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.

What does it mean to be healthy?

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.

How do you know if you are getting burnt out?

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.

Key Takeaways

• 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. 

Key Takeaways

• 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.

Key Takeaways

• 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.

Key Takeaways

• 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?

What is the Stress Response?

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."

What Can We Learn From Leaning Into Stress?

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. 

Experiencing the outdoors in Canada is a must. The gorgeous landscape is prime for all kinds of outdoor activities. But the terrain can be tricky, so It’s important to make sure you’re informed, aware and safe when enjoying nature. 

That’s where AdventureSmart comes in.

AdventureSmart is a national program dedicated to encouraging Canadians and its visitors to “get informed and go outdoors,” and offers educational programs, community outreach and special events to help reduce the number (and severity) of search and rescue incidents in the country.

During this week’s podcast, Sonya sat down with AdventureSmart’s Executive Director Sandra Riches to talk about AdventureSmart’s work and the work of the BC Search and Rescue Association. They discussed how to plan a trip, the essentials for travel, and how to know when to reach out to search and rescue.

Key Takeaways

• History of AdventureSmart
• Where to start with adventure safety
• Trip planning
• Basic essential kit
• Group dynamics
• How to know when to call search and rescue
• Riding alone
• Fire safety
• Wildlife

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

Leidy Klotz is a professor at the University of Virginia, studying how we transform things from how they are to how we want them to be. He co-founded and co-directs the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative (CBSI) at the University of Virginia. CBSI works to address climate change, systemic inequality, and other issues that combine the understanding of human behavior and the systems that this behavior creates. He has also authored over 80 research articles and has appeared in Nature and Science, The Washington Post, Fast Company and more. 

Prior to becoming a professor at University of Virginia, Leidy designed schools in New Jersey and played professional soccer.

His recent book, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, released in April 2021, focuses on problem-solving and looks to prove why we overlook subtraction and how we can access its true potential. The book taps into why we add “to-dos” but don’t consider the “stop-doings.” 

In this week’s podcast, we talk engineering, subtraction, confidence, and more.

Key Takeaways

• Engineering thought process
• Subtracting to change something from how it is to how we want it to be
• Why we add instead of subtract
• Subtracting in athletic training
• Without doing less, you can’t do more and are less efficient
• It takes confidence to do subtract
• Subtracting is not the same as not adding

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

Have you heard of Lifestyle Medicine before? Lifestyle Medicine focuses on chronic disease prevention and possibly chronic disease reversal - things like high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes. Lifestyle medicine uses six pillars in order to help patients and individuals optimize their health. The six pillars include: nutrition, movement, sleep, avoidance of risky behaviors, managing stress, and role of social connection.

We dive into these topics and more with Dr. Melissa Sundermann, double board certified physician in both Internal Medicine and Lifestyle Medicine. 

Dr. Sundermann currently practices medicine with IHA in Ann Arbor, Michigan and is helping to launch the IHA Lifestyle Medicine Institute. She has been featured in several Lifestyle Medicine articles and podcasts. 

Dr. Sundermann is plant-based and an endurance athlete. She is a 9x Boston Marathon finisher and a 3x Full Ironman Triathlon finisher. 

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

Picture this- you just gave a presentation on a topic you're proud of... the hours of preparation and practice that went into creating the presentation, the nerves you had to overcome to stand up and actually give the presentation, and the relief of having it done.  In some cases, maybe you felt that generally it well overall.  If you tend to be more self-critical, maybe you're focused on the one thing that didn't go well instead of the hundreds of things that did go well.  Let's take it a step further- let's say you are receiving feedback on the presentation.  You heard a lot of positive feedback, but that one negative piece stands out in your mind and you can't stop focusing on it.

Why is it so easy to focus on the ONE negative thing you thought about yourself or the one negative thing that was said to you?  Why does that seem to overpower hundreds of positive inputs and why do we sometimes even believe the negative things someone said or that we thought even if they aren't true?

It's called the negativity bias.  It's a built-in mechanism that is pre-programmed to focus on what didn't go well, focus on the thing that we lost, focus on negative headlines, and all the things going wrong instead of all the things going right.

Some of us are wired to be more positive and happy than others.  According to research by Dr. Sonya Lyubomirksy, 50 percent of our happiness is determined by our genes, 40 percent by our activities, and 10 percent by our life circumstances.

You may have heard the phrase, "neurons that wire together, fire together."  Neurons are brain cells that build circuits for just about everything we do.  Neuroplasticity refers to being able to mold those pathways.  And when it comes to thinking positive? Turns out you can rewire your brain to trend towards the positive and work towards overcoming the negativity bias.

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