4.16 Empowering Leadership and Wellness: An Interview with Dr. LaNysha Adams

In this episode of the Mindful Academy interview series, host Jennifer Askie engages in an illuminating conversation with Dr. LaNysha Adams, author and survivor of sudden cardiac arrest, who joins from Albuquerque. They discuss LaNysha's book, her survival story, and the significant leadership lessons derived from her ordeal. The conversation expands into a broader discussion on the principles of mindful and values-based leadership in higher education, particularly focusing on the year 2025. Jennifer and LaNysha delve into the importance of personal agency, psychological safety in the workplace, and the role of self-reflection in effective leadership. Dr. Adams also shares insights into her current role at Santa Fe Community College, leading the Student Wellness Center, and the innovative practices she employs to maintain wellness among her staff and students. The episode underscores the vital connection between personal wellness and professional effectiveness, offering practical tools and strategies to implement in everyday leadership.

FREE AUDIO BOOK LINK HERE: https://audio.mepowerbooks.com/

Find LaNysha Adams on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lanysha/

And IG: https://www.instagram.com/edlinguist/

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome

00:52 Guest Introduction: Dr. LaNysha Adams

02:12 Navigating Higher Education Challenges

04:45 Personal Identity and Professional Growth

07:59 Surviving Sudden Cardiac Arrest

09:14 Life After Cardiac Arrest

22:06 Writing 'Me Power' During the Pandemic

27:05 Exploring Self-Relationship Post-Cardiac Arrest

27:39 The Concept of 'Me Power' and Self-Awareness

29:42 Practical Empowerment Strategies

30:48 The Importance of Reflection and Self-Care

32:28 Embodiment and Academic Challenges

34:47 The Role of Journaling and Reflection

36:19 Understanding the Body's Intelligence

38:00 Creating Space for Wellness

41:22 Leadership and Wellness Practices

45:17 Top Tools for Personal and Professional Wellness

53:59 Community College Wellness Initiatives

56:27 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

 Welcome everybody to the next installment of my interview series on the Mindful Academy. Thank you so much for lending us your ears as usual, I'm Jennifer Askie. I'm your coach for leadership excellence and mindful leadership in higher education.

And today I am delighted to be talking with Dr. Isha Adams who is zooming in from Albuquerque. I am in Edmonton. We are experiencing very different climatological realities at the moment. I am sure. And I'm talking to Isha today about her book, about being a survivor of sudden cardiac arrest and the leadership lessons learned, and then we'll get into a broader leadership discussion around what it means to be a leader.

In a values-based leader in higher education today in 2025. So Isha, I'm gonna let you introduce yourself instead of me reading something pre-prepared. So I'm gonna turn the mic over to you. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I always start with this idea that, who we are is so much more than the titles that we have.

And so I'm a foodie, I'm a lover of traveling a fan of people. And at the heart of everything I do, I really believe in this idea of agency. The right? Like the power to choose how we show up for ourselves and for each other in the world. I, Ted speaker, author, I guide leaders from this overwhelmed to clarity with practical tools for my me power framework.

And at the heart of it, I really spend my days helping people feel. More grounded and connected. Whether that's leader educators supporting their students or leaders trying to help keep their teams inspired. And I think I used to say a lot when I worked with people finishing their dissertations that I'm helping them navigate these red tape of bureaucratic environments without cutting themselves or other people.

Because you know that, that gets a little tense. That I love that little insight, right? Navigating red tape without getting a bunch of paper cuts for yourself or others. This notion of like harm and potential for harm in something that I think from the outside looks like it should be like the iest white cloud of safe working environment, higher ed.

Like I, I think that. If you're on a farm, if you're on an oil rig, if you are in construction and you think of oh, and the paper cuts you have higher you poor baby. But in my work and in yours, I'm sure that we run into people every day who have experienced real harm at work or who don't feel safe and just be, you don't have to be on an oil rig to be heard at work.

Oh man. I think psychological safety and the lack thereof are probably one, it is like the most terrifying environment to, to be in. You're, if you're constantly thinking about flight, fight or flight or flee you really fight flight. You fight or flight. And that, that status of me being so dysregulated is.

Equivalent to, being in the woods and having someone chase you. It really is. Yeah. Psychologically it is the same. It feels the same in the body anyway. The, so fight flight freeze, like most people are familiar with that. More recent research have a, has added fawn to that. And that tends to be pretty female coded.

Like excessive people pleasing, excessive self abrogation. Oh please, if you are okay with me, then I will be safe. Let me, kiss the ring. And so all of these behaviors I think we see all the time in higher education. The, because research especially but even teaching and evaluation and all of that, it feels like a constant high stakes game.

You're, you are like, yeah, that was great, but what have you published lately? What grant have you gotten lately? All of that, you being equated with the product that you produce, which is dangerous when it comes to identity formation and identity security. And then in 2025, those stakes just got ratcheted up into the stratosphere.

Psychologically a high stakes place to work often or feels like a high stakes place to work. And it is my belief that it needn't be that's just ridiculous. Absolutely. What about all of the other things of who we are beyond what we produce or the roles that we play? This is I think the dominant question for us as we navigate our life and.

