The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.
Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!
This podcast provides general information and discussions about health and wellness. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The podcast owner, producer and any sponsors are not liable for any health-related claims or decisions made based on the information presented or discussed.
Jen Fisher (Jen): Hi WorkWell listeners. I am really excited to share that my book ‘Work Better Together’ is officially out. Conversations with WorkWell guests and feedback from listeners like you inspired this book. It is all about how to create a more human centered workplace. And as we return to the office, for many of us, this book can help you move forward into post-pandemic life with strategies and tools to strengthen your relationships and focus on your well-being. It's available now from your favorite book retailer.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, we all experienced feelings of disconnection from our co-workers, friends, families, communities, and even ourselves. As challenging as it has been, we all learned some important lessons. We learned the importance of human connection. We learned that we can still all show up for our community. And most importantly, we learned that we need to take care of ourselves if we want to be able to take care of others.
This is the WorkWell podcast series. Hi! I am Jen Fisher, chief well-being officer for Deloitte and I am so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things well-being. I'm here with Shelly Tygielski. She's a trauma informed mindfulness teacher, community organizer, self-care activist, and author of ‘Sit Down to Rise Up,’ how radical self-care can change the world. Shelly is also the founder of Pandemic of Love, a grassroots volunteer-led and formalized mutual aid community. Shelly, welcome to the show.
Shelly Tygielski (Shelly): Thanks so much for having me, Jen. I really am so happy to be here.
Jen: Absolutely. Looking forward to this conversation. So, let's start out having you tell us about yourself and who you are, what you do, and then how you became passionate about both self-care and mindfulness and the connection between those.
Shelly: Sure. So, who am I? That's such a big, loaded question. I wear so many hats. Let's start with the easy stuff. I'm a mother, a daughter, a wife. I am a community member, very active community member in many different communities. I've spent 20 years in the corporate world working in a variety of spaces, namely private equity and real estate arenas, and I left that world in 2015 and decided to become a full-time mindfulness teacher, which was really scary to do. But my journey since 2015 has been incredibly interesting in that what I thought I would be doing, which is primarily working in the corporate world bringing mindfulness to corporate spaces, which I do work with a lot of corporations. But that's not primarily what I spend my time doing. Instead, I spend most of my time working with organizations for
profit, nonprofit, with governmental organizations, social justice organizations all over the world on building resilience, on trauma informed mindfulness practices, and a variety of just different tools and modalities that can assist them in building self-care practices. But more importantly, building communities of care and safety nets that can allow them to support each other. So that's about me in a nutshell and you asked about the connection between all the work that I do and mindfulness, and really the premise of all the work that I do is the notion that we have to connect the inner work with the outer world and that the best version of ourselves or the best version of our world rather starts with the best version of ourselves.
Jen: So, what was the catalyst for you to leave the corporate world and make the decision to start teaching mindfulness full time?
Shelly: It's so interesting that you asked that because when I really dig deep and I kind of reflect back, I probably never should have been in the corporate world to begin with. I left graduate school in the ‘90s. I was in New York City at a great school, and at a great time to come out into the marketplace. And so, big companies were throwing money at people that were coming out of my graduate school. And I thought, well, I've got student loans and yes, I want to work for a United Nations-type agency or a nonprofit and make a difference in the world, but I have all these student loans, so maybe I'll just do that for a couple of years and then I'll go back to making a difference full time. And what ultimately happens, I think what happens to many of us is we get stuck with just the lifestyle, with obligations, you get accustomed to a life that you're leading. And not that it doesn't bring fulfillment, I was very fulfilled in many cases with the work that I was doing, but there was always that void or that could I be doing more? Should I be doing more? Is this the right time for me to step out of the role that I'm in and dedicate myself to something that really, I've been thinking about doing for most of my life? And it just never seemed it was the right time. And I always like to say that in spite of myself, I continued to rise up the ranks in the corporate world, went from a cubicle to eventually running a company with 2,400 employees in 14 markets across the country. And it wasn't like I set out to do that. I wasn't like the person who was I'm going to become this by this date or by this age. I actually was just good at what I did. And so, that continued to get recognized and I was like, okay, I guess I'll take that promotion, and I just got further and further sucked in. So, the decision ultimately came, I think the universe just threw me out of the nest. And it was enough, enough of this nonsense. After 20 years of doing this, I myself was going through this existential, let's call it a pre-midlife crisis. I was turning 40. It was 2015ish and I'm running this company. I am maybe a year and a half into my my contract, and I know that I've got a few more good years on this contract and I'm the type of person that will always see things through. But I felt very lonely at the top. I felt really lonely as a boss and as a leader of a company. And everybody is constantly coming to you and even though I had business groups that I was a part of from a mentorship and peer groups. I just kind of still really felt alone and I was longing very much for community and longing very much for connection in a very different way that I could get in the business world.
