Are you feeling like the stresses of life and business are taking their toll? Are your energy levels depleted and you struggle to complete tasks that usually come easily to you? If so, you’re not alone. Many entrepreneurs experience burnout during demanding periods in their lives – but many don’t recognise the symptoms.
In this episode of the Influence By Design podcast, we discuss entrepreneurial burnout and how to heal from it. With us for today’s episode is Feng-Yuan Liu, the founder and CEO of Metro Dietetics, a clinic specialising in fixing burnout among business owners.
Feng-Yuan talks about the signs and symptoms of burnout and ways to prevent it from happening in the first place. She provides practical tips and tricks for managing stress and maintaining a healthy energy balance.
Listen to this episode of Influence By Design to learn more about burnout, its signs and symptoms, and how to get back to full health, energy and productivity.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Why did Feng-Yuan choose to be a dietitian (02:43)
- What is burnout, and how does it start? (07:09)
- Recognising burnout and how to avoid it (16:03)
- The side effects of stress and burnout (21:11)
- The number one macro being under-eaten by most people (22:17)
- How burnout often shows up in Generators (30:49)
- How to deal with demoralisation (35:14)
QUOTES:
- “Your belief system has to be the thing that shifts before your behaviour.” -Feng-Yuan Liu
- “Sometimes we can stick our head so far in the sand that we just keep going and keep burning the candle at both ends.” -Feng-Yuan Liu
WHERE TO FIND FENG-YUAN LIU
- Website: http://www.metrodietetics.com.au/
- LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/feng-yuan-liu-867650105
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metrodietetics/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fengyuanliudietitian/
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ABOUT FENG-YUAN LIU
As a dietitian I have built a professional profile and company that focuses on applying cutting edge science to helping high performing business owners and CEOs recover from clinical burnout (or HPA axis dysfunction), and optimise their hormonal and metabolic health to perform at their peak.
TRANSCRIPTION (AI Generated)
Feng-Yuan Liu Snippet 00:00
Sort of stuff that we need to help people understand and educate on how the physiology actually works, and then be able to help them really navigate a shift in mindset. So again, we say to people, your belief system has to be the thing that shifts before your behaviors can follow. And then once you start to shift that belief system, the behaviors are the easier part to shift.
Samantha Riley Intro 00:21:
My name is Samantha Riley, and this is the podcast for experts who want to be the unapologetic leader in their industry. We’re going to share the latest business growth, marketing, and leadership strategies, as well as discussing how you can use your human design to create success in business and life. Inside and out. It’s time to take your influence, income, and impact to the level you know you’re capable of. Are you ready to make a bigger difference and scale up? This is the Influence By Design podcast.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design, I’m your host, Samantha Riley, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation today. It’s the beginning of the year, we are coming off the back of a few crazy years that we all know what I’m talking about. And I noticed that the end of last year, especially that there were a lot of people that were really tired finishing up really taking time off over Christmas. And you know, if I could say it like heading towards burnout, they knew that they were burning out. So I’ve invited today’s guest Feng one onto the show, she’s a dietitian, she focuses on applying cutting edge science to helping high performing business owners recover from clinical burnout helps them with their hormonal and metabolic health to perform at their peak. And I think this is a really relevant conversation to be having at this time of the year. Because you know, we’ve got a lot of goals, we’ve got a lot of dreams. And I think that to set ourselves up right from the beginning to have the most amount of success is the best thing that we can do. So, Finn, one Welcome to the show. I’m really excited to be having this conversation with you today.
Feng-Yuan Liu 02:04
Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here. I’m very excited to have this conversation as well, because it is, as you say, super, super relevant, after what we’ve all been through over the last few years.
