Choice Point Method for Managing Stress | Isabelle Tierney

Even under real stress, you can learn to be a green zone human being. You can learn to actually get yourself regulated, that you can be with these really difficult circumstances and still not be kidnapped by stress.

Welcome back to Innovate and Overcome. Today we are joined by Isabel Tierney.

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She's a licensed marriage and family therapist, stress management expert, and an international speaker. She holds two master's degrees as well as a certification in energy healing and authentic relating. After running a successful therapy practice for more than 10 years, Isabel's journey took a turn and burnout led her to the loss of her health and her marriage. In response, she developed a transformational methodology for less stress, more aliveness, more inspiration, and more joy. Welcome to the show, Isabel. So excited to have you here.

I'm really happy to be here, and I can't wait for our conversation now.

This process, running a business, first off, on a practice in the area that you work in itself is a. Is. It takes a toll on people. You're. You're meeting with people you're listening to fundamentally their issues or troubles, their problems, helping them get to terms with those and try to move past them. And spending 10 years doing that, I can see how that might lead to burnout. In fact, I would imagine it's probably somewhat common to a degree in your industry.

It is very common. And what I was working. So I moved to Boulder in 2003, became licensed as a marriage and family therapist and then worked with eating disorders was one of my specialties. So marriage and family therapy and eating disorders. And I don't know how much you know about eating disorders. One in 10 people who gets the diagnosis of anorexia dies. It is actually the highest mental health death of any mental health disease. And so I was literally seeing clients on the verge of death all the time. I would have hospitals calling me from all over the country to say, hey, can you take this client? Can you take this client? So that. And then couples, you know, even though couples. I love couples work, you know, couples rarely come to you when they're doing well and just. They just want to get better. You know, they usually come in crisis, and usually one of the member of the couple has been dragged there and really doesn't want to be there. So, yeah, it was a lot. And, you know, I think for any caregiver, there's burnout, people who take care of people who are sick, people who are therapists, teachers. I mean, I think in the service profession, if we're really committed and really want to create impact, it is really easy to get burnt out. And if we're people pleasers, too, which many of us in the service profession.

Are, I. I can see that. And it's so interesting what you share about the eating disorders. I. I was unaware of that. And so I think that's very helpful information for our viewers to know and. And quite fascinating. And so I can. Again, just thinking through that, putting. Trying to put myself in your shoes to some degree, and being around that experience on a regular, repetitious basis, getting the phone calls from the hospital. Can you help this person? This person is in dire need, dire straits, and being called to do that type of work, you know, when you see people going through major challenges. And I have a neighbor who's a amazing guy. He also works in a hospital industry, and he tells me the stories about individuals that come in and the things he has to see on a daily basis. And it's really, really impactful. I know for the many servicemen and women who also work in as first responders, I mean, they're impacted by a lot of these things. And so how is it that you are able to last even 10 years before you reach burnout in this business?

Hmm, that's a great question. First of all, the other piece I wanted to add, eating disorder clients are, in my experience, the single most resistant of any clients I've ever had. I have maybe had a handful of clients in all my years of practice who wanted to be there. Most of them were led by partners, by parents. So the thing is, you're not just dealing with a very serious disease that has been usually around for years and years and years and years. And unlike alcoholism or drug addiction, it doesn't show that much. You know, it doesn't show that much. It's not as obvious unless you have serious anorexia. And so there was this whole thing too, about, like, part of my work was like, will you trust working with me? Will you not be resistant so that we can actually do work that can change your life? So it was like double, double difficult. But so in my history, because I grew up with a lot of trauma as a child, that's the way I learned to cope with my trauma. I developed, like many good girls, an eating disorder. I had everything on the outside. You know, I got the two master's degrees. I went to a really incredible boarding school. I had all the things. But I struggled with food and body image, and I struggled with one of the forms of eating disorder. I struggled with bulimia. And so my own healing journey really informed my desire as Many of us, right, our wounds are often what we end up helping people with. That's why I wanted to work with women. It was mostly women, and it was like 90% women who had eating disorders as well. Cause I had found a way. I had found a way. And that's why hospitals were calling me, because I was not working unless they were seriously sick and medically dangerous. I was working from a place of acceptance, like, oh, you're using this coping skill, which is really not working for you. Can we see these other coping skills to make you feel better? But I'm not gonna get rid of the one you've got until we find better ones. So I was never pushy, I was never shaming, I was never in fear. So they were not used to it. They come into my office thinking I was gonna get rid of their favorite coping tool, and I'd be like, no, unless you're medically dangerous. Let's wait. Let's see if we can find other ways to cope in life. And that's why my work worked so much. So I was very, very passionate about healing that population, because few people are really trained to work with that population.

That makes a lot of sense. And so when did you start to recognize and see, you know, the. I guess the culmination of the work, of the activity you were doing was beginning to take a tol personally?

