Is your career ambition your North Star? Perhaps you are feeling or have felt burnt out by the time you reach your ambition. The problem isn’t that you are ambitious, the problem may be that your definition of success might not align with what you really value. On this episode, Jen Fisher talks with Milena Regos, founder and Chief Rebel Officer of Unhustle about how un-hustling can be your greatest asset in career success
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!
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Unhustling, a career superpower with Milena Regos
Jen Fisher (Jen): Hi WorkWell listeners, I'm 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's 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.
There was a time in my life when my career ambition was my North Star. I was always setting my sights on that next job or promotion and I would work nonstop until I got there. And then one day, I completely burned out. The problem wasn't that I was ambitious, the problem was that my definition of success was not aligned with what I really valued. It was only when I stepped back and reflected on what was really important to me that I was able to channel my ambition into the things that were truly meaningful in my work and my life.
This is the WorkWell podcast series. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, chief well-being officer for Deloitte and I'm so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things well-being. I'm here with Milena Regos. She's a rebel entrepreneur, ex-marketer and certified human potential coach. She is the founder of Unhustle, a community of global leaders, entrepreneurs and business owners on a mission to end the cult of overwork and embrace our humanity for a better future. Milena, welcome to the show.
Milena Regos (Milena): Thank you so much, Jen. I'm so excited to be here with you.
Jen: We're happy to have you on the show, so let's get started. Tell us your story, why and how did you start the unhustle movement?
Milena: Thank you so much. I'll try to keep it short. I'm a first generation immigrant from Bulgaria. I came to the US in '96 and I came to build a better life for myself. I did a master’s degree in international marketing in San Diego and I went down this marketing career path. Which 20 years into it, I did anything if I’m working for a media agency on the early ages of online marketing. So, back in '96, '97, I saw the whole dotcom. And then I worked as a marketing director for Ski resort for 10 years, which was a fun job, getting paid to ski and promoting skiing to people. And then I started my own digital marketing agency, social media was really picking up and I just have this entrepreneurial spirit in me and I decided to go all in and finally start my own digital marketing agency. Three years into it, I hadn't taken a vacation, I was building a team, I was working with celebrities, and I realized I was really, I don’t know
if I was burnout or languishing, like Adam Grant, would pull it, but I just wasn't happy. I was very successful on the outside. I wasn't making millions, but I had a comfortable lifestyle, a house in Lake Tahoe, a dog, a husband. But I was…
Jen: A dog being the most important, right?
Melina: Of course! But, I wasn't happy. I was lacking meaning. I was lacking being present with my husband. My health was suffering. I had digestive issues. I was pretty stressed out. We decided to take a 10-day digital detox trip. It turned into a digital detox trip, it wasn't at first. There's just no internet in the little Mexican village we went to. It turned into a digital detox and we decided to learn to kiteboard. And in that experience growing past the fear of kiteboarding and all the sudden realizing I'm all alone in the ocean, being able to kind of get present with myself, being in my body. I realized what am I doing, like why am I spending 100 percent of my energy and time and everything on work when there's so much more outside of work. So that took me on this trip of trying to figure out what do I want to do, what is my purpose, what does life want out of me? I found the Human Potential Coaching Institute. I had no intentions of coaching at that stage, but I signed up for it, because I wanted to upgrade my mind, my body. I wanted to be healthy. I did biohacking, I did Wim Hof method, I did all of the stuff, but what really was the critical piece in that training was a mindfulness training. It was a mindfulness-based stress reduction training, Jon Kabat Zinn style, and that's when my brain lit up, and I said, oh! I had it all backwards. I need to first figure out how to be present and control my emotions and my experiences, and my reaction. And then all of the sudden it led into this idea for Unhustle, because I felt that the worst possible advice given back then to entrepreneurs was to hustle all the time, and I know what it did to me, and so I went in the opposite direction, and I set up the Unhustle movement, as I call it.