Samantha Riley 02:16
Absolutely. And you know, this, I don’t know where this is going to go. Because you and I have just had the most amazing conversation. Oh, he doesn’t? Oh, wait, we should stop here. And I should press record, because we were both really nerding out on some really cool stuff. But why don’t you tell us just before we jump in, what are the types of clients that you work with? And how did you end up doing what you were doing? Or how did you get to be here? Yeah, really
Feng-Yuan Liu 02:43
great question. So in a nutshell, I work with business owners who, frankly, some of the highest performers that I meet, they’ve got huge amounts of drive huge amounts of passion for what they do. And they have decided that there’s a particular way they want things to unfold. So they set foot in the world of entrepreneurship and business. And they overtime have just thrown everything they’ve got at it burnt the candle at both hands kept going kept marching forward. And then one day, they’re just not as effectively functioning anymore. They’re not as optimally performing. And this is when a lot of them don’t even realize it, but they’re in burnout. And I help these people recover from that state of burnout and get back into a state of high performance, where they really at the end of the day, reengage in with their passion again. And how I got here is I’ve always had a particularly interest in hormone and Metabolic Nutrition. So I’ve been a dietitian for 15 years. And I personally have endometriosis and PCOS. I’m not sure if the audience is aware, but there are a couple of female specific hormonal conditions. And they have been conditions I’ve had since late teens, early 20s. And I was always told the only thing I can do about it is birth control or have a baby. And when you’re a teenager, you’re not really ready to have a baby and you feel a bit lost at that point. And over the years, you know, studying nutrition particularly you get guided down, the best way I could describe it is a bit of a garden path. So they’ll teach you all of the signs at university. But then once you graduate, they tell you to follow a set of guidelines as the easiest way to move forward in your career. But over the first initial few years, I discovered that there’s so much that didn’t make sense to me in the guidelines versus what I had learned about the way the body operates, and particularly saw that through the way my body was not responding well to guideline space nutrition. It was flaring up my endometriosis. I was always you know, going in and out of surgery. I was in pain all the time exhausted all the time. And it really did put a bit of a dampener on on how I function and how I performed, and it wasn’t until I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with really looking at, hang on, how am I eating? What am I feeling? And what is this discrepancy that I’ve been feeling lurking under the surface, that I discovered that in fact, what we’ve been told is literally all wrong. And yeah, in order for metabolic and hormone optimization, there’s a whole different set of rules that we need to be abiding by. And so I was my first ever guinea pig, and was able to really restore it for myself, and my second guinea pig was my husband who’s got Crohn’s disease, so an autoimmune condition. And we were able to turn his condition around, helped him lose, I think, 30 kilos. And you know, he was back to the guy that had a spring in his step. And then obviously, this became a huge point of passion for me. So it was about really spreading that message around to anybody and everybody who will hear me about hormone and metabolic health. But it wasn’t until I started to seek some actual mentorship in business. And I realized that a huge population or sub population within the population that was suffering from this, this silent illness that they weren’t aware of called burnout of how it came about what to do about it. And what it even means that I realized, Oh, my goodness, like, this is actually what I deal with day in, day out. So then I started to specialize in just helping that subgroup because as a business owner, myself, I knew what it was like, I knew how it felt. And so that’s, I guess, the birth of my work in this arena.
