Grow the Good

This week, Sonya gets personal and talks about all the details of her second pregnancy. She shares her experience from the first 20 weeks and some of the lessons she learned from her first pregnancy with her son.

Key Takeaways:

• Why we decided to have a baby now
• Early pregnancy experience with a SURPRISE
• My biggest lesson as a parent
• Knowing when to trust your doctor
• How self-compassion and acceptance are helping me
• I’m okay if I am not achieving

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

After first connecting on Twitter, Sonya was interviewed on Lindsey Hein’s podcast “I’ll Have Another with Lindsey Hein,” where she talks with motivating and inspiring runners. Lindsey aims to inspire and refresh listeners in her conversations with runners of all levels, from your everyday runner to Olympic athletes. 

Lindsey is an RRCA Certified Running Coach and coaches runners, writing personalized training plans for all distances - 5K to marathon distances. Lindsey also founded her own podcast network - Sandyboy Productions - which includes The Illuminate Podcast and The Up and Running Podcast.

In this week’s conversation, Lindsey and Sonya talked about running, consistency, expectations, time management, and more.

• The courage to try something new
• How she got into running
• How to stay consistent 
• How to meet yourself where you are with expectations
• Getting PCOS and a miscarriage
• What it means to have a performance you are proud of
• Powerful mantras
• How she manages her time
• Why she loves reading

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

Dre Baldwin went from playing NCAA D3 basketball to a nine-year basketball pro. His path to the highest level fo the sport required a level of discipline and toughness that drove him to build his “Work On Your Game” brand to share those tenets with a wider audience. 

He is now a full-time entrepreneur who has authored 29 books and participated in TEDxTalks about discipline, confidence, mental toughness and personal initiative. He’s active on YouTube and has a daily Work On Your Game Podcast. 

Sonya and Dre had a great conversation this week about how to go from thinking to action, self-belief, building confidence, choosing oneself and more.

• Work on Your Game
• How to go from thinking to action
• How to deal with comparison
• Becoming a pro-basketball player and an entrepreneur
• Self-belief
• How to build confidence
• How to know when to quit or keep going
• Choosing oneself

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

It IS possible to thrive in motherhood and your career! This is the message that Molly Dickens, co-founder of &Mother actively promotes. 

&Mother’s vision is a culture where motherhood is not a limiting factor in how women succeed professionally or personally, and where women can openly express their needs and receive support without retribution. It is a working world where mothers are supported as leaders and sought after as employees. Where the value of mothers in the workforce has become intrinsic such that new structural norms facilitate the needs of the modern family. 

The mission is to break barriers that limit a woman’s ability to choose to thrive in both motherhood AND a career.

One of organization’s first initiatives is creating cultural and structural change within the sports industry and shifting the narrative.

This week, Sonya sat down with Molly, a scientist, writer, advocate, and mother of two. Formerly an academic researcher, Molly became a founding team member of a maternal health startup to pursue her passion of empowering mothers. And by co-founding &Mother, she is continuing to support women and their choice to pursue career and motherhood while enabling mothers to become the driving force breaking down a system that has historically dismissed, undervalued, and discriminated against them.

• Why &Mother was formed
• Stereotypes and barriers that mothers face
• Systemic and structural failures for women
• The motherhood penalty
• Equity over equality for women in the workplace
• Maternal mental health
• What &Mother is doing to create change
• The pressure to be a trailblazing mom

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

I've spent well over a decade focusing on peak performance- both athletically in my quest to become one of the world's best endurance mountain bikers, but also in business and brainpower.  I used to think the key to peak performance was the focus on mastery: putting in the work to acquire the skills and wisdom to be a top performer in a given area.  While mastery and work ethic are certainly key components to peak performance, I have learned that there are multiple foundations upon which peak performance stands.  So what is the foundation to mastery, work ethic, and ultimately peak performance?

The answer is not as simple as one thing, but it is as broad as one category: health.  Oftentimes, we think health is as simple as sick or healthy, but the category of health goes deep and wide.  Health encompasses emotional and mental health, physical health, environmental health, spiritual health, and relational health.  In my training as a health coaching through Vanderbilt's Integrative Medicine Program and work towards becoming a NBC-HWC, we look at health in our coaching sessions broken down into these specific categories.

