Learn how to go from "Chaos to Calm" in your life and business with Diane Sieg

Hello everyone and welcome to the Better Life Better Business podcast presented by The Speakers Group. I'm Shawn Ellis, founder of The Speakers Group, and our guest today is a popular conference speaker, author of Stop Living Life Like an Emergency and 30 Days to Grace. She's also a life coach and yoga teacher, and her specialty is helping people take good care of themselves and take charge of their lives. What's so unique about Diane Sieg is that before she became an authority on living calmly with intention, she was an authority on living in chaos, having spent over 20 years as an emergency room nurse in hospitals across the country. And she says that she's a recovering adrenaline junkie herself. So if you've ever felt like or feel like life is moving a little faster than you'd like it to— and I think that may be all of us— then you're in the right place, because I'm going to ask Diane for her best advice to help you move from chaos to calm in your life, including one One Thing You Can Do Today to Stop the Chaos. So Diane, welcome and thank you very much for being here.

Oh, thank you, Shawn. My pleasure.

Well, it's, it's a joy to be talking to you. I know we go way back working together and happy to say even, even I got a chance to play a small role in, in you getting your first book deal. So it's great to be talking to you here on the program.

Thank you. Thank you, Shawn.

What is starting out here? What was kind of that transition for you moving from the emergency room as a nurse to becoming a speaker, author, and, yoga teacher. I mean, I think I can't imagine a more chaotic, high-pressure environment than an emergency room, and then now to, to be where you are today. It's a, it's a great setup, but what was that transition for you?

Well, it was, it was just a series of evolving events. It didn't— it certainly didn't happen overnight. And of course, we're all always evolving, so I continue to evolve in my, in my calmness with my, with my teaching of yoga. But, you know, working in the emergency room for all those years, I just realized that so many people Most people were there because of the choices they had made. I mean, most people. There were a few innocent bystanders, but most people, because of the way they were living, because of the warning signs they were ignoring, because of the choices they were making on a daily basis, got them into the emergency room. And if they weren't actually a patient in the emergency room, they were in the emergency room of life. I mean, just living these crazy, fast, complicated, and very stressful lives, and I really I got tired of putting people back together once they had gotten to that, that place. I really wanted to reach people before they, they ended up in the emergency room, either literally or figuratively. And so I'll always be involved in the health and fitness world and all, you know, being a trainer and, and teaching lots of exercise classes and nutrition. I just evolved into my first topic, as you know, with it went along with the book Stop Living Life Like an Emergency, where I really talked about, you know, what is emergency living like, which of course we all we all can relate to. And now I've evolved to a real practice that we can do on a daily basis that takes you from the chaos of the emergency living to a place of calm.

Yeah, and I want to talk a little bit about that practice in a few minutes, but first of all, talking about this idea of going from chaos to calm, how do you show people how to how to do that, how to go about that, how to bring that change in their life?

Well, first of all, it's— we have to realize we are in chaos. And so I have a little assessment tool, very, very short. I have a quiz to have people take. They talk about their day, because a lot of us, when you're in it, you don't realize that you're in it until you start talking about, well, yeah, I do always run late, or I do have piles, or I do keep saying when things slow down, I'm going to. So the awareness is first, and the whole idea of calm is is not necessarily slowing down and doing nothing. Calm is really a way of creating more purpose and meaning in your life by being more present, being more mindful, being more intentional in your life. So you're actually more productive, you're actually better connected to yourself and to everyone else around you. So it actually increases the performance in every area of your life when you live a life of calm. But it's a simple but not easy practice to actually initiate in your life because we have these habits that we're in. We're in this habit of trying to do too much too soon. We're in this habit of running late, of always trying to fit one more thing in. We're in this habit of multitasking. And so first it's kind of looking at what you are doing and breaking some of that down and replacing them with some new habits.

Very good. And so would you say that those, those things you just mentioned, always, always running late, things like that, would those be some of the red light warning signals, I guess we could say, that would be the signs that somebody's life might be a little chaotic?