Samantha Riley 06:44
Yeah. Love it. No, you mentioned that there’s a lot of people that don’t even realize they’re in burnout. And I find this conversation really interesting because we’re taught to think that burnout is lying on the sofa and not able to get up, but it’s not the case at all. Share a little bit about what burnout actually is, and how it comes about. Absolutely. So
Feng-Yuan Liu 07:09
I personally, you know, don’t like the term burnout because a lot of people don’t connect with that word, particularly the type of clients that I have and work with. Yeah, I would agree with you. Yeah. So burnout really, in the sort of most scientific way of describing it is called HPA Axis dysfunction. And HPA axis is the hormonal axis that our body uses to regulate stress. So it means that there is a dysfunction in the way our body’s regulating stress. So usually what brings on burnout is a combination of factors. There’s physical, there’s environmental, nutritive, but the combination that leads to burnout most prominently is negative emotional stress that’s been sustained over a long period of time to chronic negative emotional stress. And when we look at that, in combination with the type of people that I work with, a lot of the people I work with, they’re high achievers, in fact, a lot of them are overachievers. So they take a huge amount of pride and being able to achieve things and particularly achieve very specific outcomes. So this is why, you know, in business, they’re so successful because they’re hitting milestone after milestone after milestone, they have huge expectations of themselves to keep their house clean and tidy. They have expectations in the way they raise their children in their appearance and everything. So when things start to not go, right, they beat down on themselves. So they start to tell themselves, oh, goodness, what am I not doing enough to exercise a little bit more, eat a little bit less? Do I need to, you know, train my mind a little bit better. They’re always looking at how can they improve themselves, because on the fundamental level, they see themselves as not being good enough. They are always judging and critiquing themselves on things that don’t hit their expectations and thinking that they fail. So, you know, over time, that kind of negative chronic emotional stress, it leads to a host of changes in the body. So all of those things bring on more stress. So more release of cortisol, and when our body is so I guess committed to lighting that pathway up like Christmas light, our body then neglects a couple of other really crucial pathways in the body. And one of those really crucial pathways is the way our body regulates our metabolism. So naturally, what happens is when we’re under a lot of stress, a lot of the symptoms that people can encounter is they start to gain weight. And this is not to do with and I stress this I can’t stress enough is it’s not to do with you all of a sudden becoming gluttonous or becoming lazy. This is the metabolic reaction right? We start to put on weight, we start to drop in our energy levels, our energy levels start to nosedive, a lot of people start to find that their ability to regulate their sleep is gone. So all of a sudden, they’re not able to fall asleep as easily, they’re not able to stay asleep as well. And they certainly don’t wake up feeling refreshed like they used to. And for a lot of people, they may not know this straightaway on motors straightaway, but their body stops regulating temperature. So they become insanely hot, and they can’t cool down, or they become insanely cold, and they can’t heat up. And the other pathway that gets neglected is our sex hormone pathway. So for a lot of women, what that means is a drop in libido, it also means increased fat gains and drop in lean muscle mass, it means that we a lot of women actually do have compromised fertility as a result of that this cycle is all out of whack. They’ve got painful periods, or they just stop getting periods all together. And all of these things combined. People start to go, okay, maybe there’s just like all of these things going on. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s just part and parcel with having kids in a family. Maybe it’s part and parcel with running a business. But this is also why they don’t become the couch drama, you know, couch, like burnout that we tend to associate with burnout. These are people that go Oh, my goodness, okay, there’s all of this going on. They’re not even necessarily consciously aware of it. But because it’s stopping them from performing optimally. What do they do, they work longer hours, they start to work after hours, they start to they might get brain fog, right as one of the symptoms. So what they’ll do is I’ll sit there for longer to try and punch out something that usually takes them half an hour, and now it’s taking them three hours. So what they do is they compensate by doing more, not less, usually doing more. So the way these people normally will feel is not I’m still getting things done, but they’re more tired, they’ve put them away, they’re just not feeling 100% in themselves, then mood is all over the place. And so they’re high functioning burnout. Really what we’re looking at so that is, in a nutshell, what causes burnout, what I call burnout, clinically HPA Axis dysfunction, and some of the symptoms associated with what that actually looks like.
Samantha Riley 12:27
Yeah, I’m so glad that you’re bringing this conversation to the table, because it is so important to understand that this is how it plays out. I realized, and you said that a lot of people don’t associate with the word burnout. Looking back, you know, over many, many years, because I’ve been in business for 30 years now, I realized that there was like a good 15 years where I was in burnout. And I didn’t realize that because it was slowly happening. And it was like this spiral. And when I wrote my first book, there was a chapter that I wrote where I felt like, I’d gotten on to this, you know, these spinny I don’t even what you call them, oh, like a hand still wheel like, Well, yeah, we had them in the playground, we used to like stand on them. And there was plenty stand on it, and you’d run around and your friends have pushed you. And I felt like I was on one of those. And it was going so fast. And all of a sudden it got to this point where I couldn’t get off. And that’s how I described what my life had got to. And I didn’t hear anything about these burnout because I thought burnout was lying on a couch. And that wasn’t me, it was me was waking up at 4am and working till 10 or 11 at night like it got so out of control that it actually did rear its ugly head many years ago, to the point that I fell asleep in a boardroom meeting. Yeah, I was so tired, I put my head down while someone was talking and actually fell asleep and woke up and everyone had left the meeting. very embarrassing. So I really want to open up this conversation with you. So no one has to get to that point.
