This Episode Appears in Our 'Best Of' Lists:
Kelly Berry sits down with Dr. Lauren Hodges to unpack human performance science and how leaders, especially women in leadership, can thrive without burnout. They dig into stress management, calendar management for high performance, aligning values with workplace performance, and the small, practical habits that drive emotional wellbeing and personal growth.
You want traction, not theory. These takeaways translate human performance research into clear next steps so you can show up better at work and at home.
Human performance blends sleep, movement, focus, mindset, and purpose into a usable system. Lauren explains how this cross-discipline approach helps you design days that match your priorities instead of reacting to everyone else’s. Start by asking two questions: what matters most right now, and are your daily actions aligned with it?
When the answer is no, zoom in on the basics. Sleep and recovery, device boundaries, and short bursts of movement are high-leverage. Track what helps, then double down. Simple beats complicated when you want results that stick.
Stress is not the enemy. Unmanaged stress is. Lauren encourages leaders to collect their own data through brief reflection, wearables if you like, and honest check-ins with objective VIPs. You can’t argue with your own data, and that clarity makes better decisions a whole lot easier.
Build micro-recovery into your week. Ten minutes between meetings. A real lunch. A short walk before a high-stakes call. These small resets pay off in sharper thinking and steadier emotional wellbeing.
Women leaders often shoulder double loads: demanding roles at work and invisible labor at home. Layer in systemic inequities and it’s no surprise the burnout risk is higher. The upside Lauren sees daily is that women are often more open to the work, which accelerates change.
Practical moves help: advocate for autonomy where you can, set explicit meeting norms, and protect recovery windows. Progress happens when you pair personal boundaries with conversations about team norms and systems.
The calendar tells the truth. Lauren calls calendar management a hidden super weapon for performance coaching. Best practices: 50-minute meetings, protected prep windows before key conversations, and theme days that reduce context switching. Worst practices: back-to-back video calls, no transition time, and scheduling by everyone else’s convenience.
Try this for a month: block 10 minutes after every meeting to write follow-ups, capture decisions, and stand up. Guard early mornings for deep work or family rhythms. Share your rules so teammates know what to expect.
Alignment is the engine of sustainable high performance. If your values say family and health but your week says inbox and reactivity, the friction shows up as disengagement and fatigue. Lauren suggests a quick Friday audit: what energized you, what drained you, and what single tweak will move you closer to alignment next week?
If you want a structured nudge, explore Lauren’s stress personality work to see how you react under pressure and where tiny shifts have outsized impact. Awareness creates options, and options reduce stress.
“Most American workers anyway, I could speak for them, are overworked, under-resourced, understaffed, and they're experiencing a situation where the demand that they face are exceeding their capacity to manage it.” — Dr. Lauren Hodges
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“But calendar management is probably one of the hidden super weapons for this type of work because we interact with other humans on a day-to-day basis.” — Dr. Lauren Hodges
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“I feel like we get so addicted to the stories that we tell, that it's really hard to get away from them unless, again, we have data to prove us otherwise.” — Dr. Lauren Hodges
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“Don't boil the ocean on your first day of really thinking about this stuff.” — Dr. Lauren Hodges
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“We wanna learn how to thrive through.” — Dr. Lauren Hodges
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00:00 Self-Leadership and Women in Human Performance
01:30 Dr. Lauren Hodges on Building Performance on Purpose
04:16 What Is Human Performance Science?
07:17 How Sleep Affects Leadership and Cognitive Performance
10:32 Spotting Human Performance Issues in Organizations
14:32 Systems vs. Individuals in Performance Coaching
17:56 Women in Leadership: Burnout and Balance
22:50 Aligning Actions with Your Personal Values
27:35 Stories vs. Facts in Stress Management
29:11 Using Personal Data to Improve Performance
31:01 Boundaries and Work-Life Integration
33:33 Life Seasons and Performance Shifts
34:02 Mindset’s Role in Business Performance
36:13 Communicating with Different Leadership Styles
38:27 Time Management and the Power of Reflection
42:50 Discovering Your Stress Personality
47:44 High Impact from Small Performance Changes
50:58 Living with Intention and Purpose
Kelly Berry (01:05)
Today's guest is Dr. Lauren Hodges. Lauren is an expert in human performance sciences, an award-winning learning designer, author and owner of Performance on Purpose, a global training and coaching company focused on the intersections of leadership and human performance. She lives in Satellite Beach, Florida with her husband and two teenage boys. Hi, Lauren. Welcome to the podcast.
Lauren (01:30)
Hello, good to see you again.
Kelly Berry (01:32)
Yeah, thank you so much for being here today. I love what you do. At the intersection, I'll say of my personal and professional interests and kind of area of expertise as well. So I think it's truly such important work. So would like if you could just start by telling us a little bit about your story. How did you get here?
Lauren (01:52)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and we do have so much in common. It is amazing all the intersections between the work that we do. But the long and the short of my career has been I've been in this industry for a while now over 15 years, I want to say. And I started more in the fitness side, well-being side. I kind of had two roles that neither felt quite right. My formal education is in
education, actually. It's a doctorate of education in curriculum design and alternative learning methodologies. And so learning design is kind of in my academic background and then all of my certifications and my passions and interests and all of my side jobs as I was going through the doctoral program and master's program was all in the fitness, wellbeing space.