Yes, yes. I think always running late, and, and those of you out there who are maybe chronic late people, 5 minutes is late. So it's just a symptom. It's, it's a symptom of what we're trying to do too much and get one more thing in and make one more, one more turn and do one one more phone call, one more email, and we all, we all could get in that pattern because there's so much that is demanded of us right now. No matter where you are in your life, we are all, you know, we're understaffed, we're overworked, we have less resources and more information to process every single day. So it's about getting yourself calm from the inside out, and then you approach your day and your life and your challenges in a different way. It's coming to each each area of your life from this place of calm, which is again this mindfulness and presence and, and really intention. Instead of just being kind of carried, carried along with the crisis of the day or the fires that need to be putting out, or this feeling of overwhelm that so many of us feel all the time, it's really making a choice to where you focus your time and your energy.

And you mentioned one of the things I think maybe surprising about it is when you do this, when you move from chaos to calm, you mentioned that performance actually increases. And I know we've got a lot of our listeners are primarily in the business environment. Obviously, you speak to business audiences. So I know that's what they're interested in is performance and more energy and how can I get more done. And calm, it may seem like that's the opposite of it, but this mindset or way of living actually helps you. It helps you boost performance. Can you talk more about that some of the benefits that come from it?

Sure, you know, when we're in chaos, we're confused, we're dazed, we get caught up in some minutiae and the trivial things. We don't know how to discern all the time when we're living in chaos what's most important. We're putting out fires, it's that old adage of Stephen Covey with the urgent, and which turns into emergent if we don't take care of it. So it's really hard to be clear. And what calm gives you is a focus. And when you are focused and you are clear, you go. You're so much more productive. There's a very— a misunderstanding about, you know, to get more done you can multitask and do all these things because we have all this technology now. You could be on email, on your cell phone, and you can— and all these things that you're trying to do more than one thing at a time is very confusing. It's actually very low performing. We can only really do one thing at a time, when the mind keeps— when we keep distracting ourselves by checking the email, by checking our voicemail, by interruptions that we actually, you know, Facebook, whatever it is that you are— that you give yourself interruptions, those interruptions are really decrease your performance and your ability to make good solid decisions and to concentrate. But we do it out of habit and of course it's all so easily accessible. So the calm I'm talking about is not about going to sleep or about, about, you know, talking in a very slow manner or moving in a very slow manner. It's about being more intentional and being more focused and really choosing not to check your email every 2 minutes or not to jump on Facebook or not to answer a phone call when you are in the middle of working on a project or saying no to, you know, to your friend who is desperate for a coffee date, but you really need to go to your yoga class. So that's what I'm really talking about is just being more mindful and conscientious and intentional with your time and energy. And it's moment to moment at work, at home, and it makes a huge difference.

Totally. And I think that that gets back to what you were saying before about it. It sounds so simple, and it is so simple, but simple is not necessarily easy. So let's talk then about the practice that you've developed, and maybe you can share a little bit of that with us today. I know you've got an entire program built around this, but maybe you can, can help our listeners start moving down that path.

Sure, sure, because as I said earlier, you know, when you're in it, when you're feeling so overwhelmed and you're pulled in, you know, 52 different directions, you don't feel like you have time to stop. You can't slow down. I can't slow down. I don't have time to slow down. I can't even get what I'm— I want to get done now. And that's exactly the truth. As long as you keep on keeping on, you know, what you're doing, you will keep getting the same results and feeling at the end of the day exhausted and like you still haven't done enough. Like there's still, always still more to do. When you notice yourself saying, I just need to get organized, I never have enough time, I wish I could be one of those people that could just sleep 3 hours a day and then I could get all this stuff done. But this chaos breeds on itself, and instead of being focused on one thing and following it through and letting some other things that are less important go, we just keep adding more and more, and so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We get used to it, we get used to this chaotic living, and we create it even if we don't have it. So the system, what I call the practice, all it is is about stopping and connecting with yourself. It's about giving yourself even 5 minutes of a break and going inside and either practicing some deep breathing or asking yourself a question, something as simple as, what do I need most right now? And maybe it's a nap, maybe it's a meal, maybe it's water, maybe it's just a deep breath. We are so disconnected in our lives today, and, you know, it's such an oxymoron having so much availability of information and technology, and we're just bombarded all the time, all day long, and we're totally disconnected. We're disconnected from each other, and we're disconnected from ourselves. So this 5 minutes, and, you know, you can call it stillness, or prayer, or just deep breathing relaxation. Meditation, even 5 minutes to start your day every morning to really get clear and come from a place of grounding and centeredness, is life-changing.

