High Performance and Well-Being for Leaders: Own Your Zone with Jeff Salzenstein

Melissa Shanahan: I totally think you're right. I'm thinking of all the people who are watching this like, "Fuck you."

Jeff Salzenstein: Yeah. Yeah. Fine. Let me trigger some people right now, today, in this episode, because there was only 1 person out of 300 that chased me down to hire me as a coach. You are the 0.1%.

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Melissa: Okay, now you're back for your Own Your Zone method so we can cover that.

Jeff: Right, the Own Your Zone framework, which has taken a long time to develop, and it still keeps evolving, but this is the work that we've been doing, and this is what the work I do in all the rooms I go in and everywhere I go. It's all about owning your zone.

Melissa: Yeah, which by the way is a great trademark. You have a trademark, right?

Jeff: No, but maybe I should. You're a lawyer. You guys can help me with the whole lawyer thing.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: I'm not there yet.

Melissa: Okay.

Jeff: But I what I can tell you is that Own Your Zone, it's an evolution, just like everything. In the tennis world, I had Tennis Evolution. But really what I was as I was developing this framework, it was around excellence. Like, how do we unlock excellence inside? How do we deal with the pressure in our lives, personally and professionally? How do we work with all the stress that comes with that pressure?

And it was about it's a play on excellence. It's a play on developing leadership skills to unlock excellence inside us, inside our organizations. And it used to be a lot about excellence, the zone of excellence. But what's interesting is that Gay Hendricks, he has four zones, and his top zone is zone of genius. And it's when you're in your zone of genius, you're doing all the things you want to do. You're feeling creative and alive. But the zone of excellence is one stage underneath that. And you're doing all the things, but maybe you're moving towards burnout, and you're not really doing all the things you are in your zone of genius. And so it kind of has a negative connotation in Gay Hendricks's model. And interestingly enough…

Melissa: Almost like almost like perfectionistic.

Jeff: Yeah, and you're just doing everything as a leader. And so I was leading with Zone of Excellence, and interestingly enough, not many people have heard of that other model. But I felt like it was too close to what he like, my Zone of Excellence was different than his Zone of Excellence, and he's been around for like forty years. And so I was really looking for a way to separate myself and have something memorable.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: So through some iterations, we came up with Own Your Zone, which is a little catchy because it's own and zone is almost rhyming.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: And owning your zone means different things to different people, but people kind of get like, oh, I want to own my zone. I want to get in a zone. What is that all about? And so people, the curiosity is piqued, and so yeah, it's made up of this elegant framework. It's a holistic approach to performance and wellbeing. It's not a cutthroat like win at all win-at-all-costs approach. It's a winning approach and it's one where we do it where we expand our capacity to handle stress because I always say that it's not the stress that breaks us, it's how we carry it and work with it that matters. 

And so develop these three performance zones that I believe that if everyone locks into these three zones, you're 90% there. You have the foundation to build an incredible business, to build incredible life, to have your family thrive. It's like I cracked the code on the root cause of what a lot of people are missing and a lot of people are skipping over to try to get the next best thing.

Melissa: Right. Okay. That is, that's the way people know to achieve something is to like, and there's not that there's not value in that, but you and I have talked about, I've talked a lot about with my clients, but it's been really fun to talk to you about. Everybody sort of got their winning strategy that's gotten them where they where they are. But you will hit a point, whether you're an athlete or not.

So it's not just for athletes. I think about myself with business, you will hit a point by doing what you've always done, that that's, will only take you so far. And it's usually a short-sighted approach, but it's gotten you where you've gotten. And in order to really go to the next level, you have to introduce the concepts that you are talking about with Own Your Zone.

The other thing I will say that was appealing to me about Own Your Zone was I talk to clients all the time about taking the reins where they can. Take control where you have it. Don't be passive about something when you have the ability to take control.

This is, you know, a very simple one is with their schedules, with their how they spend their time. They act like the world is doing something to them. Not everybody, but this happens. And, okay, take the reins where you could take the reins. And all of a sudden starts things start to shift and start to improve. Doesn't mean it doesn't come, you know, without discomfort, but you start to take control of the things you have. And so Own Your Zone to me, this is, the second I saw that, which by the way was in that spreadsheet, when I saw it was like, yep, I got it. And I'm not owning my zone. So let's go.

Jeff: Let's go. Yeah. Exactly. And what I love about Own Your Zone is that there are specific, tangible activities, actions, habits, behaviors we can do today. It's not like you know, we talk about vision, having that 35,000-foot view, the future self, where you want to go. That's part of owning your zone. But the nuts and bolts, the brass tacks, what am I going to do tomorrow that gives me the best chance of creating what I want in the future?

And so it's this beautiful merging of like just like a tennis match. You play the next point to the best of your ability. And you do that over and over again, and you wake up in two hours, you finish in two hours, and you look up at the scoreboard and you won the match. And so it's this beautiful way of taking the reins, controlling the controllables. We talk about that in sport and in tennis. We control the controllables.

Melissa: Yeah. And the variables. 

Jeff: Correct. And so we've got three performance zones. Zone one, we restore the body. Zone two, we rewire the mind. And zone three, we reconnect the heart. And when I open that up in boardrooms, on stages with someone like yourself, who's a leader, as soon as I say that, you have an idea, right? Oh, restore the body. Okay. Oh, rewire the mind, reconnect the heart.

But then, when we get to the other side of it, you realize, oh my gosh, there's just so much to each zone. There's so many directions that we can take it. And so, yeah, let's break down the three zones. We'll start with zone one, restore the body. We'll talk about what it means to me, and we'll also talk about how you applied it to your life. So.

Melissa: Okay, give us this,  give us your spiel on zone one. 

