On today's episode, we have a special guest, Tanessa Shears and she is a health consultant to six and seven figure entrepreneurs. And if that's you or suit to be you listen in because our health is one of the most important parts about growing our business is being able be healthy so that we can enjoy the success that we get in business.
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Welcome to the Breakthrough Mastermind Show. I'm your host, Jen Argue and I facilitate masterminds for women entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses to help others and create financial independence.
Today, I am so excited to have Tanessa Shears with us. She is a health consultant for six and seven figure entrepreneurs because she has a passion to see people optimizing their brains and their health so that they can come into their business with all the energy that's available to them to run very successful businesses. And so that's why she's here with us today, because my desire is for you to have a successful business as well. So welcome to I'm so glad you're here with us. Hi, Jen. Thanks for having me on. I am looking forward to this conversation. [laugh]
Oh my gosh! Me too. So this is a little bit different than what I normally do when I interview people. But today I really wanted to have you on in order to speak to my audience, to help them because my audience is typical person who is so focused on their business, that they have a hard time actually pulling back and taking care of themselves.
And, you know, it ends up being the detriment to the work that they're actually doing, does the opposite of what they want, you know, because work is playing, they love their work. I get it. That's you and me as well from what I know of you. And that's why I wanted you here, because we all need to hear with your expertise.
How to better take care of ourselves and how to optimize our brains and our energy levels. So what have you found are maybe the symptoms of something starting to go wrong in our energy or our health as six and seven figure entrepreneurs? Yeah, one of the first things that'll show up is that your not getting as good of asleep anymore.
It's you're having trouble falling asleep or you're waking up in the middle of the night and your brain just decides to, you know, go through your to-do list for the day, go through a checklist plan, everything like that, so that's number one. If you find you can no longer get a good consolidated sleep anymore, there might be something going on with just the, the stress and the overwhelm that your body's experienced.
The other thing is if you're waking up with brain fog, so let's say you get to sleep, you stay asleep and you wake up and you're just like, oh my gosh. I'm forgetting little things. My energy's all over the place. I feel tired all the time. I have like 90 windows open and there's like, I'm scrolling between Facebook, Instagram.
I got Amazon open the emails, thinking that just feels clunky and cloudy and you're having trouble staying focused. So that overwhelming sense of just like thinking through sand, it just feels thick, it's not effective, it's not clear. And it's not having you show up in your business consistently the way you wanna feel.
That's gonna activate your audience and get them to lean in towards you and say, Hey, I wanna work with you. I love what you're doing. Yeah. I can really see that both of those things like those first signs of waking up at night or having a hard time falling asleep, thinking about that list that never ending to do list.
Ah, that just gets you right. So, how do you think, like if that were to keep going, if those are the beginning symptoms, what are the things that... that could lead to? One of the things... that tend to it? We start experiencing just being stuck in fight or flight, meaning we always are stuck as being human doings.
It is always about how many things can I get done? And we, we tell ourselves, you know, when this time comes, when I get through this list, when I'm done this launch, when I've created this project that I'm working on that, oh, then I'll start making time to sleep again. Or, you know, I'll, I'll stop eating at convenience and maybe I'll, I'll start like eating real food again.
Or I will get back on that spin bike or whatever it is. And we tell ourselves that. But then we end up filling our time. Again, like I have a client that I'm working with right now. And one of the things is she was like, I really want to work six hours a day instead of the eight that I'm working. And I was like, great, let's do that.
We got her, we deprioritized some things. We worked on her sleep so that her brain was working faster in her business, we got to the six hours. And then she shows up, she's like, I'm back to eight hours. I said, what happened? She goes, I just found more to do. I just was able to fill that time up now. And so we look at like, why are we filling this up?
And it's running us into the ground. We don't get to be human beings anymore. We miss out on, you know, enjoying feeling our life and being present and that feeling of calm, like I love feeling alert and calm. And those are two sides of the coin alert is that focus like, yeah, let's show up, let's get to work, but we need to have some contrast with calm.
So when we don't take care of our sleep and when we don't take care of our brain fog, we lose the calm and it just ends up being in this hyper-vigilance alert state in which you cannot turn off, you feel anxious and overwhelmed and you just end up wanting to throw in the towel and be like this isn't fun anymore.
