Being the CEO of Your Mind

Do you ever just wake up and feel anxious or worried or sad or afraid? Yeah, it happens to all of us. I don’t care how much of this work you do, it is part of the human experience. Life is about contrast. You can’t appreciate happiness if you don’t experience sadness, right?

However, a lot of times, we think that the reason why we feel the way we feel is because of what’s happening in the outside world. You know, you hear something on the news and all of a sudden you start thinking thoughts that create anxiety or worry. But it’s your thinking that’s creating the anxiety and worry.

And so, the other day – in fact, it was like three or four days ago – I started having this intense feeling of anxiety. And I just watched myself spiral for about six hours. And it was so fascinating because anxiety is one of those emotions that I’m very familiar with. I used to have a lot of anxiety. And I’m still prone to anxiety.

In fact, my dear friend, she says, “I feel like you function well on anxiety, just because it’s so familiar.” But the thing is for me today – and this is why I wanted to share today’s podcast with you – is that I know I’m the one creating. Whereas I used to think that the world was creating my anxiety.

You know, I’d turn on the news and hear something and I would just start feeling anxious and I would really think it’s because of what’s happening in the outside world. And the problem with that is we can’t control the outside world. But we try to, right? We want to control it because we don’t want to feel anxious all of the time.

But you can’t control the world. I have tried. Trust me, if it could be done, I would have figured it out by now. But you can’t. You can’t control people or all of the circumstances. All you can really manage is your own mind. And that is all that had happened to me the other day. It’s as if I’d walked out of the company and left my mind unmanaged. All of the employees were running around in pure chaos.

And that’s when I knew all I needed to do was step back into being the CEO of my own mind. And that is what this episode is all about.

Bonjour, and welcome to The French Kiss Life Podcast, where personal development meets style. I’m Tonya Leigh, certified master life coach and the hostess of this party, where we explore how to live artfully and well. Each week, I’ll be sharing inspiring stories, practical tips, and timeless wisdom on how to elevate the quality of your everyday and celebrate along the way. Let’s dive into today’s episode.

Well hello, my beautiful friends. Can you hear this craziness? I literally pick up my mic to record the podcast and my dogs decide to have a wrestling match in the middle of the living room. Hey, boys, stop it.

I love my dogs so much. I sometimes wonder, if you all could be in my home with me, if you might think I’m a little crazy because I have conversations with them like they’re humans. And I literally feel like they can understand me and they talk back to me and we literally have two-way conversations. They totally get me, which is hard to do, but my dogs totally get me.

But seriously, I have had the best day. And it’s really crazy for me to think about my days today because these are days that I dreamed of years ago. I call it The Perfect Day. And it’s an exercise I’ve actually taught to many of my clients and it’s so rewarding to get messages and emails from women who will tell me, “Do you remember that perfect day that I wrote out so many years ago? Well, I’m living it. It is my day more days than not.”

And I’m experiencing that too. Now, is every day for me a perfect day? Absolutely not. But I will say that most of my days are days that years ago I dreamed about in my head. Here’s the thing; everything is created twice. So, hear me out on this.

If you just look around you right now and you look at the items that are around you, they were created twice. So, for example, I have this beautiful Chapstick in my hand. I have a journal beside me. I have a candle. I also have a hard drive for my computer, and I have a pair of sunglasses.

All of these items were, at one point, just an idea in someone’s mind. It was a concept. And now I’m holding them in the physical world. And that is the power that we all have on our own lives. You have the ability to think about your perfect day, to dream about it. And then you have the ability to create it twice in the physical form.

I’m so excited about this concept. I love teaching it. In fact, if you are in Slim, Chic, and Savvy, I am going to be hosting a workshop this afternoon at 5PM Mountain time. And so, I am going to be leading you through a process of how to define your perfect day and how to literally create it in your physical reality.

I am so excited to teach this workshop to you. And understand, if you are in Slim, Chic, and Savvy, this is a bonus workshop. And this, along with The Art of Discipline, which you get as soon as you join, is I feel like a great way to really jumpstart you in the program itself because Slim, Chic, and Savvy is a 10-week immersion course.