Jeff: Okay. So zone one, restore the body, it's it's pretty self-explanatory. Nutrition, movement, recovery, and sleep. Those are kind of the three buckets on how we take care of our body. I choose to focus a lot on the recovery aspect. The best athletes and performers in the world with longevity, with staying power. You're Tom Brady, who had a twenty-year career. You're LeBron James, who's still going strong at 41. Dara Torres in swimming, Allison Felix in track and field. They all.

Melissa: Djokovic.

Jeff: Djokovic. You all have twenty-plus-year careers. You don't do it by waking up and training hard and then partying at night.

Melissa: Right.

Jeff: Right? You just don't. You get your sleep, you get your recovery, you train hard, and you do it all over the next day. And you're looking for every edge in the recovery department. And I don't think leaders wake up in the morning, most leaders don't wake up in the morning thinking about recovery being the priority. They think about working. How much work, how much output can I put in?

But if you do that without focusing on recovery, you will burn out. And no amount of caffeine and no amount of alcohol to numb the pain or to get through the next day is going to overcome that over time. You will not have staying power, you will not have longevity. So our society, again, is conditioned us to have habits that don't support longevity. We have to go against the system. We have to buck the system.

So restore, like one of the things I always like to say is that world-class athletes don't work hard and play hard. They work hard and recover harder. So as soon as your work day is over, you need to be thinking about your recovery game. And that's what I try to bring to leaders is like, let's start thinking like elite athletes do and be absolutely obsessed with recovery.

In the world of pro tennis, Novak Djokovic, he is thirty-eight years old. He's beating players ten to fifteen years younger. He's been obsessed with a gluten-free diet. He's been obsessed with his stretching and mobility routine, with meditation. He also says the most important part of his day is the night.

Melissa: Because of sleep.

Jeff: The moment his head hits the pillow.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: And the statistics show that 50 to 70 million Americans suffer from some type of sleep disorder. So many people are taking medication to help them sleep. So many people are drinking alcohol to help them get to sleep. That's just a Band-Aid. That is not the foundation.

Melissa: It is that's true, but also they, though I'm thinking there's a couple people in my mind that I know take medication to sleep because they are not sleeping. So they it's like they're one way to get it.

Jeff: You're not getting to the root cause.

Melissa: Correct, but it's not that they don't want to. It's really difficult to get to the root cause.

Jeff: Okay, it's not that they don't want to, and what I'm going to challenge is that you've got to be if you want to improve your sleep, instead of taking medication, not medical advice, I'm not a doctor, I'm just a former professional tennis player. But instead of instead of taking sleep medication, you've got to be like Melissa and be willing to sprint down the coach to help you get to the next level.

Melissa: Okay, that I don't disagree with. You need a partner.

Jeff: Most people are not willing to say I am going to hire a holistic sleep expert to help me sleep. And I am going to put my money where my mouth is instead of popping a pill, just hoping it goes away. I am going to go on the journey. And most people are not willing to do that.

Melissa: I think you're I totally think you're right. I'm thinking of all the people who are watching this like, "Fuck you."

Jeff: Yeah. Fine. Let me trigger some people right now today in this episode because there was only 1 person out of 300 that chased me down to hire me as a coach. You are the 0.1%. We need more 0.1 percenters to say, I'm not sleeping well, and I'm going to change that. And this is what I do. I go into a workshop and I have them take a sleep quiz.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: They get their sleep score and their sleep hygiene score, and they see that it's not great. And then I give them a list of ten things they can do tomorrow to improve their sleep hygiene. I have a CEO of a credit union. He saw the fifteen-minute segment on sleep and the sleep quiz. And he walked out of that room today, and he told me later, “That was revolutionary.” Revolutionary. It's just sleep.

Melissa: But it is revolutionary.

Jeff: And it's a list of ten things to do that you could find on a Huberman podcast.

Melissa: Yeah, but okay, wait, timeout.

Jeff: Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Let me finish this and then you can say timeout. Hold that thought.

Melissa: Okay. All right.

Jeff: This gentleman, nine months later, has lost forty pounds, dropped, his wife dropped twenty-five, he's got an accountability partner, he's got his whole team buying Oura rings, and he talks about sleep as a leadership skill by a fifteen minute segment where some pro athlete, former pro athlete comes in and talks about the power of recovery.

It completely changed his brain, it changed his mindset, it changed how he sees things. And that's what we, you and I did too. What is beautiful about what we're doing is we're creating an environment where people now have tools to make changes tomorrow to improve their sleep instead of accepting it and taking a pill.

Melissa: No, that is true. I think I think of everybody's like individual scenarios and stories are so different. So I don't want anyone to feel judged by this. It is just hopefully, this is helpful to someone who's in a spot to hear it. I also.

Jeff: Let me explain that.

Melissa: Well wait, hang on. I also did I didn't sleep for a while. And it was definitely hormonal. Wake up the same time every night. Also, I was drinking. So that doesn't help with sleep at all.

Jeff: You are crushing your sleep quality if you're drinking alcohol.

Melissa: Crushing in a bad way. In a bad way.

Jeff: Yes. Yeah, crushing it. So you're not getting the deep restorative Alcohol is not a sleep aid. So you litter your sleep with many more awakenings during the night. It sedates you, but you don't get the deep restorative sleep you need. What we're talking about is quality sleep, not just sleep. You also don't get the REM sleep that you need. And when you don't get the proper REM sleep, you don't get the overnight therapy to stabilize your mental and emotional health.

So everyone's talking about the mental health crisis these days, but no one's talking about the connection to poor sleep. If people start sleeping deeper, the mental health crisis just like going to play pickleball. If people played pickleball and slept deeper, we would not have a mental health crisis. I am saying it on this podcast right now. What I want to finish with around this point is you said you don't want people to feel judged.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: Let me tell you something. I am not judging anyone by making the choices that they make. What I am probably going to do is activate and maybe trigger some people because they're like, oh no, like, this is not good, or maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about. Whatever it is, it's okay. What I'm here to say is there's opportunities for everybody to shift and improve their sleep.