Really detaching ourselves from that idea that, who we are is so fixed on our role or our personality or anything, right? Because who we are is subject to change always. And it should be subject to change as we learn and grow through life. Won't think, won't hope, I don't know. Yeah. That is this notion of who we are outside of our work and the changing landscape of both the internal and the external world, of ourselves. I, I remember when I was leaving higher education as a professor and really grieving that I'd done it voluntarily and then the consequences caught up with me in like a mad rush. And I felt really unmoored because there weren't my identity. I was no longer a professor and then I wasn't good for anything.

And I actually remember sitting in my therapist's office being so angry that I had to start over. And I was really upset about this notion that oh, I had done this really hard thing. I'd gotten the PhD, I'd gotten the tenure track job. I'd gotten tenure. Like I'd done all of these hard things and they weren't necessarily fun.

And now I had given up on them and I had to do more hard things because I had to reinvent myself. And looking back on it, I was like, oh, you were afraid of growing. You were afraid of changing. And I think I'd bought into this notion of expertise as I am the Butterball Turkey, my little thingy has popped.

I am, put a fork in me. I'm done. I don't have to. Grow anymore. I don't have to be new at things anymore. I don't have to be a beginner anymore. And that I wanna take past me and shake me and say first of all, you were wrong. You were still gonna have to grow in your role as a faculty member.

But Yeah. What a loss, what an unfortunate thing to feel like you get into you get your position and then you're done. Wouldn't it be nice, at the heart of it, we, I think we have this idea like, oh, life is so easy. Life is going to be easy when I reach this 0.1 day.

It'll all be great when. And that fantasy, I think we have to release. I feel like life is a lifelong journey to, help us release this fantasy because it's almost like it, it is a fallacy. It's like this is not reality. Life is full of challenges and problems to solve. That is why we are here and we can do it joyously, we can choose to suffer or not.

And there's so many ways we can make this an adventure. But choose wisely and choose carefully. 'cause it is still your adventure. It is your adventure and you can put it on the easy setting, you can put it on the hard setting. A lot of that is up to you. And a lot of that is up to how you frame that story of what do these inevitable challenges represent?

Failure or opportunity. I, and this is the context in which I wanna ask you about your sudden cardiac arrest. But just because it's gonna sit in the back of my mind for a minute, this notion of failure is a growth opportunity. My husband and I were talking to a woman who's a psychologist, and she said, oh, that's just an a fog.

I'm like, A fog. She goes, it's an acronym, another flippin opportunity for growth. Insert your favorite expletive there. I was like, oh yeah, another flippin opportunity for growth. Look, you there. Dang. Oh, joy. I'm so excited about that. Oh boy, me, I get to grow. Yay. Nah. Such hard work.

That's amazing. I actually have that thought a lot. This is a fog. Yeah, for sure. So like in the context of challenges to navigate, like I would imagine like your heart stopping would be a challenge to navigate? Or is it, are we gonna talk about that in the context of challenge to navigate or in the context of like fight, flight, freeze and your physical reaction to stress.

What happened? And what does it mean now for you? Yeah. I'm only laughing because it is quite the challenge to try to overcome, right? So this idea of surviving a sudden cardiac arrest, right? Nine out 10 people who have it outside of a hospital typically die. So the story is like in January, 2022, my entire family contracted COVID.

For two weeks I was as sick as I had ever been in my life. So I after three weeks of having COVID I started feeling better actually. And on the day that this happened was the, I remember journaling this was the best day that I felt all year because I was so sick. So we were living in DC the nation's capital at the time, and team one.

And when DC sports teams won, pizza would be half off. And so I have two small children at the time, I had a three-year-old and a 1-year-old. And my husband went to get the pizza. I sat down on the couch to close my eyes 'cause I was stressed about meeting this book deadline. And then when I sat down the next thing I know, I'm waking up in the ICUA week later.

So when I woke up I learned that my husband returned with the pizza performed CPR, thereby saving my life. I had COVID pneumonia, which I didn't know, and that's what led to the cardiac arrest. And as a consequence, now, I was revitalized. I'm here, I'm back. Just great. And yet I have a heart condition that I have to manage and maintain.

And, when the first responders arrived, they worked on me for some time before getting my heart back into a regular rhythm. And this idea that I'm here for a number of reasons, some of which are miraculous, but then all these people, right? Supporting coming in to really help life be sustained is amazing as a story.

Wow. And your kids were there with you. My 1-year-old he was in a crib, so he didn't see anything. But my three-year-old, he was right next to me when it happened. He was there when he saw his dad doing the compressions, and then when the EMTs came in to shock me, he was there and observed all of that.

So that I can only imagine the trauma he has around that as an experience. And then like pre-language, right? Like he's not gonna be able to articulate that, but to know it and to observe it. And then this idea that, when your heart it was interesting when I got all the paperwork when I, once I left the hospital, the, all the paperwork, it said like sudden cardiac death because when your heart stops and they have to bring it back, you are like gone.

You're gone. Yeah. The question is how long and then how much time in between that. While you're away, is there not enough oxygen getting to your brain, which can lead to like severe, like epoxy or brain damage? Is it getting to your other organs? That was the main question that they had. And, I was intubated in a coma for a week, so it's is she gonna wake up?

What's gonna happen? So there were a lot of questions and a lot of after the fact trauma to, to process and heal, right? As we say. And as a person, as a family, as a couple. That's and processing the, and so in between then, and now you've moved across the country, your kids have grown and the country, right?