And so, I had this practice of meditating every Sunday morning or as often as I could get to the beach. I lived in South Florida, and I lived very close to the ocean. And so, whenever I could squirrel away some time in the morning, I would go sit at the beach and just kind of reflect on life and find some peace and quiet. And what kept kind of coming up for me and bubbling up was that I really was longing for connection and community.
And so, I had this thought in the fall of 2015 that I should put on my social media page just like a little question, who wants to join me for meditation on Sunday morning on this date in November at this location? And I thought maybe a few handful of people will show up and on November 15 of 2015, basically we had 12 people show up to meditate with me. They were all people I knew, acquaintances, and some were good friends. And it was interesting, because when I think back to the profile of everybody that did show up, everyone there was going through something.
They just had got a divorce, maybe they were just an empty nester, or just got a diagnosis with an illness or lost a parent. And so, it was so interesting, but we all came together, and it was just such a powerful moment of community and connection that we were like this is really great. We should do this again and so we decided on another date and a few Sundays down the road those 12 people turned into 30 and those 30 brought more friends and turned into 60 people, and then eventually 100 people. And by May of 2016, so really just six months after that first gathering of 12, we had close to 1,000 people on the Mother's Day of 2016 gathering at the beach. The point where the Police Department actually had to come and shut us down. Because they're emergency vehicles could not get through. We're literally from the dunes to the shore and nobody could pass through. And so, while they couldn't stop us from gathering, we just had to kind of create an arrangement and start putting cones out for future gatherings. But that group, which was really self-titled, I didn't come up with the name, but somebody started a hashtag called Sand Tribe. And so, the Sand Tribe would meet every Sunday morning 40 out of 52 Sundays a year, weather permitting, holidays etc., and it was great. It was an incredible community that kept going for five years until COVID, really the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic just no longer allowed us to gather.
Jen: Thank you for sharing that story. You share many memorable stories in your book, but the visual of you alone on the beach meditating by yourself and then a visual of thousands of people having joined you. I felt was so powerful. So, thank you for sharing that. So, your book title, let's talk about this refers to what you call radical self-care. So, what does that look like? And what's so radical about it?
Shelly: Well, I think the radical part about it is it was multifaceted. So, I think the first part is that I really try, especially in the book, to get us back to the roots of what self-care is and really delineate and make sure people understand what it isn't, because really the term self-care has been hijacked by the industrial wellness complex group.
Jen: Totally. It’s not wine Wednesday.
Shelly: Exactly, Wine Down Wednesday, mud masks, and $30 spin classes, etc., that's all great, but the reality is that the notion and just the concept of self-care was radical to begin with. And it was a means of survival. People associate self-care now with thriving, but before it was about thriving it was really about surviving. And we oftentimes forget that for so many marginalized people, not just in this country but all over the world it's still very much about survival, because they don't have access to the health care or the tools or just basically the health care, just access to anything that could possibly give them a measure of support, whether it's physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. So, in that sense, that's the first part of the radical kind of concept.
The second thing is that I really try to also create the connection between how Audre Lorde really described self-care back during the feminists and the civil rights movement. That self-care really can be an active resistance. That self-care is not self-indulgent. That self-care is just an act of perseverance, and
self-preservation. And I think finally it's this concept that self-care actually is not individualistic and that is really the biggest kind of take away that I hope people can get from the book is that, yes we use the word self, and so, in the English language, we think self, we think singular, you think one person the self. Many of us believe just is this body and it doesn't extend beyond this person that is sitting here. But rather the self is way bigger than we are. And I'm not talking about this in like a woo, woo kind of a way. This is not like, hey, let's light some incense and start chanting together, but really when we think about how interconnected we are and how intra-connected we are. Interconnection is like two separate beings are connected in some way, and we have so many of those connections through family and community and the people we work with. Even people here that are listening to this episode now are connected to us, to you and me in some way. But intra-connection is this understanding that really were part of one bigger ecosystem. And so, for that reason we're like one organism that has connections within it, and I think that if we could start to get to this concept that yes, we're intra-connected, not just interconnected, and for that reason we need to make sure that the term self really extends beyond just the singular but really moves into communal responsibility, communal obligation, a moral obligation that we have to take care of each other. Then we can really start to shift, I think, from a social movement perspective, what the world actually looks like.