Well, yeah, I'm trying to think. I think it's chicken and the eggs. So there were two things that happened to me, which I think I say in the. In the cv. The. The what? The bio you read. So Brian and I went through a divorce. And so, you know, a divorce is never a one reason thing, right? There were a bunch of things in our. In our family, in our couple that were not working. But I know without a doubt that. That my having so little bandwidth at the end of the day and on the weekends for him because I was always taking care of people who had more need than him, right? And it was either my clients or my children. I had three children. And I. Because of the abuse I grew up with, I, like, swore that I was gonna be the best mom. And I. I really was like, you know, my kids just came to visit last week and, like, I did a really good job. So guess who was the one who got nothing of me? None of me. It was my husband. And so that was one of the piece. There was also, you know, other puzzle pieces. I want to keep those private. So that was one. And then I kept noticing I was exhausted, you know, Like, I would last, like, two hours, and then I'd be so exhausted. And I remember going the medical route and, no, you're fine, you're fine, you're fine. And finally I went to an alternative practitioner who made me do a cortisol test with saliva. And I remember getting the results, and I basically was out of cortisol. So cortisol comes in order to, you know, when we need stress. Right. When we need to engage in a stressful thing. Well, if you overuse it and you're chronically stressed, your body stops even having any. And I had, like, nothing left, which is why I was so tired. And I remember my brother, who's a psychiatrist, so he knows numbers. He's like, I don't even know how you get out of bed in the morning. And it was so helpful because I didn't understand. And, you know, as you can imagine, knowing a little bit about me, I am a driven, you know, I have a big heart, I want to serve, I can push through difficulties. You know, it's what has made me be so successful. And it made me ignore as well the signals that things were not going well. And this is what most people who come to me, they have to wait for crisis, usually to start taking care of themselves, especially those of us who are high achievers. We don't want to stop until we have to.

Yeah. And for many people, it happens in the health category, whether it's their mental health or their physical health is where you start to see those breaking points, I think, occur. And so interesting that, again, your brother psychiatrist, the testing you did to help really get clear and discover what some of the underlying, I guess, medical aspects that were happening. But you also identified just the experience of having to kind of be super mom and the reasons for that that were really important to you. And the correlation to how that actually impacted your spousal relationship, which, I mean, I can totally understand. It just makes sense that that would happen. And I suspect there's similarities for a lot of people who go through similar challenges.

Yeah. I mean, we have so many things, all of us, we need to take care of, and how the heck do we prioritize those things? And so it seems like dying clients, children, although I probably would put children first. I don't know. Like, it was that taking care of a household, having a social life, you know, exercising. Because I was always, because of my former eating disorder, I always was that, you know, like, the husband. Oh, cats, dogs, you know, it's like. And the husband is like, well, he's a grownup. He's not. He doesn't have an eating disorder. He's not a child. He's fine. You know, so, so we make assumptions and, and we make assumptions that, you know, I made assumption that he needed less of me than he, than the relationship needed. You know, we, you. We need to cultivate relationships, especially when we have all those stresses. You know, the relationship should be, the home should be the place we get revitalized in or renourished from. And that was not what Brian and I did with each other.

Wow. And so when, you know, how did you start to really come to realization of that and I guess what were some of the first steps that you began to take to see about creating self repair, I guess in what you were starting to come to terms with and identify?

Well, once I got the diagnosis that I had, that, that was really, really helpful. And then so I started seeing a chiropractor. I started seeing an alternative practitioner. And so the first piece was nutrition. And so I started taking a lot of supplements to repair my nervous system because my nervous system was completely shot. And then, you know, Brian and I, we divorced. But by the time we did it, and I think that was part of already my starting to heal, we did it really consciously. So thankfully, we did not do it from the place in which we initially decided to do the divorce, which was very stressful, lots of conflict, but we really refused to do that for our children. We refused to do that for ourselves. So even in the act of divorcing, even though that sounds like it's an extreme stressful thing, I mean, we had dinner the night before we got our divorce papers, and when we went to court, we had a cup of coffee afterwards. It's just we had tried so hard to, you know, to fight less and to solve our conflict. But I think both of us came from such stressful places. He because of his own issues, me because of my own issues. We just were not regulated, you know, that word, regulated enough to be able to not take it out on each other, the stress that we were experiencing. So I had a year where we were, you know, we really only stayed apart a year. And then we started repairing again. But it was actually a really good year. I started really taking care of myself. I didn't have the conflict that was going on all the time. So that really settled me a lot. I actually did a one woman show in New York during that year. And I stopped working so hard. I mean, I had to really make some very clear decisions about what I gave My priorities to. And so I was seeing eight clients a day, five days a week before I burnt out. I mean, I can't even imagine what that's like anymore. Like these days, like three to four clients, you know, also do also a lot of other work, but like, actually really three clients, one on one, which is different than the rest of the work I do. It's maximum. Like, it's maximum because I didn't realize how much, how present I have to be to people. And, and even though it's invigorating, it's also, if you do it eight times a day, hearing trauma, very, very depleting too. So time seeing less clients, nutrition space. I had never been alone, right. Because I'd gone to college, met Brian at 22. So that year I was alone, also living at home alone. My kids were out. Well, once one child was home. And so all that started settling me and meditation, you know, and all the things that we do to take care of ourselves and not working out to lose weight and, you know, like working out to actually settle my nervous system, not to do more, which was also a big piece.

