Episode 67: Stress, Meditation, & Mindfulness In Your Pet Sitting Business With Dr. Kathy Gruver

Being a business owner can be STRESSFUL. So this week, we took a step back to discuss how business owners can manage their stress through meditation and mindfulness. Listen in as Bella and Dr. Kathy Gruver discuss: The definition and warning signs of stress What meditation is and what other coping mechanisms are for stress The definition of mindfulness and how it can improve our health How to combat the "negative tape recorder" in your head Dr. Kathy Gruver   Dr. Kathy Gruver is a motivational speaker, award-winning author of 7 books on health and wellness, a massage therapist, hypnotherapist and trapeze artist. Her passion is to educate people, inspire them to live the fullest life they can, and to let them know that they have choices! She’s appeared on over 250 radio and TV shows, am a frequently quoted expert in magazines and newspapers, hosted her own TV show, and created a stress-reduction program for the military. I'm a hip hop dancer and do trapeze to relax. As a special gift to our audience, Dr. Gruver is offering a free downloadable meditation. Claim it here Subscribe To The Show: Transcript: This is episode 67 of Bella in Your Business. Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready, Bella's got your chute. Let's jump. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, your host, and today I have a hip hop dancer, a trapeze artist, and an award-winning author of seven books on health and wellness. And you know what she's here to talk to us about today? Motivation. So without further ado, Dr. Kathy Gruver, how are you today? I'm so great. How are you? I am wonderful. I am just so enthralled by your biography here. It says that you're a motivational speaker, you have written seven books on health and wellness, you're a massage therapist, a hypnotherapist, a trapeze artist, and you like to do exactly what I like to do, which is inspire and motivate people, which is awesome. So why don't you give us a background, fill in the details, and tell us a little bit about how all of this became you. Yeah, you know, it is funny because you read all that and you go, how the heck did anybody put all that together? It's a conglomeration of just sort of my entire life. I grew up dancing and acting, so performing was always really natural to me. In fact, I was a theater major. I thought my path was going to be standing in front of people and performing—and it is—but it's what I say: same stage, different outfit, different accent. So now I get to go around the world and motivate people and teach them about health and wellness. Stress is one of my huge topics; that’s just such a huge issue right now. I started out as a massage therapist, very accidentally during my time as a theater major. A woman showed up to our school; she would massage the actors for free, and I didn’t have anything particular to do. So I observed her and I accidentally apprenticed with her for a couple summers and realized I was really good at it and I just sort of instinctively knew what I was doing. So that was always this parallel path—healing on one trail and acting on another trail. And I've been privileged enough to combine those two paths into quite a road and written seven books and lectured around the world, and it's been pretty phenomenal. I have so much respect for you. That's exactly where I want to take the next career path in my life. And what you just said is so indicative, I think, of a lot of our listeners, because a lot of them didn’t just start in their 20s being pet sitters or dog walkers. They've come from many different backgrounds. And I think that's what's so fascinating about the world these days—that we can continuously reinvent ourselves or add to ourselves so long as we have the basic foundation principles in place. And I imagine managing stress. So let's talk about that. What are some warning signs when you can realize—I mean, most people know that they're stressed out—but what are some serious warning signs where we're like, this is not good, we need to change something? Yeah, you know, and it's funny that you say most people know, because I've talked to so many people who think, “Our body’s amazingly adaptable, and its job is to seek out homeostasis.” It wants to seek out that balance, so it starts to normalize things after they've been happening for a while. So you start to think, “Well, I'm just a bad sleeper,” or “I just get these headaches,” or “My jaw always hurts.” And we kind of dismiss that away as aging or “this is just how it is.” Well, that might be how it is, but that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Things like overeating, those moments of not finding passion in the things that you used to once find passion in, the desire to escape, short-temperedness, bossiness, road rage—all of those types of things—and then the sleeplessness and the nightmares