We all seem to be in a constant state of over-activated stress, anxiety and overwhelm. Having no time for any self-care has become the new normal. Where our attention goes, our energies flow!
Dr Kelly Donahue is a working mom and recovering Type-A perfectionist. Her training is in behavioural medicine, mind-body research and clinical psychology. Dr Kelly is empowering others to practice essential self-care strategies to nourish mind, body and soul.
I chat with Dr Kelly about overcoming negativity biases to practice everyday self-care. We need to consider ourselves in small ways during the day. And it all begins with how we talk to ourselves!
Show notes
- Dr Kelly Donahue’s journey as a clinical health psychologist, change coach and author.
- We don’t have the time to recover and care for ourselves.
- Everyday self-care is the ability to care for yourself with little acts that puts you on a different life trajectory.
- It’s the ability to consider yourself in small ways during the day.
- Self-care begins with how we talk to ourselves!
- We have 60-90 000 conscious and subconscious thoughts a day.
- We don’t recognise that most thoughts are negative and well-practiced!
- Why do we believe in such negative things about ourselves?
- Negativity biases is a survival mechanism.
- Negative thoughts have a bigger evolutionary weight than positive thoughts.
- We search information in our environments to support our thinking.
- The ability to shift our programming by being mindful of our thinking.
- Dr Kelly’s “belief download” to group thoughts and core beliefs together.
- We need to challenge the negative self-constructs by searching for positive data points.
- Changing our identity, thinking and environment in order to change behaviours.
- Leaning on situational mentors and communities to support our life objectives.
- The right mentors and community will hold you accountable.
- Practicing everyday self-care will evolve into everyday self-worth.
More about Dr Kelly Donahue
Check out Dr Kelly Donahue’s Website, Everyday Wellness Podcast and her new book, Everyday Self-Care.
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Transcript
Lisa Linfield: 00:21 Hello, everybody, and welcome to today’s episode of Working Women’s Wealth. I’m joined by Dr. Kelly Donahue, who is a modern technical health psychologist, and she is a change coach. Oh my goodness, she must be very brave. She’s been in practice for over 12 years and is passionate about teaching and empowering clients to make the changes that they need to make in order to become healthier in their body, mind, and spirit. She recently released her first book called Everyday Self-Care. Hi, Kelly, and welcome to our show.
Dr. Donahue: 00:58 Hi Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. I’m just delighted to be here.
Lisa Linfield: 01:02 So why did you write the book Everyday Self-Care?
Dr. Donahue: 01:07 Well, I wrote the book because I wanted to have a handout for my clients. It summarized the ideas that I talked to most of my clients about. I was finding that no matter what their presenting issue was, whether they were feeling anxious or overwhelmed, or wanted to lose weight, or dealing with a chronic health condition, so much of what we were talking about was the same across all of these different clients, and I wanted to be able to give them a resource that would help them assimilate what we were talking about. So it started out as just a two-page handout, that was the goal, and then it just kept growing and growing, and I realized I had a lot to say about self-care and about all of the elements that comprised a whole self-care plan. So it just kept growing, and I realized that more people than just my clients could probably benefit from this; people who I wasn’t able to see in my office or via video could use this information too. So that’s how it turned into a book.
Lisa Linfield: 02:11 Wow. So there is so much pop psychology around self-care, that we must all go and take massage and the world will be fine. What, for you, is everyday self-care?
Dr. Donahue: 02:26 Oh, yes. So the massage and the pedicures would be amazing and are amazing when we can get there, but as you know, most of us as working women or women with families don’t have that time to do it, nor is that really the most effective method itself because that happens once in a grand while if we’re lucky. What I wanted to encourage women to do is to care for themselves little ways every day. Every day self-care acts add up over time and it creates a different trajectory. So it’s really about doing little things for yourself, and I say “doing little things” in that you treat yourself in small ways. So for example, you are really mindful while you’re having your cup of tea in the morning, but it’s also about not so much the “doing things” but about how we are with ourselves. So really, the biggest component of everyday self-care is how we talk to ourselves.