Wow. Incredible. The full gamut. And we're going to hear more about this incredible journey as we come back after these important messages. Okay, Richard, I keep hearing about this thing called the Colby A Index. You talk about it all the time on the show. What is it? How do I get information about this thing and why is it so important? When I first got my Colby done, it totally revolutionized everything for me. I finally felt like, oh, man, this is what I was looking for. All the things I'd been doing that have been working for me and all the frustrations I'd had. If I just understood this at an earlier age, boy, oh, boy, would my life be different. You can take that step if you want to learn and understand how it can change things for you and the way you communicate with others, you can go to coachcanfield.com and download your free report. We are back here with Isabelle going through her burnout journey, fundamentally, and trying to get on the other side of it and running an incredible practice dealing with everyone's challenges, helping people with their mental health and really sacrificing your own in the process. And so you're, you're on the road to recovery from a self care perspective. You're seeing natural health practitioners, things like chiropractors. You talked about the nervous system, having, you know, someone who's seen a chiropractor a lot and really appreciate and love what the work that chiropractors do. There's a lot of impact in the nervous system that that's all tied into there. Again, no, I'm not a medical professional, but I can certainly just think of my own circumstances. And you started to see improvements, rebuilding that cortisol and the ability to take on challenges again. But it was an extended period. So how did you find your way to get all the way through that experience you had this year of kind of being free and liberated for yourself and being alone again and finding yourself to some degree? How was it actually going through that experience and trying to come through on the other side?

Yeah, well, it's really when I created. One of the things that I am is I love research. I love research. So I started, I really just got so curious because I started talking to other women and almost every woman that I knew was totally stressed out. The successful, high achieving women that I knew were totally stressed out. And I remember wanting like, okay, I want to interview women who've had success without burnout. And I couldn't find anybody. Literally like I knew nobody. And so one of the things started to do was to study wellness and well being. You know, when you think about positive psychology with Dr. Martin Seligman began like not only that 10 years ago. Before in psychology they only studied disease, right? And then he introduced the concept of positive psychology. What can we do? Not just how do we combat disease. And so I started seeing, studying stress and stress response and how do we get out of stress? And I brought together neuroscience and psychology and spirituality. And so I started living and practicing this methodology which I now teach every all over the world. That was like, well, how do I self regulate? Not just long term, right? Like, like taking care of myself and working out and getting massages and getting the right nutrition, but also how do I regulate myself? And in the moment when I realize that I'm heading into the stress response and I want to stop myself before I get too far into that stress response and get myself depleted. Because when you have adrenal exhaustion, your bandwidth, your window of tolerance of I would work two hours and then I'd be wiped out. Like I had like, I like my bucket of energy. I remember the doctor telling me to like, it's like a battery. My battery emptied out really fast. You know when you have an older computer and the battery empties out really fast. So I had to rebuild my battery both with long term foundational changes and short term all the time learning to catch myself. I'd be working two hours and could I track when I started to get tired, as opposed to waiting till I was all the way depleted and empty and stop and maybe take a walk or have a break. So I really learned to track myself in the moment and in the long run. And that's what this methodology is. It teaches you to track yourself in the moment so you can make pivots before you get into cris crisis. And how do we take care of ourselves foundationally as well? I didn't know that's where I was going to go, but actually, I hope that's a good answer for you.

Well, it sounds like, you know, with the methodology that you've worked with yourself on and started to really, I guess, dial in the framework of. To turn it into something that you can make it recur with other people, you can make it become systematic in an approach. It sounds like there's a fundamental aspect of habits and just getting really clear on the practice of initiating a new habit to be able to see that awareness. Now I think about the elastic band trick. You know, when you put an elastic band on your wrist and then every time you recognize that you're maybe you're trying to not put money in the swear jar and break a habit, or you want to do something where you're changing a certain word that you use on a regular basis, and you'd snap your wrist with an elastic to kind of remind yourself every time you catch yourself doing it. Things like that, that kind of help to bring awareness. Like you say, getting clear on the awareness before something happens or right at the point where it's happening. So you could like, oh, here's a way that I can kind of change mentally. And the idea of the elastic is simply to create a physical response. Pattern interrupt, you know, pattern interrupt. And so that seems like to me is a big component of the work that you're doing. And I might be wrong there, but maybe you can expand that.