The other day I was doing a workshop and I get this question all the time and I don't really have the answer for it. This woman's thirty-three years old, she has three kids under the age of seven. You're telling me I need to sleep well right now, Jeff?

Melissa: Right.

Jeff: It's impossible. And I look at her and I go, listen, I don't know what you're going through because I haven't gone through that. But I know that your sleep is being impacted, but I bet there are things you could be doing to improve in this short season of your life where kids are young, you could improve. I get a text the next day. Jeff, my husband and I got the phones out of the bed last night, out of the bedroom last night.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: So even if she's waking up in the middle of the night.

Melissa: Right.

Jeff: She now has the phone because of what we talked about before, she wasn't doing that. So she just upgraded her sleep just by doing that. I also told her if you're waking up in the middle of the night and you come back and your brain is spinning, now you get to work on reading a book or doing some breath work, which you're not doing right now. You just upgraded your hygiene, and you're upgrading in zone one. So you're making these changes given the current environment and situation that you're in.

Melissa: Okay, maybe this is what I mean. Because I agree with everything you just said. It is that for high-achieving people, which is what you deal with and what certainly what I deal with as well, you have to break patterns. And there is some inertia required there that is tough when you are busy and you're doing your own thing and you have your patterns and you have your routines.

There are many things that you should pull the string at in life and it's hard to know that like, you know, when you have somebody like you who's like, yo, this is where we're starting. We're not starting here. Okay. Now I can say, okay, what are the what are the strings I need to pull within this zone? But people don't just have that unless they work with someone on that.

Jeff: Or they go on their own journey to learn it.

Melissa: They do, but there's so many things that people should improve.

Jeff: Correct.

Melissa: Like, who is thinking, I should start with sleep and nothing else?

Jeff: Well,

Melissa: I mean people that's not how it works. So.

Jeff: Right.

Melissa: I think it really is important to…

Jeff: Well, it doesn't start there because most people's belief around sleep is that I just don't sleep well. That's their belief. It is not, hey, I don't sleep well, let me go learn how I can sleep better. They accept that they don't sleep well, which is actually not natural. You're supposed to naturally sleep well. And that's where we got started.

I said, listen, you're going to go to bed earlier, like a pro athlete would. You're going to wake up with the sun. You're going to get your eyes on the sun at so that's going to start to reset your circadian rhythm. Hardly anybody's getting up and getting morning sunlight these days. We're all in artificial lights, and we're in cars driving to work. We're not getting that sunlight at the at the break of dawn.

Melissa: Yeah. 

Jeff: We're hydrating. You told me you're like, you're making me drink lemon water. If some with salt in it, with sea salt. If someone told me to do that, I would tell them they were absolutely crazy.

Melissa: I said that to you?

Jeff: Sorry. Yeah, you said if a coach told me to do that, I wouldn't do it, but because you told me to do it because you're a former pro athlete, she's like, I'm doing it. So there's the credibility piece. But like right away we're going circadian rhythm, sunlight in the morning. We're working on cell phone at the end of the night, getting it out of the bedroom earlier. We're working on getting off TVs and devices. We're cutting alcohol. We're drinking, we're hydrating, we're changing the diet, like we're moving in the morning. Like all of that actually creates an environment to improve your recovery and your sleep and to put you in a better state of mind for you to show up for your family and your business.

Melissa: Yes, 100%. And you were dogmatic about sleep, phone out of the bedroom, um lemon water. But then you really said, what are you willing to do here? What do you want to do? I brought up the drinking thing. And we were having discussions about it and you said, listen, you don't have to stop drinking. Like that's not, this is your choice. And I said, no, no, no, it needs to be I need to be done. I mean, at least for this phase of my life, I need to be done. And then, so that became something I was accountable for.

So there were these things, there were certain things that you they were non-negotiables for you. And then there were certain things that was like, okay, now what? You tell me what? And that's where we got to come up with how else.

Jeff: It's interesting when you say it that way. I don't look at it as non-negotiables.

Melissa: Oh, well, that's the way I took it.

Jeff: Yeah, I look at it as like, here's what we can do to improve. What do you want to do? And then you make them non-negotiables. I don't think I don't perceive that I say you must do this, this, and this. I'm like, these are the things I would do if I were you. And then you're like, okay, I'll do them. They're non-negotiable. So I get you to say they're non-negotiable. It's like Coach Krzyzewski, basketball coach in college, when he brings, most famous coach at Duke, he goes to his team and he helps them create the rules.

Melissa: Uh-huh. I think that’s cool.

Jeff: He doesn't create the rules. He says, what are our rules? So you create the guidelines and the rules based on the environment, based on the information that I give you, and then we do it together. It's not like I give you a sheet and say these are the non-negotiables. I say here's how you're going to improve your sleep right away. You're going to do this, this, and this, and you're like, okay.

Melissa: This, I think, and you said what, tell me about your sleep. You know, are you waking up at with the sun? Are you doing this? Are you doing that? So maybe in my head, I'm like, oh, I got to do this.

Jeff: Most people who are not sleeping well are not doing. They're patterns. It's just like if you're losing a tennis match, you're probably doing three or four things wrong in a match every single time to lose.

People are not they don't have the fundamentals in place. And so one of the main fundamental in restore the body is sleep deep. We focus on sleep. We're going to get the movement, we're going to get the nutrition, but we've got to have the foundation of sleep in place. And that's a really important characteristic.

And alcohol is a big part of it. I help people dramatically reduce or eliminate alcohol from their world. It's an alcohol-free lifestyle. I've been alcohol free for almost well six and a half years now. I made that choice as a performance coach because I wanted to walk with integrity and with my values.