And neither was quite fulfilling when I finished the doctorate. I was teaching at the university level and just not in this subject at all. And I just felt like something was missing. So to fast forward quite a bit, I started to work in the corporate wellbeing space. I did some, you know, just freelance work for a long time. So maybe about 10 years or so, I started to freelance and started to apply both of those areas of expertise.
and found that there was a nice little niche there for me. And so I started to build learning experiences for the global leaders in that space of corporate and well-being and human performance. And that's where I really ran into the world of human performance sciences, which unlocked a whole lot for me, kind of just a lot of things clicked that bit. The learning sciences, the cognitive sciences, performance psychology, and then the wellbeing world were really kind of one and it was an emerging field at the time. And so.
In 2019, December, 2019, I started Performance On Purpose with a friend of mine. And this is, this has kind of evolved to where it is today. So I still freelance a little bit, but most of what we do is do training and, um, and coaching programs and still looking at those intersections between that ability to perform at our highest potential of humor performance, and then our ability to lead effectively. And to your point in the intro, which I love, lead self and lead others. So in our personal
Kelly Berry (04:01)
Okay.
Lauren (04:01)
and like you said, I love what I do because it is in the intersection of what I'm passionate about and then what I am very lucky to earn a living doing. So it's kind of the high level arc of how my career has evolved over time.
Kelly Berry (04:16)
Yeah. So for those that aren't aware, can you explain what is human performance sciences? What does that entail?
Lauren (04:25)
Yeah, so it has become a bit buzzy, which is a great thing. I think, you know, the the Hubermans and the Peter Attia and the Gabrielle Lyons and all the, you know, the whoop, you know, devices have really kind of elevated it. But it has been kind of a blend of multiple fields for a long time back way back, you know, in the 1980s and 90s. There was two men, Dr. Jim Lair, Dr. Jack Grapple, just as an example of two people in the industry who really started
they were kind of the foundation of that industry. They started to look at the intersections between things like our physical, our mental, emotional, and our spiritual management of our energy and our wellbeing, and how they all intersected to elevate performance in the sport of life and in the sport of business. So they were testing this out on athletes at the time, kind of borrowing from that performance field.
and then really starting to see tremendous results. So I would say that they arguably are kind of the founders of the field, but to define the field, it is kind of a myriad of different research areas like sleep sciences and nutrition and exercise and movement. The idea of what is known as logotherapy or purpose and having clarity and alignment in that area.
private voice, inner voice, storytelling, so the mindset part of the world. So the Carol Dwecks of the world, the growth mindset space, and then cognitive sciences, focus and attention and then emotional wellbeing. it's the intersection of all of those areas. So it's almost like I kind of identify personally as a bit of a generalist in those areas. I wouldn't say I'm deeply an expert in any of those fields, but generally we're looking at
the intersection of all those fields and how it relates to performance. And when I say performance, it's not just do you win games or lose? Do you make a lot of money or not? It's like how we show up as our best in the different areas of life that we consider priorities for us. So I hope that's a, I don't know if that would be what everyone would define human performances, but to me, that is the definition of that body of research.
Kelly Berry (06:25)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it seems so crazy to me that it took until like the 80s and 90s for the realization that the things that you just mentioned that you just ran through impact how we show up. You know, it's almost like what were they thinking about before before then?
Lauren (06:52)
And we have a long way to go to, mean, it is continuously surprises me how many, organizations and leaders still have not made this connection and continue to operate the way they do, especially some industries where you'd be really surprised because you know that their performance is negatively impacted by the norms or the systems that are embedded in that. I'm just thinking of
Kelly Berry (06:54)
huh.
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (07:17)
you know, banking, Wall Street investments, know, those like just nonstop high, high stress, high demand environments where there's very little sleep and very little time for recovery and what that's possibly doing to their performance. And anyway, it's amazing to me how far we have to go in this as well.
Kelly Berry (07:19)
you
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, and long-term health effects and all of that. think I saw, I think you posted on LinkedIn not too long ago about sleep and the impact of sleep on performance. And, you know, I think we all know sleep is important, but I do think that there's a huge disconnect in like, especially corporate and or bigger businesses and how that affects the
you know, well, I guess we'll call it the bottom line, but how it affects like decision making mistakes, you know, you, had a lot of stats in there, but it's kind of crazy. just when you think about it, what poor sleep over time, over like a big population and your company can do.
Lauren (08:20)
Yeah, it really is. actually the person that I consider the authority in this space, her name's Dr. Els Van Der Horn and she is the one who I kind of get a lot of my great statistics on sleep and the impact to your point on business performance and bottom line. It is incredible. And that's just one area of our performance that we could look at and say, wow, this has an immediate impact for better for worse on how we show up.
Kelly Berry (08:39)
Hmm.
Lauren (08:48)
I know for myself, I'm just an absolute wreck on a poor night's sleep the next day, know, decision making and focus and really commitment to the mission of the business. Like I'm much further away from it and more disengaged and that's just one area, you know, and think about nutrition and you think about movement and exercise and, and not just those areas, but even like management of devices and how we manage our calendars. we, what are, what are those,
Kelly Berry (09:03)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Lauren (09:16)
operational norms that we have either as business owners or in bigger organizations that are kind of driving these behaviors that we know don't work, but yet we still haven't looked at it on that larger scale.
Kelly Berry (09:27)
Yeah, yeah,
yeah. You know, to your point on sleep and being a wreck. So I have a toddler. We are one month into a toddler bed transition. I have not, is not going all that well. We'll just say that. But you know, I'm a month in of, haven't had a full night or a solid night of sleep. And so that is affecting the, ability to like go to the gym, to get to the gym, to work out. It's affecting my.
Lauren (09:41)
Thank
Kelly Berry (09:55)
mood, my irritability, and I have, feel like I have less time to do the things that I need to be doing. So then I feel behind, you know, it's just like this kind of, yeah, it's a domino effect. And when you're, you know, I'm lucky that I'm not like showing up at a job that's not really like giving me any space for that. I'm in, I'm in total control of my schedule and I still feel that way. So I can only imagine if you're like showing up to
corporate America and you're trying to act like you don't have a family or you don't have kids or you know everything is good how just like mentally exhausting that would be.