I can't believe you just used that. And nobody's ever done this in podcast interviews. So literally my. I created my company. My company's name is ChoicePoint and my methodology is called the ChoicePoint Methodology. Because when I was struggling with my eating disorder, I would study every beautiful therapy, self development, mindfulness, spiritual book in the world. You know, they call it shelf development. Somebody told me the name shell development. Like, it's so. Cause like at 10:00 clock at night, that feels so inspired. Tomorrow I'm going to be so healthy. I'm going to do all my good habits and then, you know, four o' clock in the afternoon would strike right after a day filled with stress and bam. I would act out the painful habit. And I read this book by Tara Bennett Goldman, who is Daniel Goldman's wife. Daniel Goldman created the term emotional intelligence. And she wrote a book where she talks about this choice point. And this choice point is this moment between the impulse and the action. We get the impulse to do a habit and there's only a quarter second from the time we have the impulse to the time we do it. And what she said is in that choice point moment, if you can expand, it is where you can change your life. Because instead of yelling at your partner, you take a breath. Instead of going to binge on ice cream, you pause and you go take a walk. And I looked around to see what is out there in the world to help at that moment of choice point. And guess what? It was rubber beans. Like snapping ourselves or like maybe mala beads. There was nothing out there. So if you look at my business plan in 2005, my commitment was to create products and services to help people at that moment of choice. And that's literally what all my work is. It's like, how do I help people expand that moment of choice so they can pick constructive life supportive habits instead of destructive, you know, life depleting habits. So I love that you brought that up because, you know, I want to have a way that's not painful to create that pattern interrupt. And that's what the methodology is.

And so it's basically like Neo in the Matrix, slowing down to see the bullets coming and dodging them is what you're creating. That moment in time where you can see the bullets coming at you that you yourself likely created.

That should be my new logo. I love that.

Yeah, fantastic.

Because we literally we can expand time, right? They say you have a seven year old daughter. They say that adolescents have only 165 fourth of a second from the impulse to the action. So learning to expand that. And so my methodology has three steps to help you stop, slow down and breathe and then choose another habit. Like that's, that's the whole point of the methodology is how do we expand that choice point? And it changes everything because our life is made of a series of choices. Like that's what we do every day. Do I choose to work? Do I choose to go take, you know, all the time.

It reminds me of a program I did many, many years ago with a profiler out of Edmonton, Alberta. His name was Blair Dunkley. Fascinating program. And he talked about a behavior chart Basically where you go through a behavioral loop and you kind of just. It brings you into this repetitive pattern. But as soon as you can evaluate the behavior, creating that space time like you talked about, now you can choose to make a slightly adjustable different item. And so then you might have, you still have a loop, but the loop has now moved over. It's moved to a different space. And you're kind of moving this behavioral loop over in time to a place where you want the behavior to actually be.

I love that. Yeah. The methodology has a formula that says awareness plus action equals transformation. So when you are talking about is the awareness. So that's the first thing I teach is like, and you've brought it up a couple times in the last few minutes. We first have to become aware. Right. And so I teach signals. Like, like, like I was working this morning and I'd been working since 6 and so I started noticing signals. Like I was starting to get foggy, I was starting to want to go get something to eat. But because I, you know, like, I know that place, it's not because I'm hungry, it's I really want a break. Like, I started noticing I was getting frustrated when the cat was coming to me. So I'm like, oh, I'm starting to get into the stress response. And so I actually stopped my work and took care of myself. But you first have to begin with awareness and, and then take the action. And that's what it sounds like this guy was talking about, aware. And then do the little tweak and then do the action. And that changes everything when we do that, even if they're minor shifts that we're doing.

So what are a couple of, I guess, commonalities or some regular things that you might see with people who are starting this process. And what are some of the high level list of things that are these types of stress response awareness signals that people can really start to pay attention to, to give them that, oh, hey, this is happening to me, this is happening to me. Now I can start to make a different behavior. You mentioned a couple very quickly you're frustrated with the cat, getting a little bit fidgety, you know, feeling tired. So those are a few of them. What are a couple other ones that people who are viewing this maybe should, should recognize and take some notes on?

Yeah, I love that. So I have the list of physical, emotional, mental and relational signals. So I just, I'll pick a couple just from each list. So one is physical. You might notice yourself being more tense. You might notice your jaw A lot of us tighten our jaw. I start speaking faster and louder when I'm like that. Heart rate. Some people really notice their heart rate going faster. Emotionally, you might notice a sense of anxiety, right? A sense, you know, if you do this chronically, you can go into depression, you are reactive, you get frustrated, impatient more easily. Mentally, you worry, you ruminate. You can't let go of certain thoughts, you know, and because you're looping, because your body's thinking, you're in danger. So it's like, what do I do? What do I do? So this stress, this anxiety and rumination is all part of that. And then relationally, you can only find what's wrong. Like, the biggest thing that you know you're in that stress response is you can only see what's wrong either with yourself or others or the world. And so, you know, with your partner, you don't listen, you're defensive, you're irritable. You want to be right. Right? That's one of the big trigger, knowing, like that you are in the stress responses. You want to be right. And you are. You're really unkind, and you're really thinking only about yourself. It's not a collaborative. You're competitive with others instead of being collaborative. And then often habits, it's like you are wanting to act out painful habits, impulsive habits. That's another sign, like, you suddenly want to, like, drink your second glass of wine or you want to finish the cookies in your pantry. Like, it's like you're feeling this, like, ah, you know, this place. Like, yeah, that. That can let you know.

