to be grateful 24 7. And I think that gratitude, man, as you’re talking about your morning routine, that’s one of my morning routines as well.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Not while I brush my teeth, but. But I do spend some time thinking about stuff I’m grateful for, because there is so much to be grateful for. Life is imperfect. People are imperfect. Leaders are imperfect. Heroes are imperfect. But there’s so much to be grateful for. And we forget that we get so stuck.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Like you’re saying, maybe it’s a pity party, maybe it’s an entitlement thing. I should, I coulda, woulda, you know, that’s unfair. Move on.
ANNE GRADY:
When you’re grateful for what you have, you come from a place of abundance instead of a place of lack. You know, we were sitting around the living room last night and I looked up and I was like, you know what? We need to replace this and this is old and we should do this. And I started going through this list and I felt myself getting very stressed out. Like all the money, all the things, all the time. And I was like, okay, well at least I’m going to balance it out. I’m so grateful that I have concrete floors because my dog just threw up and there wasn’t carpet to get ruined. And I am so grateful that we have running water because we didn’t when the storm hit last weekend. And you forget how much you depend on running water.
ANNE GRADY:
Like there’s always something and the goal is not to wear rose colored glasses and pretend that the hard stuff doesn’t exist. Stand toxic positivity. Like when you’re going through something and you have somebody who’s like, turn that crown upside down so much to be grateful. I just want to throat punch them because not only is it not helpful, it makes you feel horrible. However, you can always look for what’s right. And so I always suggest teams start with that in meetings. What’s one thing in your life that’s right right now? And go around the room, virtual or in person. And what that does is it immediately puts people’s brain in a state of safety.
ANNE GRADY:
It makes them more collaborative, it makes them less skeptical and critical. It makes people feel safe. So I don’t know, try it at the dinner table. What’s one thing you’re excited about, Proud of, grateful for, looking forward to. Because we wait for a better mood to take action when in reality we can take action that creates a better mood. Gratitude is one of those things that completely changes your brain for the better. Thousands of studies have documented it. Everything from pain to aging to depression and anxiety, sleep, cancer recovery, all of it.
ANNE GRADY:
There’s so much research out there. Focus on what’s right.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Again, you’re not denying the realities of life. You’re not denying that you’re getting older or that you have this issue or that issue. But you’re focusing. I like what you said. You’re focusing on the abundance that you have that sometimes we take for Granted, running water, electricity, technology. Man, we need to be grateful for these things.
ANNE GRADY:
You know, I was in a conversation earlier today with a client and she kept saying, I’m so frustrated, I’m so angry, I’m so disappointed. And I heard it over and over and over again. And what we rehearse and what we repeat, we reinforce. So if you catch yourself saying, I’m disappointed, I’m frustrated, I’m angry, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like stop and ask yourself, is that the way I want to feel? No, of course not. You don’t want to feel angry and disappointed and frustrated. It’s not serving a purpose. Great. Well, you can make the choice to keep going down that road or you can make the choice to shift it.
ANNE GRADY:
Emotions or muscles, the ones we use most get stronger. Your nervous system. Same thing if you’re in a fight or flight state. The more often you are, the easier. It’s your default. You can train these things, but you have to be aware of it. And the mistake we make is trying to fix everything at once. December 31st, that’s it.
ANNE GRADY:
Tomorrow I’m going to the gym, I’m going to eat better, be a better person, go to church, not drink. You know, by January 15th, you have a beer in one hand, a cheeseburger in the other. You went to the gym. It hurt. Like, why would I do that on purpose? And we go right back because we’re trying to change everything.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yes.
ANNE GRADY:
Gradual, subtle baby changes. Put a sticky note on your bathroom mirror and mine. I have a sticky note on my bathroom mirror that says, what do you want to see today? And it’s a reminder to look for kindness and gratitude and the good stuff, not just the things that piss me off. Because if you look for that, there’s no shortage. You will find. But it’s a habit.
BERT MARTINEZ:
It is a habit. Yes. Everything. Everything’s a habit. You can custom make just about everything. I want to talk about this because again, in the book you cover energy and you say that time isn’t the problem, energy is. So it kind of explain this and then maybe talk about some of the biggest energy leaks that people don’t realize they have.