You are going to be immersing yourself in a new way of thinking and feeling and being in the world. You’re going to stop reacting to your life and you’re going to start creating it on purpose. But I feel like The Perfect Day workshop is a great introduction into what it really feels like and what it looks like to create your life on purpose by focusing on one day, just one day.

Because, if I said, “Hey, let’s create your perfect life,” you’d probably be a little overwhelmed. But if we’re just going to be bringing it down to your perfect day – because I often say, if you just focus on living one day well, you will have lived a well-lived life. Because a well-lived life is only a collection of well-lived days.

So again, I cannot wait to teach this to you all tonight at 5PM Mountain time. Make sure you look for your email. And listen, if you have not joined Slim, Chic, and Savvy, what in the world? Seriously, it is so good. I’ve never had a woman join that said, “That wasn’t worth it.”

I have women tell me all of the time it is the best investment they’ve ever made in themselves. And when you join, it is a community. It is a lifetime membership, meaning you join once and you don’t have to pay again. It is yours for life.

And I continue to build out Slim, Chic, and Savvy. So, right now, we have the Slim Masterclass, which is a program within the program for women who want to take the concepts of Slim, Chic, and Savvy and apply it specifically to weight loss.

We have the Art of Discipline Workshop. This is a workshop that I created to help women ger the most out of the experience. Because one of the things that I often hear is, “I never follow through,” or, “I always seem to disappoint myself.” And I know discipline can feel like such an ugly word to many of us because we’ve used discipline in very unhealthy ways, or we associate discipline to the discipline that was bestowed upon us with other people’s rules.

This is about you creating the rules for yourself to live an extraordinary life. Women tell me all of the time this workshop was a game-changer for them. And so, I’m excited that you get that as soon as you join. And we just keep making the program better and better every single year.

So, if you want to live slim, meaning letting go and ridding your life of whatever is weighing you down, if you want to live chic, which means to live a stylish and creative life, and you want to be savvy, which is, as the French would call it, the savoir faire, the knowhow to create your life on purpose, and you want to join us for this evening’s Perfect Day Workshop, head over to slimchicandsavvy.com and I can’t wait to have you in this community and as a part of this life-changing program.

It is time for a Community Spotlight. This is the part of the show where I get to highlight somebody in the community who has benefitted from the French Kiss Lifestyle. And today’s spotlight is actually on several of my Slim, Chic, and Savvy members.

We are going to be closing down the doors for enrolment in a few days, and so I just wanted to share with you what some of the women are saying. Because maybe you’re listening to this and you’re on the fence. Or maybe you’ve already joined and you’re a little bit nervous about what this experience is going to be like.

Well, let me share with you what Kate says. Kate says, “Nervously hitting that buy button was literally the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. Seriously has changed my life for the better, but in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I first thought about joining. It is so much more than Slim, Chic, and Savvy; so much more. I am a different person now and continue to evolve in ways that I like.”

Here’s another one from Dee. She says, “I’ve wasted a lot of money on things; weight loss, financial assistance programs, self-help. And I now realize SCS is all I need. Best investment ever.”

This one is from Kippy; hey, Kippy. How are you, my friend? Kippy says, “As an older woman with a successful career behind me, I had allowed myself to become withdrawn and depressed. When I took a chance on SCS, I rediscovered my essence and myself. I regained my self-esteem and began to live the rich life I had lived in the past. I am so grateful to Tonya for her brilliant program and for my refreshed life.”

And finally, this one is from Jennifer. She writes, “Slim, Chic, and Savvy is a program like no other. You’re not going to sit around and wallow in all that you’ve done wrong or all the things that have gone wrong then get some little taste of how life could be if only you could do this A to Z list of impossible tasks. No, Slim, Chic, and Savvy is a real fun doable action step each and every week focusing on being the best version of yourself right in this moment, right now as you are. It’s life-changing and powerful. Or simply said, it’s worth it, it’s worth it, it’s worth it.”

Thank you, Jennifer and thank you, ladies. We have hundreds of testimonials like these from women who were afraid to join, who had a reluctance, who doubted that it would work for them. And here’s what I want to say; and this is about anything you decide to invest in.

