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Hello everyone and welcome to Cuppa TV.
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It is another show called Pick My Brain where we're going to pick the brain of Jay Pottinger today.
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This show has been a long time coming but I can't wait to welcome in Jay very, very soon.
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Now before I kick it off, I just want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of countries throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connections today.
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to lands, water and community.
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I always want to pay my respects to the Elders, both past, present and emerging.
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And also I want to give thanks to the First Nations leaders, those Elders and storytellers who have appeared here on Kappa to share their wisdom with us pretty much when we're talking about wellbeing.
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The solution has been underneath our feet for 60,000 years and we just need to take the time more and more often to be in the moment.
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and appreciate what we already have.
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And I can't wait to welcome in Jay, but Jay is a former professional athlete turned corporate leader with 15 years of experience navigating the pressures of high-performance environments.
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Does that sound like you?
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He holds a postgraduate qualifications in neuroscience and mental health and also an accredited mindfulness and meditation coach, bringing together the science and practical tools in a way that resonates.
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He's worked with some of the biggest brands in town, IAG, Woolworths, Estee Lauder, eBay and many, many others.
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And today let's bring him in for his first ever cuppa.
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Welcome Jay to cuppa.
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How are you?
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I am fantastic.
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Thanks for having me along.
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Excited to be here.
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A long time coming.
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Yeah, I know, mate.
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I know.
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We work.
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If you don't know, Jay is the husband of Chelsea Pottinger, who we've had on the screens many, many times.
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Jay and I have coordinated Chelsea to be on the screen many, many times.
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And we haven't had you on yet, mate.
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So I do want to apologize for that because you're a force in your own right.
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But how are you today?
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I'm great.
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Everything is very well.
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And my lovely wife is doing well as well.
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So that means life is good for everyone.
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Yep, good point.
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Jay, you know, you've lived with the intensity of corporate leadership, sports and family life.
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Now, I'm guessing, was it before Chelsea you met Chelsea?
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Or when did you first realise your own brain needed to recharge more often?
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Ah, interesting question to kick it off.
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I think when I look back...
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playing a lot of sport as a kid and then as a young adult as well, I think athletes sort of realise that there's a real need to recharge to take care of yourself off the court as well as on the court.
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And maybe the corporate world hasn't quite caught up with that, although it is changing a lot.
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But I certainly understood the benefit of recharging back when I was playing sport and try and use those very skills today in the corporate world.
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So going back to your old sporting life, what was your sport, by the way?
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I played basketball a long, long time ago.
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I wasn't good enough to make a full career at it, but I certainly gave it a crack and had a lot of fun along on the journey and got to travel to some amazing places.
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And it took me all over Australia and indeed even into America at times.
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So it was good fun.
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It was great fun.
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Bit of b-ball, eh?
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Bit of b-ball, bit of b-ball.
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Although when I went and played in the States, I quickly realised that I was certainly never going to make an amazing career out of it.
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Being a white fellow that can't particularly shoot that well is not a good baseline to make an amazing amount of money in the professional space.
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Mate, what did sport actually teach you besides the wellbeing angle and recharging?
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What else did it teach you?
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I think it's incredible.
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Like now that I have a young family, my little girls started playing basketball.
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I think everyone should play team sports or at least do something in a team environment because you learn how to interact with people.
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You learn all those incredible skills that overlap into the real world and the working world around how do you deal with other people.
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How do you have leadership, whether it's your own or managing other people's leadership?
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How do you interact with all these people?
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How do you have discipline to show up every day and be the best version of yourself?
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And again, as we sort of kicked off the conversation with, how do you make sure that you're taking care of yourself off the court
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as well as on the court because lots of people say, you know, I want to be a high performance at work.
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I'm going to be a high performer at work.
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And then when you look at their activities off the pitch, you go, well, you're not really going to be a great performer in the workplace because all those behaviors that you have outside of work is not setting you up for success.
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And in fact, they're setting you up for failure.
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That's why I really love like former or ex-athletes being able to go into organisations with that type of mindset because you all know what peak performance is.
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You all know what you need to do to protect your most valuable asset, which is your body and your brain and your mind and all that type of stuff.
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So let's get into today's conversation a little bit more.
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How are you seeing the current market at the moment, especially when it comes to the modern world that we are living in and how it's accelerating today?
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you know, potentially stress and burnout over the last sort of 10 years since you've been really working in this space?
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Yeah, well, I mean, it just seems to get busier and more intense.
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And you've probably heard of this phase,
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a point that people talk about work intensification where, and there's a few factors that go into that and it seems to be more than ever.
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And that's just the fact that we've been asked to do more with less resources.
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We're really required to not only manage, if you're a manager, especially to manage the role of people, but the whole of person.
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And there's been lots of changes around psychological safety and all the things that go into that.
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And then on top of that, it seems like it's harder than ever to do business.
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There's more people involved in the decision-making process.
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There's more bureaucracy.
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So, you know, on one hand, we're being asked to do more, but then we're making it harder to do that more.
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And we wonder why people are completely burnt out.
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And then on top of that, you've obviously got this, the problem of technology where we're just constantly connected.
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And there really is no psychological detachment anymore.
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We are always on.
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Even if you think, you know, it used to be that when work finished, you would, you know, the bell would ring and you'd walk out the door and that'd be it.
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Now the bell rings, you get home and the email dings and the phone rings and you never get detached from that work.
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And I think that's causing a significant amount of stress and a significant amount of burnout as well, especially with those high performers and the perfectionists that put so much pressure on themselves.
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which I'm sure you can probably relate to a little bit.
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I was waiting for the secondary comment after you mentioned that, which everyone, Jay's really talking through my eyes right now because I am a bit of a perfectionist and a high achiever and want to just keep striving.
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And I think it's important that we all realise that, you know, that is not sustainable for the long term.
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Yeah, but it's a double-edged sword, right?
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You need that.
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You need that there to drive business, to make sure that you are a high performer.
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So you've got to have an element of that.
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But you also have to surround yourself with the support network that says, hey, it's probably time to take the foot off the accelerator a little bit.
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We're in this for a marathon, not 100-meter sprint that we're kind of trying to sustain for a marathon-like duration.
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I need you to put a diary note in for the next eight weeks.
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Just give me eight weeks, okay?
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And then, Jay, you can give me a call.
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Eight weeks.
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That's a significant amount of time to be sprinting there, Cookie.
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I'm like Farlap, brother.
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I'm like Farlap.
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No, I'm joking.
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We all know how that ended.
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So we won't go down that path.
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But, man, let's talk about the neuroscience a little bit.
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Let's get into the brain and the impacts that stress has.
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Like, what are we talking about here?
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Yeah, well, I mean, that's a big question.
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What are we talking about in terms of just overall stress or in terms of what are sort of some of the themes that we're seeing pop out at the moment with this constant connection that we have?
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Yeah, I think I'd like to know what the impact that stress has on the brain first, just so we can be really clear around that.
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I'm also keen to understand, well, you know, if we're, yeah, let's start there.
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Let's go there first.
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Yeah, so the impact of stress on the brain.
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I think one of the problems we have is stress is causing a lot of issues.
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And if we just put inflammation to the side, which is a huge concern, because if we have inflammation in the body and the brain for a long, sustained period of time, you've got all types of problems going to come out of that.
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In extreme cases, we're going to get all these inflammatory diseases.
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So that's one big problem.
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But just on a short term and acute sort of perspective, when we are stressed, we are not performing well.
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It causes these, we'll call them malfunctions, or the connectivity in our brain is not happening properly.
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And therefore, this connection between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic brain, the amygdala, is, you know, that connection piece gets sort of thrown out of the window and we flip our lid and we become more reactive, we become,
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more responsive.
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And because of that, that causes all different types of problems in terms of not only how we deal with things, how we're able to focus, but also our relationships as well.