You know, scientists estimate that we have 60,000 to 90,000 thoughts a day. I don’t know who counted them, but that’s a lot of thought, and probably 70% to 90% of those are in our sub or unconscious. So we’re not even recognizing all of these thoughts that are going on in our head, and perhaps the same scientists or different ones have indicated that, again, a big majority of those thoughts are negative. So if we can start tapping into becoming aware of those thoughts that are coming to the surface and then slowly shifting those thoughts, that’s really the best way that we can care for ourselves, by changing the programming that we’re telling ourselves on a daily basis.
Lisa Linfield: 04:09 So why do we have such bad self-talk?
Dr. Donahue: 04:13 I think we have bad self-talk for a number of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that it’s our programming. We hear our parents talking to themselves out loud, negatively or perhaps talking to us negatively, and we absorb that. As children, we’re very impressionable in years zero through eight or ten, so that really has a big impact on us, and it becomes a pattern for us too. In addition, we have this negativity bias. It is a protective mechanism. We are attuned to negative things in the environment as a survival mechanism because in the caveman days, we needed to know when there was a tiger in the bush. We needed to be hyper-vigilant about that, and so some of that in our primitive brain is just leftover; it’s still standing with us, and because of that, we tend to gravitate toward those negative things, and then when we have the negative self-talk, we look for things in our environment that confirms our beliefs and our negative thoughts.
So, by seeing things that confirm what we’re thinking and believing, it strengthens that belief or it makes us look for those things even more. So it’s really this cycle that we can get into of negativity.
Lisa Linfield: 05:33 How do we break that cycle?
Dr. Donahue: 05:35 Oh yeah, that’s a good question. So one of the ways we can break that cycle, the first way, is by becoming aware of the fact that we’re doing it. Because if it’s not in our awareness, we definitely won’t have the ability to make a change. So we become aware of it by noting it. When I give my clients this assignment to start noting their negative self-talk, they come back a little freaked out because they can’t believe how negative they are, how mean they are to themselves, and they’re just kind of overwhelmed by that, but I tell them that that’s a good thing because we can work with those things. We can change those things.
So we often start by doing a belief in a thought download to get this process rolling, and what that really means is sitting down with a paper and pen and writing down all of the thoughts that are in your head. Some of those may be positive, but my guess is a lot of those will be negative, pressured-to-do kind of thoughts, but once we have them down there, we can see perhaps why we’re so tired, because those thoughts are taking up a huge chunk of our brain. Then what we can do is look at how those thoughts group together because often, the grouping together shows us what our underlying core beliefs are. Some common underlying negative core beliefs have to do with things like, “I’m not worthy,” “I’m not enough,” “I’m unlovable.” We consciously don’t think these things as we’re walking around, but as we have practiced these thoughts time and time again, they start to form this really big core of negative beliefs.
So once we have those, that gives us the awareness and we can start doing something with that. Then we can start challenging those thoughts as they come up. Are we really lazy because we sat on the couch? Well maybe, but maybe not. Maybe we’ve had a hard day, and there’s another way to reframe that. So then the next step after becoming aware is challenging those thoughts. Asking yourself, “Is that a really true thought or is that a thought that’s coming from this core of negative beliefs?” Then once you challenge it, the next step is to change it, so to replace it with something that feels true. It doesn’t have to be kind of a “puppies and rainbows,” perfect scenario, but it can be something that is more neutral than the negative thought you were having.
Then what happens is we start looking for things in our environment that confirms that neutral or positive thought. So we’re creating this loop in a more positive way. Then the final step is to repeat, repeat, repeat. So we continue to [inaudible 00:08:09] so that we’re actually forming new neural connections in our brain so that our brain doesn’t automatically use the neural networks set up with these negative beliefs, and it takes time to create a new neural network, but it is possible.
Lisa Linfield: 08:23 So, you were talking about the fact that when we look at our self-talk and we see all of these things that we believe. Why do we believe such negative things? As a part of our value system, or is it just because we’re biased in that way?
