19: Vertigo

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Hi, I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the book Turn what's Working for your into what's Next, which comes out with Portfolio Penguin in September of 2016.

In this podcast I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book and business. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit JennyBlake Me podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Today's podcast is a little different. As some of you know, the tagline of my website is Systems at the intersection of Mind, Body and business. So today I'm going to share a recent health scare that reminded me why I put body in the Mind, Body and Business tagline and why I also talk a lot about moving beyond burnout. Burnout was something that I experienced many times while working at Google and trying to start my blog and book on the side. And when I left Google. Ultimately part of the reason was that I realized I couldn't do both anymore, or I certainly couldn't sustain 30 years of working at the pace that I had been. And so moving beyond burnout became a big focus for those first years. I left in July of 2011, technically March, when I started my sabbatical, and I'm approaching almost five years now of running my own business. My health cleared up significantly after I left, I think because I simplified my schedule. I'll share for another time. Not today's podcast, but I had hyperthyroidism for a long time, the five years that I was at Google, and when I left and changed my lifestyle, moved to New York, started working for myself, incorporated yoga, Pilates, walking sunshine into my daily activities, it didn't come back and I didn't need to take medication. And that experience in the Years that followed leaving Google showed me how I can partner with my body. I often say my body is my business, your body is your business. Especially if you are an entrepreneur, how you feel is going to affect how creative you are, how focused and how productive you are in your day to day work. I realized that as the number one and pretty much only full time employee in my business, that if I was run down or hungover or in a bad mood or eating too much sugar and caffeine and having these energy spikes, that not only was I suffering, but my business was going to be reoperating at 50% and that was not okay with me. So one of my biggest lessons these last five years of solopreneurship has been how critical my health is to my performance. And I wouldn't have it any other way. I think that our bodies are so incredibly intelligent and they want to be healthy. Sometimes when we get sick, you know, we all know that feeling of studying so hard for finals in college, and then the minute we come home, boom, we're knocked out sick. And a lot that happens as an adult too, where our body, we work it so hard and it's trying to be cooperative, but pretty soon it hits a limit and it just says, no more. Now I'm gonna make you sick and you're gonna get yourself back to healthy. And so sometimes our bodies force us to rest before our minds think that we need to. That's something I have paid a lot of attention to, and for me personally, I don't want to have to get to that point. But when I do get sick, instead of seeing my body as the enemy, I really get curious around why did this happen and how is my body trying to signal that the way I'm working might not be working.

And that brings me to my most recent health wake up call. Speaking of waking up, here's how it started. I woke up in the morning, it was a Sunday morning, and the room was spinning clockwise. I had not had alcohol in three, if not four weeks, so my first thought was, am I really hungover? You know, But I hadn't had any alcohol, so I couldn't understand why the room was spinning like that. But that's exactly how it felt for any of you who have had those nights, maybe back in college as well, that you drank too much. The room was spinning clockwise so, so vigorously. And then I thought to myself, well, is it food poisoning? Maybe I ate something, but I hadn't eaten anything out of the ordinary, at least in the previous few days. When I Stood up. I got incredibly nauseous. And so I laid back down. I laid on the couch. And then I thought, maybe I'm just hungry. Maybe it's like being hungover. I need to go get a bagel. I had a sudden craving for a bagel, and I don't eat bagels hardly ever. So this is sort of a strange thing to want. And as nauseous as I was when I got up and got dressed, I thought, maybe I just need fresh air. And I'll go downstairs and I'll walk two blocks to the local bookstore, and I'll get a bagel, and that this will make my stomach or my dizziness or nausea feel better. Walking down the street was tough. I was kind of stumbling. If a cop pulled me over and asked me to take a sobriety test, I. I probably wouldn't have appeared sober because it was hard to walk in a straight line, hard to stand. So finally, I get to my local bookstore, McNally Jackson, which I love, my happy place. And I go order this bagel. And before I could pay, I had the sudden feeling I was about to throw up. I don't throw up often, and, sorry, I know this is graphic for you to be listening. Hopefully you're not eating while listening to today's episode. So I hand the guy my credit card because we weren't done with the transaction, and I sprint outside. I lean over a trash can. Thank goodness New York has so many of them. And I threw up. So that was really concerning to me. But again, it didn't feel like food poisoning. And there I am, crouched now by the trash can, and these two really nice truck delivery guys poke their head out the window, and they say, miss, are you okay? And one of them goes to get me a cup of water and napkins from Parm, which is around the street, really sweet. So I sit, I have my water, I go back in, I finish paying for my bagel, I eat the bagel, and I come home. But the nausea stayed with me the whole day. The second day, I woke up, and again, there it was. And it was so bad that just to shower, I had to crawl along the bathroom floor. I kind of rolled myself into the tub, and I put my head under the bath faucet, because standing to shower would have been too challenging. So to wash my hair, I'm washing it so awkwardly underneath the bath faucet. And I spent that day laid out. And that was the day that I realized, okay, something weird is going on. I tried not to freak out. Thankfully, one of My friends had actually gone through a similar two days a month prior. And he shared it to me when I texted saying how I was feeling, where he said, I just rested and drank lots of green juice. And it went away by day three. And so I thought, okay, what's going on? And as I reflected on the previous month, I had been working really hard. But you know, I do put sleep as a premium. But I have to say my yoga had been inconsistent. I was traveling for two of those weeks. Two of them were some of the busiest weeks of the year. Finishing up the Pivot manuscript, speaking, having a lot of coaching calls. And I thought for a lot of people, November is smash time. It's just crazy. It's everybody's sprint before the holidays. And so the way that I was working was no different. But my yoga had slipped. I hadn't been doing daily meditation. I had been eating a lot of sugar because when I'm stressed, sometimes sugar is my outlet, my vice and my crutch, which I'll link to the Kick the Crutch blog post so some of you can check that out, which is related. And so in these little ways, my work stress had increased and these little habits that some of them, meditation, 10, 15 minutes, it's short, but they started to add up. And then the sugar and a lot of caffeine, a lot of coffee as well. By day two and three of this nausea, I didn't want any coffee. I truly all my body wanted was green juice. And I realized that my body was telling me I'm wiped out. It literally laid me out horizontally for two or three days and forced me to lay on the couch. And I have to say, you know, I'm down for one day of lazing around, but in general I get really bored and I love my work and I love being active and going out in the city and I generally keep a really nice balance. I'm not a workaholic and I usually stop working around 2 or 3pm and I go for a walk and I go to yoga and I meet with friends. So it's not like I'm someone that can't stand to have idle time. But when it's two or three days, at that point the boredom became almost stressful of just like, I didn't want to have to lay horizontal. I wanted to be able to do things and see people. And so that was concerning to me.