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We've all had times when we're stressed and, you know, especially as parents, you know, this, if you're stressed, you're,
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then you're not making the right decisions and your kids do the littlest thing and you completely overreact.
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Well, that happens at home.
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It happens in the workplace as well.
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And there's consequences that come from that.
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So managing stress and having specific tools that we can use to manage stress is super important so that we can be more rational in our decision making.
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And we can also have much better relationships as well.
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And, you know, certainly as a dad, it's something that I'm constantly battling with, constantly trying to get better at so that I am not as reactive when it comes to my parenting with my poor little one that sometimes cops the wrath, which is completely unfair.
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No, it is definitely unfair.
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And, you know, I've had to pull myself up a fair bit around that myself, just looking at my own parenting style and just not taking it out on them if I've had a stressful day and stuff like that as well.
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Sometimes it's harder to do in the moment, but it's an always on learning, isn't it?
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Oh, it's super hard, right?
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But we do need to remember that our emotions are contagious.
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And, you know, if you're in a good mood, well, guess what?
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Everyone wants to be around you.
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You're incredible.
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It's fantastic.
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But if you're stressed, you like to pass that stress on to everyone around you, whether that's at work or at home as well.
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And that's when you certainly aren't being the best version of yourself.
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Yeah.
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Now, everyone, if you can see the chat room, that means you are logged in as one of our free memberships.
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Please use the chat room today.
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Just put down what's resonating with you today as well.
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If you haven't signed up to our free membership, you can do so after the show.
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Make sure that you never miss out on any of our replays, et cetera.
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You talk a lot about, mate, the small shifts that actually create the big impact.
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What's one small daily shift that makes a huge difference in your mind?
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Yeah, I think these tiny little habits make a huge difference, not only to how we perform, but our perspective on things as well.
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And I know you've spoken to my lovely wife before.
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She's very big on not picking up the phone first thing in the morning and
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I think there's actually so much science behind why we shouldn't pick up the phone first thing in the morning.
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When you pick up the phone, you think about it yourself.
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You pick up that phone and, you know, you might get an email from your boss that's super triggering.
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That sucks.
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That's not a fun way to start the day.
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Or, you know, maybe you read a news article.
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That's always biased towards the negative.
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They've shown just 14 minutes of news exposure a day is going to increase your stress and reduce your mood and actually make you more likely to personally catastrophize other events in your life simply by looking at 14 minutes of news.
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So why are we starting our day by picking up the phone and starting to program our brain for negativity throughout the day?
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So before you, you know, jump out of bed, just, you know,
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practice gratitude, you know, think about some positive things, go for a walk, do anything but pick up that phone for the first time in the morning.
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So that would be one thing.
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But something else that I think is super important for, especially for the high performers and, you know, those people that are listening today that are very busy at work,
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is simply taking little breaks.
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And I know that sounds, yeah, duh, Jake, no surprise.
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We know we need to have little breaks.
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But there is actually studies showing that if we're not taking breaks, our performance deteriorates and our ability to concentrate deteriorates.
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So that's a big thing.
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But more importantly, we are going to feel so much better if we have
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a couple of little breaks throughout the day.
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And I'm not talking about going for a two-hour walk at lunch.
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I'm just talking about five minutes of downtime.
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But there's a key thing here, Cookie, and that's when people have downtime, what do people do as soon as they have five minutes?
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Yeah, pick up that phone and start scrolling.
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And of course, like the phone's amazing when it's used in the right way.
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But most of the things we do on the phone are actually cortisol inducing rather than cortisol reducing.
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So the stress hormones.
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So.
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We get to the end of the day, we're completely burnt out and we wonder why are we so stressed?
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I feel completely depleted.
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Well, you haven't actually taken a break the entire day because every single break that you've had, that morning break, when you're having a cup of tea, you've got your phone scrolling, you grab your sandwich, you sit at your desk and you scroll on your phone, you're actually just depleting your dopamine reserves, probably because you're flicking through social media or something.
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Or you're causing cortisol because you're looking at your emails.
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So we just need a few little moments throughout the day just to downregulate and let that system have a bit of a break.
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And I heard a great sort of way to sort of think about it is, you know, we would never let our phone batteries go to zero.
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And yet every single day, we never put ourselves on the charger and just let our brains recharge.
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Yeah.
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I think that's pretty simple that, you know, it's a nice, easy way to look at it.
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Just have a few minutes on the charger so that you can feel better and you can perform better.
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What's your morning routine like, mate?
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Talk to us about your morning routine.
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What does it consist of?
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Yeah, well, look, my morning routine is probably not optimal.
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And lots of people will look at this and go, that's probably not the best way to start your day.
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But we're all different and individual and have to work out our own routines that fit in with the different lifestyle factors we have.
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So for me, the first thing I do in the morning is I wake up and I write down five things that I'm grateful for in my journal just to start with.
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what's called our reticular activating system for positivity.
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So I do that first thing in the morning and then I go straight.
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Well, sorry, I have a glass of water and then I go straight in after doing a little bit of stretching, five minutes of stretching, I will go into the office and I will try and bang out as much work as I can before the rest of the house goes.
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gets up.
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I'm a bit of a weirdo.
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I go to sleep very, very early at night, but I'm up super early.
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So I'm up sort of around 4.30 or 5 every single morning.
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And I will try and work for a couple of hours before the household gets up because that's the time when it's absolute bliss.
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There's no interruptions.
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There's no emails.
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There's no phone calls.
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So by the time the rest of the family gets up, I sort of feel like I've already had, you know, achieved a lot during the day and ticked off those things that are on my to-do list.
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And certainly those things that require the most attention to sort of move the needle in my world is done.
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So that's how I would start the day.
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In an ideal world, I think you would throw a little bit of exercise in there, but, again, you've got to work out when are you feeling your best, how's everything going to fit into the very busy schedules that we all have.
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Well, and this is the thing, mate, there's nothing wrong with what you suggested there because you've created your own operating system of knowing what you need to do and when, and that helps you optimise, you know, your own work performance but also your wellbeing as well.
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So I think that's important, right, because I think everyone wants this,
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one size fits all solution, but each one of us has our own nuances and ability to be able to do things.
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Like when I don't have the kids, that's, I do, I get up really early.
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I go for a walk.
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I do a breathwork practice.
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I come home, I have a cold shower.
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I go have breakfast before I even look at my emails.
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And that's something that I've got into, but I can't do it every day because some days I've got the kids who are sleeping in my bed at 4.30 in the morning or five because they want to come in for daddy cuddles.
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And that's amazing too, right?
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I don't want to lose that moment either.
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So, you know, you've got to balance it.
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But I love some of those thoughts and perspectives there.
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Now, EQ Minds, the business that you and Chelsea operate, you work with leaders all the time, high-performance teams.
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How do we better recognise the early signs of fatigue in ourselves but also our teams?
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Like how do we really know that we're just pushing that lid too far or pushing that stick too hard for it?
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Yeah, well, obviously there's a lot of things that, you know, you start feeling from a body and brain perspective.
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But I think some of the things that we constantly or may well overlook is we start sort of getting this apathy towards work when we're really in this burnout phase.
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We're starting to think, well, why am I actually doing this?
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Do I actually really care?
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And so you start losing that motivation and it depends on how extreme you are on the spectrum of things.
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It might well be that you just lose all motivation and you feel just completely depleted and you're like, that's it, I'm throwing everything off the desk, I can't do it anymore.
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But, again, it's all individual and it depends on how far you are.
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But the quicker you can pick up on some of these changes that's happening, and often it's changes in your behaviour,
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So you start doing things differently than you would normally do.
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You start those bad behaviours start creeping in.
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Maybe you start having an extra glass of wine at night.
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Maybe it's that, you know, you start skipping exercise.