Dr. Donahue: 08:40 I think it could relate to our values, but I think more of it goes back to the fact that we are, again, looking for those things that we believe. So if those negative things come up because of childhood, because that’s how we were programmed, because we a boss that’s telling us those things every day, we are seeking out information in our environment to prove that. It’s almost like we’re looking at the world with these negative self-talk, negative bias lens in these glasses, and so then everything that we see is going to be filtered through that lens and it’s going to have a negative balance. So for example, a very simple example is a snow storm. We get snow storms here where I live in the northeast of America, and when we get a snow storm, I view that snow storm, my interpretation is often, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be such a pain. I’m going to have to shovel the sidewalks” “How am I going to get to work?”, those types of things, where my seven year old son thinks snow is just the best thing ever.
So my lens is more of a negative lens that I’m looking at the world [inaudible 00:09:45], and his lens is more of a positive lens when it comes to this particular instance. So the same can be said with our lenses that we have for our self-talk. If we look at the world with this negative belief, negative lens, we’re seeing all the things that confirm it, and then it’s just reinforcing this cycle again and again. You know, in addition, another thing is that, let’s say we’re trying to change that behavior or to change that thought. When our behaviors don’t match what we’re thinking, it creates dissonance, and dissonance is uncomfortable feeling that we have, and our brain likes consistency and it likes comfort.
So when we have a thought, a negative thought about ourselves, but let’s say we’ve tried to make some positive behavior changes. Let’s say that we have this thought that “I’m not good with money,” but you’ve tried saving and doing some things, but you still have this thought and this belief that you’re not good with money. That’s going to be really uncomfortable because the thought “I’m not good with money” doesn’t match your belief of “I’m saving and doing some good things,” so then something has to give. You either have to change the thought, which is really harder to do because we have all of these neural networks set up in our brain that support this thought, and the negative thoughts in our brain are etched with stone. It’s almost like those have a bigger imprint because of the evolutionary importance of them. So these positive thoughts take longer to form; it’s like we’re writing those with a feather and not a stone in our brain.
So when we have this dissonance, then we have to reconcile it somehow. We can either change this thought, which as I just mentioned is super hard to do, especially in the beginning, or we can change the behavior. Oftentimes, then we end up just dropping the behavior and keeping that same negative thought.
Lisa Linfield: 11:37 That fascinates me. So in your mind, the positive thoughts are like trying to change with a feather and the negative thoughts are like the ability to change with a stone. Surely the stone wins every time.
Dr. Donahue: 11:49 It really does, yeah. and it’s because of that evolutionary mechanism where we need to be hyper-vigilant about the negative things, but we’re in a very different world now. We don’t need to be as hyper-vigilant about these life threatening situations, but our brain hasn’t quite caught up to that yet, and we’ve practiced it so many times. We’ve practiced this negative self-talk. If we think we have 60,000 to 90,000 thoughts a day and let’s just say three-quarters of those are negative, that’s still at least 40,000 negative thoughts a day. They’re super well-practiced, and so it takes time and practice to use this feather to create the new networks, and it’s not like the negative networks necessarily go away, but they just become less traveled.
So the more we can practice the positive self-talk and create an environment too that is really set up to help us with that self-talk, and that means being around people who support you and being around people who think in a positive way, not only about you but about themselves too so you can see a different model. If you don’t have people in your life, one of the great things about social media and technology is that we have exposure to all of those things ,like your podcast and other podcasts and YouTube videos and TED Talks, and all of these different ways where we can reinforce some of these positive messages to speed along the building of that positive network.
Lisa Linfield: 13:18 It amazes me though because in my journey of building a podcast and all of those good things, I never knew anybody who had a podcast. So, I did a course which came, with a community group of people doing podcasts, and because everybody around me was doing it, it felt so possible. These are normal human beings like me and they were able to do it. When I talk to my friends and family, so my normal support networks, they think it is such a foreign concept. It’s so far out there that if they were my only support, you know, it wouldn’t imbibe me with potential because when you spend your time every single day checking in on your podcast group, because that’s what you’re building at the moment, and asking questions, someone has an answer for you. Someone’s walked the road before you, and it just seems so possible and it’s been a fascinating thing in a lot of my interviews, is this emergence of mentors and community completely different from the old days.