Lauren (10:32)
you know, and so when you just made me think of something, which maybe we're putting the cart before the horse on the conversation, but to get to like some action on what to do there, you know, when I'm, I only coach a few people at this point and, but the team coaches, we've coached hundreds of people. And, one of the things that, that is a lot, it's not surprising, but it's, maybe frustrating is the word is maybe sometimes we know this.
Kelly Berry (10:37)
Yeah.
Lauren (10:56)
And then we don't take certain actions to design days that are better suited or more aligned to this kind of how these high performance, let's call them like habits and behaviors. There's nothing you can do about a toddler doesn't want to sleep. So it's almost like a wave you have to ride for a little while to see. But the example I'm thinking of in my head is, is this was 2021. think I read a great book.
Kelly Berry (11:11)
Mm-hmm.
and
Lauren (11:23)
called Free Time by Jenny Blake. I think I was sharing that book with you maybe in a previous conversation. But anyway, she just made me start thinking about the systems that I have in place as an organization, as a team. There's a lot of us, a lot of calls, meetings, and we're global. And so there's Asia Pacific to worry about and time zone shifts. And I realized that I was being very reactive in how I was managing my calendar, just sort of plopping things wherever it was more convenient for others.
Kelly Berry (11:35)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (11:50)
And that was preventing me from getting a good night's sleep or exercising and really eroding my mood more than anything. And so I started to take better control over the calendar. And that helped me design a little bit better of a system. I know not everyone has the luxury of autonomy, but those conversations, even with your team, could be massively important. Even small shifts like let's take, take this 30 minute meeting and let's turn it into a 20 minute meeting and be really focused instead of having a hundred.
Kelly Berry (12:05)
Uh-huh.
Lauren (12:18)
you know, chats and windows open and get to the meeting so that I have 10 minutes to breathe and get up and move and have a healthy snack or whatever. And those small changes yield really big results. So even on a, I don't know, between knowing and doing level, there was a small change that made a huge downstream impact for me.
Kelly Berry (12:32)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. I do want to talk about all kinds of things like that because I have lots of questions. But I would, I guess I would like to ask more about like in the human performance and the work that you all do with your training, what are a lot of, when a company comes to you and says, we want to work with you, these are the problems that we're seeing or like, what are they noticing? What are they wanting to solve?
What do those symptoms look like?
Lauren (13:04)
Different companies come for different reasons. Sometimes it is for some sort of performance concern. Somebody's not maybe meeting their KPIs or delivering on, you know, maybe a sales goal. And so they come to us looking for a unique take on that. And they know that we sort of operate in a leadership development and executive coaching space that has that foundation of human performance sciences.
And they're like already champions. They see the relationship. And so that would be one reason. it's traditional performance issues or traditional leadership development. Hey, we want them to be high performing leaders. We like this spin, so we're going to take this on. A lot of the time they come to us because the reality is right now most American workers anyway, I could speak for them, are overworked, under-resourced, understaffed, and they're
they're experiencing a situation where the demand that they face are exceeding their capacity to manage it. And so they're in that disengagement or burnout mode. And then the leaders are looking for solutions, whether it's in training or coaching, to not just train their leaders, but to scale that. you we have different services that could do both, but I would say most of the time they're coming for us for one of those reasons, or they're just,
like I said, generally interested in developing leaders. And this is just one area that they feel is important kind of in a whole human approach to leadership development.
Kelly Berry (14:32)
Okay. And so when I guess to speak to some of those specific problems, like if it's a performance problem, or I'm thinking more of the like, we have a problem we want to fix rather than, you know, we'd like to basically invest in our team. What is your approach for like diagnosing or figuring out like, how do we, how do we figure out is this like a
human performance issue or is this a like training issue? Is this a just not right fit? Like what does that look like?
Lauren (15:09)
Well, that's a bit of a can of worms question. the reason I that is, and I have a friend, I know you know her name, Jen Fisher, the former chief wellbeing officer at Deloitte. And her position on this is it's almost always a systems issue. People come to you for an individual or team consideration, hey, we're not performing like we should or whatever.
Kelly Berry (15:12)
Okay.
Lauren (15:30)
it is, but the reality is they sort of have to face the truth of this is a bit of a broader conversation. So we take a bit of a holistic approach where we do a needs analysis and we have individualized performance assessments and things like that to help. I mean, you always want to take care of the leader. To me, it's the yes and of it. Let's, get them right because we do have more control than we think in this area and the system may be waxed and it might be a terrible culture, but at the end of the day, you have.
protect yourself, your energy, your wellbeing. So we take care of the leader in that sense, but we do kind of a needs analysis and we're pretty honest upfront, you know, about this is not just going to be an examination of an individual or an intact team. It's going to ask them the elephant in the room question about what are the systems and processes that are truly barriers to effectively allow individuals to invest in their whole
Kelly Berry (16:12)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (16:24)
And that question is uncomfortable, most leaders that come to us are already kind of champions. And so they're willing to do the work. It gets a little tougher when the organization is very big and we're working with one intact team. know, of course we can't change a 500,000 person organization. I have yet to meet someone who's been able to make that move that needle, but we're still working within that system to at least improve the quality of
Kelly Berry (16:36)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (16:51)
life for everyone at work and at home, you know, working on kind of a, it's almost like we're widening the aperture and narrowing it on the system and on the individual the whole time. And so I don't know if that answers your question, but that's sort of what we, we evaluate progress as it comes. The harder needle to move of course is the system. Those norms are just fixed and there's just a deep belief that this is just the way we do things and how could we change it? But a lot of companies are really willing to make those changes. And also the
Kelly Berry (17:04)
Yeah.