Jen: So let's dig into that. You say that we live in a world addicted to hustle, whether it's entrepreneurs or otherwise, we are all addicted to hustle and you say that Unhustle is a superpower, which I completely agree with. But let's unpack that, talk a little bit more about how we have become addicted to the hustle and perhaps why and then what Unhustle means and why it's a superpower? And then what are steps we can take to get there?
Milena: Yeah, sure. That's a great question, Jen. I think we know by now how we ended up with the
40-hour work week. We know where it came from, that it was a Henry Ford invention reality, he created it to maximize shifts in factoring. For some reason, we're no longer going to factories. Yeah, we're still in the same model. What was really interesting to me when the pandemic happened is that there was a
feel like that, I saw so many…because I started Unhustle before the pandemic in 2018 and all the sudden the pandemic hit, I became numb, because I was like wow! This is going to be an incredible opportunity for so many people (a) to work from home (b) to be more in control of their schedules and (c) it's going to be an eye-opening scenario for companies to see that they can trust employees, back to how we became addicted to this hustle thing. I honestly think it's a combination of history, it's a combination of biology and what we find happiness in how society describes what success looks like and what we really continue to chase, especially in the western world. I'm coming from Europe, I spend a lot of time reconnecting with my childhood values. In Europe, there's a little bit slightly different mentality. My husband is Australian, so they have a slightly different mentality. And I feel like I don't want to single the US out because the other countries suffering from the same. We know that Japan has a word Karoshi, which is death by overwork. Well, it turns out in my research that in America we work longer hours than Japanese do. So where does it come from? Is it partly capitalism? Is it partly this great American dream
that we all try to pursue and chase? But it's also a bit of a safe place I feel like for many of us, it also has to do with some societal changes like we saw in the millennials being the burnout generation. The book by Ann Peterson, when millennials come out of school these days, they have huge student debt, and they need to prove themselves and get a job and so they end up working a lot of hours. But I feel like we can change this hustle culture into a lot more human culture, and I think that's our next step. I see this as the next solution really for what's going on here with great resignation and the war for talent and remote work and hybrid work and all these things that are coming up on the surface right now. I feel like introducing a little bit more humanity in the workplace will do wonders and you actually impact the bottom line of organizations, as we're seeing without this research anything from Arianna Huffington is doing, yearbook, all of these latest research shows that well-being really can impact companies' bottom line in a positive way. I’ve been reading about anxiety and mental health and all these things and burn out and how we are killing ourselves for all the wrong reasons. A lot of what the unhustle is actually life/work redesign. I feel like the terms work/life balance are not really accurate or exist. Work life integration, anything that starts with work to me needs to be turned around to life work redesign because first figure out your emotions, your mental state, your well-being, your time off, your creativity through hobbies, and your mindfulness practices, how you can get into flow, and then figure out the work that would support that lifestyle. We actually have the opportunity to do this now with the remote work. When I started doing it and working from my Airstream for months at the time from Baja, with limited Internet, these opportunities weren't there. So right now there's a lot of choices that people can make to create a lifestyle that is psychologically rich with the experiences and the perspectives and the rest time included in it and maybe not strive as much for having the big five-bedroom house when a three-bedroom house will be sufficient.
Jen: I love this concept of kind of flipping the language around work life balance, integration, rhythm, whatever you want to call it, to life work and I might actually suggest we push ourselves a little further even on that, to say it's just life and having a meaningful career as a piece of that life. If that's what you choose, and if that's what's important to you, but I've always kind of struggled myself with whether or not it's work life or life work. It feels like we're still pinning the two against each other in some way.
Milena: Yeah, I absolutely agree with you. I think it was Richard Branson that said it's not money for work, it's all life, but I don't want to just say it’s all life because then the work part to me it's very meaningful, I think it’s part of a complete life. I think when we put 100% of our focus on work is when we get in trouble and we get into these anxious times and mental health problems. Not to say that that's our work related, but I feel like you're absolutely right, it's all life. And realizing that from a company perspective is difficult because companies are there to work and I speak with a lot of leaders who find themselves, and especially right now with what's going on, I tell people I’m burnout from reading about burnout. And leaders, especially, on that, it's really difficult for them to figure out how to take care of their employees and how to and where to draw the line between what is enough is enough in terms of work and how to take care of their employees the right way. So I feel like a part of this equation also falls on each individual person to decide how to take care of themselves. I don't think it's very fair to say oh! it's all on the company. What do you think about it?