Other people, they can drink if they want, if it works for them. But for me, that's an important leverage, that's a needle mover, and one of the biggest leverage points for leaders is to cut the alcohol. And that's a really hard thing to do when our world rewards you for drinking.

Melissa: Mhm.

Jeff: We go out and we have fun. We socialize, we connect. It's our friend group. We unwind. All of it is designed for us to actually drink. So I'm bucking a lot of trends and systems, and patterns by asking people to do the things that I ask them to do as a coach.

Melissa: That is true because when, you know, I basically we decided I was going to commit to these things. You did build a tracker for me, so thank you for that. Just to, especially at the beginning, like, am I checking the boxes on these things that are very different from what I was doing before?

It did help that you have, quote unquote, “bucked the system” on your own for a long time because I was feeling friction to those things. I was struggling with, I mean it was not easy for me to start going to bed early, put my phone in the kitchen. These sound like so like why wouldn't it be easy? But I don't know why, it wasn't easy. Get up with the sun, get outside and stand in the sun, then go for a walk, which it took us a bit to get there. I was doing the peloton in the morning, and you were like, just get outside and get the sun in your eyes and move at the same time. Like we had to work on this. And if you aren't someone who lives this and walks the walk, you're not going to be able to help me very well. So that was a big deal, and with the no drinking… It was a big deal.

Jeff: And one of the reasons we did it too is because of the body composition. You wanted to change your body.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: I don't always tell everyone they have to wake up with the sun and go out and go for a hike, but for you, we got to get those steps in.

Melissa: Oh, the movement part.

Jeff: Yeah.

Melissa: The light is something you would tell everybody.

Jeff: I would, but it's not like the thing like I was really focusing it on because you wanted to improve your sleep and you want to improve your body comp and your movement. And so that's what we do in the morning. I don't do that with everyone. Right. That's not I tell them they can, but that's not like the focal point. But.

Melissa: You're honing in on my vision.

Jeff: That's where we that's where we yes, that's where we tailor it. And so.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah, so the rest and recovery, the sleep, the movement, the hydration, all of it's dialed in. I mean, I go on trips and I travel. I travel with sleep stuff. I've got my noise machine. I've got my magnesium that I spray on my feet at night. I've got my sea salt that I put in my water, like all that stuff is happening on the physical side. And so it becomes a mindset, and I know we're going to get to zone two, but like it becomes a mindset around like how are you going to improve your body and restore your body every single day, and these little hacks every single day that make a difference.

Melissa: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess before we move to zone two and zone three, the other thing I'll say about the no drinking, alcohol has been a part of my life, my entire adult life, socially. So it was a big deal to officially say I was not going to drink anymore. I have had periods where I have not, but there was always light at the end of the tunnel.

Jeff: How long has it been since you've had a drink of alcohol?

Melissa: Now? It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend is when you and I were on WhatsApp, and I was like, I was just not, I was just I was done.

Jeff: So you're at four months.

Melissa: Almost. Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah. That's amazing.

Melissa: Yeah. It's the longest I've been as an adult, well, except for pregnancy, I guess. But I've done 75 Hard. So there, but there was a light. There's a time you're going to be done, and then you can like moderately enter back into that life.

Jeff: My journey started with a thirty-day my thirty-day alcohol free challenge to myself. I did it for thirty days. And then I went sixty, and then when I went ninety, and once I got to ninety, literally have not had a craving.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: And so it'll be curious, you're four months in. I know you still have some desires and some craving. But if you go to six months, you go to nine months, you might get to a point where you're like, I don't even like crave it anymore.

Melissa: I think you're right. I think you're right.

Jeff: So we just have to start with the first week and the second week, and the third week. It's not much different than someone who's in addiction, which I have experience with my brother. Like, we just start like, I'll do it for thirty days, I'll do it for a week, and then I'll do it the next week. And we just start stacking days, and we start stacking consistency and the little wins, and before you know it, you wake up and you're like, oh, this is me now. This is my identity.

Melissa: Yeah, you know, I was just thinking of the people watching this because some people don't, some people don't really see an issue with drinking, so they'll just keep drinking, which is fine.

Jeff: It's fine. It's great.

Melissa: It definitely took my edge. It just it just like dulled me over time. And I was done with that. And so that's why I made that decision. But it was very difficult. It wasn't, you know, I'm getting up early. I have a coach. I'm doing all these things. And then I, July 4th weekend was the first weekend where I was like, ugh. All I want is like I want a glass of wine. I'm heading out into a holiday weekend. I was so I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin. I'm sitting at a restaurant, my husband's having a beer.

Jeff: You did so great moving through that weekend. You did so great. I remember that.

Melissa: I messaged you, almost like you're a sponsor for me, but I was all I wanted was a glass, of all I wanted was just to signify heading into the weekend.

Jeff: And if you would have done it, there would be nothing wrong with it. It would have been totally okay if you would have made that choice. Honestly, it's okay. Maybe not with you, but with me, it would have been okay.

Melissa: Yeah, yeah. I just, I didn't want to let myself down, you know? And I was trying it's hard in those moments, it's hard to stay connected to what you're really trying, why you're doing this, because it's so easy to justify why it's just a drink. Just do it. I know myself well enough; it'll turn into more than just one. It'll probably be three.

Jeff: Yeah. That's what usually happens with people. That’s why we just don’t do it.

Melissa: Yeah. And then my sleep's crappy, and then tomorrow I'm going to get up and I was going to do some things, but I don't do those things anymore because I'm just feeling like, this is how the cycle starts again. So I didn't want to do that.

Jeff: And not to mention the guilt and shame that comes from making those choices on top of the behaviors, which is actually worse than the actual choices that. We could do a whole podcast on alcohol, and I could really tell you how I feel about it, but I think that would really trigger a lot of people. So we should probably move…

Melissa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. To zone two.