Lauren (17:20)
the leaders that are really invested in themselves personally, over time they're rising leaders to feel the same way and kind of pushing the narrative and the norm. so hopefully over time the culture starts to evolve into that kind of direction.
Kelly Berry (17:29)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So to speak to the women, the work around women, do you notice like more of these symptoms of, poor management of the human performance things? Do you notice that more in the women that you all work with than the men? Do you notice they have more challenges or what does that dynamic look like?
Lauren (17:56)
I mean, I've tried to be careful not to have a bias here. I prefer working with women leaders specifically because of the data that suggests that they are statistically more likely to leave the workplace, statistically more likely to turn down leadership, senior leadership positions, more likely to have experienced or be or experience at some point burnout. So, yeah, we definitely see. I will say also it's I mean, I'm
Kelly Berry (18:08)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (18:23)
mostly speaking to our culture here in the States. So traditionally women are the caregivers at home, the keeper of all the things and all the information, the house, and that's how our role is. We have two teenagers and I work from home. So naturally with the more flexible schedule, I sort of just manage everything. And that cognitive load can become really significant for most women that we work with.
Kelly Berry (18:27)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (18:48)
And of course, there's the systemic kind of inequities with women in the workplace too. So yeah, kind of piling all of those sort of demands and stressors, yeah, for sure. The women that we work with tend to be the ones who are at a higher, I would say, risk of performance issues, burnout, leaving, having challenges, et cetera. But also on a more positive note,
the more open and willing to see that broader picture and kind of make change. I wouldn't say that the men we work with don't. I mean, that's certainly not what I'm trying to imply. Just, you know, for the most part, they seem to be a little bit easier to coach. Although my male coaches might beg to differ because they do such a good job with our, with our, you know, male leaders. And then some of my female coaches who train male leaders like might disagree with me there. I have a little bit of a...
Kelly Berry (19:23)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (19:41)
confirmation bias because I mostly work with women senior leadership.
Kelly Berry (19:43)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I would say what I've seen is in line with what you're saying. You know, there's just a little bit more openness and maybe it is because you know, there's a there's more on the line. You know, it's either you can you can figure it out so you can keep doing what you're doing or you cannot figure it out and have to do something else. And so maybe men aren't really faced with that necessarily. So there could be a little bit more motivation to
Lauren (20:11)
could be.
Kelly Berry (20:14)
to get in there and do the work. I think overall, especially where we are, and this is probably like a big tangent, women are more open to the work. They are more willing to be vulnerable and open to the change that needs to happen. And I think that is because it's for a lot of reasons, but I don't think men are supported in the same way.
they have the same challenges or I'll say different challenges. And I think we'll, I think that we'll probably see a shift like where men are gonna need a lot more support and you know, they're kind of dumped on all the time now, like, and yeah, I think we'll start to see a shift, especially as the next generation kind of comes through who've been parented a little bit different, who maybe have had
Hopefully, you know, like primary needs met a little bit differently. They may act and perform different. I guess TBD on that, but yeah.
Lauren (21:13)
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean,
we've worked with some wonderful male leaders who see that whole picture. I think to your point, even this next generation, male and female, it's just going to be a different, it's going to be a different workforce. know, the pendulum tends to swing pretty extreme in one direction or another. And I do feel like we're going to hopefully kind of come to a place where high performance always matters and bottom line always matters. Expectations should not be lowered, I guess, is my
Kelly Berry (21:16)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (21:41)
about people working hard and facing all the very high demands and high degree of stress that they face and have a little bit, in my opinion, have a little bit more say and authority on how they structure their day to get things done. I mean, my husband, for example, he's in a leadership position at a hospital and his team is great. mean, his boss, but also the team that he leads, there's a lot of autonomy and a lot of support for a lot of people with young families, for example.
they still perform at a really high potential, arguably based on the data at a higher potential than maybe being forced into kind of a box of what traditional work should look like. So I do think we're kind of moving in that direction. Some industries a little slower than others, know, maybe a little set in their ways, but I'm excited to see where it goes.
Kelly Berry (22:27)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, it's not an or, you know, it's an and you can have like, you can take care of your people and take care of performance at the same time, like business performance. So yeah, yeah. So I guess what are some more of like the symptoms if we're talking about
Lauren (22:42)
Yeah.
Kelly Berry (22:50)
What do, say our listeners are leaders and incorporated, or maybe even like self-employed and they're thinking about like, what are the things that I'm feeling or that are kind of surfacing in my life? And how can I tie those to some of these human performance categories that you talked about so that I can begin to make some progress there?
Lauren (23:13)
Yeah. I mean, the biggest question I would ask as an individual is two questions really. What is the most important thing to me? People, thing, whatever it is, like what is like kind of that ultimate purpose? And are my day to day decisions, actions, habits, behaviors in alignment with that or not? If not, if not, which, you know, we can all say at some point or another, we felt that way, maybe even on a day to day basis.
Where am I feeling out of alignment? So, you you could go down the list of body, mind, spirit, you know, physically my out of alignment somewhere. Well, you know, yeah, I say that I want to live a long life and I want to be there for my children and I want to be active up until, you know, whatever. But maybe in this area, I'm not quite investing. And then the second thing they can ask is, you know, like what what's getting in the way? What's kind of the story you're telling there?