ANNE GRADY:
You know, we all have the same amount of time, but you’ve probably experienced when you have a lot of energy and then not all energy is created equal. There’s social, emotional, mental, physical. Right. So there’s different types of energy, but you’ve probably had a time where you were firing on all cylinders and you were able to get a lot done in a short period. Of time and other times where you were just dragging and even the tiniest tasks seemed to take forever. Time wasn’t the issue in either of those situations. Your energy was. And we.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s kind of like hot water or wi fi. You don’t notice until you don’t have it. And one of the simplest leaks that we can fill is something that most of us don’t even realize we do. What should I eat? What should I watch? What should I wear? Do I respond to this email now or do I wait till later? We make thousands of decisions every day. We make 200 decisions plus every day. About food. Just about food. And every decision uses fuel that diminishes cognitive bandwidth to the point where when you get home after work and someone’s like, what’s for dinner? It’s like a full blown meltdown.
ANNE GRADY:
You can’t answer one more question. If you want to make better decisions and you want to have more energy, make less decisions. So pick one thing that you do every single day that you try to figure out. Whether it’s food, what to wear, where to go. Should I work out, should I? Whatever. Pick one reoccurring decision. Create a go to solution. Try it for a week.
ANNE GRADY:
If it saves you energy without sucking the joy out of your life, awesome. You have a winner. I mean, it’s why, you know, Stephen King writes at the same time in the same place every single day. It’s why Barack Obama wore the same suit. It’s why Steve Jobs wore the same outfit. These really great smart people have figured out, why would I use my cognitive energy on things I don’t have to? How can you lighten your load? But if you want to gain energy, most of us wait for motivation to move, but it actually works the other way around. So movement is what creates motivation. It changes your body chemistry and it doesn’t take much.
ANNE GRADY:
Four minutes of brisk, anything like dancing, running around, jogging, whatever. Four minutes of brisk exercise a day reduces your risk of dying from cancer by over 30%. Stand up once an hour, you significantly reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, obesity, the list just goes on at Stand up once an hour though, if you really want to knock it out of the park. The reason I go shovel donkey stalls first thing when I wake up in the morning is because it hits all of these things. One, Sunlight. You want sunlight as soon as possible, right? It helps your circadian clock, it helps you sleep, it balances your hormones. Movement. If you can walk for 10 minutes in the morning, outside, amazing.
ANNE GRADY:
Because as the world passes by, you left and right. It’s called optic flow, and it reduces activity in the amygdala, which is the threat detection center. So spending time with something that brings you joy. I love my donkeys, right? I think one just walked by not too long ago. They bring me joy, you know, so I want to spend. I want to start my day with something that brings me joy. So, you know, if I’m speaking early in the morning or if I’m not here, obviously I’m not going to shovel donkey stalls, but it’s just something that allows me to be outdoors. So find something in the morning to start your day without social, without news, without your phone, and notice the difference in your energy levels.
ANNE GRADY:
It’s really incredible. And if you’re like one of those caffeine people, it’s kind of like, great, have your two cups of coffee, but if you’re doing that all day long, you’re disrupting your sleep, which disrupts your mental health, your physical health, and everything in between gets harder. So, yeah, energy is important.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Yeah, energy is vitally important. Because what I have found out is that when you have low energy, you know, you get a little. Your posture kind of droops and you’re almost on the. Being low energy and droopy and being depressed are like, so close together. And to your point about, you know, movement, that movement equals emotion. Getting out, getting that sunlight and. And things of that nature, I think is so vital. And sleep is super, super vital, especially the older you get.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And I think the food that we eat.
ANNE GRADY:
So it’s interesting that you brought that up because that was the biggest change in my energy from anything I’ve tried. So when I had back surgery, I was in so much pain, and I asked the doctor for anything I could do to manage it, and he said, well, the pain’s coming from inflammation and what you’re eating is driving it. So he asked me to go through what I ate on a normal day. And first I was embarrassed when I wrote out the list because I was like, ice cream, cookies, protein bar, energy drink, blah, blah, blah, bl. And then I was like, oh, crap. No wonder I feel horrible. But I made a drastic change to my diet a year ago, and I started out Carnivore, fully carnivore for about two weeks, and I missed vegetables and sauce. So then I introduced vegetables and a little bit like barbecue sauce or ketchup or whatever, right? And now occasionally I’ll have, like, a treat or a snack that I like, but for the most part, I’ve Cut out processed food, foods and bread and pasta.