But with the sleeping, I started meditating again, like making sure I was doing that. I did try to go to yoga if I was feeling okay, later in the day. And I called the doctor and they don't know much about it, but the most likely it was kind of a short term vertigo. And by day three, it started to get better. So they prescribed me something. And I know everyone has a different take on prescription drugs, but for me, I generally try to heal things naturally, naturopathically with my body through diet and exercise and rest before I'll take a prescription. And in this case, it kind of made me laugh because I looked down at the pill bottle and it says, may cause nausea and vomiting. And I thought, well, I already have nausea and vomiting, so maybe I'll wait on this. And I'm thankful to say that waking up with the room spinning, it happened one more time the day before Thanksgiving. But everything that I was doing was working. And so I ended up not needing to take the medication, though I was glad I had it. And by Thanksgiving, which was day four, I was okay. I could stand up. I was still a little off balance in moments, but I had made clear progress. And now I'm recording this about three weeks later and it hasn't returned. But I know that my system was run down, and so it was more susceptible to a virus like vertigo, which oddly enough is a virus, and it could have been something else. Part of what I realized doing this was that.

I just started to inquire, why this and why now? So of course I mentioned I'd been working really intensely and traveling hadn't been great about my personal practices. But I also realized my body has me on a short leash, meaning if I neglect myself and neglect my physical, mental and emotional and spiritual wellness practices, my body responds pretty quickly and pretty swiftly. So in this case, three to four weeks of stress and bad habits and shazam, vertigo. You know, to the point where just getting dressed took two hours. So that was kind of interesting to me to recognize. And at first I felt like, oh, woe is me. I have this short leash. Then I realized it's very positive because most likely the short leash feeling is I'm paying attention. So when things are off, I mean, vertigo pretty much knocked me out, would have been hard to ignore that, but it means that it won't manifest, hopefully into more serious things later on. So if I had been ignoring body signals for years and years, that could lead to cancer. In my case, I had the hyperthyroidism thing for five years, and that was serious. And I was taking medication for it every day to the point where the doctor at that time, when I moved to New York, said, We have to remove your thyroid, take this radioactive iodine pillow. And there again I thought, I don't want to remove an organ with radioactive iodine if I don't have to. And having my getting my health and wellness practices in place, I've been totally normal thyroid levels for five years now since that meeting with the doctor. And I did not take the radioactive iodine pill, which would have killed my thyroid, and I would have had to take a prescription drug every day for the rest of my life to replace my thyroid function. Now, I'm not saying I am not a doctor, whatever legal disclaimers convey that I'm not a doctor or even a trained health practitioner. I'm just sharing my experience so I don't know what's right for you and your body. And if you have thyroid issues or vertigo, my solution may not work for you. And I'm all about consulting professionals. But I do think no matter who we consult, no matter what prescriptions we do take, it's always helpful to ask and inquire, why this? Why now? Why is this health problem presenting? What is it asking me to look at or revisit in my life? And gratitude is such an important piece of this and something I realized through this vertigo experience, too. The first few days, I was really upset and annoyed and there were a couple moments where I just broke down in tears, like, what is going on? And why can't I even do the most simple activities? But then it turned to gratitude because it showed me some really important things. First, it taught me about the short leash thing that I described, but also it highlighted I've really got to get disability insurance for my business. This took me out for three days. And what if something else happened? What if I got in a car accident? What if there was something that was totally beyond my control? What would I do? How would I earn a living? In this case, I couldn't sit up straight, let alone look at a computer. So it really motivated me to start the process of looking into disability insurance, which is currently underway and also continuing to build a business model where I have some scalable income that doesn't require me at 100% top health functioning in order to generate that income. And so for me, right now, when I'm in periods of good mood and good health, I kind of. I lean almost too heavily on my ability to work hard and create output and deliver. Now, I love things like writing a book and I love speaking. I love being the person that does those things. You know, there's no way I could Scale myself out of writing the book or speaking. Certainly not in a way that I would want to. Some people are fine with hiring ghost writers. That's never something I would do. So.