Mm-hmm so you go to like anxious, you end up like wanting to throw in the towel on whether it's your business or something else in life that maybe you might be displacing the blame unto, but all those things are... are terrible and are real reasons to, you know, start to focus on it and you know, the need to focus on that is real.
Yeah. And I, I find it shows up a lot as the hyper-vigilance, meaning it's when you wake up and you start like your brain turns on like a light switch and you just cannot get back to sleep. So you're like, well, it's 4:00 AM. I mean, it's close enough to five. Right? Well, just get up anyways. But this ends up being a repeating cycle or you hyper-vigilance can show up as checking email over and over. You just checked it five minutes ago, but you're checking it again. Or you're checking your Instagram or you’re notifications or your preemptively checking for client notifications. You can't lean back out of your business. It is that sense of being so plugged in that it is creating just this feeling of like, I can't really breathe.
Oh, gosh, I love what you're saying about that, that hyper-vigilance, how that might show up, because I think there's probably a lot of us out there. I know this was me that back in the day, when I had this huge aha experience of how pushing and pushing and pushing, doesn't always make the connection in my brain that this is why my body's falling apart.
You know, like I had this experience about oof, like maybe 15, 20 years ago, and my body just started falling apart and I was like, what is going on? I think I'm eating right. You know, and whatever until I actually went on this vacation, like in the midst of all this, my body falling apart and all of a sudden and no problems.
And it was this huge light bulb. Like that's stress, like it wasn't computing in my brain, but my body was screaming at me. And when I finally made that connection, I had this renewed commitment to handling stress better. And. It's funny how some of us, we just like push forward and we don't even realize like we're connecting, we're not making, connecting the dots, yeah!
Of our bodies falling apart. And yet we're holding all this stress in our brains. Yeah, it it's such an interesting experience going through that. And often one of the things, the telltale signs that you're not able to disconnect to is let's say, we're talking about your relationship with your kids. Let's say, and when you are working, you are really loving what you're doing, but you're also like, ah, I really miss my kids.
Like I just wanna go hang out with them. But when you're go to spend their time with them, you're like on Instagram the whole time. And you just find that you can't fully be in one place. Mm-hmm that you're always thinking about your work, but when you're working full time, you're like, oh, I, I can't wait to spend time with my kids that it's at this back and forth of like, not being able to enjoy where you are. Yeah. And it's not that we don't love our businesses and wanna be involved in them, but it's that we aren't getting the full experience of things outside as well.
Yeah. Yeah. And that goes along with what you were saying before about being a human being. Yup, Just being where you are being present. Yeah, I really great sign. And it's funny because with my background as a mental health therapist, that's often one of the biggest indicators of mental health, like being healthy, emotional health is tied to being able to be tied into the present moment and not worried about the future depressed about the past.
And so I can see that as being a good symptom to be alert to yeah. If you're not being able to be present. So tell me about how you got involved in this? What's your passion, that's driving this? Yeah. Well, I was the girl that would show up late to PE on, purpose late so that I did not have to participate in the sweaty things and the, the runs.
And like, I was the least health involved person growing up. And so I used to be a swimming instructor and I used to teach many, many, many swimming lessons. And one day the supervisor came up to me and was like, Tanessa if you teach the seniors Aqua-fit classes, you don't have to teach as many swimming lessons.
I was like, sign me up, get me out of the water. It's like, I, I, I don't wanna teach anymore kids swimming lessons. So I went through the process of becoming a group fitness instructor at the time and I was so fascinated by everything that went into the science side of fitness, that I literally, I was doing a degree in communications at the time I walked into the registrar's office, I was like, sign me up for kinesiology. I need to switch my whole life over. And I pursued a degree in biomedical physiology. So when I graduated, it was like, literally I graduated in December, February of 2014. I quit my job as a personal trainer, as a box gym and opened my own business.
And I loved it. And it was a six figure business very quickly. I was working with, I have had 33 clients within about a year, which was, it was a lot, that is a lot on your body. It is a lot of energy, but thank goodness I was 24 at the time, cuz I was like, yes, like I've got the energy for this, but I knew that down the road, like I wanted to have kids and that might mean I not be able to be in the gym that much.