Feng-Yuan Liu 14:10
Right. And this is the thing, one of the things that I notice a lot when I first talk to these clients or prospective clients is they often say no, I’m doing more than I do. Right. I don’t identify with functioning Wallace. They identify with actually doing more. That is usually when they’re on that like that spinny thing that you’re talking about that the playground that’s when they’re on it and they’re not even aware of it. Yeah. And then often what will happen is something will happen that makes them crash. Yeah. And that’s something is often when they stop. They don’t allow themselves to stop. Yeah. And then for example, they’ll have a holiday that they’ve pre booked from ages ago, and they will be on holiday, you know, and so they’ll all of a sudden go oh my goodness, I can’t actually enjoy myself, I’m in the hotel room the whole time to sleeping. Sick, or it’s end of the year, Christmas and New Year. And this is something that I’ve seen a lot is people will start to go, okay. I’ve just had some time off. Maybe I shouldn’t have time off. Because when I have time off work,
Samantha Riley 15:17
yes. Yeah. And so the cycle continues. Correct. So if people are listening, and I would, I’m going to hazard a guess to say that, probably, if not all, it’s going to be a high percentage of my audience that at some point in their life, understand, understands that I’ve been here or I’ve seen myself play this out, or I felt like this. Once people have realized, okay, this is, you know, I feel like someone’s looking in the window at me, I feel very seen right now. Yeah, how can we start to do something different? Or what needs to happen? Like, what’s the first thing we need to do to start to turn this around? I think
Feng-Yuan Liu 16:03
one of the first things is acknowledging it, sometimes we can stick our head so far in the sand that we just keep going and keep burning the candle at both ends. And the ultimate trajectory that leads you to is exactly the scenario you described, which is falling asleep in the boardroom, or what I like to call a forced stop. So it’s basically even if you want to keep going, your body just says not. Right. Yeah. And some of my clients, the way that they’ve experienced that full stop is a heart attack or stroke. What we want to avoid is that kind of situation. 100%. So acknowledging it, but the other thing to acknowledge is, because the problem is hormonal, the fix has to be hormonal, right. And unfortunately, a lot of people think taking a holiday or having some extended time off will solve the problem. So in more extreme cases, I’ve seen people shut down their business or sell their business thinking that to solve it. But the problem with that is, these are high achievers, right. So even if they were to sell their business or shut it down and have a period of time off, it’s only a matter of time before they’re itching to get their hands into something else. And if they continue to operate the way they were, without changing any of the fundamentals, they’d go back through another cycle of burnout. And what was really interesting was one of my clients, she was so utterly burnt out, she was getting sick every month, for about a week or so. And then just as she was coming out of that, she would pick up something else. And it was non stop, and she was exhausted. And at this point, she was running a $3 million business with a young daughter as a parent. And so she was under a lot of pressure. And one of the big things was she went to the doctor, after we said, alright, we need to go and we need to get a set of comprehensive bloods done. If she went to the doctor, and the doctors solution for her was while maybe you need to step away from your business for a bit. And she was so just absolutely flabbergasted that that’s the general advice that people have. But that’s all people think that is, maybe if I step away from this, and she was thinking in her head, and she told me later on. Well, even if I was to sell the business, I can’t just walk put my daughter up for adoption.
Feng-Yuan Liu 18:24
Exactly. That’s right. That’s right.