Jen: I love that and talk about something that perhaps is needed now more than ever. So, I guess, how do you go about building this community of care around you. I mean, for you and the story you shared about meditating on the beach, it was, I guess, what was seemingly a simple social media post that created this giant community. But what do you suggest we do to build that community of care?
Shelly: Well, I mean it has to be incredibly formalized. So yes, I put up a social media post eventually that led me to forming this community of 15,000 meditators that eventually gave me the courage and pushed me into this place where I am today, gave me the courage to leave my job, help me understand that there are other things in the world that I need to be doing. But while I viewed that community the Sand Tribe, if you will, as definitely a community of care of sorts. It wasn't a formalized community of care. And so, what I talk about in the book a lot is how there's a few kind of formalized steps that we each need to commit to taking. And the first is that we each need to have our own formalized self-care plans, which means that we have to actually write down, we can metaphorically think of it as a break glass in case of emergency. When we are at our worst, when we are feeling emotionally depleted, when we are on the brink of burnout or just really fatigued. We're not making necessarily the right choices, we're making the easiest choices for ourselves in that moment. And so, it's really important to have an emergency plan that is written down, that is formalized. And what happens is that a lot of people create self-care plans, or we've seen people creating vision boards, especially at the beginning of the year. But when you do that you just kind of stick your self-care plan in your desk or under a pile of paper, you're not doing yourself any…you’re doing yourself a disservice actually. And so, what I suggest oftentimes is for people to then at least find one other person. The more the merrier of course. But let's start with one, find an accountability buddy. Find a person that is also going to commit to creating a self-care plan and then share the plans with each other. Share the plans with each other in such a way that you start identifying the obstacles that you believe you will have. So, for example, and this is an example that I used for my book, actually at the time that I started really working on a self-care plan I was a single mom. And so, even though I had things like exercise for an hour a day or go to yoga twice a week, all of these really great things that are written down. But the reality is that I had time poverty. I really just did not have the time to do any of those things, because I was working full time. I was single mom. I was still
very much an active member of my community in different ways. And so, I seem to always put myself last. I came last. And that kept depleting me in many different ways and I had a lot of health issues at that time as well. And so, in creating a self-care plan and sharing it with a group of like five or six women who also had a self-care plan. They were able to basically have this honest conversation with me where I said I have time poverty. There's no way that I can make it to the gym every week and I'm really starting to feel this decline in my health, because I'm not taking care of myself physically. And so, I had a bunch of women who were in this group say, well, I can drive your son to school on this day, and I can babysit for an hour a week on this day and that gave me back time, because they had an excess of that. They had extra time. And I was able to then do things for them to remove obstacles that maybe were on their list. And so, in doing so what we realized is that when we create these mutual aid communities, we start to create this beautiful tapestry, we start to weave this beautiful tapestry where every single person in the community has something they need, and every single person in the community has something that they can offer and we remove the stigma of asking for help, we remove the fear and we recognize that regardless of the socioeconomic status, because we always tend to associate having freedom or the ability to do things with that regardless of socioeconomic status that we can all help each other and that a rising tide really does lift all boats.
Jen: I love that, and I feel like in the book, that's when you, I mean, and you touched on it before that self-care should be something that everyone has access to and you talk about it as inclusive self-care. And so, I guess this is the path or the avenue that regardless of what means we have we can build a community and ask for help and give help in the ways that we can. And that's going to look different for everyone. So, I want to talk about Pandemic of Love since its inception. Since you started it, you've facilitated over 60 million in aid to people in need. But talk to us about how you came up with the idea and just the approach, because it's pretty unique and I know that you are just recently back from Ukraine. So, take us on that journey.