and the waking up in the middle of the night ruminating and thinking about things. We're not supposed to be doing that. Our brain is supposed to be resting at that point. So if you're up at 2 a.m. worried about where you put the key for the house for the cat you're supposed to sit for on Wednesday, we’re not supposed to be doing that—we’re supposed to be asleep. Those types of things that we oftentimes, again, just shrug off as “that's just me,” it might be, but it can be different. That's fascinating. And I love that you just really dove deep on that. And I know a lot of people that are listening right now are going, “Shoot, that is me right now.” You do, you want this homeostasis, so you kind of actually just accept it as “that's life and this is how it is.” But in actuality, I'm so glad that you're here in our listeners' ears right now, reminding us that it doesn't have to be that way. So I know the way some people cope with it is they talk about this meditation thing. And for the longest time, I was not a person that even knew how or could meditate, but I've actually gotten really good at it. And it's been a good grounding thing for me personally. Can you speak to those people who say that they can't meditate and how they might be able to overcome that? Yeah, absolutely. And in doing that, I'm speaking to myself because I'm very type A. I'm a dancer, so I want to be moving. So when people said you should meditate and I had this idea that I had to sit with my legs crossed—which I could do because I was a dancer, so that I had down—but it was the sitting still and the quieting the mind. And you had to touch certain fingers together, and I didn't know if you touched the wrong fingers you got sucked into a different realm. I didn't know how that worked. And your tongue went somewhere and you rolled your eyes back in your head, which always gave me a headache. And then inevitably something itched, but you're not allowed to scratch it. And then something would cramp and I thought I was comfortable. I mean, it was a nightmare. It was horrible. And I'd get about two minutes into it and I'd finally be quiet for a moment, and then I'd go, “I was supposed to call that guy back,” and I'd leap up and do it. And I started to joke saying it was my to-do list meditation because it quieted the chatter enough just that I could remember all the other crap I had to do. On one hand, that's very useful, but again, that's not the point. It's a time to go inside and be still. And “still” was not a word that worked for me. Then I had the privilege of studying at Harvard. I studied mind-body medicine, mindfulness, stress reduction, that sort of thing about five or six times with them—the pioneers of this. A woman taught us what they call mini meditation. And when she said, “Now we're going to meditate,” I thought, “Crap, here we go,” because I was terrible at it. I was raised very competitive, an only child. My dad wanted a son and he got me, so I was raised to be very win, win, win. So to say, “Sit down and do something you're bad at,” why would I do that? But she explained that meditation was actually really simple. You concentrated on something repetitive. And when thoughts intruded—not if they intrude, because they're going to come in—when they intrude, you dismiss them without judgment and return to that thing you were concentrating on. And it doesn't matter how you're sitting and you can keep your eyes open. And they taught us in this manner and it to me was the gateway drug to seated formal meditation, which I now can do—sometimes up to two hours because I've done silent retreats and things like that. So it's as simple as you concentrate on your breath and you observe the rise and fall of your chest, and on your inhale you think, “I am,” and you keep repeating that. And on your exhale, you think, “at peace.” And you keep repeating that with every exhale. So inhale “I am,” exhale “at peace.” And when other thoughts intrude, just acknowledge, “Hey, I was thinking, okay,” and dismiss them and go back to the “I am at peace.” Without judgment, without criticizing yourself—“I'm stupid, can't believe I'm thinking about bread,” or whatever—because things will pop in. You hear a sound and suddenly you're daydreaming about when you're going to get your oil changed. Just bring it back and get your oil changed later. But it really is just that—training the brain—and you get to a point in doing that where you're so good at catching when you're about to think of something that you can bring it back easily and it doesn't turn into this full-blown 20-minute daydream, which is the other thing that used to happen to me. I'd have this amazing fantasy but realize, okay, I wasn't meditating. And this is a really simple way to start, and you can do it anywhere, and anybody can do this. I've taught that to millions of people including drug addicts, people in recovery, children. “I am at peace.” It's that simple.