So 2017 I brought my business online. And I was working in part training, but a lot as a weight loss coach, cuz that was a lot of what people came to personal training for, but it was about a year and a half in and I was not like excited and lit up about talking about, you know, food plans and weight loss anymore.
And I was just, there's gotta be something deeper. So I started noticing actually what I was doing in my business and the type of clients I was getting. And a lot of them were entrepreneurs and I was like, what is this? And they said to me, Tanessa, you know, I came to you because I wanted to lose weight or I wanted to build some muscle, but I'm sleeping better.
I don't feel as stressed out, outside of work. I'm more focused when I'm at my desk. And I was like, this is interesting. So from there, I pivoted to working with entrepreneurs because I could see what a difference it can make in your business when you're not showing up exhausted with a brain. That's not thinking clearly, like when you take your brain up to peak performance, you're able to think, clearly you can get more done.
You're easier to focus and you just end up creating that space to take better care of yourself. And I just love, love, love to share the message that it does not have to be a choice between the success of your business and your health. You get to have both, it's just learning the skill process and the skill set to do that.
Mm. Mm. I love how you’re passion, you know, came out of just the joy that you had of seeing these lives changed. Mm-hmm that's huge. So what would you say then would be some of the biggest things that would make a difference in an entrepreneur's quest for health. At top of the list is sleep. And it is the least sexy thing to talk about because not only is it like you're not awake for it, it's not like you can experience it, but it's also something that doesn't like, it doesn't feel like we're doing that bad of a job.
I mean, I can't tell you how many people like, no, I sleep fine. No sleep fine. I get enough sleep. Trust me. And then I strap like an aura ring or a Fitbit on them, which are basically just wear wearable trackers, which give me data on how well you slept and how long you slept. And I'm like, oh, well, if this is how your brain works and you think you're sleeping fine.
And I can see room for improvement in here. Imagine, how your brain would work. If we had you sleeping an optical amount of time, or you were getting enough dream sleep, or you were getting enough deep sleep, like all of these things contribute to different parts of how we show up as an entrepreneur. But I often find that sleep is one of the things that gets sacrificed either because our brains are up at three in the morning and we just don't go back to sleep and we lose it on that end.
Or we tell ourselves it's just a busy season. I'm gonna stay up till midnight working in front of my screen. And not only is your brain, like on a hundred level, a hundred of like thinking and doing and processing, but we're steering into these blue light screens, which are affecting how are physiology functions for up to three days after the blue light exposure.
So while we think I'm fine, what if... you’re fine now was operating at 50%. What would it look like to be at 90? How would your business be different? How would your, how would, how you show up feel different? So I always say though that we always wanna get to the exercise and the food, because that's what we're told.
We'll change everything. It's really the sleep that creates the foundation to build upon those things. Amazing. Mm-hmm so if you could just give a couple tips. Yeah. What would really help somebody's sleep that you could just share with us right now? Yeah, so we have this fun thing called a circadian rhythm and basically all of the organs and cells in our body function on a clock.
Like the 24 hour clock that we go through every single day. And there are certain things that happen at certain times, we get temperature rises, temperature falls, hormone rises, hormone falls, it's all on the clock and scheduled to go off at a certain time when we like to stay up really late. And then go back to our normal time or get up really early and then go back to our regular time.
What this actually does is it tastes to our body clock. Like there is nothing regular about how we sleep here. So what that does is it throws off the timing for all of these things. And you might think like what's the big deal. Well, the fact is, is that I'll give you an example. There is a hormone that is set to go off in the morning, right before you wake up and it is called Cortisol.
And it is the same cortisol that we love to, you know, give the bad rap to in terms of like, oh, that's the stress hormone, but we need this hormone to go off in the morning to help us feel alert and awake. We want this. Now, if you're constantly changing the time that you're waking up, then you're what ends up happening is you miss that cortisol spike.
And you end up feeling really groggy in the morning and you can't really wake up. And then all of a sudden you show up to your business like this, right? So one of the best things that you can do for your sleep is develop a consistent sleep window, go to bed and wake up within an hour window as best you can given the fact that we're humans and we have social lives.