Wow, those are incredible. And I think many people will resonate with some of those things you identified. And so with that in mind, we're going to talk more about what to do when these feelings come up and you get aware of them. When we come back after this incredible commercial break, are you looking for a great book to read? Turns out I have one for you. It's called Cash Follows the Leader. It's available anywhere books are sold. But if you want to get a free copy and you can download it right to your inbox, you can go to coachcanfield.com cash follows. So, Isabelle, you were talking about some of these identifying stressors that people go through to become aware of what's starting to transpire so they can capture or catch this behavior before it becomes kind of into the negative zone. And you used a bit of an analogy with me on kind of like a traffic light. It's a. It's the red, yellow Green color schedule and how to be more cognizantly aware. So could you expand on what that looks like for people so they have a bit more understanding for how to recognize these things as they come up in life?

Yeah. So we talk about the awareness piece. So I have this scale called the feel good scale that really has you look at levels of consciousness. So there's the red zone, yellow zone, and green zone. So the red zone is when you are in the stress response. And in the stress response, it's where all the signals that I was talking about, your body thinks you're in danger, even if it's just your partner that didn't empty the dishwasher or you're running late for work, or maybe you have your children are being cranky or whatever it is. Right. We are misinterpreting the seriousness of danger. And when we live chronically in the red zone, that's when health issues occur, like my adrenal exhaustion, all the things that occur. So what you learn to track is which zone are you in? So that's the awareness piece. Like, you track yourself all day long. At least a few times a day. I'm in the red zone. The green zone or the yellow zone, which is in the middle? The yellow zone is the best place in the world. In the green zone, who we want to be, who we aspire to be, that's where we live. In the green zone, you can be creative and inspired and loving and kind, and you feel like every. So my whole work is about how to recognize if you're in red or yellow and bring yourself back to green if you're the type of human being that wants to be your best self, which I imagine your listeners are. So once you realize you're either in the red zone in the stress response or heading there, you then practice three steps, which are really easy to remember because they go with the traffic light metaphor. So what do we do? Red? We stop. So step number one, if you notice, like this morning, like, oh, I'm starting to notice. I'm starting to get irritable and I'm wanting to eat. I'm like, you know, stop. And the stop is remember, don't take any action because the way you're seeing and feeling is distorted. It's being distorted by the stress response. So everything is becoming exaggerated. So don't trust what you think, feel, or want to do. Just stop. Okay? Okay. Second step. Think yellow. Slow down and breathe. Right. Yielding. So you start telling your nervous system through the slow, deep abdominal breath that you're actually not in danger, that you don't need to be in the stress response right now. And slow abdominal breathing is the fastest way to tell your body that. Like even listen to how my voice changes when I start talking about that. And then the final step is go and go for what I call is a feel good habit versus a false good habit. A false good habit is something you do to feel immediately better, but that usually has negative consequences. A feel good habit is one that brings you to the red zone. You can call it a healthy habit. I like feel good better. And so a feel good habit. Like I got up and I went and I made myself a cup of tea and I took a few minutes and then eventually came back down. It could be calling a friend, it could be taking a bath, it could be depends where you are. If you're at work, you can just get up and go to the bathroom or, you know, if you can go outside and walk for 10 minutes. It can be a one minute thing or it can be a two hour thing, whatever time you've got. And so, right, remember awareness. What zone am I in? Action. Take the three steps. Stop, slow down and breathe. Go. If you're in the green zone by then, nothing else you need to do. If it didn't work and you're still like, yeah, I like went down to the yellow zone, but all right, you can do the thing again. And eventually over time, Richard, what I've seen in myself and others is we teach our nervous system to go back to the green zone at will. And that's the thing. People who struggle with chronic stress get stuck in the rut of chronic stress. That's the problem. The problem isn't stress is that we get stuck in stress. So every time we notice and we shift, we're getting our brains to become more agile and more adaptable. And so that when it hits as a real stressor, it can do what it needs to do, but then it can come back to the green zone. And so that's really the greatest outcome. We become regulated with our nervous systems instead of dysregulated it.

It's interesting, I like how you identified, you know, the, the, the where people really develop problems of being stuck in stress because stress on its own isn't actually bad, it's actually a very powerful thing. If we think about the simple act of working out. You want to build muscle where you're actually putting stress on the muscles. You're, you're creating micro tears so that it can, the body can go back and heal those things to build on top of what's there, that you wouldn't be able to get a buildup effect if you didn't have a degree of stress. So what I think I hear you saying is that you want to control the way that stress is appearing in your life by being able to manage, not even manage the stress, but to redirect the stress signals in a way that brings you back to a positive outcome. And you want to be able to do that on a repeated basis and by doing it repeatedly. It's like training. It's like going to the gym and doing the same workout on a regular basis. So you develop that habit and that routine in that routine level. Once you develop it. That's the thing about habits. People are 100% disciplined in their habits. It's just which habits are they want? Are they the habits that are beneficial to you, the habits that aren't. The other thing you kind of mentioned is the green being the choice to make it a positive action. Where I think what it sounds like, the people who are stuck in stress is they're probably doing that same red, red, you know, red, yellow, green. But the green thing that they're choosing isn't a positive outcome. It's usually a negative. So, so like, you know, eating, let's say, you know you're stressed, you know you're having to have a good day. So what do you do? You go to get the cookie jar or the bag of chips and you sit on the couch and you deal with it that way. Which isn't necessarily creating the positive result that you're looking for.