Jeff: At some point to zone two.

Melissa: Yes.

Jeff: Rewire the mind.

Melissa: Yes. I just want people to understand how difficult these changes can be, and if I didn't have someone to be steadfast with me, non judgmentally.

Jeff: Yeah. I bring so much love to the changes. Yeah.

Melissa: Not a change in the world. Not a chance in the world that I would have stayed with it. I just wouldn't have.

Jeff: Yeah. Now, there are some people, though, that do like that they can quit or stop on their own. They don't need coaching or whatever. So let's not say it's just you have to have someone, but you know, you're 95% more likely to create lasting behavior change if you have ongoing accountability. It's proven.

Melissa: If there are many things you want to change at once, which I was doing, I don't know that you can do that alone. It's very difficult to hold focus for all of those things. Yeah. So, yeah, if it was just not drinking, that's one thing, but it was so much more than that. I needed you.

Jeff: Yeah.

Melissa: Okay. All right. Zone two. Let's go. Rewire the mind.

Jeff: Rewire the mind. I mean, how powerful is the mind? It's crazy. Study show we can have as many as 60,000 thoughts per day, especially those overthinkers out there. I'm an overthinker. 60,000 thoughts per day. 80% of our thoughts are negative. 90% of the thoughts that we have today are the exact same thoughts that we had yesterday.

So if the same thoughts today creates the same choices and the same choices create the same behaviors, and the same behavior create our experience.

Our thoughts create our reality, just like we were talking about. If you have a belief that you don't sleep well, you will keep living out that belief. You have to change that belief before you can change the choice. If you think alcohol is fun, you're not going to stop drinking alcohol until you decide it's more important for me to get in shape and sleep better than to have fun, whatever fun is when you drink alcohol, okay?

So it really does start with our thoughts. It starts with the words that we choose. Language is powerful. Language is magic. Language is words are energy. Words are energy, and they cast spells on people. So how do we what spells do we want to cast? Do we want to uplift people? Do we want to uplift ourselves with our words, with our thoughts, with our beliefs? Or do we want to bring people down?

I first got wind of all of this, obviously as a tennis player. If you're going to win, you have to be proactive with your thinking. But when I was twelve years old, I was going through it. You know, for a twelve-year-old, you know, I was number one in the state, Colorado, and the region, and I wanted to be number one in the country, but I was really hard on myself. You know, I would we talked about this on another episode, but I'd lose and I'd cry. I'd be out on the tennis court, on a baseball field. I'd cry if I struck out or I double-faulted, whatever.

But when I was twelve, my father wrote this champion's poem for me, and the champion's poem goes something like this: “A champion is a gentleman. He does not whine or complain. He picks himself up when things get tough. He absolutely never quits. He wins with class. He sometimes loses, but he does so with class. A champion stands tall with his head high. He walks proudly with a purpose. You are a champion.”

And my step father wrote that poem for me when I was twelve, going through a rough time and I started reading that poem every day. It's probably not an accident that ten months after he gave me that poem, I won my only singles national title as a twelve-year-old. And then it was all downhill from there.

But I get this champion's poem and I'm reading this thing almost every day and I read it in college and I read it in the pros, and it became a staple. These words coming off the page. And when you think about the world we live in, social media and the news, everything's so negative. It's an important milestone, an important tactic, an important strategy to have your own version of a champion's poem.

So I always say if you're a leader, have you ever written a champion's poem to yourself? Do you have a work colleague that you could inspire that you could write a version of a champion's poem? Could you write a champion's poem to your partner, your wife, your spouse, your husband, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your partner, whoever?

And what about your kids, your kids that are infiltrated with negativity in their own minds all day long, and also from the external world pushing a negative narrative on them? They need a champion's poem in front of their faces every single freaking day.

And so that's the thing that's most sought after with my program, is like when I do my keynotes, they're like, I want that champion's poem. And I tell them like, download the champions poem, take the template, write it for your daughter, write it for your son, write it for somebody. And with you, I shared it with you, and then…

Melissa: You did not. You did not. I found it.

Jeff: Oh, I didn't share the champions poem. You found it. Okay.

Melissa: But where I was stalking you and I was like, what is that?

Jeff: But where I where I was going to go with it is that this idea of the personal success anthem, like you took it a step further. You wanted to create your own North Star. And so you scripted and created that vision, that 11 out of 10, that future, that mindset that you want to live into to create these behaviors. You created your own anthem out of it.

Melissa: That was that same Sunday. I mean, I seriously think we were on WhatsApp for like four hours. I don't, you came, I was like dumping and giving you context.

Jeff: Yeah, I definitely wasn't on it for four hours.

Melissa: No, I mean, I think you were, but not all four hours at once. But yeah, but it was you kept saying, nope, just spill it. Just give more. I want more context. And there was a really big tennis match that day. I was watching the tennis match. I was sitting in my bed watching the TV in our room, watching the tennis match. And I started thinking about like, where can I…

Jeff: It was either the French Open final or the Wimbledon final.

Melissa: It's probably top of June or end of May or top of June.

Jeff: Yeah, that was French Open final in June.

Melissa: It was a crazy Alcaraz match.

Jeff: Yes, saved match points. Alcaraz and Sinner.

Melissa: Yes. And so I was watching that, and I knew that day, I think is the day that I signed up with you. And I so I started I was like, what, all right, well let's just start listening to him now. How can I like I'll just start getting ahead of the game. So I was trying to find podcasts you've done or something so I could just start listening. Like, all right, let's get this rolling. And I heard you talk about the champion's poem.

So I'm sitting there, and in the middle of whatever conversation it was, I just pushed pause. I went to AI and I started, I said, I want a poem for, you know, I want it to I want to talk about these things. And it was giving me cheesy stuff. And so that's eventually it probably took me two hours to get to what I sent you, which I was referring to as my anthem.