In the old days, you had to have mentors and community that were physically with you, but now, we have the opportunity of choosing different mentors and different communities for every one of our objectives. So if I want to start a podcast, I must be with people who are on the road with me and slightly ahead of me, and then it seems usually possible. If I want to write a course, then I must be on a road with people who are building the course. If I want to build a business, I must be on the road. It’s fascinated me, this shift in mentors and community as being situational, and I guess that’s absolutely correct. So if you want to change how you think about anything money, then you must listen to money podcasts because it’ll change your thoughts of what is possible. Is that correct?
Dr. Donahue: 15:09 Absolutely, yes. 100%. Where attention goes, our energy flows, and when we start putting attention into these groups and these networks of people who are models for us and are doing the things that we want to do, we see that it’s possible and we’re able to put more energy into them.
Lisa Linfield: 15:27 I also think it changes the way we think in terms of our ability to visualize it and to quantify our dreams in things that are closer than rosy pictures, because the detail gets filled in by the people around you. “This is what it takes,” “This is what it is,” you know, as opposed to this la-la land view of the world, which we can never achieve. You know?
Dr. Donahue: 15:48 Yeah, and it helps us to see that we don’t have to have it all figured out. We just need to know what the next step is, and then we need to be held accountable. That’s another great thing about these groups, especially if you’re a participating member, is that you can be held accountable. So that’s a way to help create behavior change when you have accountability.
Lisa Linfield: 16:07 Absolutely. You know, I have come to realize that I would far rather invest in the right people and communities, and maybe invest more money than I’d like to invest, but I know that I’ll get it done in a quicker, shorter time because of the accountability and the level of the people around me than waste a lot of money over a long period of time, because I’m a person who needs accountability.
About 10 years ago I got a personal trainer, and by quantification, I’m actually a physical therapist, so it wasn’t that I needed a personal trainer for his technical capabilities. I needed an accountability partner because up until then, I had never managed to consistently exercise. I had done it over certain periods of time, but I hadn’t ever managed to do it for a long period of time, let alone seven years in a row of doing this exercise twice a week. I always say it changed my conversation from, “Do I feel like waking up and going to gym, or do I feel like wasting the money?” I’ve never got to the answer of, “Yes, I feel like wasting money.” So I’ve gone seven years in a row and it’s the only thing that has changed.
You mentioned painting behavior and the fact that you specialize in changing behavior.
Dr. Donahue: 17:28 Mm-hmm.
Lisa Linfield: 17:28 When we set on New Year’s goal to look like Cindy Crawford or whatever the modern equivalent [crosstalk 00:17:33] is, I showed at my age, why don’t we manage to sustainably change ourselves in order to reach these goals that we set every single New Year’s for ourselves?
Dr. Donahue: 17:46 Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think the first part of it is that we often set the goal that needs behavior change in order to get there. So we want to lose weight, we want to save more money, we want to start to exercise. All of these things require different behaviors, whether you’re allocating your money in a different way, you’re changing the patterns of your eating or, like you just mentioned, you’re getting to the gym. Those are all behaviors, but we can’t really just sustain behaviors alone because there are things that proceed behaviors that are super important to help create and sustain it, and those are our thoughts and our emotions. So, we have to think in a different way in order to behave in a different way. Let’s say we wanted to focus on saving more money. We have to think that, first of all, that you’re capable of doing that. “I can save money,” and then that will make you feel in a way that is empowered, that you can do it, and therefore the behavior will be much easier to do.
If we have this goal of losing weight and we say we want to eat differently, we have to believe that we can eat differently and tell ourselves and think thoughts that will help us to get to that behavior. So thinking, “Ah, screw it. I’m just going to have a pizza again tonight” is not going to help us get to that behavior of eating more vegetables, but if we say, “You know what? It’s going to take me a little more time, but I’m going to roast this broccoli tonight and I really have this great recipe.It’s going to be delicious,” we’re going to feel better about doing that behavior. That thought will be into an emotion that is more empowering and we’re going to have a change in behavior.