Like we've come out of COVID. I'm using bunny ears there. COVID is still an active virus. It's I think leading to fewer deaths. The vaccine protocols around it are all over the map. And it as does the flu, as does. I live in Alberta where we've just experienced our first measles death in generations because we've decided that vaccinating against measles isn't necessary.

And so like the world is changing and the grief and the processing from COVID is happening while you're also doing your own personal reckoning around okay, now what? Yeah I think an event like this, it's interesting. Like to me, I wasn't conscious the fact that it happened is like an interesting story to tell.

That's what I, that's how I make sense of it. Even though it's my lived experience, but when it happened, I wasn't conscious, right? So it's very hard for me to, really wrap my mind around it. So I just deal with the consequences of that. And then the way I think about it and how I move through it is this I take this idea that everything is, it's true.

Everything is based in choice. Like how you see it, what it means to you, what meaning you derive from it. All of that. I can choose, I could choose to be like. Sad about the fact that now I have a chronic health condition that I didn't have before, which you don't have a lot of ideas about that at times.

Some of them are not so positive. For the first part, they are very positive, but Right. Depending on what side of the bed you wake up on. Can you imagine? You wake up some days, you're like, what the heck? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's like funny in, in, in a way. But I really love this idea like how do I want, how do I want to see it?

How do I, what do I get to decide? I don't get to choose the cards that I was dealt. I don't get to choose to, some things we can control. Like I can control taking my medicine every day, which I have to do now. I'm on a strict regimen, and then I can that affects me physically, but I can't control the fact that I need to take it.

If I could do anything, if I could have done anything within my control not to have had that experience happen. For one, you better believe for one second I would totally choose something different, but I didn't choose that. So look, what do I do? Even when you don't get the cards that you want or something happens beyond your control, what's your response to that?

And I think this this idea is so dominant and I feel like we constant, we need constant reminders because as we go through life, as we age, as our body breaks down, you just put the frame of like life, everything is on the dec. We're like on the ascent, and then it starts going down. We're like, damn.

Like here we are. What are we doing? What's happening? You're talking to a woman of a certain age. Let me tell you, I can sing a few bars of that song really well. Good. That's good. And they are self pitying. Woe is me. Why do I no longer have the body and the metabolism of a 25-year-old?

Listen, we can't do what we used to do. Forget it. All of us. And then it just gets worse over time. We can't do what we used to do, but we could still do stuff. What do we wanna choose? How do we wanna see it? Like it's all within our, that is within our control. Control and choosing.

Choosing, not like I'm gonna pick the worst of, I'm gonna pick the best thing of the shitty options in front of me. That doesn't feel very good. No. And so when you talk about being a choice like you, we might not control what happens to us, but we certainly have a choice about what we do with what happens to us.

How do you navigate that with joy? Yeah. I don't think it's always joyous. Like I, I always, my friends and I, we were talking about this, I'm, when I got outta the hospital, like I, I had to learn how to walk, I had to do all these therapies, like people coming to your house, helping you get down.

I had stairs in my house, I have small children. I can't chase them. So there were so many things and that that's what we're focused on, right? 'cause our brains are wired to think about threat and what is creating conditions up for us to. Protect ourselves. So it's very negative.

It's what is gonna get me right now? And when you're trying to heal, it's, it is very negative. It's I can't do X, Y, Z, and you go through the whole alphabet. So what I started to do, and actually it is fascinating 'cause I think when I wrote the book, I was thinking about my reader in a very distant way.

Not like I am the reader, or I'm writing this for me. Or I would be in a condition, a position where I needed to really practice what I preach, right? So what I started doing was saying, okay, if I can't walk and I need to go do these therapies with all these people, how can I make this into a game for myself?

I wanna do this. They say I need to do three, pelvic exercises or three exercises where you can, because if you can't stand up without grabbing something, you know your legs are really weak. So what, how can I like up the ante for myself, not just for what the bare minimum was.

Yeah. So that was great for me and it. It wasn't positive at first, but then it started becoming as I became stronger, then it became like a game. And then the other thing was like, okay, I was already low sodium, so as it relates to diet and stuff like that, I didn't really have to care. But I was like, you know what I'm a big fan about having green smoothies.

Like I'm gonna start making these elaborate, beautiful, wonderful, delicious smoothies, which no one required me to do, but I get to decide. And then once I got the pacemaker, so now I have this pacemaker, $71,000 device that's Bluetooth connected. So if anything goes south of the heart, I'll get shocked and then, I'll be all right.

I won't be like. Needing to go to the hospital like before. So now I have this pacemaker, right? And so I don't get, I have to go through this little area at the airport. They have pet me down all of this. But I got a Peloton like that next year was on sale. 'cause during all the pandemic, there are all these sales.

So I got a Peloton and I was doing all the geriatric, exercises on there. And I was like, I'm the pacemaker powered Peloton writer, right? So I started taking like these small actions, and then the way I started seeing myself was like, even though there's this limitation, right? I would've never thought.

To have to get very nice colored containers to put my medicine in and then go through this ritual of taking it because I wasn't on any medications. I just took vitamins. I didn't have anything. So it was just so fascinating 'cause as I took these small steps to change it, then I started relating that to.

Kind of like how I felt about myself and then how I wanted to be what and when I think of identity, I think of it like repeated being and like how beingness, like how are my actions enforcing what, who I am being, who I am becoming? And that was so crucial for me. So was it joyous? Not all the time, but is it joyous now?