It is, and it's one of those things I can say speaking from experience that you really, you don't understand or you can't imagine how much it makes a difference until you, until you really experience it. There's really no matter how much you read about it or hear about it, you've really just got to, you've got to try it and see for yourself.

It's right. It's absolutely right. And it doesn't, you know, the whole practice that I actually have created is 30 minutes. It can be 60 minutes. It can be 2 minutes. But 5 minutes is enough time just to get back in touch with yourself, to feel what you feel, to actually be here now instead of someplace else, which most of us are either agonizing about the future or we're, you know, we're ruminating about the past. We're not, you know, This whole idea of being present is so— it is so simple. And, oh yeah, yeah, of course, of course, of course, yeah, I get that, I get that. But we don't do it. We don't practice it.

Right, right. What— go ahead and share with people, you've just recently published 30 Days to Grace, which I know is— kind of contains this practice. Go ahead and share some of the resources that you've got available for people who want to dive a little bit deeper into this.

Well, sure, and the 30 days is a 30-day program, and for many reasons. It usually takes around 21 days to make a habit, but what I didn't realize until after I created this is that in 30 days you can actually rewire your brain. And they did a test— NASA did a test with astronauts that where they were trying to check out the spacelessness and the effects of of weightlessness in space. And in the experiment, they had all the astronauts wear goggles that literally turned their world upside down 180 degrees, and they wore the goggles 24/7. And by day 30, the brain had actually created new neural pathways so that everything was right side up again for the astronauts, even though they still had the goggles on. So that is amazing to me, that when you do a practice, and even for 5 minutes, for 30 days in a row, you are actually rewiring rewiring the way the brain thinks. And this practice is— it's all about focusing on intention, something that you want to shift focus or give more energy to in your life. And so the brain doesn't know any different if we think about it or if we actually do it. So you are rewiring your brain in this positive direction, all focused on your intention, which is why this practice is life-changing and is so powerful. So I created a CD that actually guide you through the practice with timed music and guide you through the 5 different elements, which include deep breathing and meditation and some yoga poses accessible to anyone, and also some journaling, all focused on this intention that you, that you decide what is most important for you to shift focus or give more energy to in the next 30 days.

Great. And people can find that on your website, DianeSieg.com, right?

Yes, yes, and it's also available on Amazon as well. But yes, they can get both the book and the CD. And the book just goes a little deeper into all the benefits of meditation, which are, you know, just life-changing just in their own right, and deep breathing and moving and writing or journaling. So the book— and book gives a little bit more anecdotal stories about all the people that have been able to really, really benefit from this. And the reason why I wanted to create this is because it's accessible. You know, so many I can't meditate. I'm not very good at meditating. I just never got that. I can't stop my mind. And this practice is simple. The challenging part is giving yourself permission to actually do it and to take the time, whether it's 5 minutes or 10 minutes or even 30, to give to yourself.

Well, well said. Yeah, the stories that you've got, the testimonials from people who have gone through this program, they're just amazing stories of transformation. So if you want to learn more about 30 Days to Grace, whether the CD or the book, go to DianeSieg.com. That's DianeSieg.com. And also there, by the way, she's got a free report, 7 Habits to Feel Better Now. So you can start with that if you'd like. You can also learn more about Diane at thespeakersgroup.com. She mentioned her books are on Amazon.com. And if you'd like some daily inspirational nuggets to help you bring more calm into your life. Follow Diane on Twitter @dianeseeg. And Diane, before we go, just to sum all this up, because the taking action is, is the most important thing, I'd love you to just leave us with one thing that our listeners can do today to bring more calm in their life, to step outside of this chaos.

I would just encourage them to take 5, take 5, and, and and right now, right now or as soon as you're finished listening to this, to go— sometimes you have to go in the bathroom to do this, or in your car, or in a place by yourself, or close your office door, turn off your cell phone and your email and your email notifications, and just close your eyes and take 5 minutes. And I usually set a timer for people so that you're not— so you don't sit there too long and you'll know when the time is up. But take 5 minutes to go inside and just start to breathe. Start to breathe and ask yourself, what do I need most right now? What, what do I need most right now in this moment? And, and it's, it's not life-changing in, in the moment, but you will be different after that 5 minutes than if you just jump on the next conference call or answer an email or, or pick up the phone.

Very good, Diane. Thank you so much. Truly life-changing advice here. I'm glad to have you with us, and thank you for listening to the Better Life Better Business Podcast. We'll see you next time.