Oftentimes with these New Year’s resolutions, we just dive in at the level of behavior and don’t understand that we need to work on the thought pieces well in order to sustain it, because we can do behavior change for a sprint. We can do that for a short amount of time, which is why we see people in the gym going at it from January to maybe mid-February, but that is not sustainable without changing those underlying thoughts, which influence how we’re feeling.
So I think that’s one of the biggest reasons, and then I think that you bring up an excellent point with your example about having accountability, having some sort of support, and creating the environment too. So you can’t decide that you’re going to eat broccoli and kale every day if the only things in your house are Oreos and Twinkies. You have to create a different environment too, whether that’s with the people around you or with your food environment, or with your financial information environment. So having awareness of changing your thoughts, creating an environment that helps you to reach those goals, and that includes having people, whether they’re real in-person people or virtual people that you’re connected to, those are all ways that we can achieve those goals.
Lisa Linfield: 20:48 One of the things that you mentioned in our research session was around the whole context of the ability to change behavior when your identity or thoughts are completely at odds with each other, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot because one of the interesting things around long-term habits such as health and finances is that we often set them as a short-term goal as opposed to a long-term way of life, and it amazes me when I think about myself because if you were to say to me, in my identity, “Do I see myself as a consistently regular exerciser?”, I would say, “Not a hope.” I mean never in my life have I ever been a consistently, regular exerciser, but then I look and I go, “But actually Lisa, you’ve been doing it for seven years, twice a week, every week for seven years. Surely that qualifies you as a consistently regular exerciser.”
Then I think to myself about some of the other behavioral changes of waking up early so that I can exercise first but then work on my business, and then I think to myself, “I know my thinking, subconsciously and sometimes consciously, is, ‘But you’re not an early morning person,'” and I think to myself, it really created such an awareness over the last week in me on, “How do I see myself?” “What is my identity when it comes to these things?” So am I regular saver? Well in my case, yes, but in many of my listeners cases, no.
Do I wake up early in the mornings and exercise and work? My instinctive reaction is no, and then it’s the first time that I’ve really created the link between our thoughts making us in our identity because somehow my identity, I have labeled myself as a late sleeper, non-regular exerciser, but in actual fact, that stuff comes from my teenage years and my university years and all those times when you do sleep more because your brain needs more sleep. Whereas now, if I look at myself, I’m regularly up early sorting my kids out, working on my business, doing my exercise, and it interests me that, as you say, it is very difficult for us to maintain behaviors if our thoughts don’t shift to support those behaviors.
Dr. Donahue: 23:16 Exactly. Yeah, and so I think also, if you have this identity that you are a late sleeper, you’re not an early riser, you are, again, looking for information in your environment to support that, and your current information has to date back to the time when you were much younger and that was required, but when you’re able to look at it, now you’re seeing that, “No, no, no. My behaviors now don’t match that identity,” and you’re slowly able to change that identity. I think when you can consciously make a change with that identity to say, “I am an early riser,” that makes you feel in a different way. It’s even going to increase your results, increase your behaviors that you’re going to need to do to reinforce that identity.
If you have the goal that you want to save $10,000 but you’re not a saver, well first of all, those things don’t align, like we talked about before with the dissonance, but secondly, once you get to that $10,000, once you have that in your account, then what? Then what happens? Do you go back to your previous behaviors where if you change it and you work on this thought piece first and create that identity, that “I am a saver, I am a wealth conscious person,” it’s going to be much easier to make little choices every day that align with that identity rather than just kind of charging through to get to that goal and then not changing the foundation for how you got there.