Yeah. 'cause I have a lot of things to say about it, and it's funny to me. Plus the alliteration of being a pacemaker powered Peloton writer. Like what? That's great. That's great. Right Now if you could like, hook up the pacemaker to the Peloton, like the Bluetooth just opens up a whole either, fantas phantasmagoric or dystopian world of, you know what?

But no dystopian Is 1000% legit, like I, I didn't know. As I'm going through this journey, there's so many things I can learn. So one is I didn't know that it can malfunction. So every eight to 10 years, the battery needs to be replaced. So that means I have to go through a procedure, they open me up, they replace the battery, close me back up, boom.

I can keep going about my life. But my heart because of all the meds that I take, because of the exercise I do it was starting to get better. So the device is programmed based on settings when it was put in, which was in 2020. So between 2023 and now it's never been adjusted. So I go in every three months, I go in for my routine appointment.

They check the battery, they look at the data, we talk about what stress is, creating pressures on the heart because it shows irregularities in the data. So I'm sitting there and the guy's have you felt a shock? And I was like, no, I haven't felt any shocks. What does it feel like? Oh, you would definitely know if you got shocked.

And I said why are you asking me? The reason why was because the device needed to be reprogrammed, but it has to be cleared by all these doctors. Humans have to do something. And if I hadn't, I almost skipped that appointment or rescheduled, but if I had done that at some point, I would've gotten shocked inadvertently.

So the technology is like any other technology, we need to restart our computer. This thing starts wigging out. Zoom won't open, right? But imagine having that in your body. I was like, it can malfunction. I was like, what? I don't like that. Like that. I don't like the sound of that at all.

No, I don't like it either. I was like, wow, thank goodness I'm coming to these appointments. I'm happy they're every three months. And then it can be monitored by humans if you're, if the Bluetooth technology is hooked up to a clinic in your state. So I had to go through the process of making sure that was the case for being in New Mexico, which is different than being in dc.

So I was like, I learned like all these new things and I was thinking, how is anybody supposed to navigate all of this? It was so confusing, the idea of having to do it. But yeah. So anyway, the, this idea of dystopian or not, that is fascinating. So what I think I heard you say is, so I'm if people are watching this on YouTube, you will see that behind Isha is this book, it says me Power, right?

Yes. Me power. And did I hear you say you were working on that before? Yes. Yeah, in 2020, so June, 2020, I had my second son as, rag, we're raging in the pandemic, was like nothing happening. And I was doing dissertation coaching. I had cli individual clients and I had university clients. I was also doing some research consulting work with government agencies in the Washington DC area.

So I was constantly trying to figure out what is my next move gonna be for contracts? So I was in the throes of this, and then I ha I don't have childcare, I have the children. I was like, I'm gonna go crazy, so I might as well just start writing a book. Why that timing? I don't know.

But in any case, I started doing it. Some people took up sourdough. You just wrote a book, it's all good. Exactly. Oh I'm gonna a project, write a book, and juggle these small kids. And I convinced one of my friends to move in with us and then she. Was, she's a chef, so she made all these amazing foods.

So we were like fat and happy, and as I January, 2022, I'd gotten my. First, the acquisition editor gave me all of these edits. So I had written the book like a researcher typically does, which is not good for readership, typically. It's not a university press, it's trade press. So then they were critiquing how I like the voice I took in the text, and then I had three parts and I had to change, get rid of one, and then restructure the whole manuscript.

So I was really struggling with like, how was I going to do all of that? And that's what I was worried about when this cardiac arrest happened. And then when I was getting outta the hospital, it was my, I, I have my children and they're like, they needed me, my baby was still, I was still breastfeeding, which was crazy, which I had to stop because you didn't have milk. I couldn't produce, I was in a como for I imagine that was like, that was the end of that intubation. The coma, the meds that interrupt. No more breastfeeding for you. Surprise. And your dad. So I was like, what?

What's interesting is like I needed something, like a project to help me get through the process to help myself focus on something that wouldn't be a hypermania about my condition, about what this means for my life. All of the cerebral things that, we're pretty good as is PhDs, but when it comes to your health and wellbeing, if you ruminate like that, it can be destroy your vibes, all the vibes that you need to really heal and get through.

Yeah. So what is, so you wrote this book, the Power of Me. Yes. And and it sounds like it's insights from coaching people to get through their dissertations. Also, now you're in a leadership position. So give us just a brief rundown of what's in the power of me, and I think you've touched on a lot of the things that animate the book, but who's it for and what's the lesson, one of the main lessons in there that you share with people regularly?

Yeah, for sure. I think that my main motivation for writing it was to really help people see that empower is not. Even though it's a transitive verb it's already passive by, its linguistic properties. It's really not about waiting for someone else to give you something. I think so much of our life is based on this idea of being conditioned, that we're looking external, we're looking for external things.

If you're getting PhDs, everything about that is external motivation. Like you're gonna get to this next level. If you choose a professorship, you're definitely in the throes of that. It is all external. But then what about the inside? What about who we are and then what we do to empower ourselves daily?

So the book was really to unpack that linguistic history of empower and to tell story and to have a lot of research to support like how we have a better relationship with ourself. So that. We can have a better relationship with other people in our life that we choose. And I really felt our influence to cultivate this, me power to activate it for ourselves is really limited by the level of consciousness that we have and the partnership that we partnerships that we sometimes ignore.