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You start, you know, maybe making poor food choices or at night you're like, you know, I'm just going to watch an extra 30 minutes of TV because I'm just completely burnt out.
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And you look at these sort of bad behaviours as soothing behaviours
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But again, they're just contributing to you feeling worse and worse as we go down the track.
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I found it really interesting.
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I saw this research from the CEO Institute and they surveyed 1,000 of their members, all CEOs.
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Number two of their challenges at the moment is their own mental health.
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it popped up as the second biggest challenge, like alongside like AI and the emergence of technology and what does that mean for the future of our business.
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But their own physical mental health is being identified as one of the biggest challenges.
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How do we get it right when the CEOs are struggling?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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You know what I mean?
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Like, and I don't know if you're going to be able to solve that, but like I sit there and I go, out of those thousand CEOs, over 50% of them more identified that mental health was a massive issue.
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Yeah.
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I'm sitting there going, like, how does this all carry through?
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Where's the systemic change that we need to create inside businesses?
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So the CEO is thriving, as will the team.
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Yeah, it's a great point and something that we're seeing consistently, although there is also a certain segment that I think is starting to take a lot better care of their mental health.
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I don't know if you've ever heard of the big five around mental health, so the big five for good mental health.
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And it's all these things we know about, and yet they're the most important factors when it comes to what we thought was physical health, but also mental health as well.
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So if you think about, you know, are you sleeping well?
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Yeah.
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Are you eating well?
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Are you taking care of your stress?
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So your mindfulness.
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What else have we got in there?
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Are you connecting with those people?
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You know, so very important.
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And I'm missing one there.
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What's the one I'm missing?
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So what do we do?
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Sleep, nutrition, nutrition.
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Connection.
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What about spiritual exercise?
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Exercise, of course.
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So you look at these five factors and you go, oh, of course, everyone knows that.
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But how many people are actually taking care of all of those five factors and sort of looping back into the start of the conversation?
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These high performers, they're so busy.
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The to-do list never ends.
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What are the things that fall off that?
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Yeah.
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It's taking care of yourself.
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It's making sure I'm busy.
285
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I need to just work late tonight.
286
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Your sleep goes out the window.
287
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Oh, my sleep goes out the window.
288
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So my hormones are all out of whack.
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That means I'm going to start making bad food choices.
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And it's just sort of domino effect that starts plaguing not only the CEOs, but high performers, everyone.
291
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And we sort of end up, well, our mental health is suffering, but it's actually our entire well-being that is suffering.
292
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It's just that the mental health has become
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sort of very prominent at the moment and everyone's identifying, well, my mental health is not that great, but it's actually their overall wellbeing often is problematic.
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And so I think that's something.
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It's how do we start prioritising wellbeing?
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You know, and again, it's about if you want to perform well on the court or in the office, you have to perform well off.
297
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You have to recharge.
298
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You have to take care of those things that are going to so very much impact your performance in life.
299
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Many of us high performers feel guilty about slowing down.
300
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I hear this every single day.
301
00:22:20.376 --> 00:22:26.820
How do we make it a reframe that you should be proud about slowing down?
302
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Because obviously I love seeing what you and Chelsea post.
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on social media about taking breaks and what is it, once every four weeks or once every... Six weeks, yep.
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Once every six weeks.
305
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You take a little break every six weeks.
306
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Well, I'll ask you this question, Cookie.
307
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When do you perform at your best?
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When do you perform?
309
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So when you arrive at the office and you know that you're going to be at your best cognitively, what's happened in your life?
310
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What's going on?
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I've had a good sleep.
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Had a good sleep.
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Firstly?
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Yeah.
315
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Yeah.
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Had a good sleep.
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I've woken up without any interruptions.
318
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So, yeah, it's good when the kids aren't jumping in the bed.
319
00:23:03.597 --> 00:23:07.099
You probably didn't drink beers the night before.
320
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Yeah.
321
00:23:07.919 --> 00:23:11.301
Well, I've been off that for a while, so that doesn't feel it anymore.
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00:23:11.321 --> 00:23:13.683
You didn't have a kebab the night before.
323
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I've started the day with me, like for me.
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Does that make sense?
325
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Where I may have saw the sunrise or got by water.
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I've done a breath work, so I focus on my breath.
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Yeah, and I'm in flow.
328
00:23:27.436 --> 00:23:28.739
Like business-wise, I'm in flow.
329
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That's the other thing.
330
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Yeah.
331
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So it's all those things about, oh, I've taken care of myself off the court.
332
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I feel good.
333
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I've arrived at work and I'm going to punch out probably three times as much work as I would on a day where I don't feel great, you know, whatever that number is.
334
00:23:45.335 --> 00:23:52.621
So it's about reframing that actually, if I want to perform at my best, I have to perform at my best off the field as well.
335
00:23:52.722 --> 00:23:56.245
I have to be doing those little tiny little habits and they're all simple.
336
00:23:56.265 --> 00:23:56.745
They're all simple.
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They're not easy.
338
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They're hard to do, but they're simple.
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We all know them.
340
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If I'm taking care of all that stuff, when I arrive at work, I'm going to be at my best.
341
00:24:04.629 --> 00:24:08.912
And so it's reframing that around how can I perform better?
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Well, I need to take care of this stuff.
343
00:24:10.733 --> 00:24:13.374
It's a bit like a professional team.
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If you think about, you know, your favourite professional team, if you said to them, hey, I don't care about what you do off the pitch.
345
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You do whatever you want.
346
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It's just we're just going to care about the, you know,
347
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The one hour during the week where you're actually, you know, on the pitch playing, can you imagine how well that team would perform?
348
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They'd be horrible.
349
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They'd be at the bottom of the ladder because their performances would be just horrific because people would be off having the time of their lives off the field and the performance would suffer so significantly.
350
00:24:42.827 --> 00:24:45.588
And then, yeah, that's what many people do in the corporate world.
351
00:24:48.069 --> 00:24:50.870
How do we have guys to lean into this conversation more?
352
00:24:50.890 --> 00:24:53.531
I know it's not just a guys and girls thing, but, you know, many –
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Many, like I think a lot of men in particular in these senior level roles because that's what dominates the senior level roles.
354
00:25:02.436 --> 00:25:08.058
But, you know, how do we get them to realise this impact before it's too late?
355
00:25:08.138 --> 00:25:12.078
I lost my dad when I was four and it was due to a heart condition, right?
356
00:25:12.098 --> 00:25:14.659
So it was nothing to do with this component.
357
00:25:14.739 --> 00:25:15.419
Or maybe it was.
358
00:25:15.459 --> 00:25:18.600
He was a sales director of a fruit juice company.
359
00:25:18.620 --> 00:25:21.380
Surprise, surprise that I'm in sales as well in many parts.
360
00:25:21.440 --> 00:25:24.841
But, you know, I'm worried about...
361
00:25:25.828 --> 00:25:28.951
the rates of suicide in men and especially older men as well.
362
00:25:29.011 --> 00:25:30.853
Like how, because this is all, it all stems with this.
363
00:25:30.873 --> 00:25:32.034
We're not looking after ourselves.
364
00:25:32.714 --> 00:25:33.495
Yeah, a hundred percent.
365
00:25:33.535 --> 00:25:37.739
Well, we do what you've started to do, which you've been doing for a long time.
366
00:25:37.779 --> 00:25:48.749
Now you create communities where that awareness is, is available and that connection is there so that people can come together and learn about best practice and understand all,
367
00:25:48.969 --> 00:25:56.155
oh, there is a way that I can actually feel better because my mate Joe over here is doing that very thing and look at him go.
368
00:25:56.235 --> 00:25:56.956
He feels great.
369
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He's always got energy.
370
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He's performing better.
371
00:26:00.099 --> 00:26:01.540
And we start bouncing off each other.
372
00:26:01.620 --> 00:26:04.242
But that all comes back to having these communities.