Jeff: Yeah.

Melissa: And you gave some feedback on it. I worked on it a little more, and then that was it. And I read it every freaking day. I tell people, clients, that they need reminders. They need reminders of what they're working towards. And it had been a while since I had done that for myself. Like it had been a bit, and I it was really it's just powerful. It was a reminder every single day of why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Jeff: Well, the champion's poem and the personal success anthem is so important because we must rewire the mind. We have to start to change our thoughts, our words, and our beliefs until they become who we are, our identity.

And you know, more statistics around all of this that University of Pennsylvania study found that negativity is much more powerful than positivity. And one of my guides in this whole mindset pursuit was a gentleman by the name of Trevor Moawad. He was one of the top mental conditioning coaches in the world, and he worked with a ton of athletes and sports teams and CEOs and such, and unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago to cancer. Rest in peace, Trevor.

And what he claims is that negativity is four to seven times more powerful than positivity. So think about that. If you have one negative statement, one negative thought, you've got to offset that with five positive thoughts. Now we know people are not doing that out in the world. They are mostly saying negative things about themselves, whether they realize it or not.

And then it's ten times more powerful to say things out loud than to keep it to yourself, which means if you combine those two stats, it's 40 to 70 times more likely that bad things or mistakes will happen if you say negative things out loud.

So this is a big problem for high-achieving leaders that don't realize how negative they actually are. Even though they've created success in their lives, there's a ceiling here. They're playing at the floor with what's possible. They could 10x, they could 11 out of 10 if they change their thinking, and they change how they see the world, and they change how they communicate.

If you have a problem with leadership or with your team, you've got to change the way you're communicating to try to inspire to see if you can uplift them because there are ways in as a coach or as a leader, there's ways in, but you first have to start with yourself with the poem, with the with the anthem to rewire that mind.

Bill Buckner, he was a famous baseball player, and twelve days before the World Series back in the eighties, he told a reporter, he said the dream would be to win the World Series, but the nightmare would be to let the ground ball go between his legs to lose the World Series. And that's exactly what happened. The ball went between his legs to lose the World Series. He spoke it into existence.

Now it doesn't mean it's going to happen when you always say negative things. Like if you say I'm a terrible driver or I may get into a I'm gonna get into a car wreck or something like that, just in flippantly, and I can't believe I just said that, so I have to say five things to offset that. But all you did was increase the likelihood of something bad happening. You put it into your, you planted a seed in your subconscious mind.

So what we want to do is we want to buck the system out there in the 3D world of like so much negativity. You see all the negativity around us, we have to buck the system again. We have to go against the system, and we have to become delusional with how we communicate. Now that doesn't mean being positive if it's inauthentic, but it is finding a neutral place.

So the fundamental that I teach in Rewire the Mind is called win with words and our thoughts. We completely remove negativity and complaining from our world. That's hard for a lot of people because we're so used to gossiping and being negative.

So just try practicing in your life being neutral with your language and your communication, and even borderline positive, and see the world through a different lens. And then start to notice how your experience shifts.

Melissa: Yeah. You um probably with all of your clients help them see the effects of and help them notice when they're being very self-critical and hard on themselves, which I think that is also a trait of a lot of high achievers and I mean just when you first started to say like I'd be in the middle of typing or in the middle of you know, I sent you a message and you're listening to the voice message and you're typing back up until now, like can instead of should, like you're you're correcting me as we're going. And I'm not even aware that is happening, but it is indicative of what is going on in here. It's just the articulation of what's happening in here.

So one of the things you said, do you mind if I just show you every time I see it where you're being hard on yourself? And I said, sure. It's then game on. So then you're just left and right showing me. It's probably my husband's favorite thing about working with you is that someone other than him is saying like, yo, like, are you aware of what you just said?

Jeff: Yeah, of what you just said. Right. Our words are magic. They have power. And if you're not shifting that into your point, like we sometimes we get on calls and you're not even speaking because you're like, I don't know what to say right now, because if I say it, it's not going to come out in the most eloquent way.

So it requires a rewiring, a practice to get the neurons to fire. And we want to remove try and don't and need to and should. And we want to replace it with I commit, I'm learning to, I'm getting better, I'm getting excited. Like we want to change how we how we use our language and when we do that, when we change our minds, we do change our experience.

And then of course, there's so much more because then we move into like it's not just about our mind, it's of course about our emotions and our feelings and like how we regulate ourselves and then we combine all this and it becomes really a beautiful performance model.

Melissa: Yeah. Funny story, one day we were here for coaching and Natalie came in, and right before Natalie came in, you had said, “Today you can't say should and you can't say need.” And I thought, okay, fine.

I could barely talk. I was I was so just to your point what you were just framing a minute ago, I was like, now me Natalie comes in, and I'm trying to talk to Natalie, I'm really quiet and really slow. It's crazy how many times a day I use those words. It is insane. And when you look at how you're using them and the impact of them. It's not your intention.

Jeff: It creates pressure in the system when you say we need to do this. Yeah. I need to do this. You need to do this. You should do this. If you say that to your kids, it creates pressure. So there's different ways we can communicate a message. Hey, I'd like you to do this. What if you could you, would it be possible for you to like look at it this way? Like, there's so many different ways we can communicate. we just have to practice that, and then it makes us a better leader and it makes us achieve our goals and then people around us feel more inspired and uplifted because of the way we're communicating the message.

Melissa: Mostly with ourselves, it's hard.

Jeff: Uh huh.

Melissa: It's very hard to not have the thought, I need to do this. I should do I should have done it this way.

