What Do You Feed A Million Dollar Race Horse?

WHAT DO YOU FEED A MILLION DOLLAR RACE HORSE?

In this solo episode, Jo discusses how health professionals often prioritise others first, and in doing so, sacrifice their own self-care and health in the process and why it’s so important for you to treat your health as your most important asset.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to another episode of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast.

And here is an interesting question for us to ponder this week. What do you feed a million dollar racehorse?

Well, when you think of a million dollar racehorse, you think of an asset and investment, something that’s gonna create a return. After all, you’re not going to purchase a million dollar racehorse and stick it in the paddock down the back and just let it live its life, right? You’re going to want to stud it or you’re going to wanna race it. Or you’re going to wanna do something with this asset to allow you to get a return on your investment.

Now, this is not my original question. This question popped up in my newsfeed by naturopath Jen Jeffries, and she’s got a fantastic platform as a naturopath here in Australia. And she asked this question and I literally stopped my scroll.

I heard her ask the question and I went, oh heck, that’s powerful. Because what she helps us understand is that we are the million dollar race horses. And I have been coaching clients again this year and for the last 12 years. And what I notice we are exceptional at doing as health professionals is living off leftovers when everybody else has been taken care of in our businesses with our clients in our families, then we will be looked after. Then we’ve got the time and the energy and the resources for us to look after. It is the antithesis of the messages of self-care that we are giving ourselves or memeing, or telling our clients to do. We’ll be the last person in our business to get a salary increase. We are often the last people and get the leftovers of any time available to take off for annual leave or holiday or paid time off during the year. We will often pick up clients that nobody else wants to work with. Or when there is no more human resource in the business, we’ll just step in and do it, even if it’s work we are not good at or work that doesn’t bring us joy, because that’s what we do. We step in, we get it done, and we continue to feed ourselves the leftovers. We are often fatigued. We have poor sleep, and because we’re fatigued and sleep deprived, we’ve often got poor nutrition because who the heck can be bothered making sound nutritional choices when all I want is just the chocolate and the carbohydrates and the caffeine and the sugar and the things that are just gonna make me feel better. Because I’m so freaking tired. Yeah, I know this story. So we fill ourselves when we are most depleted physiologically, we’re filling ourselves with artificial stimulants.

And this might be the way that we work, the adrenaline and the cortisol we are pumping through our bodies. Maybe the sugar that we are consuming or the caffeine we are consuming. It’s often a lack of water. It’s often a lack of sleep, and it’s often a lack of nutritional choice. Now, I am not judging anybody. Here I am speaking to myself. I know this pattern. I am awesome at getting to a Thursday afternoon and needing my switch off time to be on the couch, watching yet another episode of something from an NCIS eating a bag of potato chips. I am talking to myself here. I get this. But what we don’t understand is that in this day and age, we are using our brains and we are often talk about brain fog and brain fatigue and, and in terms of burnout or post-viral fatigue or just how fatigue turns up for us, we’re noticing it a lot in our heads, but a lot of the work that we do requires us to use our brains, whether it’s regulating emotions all the time, or we are thinking and planning and strategising and thinking and planning and listening and attending and the like. There’s a lot of executive function going on all the time as a health professional. Yet our frontal cortex is the most energy consuming part of our brain. And our brain uses 20% of our total energy needs for our bodies. So that tiny relatively tiny, or by comparison, tiny organ on the top of our head is using 20% of the energy produced or needed by our bodies. That’s a lot of energy. So now your 3:00 PM slump where you need some sugar makes a lot more sense because you’re needing those sugars to be able to keep your brain functioning, to be able to keep doing the work that you’re doing.

So we’re literally putting into our million dollar asset because we are that asset. We have the ability to produce wealth, we have the ability to serve all our clients. We have the ability to grow a team or create new products or create new services or lead groups or build an empire or create real estate opportunities for ourselves or create licensed products, create franchises. We can do all of that, but we’re trying to ask ourselves to do it on leftovers that don’t have a lot of the really great nutrition that we need to be able to fuel ourselves to put ourselves in the best position to be able to make these decisions or these choices.