I want you to practice being an active participant in your life. Meaning, whenever I decide to work with a mentor or join a program, I don’t sit around and say, “I hope this works for me,” or, “I hope they deliver.” I don’t put my power in the hands of other people.

I use them as a guide. I use them as a resource. But I always feel like I am the creator of my experience. And I really believe this is why so many of my members get such fantastic results is that I teach them early on, you are the creator of your own experience, and use this program as a container to practice that knowing.

And so, I love this community so much. You all who are in SCS, you know how powerful it is. Women tell me all the time it literally is like the best community on the internet. I mean, where else can you go and be surrounded by likeminded women who are cheering you on and celebrating with you and we’re all witnessing each other’s growth.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. And again, I’d love to have you as a part of it if it speaks to you. Maybe it doesn’t, and that’s okay. But if you’re on the fence and you know that you are ready for the next step and you know that you are worth the investment, I would love to coach you. I would love to have you in the community. All you have to do is head over to slimchicandsavvy.com.

Today’s episode is proudly sponsored by a crazy day I had in my head about four days ago. I want to talk with you about the unmanaged mind. One of the concepts that I teach in Slim, Chic, and Savvy is to be the CEO of your own mind. And I want you to think of your mind like this. I want you to think of it as a company.

So, what does every great company have. Well, number one, it has a vision statement; a clear vision of where it wants to go and the future. It also has a mission, which is the company’s objectives and its next goals and its approach to reach those goals. And then it has values. And company values are a way to create company culture. So, a value is a set of expectations on how you will behave, on what is important to you.

So, for example, some companies, their number one value may be innovation. Whereas another company, their values are kindness or creativity. It doesn’t matter what your values are. What matters is that you have them, right, and that they support you.

And so, I say all of this because, if you think of your brain as a company, you can see how valuable it is for you to have a clear vision and a clear mission and clear values in order for your brain to know what to focus on. And then you can think of your employees as the thoughts in your head.

There are some employees that need to be fired. They don’t belong in your company. They don’t support where you’re going. They don’t support what your mission is. They don’t embody the same values. They just need to go.

There are other employees, they simply need to understand what you are wanting to create, what your intentions are, what you value, so that they can get to work for you. But all of this requires that you become the CEO of your own mind, that you manage your mind so that you can create focus, so that you can create momentum, so that you can create the results that you’re wanting to create in your life.

So, I told you that this was inspired by a crazy day in my head about four days ago. So, a lot of times, what we think is that things are happening in the world that makes us think a certain way and feel a certain way. And for me, this was the media.

So, I typically don’t watch the news, but this was one of the days where Glen decided that he wanted to watch the news all day long because he wanted to be informed of what’s going on in the world. And all of a sudden, I started to feel anxiety. I started to feel worry. I started to feel doom and gloom. I started to feel a lot of fear.

And if I didn’t know this, I would have really thought that it was what the media was saying about the state of the world; this whole coronavirus thing and the politics, like all of it. But I know better. It is never anything outside of me creating how I feel. It is always the thoughts in my head.

And what was really going on in that moment was that I was just not managing my brain. It’s as if the CEO left, didn’t leave instructions for the employees and now they’re just running around wild having a heyday. They don’t know what they need to create. They don’t know what they value anymore. They don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.

So, they’re just having the time of their life at the detriment of what the company is trying to create. Are you with me? Is this making sense? So, what I did that really helped me to stop spinning is I took a look at what the employees were doing.

So, I did a brain dump of everything that was in my head. And, y’all, it was not pretty. It was not in alignment with how I want to feel. It was not in alignment with what I want to create. Like, I wasted a whole day in these very un-useful emotions that didn’t drive positive action, but really drove me to want to just curl up in my bed and sleep all day because I was just so emotionally exhausted.

I had taken a day off of work, from my brain, and as a result, my brain went a little crazy. And here’s what I can tell you; that managing your mind is a daily process. People will say to me, “You’re just so confident,” or, “You’re just so happy,” or, whatever, fill in the blank. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that I work on this every single day.