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I know for myself, you know, I live down in this tiny little town on the south coast.
374
00:26:10.077 --> 00:26:16.203
And I'm so very fortunate because there's a really great little community down here and especially a male community.
375
00:26:16.223 --> 00:26:17.364
I'm part of a fitness club.
376
00:26:17.764 --> 00:26:19.085
And these guys, they're awesome.
377
00:26:19.105 --> 00:26:19.726
They're all fit.
378
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They're all healthy.
379
00:26:20.626 --> 00:26:22.168
They're all bouncing off each other.
380
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And it inspires you to make sure that, you know, you're there on a Wednesday and a Saturday working out next to them because, you know, you're going to be feeling great after that.
381
00:26:32.097 --> 00:26:42.525
and when we go and have a coffee after the event, you know, you've earned that coffee and you know you're going to have a great chat as well and you're going to talk about all different things that are going on in your life, including how do you perform better?
382
00:26:42.766 --> 00:26:46.168
So I think it's about those things that you're creating, mate, around the community.
383
00:26:46.188 --> 00:26:49.711
Define mindfulness for me, mate.
384
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Like, you know what I mean?
385
00:26:53.535 --> 00:26:57.398
Because mindfulness and meditation, right, sometimes people think that's a little bit fluffy.
386
00:26:58.248 --> 00:26:58.528
Yeah.
387
00:26:59.009 --> 00:27:04.373
So I think mindfulness tools and mindfulness get mixed up a lot.
388
00:27:04.573 --> 00:27:11.719
So meditation is just one mindfulness tool that is available to make you more mindful.
389
00:27:12.319 --> 00:27:16.563
So mindfulness is really just the intentional use of your attention.
390
00:27:17.323 --> 00:27:21.447
You know, if you looked at the definitions, they'd probably say in a non-judgmental way.
391
00:27:21.467 --> 00:27:22.387
But yeah,
392
00:27:23.108 --> 00:27:27.469
There is a million different tools that exist in order to be mindful.
393
00:27:27.489 --> 00:27:37.951
So you don't have to go and sit under a tree and meditate for 40 minutes a day chanting, you know, in some crazy earth year just to be mindful.
394
00:27:38.272 --> 00:27:52.875
Being mindful is just about taking little moments throughout the day to actually be present, to be in this moment, to be here with you right now, to be mindful in the conversation, to listen to people when they're talking rather than, you know,
395
00:27:54.217 --> 00:27:56.261
these other things that fill up our words.
396
00:27:56.281 --> 00:28:04.316
And unfortunately, I think devices have really amplified the non-mindfulness that's existing in today's world.
397
00:28:05.121 --> 00:28:09.204
You just walk around the street and people are engaged.
398
00:28:09.244 --> 00:28:16.169
They're engaging their prefrontal cortex into a little tiny device and they've got no idea what's going on in the world.
399
00:28:16.469 --> 00:28:21.533
Is that mindful living or is that just living in a constant state of distraction?
400
00:28:22.874 --> 00:28:26.857
So it's just being more in the present moment is what it comes down to.
401
00:28:26.877 --> 00:28:31.521
I saw a perfect illustration of a phone with a dog lead to the person
402
00:28:32.301 --> 00:28:37.163
around the neck saying that the phone's leading them, not the other way around.
403
00:28:37.183 --> 00:28:38.084
Absolutely.
404
00:28:38.104 --> 00:28:52.510
And that's sort of if you start looking at that when you're out and about and you see all these phones out there and just picture that dog lead just carrying them around, just, you know, I'm leading you and that's a big, big part of everything that we're challenged with today.
405
00:28:53.110 --> 00:28:54.751
That's a perfect illustration of it.
406
00:28:55.713 --> 00:28:56.834
It's been absolutely amazing.
407
00:28:57.034 --> 00:29:10.379
And you're part of our broader community at Kappa, where we have got this incredible platform that if you do want to engage Jay in anything, you can actually find out more about how Jay can help all the different offerings and services here as well.
408
00:29:10.999 --> 00:29:13.060
All the info is there.
409
00:29:13.100 --> 00:29:14.100
Some even fun facts.
410
00:29:14.120 --> 00:29:15.100
What's your fun fact, mate?
411
00:29:15.220 --> 00:29:18.322
Basketball allowed you to travel, surfing or skiing, your happy places.
412
00:29:19.242 --> 00:29:21.963
You've worked with your wife for over six years and you're still together.
413
00:29:22.003 --> 00:29:22.983
That's the biggest one there.
414
00:29:23.043 --> 00:29:23.844
Is that fun fact?
415
00:29:23.944 --> 00:29:24.484
That's a good one.
416
00:29:25.164 --> 00:29:32.499
yeah it's still it's even getting longer now it's craziness yeah she's my boss as well so that's even worse but everyone please
417
00:29:34.365 --> 00:29:36.627
Please do check out Jay's profile.
418
00:29:36.767 --> 00:29:40.731
And if you do want to get in contact with Jay, you can directly message him in this platform as well.
419
00:29:40.771 --> 00:29:42.352
So please make sure that you do reach out.
420
00:29:42.492 --> 00:29:44.714
I've also put a QR code at the top of the screen.
421
00:29:44.734 --> 00:29:47.017
If you want to scan that right now, you can do that also.
422
00:29:47.777 --> 00:29:51.861
Jay, what would be some final comments or words that you want to leave our audience with?
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Or what's the first step that they should take today after this conversation?
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I think one of the best things you can do is literally carve out five or 10 minutes in your day, go sit in a quiet spot.
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If you can do it in nature, it would be even better.
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And just reflect and reflect on where you're at.
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Am I happy with where I am right now?
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Am I happy with my behaviors and where they're going to take me in the next 10, 20, 30 years?
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Or is it time to make a little change that's going to help me become the person that I want to be and make me feel better and take care of my mental health?
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And if the answer is I'm good with it, fantastic.
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But if it's not, what's the one little change that you can make today to start moving towards that person that you want to be?
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What a beautiful way to end this show, Jay.
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It's been absolutely incredible for your first Cuppa appearance.
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I do want to say thank you, mate, for being part of our community and always being a great, you know, person to bounce off ideas and be there whenever I need it as well.
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You and Chelsea are incredible in what you do.
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And more and more organisations should be lapping this up.
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Thank you so much, mate, for being a part of Cuppa.
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Mate, I appreciate it.
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And thanks so much for creating this amazing community that's helping people come together and share these different ideas and just support each other as well.
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So thanks so much.
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Thank you, mate.
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And thank you, everyone, for joining in today.
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Make sure you tune in to our other couple of sessions.
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We have loaded October to the brink, so make sure that you check out all the shows that you have coming up and also join our free membership.
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00:31:21.985 --> 00:31:24.006
That means you don't miss out on any communication.
446
00:31:24.026 --> 00:31:27.048
It means you can join in on the chat rooms and also check out all the replays.
447
00:31:27.768 --> 00:31:29.629
Ah, and we also have other big news.
448
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The reason why I said to Jay that, you know, the next eight weeks are intense and to give me a call is we're launching our first ever venue.
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I don't know.
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I think it would probably be our last ever venue in all honesty because it's so intense.
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But this little cafe backdrop and just a reminder, this is just a $40 poster on the wall, which I started with five years ago when at the start of COVID I launched this virtual cafe.
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So this $40 poster is going to be rolled up.
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We will have a brand new venue in Baringaroo at International Towers in Sydney.
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If you want to check out what it is, you can go to our website, Kappa.TV, check out the venue tab and find out more information.
455
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If you are a workplace, you can hold off-site days there, workshops, we can bring in talent like Jay to help out with those days that you want to do it.