Ouch. I don’t like this conversation because I really, really enjoy being able to go, I’m too tired. I’ll think about it tomorrow, but I can assure you as somebody who has fought breast cancer is now in her fifties, I’m a little bit conscious that I don’t have as many tomorrows as I once did.

But this asset, we as a million dollar asset in our business, we don’t just consume food and water. This is also about what we hear. What are we listening to? What podcasts or music or listen, where else are we consuming things that we hear? Are we consuming the sounds of silence? Are we consuming nature or have we always got chat, chat, chat going on? Are we always so busy trying to learn, we’ve got podcasts going on, or audiobooks going on, we’re trying to consume. What are we putting through our ears?

But then what do we also see? What are we watching? What are we watching on social media? How are we consuming our news these days? How are we keeping up with current trends in our industry? Are we learning by memes? Has that become the new educational tool, a 92nd meme or a 92nd reel? Is that what we’re constituting as learning? Is that what we’re trying to consume?

So it’s not just about what we put in our mouths, it’s also what we hear, what we see, and then what are we saying to ourselves? We’re asking our brains to do all of this incredible work so that we can help people heal and fulfill the calling that is in our life. What are we saying to ourselves? How much of that negative self-talk, unwise self-talk have we got going on, on a loop inside our heads?

I know my loop is often very difficult to turn off scratching that record, which is why I use a tool like the Book of Evidence that I created because that has been an incredibly empowering tool for me to be able to change the language that I’m using when I speak to myself. Otherwise, I would spend all of my days telling you, when telling anybody else, I would apologise for my existence. I would tell you that I’m not good enough and I would continue to over function in a way to prove to you, which is really myself, that I am good enough. So what am I putting inside of myself? How are my sensors taking in that information? And how am I taking care of the most important asset in my business? So if we think about this million dollar racehorse, we’re not gonna put it in some stable out the back where it’s drafty and cold and where it doesn’t have something nice to sit down on or lie down on or whatever a horse does. We’re gonna give it something that’s comfortable, that’s gonna put it in its best condition that’s gonna allow it to do the things that we need it to do to help continue to thrive because nobody wants to buy a million dollar asset and two weeks later, it be too ill to be able to fulfill the job that it was intended to do.

I was so confronted by this question though, that really got me thinking, and it’s one of the reasons why I ran the Energy Activator Workshop again, was because we really need to get this inside of ourselves. So it’s not only what we are consuming, and what we are hearing and what we are seeing and what we are saying and how we’re learning, but it’s also how do we rest and replenish? Because you’re not gonna put a million dollar racehorse to run a 4,000 meter or four kilometer or a four mile race and then back it up the next day with a 10 mile or a marathon or whatever it is we ask horses to do.

Yet we’re continuing to ask ourselves to run a marathon. I now call it a decathlon because I do think we’re jumping through hoops and over high jumps and putting out fires more often and more frequently than we ever have. So not only do we need to be looking at our physiology, we need to be mindful of our psychology and also our sociology because even when we’re completely isolated and alone, we have created an unhealthy sociology. I see everybody being so keen to find the next hack for efficiency. I don’t think the right time for efficiency is now. I think Covid showed us that efficiency, we are done with that for a while. What we’re really seeking is how to make ourselves more effective. What do I need to do to be able to have the type of lifestyle that I long to have?

Because if we are truly looking to be able to seize the next entrepreneurial opportunity, we need to have energy to do that. It’s no good walking away from a fantastic retreat or mastermind full of ideas in the moment and then having no energy to execute. If we genuinely wanna create new goods and services and genuinely wanna be able to take our healing to the people who need it, we need the energy, the time and the resources to be creative. We can’t do that. If we feel sick all the time for us to be the most effective we can be, then we really need to examine how we are caring for the most important asset in our businesses, and that is us. Whether you are a private practice owner with a group practice, it’s you. If you’re a solo practitioner, it’s you. If you work for somebody else, it’s you. I don’t think I can harp on this much longer.

So my question to you today is what are you feeding the most important asset in your business?