Because the human brain, for whatever reason, because it’s afraid, it’s, you know, still evolving from our caveman days, it wants us to be scared only because it thinks we need to be scared all of the time to protect ourselves. But it’s not true. We’re no longer being chased by bears and tigers.

We hopefully don’t have people walking up to our front doors with guns, and yet we’re living in the state of constant fear and stress and we really think it’s because of the world. But it’s not. It never has been. It’s because we’re not managing our own brains.

So, again, what I did is I wrote all of the craziness down on paper and I looked at it and I’m like, “Okay, is this how a woman who wants to reach a million women in the next few years, is this how she’s thinking? Is this how she’s feeling? Is this how she’s using her time?” Obviously not.

Are these the thoughts of a woman who loves life, who is living fully and abundantly? Obviously not. I needed to remind my employees of what we are creating, of how we want to feel, of what we value, of what we are doing, what our mission is, so that I could start to get everybody lined back up again.

And that’s exactly what I did. I looked at all of this craziness in my head and I’m like, “Nope, this is not what my company represents. These are not my values.”

Here’s the thing. I’ve heard a lot of people talking about being the CEO of your life. And I love that idea. It’s like you deciding what you want your life to represent, you deciding what you want to create in this lifetime, you deciding on what are your next objectives to lead you in that direction.

But being the CEO of your life requires that you become the CEO of your own mind. As I was saying earlier, everything is created twice; first in your mind, then in physical form. So, whatever you are thinking in your mind, if you hold onto that thought long enough, you will eventually create it in reality. It’s just the way the world works.

And I remember so clearly a prime example of this in my own life. So, what I became pregnant with Sarah, I gained a lot of weight I gained 75 pounds. And I remember, after having her, I started to think, “I’m fat. I’m overweight. This is a huge problem.” And so the weight that many women would have lost immediately after pregnancy, I hung on for years because I held it in my brain first, and then over time, holding onto the thought, “I am fat, I am struggling with my weight. I’m never going to figure this out. Oh my god, this is such a big deal. I need to control everything that I put into my mouth.”

Like, all of these thoughts were first created in my head. And then guess what; I created a weight problem for myself that I had for many, many years. But I also have so many positive examples of this, right? So, one of them being my Slim, Chic, and Savvy program.

I remember having the vision, the idea of this program, to share the many, many tools that completely changed my life. And so, it was about me lining up my mind with the outcome that I wanted. Because trust me, in that process, I had many employees that told me, “This program’s not going to be good enough. No one’s going to like it. No one’s going to buy it. You’re wasting your time. Why don’t you just go back to being a nurse?”

That is a result of the unmanaged mind. And in a company, those kinds of employees would be fired, right? The CEO would be like, “Hey, listen, if you’re not onboard with what we’re doing and where we’re going and who we are as a culture, you don’t need to work here. You’re not allowed. Go find a different company to work for.”

So, managing my mind required that I promote new employees, that I promote my own thinking. And for me, it was practicing thoughts like, “People need this. This program is so valuable. What you teach changed your life. Just get started. Share it with as many people as you can share it with. You can make it better as you go along and you learn more and you get more feedback.”

And so, by having those kinds of thoughts, they aligned with the vision of what ow is Slim, Chic, and Savvy and has touched the lives of over 2000 women. But I couldn’t have created that is I had all of the noise of bad employees in my own brain.

I hope this concept is resonating with you because I think we all know that our thoughts are very powerful. We’ve probably heard it from many, many different people because it’s not new. It’s ancient wisdom. But I wanted to present it in another way for you to think about are your thoughts serving your company vision. Are you being the CEO of your own mind?

Now, this concept can only work if you know what you are wanting to create. Like, a CEO is very clear on, “This is where we’re going.” Now, it can change, right? But in this moment, they know, this is our vision. This is where we want to position ourselves in the marketplace. This is what we want to create and these are our company values.

And so, to be the CEO of your mind, you need to know what it is that you want to create. And this is where I see so many women spin in confusion, like, “I don’t know what I want. I’m confused.”