456
00:32:15.472 --> 00:32:35.795
um and please do check it out you can make an inquiry online there and we'll get in contact it launches in mid-november so 2026 here we come we're going to have our brand new venue in barangaroo ready to go for you uh that is it everyone thank you so much for being a part of cuppa today it's been an absolute privilege and once again make sure you check out all our other shows uh coming up for the month of october talk to you soon bye
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Hello everyone and welcome to Cuppa TV.
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It is another show called Pick My Brain where we're going to pick the brain of Jay Pottinger today.
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This show has been a long time coming but I can't wait to welcome in Jay very, very soon.
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Now before I kick it off, I just want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of countries throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connections today.
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to lands, water and community.
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I always want to pay my respects to the Elders, both past, present and emerging.
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And also I want to give thanks to the First Nations leaders, those Elders and storytellers who have appeared here on Kappa to share their wisdom with us pretty much when we're talking about wellbeing.
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The solution has been underneath our feet for 60,000 years and we just need to take the time more and more often to be in the moment.
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and appreciate what we already have.
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And I can't wait to welcome in Jay, but Jay is a former professional athlete turned corporate leader with 15 years of experience navigating the pressures of high-performance environments.
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Does that sound like you?
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He holds a postgraduate qualifications in neuroscience and mental health and also an accredited mindfulness and meditation coach, bringing together the science and practical tools in a way that resonates.
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He's worked with some of the biggest brands in town, IAG, Woolworths, Estee Lauder, eBay and many, many others.
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And today let's bring him in for his first ever cuppa.
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Welcome Jay to cuppa.
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How are you?
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I am fantastic.
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Thanks for having me along.
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Excited to be here.
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A long time coming.
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Yeah, I know, mate.
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I know.
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We work.
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If you don't know, Jay is the husband of Chelsea Pottinger, who we've had on the screens many, many times.
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Jay and I have coordinated Chelsea to be on the screen many, many times.
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And we haven't had you on yet, mate.
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So I do want to apologize for that because you're a force in your own right.
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But how are you today?
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I'm great.
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Everything is very well.
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And my lovely wife is doing well as well.
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So that means life is good for everyone.
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Yep, good point.
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Jay, you know, you've lived with the intensity of corporate leadership, sports and family life.
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Now, I'm guessing, was it before Chelsea you met Chelsea?
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Or when did you first realise your own brain needed to recharge more often?
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Ah, interesting question to kick it off.
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I think when I look back...
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playing a lot of sport as a kid and then as a young adult as well, I think athletes sort of realise that there's a real need to recharge to take care of yourself off the court as well as on the court.
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And maybe the corporate world hasn't quite caught up with that, although it is changing a lot.
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But I certainly understood the benefit of recharging back when I was playing sport and try and use those very skills today in the corporate world.
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So going back to your old sporting life, what was your sport, by the way?
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I played basketball a long, long time ago.
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I wasn't good enough to make a full career at it, but I certainly gave it a crack and had a lot of fun along on the journey and got to travel to some amazing places.
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And it took me all over Australia and indeed even into America at times.
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So it was good fun.
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It was great fun.
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Bit of b-ball, eh?
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Bit of b-ball, bit of b-ball.
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Although when I went and played in the States, I quickly realised that I was certainly never going to make an amazing career out of it.
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Being a white fellow that can't particularly shoot that well is not a good baseline to make an amazing amount of money in the professional space.
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Mate, what did sport actually teach you besides the wellbeing angle and recharging?
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What else did it teach you?
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I think it's incredible.
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Like now that I have a young family, my little girls started playing basketball.
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I think everyone should play team sports or at least do something in a team environment because you learn how to interact with people.
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You learn all those incredible skills that overlap into the real world and the working world around how do you deal with other people.
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How do you have leadership, whether it's your own or managing other people's leadership?
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How do you interact with all these people?
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How do you have discipline to show up every day and be the best version of yourself?
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And again, as we sort of kicked off the conversation with, how do you make sure that you're taking care of yourself off the court
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as well as on the court because lots of people say, you know, I want to be a high performance at work.
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I'm going to be a high performer at work.
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And then when you look at their activities off the pitch, you go, well, you're not really going to be a great performer in the workplace because all those behaviors that you have outside of work is not setting you up for success.
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And in fact, they're setting you up for failure.
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That's why I really love like former or ex-athletes being able to go into organisations with that type of mindset because you all know what peak performance is.
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You all know what you need to do to protect your most valuable asset, which is your body and your brain and your mind and all that type of stuff.
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So let's get into today's conversation a little bit more.
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How are you seeing the current market at the moment, especially when it comes to the modern world that we are living in and how it's accelerating today?
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you know, potentially stress and burnout over the last sort of 10 years since you've been really working in this space?
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Yeah, well, I mean, it just seems to get busier and more intense.
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And you've probably heard of this phase,
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a point that people talk about work intensification where, and there's a few factors that go into that and it seems to be more than ever.
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And that's just the fact that we've been asked to do more with less resources.
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We're really required to not only manage, if you're a manager, especially to manage the role of people, but the whole of person.
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And there's been lots of changes around psychological safety and all the things that go into that.
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And then on top of that, it seems like it's harder than ever to do business.
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There's more people involved in the decision-making process.
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There's more bureaucracy.
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So, you know, on one hand, we're being asked to do more, but then we're making it harder to do that more.
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And we wonder why people are completely burnt out.
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And then on top of that, you've obviously got this, the problem of technology where we're just constantly connected.
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And there really is no psychological detachment anymore.
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We are always on.
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Even if you think, you know, it used to be that when work finished, you would, you know, the bell would ring and you'd walk out the door and that'd be it.
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Now the bell rings, you get home and the email dings and the phone rings and you never get detached from that work.
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And I think that's causing a significant amount of stress and a significant amount of burnout as well, especially with those high performers and the perfectionists that put so much pressure on themselves.
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which I'm sure you can probably relate to a little bit.
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I was waiting for the secondary comment after you mentioned that, which everyone, Jay's really talking through my eyes right now because I am a bit of a perfectionist and a high achiever and want to just keep striving.
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And I think it's important that we all realise that, you know, that is not sustainable for the long term.
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Yeah, but it's a double-edged sword, right?
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You need that.
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You need that there to drive business, to make sure that you are a high performer.
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So you've got to have an element of that.
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But you also have to surround yourself with the support network that says, hey, it's probably time to take the foot off the accelerator a little bit.
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We're in this for a marathon, not 100-meter sprint that we're kind of trying to sustain for a marathon-like duration.
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I need you to put a diary note in for the next eight weeks.
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Just give me eight weeks, okay?
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And then, Jay, you can give me a call.
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Eight weeks.
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That's a significant amount of time to be sprinting there, Cookie.
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I'm like Farlap, brother.
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I'm like Farlap.
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No, I'm joking.
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We all know how that ended.
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So we won't go down that path.
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But, man, let's talk about the neuroscience a little bit.
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Let's get into the brain and the impacts that stress has.
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Like, what are we talking about here?
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Yeah, well, I mean, that's a big question.
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What are we talking about in terms of just overall stress or in terms of what are sort of some of the themes that we're seeing pop out at the moment with this constant connection that we have?
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Yeah, I think I'd like to know what the impact that stress has on the brain first, just so we can be really clear around that.
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I'm also keen to understand, well, you know, if we're, yeah, let's start there.
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Let's go there first.
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Yeah, so the impact of stress on the brain.
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I think one of the problems we have is stress is causing a lot of issues.
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And if we just put inflammation to the side, which is a huge concern, because if we have inflammation in the body and the brain for a long, sustained period of time, you've got all types of problems going to come out of that.
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In extreme cases, we're going to get all these inflammatory diseases.
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So that's one big problem.
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But just on a short term and acute sort of perspective, when we are stressed, we are not performing well.
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It causes these, we'll call them malfunctions, or the connectivity in our brain is not happening properly.