Feng-Yuan Liu 18:28
He can’t just all of a sudden decide to let go of everything that causes stress in our, in our lives. The solution really is, when we think about HPA Axis regulating stress, what we need to look at is are there stressors that are our stressors we can eliminate I think is the best way to put it Yeah, is some stresses we can’t eliminate or avoid. But there are some stresses that we can absolutely mitigate or get rid of. That’s the first thing and that can be environmental that can be physical, but that can be nutritive as well. The other part of that equation is our stress tolerance. So how much stress we can handle before the body starts to crumble. And that is also malleable in that we can absolutely widen or broaden our stress tolerance threshold. So how we fix this or how we address this is, on the one hand, eliminate stresses that don’t need to be there, and on the other hand, broaden our ability to tolerate stress. So all of a sudden now the same things that we always have to do particularly in business and in life, our body can cope better with and even if there is from time to time, some of the other stresses that creep in because things pile up in life and that’s what happens. Our bodies now got or our our physical body now has the ability to tolerate that extra bandwidth for stress. Yeah, that That’s the premise that we need to operate. How we do that is through fundamentally, nutrition. Yep. So when we look at all of the symptoms that I described before, whether it is low energy, poor sleep, weight gain a lot of the time, what we see is there’s very specific patterns of weight gain. It’s not just an overall weight gain, weight gain around the midsection, and we see low mood, brain fog, a lot of anxiety and overwhelm. A lot of people get muscular aches and pains, a lot of people get gut or digestive issues. So all of these things are all symptoms of the body not coping with the stresses around. So how do we broaden that? So one of the first things that I look at is someone’s nutrition. So we do a bit of an audit of what they’re currently doing as far as nutrition goes. And you might not believe this, but literally 95% plus of people that I speak to share one common issue, and that is they are severely underwriting.
Samantha Riley 21:09
Interesting.
Feng-Yuan Liu 21:11
Yes. And what brings that about often is, again, like I said, it’s real gradual. So what will happen is they’re under a lot of stress, their body starts to change a bit, they start to put on a bit of weight. And because they’re people who take immense pride in how they feel and how they look, or go up not having a bar of that. So they all start to do what traditionally you get told to do for weight loss, which isn’t, exercise more, eat less, yeah, and they’ll implement that, and it’ll work for a bit, and then they’ll plateau. And they’ll go, well, maybe I need to do a little bit more, exercise a bit more, cut the food back a little bit more. And it gets to a point where it becomes unsustainable, in that they’re hungry all the time. They’re irritable all the time, they’re fatigued, they’re sore, their injury prone, and they can’t keep keeping that up. And this is what I was saying before is they will look at themselves like oh, my gosh, I’ve failed. Yeah, in fact, I hadn’t failed the system at large has failed them. Because now they’re in a situation where they’re severely under eating, and of all the nutrients that they’re under eating, I’m going to pick one just for the sake of today to sort of run through as an example, is one of the main ones that they end up under eating is protein, Aha,
Samantha Riley 22:27
I have done been doing so much research into protein just recently, so much year, and it’s just coming up over and over and over that, that the protein is just not enough
Feng-Yuan Liu 22:40
people and not eating enough protein for so many reasons. But when protein has such a broad spectrum function in the body, it literally builds every cell in the body, it literally builds our muscle tissue, our organs, our brain, our neurotransmitters, our hormones, our immune system, like everything right, is when we don’t get enough protein from food, what inevitably happens is our body still needs it to function. So or is it and where it borrows it from is where our body holds it in is sort of the largest store, which is our muscles, haha, but what will happen is to sustain basic function, if you’re not getting enough from food is your body will start to break down lean muscle tissue. And so here’s the thing, when we start to break down lean muscle tissue, what happens to the metabolism, it goes down. Mm hmm. And when our metabolism starts to go down, this is where we start to see energy levels, crash or weight go up. And they just feel like they’re just sluggish all the time. And that is a state that I tend to call nutritive stress or starvation, stress, right? And a big misconception that people have is all but I’m carrying an extra 10 kilos, how can I possibly be in starvation? Yeah. And so that is starvation isn’t about how skinny you are. Although that’s kind of what we’ve been led to believe. You know, if your skin and bones that means you’re on starvation, starvation is actually to a physiological state that we get into when we lose more than a certain percentage of lean muscle mass. Because they’re losing lean muscle mass, they go into starvation mode. And in that starvation mode, the body conserves energy. So at this point, doesn’t matter how little you’re eating, your body’s holding on to that tightly.