So that's a really big thing is being consistent with your sleep time. The other one I would really pay attention to is how we use light. Now, most of us don't even think about light, but light is another one of those things that really cues and sets that clock. So what this would look like is when you get up in the morning, if it's possible within an hour of waking up, can you get outside?
If it's raining, can you stand in the doorway? Can you stick your head out an open window? Like this doesn't need to be too. You don't need to be, you know, like out in a nature walk, can you get outside for between two and 10 minutes? That exposure to that natural light. Not only will it boost your energy, but it boosts serotonin and helps you feel better.
It helps you focus and it helps you turn off the hormone that's making you feel sleepy. These are all great things. We like this. We wanna get outside. Now, if we get outside early in the morning, the other thing I would recommend as my other thing that is like, what can we do to make this better is pay attention to your evening light.
Now, if we think of how the sun goes down during the day, It ends up going lower in the sky. It gets dimer and it goes from, you know, brilliant bright to red and orange. So we wanna use our indoor lighting the same way because it cues our brain and that clock that we talked about, we're winding down time to go to bed.
So what does that look like? Turn on lamps. Turn off overhead laps. Overhead lighting, dim the lights, switch out some yellow bulbs for those bright white ones so that you can have that like evening ambience. So just to reiterate, if you keep your sleep times relatively consistent, you get outside for two to 10 minutes within a couple hour, within an hour, waking up and take the lighting color and intensity down in your evenings.
That will go so far in helping you optimize your sleep. Hmm. You know, that would be an interesting thing if someone's not doing that right now to just test it out. Right. Mm-hmm cause sometimes we get advice from people and we think, oh, would that really make a difference? But [laugh], I mean, here we have a, a health consultant and expert giving us these tips.
I think that we need to test these out and give it a try because, yeah, like you said, the difference it could make, could be so dramatic that we wouldn't even realize that was possible. Yeah. And the best part is we're already sleeping. So it's not like you have to carve all this time out and it's free. [laugh]
Like it's literally something you could say. Okay! Tanessa on the podcast, I am going to try getting outside for 10 minutes in the morning for a week and see if that works. Like it's something that's so accessible. We don't need fancy machines or watches or anything. Yes, It's literally so easy and it's free. And what I like about what you're saying about it from someone else who doesn't always like to sweat [laugh] that... this is something that's so easy.
Just to go sit outside. I could multitask while I'm doing it. I could eat my breakfast while I'm just soaking in the sun or yeah, you could, could set your intentions for the day. You could listen to a podcast, you could stretch, have a cup of coffee. Like there's so many things you can do that like are enjoyable.
Yeah. And you can get outside at the same time. Yes. I love those tips. I challenge anybody who's listening to go ahead and try those tips. Let me know, reach out in my DMs or in my email and let me know, and I'll share those results with Tanessa. Also at the end, you're gonna get ten's contact information as well.
So reach out to her as well. So one of the things that I love to explore from people too, is when I'm interviewing them, is how do you work with people? Like how does health consultant work with people? Is it a one time? Is it ongoing or do you do memberships? What do you do? Yeah. So the way I've structured my business and the current model that I'm in, because businesses are ever evolving is I am doing a four month one-to-one coaching experience.
So we meet every, every week for an hour and we go over what we implemented last week that worked. What didn't work and what we're gonna do differently going forward so that we're constantly evaluating. And the way that I keep it very individualized. And we know if what we're doing is working or not, is I equip all of my clients with wearable trackers.
So whether that be a Fitbit, an aura ring, and I love a spreadsheet. I do recruit their data and organize it into these beautiful spreadsheets that are color coded. They don't have to worry about them, but I look at them and I look for trends. So when we implement something, let's say the getting out in the morning or let's do the light in the evening.
What I'm watching for is okay. When we made that change, did we see a quantifiable increase in the amount of time you spend in deep sleep. Hmm... Or does the length of sleep change or does your time awake every night drop, all of these things that I'm watching for are essentially going to help you wake up feeling energized and well rested and be able to maintain that all day.
So I'm watching for things based on working with dozens and dozens of clients and the research as well, looking at trends. So that way I can literally look at this and being like I noticed you're not getting enough REM sleep. Here's what we can do to improve that. What do we wanna implement this week? And we come back and we say, did it work?