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And therefore, this connection between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic brain, the amygdala, is, you know, that connection piece gets sort of thrown out of the window and we flip our lid and we become more reactive, we become,
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more responsive.
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And because of that, that causes all different types of problems in terms of not only how we deal with things, how we're able to focus, but also our relationships as well.
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We've all had times when we're stressed and, you know, especially as parents, you know, this, if you're stressed, you're,
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then you're not making the right decisions and your kids do the littlest thing and you completely overreact.
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Well, that happens at home.
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It happens in the workplace as well.
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And there's consequences that come from that.
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So managing stress and having specific tools that we can use to manage stress is super important so that we can be more rational in our decision making.
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And we can also have much better relationships as well.
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And, you know, certainly as a dad, it's something that I'm constantly battling with, constantly trying to get better at so that I am not as reactive when it comes to my parenting with my poor little one that sometimes cops the wrath, which is completely unfair.
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No, it is definitely unfair.
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And, you know, I've had to pull myself up a fair bit around that myself, just looking at my own parenting style and just not taking it out on them if I've had a stressful day and stuff like that as well.
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Sometimes it's harder to do in the moment, but it's an always on learning, isn't it?
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Oh, it's super hard, right?
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But we do need to remember that our emotions are contagious.
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And, you know, if you're in a good mood, well, guess what?
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Everyone wants to be around you.
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You're incredible.
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It's fantastic.
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But if you're stressed, you like to pass that stress on to everyone around you, whether that's at work or at home as well.
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And that's when you certainly aren't being the best version of yourself.
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Yeah.
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Now, everyone, if you can see the chat room, that means you are logged in as one of our free memberships.
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Please use the chat room today.
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Just put down what's resonating with you today as well.
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If you haven't signed up to our free membership, you can do so after the show.
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Make sure that you never miss out on any of our replays, et cetera.
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You talk a lot about, mate, the small shifts that actually create the big impact.
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What's one small daily shift that makes a huge difference in your mind?
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Yeah, I think these tiny little habits make a huge difference, not only to how we perform, but our perspective on things as well.
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And I know you've spoken to my lovely wife before.
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She's very big on not picking up the phone first thing in the morning and
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I think there's actually so much science behind why we shouldn't pick up the phone first thing in the morning.
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When you pick up the phone, you think about it yourself.
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You pick up that phone and, you know, you might get an email from your boss that's super triggering.
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That sucks.
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That's not a fun way to start the day.
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Or, you know, maybe you read a news article.
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That's always biased towards the negative.
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They've shown just 14 minutes of news exposure a day is going to increase your stress and reduce your mood and actually make you more likely to personally catastrophize other events in your life simply by looking at 14 minutes of news.
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So why are we starting our day by picking up the phone and starting to program our brain for negativity throughout the day?
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So before you, you know, jump out of bed, just, you know,
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practice gratitude, you know, think about some positive things, go for a walk, do anything but pick up that phone for the first time in the morning.
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So that would be one thing.
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But something else that I think is super important for, especially for the high performers and, you know, those people that are listening today that are very busy at work,
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is simply taking little breaks.
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And I know that sounds, yeah, duh, Jake, no surprise.
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We know we need to have little breaks.
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But there is actually studies showing that if we're not taking breaks, our performance deteriorates and our ability to concentrate deteriorates.
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So that's a big thing.
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But more importantly, we are going to feel so much better if we have
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a couple of little breaks throughout the day.
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And I'm not talking about going for a two-hour walk at lunch.
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I'm just talking about five minutes of downtime.
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But there's a key thing here, Cookie, and that's when people have downtime, what do people do as soon as they have five minutes?
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Yeah, pick up that phone and start scrolling.
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And of course, like the phone's amazing when it's used in the right way.
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But most of the things we do on the phone are actually cortisol inducing rather than cortisol reducing.
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So the stress hormones.
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So.
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We get to the end of the day, we're completely burnt out and we wonder why are we so stressed?
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I feel completely depleted.
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Well, you haven't actually taken a break the entire day because every single break that you've had, that morning break, when you're having a cup of tea, you've got your phone scrolling, you grab your sandwich, you sit at your desk and you scroll on your phone, you're actually just depleting your dopamine reserves, probably because you're flicking through social media or something.
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Or you're causing cortisol because you're looking at your emails.
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So we just need a few little moments throughout the day just to downregulate and let that system have a bit of a break.
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And I heard a great sort of way to sort of think about it is, you know, we would never let our phone batteries go to zero.
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And yet every single day, we never put ourselves on the charger and just let our brains recharge.
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Yeah.
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I think that's pretty simple that, you know, it's a nice, easy way to look at it.
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Just have a few minutes on the charger so that you can feel better and you can perform better.
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What's your morning routine like, mate?
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Talk to us about your morning routine.
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What does it consist of?
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Yeah, well, look, my morning routine is probably not optimal.
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And lots of people will look at this and go, that's probably not the best way to start your day.
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But we're all different and individual and have to work out our own routines that fit in with the different lifestyle factors we have.
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So for me, the first thing I do in the morning is I wake up and I write down five things that I'm grateful for in my journal just to start with.
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what's called our reticular activating system for positivity.
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So I do that first thing in the morning and then I go straight.
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Well, sorry, I have a glass of water and then I go straight in after doing a little bit of stretching, five minutes of stretching, I will go into the office and I will try and bang out as much work as I can before the rest of the house goes.
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gets up.
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I'm a bit of a weirdo.
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I go to sleep very, very early at night, but I'm up super early.
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So I'm up sort of around 4.30 or 5 every single morning.
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And I will try and work for a couple of hours before the household gets up because that's the time when it's absolute bliss.
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There's no interruptions.
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There's no emails.
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There's no phone calls.
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So by the time the rest of the family gets up, I sort of feel like I've already had, you know, achieved a lot during the day and ticked off those things that are on my to-do list.
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And certainly those things that require the most attention to sort of move the needle in my world is done.
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So that's how I would start the day.
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In an ideal world, I think you would throw a little bit of exercise in there, but, again, you've got to work out when are you feeling your best, how's everything going to fit into the very busy schedules that we all have.
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Well, and this is the thing, mate, there's nothing wrong with what you suggested there because you've created your own operating system of knowing what you need to do and when, and that helps you optimise, you know, your own work performance but also your wellbeing as well.
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So I think that's important, right, because I think everyone wants this,
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one size fits all solution, but each one of us has our own nuances and ability to be able to do things.
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Like when I don't have the kids, that's, I do, I get up really early.
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I go for a walk.
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I do a breathwork practice.
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I come home, I have a cold shower.
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I go have breakfast before I even look at my emails.
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And that's something that I've got into, but I can't do it every day because some days I've got the kids who are sleeping in my bed at 4.30 in the morning or five because they want to come in for daddy cuddles.
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And that's amazing too, right?
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I don't want to lose that moment either.
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So, you know, you've got to balance it.
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But I love some of those thoughts and perspectives there.
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Now, EQ Minds, the business that you and Chelsea operate, you work with leaders all the time, high-performance teams.
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How do we better recognise the early signs of fatigue in ourselves but also our teams?
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Like how do we really know that we're just pushing that lid too far or pushing that stick too hard for it?
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Yeah, well, obviously there's a lot of things that, you know, you start feeling from a body and brain perspective.
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But I think some of the things that we constantly or may well overlook is we start sort of getting this apathy towards work when we're really in this burnout phase.
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We're starting to think, well, why am I actually doing this?
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Do I actually really care?
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And so you start losing that motivation and it depends on how extreme you are on the spectrum of things.
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It might well be that you just lose all motivation and you feel just completely depleted and you're like, that's it, I'm throwing everything off the desk, I can't do it anymore.
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But, again, it's all individual and it depends on how far you are.