Shelly: Well, it's interesting because when you see some of the clips that were done on different television programs, national programs about Pandemic of Love. They love to paint this picture of this woman who's a housewife sitting in her kitchen table and just comes up with this idea, and it's a really romantic and great story, but that's not actually the story. The story is that I was already in the process of enacting mutual aid in the form of self-care communities, but also just from a financial perspective as well within the Sand Tribe community. So we had this closed circuit mutual aid that was happening, because over five years you really get to know people and you get to know their personal stories and you get to know when they have a diagnosis or when they lose their job or when they lose a spouse or something is going on in their life and ultimately, the community rallies around them and helps to get them what they need to make sure that they're in a good place. And so, we started to formally create these self-care groups or these mutual aid groups, if you will, where there was a community for recently divorced individuals and a community for cancer survivors and people who were just diagnosed with cancer. And every time being in South Florida, which was an annual occurrence, like a hurricane, we would get together and make sure that pre-hurricane people were able to have what they need to be prepared for the storm, in case their power went out for a week or two, which was a very common occurrence.
Jen: I don't know if you know this, but I live in Miami and my biggest fear in life is hurricanes. And so, people will be like and why do you live in Miami? And that's a great question, but I love Miami.
Shelly: So, you can empathize.
Jen: I can absolutely. It sounds like I need one of these mutual aid communities during a hurricane, because I am a hot mess.
Shelly: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I hear you there, but in terms of the physical aspect, what it's like when you are preparing for a hurricane, they're like go get your hurricane supplies, but if you're barely making ends meet and you could barely put food in the fridge and pay your bills. How are you now going to go get supplies to last you for two weeks. That's not even realistic. And so, we started to kind of several times a year back to school, making sure that all the kids in our community had the uniforms, because again in South Florida at least, public schools require uniforms. And so, again, your kids are growing constantly. We may take for granted the fact that you could just go to a store and purchase the uniforms for them, but many people can't afford to do that. And so, we started uniform collections and collections for things like laptops, different types of technology that students would need. And then during the holiday season as well, we would really ramp up efforts to assist community members who relied on things like free lunch and breakfast at their public school and suddenly they were going to have 10 to 20, I mean 10 days to two weeks off, where the kids would be at home and would really need to eat and maybe they didn't have enough money for holiday gifts, etc.
So, we already have this formalized process, but it wasn't anything fancy, it was just something that was open access and people could actually see the names of community members and what they needed and they could go in and say ‘oh, Judy needs a ride on Sunday mornings; oh, I live next to Judy I can give her a ride or this person needs help writing a resume, I can help with that. This person needs a laptop, I have a laptop sitting at home.’ So, it was like this informal formal mutual aid community. And when the pandemic started really ramping up, Florida, I think one of the last states that actually started to announce sheltering in home and social distancing and things like that. But it was inevitable. It was already happening in New York and in Washington and California and other places. And so, I already started to feel fear beyond just fear for my own family and for my own self. So of course, I was worried about my mother, who is in her 70s and has a pre-existing condition. I was worried about my immediate family and my family near and far, but I also started thinking about all these community members that I knew were going to really be suffering from this and that sheltering in home for them would not be easy at all. Because, in many cases, their kids didn't have laptops, but also, they don't maybe have Wi-Fi, so they couldn't necessarily continue to go to school and they would fall further behind and sure, they also needed food, but these are individuals that couldn't work from home. They work in the hospitality industry. They work in restaurants, etc. They were shut down and they were not getting income and it was just…I saw the writing on the wall and I thought ‘oh, this is going to be really tragic and remember at that time, if you can kind of take yourself back to March of 2020 when we were sheltering in home, I think we all thought this was going to last for a week or two.
Jen: They told us two weeks.