Because if you think about me power just alone, you might think it's so individualistic, like just focus on the self, right? The concept is really like our me power. Like we, I believe that like self knowledge, who we are is the most important knowledge and all other knowledge of people revolve around that.

So we, I think a lot of times we ignore it. And so the book really was about. Unpacking what that means, what that looks like. But the goal is so that we have a stronger self in relationship to other people, always in relationship to others. Not over them. Not to disenfranchise others, but to really think about what kind of community do we wanna build, but we are at the center of how we live our life, so what is that about?

And I really wanted to highlight for re that for readers. And then through the revisions process as I was healing, it really served as like my, the number one thing that helped me get through it, right through that process. So who, what is your relationship to yourself, especially yourself in a body that isn't the same as it was prior to the cardiac arrest.

And I will say that just in listening to you talk about this I finally twigged the like the play on words between m empower and me power. The penny finally dropped. Took me a minute. Thank you for that. The German, come on. It's a French is a French, think German. Like German, right? Like that that I'm embarrassed.

But here we are and I really want to affirm and come back to the, what you said about we are at the center of our relationships with others. And I can't, if I'm thinking about my relationship with somebody else, if it's a colleague, a child, a husband, a partner. I can't actually control how they feel.

I can't control what they do sometimes, much to my chagrin, right? So what I have un under my control what I can make productive choices about is how I choose to think about things, the narratives I attach to things, the actions I take, the emotions that I let help steer my decisions. And I think that self-awareness and yeah, and real self knowing only helps when not just navigating our own lives, but navigating relationships with others because it allows us to yeah, tap into that relationship at a different level, not just oh they me.

But who am I when I show up with this person? And what's my. What are my choices? What are my options here in showing up in this room with these people that might help me get a result that I want that might support the relationship I want? And what are the choices I might be making that don't head me in that direction?

Absolutely. Wherever you go, there you are. But how are how are you showing up? Is that optimal for you? Is it causing you stress? What, what's happening for you? And I also think it's not just theoretical. 'cause I've read, so all of texts on empowerment as an idea and like this notion, but it's really a practice, right?

Like embracing your barriers, focusing on your strengths, speaking for your life, putting voice to what it is that you want and how you're going about it. Choosing your guides and realizing that you need guides. What who, is it gonna be a mentor? Is it gonna be a coach that you pay? Is it gonna be somebody you know?

And ritualizing reflection so that you're in this practice, like throughout your life? Because things are going to happen to us that we cannot control. That is the one constant about life that I think we need to think about. And when things happen to us that we can't control. What do we do in response to it?

Yeah. And what again, for viewers on YouTube, you're getting a whole answer of Sadie, the dog. She was napping and then I decided it was time for a podcast recording, and she decided it was time to show up. So she's molesting me. She's so cute. Adorable. This, so the principles that you just outlined, right?

Like acknowledging where your edges are, like the, these are my limitations. This is either where I can choose to grow or not. These are my strengths, like all of those things and the, and being reflective. All of these are also really good pedagogical principles that in higher education people may be familiar with as.

Theories behind effective pedagogy. So I taught a foreign language and we always talked about, the L one to L two leap. Like you wanna push people to the edge of their comfort zone all the time. 'cause that's where the growth happens. So we might be familiar with the pedagogical parallels here, but the academic mindset, the professorial mindset the graduate student and postdoc mindset, the notion of digging deep personally is a bit challenging.

I've been thinking about this a lot, is terms of patterns I still have around oh, I'm experiencing a gap between where I am and where I want to be in terms of knowledge or action or impact or whatever. And my first impulse is to go find the book. That will help me solve that problem, which might have its place, but my first impulse is not to stop and stay, take stock and say, what do I already know?

It's so tough. I think we, if we've been conditioned that way, our success has been based on that as a practice. I would say go for it. Like we can start, wherever you wanna start is fine. However we have to come back to ourselves. This, like when I was coaching people writing their dissertations, that was probably the most nerve wracking point to be in, right?

If you, when you're writing and then you submit your drafts and they don't get back to you, then you have to harass them. Then you have all this self-doubt and there's just so many things. But the main part of the problem that I identified was this dis embodiment of you between what you're doing, you and the producing of thought, you and the production of.

Being able to make an argument and make a case for defending your idea. And there's so much about that training that really enforces us to disconnect from us and just keep it in the cere rural space. And so one trick that I always say is I'm gonna be like, oh, I'm really curious about this.

This is bothering me. I'm gonna go research. I'm gonna go find out. So I will go through that as a process and then like my practice of really reflecting on okay, what did I do today? And what gave me a lot of joy? I got a lot out of that quest because I like Quest. I love going on the hunt for knowledge and information and learning something that I didn't know.

And that feeds me and that's part of my process. But then when I come back to myself at the end of the day, I am like, yo. What does this do for me? And like where am I in that what am I feeling? What am I about? What am I frustrated about? 'cause I'm Aries and I'm really hot. I burn really hot.

I get really excited and I get really, I irritated, agitated. And sometimes that's really motivating for me. So it's important for me to figure out what is it about this and what is it that I'm what's driving me? And that really helps me tap into who I am in that moment, because I think if we skip that process, then we just stay in disembodiment.

And we start doing weird stuff and we start treating people weirdly, and we start forgetting our humanity. And we have to have a practice to help us, bring us back to center, to, who we are being and like, what's really motivating, what's really driving us. I think you have pets, pets help you do it, but there's so many things we can choose in life to help us do that.