Jen: I completely agree. I mean like we all have individual agency for our own well-being and what we allow and what we don't allow and the boundaries that that we want to set. I think you and I have spoken previously about boundaries and what I find interesting is that we lock up our things, we lock up our homes, we lock up our cars, we protect our things, but when it comes to protecting our own
personal well-being, we unlock the doors, we open all the windows and we say come in at any time and take what you want. And then we also, especially in the workplace, tend to get frustrated with others when we feel like our boundaries are overrun, but oftentimes what I have found is that when somebody overruns my boundaries, they're not a nice person or don't care. It's because I haven't actually communicated it. As you said, it's about humanity and bringing that back into the workplace and having a conversation and having dialogue about what works for everyone, it doesn't take a lot of money certainly, and it doesn't often take a lot of time just to have those conversations, but as I listen to you talk, and you know this, because you and I had a chance to catch up, but like I've definitely been a victim of the hustle mentality. My whole back story of becoming the chief well-being officer is rooted and burnout in many ways. I remember at that time for myself that…I don't know that I wasn't aware of what was happening until I was too late, but I wasn't willing to admit it to myself because admitting that I needed to take a step back, or that perhaps I was burning out, felt like failure to me, and so what would you say to somebody? What are some of the signs, the red flags of a hustle lifestyle that ultimately kind of leads to burnout? What should we be aware of in ourselves and quite frankly, and others and our colleagues and our family and our friends?
Milena: Yeah, thank you for that, Jen. I feel like having that mindfulness and awareness piece is key in being able to recognize when you start going downhill on that road, because if you are putting your well-being or your exercise, or your family, not just once, but on an ongoing basis after work in terms of priorities, then eventually you end up burnout. I see your exercise on Instagram all the time, and I know you're very committed to your exercise, and I applaud you for it, because we can get into… I had this entrepreneurial mindset, a lot of leaders do whether you work for yourself or you work for a big company, we're over-achievers, type A personality. And it feels good. It drives us. Obviously, those newer chemicals that go with that whole process. And so to me, if you start going, if all you do and all
you think about, and all you are focused on, all your energies are on work, and we know a lot of business leaders are that way. Eventually you would start missing some things in life or suffering from certain things in life. I mean even people like Elon Musk admit to this. So what are some of the signs to watch for? I would say if all you do is think about work and nothing else, if you are looking at the rest time as not adding to your productivity, but while subtracting from it. I think a lot of us, when we think about rest time, we think about lying on the couch, taking a nap, and all these things are great, but because I spend a lot of time, we're searching about flow and being able to maintain that flow on a 24 hour basis, I feel like we're missing having exciting time off. When you have something that's exciting, this is where kiteboarding really helped me realize. I was very excited about going kiteboarding and it was my reward for putting in a good day work, but it focuses your energy and flow drives more flow. So instead of dealing with the errands and paying the bills and making up for, I don't know, having some kind of creative hobby can actually really help you maintain that focus and an awareness and creativity, so not having that would tell me that all you're doing is focused on work.
Jen: Yeah.
Milena: I think a lot of times we get into trouble when we're anxious and worried and nervous and we look at this as I'm going to go into a yoga class which I used to do, I used to go to yoga, but I'm still thinking about work, so bottom line is doing something that switches your brain off from work would be the best thing you can do.
Jen: Yeah, and in a lot of ways is one of the reasons that I exercise is, I often say that my exercise is, I get the physical health benefits of it as a side effect, but I do it much more for my mental health, but it is one of the only times that I find myself fully kind of in the moment focused on what I'm doing because it requires that focus. And so if you're lifting weights and you're thinking about work that could be very dangerous.