Lisa Linfield: 24:45 Absolutely, and you know, my husband and I were talking about it this morning. You clearly had such a profound impact on us making this whole thing because he’s a very goal-oriented person and when he sets his mind to a goal, oh my goodness gracious me, nothing can step in the way of that, you know? We were talking about whether it’s actually okay to say, “,”I’m a goal oriented person because then in the periods in between goals, as you say, the behavior disappears and you find yourself back to exactly where you were. So in his case, it’s a goal to row at a certain competition. For some people, it’s a goal to lose 10 kilograms. For other people, it’s a goal to save $10,000, and you achieve that goal. And because you haven’t changed your identity, it’s only a temporary shift in your mind because it’s, “I’m going to do this until I get $10,000, until I lose this weight, until I” whatever. Because you never do the work to shift your identity, you cannot make sustainable change.
Dr. Donahue: 25:45 Exactly, yeah. That’s exactly it, and I think that that’s part of the reason why there are these anecdotal stories of people who win the lottery or come into a lot of money. They have the money for a very brief amount of time, but then they lose all of this money because their identity, their [inaudible 00:26:00] don’t match the reality of having this money, and it’s just too inconsistent. They don’t have [inaudible 00:26:08] identity to match that behavior and to get those outcomes.
Lisa Linfield: 26:11 So when it comes to changing your thoughts and this dissonance, what do you do in the beginning when it’s very hard to say to yourself, “I am a saver” when it’s day one, step one and you’re in a lot of debt? How do you manage the dissonance then? So in my case, I have a dissonance between, “I’m a regular exerciser” but actually, I’ve just got to update my brain because actually I am there and I’ve got seven years of evidence to prove it. What happens on day one where someone wants to get out of debt and they setting in debt, and it’s very difficult for them because they have actually no data points to say, “I am a saver, and I don’t love my life and debt” because right at that point, that’s not true, and then you’re going to create dissonance because what you’re trying to tell yourself and what you are actually doing are completely different. How do you structure those first steps?
Dr. Donahue: 27:04 Another great question. So I think there are a few things you can do to help gain momentum in the very early stages of making any type of behavior change. So until you have those data points living out there, I think it’s helpful to visualize yourself doing those things that support that new identity. If you’re a saver, even though you don’t have those data points to show that you’re saving now, visualize yourself going through your day, making behavioral choices, thinking thoughts that will help to support that identity. Maybe it’s physically putting $5 into an account at the end of the day. That’s creating the data points. So they don’t have to be these huge data points of watching your savings account go up. It can be little small changes, even conversations that you have with people that can increase this, and again, it goes back to your self -alk.
So you’re not believing that because you don’t have the data for it. And because it’s such a foreign piece of information in your brain. So going over it again and again can be helpful, surrounding yourself with information and support for people who have been in that same position and have then gone on to do other things. You can use other people’s data points until you start collecting data points of your own. I also think that knowing, having the understanding that this is how the brain works, having that awareness of “I just need to go through these couple of days,” or whatever it is, “until get to a point where I have more data and then it’ll be easier.” If you have that knowledge, it’s going to help you. So for example, if you take medication to cure an ailment, you might not see the benefits in the first couple of days, but you have that belief in what the doctor has given you that you’re going to get better. So you keep taking it, you keep doing it because you have that belief.
So I think really creating that belief and creating an environment to help you support that belief. Even when you can’t see the results, it’s super important. There’s one more piece to keep in mind, and this is something that I share with my clients and I borrowed it from James Clear’s Book Atomic Habits, and this is called :the plateau of latent potential.” I just love this. The idea is that when we first start making changes, we don’t see the results necessarily, and it takes time in order for the results to show up, but there is this period that he calls “the plateau of latent potential” that you’re not seeing these big results. So it’s sort of like with compound interest you can start saving and start saving and start saving, but you don’t really see things accelerate until later on.
So we know that that is true of making behavior changes too, and it’s because what we’ve talked about from a neurological, biochemical perspective, we have to create the neural networks to support these changes so that it becomes the go-to rather than something that’s more difficult to create. So when we are able to do some of these changes, even when we’re not seeing results, we know that this is a normal process. We know that we have to do this for awhile, before we get to the point like with compound interest. Where the result accelerate, we really see change.