And I don't mean that to mean to be harsh. It's not that there's not truth in that, you know, perspective or story. But what traditionally am I going to say? Well, I don't have enough time or my schedule is busier and I'm in this season or that season. And and then what are the real barriers and then what are the ones that maybe, you know, could be something I have a little more control over than I thought. Those are the questions I would ask us in terms of symptoms. It's
hard for me to describe, I don't know, but that feeling, and I know we've all felt it, is that feeling of just being out of alignment in one area. I remember when my kids were your age, I was just all over the place, you I wasn't thinking critically and I wasn't, I was in my doctoral program actually when they were your, yours is age and I was an absolute mess and I wasn't.
I wasn't performing at the level that I expected of myself. And I had one professor, such a godsend, and she was also in the same phase of life as me in terms of parenting. And she said, don't forget, you know, the brain science here, like there is cognitive fog that's associated with raising toddlers and there is a lack of sleep. And she kind of like poked that human performance science right back in my face as I was learning.
Kelly Berry (25:21)
Thank you.
Lauren (25:23)
And I say that to say, noticed it, but it was a real barrier. It was an actual season, but there were things that I could have been doing a better job of, you know? I mean, I could have taken a little bit more breaks than I typically would have, given myself a little more grace in that category or, you know, little tweaks here and there to at least kind of move the needle a percent or two in the direction of feeling more rested and awake and ask for more help. That was a big one for me, you know, get a little bit more help. Don't...
set up a pack of play in the library, you go ask your mother-in-law for help and she was so amazing to do that. I know that's a little bit of a tangent, but the symptoms would be feeling out of alignment, feeling burned out, maybe feeling consistently burned out. Cause I do think that day to day, hour to hour, we can feel a wide range of emotions and experiences and our energy can fluctuate significantly, but what are you consistently feeling?
Kelly Berry (25:53)
Yeah.
Lauren (26:18)
over time and that's where I think journaling and maybe talking to someone or even just taking notes on your phone can help you go, you know what, I have been trending in this direction. My energy is lower. I do feel less and less engaged at work or whatever with XYZ and I've noticed this and then yeah, then it's maybe time to start paying attention and taking some action.
Kelly Berry (26:42)
Yeah, one of the big things that I heard you say there that I think is really important for people to think about are like facts versus stories. You know, the facts are the facts and that's like real information that you can do things with. The stories are not, you know, sometimes they do tell you things that are helpful, but a lot of times those are the things that we're telling ourselves to keep us stuck. And in your example, like,
Lauren (27:08)
Mm-hmm.
Kelly Berry (27:09)
to ask for help. You know, you may be telling yourself a story like, no one wants to help me or I need to be able to do this on my own or, you know, a thousand things that you could be telling yourself, but, you know, those are stories. They're not facts. And if you start to pay attention to your thoughts and your, I'll say excuses or your reasons or all of the things, the narrative in your head,
I think it's very enlightening the things that you actually think that are facts versus the things that you think that are not facts. And that goes from everything from the way other people are interacting with you, the way, you know, whether it's email, whether it's colleagues, whether it's your spouse, you know, it's all of the things. It takes so much mental energy. And we can like kind of weed through that and start thinking in facts or
like inarguable truth, then it frees up lot of bandwidth and then you don't have to worry about, you know, that's at least some bandwidth that you get back from all the stories that you're not like letting guide you.
Lauren (28:16)
Yeah. And I, I'm a huge proponent of data, not numerical necessarily, just data information. And you just can't argue with it. I have a good friend, Bill, who says you can't argue with your own data. And I love that. I mean, that's why I wear two wearable devices. do like data quantitatively too, but it's important. You you're tracking through your, your private thoughts in a journal or you're talking to a therapist or you're
Kelly Berry (28:19)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (28:43)
talking to the VIPs in your life, which I will caution, like have a few of those if possible, someone who's gonna be objective, cause some of, you know, your best friend or whatever is just gonna be your champion no matter what and confirm your stories all the time. And then you have some that are kind of like overly critical. And then you have those ones who are more objective, like a therapist might approach things, having those VIPs and you start collecting that data. And it's really, it's really interesting. You know, I will never forget when...
Kelly Berry (28:55)
Thank you all, bye bye.
Lauren (29:11)
I used to have this powerful story that I'm a business owner. I can't take off. I I get what I put in and you don't understand. I used to tell my husband, you don't understand. My kids, don't understand. And I had no real boundaries with the business. And I was saying it was because I was a startup. I'm a startup. And there's truth in that. You have to hustle when your company is younger and growing. Revenue is king. you have to get butt.
I'll never forget, I was at my son's practice and what I would do is I would go to work and he would come home and I would take him to soccer and I would, would I do? Get right back on the laptop and I would work through practice. And I remember one time there was some scrimmage and he came back in the car. He was so excited. He had had this great goal and, I missed it. And he was so upset when he said, why are you always working? You're always working. And I fired back to like a 10 year old.
You don't understand. I own my own business. It's I'm not like daddy. I don't get to clock out. And I just heard it. I just, I was so convicted. I was so embarrassed. And I was like, you know, this is ridiculous. I'm missing these moments. Not that I, and so I back to the pendulum swing, not that I never looked away from a soccer practice again. They could get, you know, um, repetitive, but I started to create more boundaries and tightness around.
Kelly Berry (30:27)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (30:34)
I'm going to go walk during practice and maybe I'll listen to a podcast and that way I can kind keep an eye on the field, but I'm also still kind of investing in the other areas of work that aren't me staring at a screen. And everything changed after that for me. That one story actually led to what I was telling you before examining my calendar and all that. But gosh, your mindset is such a powerful driver of your behaviors. I feel like we get so addicted.