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But the quicker you can pick up on some of these changes that's happening, and often it's changes in your behaviour,
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So you start doing things differently than you would normally do.
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You start those bad behaviours start creeping in.
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Maybe you start having an extra glass of wine at night.
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Maybe it's that, you know, you start skipping exercise.
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You start, you know, maybe making poor food choices or at night you're like, you know, I'm just going to watch an extra 30 minutes of TV because I'm just completely burnt out.
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And you look at these sort of bad behaviours as soothing behaviours
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But again, they're just contributing to you feeling worse and worse as we go down the track.
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I found it really interesting.
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I saw this research from the CEO Institute and they surveyed 1,000 of their members, all CEOs.
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Number two of their challenges at the moment is their own mental health.
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it popped up as the second biggest challenge, like alongside like AI and the emergence of technology and what does that mean for the future of our business.
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But their own physical mental health is being identified as one of the biggest challenges.
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How do we get it right when the CEOs are struggling?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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You know what I mean?
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Like, and I don't know if you're going to be able to solve that, but like I sit there and I go, out of those thousand CEOs, over 50% of them more identified that mental health was a massive issue.
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Yeah.
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I'm sitting there going, like, how does this all carry through?
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Where's the systemic change that we need to create inside businesses?
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So the CEO is thriving, as will the team.
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Yeah, it's a great point and something that we're seeing consistently, although there is also a certain segment that I think is starting to take a lot better care of their mental health.
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I don't know if you've ever heard of the big five around mental health, so the big five for good mental health.
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And it's all these things we know about, and yet they're the most important factors when it comes to what we thought was physical health, but also mental health as well.
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So if you think about, you know, are you sleeping well?
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Yeah.
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Are you eating well?
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Are you taking care of your stress?
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So your mindfulness.
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What else have we got in there?
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Are you connecting with those people?
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You know, so very important.
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And I'm missing one there.
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What's the one I'm missing?
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So what do we do?
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Sleep, nutrition, nutrition.
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Connection.
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What about spiritual exercise?
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Exercise, of course.
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So you look at these five factors and you go, oh, of course, everyone knows that.
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But how many people are actually taking care of all of those five factors and sort of looping back into the start of the conversation?
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These high performers, they're so busy.
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The to-do list never ends.
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What are the things that fall off that?
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Yeah.
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It's taking care of yourself.
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It's making sure I'm busy.
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I need to just work late tonight.
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Your sleep goes out the window.
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Oh, my sleep goes out the window.
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So my hormones are all out of whack.
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That means I'm going to start making bad food choices.
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And it's just sort of domino effect that starts plaguing not only the CEOs, but high performers, everyone.
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And we sort of end up, well, our mental health is suffering, but it's actually our entire well-being that is suffering.
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It's just that the mental health has become
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sort of very prominent at the moment and everyone's identifying, well, my mental health is not that great, but it's actually their overall wellbeing often is problematic.
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And so I think that's something.
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It's how do we start prioritising wellbeing?
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You know, and again, it's about if you want to perform well on the court or in the office, you have to perform well off.
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You have to recharge.
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You have to take care of those things that are going to so very much impact your performance in life.
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Many of us high performers feel guilty about slowing down.
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I hear this every single day.
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How do we make it a reframe that you should be proud about slowing down?
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Because obviously I love seeing what you and Chelsea post.
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on social media about taking breaks and what is it, once every four weeks or once every... Six weeks, yep.
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Once every six weeks.
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You take a little break every six weeks.
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Well, I'll ask you this question, Cookie.
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When do you perform at your best?
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When do you perform?
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So when you arrive at the office and you know that you're going to be at your best cognitively, what's happened in your life?
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What's going on?
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I've had a good sleep.
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Had a good sleep.
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Firstly?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Had a good sleep.
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I've woken up without any interruptions.
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So, yeah, it's good when the kids aren't jumping in the bed.
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You probably didn't drink beers the night before.
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Yeah.
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Well, I've been off that for a while, so that doesn't feel it anymore.
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You didn't have a kebab the night before.
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I've started the day with me, like for me.
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Does that make sense?
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Where I may have saw the sunrise or got by water.
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I've done a breath work, so I focus on my breath.
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Yeah, and I'm in flow.
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Like business-wise, I'm in flow.
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That's the other thing.
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Yeah.
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So it's all those things about, oh, I've taken care of myself off the court.
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I feel good.
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I've arrived at work and I'm going to punch out probably three times as much work as I would on a day where I don't feel great, you know, whatever that number is.
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So it's about reframing that actually, if I want to perform at my best, I have to perform at my best off the field as well.
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I have to be doing those little tiny little habits and they're all simple.
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They're all simple.
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They're not easy.
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They're hard to do, but they're simple.
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We all know them.
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If I'm taking care of all that stuff, when I arrive at work, I'm going to be at my best.
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And so it's reframing that around how can I perform better?
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Well, I need to take care of this stuff.
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It's a bit like a professional team.
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If you think about, you know, your favourite professional team, if you said to them, hey, I don't care about what you do off the pitch.
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You do whatever you want.
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It's just we're just going to care about the, you know,
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The one hour during the week where you're actually, you know, on the pitch playing, can you imagine how well that team would perform?
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They'd be horrible.
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They'd be at the bottom of the ladder because their performances would be just horrific because people would be off having the time of their lives off the field and the performance would suffer so significantly.
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And then, yeah, that's what many people do in the corporate world.
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How do we have guys to lean into this conversation more?
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I know it's not just a guys and girls thing, but, you know, many –
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Many, like I think a lot of men in particular in these senior level roles because that's what dominates the senior level roles.
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But, you know, how do we get them to realise this impact before it's too late?
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I lost my dad when I was four and it was due to a heart condition, right?
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So it was nothing to do with this component.
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Or maybe it was.
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He was a sales director of a fruit juice company.
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Surprise, surprise that I'm in sales as well in many parts.
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But, you know, I'm worried about...
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the rates of suicide in men and especially older men as well.
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Like how, because this is all, it all stems with this.
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We're not looking after ourselves.
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Yeah, a hundred percent.
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Well, we do what you've started to do, which you've been doing for a long time.
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Now you create communities where that awareness is, is available and that connection is there so that people can come together and learn about best practice and understand all,
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oh, there is a way that I can actually feel better because my mate Joe over here is doing that very thing and look at him go.
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He feels great.
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He's always got energy.
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He's performing better.
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And we start bouncing off each other.
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But that all comes back to having these communities.
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I know for myself, you know, I live down in this tiny little town on the south coast.
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And I'm so very fortunate because there's a really great little community down here and especially a male community.
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I'm part of a fitness club.
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And these guys, they're awesome.
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They're all fit.
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They're all healthy.
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They're all bouncing off each other.
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And it inspires you to make sure that, you know, you're there on a Wednesday and a Saturday working out next to them because, you know, you're going to be feeling great after that.
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and when we go and have a coffee after the event, you know, you've earned that coffee and you know you're going to have a great chat as well and you're going to talk about all different things that are going on in your life, including how do you perform better?
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So I think it's about those things that you're creating, mate, around the community.
383
00:26:46.188 --> 00:26:49.711
Define mindfulness for me, mate.
384
00:26:50.312 --> 00:26:53.394
Like, you know what I mean?
385
00:26:53.535 --> 00:26:57.398
Because mindfulness and meditation, right, sometimes people think that's a little bit fluffy.
386
00:26:58.248 --> 00:26:58.528
Yeah.
387
00:26:59.009 --> 00:27:04.373
So I think mindfulness tools and mindfulness get mixed up a lot.
388
00:27:04.573 --> 00:27:11.719
So meditation is just one mindfulness tool that is available to make you more mindful.
389
00:27:12.319 --> 00:27:16.563
So mindfulness is really just the intentional use of your attention.