Health is multi-dimensional including emotional, mental, physical, environmental, spiritual, financial health and more.  Specifically, we consider these health categories to paint in broad strokes what it means to be healthy

• Sleep and Rest
• Mind-Body Connection
• Compassionate Self-Awareness
• Daily Rhythm and Balance
• Food and Nourishment
• Environment
• Spirit and Soul
• Relationships and Community
• Movement, Exercise, and Play

At the center of health is mindful awareness of your actions, your attitude, your habits, and your thoughts. What do these categories have to do with peak performance?

Think of yourself as a beautiful tree with a large trunk and expansive branches with and vibrant leaves.    Or if you prefer, a skyscraper with a really cool architectural design.  If your tree has roots that are not nourished properly, or if there are cracks in your building's foundation, that tree is going to eventually fall over and that building will come crashing down.  The tree can only grow big and healthy if its roots and nourishment are healthy.  A building can only be built tall and sturdily with a well-planned foundation.

That brings me to today's topic which is taking care of your foundation.  It was the subject of a keynote I did last week to an executive team interested in performance, but also highlighting that peak performance starts with taking care of the person.

The HARDEST thing to do when we get busy, stressed, or super-focused is to take care of our key needs as humans, but they pay the largest amount of gains.  We all want happiness, general well-being, and satisfaction in life, but you have to take care of your foundation before you feel fulfilled and good most or at least some of the time.   Things like achievement, comparison, stress, and overwhelm can crowd out feelings of ease, happiness, and having energy.  Burnout affects over 62% of the workforce.

Symptoms of burnout include apathy for something you generally enjoy, frequent sickness, having trouble sleeping, feeling short-tempered, everything feeler harder than usual, and loss of mot

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

As an endurance athlete, nutrition is a critical piece of success. In this week’s podcast, Sonya sat down with Stevie Lyn Smith, a Registered Dietitian and avid endurance athlete, to talk all things sports nutrition. 

Stevie Lyn is a sports nutrition specialist, marathon runner, Ironman triathlete and adventurer. She knows a thing or two about preparing your body for an endurance event. She founded Stevie Lyn Smith Nutrition Wellness Consulting, PC, and writes for the wellness company, InsideTracker. She has also contributed to Runner’s World Magazine, Outside Magazine, Bicycling Magazine and Triathlete Magazine. 

Tune in to hear more about how to fuel your body, weight loss, knowing how much to eat, and more.

• Common biomarkers
• How to lower cortisol
• All about iron
• Supplement safety
• Inflammation vs. anti-inflammation
• Focusing on sports nutrition
• Weight loss
• Knowing how much to eat

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

What happens when you start running for fun instead of a finish line? In this week’s podcast, Sonya sat down with Tina Muir, CEO of Running for Real, an incredible podcast and the largest global community of socially engaged runners, and talked about learning how to run for enjoyment instead of recognition. 

Tina hosts the Running for Real Podcast, a collection of podcasts about running, the climate emergency and social justice. She also co-hosts Running Realized with Knox Robinson, exploring running culture. 

In addition to her professional running career representing Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Tina is recognized for her story battling nine years with amenorrhea (RED-S), or the absence of menstruation.

Tina is the mother of two girls and is supported by Alta Running. 

• Running for enjoyment instead of a finish line
• Burnout
• Amenorrhea
• Evolution of self talk
• Happiness versus success
• Sports psychology and meditation
• Passion versus compulsion
• Climate Change
• Running realized
• Social change

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

Mindset and performance coach Polly Bateman works with clients to recognize negative patterns in behavior and barriers they reinforce for themselves. By facilitating a shift in mindset, Polly helps her clients progress in life to become more fulfilled and happy.

Polly believes that we’re our own problem and solution and that everything we need to lead a fulfilling, productive, and happy life is within us. It’s just a matter of moving past our self-imposed limits.  

Sonya and Polly talk about vulnerability, coaching, mindset, performance and more in this week’s podcast.