Yeah, that's why I love calling them false good. You know, have you ever heard of false gods? You know, false gods, it's like they, they promise themselves to be like, like, you know, the, the Trojan horse. They promise that they're going to is danger. And so false good habit temporarily brings you to the green zone, but then brings you back to the red because now you feel stuffed and you don't feel good or if you've yelled at somebody. So that's why false good or feel good. The thing that I wanted to say about stress, there are two things I want to say about what you said. One is most of the time our brains exaggerate the stress we're under and exaggerates to bring us into the stress response. So that's one thing. This work makes you realize we're actually not in danger as all often as the brain, the brain is outdated. It's got an evolutionary Glitch. It's still things where cave people living in times where we have to fight flight all the time, right? So that's one we often exaggerate. The second thing is, even when the stress is that difficult, I have many people going through my work, they go through difficult, difficult divorces. I have three of my facilitators that I've trained in my work are going through cancer. I mean there's just, you know, there's so much. So even under real stress, you can learn to be a green zone human being. You can learn to actually get yourself regulated, that you can be with these really difficult circumstances and still not be kidnapped by stress, right? So two things, often stresses are not as high as our bodies think. And two, even if they are, there's a different way to be. Jack Canfield talks about, he has a formula that says event plus response equals outcome, right? And he says, isabel, your methodology is the best response methodology I've ever seen. Because like there's an event, I have cancer. How do you respond to it? Do you respond from the red zone or the green zone? And the green zone doesn't mean you're like rainbows and unicorns. It means you stay calm, you stay grounded, you stay present, you get information, you know, in the red zone, you freak out, you panic, you have worst case scenarios running through your head, you know. And so, so if you have an event and a green zone response, that's going to create a different outcome than an event and a red zone response, that's going to create a very different outcome.

Yeah, very interesting. It kind of reminds me, I had an interview with an amazing gentleman on one of the episodes, Russell Schmidt, who is a former coach with Strategic Coach Organization and he was a three time cancer survivor. And so he had to go through that experience a number of times. And, and he talked about it similarly in that way. It's like, well, what's within my control? What can I control? We'll just control that. And he also just fundamentally just felt like, no, I'm just going to tell cancer, not today. You don't get to run my life. I run my life and I'm going to do it the way that I want, not the way that you want. So he had a very hard line experience on how he wanted to treat cancer, not how he wanted cancer to treat him.

Yeah, I love that. Like, right. And that's the whole thing. It's respond versus react. That's really what my work does. It teaches you to respond to circumstances consciously. Choice. That's why it's called choice point versus react. React is we have no choice. And that's the thing. In the red zone, we lose the power of choice. Our frontal cortex gets kidnapped so that we don't think, we just act. And so we can't think straight, we can't make conscious choice. So we've got to stop, not take action from that. Because if we take action from the red zone, we will create something that is not gonna support it. We stop, slow down and breathe and then take action. You see the difference? If we take action from the red zone, unless you're in actual danger, you're going to create turbulence in your life. In actual danger. The red zone is amazing, right? If you're in front of a bear or a killer, it is really good to act from the red zone.

Yeah, I mean I think that's the, that's the, the reason those, those instincts are there is to. Is self preservation and.

Exactly.

You know, it's, it's fight or flight scenario. But designed in such a way to keep you safe. That's what it's really there for.

That is correct.

Fundamentally, in our modern world, society, the communication that we have with people, our lives are so much different than a fight or flight scenario. If we go back thousands of years, but we're still living it, and we're now creating these fight or flight responses through unseen activities that wouldn't materialize like a lion in the jungle or what have you. We're, you know, now it's that email that came in, that's the line in the jungle that's attacking you, which is a different experience, but you're, it's creating a similar outcome. You know, physiologically, if we want to.

Get really fancy and lofty, I think that we are slowly but surely changing our brain structure because I think we, you know, somebody helped. I called an evolutionary glitch and I forget his name. He's a very famous doctor that belongs to this group I belong to and, and I call and he's like, yes, that's the word. It's like we have a brain that, that's still way too oriented towards the limbic system, which is the old evolutionary brain that goes into fight or flight and overdoes it. And I think that every time we do this work, whether you use my methodology or other work and bring yourself back to the green zone, bring yourself back to conscious response. We are changing the brain of our human species. And hopefully we're going to have a species soon enough that's gonna be primarily A thoughtful, conscious, responsible species, instead of reactive, impulsive, destructive. That's. That's one of the reasons I do.