So I'll pause there. Yeah. Yeah. And it sounds like your practice is journaling. You've mentioned that a couple times, right? Getting in touch with not just your thoughts, right? But this embodied sense of, okay, I've done, maybe I've gone down the rabbit hole, I've read the things. If you're me, I've bought the book and it's on my shelf and maybe I picked it up, what, how am I integrating that?

How does it fit into the landscape of what I already know and do? How does it support me feeling a certain way or behaving in a certain way around something? Because the notion that as somebody trained in the academic research and writing, that you are just a vessel for knowledge, right? And it all just passes.

You ingest it through your brain and you spit it out through your hands, but it bypasses the rest of your body entirely. I see. Personally on, on a Jennifer level, that has been an enormous struggle for me. This notion of being an embodied human. And I know the clients that I work with, one who's a lovely human being and is now going through a coach training program because she found coaching so impactful herself.

I was asking about her body. She was preparing for some surgeries, like hip replacement, I think. And I was like, so how's the body? And she goes, oh, you mean the meat sack that carries me to meetings? The meat sack. But oh, and the meat sack mentality ignores the fact, it ignores some scientific facts that there are far more chemical and neuronal connections going from our heart, our cardiac system, and our gut system to our brains than the other way around.

So our body actually has intelligences multiple. People talk about three brains. Your cranial brain, your heart, brain, cardiac brain, and your gut brain. And if you are ignoring the heart and the gut, where, and also where are everybody's problems right now? And in the gut, in the heart and in the gut.

In the heart and in the gut. But tapping into that intelligence and into that emotional awareness like the gut is where we feel fear. What am I afraid of? If I'm not, if I'm not giving myself the time to reflect and process, what am I running away from? Flight, fight, flight, freeze, fa.

All of these systemic things involve our bodies. We cannot just. Think our way into and out of things. And on organizational levels, we can't just like process and handbook our way into and out of things. Like on an individual level, you're in your body doing the thing. And on an institutional organizational level, we are in rooms physical and virtual with each other, making joint decisions.

And so our emotions and our mirror neurons are going all over the place. And if you're not in touch with that, then maybe you're making choices that you're not even aware you're making. And how's that going for you? Not well. I imagine. And I think we don't, we need space. We need to create space in our life where there aren't pressure, where there isn't, there aren't all these deadlines and there are no immediate demands, just some kind of space.

Or an environment where our attention can expand. And a friend gave me this challenge recently, and it was, it's been phenomenal changing my practice. She said, for two hours a day, I challenge you to make space for yourself. And I was like, no, what? That's impossible. And she said, oh, you could split it up in 15 minute increments, but this is like an intentionality practice for two hour.

I'm gonna measure in the day out of 24 hours, can I spend two hours giving myself something without. Any agenda, it can include connecting with somebody or having a coffee with a friend or making a quick phone call. Just to be in that moment. But that this has led me to walk outside like I left for 15 minutes.

I would've never thought to do this if I didn't have this challenge. I went outside for 15 minutes and stood outside. I'm not even kidding, in the sun 'cause it's still nice. It's fall here in Santa Fe and I stood outside and I just stood in the sun for 15 minutes. It was the most bizarre thing I could have done, but I do it every day.

I spent 15, at least 15 minutes outside doing literally nothing. And I could go for a walk, I could do whatever. But the goal is to not have an agenda, don't goal is I don't have to perform and meet an expectation in these 15 minutes. There's not. That's an outcome by which I will judge the success of these 15 minute chunks.

Isn't that amazing, right? I'm so data-driven. I'm so metrics oriented that I'm keeping track of those 15 minutes. So I'm not stepping away from who I am at the core. However, in the that time, I'm honoring the time what it gives me for myself to think outside the box, to explore maybe while ideas, to maybe just stand there and literally do nothing but breathe and observe the trees and get the vitamin D and be in the rays of the sun.

This is super woo. But I think that documenting that as a practice and tracking how it evolves over time helps me tap more into who I'm being, like who I am evolving into and through that as a practice we need that space, all of us. I really appreciate you saying that because because organizational life, higher ed and otherwise doesn't really give.

Does not issue the engraved invitation to do that. And especially if you're in a leadership role, and I will argue that you're always either leading yourself, others, a discipline, an institution, right? Like you've got eight a handful of leadership hats to choose from that time to reflect and connect and think and maybe even be bored and stare off into the middle distance and let the system settle down.

Like all of that is so valuable for. Being on a leadership path. So I'm curious as you're documenting this and tracking the metrics but how does this fit into, because you've left coaching and writing books and, not behind entirely, but you've taken on an administrative role at an institution where you're leading a team and you're leading initiatives and you have a whole bunch of disparate things underneath you.

And I can imagine that saying, oh, 15 minutes at no. I'm just, I go from meetings to meetings in the meet sac. So what are you noticing about your own leadership when you prioritize embodiment and when you prioritize I'm going to do self-reflection, I'm going to do me time, I'm going to do non-ag agenda, non-focused time.

Yeah, it's been an interesting idea. I have the joy of being focused on wellness. All the research supports this, right? Like, how do you supercharge your ability to generate new ideas and solve problems? That's done by creating space, taking time to really regulate your nervous system and have a way of approaching something from that regulated space so it's not high stress and not, so I get to connect everything back to this idea of wellness.