Here’s the thing; that is just because you’re afraid to decide. Let’s just be honest. Let’s call a spade a spade here because I’ve done this to myself. It’s so much easier and comfortable to be confused and blame confusion for why you’re not creating what you want versus to say, “This is what I want. Now I have to feel all of the discomfort of the unknown. I have to feel all of the discomfort of potentially failing. I have to feel all of the discomfort of putting myself out there. So, let me just be confused. That’s so much easier.”

And so, you need to decide, like, this is where I want to go. And then you have to decide, these are my next goals to get there. I don’t know if they’re going to work. I may fail. This is all an experiment. But I need to get the momentum going.

And then you need to decide, like, what are your values? How do you want to get there? What do you want to represent? And then, it’s just a process of lining up your thinking with what it is that you want.

It’s so easy to think about. It’s such an easy concept, but it comes down to the daily practice because here’s the thing, you all; if I don’t manage my own brain, it can go to some crazy dark places. And I’m so, so grateful for these tools because, you know, the last three years – I’ve talked about it on the podcast – dealing with Sarah and this mystery illness that she had, my brain would go to the darkest of places.

And I would just watch it because we’re going to have crazy thoughts. We can’t control our thinking in the sense that we can’t keep certain thoughts from popping into our heads. But we can control which ones we promote, which ones we hire, and which ones we say, “No, you’re just not a good fit for this company.”

I read a really fascinating article by the National Science Foundation and they said that we have between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day; just thoughts that pop into our heads. But 80% of them are negative. And, wait for this; 95% of them are thoughts that we had the day before.

So, if it’s true that our thoughts are creating our lives because they impact how we feel, and how we feel impacts what we do and what we don’t do, then it would make sense why so many people really struggle with creating the results that they want. Because what they’re creating first in their heads isn’t what they would intentionally create.

These are negative thoughts that we have repeated over and over and over again and because we’ve repeated them over and over and over again, now we have piles of evidence as to why they’re true. And so, we just believe it’s who we are, it’s just the way the world is, it’s just the way our lives are.

But the reason being is because we keep thinking it so. We are not managing our own minds. We have become lazy CEOs. We’ve just checked out of the company. And as a result, the company is in chaos. It’s about to go bankrupt.

So, the question becomes, like, how do you become- the CEO of your own mind? How do you begin to manage a mind that maybe hasn’t been managed in years? Or maybe forever?

Because here’s the thing, you guys, we have constant information coming at us all day every day. We have positive news and we have negative news. We have all kinds of opinions coming at us. People tell us we should do this. Other people tell us we should do that.

At some point, you’ve got to run it through a filter of your vision and your mission and your values to decide what information you are going to take in. does it serve where you’re going? And to know, it doesn’t matter if an employee has been around since the beginning of the company, AKA your childhood. It doesn’t mean that you have to keep them.

Let’s just think for a moment of Steve Jobs. Like, when I think of innovation and a company that just rose to the top of its industry, I think of Apple. And can you imagine if Steve Jobs is in a meeting with his employees, his leadership team. And he’s sharing with them the vision of the iPhone.

And this employee speaks up and says, “But, Steve, we can’t do that. That’s not possible. No one else has ever been able to do that before.” What do you think Steve would have done? He’d have been like, “You are fired. How are we going to get over there with this kind of baggage holding us back?”

No, he needed to hire employees that believed in his vision, that told him it was possible, that they were going to figure it out. And that’s what our thoughts are like.

I had a friend the other day who called me up and she was freaking out over the stock market. It was the day that the stock market crashed and she’s just freaking out. And she was like that employee that you want to fire if you’re trying to create abundance and wealth and prosperity, right?

And I notice my brain starting to entertain these thoughts based off of her anxiety and I was like, “Nope, that is not allowed in my world. That is not what we’re creating.” It doesn’t matter what is outside of me. That is not the energy and the vibration that I want to put into the world. That is not where I am going as a company, even personally or professionally.

And so, the thoughts that she triggered in my brain, I had to quickly demote and ask them to leave the building. And I said to her, “How are these thoughts serving you? Number one, this is the cycle of the financial markets. It’s always been this way. But if you look at the bigger picture, the trend is always upward, always upward. And why is that? Because the world is always expanding; always, always, always.”