390
00:27:17.323 --> 00:27:21.447
You know, if you looked at the definitions, they'd probably say in a non-judgmental way.
391
00:27:21.467 --> 00:27:22.387
But yeah,
392
00:27:23.108 --> 00:27:27.469
There is a million different tools that exist in order to be mindful.
393
00:27:27.489 --> 00:27:37.951
So you don't have to go and sit under a tree and meditate for 40 minutes a day chanting, you know, in some crazy earth year just to be mindful.
394
00:27:38.272 --> 00:27:52.875
Being mindful is just about taking little moments throughout the day to actually be present, to be in this moment, to be here with you right now, to be mindful in the conversation, to listen to people when they're talking rather than, you know,
395
00:27:54.217 --> 00:27:56.261
these other things that fill up our words.
396
00:27:56.281 --> 00:28:04.316
And unfortunately, I think devices have really amplified the non-mindfulness that's existing in today's world.
397
00:28:05.121 --> 00:28:09.204
You just walk around the street and people are engaged.
398
00:28:09.244 --> 00:28:16.169
They're engaging their prefrontal cortex into a little tiny device and they've got no idea what's going on in the world.
399
00:28:16.469 --> 00:28:21.533
Is that mindful living or is that just living in a constant state of distraction?
400
00:28:22.874 --> 00:28:26.857
So it's just being more in the present moment is what it comes down to.
401
00:28:26.877 --> 00:28:31.521
I saw a perfect illustration of a phone with a dog lead to the person
402
00:28:32.301 --> 00:28:37.163
around the neck saying that the phone's leading them, not the other way around.
403
00:28:37.183 --> 00:28:38.084
Absolutely.
404
00:28:38.104 --> 00:28:52.510
And that's sort of if you start looking at that when you're out and about and you see all these phones out there and just picture that dog lead just carrying them around, just, you know, I'm leading you and that's a big, big part of everything that we're challenged with today.
405
00:28:53.110 --> 00:28:54.751
That's a perfect illustration of it.
406
00:28:55.713 --> 00:28:56.834
It's been absolutely amazing.
407
00:28:57.034 --> 00:29:10.379
And you're part of our broader community at Kappa, where we have got this incredible platform that if you do want to engage Jay in anything, you can actually find out more about how Jay can help all the different offerings and services here as well.
408
00:29:10.999 --> 00:29:13.060
All the info is there.
409
00:29:13.100 --> 00:29:14.100
Some even fun facts.
410
00:29:14.120 --> 00:29:15.100
What's your fun fact, mate?
411
00:29:15.220 --> 00:29:18.322
Basketball allowed you to travel, surfing or skiing, your happy places.
412
00:29:19.242 --> 00:29:21.963
You've worked with your wife for over six years and you're still together.
413
00:29:22.003 --> 00:29:22.983
That's the biggest one there.
414
00:29:23.043 --> 00:29:23.844
Is that fun fact?
415
00:29:23.944 --> 00:29:24.484
That's a good one.
416
00:29:25.164 --> 00:29:32.499
yeah it's still it's even getting longer now it's craziness yeah she's my boss as well so that's even worse but everyone please
417
00:29:34.365 --> 00:29:36.627
Please do check out Jay's profile.
418
00:29:36.767 --> 00:29:40.731
And if you do want to get in contact with Jay, you can directly message him in this platform as well.
419
00:29:40.771 --> 00:29:42.352
So please make sure that you do reach out.
420
00:29:42.492 --> 00:29:44.714
I've also put a QR code at the top of the screen.
421
00:29:44.734 --> 00:29:47.017
If you want to scan that right now, you can do that also.
422
00:29:47.777 --> 00:29:51.861
Jay, what would be some final comments or words that you want to leave our audience with?
423
00:29:52.081 --> 00:29:55.925
Or what's the first step that they should take today after this conversation?
424
00:29:56.745 --> 00:30:04.067
I think one of the best things you can do is literally carve out five or 10 minutes in your day, go sit in a quiet spot.
425
00:30:04.227 --> 00:30:06.468
If you can do it in nature, it would be even better.
426
00:30:07.188 --> 00:30:10.329
And just reflect and reflect on where you're at.
427
00:30:10.750 --> 00:30:13.350
Am I happy with where I am right now?
428
00:30:13.711 --> 00:30:19.052
Am I happy with my behaviors and where they're going to take me in the next 10, 20, 30 years?
429
00:30:21.593 --> 00:30:29.621
Or is it time to make a little change that's going to help me become the person that I want to be and make me feel better and take care of my mental health?
430
00:30:30.402 --> 00:30:33.044
And if the answer is I'm good with it, fantastic.
431
00:30:33.084 --> 00:30:38.209
But if it's not, what's the one little change that you can make today to start moving towards that person that you want to be?
432
00:30:39.358 --> 00:30:40.838
What a beautiful way to end this show, Jay.
433
00:30:40.858 --> 00:30:43.599
It's been absolutely incredible for your first Cuppa appearance.
434
00:30:43.619 --> 00:30:52.441
I do want to say thank you, mate, for being part of our community and always being a great, you know, person to bounce off ideas and be there whenever I need it as well.
435
00:30:52.481 --> 00:30:54.922
You and Chelsea are incredible in what you do.
436
00:30:55.262 --> 00:30:57.742
And more and more organisations should be lapping this up.
437
00:30:57.782 --> 00:30:59.443
Thank you so much, mate, for being a part of Cuppa.
438
00:31:00.083 --> 00:31:00.863
Mate, I appreciate it.
439
00:31:00.883 --> 00:31:07.785
And thanks so much for creating this amazing community that's helping people come together and share these different ideas and just support each other as well.
440
00:31:07.965 --> 00:31:08.785
So thanks so much.
441
00:31:09.578 --> 00:31:10.418
Thank you, mate.
442
00:31:10.519 --> 00:31:12.340
And thank you, everyone, for joining in today.
443
00:31:12.720 --> 00:31:14.761
Make sure you tune in to our other couple of sessions.
444
00:31:14.781 --> 00:31:21.965
We have loaded October to the brink, so make sure that you check out all the shows that you have coming up and also join our free membership.
445
00:31:21.985 --> 00:31:24.006
That means you don't miss out on any communication.
446
00:31:24.026 --> 00:31:27.048
It means you can join in on the chat rooms and also check out all the replays.
447
00:31:27.768 --> 00:31:29.629
Ah, and we also have other big news.
448
00:31:29.689 --> 00:31:37.333
The reason why I said to Jay that, you know, the next eight weeks are intense and to give me a call is we're launching our first ever venue.
449
00:31:37.353 --> 00:31:38.774
I don't know.
450
00:31:38.814 --> 00:31:42.456
I think it would probably be our last ever venue in all honesty because it's so intense.
451
00:31:42.956 --> 00:31:53.081
But this little cafe backdrop and just a reminder, this is just a $40 poster on the wall, which I started with five years ago when at the start of COVID I launched this virtual cafe.
452
00:31:53.101 --> 00:31:54.902
So this $40 poster is going to be rolled up.
453
00:31:55.302 --> 00:32:00.785
We will have a brand new venue in Baringaroo at International Towers in Sydney.
454
00:32:00.905 --> 00:32:07.188
If you want to check out what it is, you can go to our website, Kappa.TV, check out the venue tab and find out more information.
455
00:32:07.368 --> 00:32:14.892
If you are a workplace, you can hold off-site days there, workshops, we can bring in talent like Jay to help out with those days that you want to do it.
456
00:32:15.472 --> 00:32:35.795
um and please do check it out you can make an inquiry online there and we'll get in contact it launches in mid-november so 2026 here we come we're going to have our brand new venue in barangaroo ready to go for you uh that is it everyone thank you so much for being a part of cuppa today it's been an absolute privilege and once again make sure you check out all our other shows uh coming up for the month of october talk to you soon bye