Jeff: Well, because there was a voice or there was a parent or there was a coach or there was someone when we were younger that told us you should do this and you should do that and you're not doing that. And so there's usually like some critical person in your life that was hard on you. And so that voice is still in there. And if it's not from that person, it's from the outside world.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: So we have to be aware of that inner voice that's not supporting us and then the inner voice that's like our biggest cheerleader. and that's where we have to go delusional. And it's going to feel awkward for people to go delusional. That's where you want to go if you want to create a new future, you got to go delusional and you got to like, when I before I get on a stage, if I'm self-conscious of like what people are going to think of me, I have to tell myself you're the best speaker in the world. You're going to go crush it today. You have a message to share. You're going to help people. I have to work myself into a lather both with my words and also with my body and my emotions and my feelings in order for me to go be the best version of myself.

Melissa: Okay, let's talk about zone three.

Jeff: Zone three, reconnect the heart.

Melissa: This is the one I was like, okay, this is nice.

Jeff: Touchy-feely. You want to get a little touchy-feely now? Reconnect the heart. This is about really the next level of performance if people are willing to go there. Reconnecting the heart means a couple things, but emotional regulation, emotional intelligence, being aware of your emotions, increasing your capacity to handle stress and deal with the frustrations of life, really leading your life more from here instead of from here.

You know, when I was struggling with burnout as a professional tennis player, and I had cried three times in two weeks, three weeks knowing my pro career was about to end. I was leading with my head in that like, I need to keep grinding and being gritty. But my heart, your heart and your gut always knows if you really tune in, it knows the answers.

If you're not listening, that's going to become a problem. That's what happened. I got sick, mentally and physically got sick because I was not listening to my heart.

So I think many leaders today are so disconnected. There is like this armor, and there's this casing around the heart for different reasons. And sometimes putting that casing on allows us to go build a billion-dollar business. But then we wake up one day and we just feel empty and we feel disconnected from our heart because we chase something that it didn't really like, it didn't really heal or soothe this part of our body.

And so really what I want to help leaders with is this idea of reconnecting to their heart and developing more capacity to handle the feelings that come up in their lives. And the science proves it all out. You know, some might say, oh, it's woo-woo, it's soft skills. Yes, it's also hard skills because if we get leaders and teams connecting to their hearts mean and more, and being able to emotionally regulate, then actually revenue is going to go up.

Melissa: Mhm.

Jeff: People are going to be more productive. You're going to get 12 to 30% more out of your team. You're going to be three times more creative, new ideas and new innovation comes from someone who has a regulated nervous system.

That's really what we're talking about with reconnecting the heart is regulating our nervous system. And most people's nervous systems are completely disregulated from the stress that we're living in all day. What happens is that when we have a stressful event in our lives, we release stress hormones, cortisol, and adrenaline. And when we have one event in our lives, like an email that we don't like or a hard conversation, or we lose a deal, those stress hormones are circulating in the body for about eight hours.

And if you stack ten stressful events in a day, that's eight hours on top of eight hours flooding the system. And then you wake up the next day, you didn't clear it out, you didn't sleep well, you drink alcohol, which is another stressor. You wake up the next day and you're piling on more stress every single day. And that's how you get sick.

Because 95% of all illness and disease is connected to stress. This is a 10, 15, 20, 30 year, 40 year game of longevity that we're playing. You will not be healthy in thirty years if you're not clearing the stress out of your body, full stop. no matter what.

So we've got to learn to clear the stress out of the body. We've got to learn to regulate our emotions. We have to learn to build our capacity to regulate these emotions. And there are simple techniques out there, somatic techniques. Somatic means simply getting into the body. Our body stores everything: our emotions, our feelings, everything, our trauma, all of it.

So when we do these little daily practices every day, we start to increase our capacity to handle stress, we connect more to our heart. So one of the things that I teach, it comes from the HeartMath Institute. They've been studying this for over thirty-five years is this idea of the heart-brain connection. The pro fundamental that I call it is syncing the heart or sync the heart. We sync the heart to the brain. So that way we're not separated, but most people don't even pay attention to their hearts.

When I have people do this heart focused breathing exercise, they'll tell me it's the first time I've even focused on my heart in I don't I can't remember. I tell them if you can put your hand on your heart and you notice your heart beating, you are regulating your nervous system. All your heart wants is for it to pay attention. That's it. And for a guy who's lived most of his life up here, I feel like, oh my gosh, I was never taught this. Now I'm doing it. Now I'm teaching it. Now people get to actually drop down here and just notice their heart.

That's all it is. It's not some elaborate, confusing technique. It is literally just pay attention to your heart and do some deep breaths in your heart, do some deep breaths in your belly, and then you get into coherence. Coherence is the flow state. The flow state is zone. We're getting into our zone every time we connect to our breath, every time we connect to our heart, every time we connect to our belly.

There's another technique called tapping, where you tap on these acupressure points. We haven't really gotten into that yet, but this also clears stress out of the body.

So getting out into nature, getting your feet on the grass, all of that regulates the nervous system, decreases inflammation. It's beautiful when we have these tools that actually are simple that we can practice. People say I don't like to meditate, I can't meditate. What if I tell you that if you just breathe three to five minutes a day and you focus on your heart or your belly and you slow your breath down and you focus on being grateful in that moment for two, three minutes every day, you are clearing the stress out of your body and you are creating longevity, you are improving performance and productivity, absolute game changer to learn these principles.

When you combine that with better sleep, it by the way, it helps you sleep better. You combine that with sleep and an upgraded mindset, this is why I say this is the most important work we'll ever do. You do these three zones, you're unstoppable.

Melissa: Yeah. There was a point where you said, okay, take some breaths. We're doing an orienting exercise that you said, I want you to feel your heart. I was like, what is does that mean? I so I said, I don't know what you mean by feel my heart. I was like trying to, and it felt weird. I was like, I don't even think I'm doing this right. You're like, so you explained it a little bit. And once I was able to just put my attention there. Like that's really what it was. Just feel your heart, put your focus on that area of your body. And I was like, this is kind of nice. Like, I've never done this before.