Milena: Yeah, absolutely, that's great, because I tried to meditate for years, on and off, on and off, I can get it. It wasn't until I realize that you can sit comfortably, have to be cross legged on the floor or with a cushion and a scented candle, but you can actually sit comfortably and close your eyes and just focus on your breathing when I was able to have more of a consistent meditation practice, but nowadays instead of I do that, but I also try to just be a little more intentional throughout the day. So regardless of what I'm doing, I just try to be more intentional and more present, regardless of what I'm doing, you are doing the dishes or walk the dog, or work, you do one thing at a time and you do it well, and then you focus on the next thing. I think where we get caught up using a lot of distractions, whether we're working, it's like you are saying with exercise, I see so many people exercising while they are listening to podcast or listening to a book, and to me that's two different things. So when I go for a walk, I just go for a walk and that's I think the piece we're really missing these days is time alone with our thoughts, whether you're meditating or doing some kind of mindfulness, it's just being with you on thoughts and lot of what Unhustle is about finding that time to be within your own thoughts and acknowledge the feelings and the emotions that are running through you and accept them, because a lot of what we were talking about earlier with regards to boundaries, I feel like it's fear to push back, it's fear not to be people pleaser, it's fear not to be helpful and of service to other people or certain other emotions, but being aware of these emotions will be the key to asking yourself why you’re feeling this and what are really the consequences and the repercussions. So time alone, I almost want to say this instead of former FOMO, but I'm also thinking these days it's JOBA and JOBA is Joy Of Being Alone, I just made it up.
Jen: I like it.
Milena: It's just time alone, and we were missing, so inundated with whether it's information or emails or messages or great podcasts, we all want to listen to and learn and stay on top of things, and I just feel like we're missing this old, really ancient practice of doing nothing. We just don't ever do it and how time off with John and Max that kind of along the same lines right with rest ethic being just as important to work ethic and all the science behind it. Well, I think that's what mindfulness and meditation really is trying to teach us. It's just being without thought has a lot of value to being a better leader, to not falling into anxiety traps, to not get falling into distractions. Because you can gain the clarity to say what are the most absolutely important things that I need to do today and then just do it one by one. It's just being more intentional with your life and your work.
Jen: So, what are your strategies? I mean, you talked about kind of your digital detox that perhaps wasn't by design, but you had no choice. What are your strategies now to kind of gain control over the distraction of technology and kind of how ubiquitous it is in really every aspect of our life and the impact, we know that it's having on all of us, but we somehow can't seem to use that that little slice of self-control that we have to, just step away from the world that is sucking us into our technology constantly?
Milena: Yeah, I have a completely different attitude about things these days and I've used a lot of apps and I've used tech to protect my focus and my attention. To me, the people who learn how to control their focus in the future would be the ones who be able to win at work and have a meaningful life. I also have morning rituals which I referred to as the unhustle morning with SUNRISE method where I run through certain rituals every morning depending on how my energy is and how my day is planning out, but SUNRISE stands for, S stands for sleep and getting sunlight in the morning, so you can improve your sleep. Obviously, science leads to that direction that increasing your melatonin in the morning can help you have better sleep at night. So really having good morning ritual, evening before, so if I don't get enough sleep, I don't feel as focused and I don't have as much clarity. So sleep is a really important part to me and obviously not getting attached to my phone or my computer late at night. So I have a cutoff time at about 5 o'clock, the dog actually barks at me if I continue to work after 5:00, so I can't, and my husband, he doesn't bark, but he's not happy. So I disconnect from phone and I just put my phone away and I don't touch it until after my morning rituals, which sometimes could be a problem, because I don't have any notifications on my phone. I don't look at my emails. So the summarized method, U stands for unplug starting with day unplugged and doing 60 to 90 minutes of deep work in the morning. N stands for time in nature, this is where I practice my gratitude, my mindfulness practice as well. I walk the dog, sometimes I do some movement in nature just to get my body moving. R is for reading and writing.