Lisa Linfield: 30:18 That’s wonderful. I love that idea, that there are these times because they are, and I mean I think of it about starting side houses and businesses. You know, I’m at a point right now where I feel like I’m working unbelievably hard, but I’m not seeing the results, and you have to have that certain level of faith that there is a whole universe at work inside your brain, training your habits inside your heart and your soul and everything at work that as you say, the plateau of latent potential.
Right now there’s a big plateau, and I’m hoping there’s a lot of latent potential that’s going to be realized into actuality, but I think it is true because I think one of the challenges is that we’re all set [inaudible 00:31:02] gratification of people, that unless we see like radical shifts right now, we’re going to give up. So whether it is that we’re going to give up on creating the new behaviors and the new disciplines of a new business, the new behaviors with disciplines of saving and investing, the new behaviors and disciplines of even understanding savings and investing. I often say to people, “Just listen to one podcast a week on something to do with money or finances or financial mindset. When I see them later, they’ve given up and I say, “why?” He said, “Because I didn’t understand a word,” and I’m like, “You gave up too soon. It comes with time.” It’s like imbibing a language. It’s just something that you just got to listen to often enough, and suddenly you will start to understand it, but they give up in their plateau.
Dr. Donahue: 31:48 Absolutely, yes.
Lisa Linfield: 31:51 So, I mean I could talk to you forever. I love this conversation. I definitely recommend that everybody gets your book of Everyday Self-Care. How would our listeners get hold of that book and how would they get hold of you to learn more about what it is that you do and follow you?
Dr. Donahue: 32:09 Oh well thank you for that. So they can get the book on Amazon or by going to my website, which is kellydonahuephd.com, and did they can also learn more about the programs that I offer there. I offer a program called Health Gains Weight loss program where we work on creating healthy behavior changes and as a side effect, people lose weight when they’re doing these healthy things, and my upcoming overcoming overwhelm course and they can also learn how they could work one on one with me.
Lisa Linfield: 32:38 That’s fantastic, and I love the fact that you do consult one-on-one over zoom because you know my audience is in 75 countries, so it’s wonderful to know that there are people out there who we can reach out and access to support us through making sustainable changes in our life through a video conference. I think that’s wonderful.
Dr. Donahue: 32:58 Yes, technology is great when it can be used in that way.
Lisa Linfield: 33:02 It is, it is. my girls came in the other day and I’m starting the process to write a book and my book coaches in Puerto Rico and, I asked for my birthday this year for a globe because every time they come in and I’m speaking to someone at a different part of the world. So we come in and we have the globe and they say, “Mama, who did you speak today?”, and I said, well, I spoke to someone in Puerto Rico and I spoke to someone in California and I spoke to someone in London, and they grew up with a completely different view of the world that you can speak to someone about anything you want to solve a problem.
Isn’t that wonderful?
Dr. Donahue: 33:31 That’s amazing.
Lisa Linfield: 33:33 So thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it, and for all of you out there, the links to get ahold of Kelly are going to be in the show notes. So thank you so much and have a great day, Kelly.
Dr. Donahue: 33:43 Thank you Lisa. T
Lisa Linfield: 33:45 That was Dr. Kelly Donahue and goodness, I enjoyed that interview so much. You know, it’s such a battle for us all to permanently change our behavior, whether it is our behavior towards money, whether it is our mindset shifts that we need to make around our health or exercising, or whether it is changing the way we think to create the space in our mind and our day to prioritize working on our side hustle. It just always is a challenge for all of us, and I love, and I’m so fascinated by different people’s insights into how we can change our behavior.
You know, the great thing about speaking to authorities like Kelly is that all of them deal with this all the time. She focuses on change, and how we change our world and our life and our trajectory. So it’s such a privilege for all of us to be able to get access to years and years of work and learning and understanding so that we can take those nuggets and use them to change our lives. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. I’m Lisa Infield. This is Working Women’s Wealth. Take care and have a great day.