And so, I don’t listen to thoughts of contraction and fear and worry and anxiety. It’s not that I don’t have them let me be clear. I tend to be a very anxious person. But number one, I don’t fight the anxiety anymore. That’s a whole different podcast. I just allow it and I understand it’s my brain being unmanaged. And then I get to the work of managing my mind. I step into being the CEO.

And you know, when I think of my personal company, one word that comes up for me is elegance. Now, I know this seems very irrelevant to the topic, but hear me out. Elegance is effectiveness and simplicity. And when you think about really great companies, there’s an elegance to them. There’s simplicity and effectiveness in terms of how they approach their vision and their mission and they’re clear on their values, which makes all of the decision-making so much easier. And it also makes knowing how to think on purpose so much easier.

I want you to understand that thoughts are optional. You don’t have to keep them just because they’re in the building. You don’t have to keep them even though they’ve been working for you for years. You get to fire them. You get like, “Hey, this isn’t the same company that you used to work for. We are changing. We are shifting. And we are moving in this direction. And because you’re not onboard with that, you’re going to have to leave.”

And you can do all of this with so much love. You know, when I’ve let employees go before, which is hard, I do it with love. It’s not like, “I hate you. Get out of here. I’m so bad for hiring you. This was a terrible idea,” and then beat myself up for it. No. It’s just like, “hey, thank you for your service, and this is no longer a good fit.”

And I think this is really important to mention because I think many times – I don’t think, I know, because I coach so many of you and I’ve done it to myself – that we start to learn these concepts, and then we beat ourselves up for being human, meaning we beat ourselves up for having negative thoughts. Negative thoughts are just a part of life.

Again, we think between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts a day and 80% of them are negative. So, if you beat yourself up for having negative thinking, you’re beating yourself up for your natural tendencies, which is crazy when you think about it. I actually did a podcast on embracing our humanness. And part of our humanness is the dark places that our brain wants to go sometimes.

But what I want to introduce to you now is that you get to release them with a lot of love and you keep releasing them and releasing them until they realize, she’s never going to hire me back. And before you know it, these thoughts that you’re having every day are more purposeful. The dark thoughts don’t come up as much, and when they do, it’s just no big deal, you know they’re optional. You get to ask them to leave and you get to really focus on your powerful employees who are excited about where you’re going.

Now, for some of you, I love this actual company metaphor. This is actually really good. Because for some of you, most of your employees need to be fired. And so, you may be in that place of, “I don’t have anyone in the building who is onboard with what I want to create.” You just need to pick one.

One great employee is so much more powerful than 100 bad employees. So, what that means is just pick one thought that you can get behind, that you can believe right now, that moves you in the direction of your vision, what it is that you want to create. And as you and that one employee are working together and you’re more excited and you’re taking better action and you start to feel the momentum, you’re going to notice that you become an energetic match for more employees who want to come and work for you.

Is this making sense? It’s pretty powerful, right? And so, the next employee shows up and now you’ve got two good employees that become three and become four, and before you know it, you are surrounded by employees who are so excited for what you’re doing. And now, you’re creating things in the physical form because you’ve been thinking these thoughts for so long.

And remember, everything is created twice; first in your head and then in reality. So, you’ve been thinking these thoughts, and now you’re starting to pile up evidence for them. And now other people are noticing, AKA other employees or your thoughts, and they’re like, “I want to get on board with that. That looks like a fun company to work for.”

And so, you build this momentum starting with one good employee or starting with one positive thought that you can get behind. That, my friend, is how you become the CEO of your life, by being the CEO of your mind.

So, I just want you to think about something that you want to create. It can be anything. And I want you just to notice your thoughts around creating that. And I want you to pretend you’re Steve Jobs and you’re about to start designing and creating the iPhone.

And just ask yourself, do these employees belong in this room with me? Are they going to help me create what it is that I want? And if not, you’ve got to let them go. And sometimes, it’s hard to let go of the familiar employees that have been around that you know really well, even though you don’t want to be around them. But they’re familiar. It’s like the devil you know.