Kelly Berry (30:37)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (31:01)
to the stories that we tell, that it's really hard to get away from them unless, again, we have data to prove us otherwise. So thank God for year old for me, you know, kind of calling me out. Better than any therapist ever did or any friend.
Kelly Berry (31:03)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah,
yeah. And I think, you know, when you think about, you know, we're always in motion, right? We're always in seasons of change and you have to be willing to look around and assess like, you know, I'm not, don't have to make this decision forever, but this might be the best decision for me for now, for where I am in life. And, you know, if, if you have to like,
walk at soccer practice because you need time to like move your body and you want to be present. You you won't have to do that forever, but maybe that's what you have to do in the moment because you do have two kids and they have two different schedules and you're trying to manage everything. I have made decisions like that just to go back to like your calendar for work. I've made decisions where, you know, it's like, okay, I'm not doing any meetings anymore on Mondays. I was noticing I wasn't prepared. I wasn't...
You know, I was forgetting things. I wasn't showing up well. Time was being wasted. So I just stopped and it's like no more meetings on Mondays. I may go back to that at some point, but I don't have to have them right now. And it's actually like wasting more time than it's benefiting. And so I'm making that decision and you know, I don't really have any meetings before 10 a.m. And there's there's a lot of things that I do and I'm able to do, but it helps me like
you know, I'm able to be present all morning with my daughter after she gets up before she goes to school. I'm not like trying to rush her out the door and go sit at my computer, you know, just things like that. But remembering, and a lot of it's reminding myself, like my life isn't going to be this chaotic forever. I am in a season. I do have to kind of just like get through it. But I think that that's a really valuable thing to think about.
Especially, you know, women our age who have children of all different ages and now are becoming caretakers for their parents. There's a lot of there's a lot of things to balance. And so if you think that you're that this is going to be the situation you're in forever, sometimes that can be really hard to like face or be able to like have the gumption to like get through. But if you think of things, OK, it's a season like I just got to do this.
one change for a little while and then I'll re-evaluate.
Lauren (33:34)
Yeah, yeah, you know, and I was thinking earlier.
business performance, you had said about business performance, just giving an example of the power of this mindset part and also these small changes. mean, because we're talking about, you know, personal examples of boundaries and whatnot, but it really has real impact and kind of downstream return on investment to think about these things from a business perspective too. There's a CHRO that
She leads a massive company. This is like a $2 billion company. so safe to say the demand on her extremely high. Her work ethic is really, really very traditionally just I'm going to charge nonstop nights, weekends when we first started. One of the things though that was something we worked on was she had a monthly standup privately with the CEO and they would go through things. Sometimes it would be every other week.
And she never felt quite confident or prepared. He was sort of like a quick talker, kind of charged back, asked a lot of questions. Not a great listener, this particular person. And one of the things that she made a decision on, well, first thing we did was get some data, you know, on what's going through your head, how are you showing up? Because what she was feeling, the...
The performance issue was she wasn't able to clarify or ask for what she needed. She had a lot of strong data to present, but she just kind of would fumble her words and then imposter syndrome would sink in. And then all of a sudden, you know, those meetings, just felt like they sort of just went downhill from there. So long story short, two things we worked on. Number one was sort of journaling after the meeting, taking 15 minutes of what happened. How did you feel like you showed up? Where did you think you were off course a little bit?
And then I also asked her to examine her work schedule and block, have a time block before that meeting, either the day before or the day of a couple of hours to really go through that data so that it felt a little bit more natural and she was better prepared. And just those two small tweaks really helped improve her confidence when she showed up because she would recognize that kind of imposter syndrome come in.
What were the physical sensations that would come over her? We put in a strategy around physically, taking a couple of deep breaths, nothing that was elaborate, you know, but just little things to kind of hack, not hack her biology, I don't love that term, but you know what I mean? Just kind of like influence her biology so that physically she was calmer and yada, yada, yada. But I mean, it had a real impact on her performance in those moments, which then...
Kelly Berry (35:56)
I
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (36:13)
at the end of the year in her performance review, her CEO tells her, wow, I've really noticed you've come a long way in your ability to speak and whatever. So she had some real barriers. He was kind of a talker over type, but he even recognized the growth in her kind of owning her space, being more clear in her messaging and communication and feeling more confident overall. So, I mean, this stuff has a real impact.
Kelly Berry (36:36)
yeah.
Lauren (36:37)
on every area of our life when we really like make these small tweaks in the right direction, you know, just dial up or down in one area and see the results of it. So I wanted to share that because sometimes, you know, for me, I think a lot about my personal life, how it relates to professional, but this has real impact on our professional lives too.
Kelly Berry (36:43)
Yeah.
Yeah, I love that story because I think that it's really easy when you're in a situation like that where maybe you have a boss that is a very different communicator to get into like victim mode. Like I can't communicate, you know, he won't listen. you know, no matter what I do, like I can't my point across or whatever, but it sounds like, you know, she was really willing to put the work in.
to figure out, how can I communicate this better to this kind of communicator so that I'm the one who's like moving the relationship and then the business forward. I think I just think, you know, personally and professionally that's really commendable because I think it's easy to just write somebody off or be like, you know, he's a jerk or he's, he's too busy or whatever, but yeah.
Lauren (37:47)
Yeah, she could have made that decision. I never made any changes. And
she actually took all that training into a new role and the new organization. And I mean, she's a different leader. She showed up in her interview. She showed up differently in her first couple meetings with the board. I mean, it just, it is a huge, it's nice to reflect back on the growth that she's made. you're right. You know, it could have been easy for her to fall into that trap of, it's just, we don't clash, you know, or we clash.