ANNE GRADY:
And I was talking to my husband about it last night. I used to crash around 2 or 3 o’ clock in the afternoon and I would need like a cookie and a cup of coffee and like something I don’t crash anymore. Like, I have the same energy when all day long I might be tired in the morning, but I have the same energy because I didn’t realize how much the food was affecting it and my pain level. Like, I love cookies and cake and pasta and bread. They’re my favorite things. But I hate the way I feel. So now I make a decision. Is it worth it? I’m going on vacation.
ANNE GRADY:
While I’m speaking in Puerto Rico next week and making a vacation out of it. Am I going to eat a bunch of crap? Probably. Do I know that it’s probably going to affect how I feel? Yes. But what’s most important for me, Having fun on that trip. What choice reflects that? Not worrying about everything I put in my mouth and beating myself up over it, knowing that I’m going to go right back when I get home. So it, it all blends together, right? We’re all in this journey of life. Nobody has it all figured out. We all wake up and go, is this it? Is this what I signed up for? Yes, this is it, folks.
ANNE GRADY:
You are here. Find ways to enjoy it before you can’t enjoy it any longer. My friend John passed away at 59. One day he was fine, the next day he was dead. And he spent his whole life trying to make money and get awards and build his ego. And I loved him, but none of it made him happy. And now he doesn’t have a life with his family anymore. Right.
ANNE GRADY:
So be careful what you chase.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Absolutely. Because we have a limit, limited amount of time, a limited amount of energy. And I think it’s. It’s good to be focused and again, operate off your values. So I want to talk about this because again, this interview came about because you have a book that is either out or is coming out.
ANNE GRADY:
Yeah, it just came out. Evolving, Growing Forward, When Life Goes Sideways.
BERT MARTINEZ:
And tell us a little bit about the title. That’s a kind of a unique title. And so why did you come up with that title?
ANNE GRADY:
In biology, evolvability is an organism’s ability to adapt over time in response to pressure. So is ours. It’s how we adapt to change. It’s how we adapt to uncertainty. It’s how we deal with pressure and growing forward when life goes sideways, because it does. And we have A choice, we get buried by it, we sometimes just get back up. But we can grow from it, right? Think about anything you’ve been through in your life that was hard. I’m willing to bet you learned something as a result.
ANNE GRADY:
So we can.
BERT MARTINEZ:
Absolutely, absolutely. And what’s interesting to me is one of my favorite things to do are these things called Spartan races. And Spartan races are very popular and I think for a lot of people it’s probably the hardest thing they do, but they love it. It’s, you know, you’re out there, you’re doing these obstacles, you’re getting dirty. One of the obstacle, a couple of the obstacles get you muddy from head to toes. But people love it because sometimes it reminds us that we can do hard things and we forget that sometimes and those things force you to be in the moment.
ANNE GRADY:
Like one of my favorite pastimes, we named our riding lawnmower Marilyn Monmo. And my favorite pastime is riding that thing because you have to be present. Like when you’re doing these Spartan races, you’re not thinking about how to fix your podcast or do your thing or send your email. You’re. You’re in it. You have to be physically, mentally, emotionally in it. And that’s the same with mowing the grass, right? I’m going to run over something if I’m not paying attention attention.
ANNE GRADY:
You’ve got to find things that make you forget to check your phone.
BERT MARTINEZ:
So let me ask you this. As a resiliency, resilience and adaptability expert, what do you want people to take away from our conversation today?
ANNE GRADY:
That everyone is going through life the same way. And this is a science backed six step framework to navigate it. A portion of all the proceeds go to the national alliance on Mental Illness. And the thing I would say, if you could do anything, is focus on what’s most important to you right now. And whenever you’re making a choice, make sure it reflects that everything comes back to that. And it’s so simple, but it’s so profound and it will change the way you live your life.
BERT MARTINEZ:
I think it’s profound and I want to thank you so much for stopping by. I’m going to put a link to your book on the in the show notes as well as a link to your website in the show notes. And thank you so much for stopping by, Bert.
ANNE GRADY:
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation.