• Tapping in to your own vulnerability
• 3 fundamental triggers 
• Dealing with your past without it defining your future
• Breaking habitual patterns
• Identifying your blind spots
• What it means to take full responsibility for your life
• Dealing with rejection and failure 
• Zone of genius/value

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

Catharine Pendrel, a three-time Olympian and 2016 Bronze medalist mountain biker, became a new mom this year. In this episode, Sonya and Catharine discuss training during pregnancy, process-oriented goals, overcoming adversity during the pandemic, and more.

Pendrel grew up riding horses and later bicycles in Canada. In addition to her Olympic appearances, she has two World Championship titles for Canada and 40 World Cup podium finishes. She lives and trains in Kamloops, British Columbia, and races professionally for the Clif Pro Team.

In 2017, Pendrel and her husband Keith Wilson formed Pendrel Racing, a cross-country mountain bike development team created to provide opportunities for the next generation of Canadian mountain bike racers.

• Process oriented goals
• Adversity during the pandemic
• Approaching training during pregnancy
• Returning to the sport after a C-section
• Returning to racing with a baby
• Shifting expectations
• Dealing with self-doubt
• Olympics

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co. 

How do you feel in your body when you hear the word stress? I'll give you a second to tune in.  We spend so much time trying to avoid stress, but what would happen if we leaned into it?  What would happen if we allowed ourselves to feel it? How we relate to stress is important to making it work for us in a positive way.

Oftentimes, we view stress as a constricting, negative input that we associate with feelings of overwhelm and feelings of being unsettled.  Stress can certainly create those feelings in the body, but we usually feel this way when the stressful feelings become unmanageable.  Stress can also become too elevated when it turns into anxiety.  Stress turns into anxiety when we start asking too many questions and trying to predict the future when there is no way to actually do that.  Stress also becomes a challenge when we try to ignore the discomfort it may be causing.  The problem with trying to ignore discomfort is that it will not make it go away. In fact, suppressing the feelings around stress will only make it worse.

Our relationship with stress, especially in the form of mindset and attitude is actually more impactful than the stimulus that is causing the stress itself.  There's a wealth of scientific research on stress and how we can use your mind and self-awareness to optimize stress.

As athletes, we intentionally put our bodies under stress because we need stress to grow and improve. Our workouts create stress and our muscles breakdown, and our recovery days are what enable us to recover from that stress and get stronger.  If you've had a big project at work, the stimulus or pressure of having to get something done can create stress. Sometimes that acute stress can be motivating and have you do focused work. Other times, having a big project can create too much stress and anxiety.  So how do we manage and how should we think about stress?

Our body needs to react to life-threatening situations- it's the body's response to keeping us safe.  From an evolutionary standpoint, it kept us alive from tigers lurking in the grass. Today's tigers are a little more insidious- start lines, our job, mortgages, potential sickness... and our minds love to take the ball and run with thoughts about future negative outcomes that haven't even happened yet.  If you want to know why we tend to focus on the negative, here's my podcast and article on our negativity bias.

Our body responds accordingly when we encounter a stress response.  Our culture has labeled this response as a negative thing, but really?  The stress response gives us energy, focus, and oxygen.

Here's how it works:

• adrenaline increases heart rate, preparing you for action
• your breathing speeds up when your heart rate increases, giving you extra oxygen
• cortisol increases sugar levels giving you extra energy

Extra energy, focus, and oxygen doesn't sound all that bad, does it?

Mantra: "Stress gives me extra energy, focus, and oxygen so I can perform at my best."

As I mentioned earlier, avoiding stress and even shrinking away from the discomfort it might initially cause is simply not effective.  Avoiding stress or stuffing it can cause health issues and anxiety.

The first step to making stress work for you is simply to notice and acknowledge it.

The way you think about stress after acknowledging it gives you power.  Treating yourself with self-compassion saying something like, "It's okay" or "This feeling is normal" or even "This is going to help me perform at my best" makes a measurable difference.  There was a Harvard study conducted where researchers asked students to say "I am calm" while others were instructed to say "I am ex

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The Grow the Good Podcast is produced by Palm Tree Pod Co.