Kelly Berry (37:59)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Lauren (38:17)
You know,
he talks over me, it's him, it's him, it's him. And it is, yes and. And there was stuff that she could have kind of worked on, you know, to interact with that type of communicator.
Kelly Berry (38:22)
Right.
Yeah. And the other part of it that I want to talk about for just a minute, you've mentioned a few times like the schedule changes and time blocking. When we had our coaching organization and we coached fitness business owners for a long time, internally, our culture was, our meetings are 50 minutes. You always have 10 minutes between meetings and it's the facilitator's responsibility to end the meeting on time because everybody needs that space between meetings.
You know, now I see people going back to back to back all day. You know, they don't even have time to get up and go to the bathroom. And I mean, that just seems absurd to me. But we had a limit for coaches. You know, you can only have this number of coaching sessions in a day. Only have this number of coaching like when you're doing annual coaching sessions or quarterly, you know, there were rules around all of that because you can't keep piling on and keep performing well.
Lauren (39:21)
Right.
Kelly Berry (39:22)
You know, we also had a weekly coaches meeting and our weekly leadership team meeting. And the expectation was that you had the hour before both of those blocked off so that you can prepare. And then we had kind of like this, we called it our weekly operating routine, but at the beginning of an end of each week, was specific time set for reflection. And I think like those things seem kind of small and you know, 10 minutes between meetings doesn't seem like a long time, but
If you have no minutes between meetings, seems like a long time. And if you're not taking any time during your week to have some built-in reflection, then you're just, it's like sleep. You're not ever able to absorb all of the things that you've just been through, that you've learned, that you've accomplished. And so you can't internalize any of that to then carry forward. And I think that just keeps a lot of people really stuck and really in the hamster wheel.
Lauren (40:16)
Yeah. And it is hard to initiate those conversations with a manager, a boss. But, you know, one of the ways to do that is just, you know, curiosity and, I heard this podcast or I read this research. I'd love to talk about, you know, is there a better way for us to do this and, you know, come with your own metrics? I've noticed I'm less focused or I, you know, my team's making XYZ more errors on their invoices, you know, whatever it is.
Kelly Berry (40:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (40:46)
that you could present and have that conversation and be courageous enough to have that initial, hey, you know, I think there's a better way for us to do this. Can we think outside of the box on how we manage our day? But calendar management is probably one of the hidden super weapons for this type of work because we interact with other humans on a day-to-day basis. We don't operate in a silo. So for me to protect my calendar is great, but I had to communicate that
Kelly Berry (41:03)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (41:13)
the team too and set expectations. And some people, they would push a little like, oh, I'm sorry, this is not going work for me. How about 8 AM? No, 8 AM is not going to work. I'm going to be at the gym and not being afraid to say that. I get that not everyone has that privilege, but we have been able to kind of successfully nudge our clients in that direction too, to the best of our abilities. Asia Pacific region makes it a little harder. They're 12 hours ahead or behind.
Kelly Berry (41:22)
I think.
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (41:42)
So I have those kind of protected outlier days as well. And I try to make sure that the, again, going back to like the cumulative effect, we're only doing one or two of those a month at most. And at a time that was convenient for both of us. So that'd be the only time there's an exception. Now, some people who work in global organizations becomes a real issue. Their work schedules are horrible. So hopefully they're building in time for more recovery during the day, you know, in examples like that. Taking large chunks of time and
Kelly Berry (41:51)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Lauren (42:12)
going to the gym and getting their workout or taking a long lunch or whatever it is during their lunch breaks. For example, if they do have early and late meetings because they're interacting with people on other sides of the world.
Kelly Berry (42:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's tough. Yeah, well, this has all been great. Is there anything else? I know, so you have a book. I mentioned at the beginning that you're an author and you have like a stress quiz on your website. So talk a little bit about like what you're, where you're going with that and what you're doing. Tell us like the name of your book. I know it's on Amazon, I'll include it in the show notes, but talk a little bit more about that.
Lauren (42:50)
Yeah, so one of my kind of passion areas within human performance is stress sciences. And I was very lucky 2016, 17 ish to be a set. was in consulting. was freelancing on a project with Thrive Global and they were partnered with Stanford Medicine and Accenture. And to make a long story short, there was some really great research coming out of Stanford at the time on the brains of patients with mental illness. And there was some really, really cool stuff coming out
created a digital program called Thriving Mind that was launched March 2020 actually at Accenture and it went on to become the most popular course in their company history. I it was so needed at the time so the timing was a lot of that success but I fell really deeply in love with a particular area of stress around neurosciences of stress in the brain and how we all show up very differently.
when it comes to our thoughts, our behaviors, and our emotion under stress. So we call them our stress personalities. And so the book is almost like a choose your own adventure where you kind of learn a little bit about the basics of stress sciences, how the stress personality kind of forms. And then it goes into sort of like the eight different stress personalities. And the reader, I'm hoping, is just sort of flipping to the ones that they feel are most aligned to them. The quiz is embedded in the book, but it's also on our website.
And it's to me a really great way to build awareness of how you show up under stress, those predominant patterns. And we go into, I go into a lot about storytelling mindset. know, all the things we've been talking about today are kind of infused into that book as well. But that's the crux of it. It's called less stress, more calm, discover your unique stress personality and make it your superpower.
Kelly Berry (44:30)
I hear you.
Yeah. So do you now run programs based on that methodology as well?
Lauren (44:47)
We do, yeah, our agility program is on that topic and on just sort of resilience in general. We call it agility because we don't just wanna bounce back, which is kind of the definition of resilience. We wanna learn how to thrive through. And so part of that program experience is getting to know how you show up under stress. So yeah, it's definitely a part of the program. This is just a very extended version of that live in-person program.