Shelly: So, in my mind I was like, so we can…everything is “figureoutable”. We could figure out how to get these people what they need for two weeks. So, I sat down, this was even before we officially were starting to shelter in home. And I thought, okay, what can I tangibly do about this? How can I channel this fear, channel this fear of the unknown and this despair that I'm feeling into a tangible action? And I thought, okay, I can’t put up a spreadsheet that is like open access and make it widely available to everybody in the community, meaning beyond just the Sand Tribe community, because people’s
personal information is on there and that would not be a good thing. So maybe what I could do is just create two forms. I created two very simple forms and they're still very simple. If you go to our website pandemicoflove.com, you'll see just how simple they are. And maybe I just create two really simple forms and then I have a person who wants to give help, fill it out; and a person wants to get help, fill it out. And we can then connect people directly at a time of disconnection because we're social distancing. And now a lot of people were starting to ask me like how can I help? What can I do? And I didn't have the answer for that and so this became the answer to that. So, I put up the two links for the forms, give help and get help on my social media outlets, and I woke up the next morning and I was shocked to see that hundreds of people filled it out and they were not all people from South Florida. The forms went around the world and came back and, in a way, proved that really diseases aren't the only thing that can go viral, but a lot of other things can be contagious to things like love and hope and kindness and so on. And so, it's amazing because we were getting requests from Italy and from Portugal and just places that had already been going through this now. They were in week 3, week 4, week 5, and they were like this is an amazing thing. How do we recreate this in our communities? And so, I started to replicate the forms. And really soon thereafter I realized like wait a minute, I now have 100 different forms and it's really getting impossible to manage. I need volunteers and I need to start to really streamline this and think about more and more efficient way of doing this. And bringing community leaders together so that they could share best practices and we can continue to hone and improve the process. And this is where I realized I will tell you, Jen, that the 20 years I spent in the corporate world was actually not lost. I was like this is why I had to spend 20 years understanding how to scale businesses, how to build websites, how to really think about the infrastructure and supply chain and create all these different efficiencies. And so, it's pretty cool because the website now sits on a Server, we can look at data, raw data, and manipulate the data and I know for people listening to those who are Deloitte, they're probably going to be geeking out on this because especially if you're a management consultant, you're like, oh, that's so cool. We have a dashboard, we can see how many people do we have in need, how many requests do we have and how many people are available to fill those needs and where are they. We can really see the demographics down to the ZIP code and age group and gender, etc. And it's pretty amazing and remarkable to now have this millions of datasets, because we've matched over 2.2 million people, but we have 2.5 million people in the database right now that are, it tells a story. The numbers and the way that the data…you could see the types of requests and the amount, the denominations, and where they're coming from. It really begins to tell a story. I think of what has happened in the last 24 plus months.
Jen: Can you create these mutual aid communities within companies and corporations? Do you work with teams within companies to do this?
Shelly: Yeah, I actually do all the time. Actually, in the last couple of years, we've created probably 30-35 amazing mutual aid networks within international corporations, which I'm really excited about because again it destigmatizes asking for help, it allows for an environment where there's a lot of transparency within teams about what is needed and it's great for leaders because they're able to anticipate some of the obstacles that a person on their team is facing that they may not have even known about and they can work together to remove those obstacles and a lot of times, many of the other team members are able to step in and assist, again with things like helping with time or it doesn't necessarily have to be just a monetary thing. Usually within companies, it's not.
Jen: Yeah, but I could just see. I mean, the powerful impact that it's having on society and the world at large and bringing it into our own companies, especially in this virtual, hybrid. There's a weird world that we're living in. The needs have changed and are so different and sometimes when you can't physically be with someone, you can always see those things and you can always have those types of conversations. So, just I absolutely love that concept. So, I want to get back to something that you said in your intro. You're a mindfulness teacher. So, let's talk about mindfulness a little bit, the impact that it's had on your life and then how you help others practice it as well. We've had a lot of people talk about mindfulness on this show, but it's something that I know even within our own organization, it's just continuing to gain popularity is probably the wrong word but appreciation for the benefits of it.