And I could see where if you could do that, which is really awkward for someone who has never done that, to your point, if you've lived up here and then all of a sudden you're like, wait, what? What?

But I know I know the feeling that you're talking about with coherence. Like, then you can feel then it almost automatically connects. It's almost like you're just finally connecting your brain to it. Yes. Anyway, it was that was fascinating.

Jeff: If you want to communicate better, if you want to feel calmer, more patient, more connected to yourself, to others, you connect to your heart, you connect to your belly, you get your breathing rate down to five to six breath cycles per minute. So that's about 10 seconds, 10 to 12 seconds inhale, exhale.

So if you slow the inhale down, slow the exhale down, five to six breaths per minute, and you're focusing on appreciation or gratitude or calm or care, compassion, oh my gosh, your life will change because what happens is all the stress is not going away. The pressure is not going away. People are going to piss you off.

Things aren't going to go your way, but if you have the capacity and you can stay in coherence and you can master your inner game, you're owning your zone. And this is the secret sauce. This is the thing that's going to allow you to have a happy, fulfilling life while you're achieving your goals. You can breathe three minutes per day with everything going on around you and start to build that muscle.

Remember, all of these zones, these fundamentals that I've talked about, sleep deep and restore the body, win with words with rewire the mind, reconnect the heart, or I should say sync the heart, which is inside, reconnect the heart. All of these are leadership skills.

So if you're listening to this and you're a high achiever, a high performer, you want to be a better leader, these are skills to develop just like financial literacy, like running your business, your systems, your uh SOPs. These are your SOPs. These are your practices. These are the things that you do to upgrade the system so that you can have the best life possible and be connected to yourself and to others.

And the last thing I'll say around this is the foundation of all of this is giving yourself grace and compassion. Because we are going to fall out of our zone, we are going to fall off, we're going to fall off in different areas, physically, mentally, and emotionally. The key is to forgive ourselves. I gave you the Ho'oponopono prayer in the beginning, I think. I sent it to you. 

Melissa: Yeah, every day. 

Jeff: Every day we practice forgiving ourselves, we practice giving ourselves grace because then when we do that, it gives us more space to get back on the horse again instead of all the judgment that comes with it. So I think that's an important part of the puzzle, and the coaching is that we give ourselves grace to move through things when it doesn't go the way we want it to for a certain stretch of time.

Melissa: Mhm. You, with the grace and compassion, I taught clients this. One of the things that I early learned from you, this was when we were talking about drinking. I'm like, I just never stop for good. I never I always come back to it. I always sort of drift back into it. And you said, up until now, you typed that in the chat and I thought, oh, that's nice. Yes, up until now. But I didn't know that was like a thing you say all the time.

So then as I get to know you more, you I will say a sentence and you'll say up until now. I'm like, oh yeah, up until now. So I taught that to clients and they loved it. And they were at a workshop in June, I think. And it's these small things that can really help with each of the zones. It's not, I did an overhaul. I hired you and said, I want an overhaul. And so I think I did that in many, many ways, but it's not about overhauling. It's about incorporating these things that are underneath any like top performer.

Jeff: A top performer that has an approach around success and fulfillment that is more balanced.

Melissa: Yeah. 

Jeff: Because we want you to wake up even when it's really hard. We want you to have these practices, these fundamentals, these zones in place because when things aren't going well, you want to be able to move through it more gracefully and more in a healthier way.

That's that's what I think the magic is. It's not just about winning, it's just about like how do I have the capacity to do these things when things aren't going great and I have these habits in place that actually work. Like these things work. You do these things. This is my life's work. Like I've put this elegant model together so that it could be simple for people.

Like, what if we just took one thing from each zone and we just practice that? Hey, I'm going to take magnesium to improve my sleep. I'm going to start saying up until now, and I'm going to breathe one minute per day. You do those three things, you're going to get better. Like life is going to get better for you. Now, if you do the fifty things that you were doing, it gets a lot better faster. It just depends at the pace you want to go and you know, how far you want to take it.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. I last thing I'll say about working with you within this is the nuances of things I would bring on coaching calls, difficult conversations that I needed to have, and us talking about how to regulate in those conversations. How to hold space for the other person in those conversations. Like those are things that sound nice and I'd like to be able to do, but it was actually walking, talking through that that helped me prepare.

Jeff: That's like the bonus zone of like the nuance and the deeper work.

Melissa: It is. I mean.

Jeff: That's that's the deeper stuff that people don't see in a workshop or a keynote.

Melissa: Yeah. 

Jeff: That's what they see when like you and I are like you're come to me and you're like, I've got this issue with somebody, and I got to have this conversation.

Melissa: Yeah.

Jeff: whether it's personal or professional, and then we walk through like, okay, how are you doing this, or how would you do it? And I listen and then we ask questions and then and then you have a plan and you're prepared and you're like, okay, I can do this differently. And then you get another rep, and then you start building that muscle, and you build that skill.

Melissa: Right. Right. And even the analogies that you bring to tennis, like the techniques that you have me think through, then you liken it to just making one shift to your serve can change everything. And so then we talk through the but it does all come back to those three zones, but, you know, integrating it in your life in a way that matters has been, yeah, it's been really helpful.

Jeff: Awesome. Well, I'm happy to help, and we've been doing our thing, and I love sharing the Own Your Zone with the world, and that's my mission. I want millions of people to get exposed to these techniques and these fundamentals and we're going to this is what we're doing. We're on we're on it. This is happening.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. This is yes. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you. Own Your Zone.

Jeff: Own Your Zone. Let's keep going.

Hey, want to watch the video of this episode? Head over to Velocity Work’s YouTube channel. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

You may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map Friday Wrap. If you go to velocitywork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans so that week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to velocitywork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.