And then, my team, they really get so much space. 'Cause I do this practice of. Time blocking, blocking off your calendar. And then we have all these online tools for students at the community college. They can click this, they need help, they schedule their appointment. You don't need to call and come in.

It is all online. So then the staff have to be really intentional about how they want their day to go. So everyone's blocking their lunch and then I make them block reflection time. I built it into a structural way. And it's funny, I had one staff say, oh, I. I just worked through my reflection time and then she did that for three months and she just said to me yesterday, oh I'm really, I'm stopping that as a practice.

And I was like, why? It's your choice. And she's I've noticed that I'm not able to really make sense of all the things that I'm doing. I just keep going. The body sec, the meat sack is just being dragged. And so it was, it's just so interesting 'cause it's structurally we can build in all the things and it's it's a way of viewing the world.

It's a way of practicing of being in the world that I've codified right in a framework in this book. But then it permeates how I lead, how I help my team. See themselves respect themselves as they're navigating all the things. And the reality is always gonna be the reality. We're seeing more students like our, my counselor, she my mental health Cal counselor, I supervise her and she sees typically like 50 students each semester.

We've been in school for a month, like a little over a month. She's seen 55 people. So we know from the demand of what's happening in the world and what's happening right now, things are bonkers. Like life, the work is very intense and it's stressful and that doesn't go away. But then how do you navigate that?

How do you mitigate the stress? How do you embody you in your life and in your work and still have a good time doing it? And I think that these practices of like really creating that space, really allotting time to learn. About what you're choosing to do and maybe how you wanna make different choices, and then how you think about yourself, that has to be honored.

And so it's just been so interesting watching like other people, have it play out for themselves. 'cause it's you can choose to take the reflection time or blow through. It's your choice. I don't know, I think I would take the reflection time that's, that is so interesting.

And so your system for doing this is part of what you've mapped out in the book and

how, okay, when people say what are your tools what are like your top three tools? If you're focused on wellness yourself, like personal, physical wellness, mental and emotional wellness, professional wellness, what are, what if a leader were to come to you and say, okay, I'm gonna academic leader.

And I feel like I'm not even treading water. I go under every once in a while and then I come up gasping for air. What would you point them towards as tools to keep on hand and to not just intellectualize and not just blow through if they've blocked them off on their calendar? Yeah.

Intellectualizing it is probably a strategy you could use when you're doing the self-reflection part. The way I practice that is through writing, journaling because it feels good, I like being able to go back to it. And I also have another tactic for doing that measuring where you are, like in this moment in time by.

Thinking back to other key highlights in your life. Like I, I've been doing it every month. Like I'll pick three from the year, three moments in time that are like highlights. First three that come to your mind, right? Like I just did a TEDx event but I wasn't doing it. I did that last year. I was helping speakers.

So that's probably like one that comes to mind. I pull up a picture to help me get out of the writing ruminating research lens. So I'll take a picture from that moment in time and then I'll really start to go back. 'cause you're not in the moment anymore. You're past that. Even though this just for me, the one I would pick just happened like a couple days ago.

But we pick, we picked the picture. We take a look at it and then we start to ask ourselves some questions like, what was I, what do I see here? What was showcase for me here? How do I feel about it? Ne how did I feel about it in that moment? Yeah. What to remember about felt sense in the moment and now looking at it, what's coming up.

Exactly. That's a great, what's coming up for me? That's a great reflection. And the, if you pick like a few of 'em, then you can start to get a picture of like where you are right now, because you can't help it. You're not, when you reflect back to then you're gonna be thinking about right now 'cause you're living right now.

But then it also has this beautiful effect, which is like, what does this mean for where I'm going? And what does that mean for how I feel about what I'm experiencing right now? It may be goal oriented. It may be for your next thing that you're going after. It may just be for how you feel and if it's shitty, getting out of that, like how you're gonna help yourself navigate that.

Because I think when we pick pictures and we pick things that highlight things. In and of itself as a process, we're not capturing crappy moments or feelings. Typically we're capturing like things that are worth reviewing and looking at that bring us joy or give us something that has meaning that is generally positive.

So it's already baked into that. I think that's one as an exercise, as an activity, as a frame. The second one, and it's probably like my first favorite one, and it's really helping you center. Because sometimes we do forget that we have feet and we are putting them on the ground. I heard in one of your previous episodes you were talking about that with a client so heady, so stressful, and then she started tapping or doing something to center her.

Yeah. And then she could feel her feet. She could feel that she's in the body and she is like on planet earth. Yeah. So my favorite way to do that is to use an essential oil or some kind of scent to really ground you. And I have in a jar, I have this geranium and lemon on cotton ball in a jar.

And so I can take open the jar and take a deep breath to the count of four hold it and excel for the count of four. And that kind of like box breathing tactic? Yeah. With the scent helps you regulate. In a way that a meditation, you could do meditation, but the scent piece of it really brings you back to earth in a way that you cannot even, it bypasses all of your intellectual overprocessing, if that is one of your challenges of Yeah, that overthinker.

And what a great way to because I'm thinking of, various meditation trainings I've done where they want you to ground into your five senses and the one that frequently gets introduced versus touch. Touch your fingers, find your toes, hold your hand in am mudra.