There are a lot of science that points to how reading and writing can put you in a better mood, release stress, and it's good for your creativity. So, whether it is just a little bit of journaling or reading a page of a book, which currently I am reading yours, thank you so much. It's a great book, I love it. I is for intentions. Ideally I set my intentions for the day before, but I reconfirm my intentions because things might have changed in my mind or what I want to do, and I try to focus three to five things each day. S is for stillness, that's the mindfulness and meditation part. To be honest with you, I would take breaks throughout the day to calm down and to reset my attention. So, I would do like little mini meditations or just 60 second reset, little bit of breathing practice. E is for energy and that's your movement, culture hours, bulletproof coffees. So, I pick and choose from these morning rituals, but ideally I don't start working until my mind and body are fully ready to work and get into that deep work. The days that I don't do it, I definitely feel the effect. Now, am I perfect every morning with this? Absolutely not. There are great things to strive for, but they don't always happen. In terms of managing technology, I have completely restructured my phone notifications so that I don't get a lot of them and I have very limited notifications on my phone. I have an app that controls when I can get into my emails and it kind of locks me out of emails which could be annoying at the same time because so much of us leads back to our emails, but the opportunity is there and I try to do one thing at a time. I know having multiple tabs is how we all work these days, but limiting the amount of tabs really helps you control from a neuroscience perspective. It helps you control your attention. The minute you have a lot of tabs or your email open, our human brain just wants to check what's going on. So, doing anything possible to limit the notifications and the distractions from that perspective has helped me have a little bit more focused attention. It's hard though, it's an ongoing battle.
Jen: I need to hear more about this app that locks you out of your email. I think I would do everything in my power to override it or I would end up just deleting it.
Milena: It's really hard, but you can set schedules. You can say, I want to be able to get into my inbox from let's say 9 till 9:30 and then again from 3:00 to 3:30. The problem I find with the app is that now everything links back to email and sometimes you are like what was that link in my email. So it's not that
easy, but I try to do it, let's say from 7:00 in the morning till 10:00 in the morning if I don't have any meetings which I try not to schedule any meetings in the morning and do my most creative and deep work in the morning is okay, I don't need to get in my inbox knowing that I don't have any meetings that I don't need to respond to anybody. Sometimes, I have to override it and you can do that easily, but it's definitely goes back to that mindfulness thing, why do you want to override being aware of the action and what other behavior can you do instead of that. So, I can go and get more tea or coffee or have breakfast. It's just being aware of the behavior and the habit that you are trying to break.
Jen: In that moment when you are getting ready to do the override kind of pausing and saying, why am I overriding this?
Milena: It's great, it comes with a 15 seconds wait time before it lets you into email to really give you a chance to say okay do you really want to be in your inbox because I know that once I am in the inbox it's at least 30 minutes and this is the problem that I think a lot of people in the workplace right now are dealing with. It's basically meetings and emails and messages. I was actually speaking to somebody who said I am in 25 meetings in a week and my question was when do you work, I mean how do you work, and she says I am multitasking while I am in meetings. Well, then you are not in the meeting and you are not really working and I think that kind of behavior is what we need to start changing. Do we really need all these meanings? Do we really need to be 60 minutes, obviously I would love to hear what you think about that and how do we change culture?
Jen: The first thing I would say is do you think that the pandemic helped that or hurt that?
Milena: I think we had more meetings. What are you seeing?
Jen: I think in a lot of ways we have essentially replaced what was kind of a historically more in-person world with just a digital world without stepping back to think about does this actually need to be a meeting? Does everybody actually need to be on video for this meeting? My view is if you are sharing content or slides, having everybody on video isn't all that useful because it's leading to burnout for them. Most of the time I think people are looking at themselves or others and not paying attention to the content, but also everybody is the size of a thumbnail. So, it's not like you can really see or gather anything from those interactions if there is content being shared. I do think for small group interactions or one-on-one interactions if you aren't in person, sometimes using video can be good, but I will tell you in my own experiences some of the most deep meaningful conversations that I have had during the pandemic with people haven't included video. But I agree with you, I think that during the pandemic, especially for me and others in the early days, and you kind of alluded to this earlier, I think we were overworking even more because it felt safe and comfortable for those of us that were fortunate enough to still be employed. It felt like something we could control in a world that was completely out of control. But then we all started feeling the impact, the fatigue from that amongst other things. I think we are at a really pivotal moment to say we have the opportunity to change work in a really positive way and to take forward what works well because I think there are things that came forward in the pandemic that I would like to hold on to related to authenticity and vulnerability and asking for what we need and kind of speaking openly, conversations around mental health, I think all of those have seen really positive advancements during the pandemic. So, what do we want to take forward and what do we want to leave behind and think about and do differently? I think meetings in general need a complete overhaul, especially if they are virtual meetings because I think virtual meetings it's very easy
to over invite people so that they won't feel FOMO. Letting people off the hook to say you don't need to feel FOMO, we will send you the notes or you can listen to the recording or if there is a to-do for you, we will just let you know what it is. But you don't need to attend kind of the hour-long meeting or the 30- minute meeting. I think there is a lot of opportunity there to use technology differently and to rethink the way that we are working.