Shelly: Yeah. So, I started practicing actually meditation, not mindfulness, but really just a straight form of meditation called Metta, spelled M-e-t-t-a, which is loving kindness meditation, which helps to cultivate compassion, self-compassion and compassion for others. I started practicing that as a graduate student in the late 90s and I was very fortunate to be introduced at a very young age and at that time to somebody who's still my core teacher, Sharon Salzberg, who many of your listeners may, especially those who are appreciative of mindfulness and meditation, probably are aware of. Meditation was a private practice for me for many years. I will say that up until my health scare, when I turned 27 and I was diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition that could cause blindness and actually has caused blindness in my left eye, that I was a crisis meditator. I was a person that when things were really rough, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I need to meditate. I would just get to a point where I was back at equilibrium; I would reset; I was homeostatic, just breached my homeostasis, if you will; and then I would just fall off the wagon again and it was just peaks and valleys, but it wasn't until I was diagnosed that I really started thinking about my self-care and I had those accountability buddies who were like, ‘Did you meditate today?’ and held me accountable to what I said I was going to do for myself that I began to make it a part of my morning ritual, and it's a nonnegotiable practice because I feel just like I wouldn't leave the house without putting clothes on or brushing my hair or brushing my teeth, if I don't meditate, I’m not the best human form of myself when I leave the house, but what I will say is that I think there's a lot of people who are probably in that same boat where maybe your employer brings in a mindfulness program or there's a weekly sitting that happens during lunch or they bring in a speaker. So, you get the benefit from that moment from those 15 minutes or 10 minutes that you're doing a challenge for 30 days at the beginning of the year, but slowly, you may peter off and fall off. So, you do know that there are benefits to it, but again, it's you put yourself last and you say, ‘Yeah, you know, I don't have those 10 minutes a day or I don't have those 20 minutes a day to do this.’ So, for those individuals, the way that I work with companies, the way that I work with individuals is really honing into micro practices and getting people to start creating these micro habits that really adhere they fit on and take advantage of the things that they are doing anyway on a daily basis and I try to help to look at a person's daily cycle, like an average 24 hours in a person's life, and what that looks like and we try to build in these little proverbial, and I talk about this in the book, these mudrooms where they can create these mini-spaces before moving from one thing to another, from one meeting to another meeting, from your commute into walking into the house, from walking and getting on a conference call, and so on. So, I try to help create these little vignettes, these little moments, mindful moments that actually have a huge impact. People may think, well, it's only 60 seconds that I'm focusing on my breath or that I'm being present, but the quality of how you show up for that next activity is remarkably different when you are able to build these mini-moments into your life, six or seven or eight times a day and that seems very plausible and very doable for a lot of people and that's a really great way to, I say, plant a seed, that can really flourish
and continue to grow, because when you continue to do these mindful moments throughout the day for a while, you start to realize, okay, well, maybe I can spend five minutes in the morning before getting out of bed and just prop myself up against the headboard and meditate for five minutes before I get up, maybe I could do that. So, things just start to feel a lot more doable.
Jen: Yeah, and I imagine, well, in my own experience. So, I know you certainly start to feel the impact even of those 60 seconds a few times a day, which inspires you to want to do more. So, that helps.
Shelly: Yeah. It definitely does. Absolutely, it does.
Jen: Well, Shelly, this has been awesome. Thank you so much. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I know the listeners will too. I have one last question. We've talked so much about self-care and you talked about the need for a self-care plan in an emergency. So, what is your own self-care plan?
Shelly: Well, so my self-care plan is actually very visual. It has six different quadrants. Things like, it's a spiritual quadrant, physical, financial, and etc., and in each one of those quadrants, I have a list of activities or ways or things that I can do for myself on a daily basis, on a monthly basis, weekly basis, on a seasonal basis, and I really identify those rhythms in my life that require for me to show up for myself so that I can show up continuously for other people as well. So, it's actually a piece of paper that when I had an office, I would keep on my bulletin board in the office and it became a conversation piece with a lot of my employees who would come in and say, ‘Oh, what is that?’ and we would talk about it, and I would encourage them to print out a template. There's many different templates by the way. We're all obviously very different people in terms of how we think about things. Some of us are visual, some of us love spreadsheets, and so on. So, if you just go into a web browser and you search ‘self-care plan template,’ there's so many different types that you can just go down just like a rabbit hole and find the one that's exactly right for you. So, my self-care plan includes everyday meditation, it includes connection with the people that I care about, it absolutely includes nature. I have to get into nature on a daily basis and just put myself in the line of beauty as often as possible.
Jen: Well, thank you and I think that's probably thinking in visual quadrants that might be a little bit of your corporate or management consultant coming out.
Shelly: Exactly.
Jen: We love to think in quadrants.
Shelly: That's right. Exactly. I'm trying to speak your language.
Jen: Awesome. Well, again Shelly, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom today. We really appreciate it.
Shelly: Thank you so much, Jen.
Jen: I'm so grateful Shelly could be with us today to talk about self-care, community, and mindfulness.
Thank you to our producers Rivet360 and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various podcatchers using the keyword WorkWell, all one word, to hear more. If you like this show, don’t forget to subscribe so you get all of our future episodes. If you have a topic you would like to hear on the WorkWell podcast series or maybe a story you would like to share, please reach out to me on LinkedIn, my profile is under the name Jen Fisher, or on Twitter, @jenfish23.
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