Kelly Berry (45:14)
Yeah, yeah, I mentioned to you before we got started, I took the quiz yesterday. I was a little surprised my stress personality is a worrier. I'm a little surprised by that, but some of what I read in the report, I will say was spot on. yeah. Yeah.
Lauren (45:22)
⁓
Maybe you're a couple different ones and that's
the elements of one. I'm a runner. I avoid procrastinating push off for sure. And then I'm a warrior, I think, and a negative self-talker. definitely that will creep in kind of like as a runner up to the avoiding stuff for me. But yeah, maybe, I don't know, maybe take it another day and you could experience something different.
Kelly Berry (45:45)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah,
yeah, definitely. And I'll include the link to that as well, because I love quizzes. I love assessments. I will take all of them, because I think they're insightful. And the more that you learn and become aware, or even just if it's something to think about, you don't have to live by it. But if it helps anyway, I think.
Lauren (46:04)
Thank
Yeah,
it's definitely not the intention of it is here is you picture of you forever. This is always how you show up. We show up in so many different ways under stress, but based on this, the brain science, which I'll let them read about one or two usually is our default where we go first and most often. And that's where I'm trying to get readers to move toward is where do I go first and most often? Does that change with the environment or context?
Kelly Berry (46:29)
Mm-hmm.
Lauren (46:38)
the intensity of stress. so that's kind of the, the hope is that they're using it as a learning tool, not like a, you know, this is who I am forever and always. I mean, I think that's my kind of beef with like disc profiles and things are wonderful. They provide a lot of awareness, but we kind of get fixed into, well, this is just who I am. And I think we're always, you said earlier, emotion and changing and evolving. So hopefully they use the quiz in that regard. It's a really fun quiz.
Kelly Berry (46:47)
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's not your identity, right? It's just, yeah. Yeah. I know. I feel like disc in particular because, you know, people are like, I am a C. I am a D. I am, I am. But yeah. Yeah. So anything else that, you know, we haven't touched on today that you think is important to all is a big part of your work or just kind of like a message to women who maybe
Lauren (47:09)
No, exactly.
Yeah, right.
Kelly Berry (47:35)
looking for ways to impact their mental, physical, overall human performance.
Lauren (47:44)
Yeah, mean, think start small is an important message. Don't boil the ocean on your first day of really thinking about this stuff. Just one small shift in one direction can really have a significant impact on us. I I started with soccer practice and that turned into literally evolved into how I run and operate our business. And that's huge.
So start small, collect data, be curious about yourself, know, turn kind of that mirror toward yourself here and there and just ask how you're feeling. So that curiosity around how you're showing up. think keeping a note section or journal handy and just sort of writing in a little bit, it doesn't seem fruitful in the moment, but over time you go back and read and you go, wow, there really are some patterns here. I've noticed that when this happens, this is how I show up and these are the thoughts that I have. And that insight is...
gold. So that would be another suggestion is just get curious about these topics and and invest in yourself, even if it's just fiercely protecting, like you said, 15 minutes or whatever for reflection time at the end of a week, 15 minutes could be priceless for you. So see where that takes you hopefully takes you further and further in the direction of alignment between who you want to be the best version of yourself more of the time, you know, and how
Kelly Berry (48:40)
Mm-hmm.
⁓
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Don't boil the ocean. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've actually heard it maybe. I've never heard it before. And then in the past month, I've probably heard three or four people say it. And I'm like, maybe that's a message to me. Maybe I'm, maybe I have heard it before that, but I haven't been listening to it. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Lauren (49:09)
where you are now, whatever that looks like.
Yeah, yeah, I love that phrase.
Yeah.
Yeah, think they could pay attention to that. I read it down in their journal.
Kelly Berry (49:35)
Yeah, so tell everyone where can they find you, where can they follow you, and for anyone in a corporation who may be looking to work with an organization like yours, what does that look like too?
Lauren (49:48)
Yeah, so they can find us on our website, performance-on-purpose.com. That's the name of the company, Performance On Purpose. I'm on LinkedIn. DR, Lauren Hodges, I think is the handle on there. And I have a LinkedIn learning course on the stress personality stuff. If they have a free subscription or they can just message me, I can send them one. And then I think, like you said, books on Amazon so they can check that out if they're really interested in that angle. But just reach out with any questions.
Truly love talking about this stuff. I really do. And I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone has.
Kelly Berry (50:20)
Yeah, awesome. Well, thanks for being here. We didn't even talk about all of your learning design and all of that part of it. You just have so much going on. It's hard to fit in a podcast conversation, right? Thank you so much. This has been great. And again, all of those links that she's mentioned are in the show notes. So if you have a few minutes, I would encourage you to take this dress quiz. I think it's insightful. And like she said, her LinkedIn course, just lots of resources that you can.
Lauren (50:29)
Another day.
Kelly Berry (50:49)
take advantage of and learn from. So thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you.
Lauren (50:53)
Thank you, good to see you.
Kelly Berry (50:59)
Thanks for listening to Life Intended.
Sadie Wackett (51:02)
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Kelly Berry (51:14)
Life Intended is more than just a podcast. It's a movement back to self-trust, personal power, and living with intention.
Sadie Wackett (51:23)
and we're just getting started.
Kelly Berry (51:25)
So keep showing up, keep tuning in. If you're ready for more support on your path, head to LifeIntended.co. We've got tools, community, and programs to meet you where you are. Until next time.
Kelly Berry is a strategic business leader and business coach. She is known for her operational excellence and her ability to drive growth and results across multiple industries.
She is also hosting her own podcast, Life Intended.