Milena: I agree. Jen you wrote the book on relationships, the power of strong relationships in the workplace and that's the one thing I feel like with all this remote work is the one thing that's really missing. When I look at companies that are going on five-hour workday or four day work week, I feel like that's the one thing that will suffer. So how do we continue this humanity in the workplace and having friends and having the social aspect yet minimizing the amount of hours that we work so we have more time for family, more time for hobbies, more time for exercise. I think that's what your book is addressing, which is great.
Jen: I think relationships in the workplace that in large part is what gives work meaning. It's why the people that we work with and having a few good friends at work makes it more exciting to log on each day and it’s also what makes us human. Computers don't need to be friends with each other, they don't need to have relationships, I guess in some way they do, but not in the way that human beings do. So, I think that's a component of the workplace that certainly needs to have much more attention and focus as we as we move forward. Let's talk about kind of the flipside of this. People have been working longer hours, more attached to their technology during the pandemic, which in some ways I think has kind of fueled the hustle, fueled burnout, but do you think it's also on the flipside benefited the Unhustle movement in some way because it has created a different type of awareness.
Milena: Absolutely. I wrote an article the early days of the pandemic about can the pandemic kill hustle culture, not sure if I published it. I started working on my book and I got so deep into it that I felt like I need to start publishing more articles. But I do feel that it brought a lot more awareness and awakening to people to realize that the way we are currently working isn't working, the way we have currently structured our lives isn't working. I have people reaching out to me from, it's interesting, it's from all over the world really, people in the hustle community from any place of the world, from India and Australia and New Zealand and a lot of people from Europe, Canada. So, I know it's not just a problem in the US, the challenges are very similar across the board. Sometimes, I see posts on social media, especially on LinkedIn about how the Europeans have it figured out, and it's really not the case. They may have slightly different mentality and different approach to work and life, but at the same time I feel like they are still struggling. Has it been good fun hustle, in a way I feel like it has made it a lot more approachable and relatable and yet people are still afraid or don't really know how to go down that road. A lot of people who lost their jobs, obviously they want to hustle, they don't want un-hustle. So, the point we don't hustle is not to really stop working, but rather to live and work more mindfully with more authenticity, with more courage, with more purpose, and create a life and work that fills you up and energizes you and fulfills you so that you can show up every day feeling your best and doing your best. A lot of people crave that they are not quite sure how to get there.
Jen: So, let's go there, if you could go back in time and give your hustle self some advice, what would that be?
