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The Best Ever Podcast with Scott Eblin is your insider’s guide to what it takes to lead at the highest level at work, at home, and in your community. Each week, Scott sits down with remarkable leaders for real, revealing conversations about the mindset shifts, self-management habits, and everyday routines that fuel extraordinary leadership impact. Drawing on his 25 years of experience as a top executive coach, Scott brings a coach’s lens to every episode to help you bridge the gap between intention and action.
Scott: In this special episode of Best Ever, my guests and I are going to unpack one of the key building blocks of my Life GPS personal planning system - the mental routines that can help you show up at your best - at work, at home, and out in the world. I’ll get to the guests in a couple of minutes, but, first, I want to share a little personal observation and experience with you.
There’s so much coming at us today in terms of information, meetings, news, and competing commitments that keeping yourself at your mental peak can be a real challenge. When I was doing the research for my book, Overworked and Overwhelmed, here’s what I learned about why that’s true.
All of the stuff that you’re paying attention to, distracted by, or worrying about can leave you in a chronic state of fight or flight. Your sympathetic nervous system is working on overdrive and when it does all of the neurological and physical systems start moving in the wrong direction - your stress hormones spike, your blood pressure goes up, and in the worst case scenarios, your blood can clot to the point that you end up with a heart attack or a stroke. On the other side of the ledger, other systems slow down - a wonky digestive system can lead to ulcers and other GI issues; your immune system weakens leading to colds in the best case scenario and cancer in the worst; your growth and sex hormones subside which can lead to premature aging.
That all sounds pretty terrible so why am I telling you this? Because the good news is you can also reset your brain to counteract all of the input that puts you into chronic fight or flight. The power move is to activate your rest and digest response.
If you’re like most of the people I coach and speak to, you haven’t heard of rest and digest until just this minute. It’s the nickname for your body’s parasympathetic nervous system. One way to think about it is that fight or flight is your body’s gas pedal and rest and digest is your body’s brakes. To perform at your best - not just mentally, but physically, relationally, and even spiritually - you need to tap the brakes throughout the day to keep your fight or flight and rest and digest in sync. It’s what scientists call homeostatic balance.
And the best way to bring yourself back to that is to breathe. When you’re breathing the right way, the rhythmic, repetitive motion of the breath activates your rest and digest braking system.
So what’s the right way to breathe? I’m going to draw on my yoga teacher training to teach you.
Ready? Here we go. Sit in a comfortable, grounded position and put one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest. I’m going to give you three rounds of counting the inhale and exhale. As you do, focus on your belly - your hand should be moving out on the exhale as the belly expands and back in on the inhale as the belly contracts. So, with your lips gently sealed breath in on one, two, three and four. And exhale gently through your mouth on 4, 3, 2, and 1. (Repeat two more times)
What do you notice? I’m guessing you feel calm, clear, and focused. If you do, it’s because you just activated your braking system - the rest and digest response. The great thing about taking three deep breaths that way is it’s a mental reset button that’s always available to you. When you’re feeling spun up, notice that, pause, and take three deep breaths from your belly.
That’s one routine to keep yourself at your mental peak and it’s one that Olympic gold medalist and four-peat NCAA championship coach Dain Blanton uses with his players on the USC women’s beach volleyball team.
Dain Blanton: Interesting. Those two things are so big, right? They're huge. And so most practices, I start with five minutes of meditation and five minutes of visualization. So you've got to understand the student athletes have so much on their mind. They're taking 16 to 20 units of school. They're coming from a class. They're coming from a weightlifting session. So not only do I use that five minutes to prepare and visualize, but it's also kind of a reset for them as they come into practice and get their mind in the right place to do something for the next hour and a half. I think that ritual and that... That technique of using five minutes to really reset yourself is paramount. It's huge. And it can change everything. So not only do we do that when we are practicing, we also do that when we are competing.