Samantha Riley 24:33
Wow. Yeah. So what is the next step? So if that’s one of the first things that you pick up, yep. What does this look like? What does it look like to be eating the right amount of protein or the right amount of protein for us? And also, I guess my next question off the back of that is, how do we know what is the right amount for us? Like how do we know that feeling to know that we’re on the right track?
Feng-Yuan Liu 24:57
Absolutely. So to get enough protein, this is a really good and complex question to answer is we need to take into consideration a few different things. So we need to take into consideration each individual’s what we call resting metabolic rate. So that means what your body uses as far as energy goes, just to keep you breathing and keep you alive, right, and so the metabolic function at rest, then we need to take into consideration your stress levels, and we need to take into consideration your activity levels. And then we need to take into consideration of the mass that is currently in your body, how much of it we need to be feeding, as far as how much of it is muscle mass, and how much of it is fat mass, how much of it is water mass and bone mass? And then we need to be able to take all that together to work out exactly what is the optimal amount of protein for each individual person? Mm hmm. Okay. Once we understand what that looks like, we then need to translate that to what does that mean as far as food goes? And so just as an example, most people fall out their chair when I tell them this is a lot of people when they eat, for example, their breakfast, they’ll do cereal, or porridge, or muesli or a piece of toast toast, and then there’s someone might go, Oh, I do some eggs on type stripe, which is like, right, how many one to two? For me, my breakfast has consistently for the last eight to nine years consisted of between five and six eggs in the morning. Oh, whoa. Yes.
Samantha Riley 26:40
I’m absolutely flabbergasted, there is a lot of eggs.
Feng-Yuan Liu 26:44
That is a lot of eggs. And it’s a lot more than most people. That’s this one. So a lot of people fill out the true when I say that, right. And it’s like, that shows you the magnitude of how much people are just underrating. Yeah, totally right. Because when you are getting enough protein, it should be satiating, you should feel nice and comfortably for not that kind of distended fullness that you get after you’ve had you know, too much at Christmas lunch. Really comfortable, satiety that is very much long lasting. So you can have that meal. And rather than two hours later dip into this uncontrollable hangar able to last for hours upon hours upon hours. And when you do eventually get hungry, it’s like a slow dip into hunger, not the sharp drop into hunger. Yeah, and when you are protein for when you are getting enough protein, your muscles shouldn’t be aching, your injuries and you know any type of immune related issue. So illnesses should start to repair and recover much faster. And what else you should start to notice your skin starts to look better have as dull looking skin, you should start to notice that your muscles don’t look sunken in, they look nice and solid, not not a think that solid, you should feel like rather than be really fatigued through your joints and your muscles, you should feel nice and strong through your joints and your muscles. But the other thing with eating enough protein is that all of these processes start to happen really, really optimally again, is you should start to notice that just by getting enough protein, your metabolism starts improved again, and some of those signs are you’re actually getting in a metabolism, you’re getting an appetite back, you’re starting to feel hungry again, not just a dip into hangar mode where you can eat anything and everything. Not I just want to eat chocolate or ice cream. Like to get a healthy appetite back, right? Yeah, so all of these things, and the miracle thing is eating more you actually end up start losing weight. So if your body was holding on to unhealthy amounts of weighing, you start to drop it.