This work Amazing well. And we're going to talk more about the work and some of the things you're working on when we come back. After this incredible break in the year 2009, my life completely and totally changed. Something momentous and incredible happened to me. That thing was this incredible book, becoming your own banker. It was written by my mentor, an amazing friend of mine, R. Nelson Nash. It completely revolutionized and changed my entire life. You can learn all about it by registering for a free on Demand webinar@learnibc.com Take the initiative. You won't regret it. While we're having an incredible conversation with Isabel, we're learning all about her incredible methodology. How, how to deal with stress in a whole different way, how to be very functional, how to build the correct habits around it. You shared so much incredible goal with us. What I'm curious about is how would you help people really move the dial on this? What are some of the. First of all, what is the best way for someone to get a hold of you or to learn more about this if they want more information?

Mia, thank you. So my website is thefeelgoodlife.com and really what the Feel good life is for me. Me, it's not like this. Like I said, I keep being, you know, I'm a snarky person. Even though I'm very spiritual. I'm also very snarky because I get very turned off. Like, you know, when we talk about, oh, I feel peace all the time. And it's like we're human beings, right? You know that quote that we're not human beings learning to be spiritual, we're spiritual beings learning to be human. And to be human is hard, right? So my work, the Feel good life, is in a life in which you are alive and joyful and you can stay grounded. But it's also a life in which you know how to be with turbulence and you can be resilient. Right? So I don't teach about a perfect life. So thefeelgoodlife.com is the website. And then I have a really great ebook, that's thefeelgoodlife.com habits. And the workbook has three parts. The first part is teaching the methodology. And then the second part is you build your own feel good habit toolkit. So you go through health, relationships, career, spirituality, and you look at what habits are false good habits that you're willing to let go of and what habits are feel good habits? So that the third part can occur easily. It's a one page handout that in the moment, what do I do? It helps you track what zone you're in and then has a list of feel good habits that you can do. So that way you don't forget it because you know, again, shell development, I can learn something at 10:00 clock at night, but if I don't have it in front of me when I'm in the red zone, I'm wait, what feel good habit did I pick? You know, like. And so that's what I love about the work. This, this ebook is it really allows you to practice the work in real time. So that's the feelgoodlife.com habits.

I love it. Well, everyone needs, you know, in order to work on a project or do a renovation, you need a bunch of tools. And you, most people store those in some kind of a tool kit or a tool drawer. So what you're doing is you're building and providing tools to people. You don't know when you're going to need the tool, but you want to make sure you have it. If you don't have the tool and you got to go to Home Depot and get it, you're going to have a problem because that's going to cause more stress. So making sure you have these things available I think is really key. And speaking of tools, you know, before we started our recording today, we were talking about one that's one of my favorites, which is the Colby A index. And you have a 6383 Colby. I have a 3386 Colby. So we're almost like we have the same numbers just mixed up in different locations. And what's really fascinating about the Colby is to me, it's a tool in the toolbox. And that tool brings awareness in order to make change. Just like you identified behavioral change in a stressful environment, you first have to start with that awareness piece. And so similarly, if you can start stack ranking your toolkit filled with lots of tools that help you have a deeper understanding of who you are as a human being, what makes you tick. I believe Colby is a core element of that because it identifies your instinct, your natural way of going about doing things. And if something is natural to you, you're really going to be really good at it. If it becomes unnatural, just think for a moment of the experience of signing your name. If you're right handed or left handed. Now change hands and try to sign your name you can almost mentally put yourself in the picture of what that is, and the feeling is very, very uncomfortable. That uncomfortable feeling is working against your natural instinct. It's working against your instinctual grain. And so when you put yourself in that position, you're creating stress and a stressful response to things in life. So if you can understand what that instinctual way of being is, you can learn to develop and understand how to double down on those things and try to minimize the ones that cause more of that tension and that, you know, signing your name with the wrong hand, environment and across the board, that can help alleviate some of the stresses and also can enhance communication. You know, going back to your circumstance, you know, surviving through a marriage experience where your marriage ended up not proceeding. You guys. You guys called it quits, but you called it quits in an amicable fashion. And yet bring us forward to today, and it's a different experience.