We work on a lot of breathing techniques and really relaxing yourself so you can be in a calm state. I would put that more in the meditative box. And then there are days that we do more visualization or focus on technique. But definitely two separate things. They do happen in a similar environment though, right? We let them spread out along our facility, lay down in the sun. It's quiet. We either have like a meditative song going or on the speakers, something to get them in kind of a relaxed state, whether they're in visualization practice or in the meditative state. And so all those things are the same, but within that, you're absolutely right. There's the visualization at times, and sometimes it's just straight, hey, let's focus on our breathing for the next five minutes. And let's try to slow down our breathing with really long breaths and long exhale, filling up the chest and the belly, and then the exhale. And if you can think of, hey, try to have six or seven breaths only during about a minute, you're really focusing on slowing down that pace and getting prepared for what's to come…
Scott: Getting yourself into that sweet spot between fight or flight and rest and digest sets you up to do higher order mental work like assessing what actually is and isn’t a big deal and then acting in the most appropriate way. It ties back a lot to how I define mindfulness - it’s the combination of awareness and intention. Awareness operates in two domains - extrinsic - all of that stuff out there in the world that’s happening - most of which I can’t do anything about - and intrinsic - my own self-awareness of how I’m reacting to all of those extrinsic factors swirling around me. That’s where the intention comes in. Once I’m aware of external and internal dynamics, I’m much better positioned to be intentional about the response that I choose. What’s the best thing for me to do - or maybe more importantly - not do, next?
That’s why I love this clip from Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah who breaks down his strategy for setting the conditions to be intentional about how he responds under stress. Spoiler alert - it comes down to how he views extrinsic triggers.
Vivek Shah: I mean, it's true. And so you have to look at things in a broader context, which I do. And so, you know, people tell me here I take bad news well. It's not that I like bad news. It's that in the end, I don't know if I characterize it as bad as others might, because to me it's, there's real bad news in the world.
Scott: Mm-hmm.
Vivek: You know? You know, a weak sales number is really not one of them. Like if you, you know, inside of one company of many, it's like, I just, I think maintaining proportionality is so, so important. And I- It's hard. I think, you know, I, I see it on athletic fields and at schools and the pressure kids are under, like I see it with kids, right? Like. Everything feels... So, so big, so immense. I think that's hard to deal with mentally if that's how you go through life.
Scott: So, let’s say that, in spite of your best efforts to keep things in perspective and work from that mental sweet spot between fight or flight and rest and digest, you’re feeling stuck, stalled, or overwhelmed by what’s going on - what do you, then? Option 1: is to come back to your breathing. Option 2: is to take advantage of the mind-body connection and get your body moving. That worked so well for Donagh Herlihy that he made it a regular daily routine when he was the chief technology officer for Subway and a number of other well-known companies Digital leader Donagh Herlihy on how a short, physical break at noon resets his mind for the afternoon.
Donagh Herlihy: Not that structured. Yeah, not that structured, but actually, I'll fess up. It was a repeating calendar entry at 8 o'clock every morning. First thing I'd see in my calendar would be that word. And I learned from my own outside work, my own well-being. I have a practice now, look, I'm 61. So As anyone at my age, I've had some ailments over the years. I start each morning. Thanking God, for the resolution of various physical ailments. And then I thank him for the relationships with my family, and then I thank him for our health and prosperity. And so, I find if I start the day, with that mindset it's better for me. If it's better for me, it's going to be better for the people who interact with me, and then the other thing, for me in terms of being my best self. You know, exercise in the middle of the day, you've had a morning, you've had a bunch of meetings. It might be starting to wear you down. You might have a big issue. You might be grinding on something or stressed about something. Going to the gym at lunchtime. Disconnecting from the problem, getting a different perspective by not thinking about the problem, by focusing on something completely different. Like, can I do a plank for however long? And coming back, re-energize physically, but also with a better perspective, a broader perspective in the afternoon. So very simple tactics, which I'm a believer in the power of habits.
Scott: When you keep your perspective, you’re in a better position to see the bigger picture. One of the key takeaways I picked up from my graduate school days at Harvard’s Kennedy School comes from professors Ron Heifetz and Marty Linksky - leaders can either be on the dance floor or the balcony and it’s important to intentionally shift your perspective so you can see the patterns that make up the bigger picture. Here’s how Vivek Shah creates balcony space for himself.