It helped me continue to reflect that. I do want to create a business where if I. And then sometimes for me, it's just mood. What if I need to go through a period of six months of creative retreat? I talked about that on an earlier podcast. The idea of a creative sabbatical. Maybe I am not in a mode of being able to go hard. That's what happened to me in 2013, which I reference a lot. But at that time, all I wanted was to be private and not produce and not have output and not be going to conferences and not be doing speaking or even much coaching. And I really needed that time. And it was a huge struggle to figure out how to do that and still earn a living when self employed. So this Vertigo experience triggered how I felt in 2013 and reminded me again to create more margin between myself, my health and my business so that again, if I'm not at top functioning in the case of Vertigo, all right, I was out for, let's call it a week of just the initial days of forced rest and then my own extended rest to make sure I really kicked this thing. That was a week's worth of margin. Nothing was negatively impacted. I pushed back a book manuscript deadline by a week, but that was no big deal. But what if I needed a month or three months? How could I continue to create that margin in my business? I'm working on it, and things like the Momentum Community are helping me do that. Where I focus on one community and everything I launch is within that community. So I'm not relying on new external products and courses to launch. It's all in one container, so there's momentum. The book, speaking, coaching. The podcast doesn't earn income yet, but one day could through sponsorships. And even with something like the podcast, I can do better at recording more, having more episodes in the can, as they say, so that if I am out for a month, it doesn't grind to a halt. I could do the same with blog posts. And so these are all the ways, big and small, that Vertigo has taught me to reflect on my business. As I head into the new year, I'm also really grateful that the Vertigo jump started my healthy habits again. In order to knock it out as quickly as possible, I got back to meditating 15 minutes every morning, not drinking any coffee, no alcohol, no sugar, getting back to yoga a few times A week walking, resting and sleeping. And again, those are all things that have been important to me. But I put them front and center and now I feel 10 times better. So now it's been at least three to four weeks of no coffee, alcohol, sugar. My skin feels radiant. It's like a different color than it was before. I feel healthy. I just feel feel so much better now. Those things that I mentioned, cutting out are all delightful. So I'm not trying to say that I'm going to abstain for the rest of my life, but I will say that the vertigo experience kickstarted a really healthy set of patterns of restarting those healthy patterns. And I'm grateful for that. And finally, I'm really grateful now for every normal day. And I know there are many people of you listening who've probably had much more serious health scares than mine and some have overcome cancer and near death experiences. Whatever your experience has been, small things even like this just remind me that wow, to be able to get dressed, to be able to walk down the street, to be able to sit upright at the computer. These are gifts and I'm grateful for them. And I'm grateful for every day that I'm in my healthy body and in a good mood and that that is so precious. And we can aim for long health and wealth, but we're not guaranteed anything. So this experience really reminded me to be very grateful for every day and every moment of every day and make the most of it. Every day in my meditation, I thank my body and reaffirm that I trust my body. It wants to be healthy. Like I said earlier, our bodies are such intelligent machines and they want equilibrium and thrive on equilibrium. And we do too. So that's my experience. I would love to hear from any of you who are willing to share if you've had a recent health scare or wake up call. I'm really fascinated by the idea of blessings in disguise when something happens that feels really shitty in the moment, how we turn it around and how it's actually showing us something really important, a message that we might need to hear at that exact moment in our lives. So if you're willing, head on over to the blog at Jennyblake me and share your thoughts on any recent blessings in disguise or health related health scares, or how you've gotten yourself back to equilibrium and what's important to you about doing that. And then again, I encourage you to reflect whenever your health feels a little bit off or your body sends you a loud signal to ask why this? Why now? And what can I learn? And what am I grateful for? Thanks again for listening and I'll see you all over on the blog.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit JennyBlake me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter ennyblake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.