Milena: I think it again comes down to this seven really simple principles that I shared Wisdom 2.0. To me, one is unlearn and relearn, unlearning that the way we are working isn't working, unlearning that 70 hours a week is the way to go about it, unlearning and redefining what success really means for each one of us, a lot of it is about redefining success and what is success for you because it's not all about one sided in terms of salaries and titles and promotions. The next one is the unplugging part, which is taking a little bit of time to be without technology and to find that inner joy, inner freedom inside you as opposed to constantly trying to look for gratifications on social media or on email. Unthinking, that's part of like rewiring your brain and realizing that there is a huge heart-brain connection, and so tapping into your heart and into your gut, tapping into your intuition, that's a little bit the work of Jodi Spencer and how you can rewire your bad habit, the ones that have been habitual, anything with grabbing your phone first thing in the morning to how you exercise or how you look at work, all of that rewiring is completely doable and the easiest thing to do that would be with a gratitude practice. 21-day gratitude practice has shown to rewire your brain. Uncomplicating, that's really a little bit of simplicity, adding a little bit of simplicity in your home and in your work. My journey started with reorganizing my closet and realizing that I don’t need all these clothes and just making things real simple and then we went on a two-year journey to go through the whole house and we moved all the things that weighted us down and added to our hectic life instead of adding value to our days. We went down on a big simplicity journey and I have seen how much more time and space and calm it adds to your life, not necessarily minimalistic, but just asking yourself do you really need this and is it adding or subtracting from your days. Then other thing is unwinding, which is where you play a big part, taking care of your well-being, mind body. I have done so many experiments with my own body, anything from biohacking and cult showers and swims in the lake and breathwork and diet. I suffered for 20 years, I suffered from digesting problems, and I took control of it. I went to western eastern doctors and no one could really help me and I finally figured out how to heal my body and all of this I think had to do with being able to manage my stress levels, so going back to mind over matter kind of thing and mindfulness and all that stuff. I continue to experiment. Jen, and it's crazy what I do. But I would go a week eating bacon and ice cream and not exercising but meditating and then the next week I am on green juice and cleansing, which is not the healthiest thing to do, but I wanted to see can I just pay attention to my mind and not worry about my body and the answer is no. Don't do that at home. It’s not the smartest thing you can do. I was also just experimenting and seeing what works and what doesn't. And I go through different techniques and practices and I start doing Qigong instead of hard work exercises because for Taipei people, it's a lot easier to do a hardcore heat workout, but it's harder to do a slow movement, so that's what helped me kind of slowed down in my days and then I will go through days when I do need the heat workout. So again, just listening to your energy and your body but bottom line is how you are maintaining and sustaining your energy as opposed to just doing what everybody says it's the right thing to do, learning what works for you.
Jen: That's the most important and also the most difficult. So, perhaps not in the spirit of un-hustle, but what's next for the unhustle movement?
Milena: It's great when you start settling down a little bit and clearing your energy. I am working on the book, I am really hoping to wrap it up in the next 20 days and send it to my editor. So, I am excited for that.
Jen: Congratulations.
Milena: Thank you.
Jen: That's a big milestone.
Milena: It's a really big milestone. I am still like neck deep into it because all this new research keeps coming up and things change, especially in this space, but at some point in time, I am going to have to send it out. So, I am excited about that. I want to continue to get more people connected with like- minded people. We do that with the Unhustle community and in there we invite people like yourself as guest speakers and presenters, but we also do day-to-day things that help people out because a lot of people; you asked me a few times like what are the practices, how do we put this into practice, and that's exactly what people want to know, how do I make this realistic. We do challenges on a day-to-day basis or weekly basis. Last month was on digital well-being, so we did like a seven-day digital well-being challenge. This month is on hyper focus. We also do book reviews. Time Off is on this month’s book lists. We also have hours where we dedicate for deep work, so couple of hours each week deep work.
Basically, a lot of un-hustle, where it is going, is more towards tapping into finding your flow and figuring out highly optimized life and work situation. I want to restart my podcast, which I put on hold so I can focus on the book. I feel so grateful for all the people that are reaching to me from all over the world and saying the message resonates with them and how much this is new in the workplace and that's what fills me up. I also have an eight-week program for leaders and entrepreneurs to take them to this whole journey and hopefully they can make the changes that I made in eight years.
Jen: Make them faster.
Milena: Make them faster. So, that's kind of what's on the book.
Jen: All of it sounds great. Again, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and for all that you shared with our listeners.
Milena: Thank you so much Jen, I am very grateful for you for having me. Thank you.
Jen: I am so grateful Milena could be with us today to talk about the Unhustle movement.
Thank you to our producers, Revit 360 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, and if you like the 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 at JenFish23. We are always open to your recommendations and feedback and, of course, if you like what you hear, please share, post, and like this podcast. Thank you and be well.