Vivek: Yeah, so I think for me, it's all about pattern recognition. So what I've done well in business is I expose myself to lots of things in and outside of business, and then I look for patterns. And I can see things in one place that have absolutely, seemingly nothing to do with my business and say, well, wait a minute, that dynamic actually can play itself here. So it's two things. It's being curious and learning as much as you can. And right now, this is the age for the curious. I mean, with AI and the potential to access knowledge, curiosity will get rewarded. So be hyper and ultra curious. And then recognize that there are patterns. And so look for the patterns that you could say, wow, well, how can that business connect here? I've always tried to understand how something works from a business point of view. More precisely, how does this make money? I'm always fascinated by this. Like, how does that make money? And when you learn how that makes money, you may say, well, you know what? That can make me money here. And so that has been really helpful for me. So I love to read. I love to study. I just I love to hear about things. Right. I like, well, how does that work? And what do you do here? And tell me about your business. And and so if you're that kind of person and you'd be amazed how much people would love to talk about their businesses. They'll talk to you about it. If you show curiosity, they're going to talk to you about it and you're going to learn something.
Scott: You can deepen your levels of curiosity by creating a regular habit of feeding it. I love this example from learning innovator Richard Culatta about how he and his son have made a nightly ritual of bonding over their mutual curiosities about what’s going on in the world and why.
Richard Culatta: And then at night, before we go to bed, we do something called rabbit holeing, where we pick something off the list. And for 10 minutes, we go as deep as we can in the rabbit hole to find out what the heck, you what do we learn about clouds or sushi or astronauts or whatever it is that we're choosing. It's just a nice way every day to have a habit of learning something new and exploring new
Scott: How long have the two of you been doing that? I have never heard that routine. That's a great one. So how long the two of you been doing that?
Richard Cullata: Oh, we've been doing it for a number of years now… we used to… read at night before going to bed… and so we said, well, why don't we just make this tradition of doing this every night before we go to bed?
Scott: One of the reasons I love that rabbit holeing routine from Richard and his son is that it’s a high leverage two-fer - it’s not just a mental routine, it’s a relational routine as well. And the idea of high leverage sets up the last guest I want to tap for this special episode on mental routines.
Scot Wingo is a highly successful technology entrepreneur who always has a lot going on. One of the ways he stays on top of his game is to go offline for a week every year to assess what’s been working, what could be working better, and what should be next. Here’s how he uses the week and what it’s done for him over the years.
Scot Wingo: Yeah, I don't know how I started this, but I always take that period between Christmas and New Year's. It's like a quiet period. It's the only quiet period in Startup Plan. And I use it for a lot of reflection and planning the next year. And then, you know, so I've been doing that for 30 years. So there's a, and then there is when I think about how I'm using my time, what I can do better. A new, I always try to like make an adjustment so I can be more efficient. So I'm always trying to like challenge myself to be more efficient with my time. And then, you know, the other thing I would tell founders and folks that are younger is if you do that over, and you've probably got some habits like this too, these habits compound just like interest. And, you know, every year for 30 years, I've been trying to like turn the dial like a little tiny bit, but it starts to have a logarithmic approach to it.
Scott: You know, there’s a larger point that Scot highlights when he talks about the power of compound interest. Little steps when consistently taken lead to bigger results. That’s true in all aspects of Best Ever leadership and life including the mental routines that help you live and lead at your best. Whether it’s using your breath as a mental reset button, maintaining a sense of proportion and perspective, nightly rabbit holeing, developing a regular cadence of taking time to step back and assess, or anything else my guests or I shared in this episode, I hope you’ll either double down on a mental routine that’s working for you or start taking small and regular steps to build a new mental routine that will serve you as well as the people you love or lead. Contact me through eblingroup.com to let me know what’s working for you or to learn more about the Life GPS and my companion online course, Best Life Ever.
Thanks for listening to or watching Best Ever. I’m Scott Eblin, see you next time.