Samantha Riley 29:05
Yeah, and this is a real mindset. I feel like this is a bigger mindset shift than it is actually a physical shift. And I’m one of them. I did put on a lot of weight in a very short amount of time. You right, we automatically think, oh my goodness, we got we need to eat less. So for someone to say and my trainer very much subscribes to your way of thinking and she’s like, you’re just not eating enough. The mindset shift was way more than the problem of actually praying my mouth. Oh, my goodness, the boundaries for all the time,
Feng-Yuan Liu 29:39
right? Say look, one of the biggest hurdles you’re going to have to overcome is the idea that eating more food is not going to be the isn’t going to result in you’re putting on more weight, right? You’re eating more food is actually just to mitigate all of that underwriting you’ve been doing and this isn’t more this is just all of a sudden you’re eating the right amount again, that is a brain twist for a lot of people, they they go, how can I possibly like, using my breakfast as an exam? My first meal as an example is how can I eat five, six eggs? And how can I lose weight? How can my cholesterol be okay? How can my heart health be okay? All of these questions start to come about and sort of stuff that we need to help people understand and educate on how the physiology actually works. And then be able to help them really navigate a shift in mindset. So again, we say to people, your belief system has to be the thing that shifts before your behaviors can follow. And then once you start to shift that belief system, the behaviors are the easier part to shift.
Samantha Riley 30:49
Yeah, yeah, I totally get that. No, a conversation that we had before we started recording was around human design, you and I are both generators, we are here to be lit up by the work we do and provide energy through that work. And my guess is that a lot of your clients are going to be this way, we’re here for, you know, to do these big things, we’re here for mastery, we, you know, we want to make sure that they’re as amazing as we can make them be. And what’s really interesting about this is that as a generator, if we’re not feeling lit up by the work we do, we can go into functional burnout, which again, is not these burnout that has you on the couch it is it’s like Groundhog Day of just like go go go go go. Where is the crossover between what we’re talking about here, which is a real energetic thing, that when we’re not doing or when we’re not lit up, we’re feeling very drained. Yeah, and bringing in this nutrition, because I think that, that where this comes together is, I believe, where the magic will happen.
Feng-Yuan Liu 31:59
Oh, 100%. And when we were talking about this before, I’m like, Oh, my goodness, this is actually incredibly relevant. Because when we think about the reason people become business owners and entrepreneurs, and you know, we talked about this a little bit at the beginning is because they have this huge amount of passion for what they do. And they have huge amount of purpose. And they have a particular way they want to do things. So they’ve working really hard, they’re throwing everything they’ve got at it to make it work and when they’re achieving outcomes, because again, these people are very outcomes driven. So when they’re achieving those outcomes and hitting those milestones, they feel a sense of achievement and pride and actually keeps them going. And that keeps spring that on, but over time, because they push so hard. And because life inevitably throws lots of stress and challenges our way is the stress starts to mount. And when the stress starts to mount and their response, or I should say our response is to keep going is to do even more is to work longer hours is to burn the candle at both ends to keep everything happening and everyone happy and all the balls in the air, we end up wearing our physiology down. So from a hormonal perspective, what we start to do is we start to go into low energy, sluggishness, all of the things we talked about before. And what that inevitably means is, we are outputting a huge amount of effort, but not getting the same outcome and not getting the same results. And that can be hugely demoralizing. And for a lot of these people who are generators, they will start to look internally at fault. Oh, I’m failing, I’m not good enough. Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe I shouldn’t do this anymore. And the self doubt sets in and they do they lose a level of passion or a level of that clarity around why they started it in the first place. And this is one of the things that I do talk about with my clients is sometimes you know, the things that they’re noticing is, doesn’t matter how hard they train or how much they eat, how little they eat, they’re just not losing the weight, and that frustrates them. Sometimes they’ve noticed that they’ve started to creep, you know, these unhealthy coping mechanisms are creeping in, and that’s their cue that okay, maybe something’s amiss. But sometimes, in fact, the bigger the more more prominent thing is, they don’t notice those things because they just using them to get by when they do notice is not feeling as passionate about the work that I do. I’m not feeling as connected to the work that I do. In fact, I’m not even feeling as connected to the people that I love. A lot of these people are not no longer intimate with their partners. You know, they’re not present with their children. So they’ll be with their children, but they’ll be somewhere else. And that brings on a huge amount of guilt and a huge amount of negative emotions. And they will put it down to again, they’re trying to just justify this Oh, it’s because I’m getting older or run a business, I’ve got children. But in actual fact, what is happening is this combination of they’re not getting the outcomes that they’re so used to getting. And they’re putting in more effort than they’ve ever put in. And that is the that that cross section of demoralization. And so really how we address this is if we can address the hormones and the metabolic dysfunction that’s going on in their bodies, the energy levels will come back. And when the energy levels come back, their efficiency and productiveness comes back. And then all of a sudden, rather than spending 10 hours to do a thing, they’re spending four hours, and they’re getting a great outcome. And they feel accomplished again. And when they’re with their children, they’re not so exhausted that their minds over here, they’re actually able to be present, their libido is back. So they’re feeling intimate with their partners. And all of these things allow them to feel like by themselves, is what they use to reconnect with the passion and their purpose in their work. And that’s what allows them to step into fully that kind of generator mode, which is what a lot of my clients
Feng-Yuan Liu 36:07
are lit up, lit up.