And also what can you smell and taste in the moment? Is it, the coffee you just had or, but the intentionality behind, what do I know that if I make this scent special, right? If I use it as a way to ground myself, we know what aromas do to us, right? The smell of pumpkin pie does something to our brains.

Bring. Yeah, it's experiential. It's it, we don't even have time to catch up. To the thinking of it. It's just like a felt sense. If something smells stank, we definitely have a very reactionary it's oh gosh, get me outta here. But if it grounds you in a beautiful way, you're like, whoa, what was that?

And I was doing it with my speakers. I had this little jar of essential oils and it was like aromatherapy in the moment right before they would go on stage. Because I would see them going out of their mind, look, taking in all of the other senses that are overloading and overwhelming, but that's, scent would ground them in a way.

You could totally become present in that moment just by using a scent. It's it's so simplistic, but it's super powerful in a way that's wow. But scent combined with the breath. And then obviously the third one is a, is around like. Doing something really joyous. So another sensory thing that I love and we see athletes, we see people who are preparing for something really stressful, using music as a way to really center in themselves.

And not just themselves, their body, but their feeling self, right? Because mu music can hype you up. It can get you into modes or ways of being, or you can just enjoy it. And I think that's a really good tactic and technique. So those are my top three I would say. I love it. So we have the visual that taps into the emotional.

We have the. Old factory olfactory. Thank you. I was like it's not oral. I was, it started with an O, but I wasn't getting it. So we have the olfactory that, again, just straight into the body, straight into the emotions and music as, and I think of music as like a whole body experience, right? Yes.

If you're using it to pump you up or bring you down, settle you in. That's a, it can be a root chakra thing, right? As well as like a throat chakra bopping around singing thing. Yep. So yeah, a grounding in the body, but with tools that really help help us access parts of ourselves that if you are a head first person, you might not be accessing on a regular basis.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I want, so me power, I assume, is available in all of the usual bookish places. Yes. And of course, if you would like to order it from your local independent bookstore, your local black or indigenous owned, independent bookstore, we are all about that. But I'll put a link to I'll put a link to the book in the show notes.

And so in your role, so you're now and I don't director of your title of the student. Yeah. I never, I didn't, I don't think I ever said titles. No, you have, I know you, yeah. So your title and just like the work that you're doing now, if people wanna follow you and what you're doing, and get in on your wisdom.

So they buy me power. How else do they find out what's Isha up to? Because she has such great insights and I want more of her in my life. Where do they find you? For sure, and I'm giving a free audio book to listeners for the show notes. People can, oh my goodness, I love that. Check it out so much because yeah, listen to Sadie and I will go on a walk and we will listen to it and we will have the written copy and that will make, I don't know if it'll make Sadie happy, but it will make me happy.

Sadie doesn't have her own headphones. Yeah, that's awesome. So people can, have the book for free. And then I'm a big fan of Instagram and LinkedIn. LinkedIn probably more. I spend a lot of time on that social media space. But if people send me a message I'm always responsive and it's me responding.

And I I'm at the community college, so I'm the director of Student Wellness Center and the wellness center here in Santa Fe at the community college includes. Mental health counseling. So we have an on onsite counselor and teletherapy services online. We also, under that umbrella include accessibility services.

So if you have a diagnosis of some kind or a disability, you get the accommodations and support you need through this office. And then we also have student resources, which includes our food pantry and our clothing exchange store. So all of that is under this wellness umbrella to provide like a holistic non-academic support for all the things that you might need.

And what's cool about the thing we have going here? Is that students can come and shop, like at the exchange, at the food pantry. They can come and shop for their whole family for a week's worth of groceries every single week. And we have a partnership with the farmer's market, so we're getting fresh fruits and vegetables into a food pantry, which is so unusual because normally it's just canned goods and shelf staples.

But now we have like proteins, frozen proteins, fresh proteins, and then tons of fruits and vegetables. And we partner with the controlled agriculture program on campus. So they ha there's a greenhouse and they grow all this lettuce and tomatoes and basil. So we really get to do a lot here in relation to health.

That is amazing. And you have a staff that you're supporting to be well so that they can help students be well as the need only spikes. Yes. Yeah. We have a small, a mighty team of 11 with our student workers and yeah it's beautiful. It's nice to see that the institution cares so much about student wellbeing that they're gonna invest.

And then we see with a lot of the social supports what's happening federally in the US a lot of the social supports are being, the federal funding for those are being decreased. So then the state, and the state institutions and communities spaces have an opportunity to really be like the plug for folks in the community.

And so that's what we see happening and it provides so much meaning. But I, I do this nine to five and then I have my two sons, and then I also do a lot of public speaking and workshops around me power and the idea of how to make it come to life in different settings. Excellent. So people can bring you in to talk about me.

Power on their campuses, in their offices. Yep. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, so thank you so much for having me. It's been laisha, this has been an unmitigated joy and I am delighted that you're sharing a free copy of the audio book with everybody. And so that'll be linked in the show notes below this on the website and hopefully in the pod feeders, that's always a tiny bit glitchier, but on my website, under podcast, it'll be there.

And and go find Isha on LinkedIn. 'cause I think that's how we found each other. And you reached out to me and it was you, it was not a podcast picture, right? So you're wearing all the hats and doing all the things with a great deal of integrity. It's been a real pleasure to get to know you.

Awesome. Thank you so much. All right. Take good care. And to our listeners, we'll be back in your ears in a couple weeks with the next awesome interview. Thanks.