But you’ve got to be willing to let them go and realizing that every thought is optional. Every employee is optional. So, if you want to build a great company, you’re going to have to surround yourself with great employees.

So, what employees do you need to let go? What thoughts do you need to fire? And then just find one good employee, one good thought that will start leading you in the direction of what it is that you want to create in your life.

It is time for J’adore; the part of the show where I get to share something that I love with you. And I just want to say, I am so grateful that you all love this part of the podcast. In fact, on a rare occasion I don’t do a J’adore, I get so many messages saying, “Have you dropped that part of the show? Please don’t. Bring it back.” And no, I haven’t dropped it because I will always want to share things that I love with you. But maybe just not every week.

So, let’s talk about today’s J’adore. When I think about this community, I think about you all in so many different ways and I’m always asking myself, what can I share, either personal development tools or products that I love, or things that will make your life more beautiful, more healthy, more passionate, more loving?

But today’s J’adore is a pretty serious one because I believe that most adults are dehydrated. And whenever women come to me and I’m coaching them, of course, I’m always looking into their mind as to what they’re thinking. But there are also environmental factors.

We don’t live in a bubble. We are spiritual, physical, and emotional beings and we really need to learn to take care of all parts of ourselves. And one of the ways that we can do this is to drink enough water, right?

It’s like wilting plants. You look at plants that don’t get water and they start to wilt and they just look terrible. And you just give them a little bit of water and they perk right back up.

We need lots of water, especially for our own brain health. I read one recent study that said that 1% dehydration will cause a 5% decrease in cognitive function. So, it’s really hard to manage our own minds when we have depleted them of what they need in order to flourish.

Here’s an interesting fact; did you know that the brain is made up of 75% to 80% water? So, water is necessary for optimal brain function. It will help you think faster and be more focused and experience greater clarity and creativity.

And I’ve personally experienced this. I’ll never forget when I ran my first marathon. I thought I was well hydrated, but obviously I wasn’t. and towards the end of the marathon, I literally felt like I was in another world. My head was swimming, I couldn’t think. I became a little disoriented.

And all I could think about, all I wanted was water. My body was craving it. And so, I hydrated myself. And like the flower, I perked back up. But I feel like a lot of us are just low-level dehydrated all of the time because we’re not drinking enough water.

Yes, I’m on my soapbox right now, but my dear friend Kitha Arora, she is a doctor and she is the one that convinced me. Even though I thought I was drinking enough water, she was like, “No, sister. You need to be drinking way more.” And so, water is a big part of my healthy living plan.

Now, when it comes to water, quality does matter. So, I promise you all, I’m getting to the J’adore. Because one of the beautiful things that came out of my daughter’s illness is that we became so much more aware of the toxins in our environment. And I started to look at everything we were consuming or putting on our skin or the air that we were breathing.

And one of the first things that we did was invest in a water osmosis filter. Now, I am not going to go into details about what this is because y’all can read about it. But what I can say is that I love knowing that I am getting the best quality water possible, that is filtered. Because did you know that regular US tap water – I can’t speak about the rest of the world because I haven’t done the research on it, but it can have up to 300 pollutants in our water, in our drinking water.

And so, while it is an over $200 investment, it is so worth it because quality water is leading to quality health and a quality life. Now, I know today’s J’adore is not as sexy as a handbag or my favorite skincare products. But health and beauty really do start from within. And I believe quality water matters.

So, if you want to check out the water filtration system that we invested in, you can go to frenchkisslife.com/waterfilter. And you can see the one that I have. But it is an osmosis filter that takes water through all kinds of incredible stages to get rid of all of the pollutants so that we can guarantee that our family is drinking the highest quality water possible.

I love you all. Go out there and have a beautiful day and I will see you in next week’s podcast.

If you enjoyed this episode and you want to dive even deeper into the French Kiss Lifestyle, let’s start with a makeover; a mindset makeover. You can download my free training, The Three Mindset Makeovers Every Woman Needs, by visiting frenchkisslife.com/mindset. Because, after all, mindset is the new black.