Did it not work? So it's constantly looking at individualized data. Did it work? What are we keeping adding something the next week? So it's like a step by step every week, adding in little things. And ultimately the whole plan is by the end of four months, we walk away with a very personalized set of health habits that are optimized to how you feel and how your brain works and how your energy works.
So it's not just literally, like I found 10 health habits on the internet. I don't know if they work for me because we don't have a lot of time entrepreneurs. We don't have time to be doing all the health habits if they're not going to benefit us as individuals. So by using these tracking devices, I'm able to say on an individual level, this optimizes you. Mm-hmm... mm-hmm... I love what you're saying about that is that it's customizable.
Yeah. So you're doing a customized plan for each person and their own uniqueness. And the other thing I love about it is we know what we focus on growth. And so we're going to grow in our health. If we're focusing on what I think is really important for entrepreneurs is to think about... yes, your daily life, like being an entrepreneur is an extreme sport... mm-hmm and we need to be in optimum health for it.
And so hiring a health coach to help with that, I think is really important. But also what comes to mind is what would it be like if you hired a health coach? During a launch? So if your business includes launching, I would think it would be amazing, especially if you had a four week container to have your launch be in the middle of it.
Because so often we're giving for those of us who launch, we give so much, it's, it's building to a crescendo, you know, around cart clothes, and then there's this crash. Right. I mean, there's the roller coaster up during the cart open time, but then after the cart closed, there's always a crash and it's sometimes very hard for people to get that energy back and that energy doesn't come back.
The focus doesn't come back and, and that's when things can fizzle. Oh. And we can kind of get depleted our business can feel... I don't know, unmotivating to be around [laugh] You need a nap, [laughs] you need a nap... big nap... [laughs] One of the things I've actually, uh, had this discussion many, many times on consultations is I will get someone that'll say, I love this.
I'm gonna start after X Y Z because I'm not gonna have enough time and I wanna be able to dedicate time to this. And one of the things I always like to ask the question of is like, is this not exactly when you need the most support? Is this not exactly when you are most likely to completely stop working out and disrupt your sleep?
Wouldn't you like to have the support to learn that skill during the challenging part, instead of when it's easy, it's easy to do stuff. When we don't have obstacles or a lot on our plate, we need to learn how to sustain these things while we are in our busy season, cuz let's be real. We're all in our busy season. Right?
Like I had a client that I worked with last year and she had a very large copywriting company, but she launched a second company while we were working together and we had her sleeping twice as long. As she was sleeping when we started, she was sleeping three to four hours a night. We got her up to seven consistently cause she was running herself into the ground, getting ready for this.
But one of the things that when we worked together, she's like the most interesting part was not all the what and the how to do, but it was the coaching on how do I do this when I'm doing one of the biggest things of my life right now, mm-hmm and learning how to do that has made that so much more sustainable than only learning how, when it's easy, mm-hmm.
It's exactly it. And to have a coach when you're an expert, we know that what gets us to the next level is when we have a coach or we have some type of supervised support, [laugh] you know, guiding us, supporting us and, and our help is the baseline for everything "Health is Wealth" ultimately. And... to have that guidance and to be able to focus on it, to get better in it.
Mm-hmm, really will advance all areas of our life, I think. Absolutely. Yeah. So thank you for what you're doing. How can people get in touch with you and get into your world? Well, you can definitely find me on my podcast becoming limitless, basically, if you're just like let's choose one health habit and get really good at it, you'll basically find a podcast episode on how to implement it and how it affects your business.
So that's really fun. But beyond that, you can find me on Instagram. I'm on there all the time. My handles @tanessashears and I have a really fun, I call it my entrepreneur's playbook. It's 12 of the hacks that I have found the most effective for building energy and sustaining it throughout the day in our business.
So if you wanna get a hold of that, it's called 12 ways to hack your energy. You can shoot me a DM on Instagram and I will send it right to you. And then I can say hi to you at the same time. And you can let me know that you came here from the podcast. I love it. Thank you so much Tanessa. Yeah. Thank you for having me.
Again, if you are looking for more support challenge and inspiration and running your online business, I would love to have you apply to my mastermind.
Check it out! @jenargue.com