Feng-Yuan Liu 36:11
Exactly, we talk again. And then you know, the way you can really see that is they want to do more, because these people never want to stop there. The Mo is not to just stop the MO is Go go go. So all of a sudden now they’re like, oh my gosh, I can see the path. So clear. Again, I want to do more, I want to see more things, I want to be more I want to achieve more, and they get that back. But that never left them all it was it was dragged back and hidden under this cloud of hormonal dysfunction that once we actually optimize the functioning of their body, this is going to just come through again.
Samantha Riley 36:48
Yeah, oh, my goodness, I love this conversation too, so much. And I feel like we haven’t even half scratched the surface of. So I know that you’ve got a guide that goes into this in more detail around behind the way people are feeling like they do. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about this?
Feng-Yuan Liu 37:09
Yeah, look, I think one of the big things that I started to realize, when I started to step into this work that I’m doing at the moment, is that there is a lot of misinformation out there so much. And there’s a lot of stuff that people are feeling. And a lot of people a lot of advice that’s been given to them on what to do in those situations, that is actually wrong information. And it’s actually what makes them feel worse. So this guide really steps through some of the biggest myths around why people are feeling the way they are what they need to do. And it tells them what they should be doing instead to actually fix the situation. So is some of the main is really common things that I see over and over again, the crimes committed, if you will, on metabolic and Hormonal Health, and a bit of a support document on what types of things they need to be looking at as well. So for a lot of people who are absolutely resonating with what we talked about and the symptoms that we spoke about, and I like oh my goodness, I think this is me, report will give them additional clarity around what that actually is what’s actually going on and what they need to start doing to address it.
Samantha Riley 38:21
Yeah, and people just need to email you for that we don’t have anything fancy happening.
Feng-Yuan Liu 38:25
We don’t have anything particularly fancy. I’m, you know, at this point, I love for people to reach out if you want a copy of that. But also, if you want to reach out just to sort of chat further about your situation, that’s fine, too. Which is why the email option is so good. Because if you want a copy, and that’s all you want, I’ll just shoot it right through. But if you want to ask additional questions, you can as well.
Samantha Riley 38:47
Cool. So we’ll pop your email in the show notes over at influenced by design podcast.com So that you can reach out to Fenghuang. Like I said, I’ve been doing lots of research about this over the holidays. And I find this so fascinating, in that a lot of the information that we’re given in mainstream is just so far from what is actually working. And it just sends us into even more of a downward spiral.
Feng-Yuan Liu 39:17
Correct. And it’s what has people scratching their heads going, I’m doing everything by the book, Why am I not getting the results? And it’s because the book is full of wrong information and the hardest part to actually navigate. But like you said, you know, there’s so much more to this. There’s so many more layers that really feeds into you know why people are feeling the way they are, but they’re the things that I’m happy to share either another time or with with listeners individually.
Samantha Riley 39:47
Totally thing. Well, thank you so much for coming and sharing about this topic today. It’s been an absolute pleasure speaking with you.
Feng-Yuan Liu 39:54
Likewise, thank you so much for having me.
Samantha Outro 39:57
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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