Well, yeah, I know I always forget the part to talk about. We're back together. We've been back together. And, you know, partly because of this methodology, there's no doubt we use the language all the time. This is one of the things I love about the methodologies. The language is so easy, where one of us will say, hey, I'm in the red zone. And when I'm in the red zone, and this is true of a lot of women, I want to stay and repair. Now. That's what makes me go back to green zone. If we can say, so what happened? Oh, I'm sorry. Whatever it is, Brian, you know, like, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Brian needs to go to his cave. And for me, when he would go to his cave, I would get even more red zone because I thought he was abandoning me. And, like, so my nervous system. So, for example, he'll say, honey, I'm in the red zone. I don't want to talk right now. I need 30 minutes. So that's what we learned to do is like, just tell me you'll come back. Because I would get so dysregulated, and him, because he just needed space and he was doing a really good job wanting to take care of himself. I'd be like, no, no, no, we gotta talk about it now. So he'd get more and more red. And then he'd eventually say something really unkind to me to just try to get me off, you know, him. And it's something I've seen couples a lot that we have different. So even. So think about this work. You have to learn about yourself. And what brings you to the red zone and how to get out of it? And then as a couple, like, how do each of you respond in the red zone? And how do you take care of yourself? And if you can talk about it, you know, people teach this to their kids. Every time people learn this work, they automatically bring it to their kids. Cause the kids get it, they love it. They don't have to tell, mom, it's because my friend didn't do this. And they don't have to explain. They just say, mom, I'm in the red zone. Give me a couple of minutes. Or mom, I'm in the red zone. Can we talk? It's such fabulous thing. It takes away shame. It takes away a lot of having to explain things. It's just a signal that we need help and that either we'll take care of ourselves or we need support.

Well, you know, if you think about driving on the road and the red, yellow, green system works pretty much globally to the degree that people develop the habit of being able to recognize their importance almost on autopilot, that is correct. I think fundamentally that's what your methodology is helping people to do. But it's doing it now, individually, with yourself, because you're on the road to life. No matter what. You're going to be hitting stops and turns and all the things along the way. And so this really gives you the framework to start to solve that. I think it's fantastic. Now, we talked a little bit about, of course, all of your work in the past and becoming virtually expert level and well sought out for helping people with eating disorders. That's something that you spent a lot of time doing. You've kind of moved away from that. Although you still have a degree of ability to help people there. Is there anything that you would like to maybe share for people who are either experiencing that or have experienced it in the past? What would you want to share with people who have a past in that environment and how they could seek some help or seek some clarity.

I love that. So one of my core tenets is that everything we ever do. There's a line this teacher said is there's a perfectly good reason for everything we do. And when I heard that sentence, I was struggling with my eating disorder and I was like, wait, what? There's a perfectly good reason for this horrible thing that I'm struggling with. And then what I started realizing is that everything we do is trying to meet a deeper need for peace, love or joy. Everything we ever do at the very core. And so I started asking myself, well, how is this bringing me peace by doing this behavior with food? Why is it bringing me joy? And then to start asking myself, well, how well is it doing it? And then I'd be like, well, when I've binge, I have peace for like five minutes. Really. Like the endorphins come in, dopamine comes in, and then I have health for the next three hours. And I started just working with like saying to myself, well then what are other ways? If what I really want is peace or love or joy, are there more effective ways for me to get peace, love and joy? That's why people wanted to work with me with eating disorder. I didn't say this is bad, your behavior is bad if you drink too much or whatever it is. But it's like, what's the perfectly good reason for it? Is it working for you? And if it's not, can we find other ways for that beautiful sacred intention of you just trying to reconnect to your deeper self, which is peace, love and joy. So if you're struggling with an eating disorder or whatever you're struggling with, know that you are just looking to reconnect to yourself, which is peace, love and joy. And then ask yourself with no judgment, how's it working? And then find other strategies, other habits that might meet that need better. And that's a life changing practice to do that because we. Shame just perpetuates, right? The red zone. Shame doesn't work work ever. Loving ourselves and being curious about ourselves is the only thing that ever works.

Wow, love that. That's fantastic advice. Makes me think of something I learned years ago, again actually from the same individual, Blair Dunkley. He just taught me a question that I've always resonated with and it's what else might I do or what else might I do specifically right now. So tweaking and changing that question to open up the space in the mind. And what might I do is the might question part of it opens up to possibility because you're not saying you're going to do it. You're just trying to figure out what you might be able to do. And even if it's silly or crazy, it just creates a new pathway for thinking in your brain. Sometimes we get stuck, we can't even come up with a new idea. You're writing a list and then you run out of things on the list and you say, well, what else might I do that's not on this list? What else might I do that I haven't even considered yet. And if you put something really bizarre and crazy on there that's kind of goofy and it makes you chuckle in yourself mentally, it opens up all of a sudden a new space in your brain to start putting more things on the list that weren't there before. So it's kind of like a little trick that I learned that it's always worked well for me. And a number of people that I've shared it with, they've said it's worked well for them. Yeah.

And you hear what you're doing. It's curiosity. Curiosity is probably the greatest Green Zone strategy. It's like, if you can be curious about yourself, if you can, you can be curious about others, like, why did they behave the way they did? Curiosity is the opposite of judgment. It's opposite of shaming. It's the opposite of what leads people to become violent is curiosity. So that's what I really like. Like, did you even notice when you. But what might I do? Right. It's like, even in the way you speak about it, there's just this accepting curiosity that is so Green Zone. Greatest green Zone quality.

Well, absolutely love it. Isabelle, it's been amazing having you on the program today. You shared so much incredible value for our viewers. For those of you watching, maybe sure to tune in next week as we continue to unpack the incredible innovations that people are coming up with, the entrepreneurial drive. And for those people who are making a bigger and brighter future for tomorrow.