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Wendy Thomas: Mindset at Work (Ep. #33)

The BetterManager Team
Building Better Managers Podcast Episode 33 - Wendy Thomas

Building Better Managers Podcast Episode #33: Mindset At Work

Wendy Thomas joins the podcast to show you how to cultivate the mindset that can help you define and achieve your far reaching goals.

Take on life's challenges as opportunities to excel instead of seeing every bump in the road as a frustrating setback!

In this episode:

Meet Wendy:

  • Wendy Thomas is the Founder of Wendy Thomas Coaching which helps individuals and teams excel in work and life by learning to harness the power of mindset. An early stage breast cancer diagnosis gave Wendy the courage and perspective to follow her long-time entrepreneurial dream of establishing her own coaching company. Her authentic and vulnerable coaching style inspires individuals to discover their potential, and to achieve greater depths of personal and professional fulfillment.
  • Prior to launching Wendy Thomas Coaching, Wendy spent 18 years in financial services working at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and FactSet. Most recently, Wendy led FactSet Canada in developing effective strategies for growth, talent acquisition, team building, and operational effectiveness. Wendy’s corporate experience demanded a strong focus on personal development, as well as a sense of vulnerability in the face of the pressure of a high-performing environment.
  • As a coach, Wendy not only helps clients cultivate the tools to define and achieve far-reaching goals, but also teaches the imperative skill of seeing life’s inevitable challenges as opportunities to excel rather than setbacks.
  • Wendy is a passionate mom of two young boys and cares deeply about helping people create a healthy work-life balance. Wendy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and Marketing from Duke University.

The Power of Intuition

  • I'm very open and very vulnerable about my story, because I want so many women to learn from the power of intuition to discovering cancer at an early stage. But I started to really evaluate what I'd been good at in the corporate world, I spent almost 20 years in financial services, but what I really loved about the corporate world was my ability to connect and inspire people. I loved working with teams.
  • And I noticed that when I was happy, and I was able to spread my infectious energy, my infectious enthusiasm, people used to call it, I was able to really inspire others around me. And I thought, well, what if I could actually take this skill, and build my own coaching business. So at the end of the year, I did a lot of soul searching.
  • I'm incredibly passionate about what I do. I help people realize their full potential through a change in mindset.

The Power of Mindfulness

  • The goal is to use your mindset to go after really big and inspiring goals and not listen to the negativity around us. Better to focus on driving your own happiness, as opposed to letting circumstances drive your happiness.
  • Through the pandemic, we've really noticed that happiness has to come from within, because we can no longer look to outside circumstances to drive our happiness, because many things in the last year have been canceled.
  • What we do have control over is the power of our mindset, and the small things that we can do to find incremental happiness every single day.
  • The term "mindfulness" has been thrown around pretty loosely in the last year. When I was in the corporate world, I really didn't understand it, because I thought mindfulness was all about yoga and meditation, and I'm not very good at yoga, I can't touch my toes.
  • But mindfulness is important because it's all about understanding our mind, and how much control we have on our behavior, with our mind because everything starts in our mind.
  • It's about choosing the thoughts that really serve you. Your mind is divided into two parts, your conscious mind and your subconscious mind.
  • Your subconscious mind has no ability to reject thoughts that come their way. So you have to be really careful about the thoughts that you are selecting.
  • Being mindful is really setting an intention for the day, it's waking up, expressing gratitude. It's knowing that feeling of when you're in the flow, and when you're in the flow, you feel happiness, you feel that you are guiding your own day, and you're no longer looking into the outside world, for your emotional happiness.

The Barrier to a Successful Mindfulness Practice

  • When we live from the outside-in, referring to our five senses, we are guided by what people think about us, what we hear on TV, what we see taste, touch and smell (basically, like animals). While animals are more in tune with their senses than we are, for example, if you open up a can of tuna fish in the kitchen, your cats come like running, but we as humans shouldn't actually operate like that.
  • You've heard words such as: intuition, memory, imagination, will, perception, and reason. This is what we call our higher mental muscles. If we don't use them, they actually don't work. And when you're not living from the inside-out, you automatically default to the outside-in.

The Power of Gratitude

  • Gratitude is the first thing that I do every morning, because it powers my mind, it really does. I open my journal in the morning, and I write out 8-10 things that I'm grateful for. That could be a warm cup of coffee or cup of tea, or seeing my kids learning remotely the day before, or the or my cat sitting next to me, just little things
  • You start to notice everything around you. When you're in tune with that, you notice your overall vibration and energy picking up in your body, and it puts you in very calm and uplifted states. When you're in that state, you just feel overall peace and happiness, and are able to be that much more productive.
  • If you feel yourself like drifting a little bit in the day, or if there's something that's niggling in the back of your mind, or you're getting an email that just doesn't sit well and you're just in a funk - really go back to the basics and write out 8 things that you're grateful for that day, and your mind will just think about those things, and your vibration will be elevated. It makes such a big difference.
  • When you're doing it every single day, it's hard not to do it. I wonder how on earth I was able to function without doing this exercise every day!

Downloads & Resources

Follow Amy on LinkedIn, Facebook. or at WendyThomasCoaching.com.

Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform!

Check out our blog articles on Leadership here.

About Wendy Thomas

Wendy Thomas is the Founder of Wendy Thomas Coaching which helps individuals and teams excel in work and life by learning to harness the power of mindset. An early stage breast cancer diagnosis gave Wendy the courage and perspective to follow her long-time entrepreneurial dream of establishing her own coaching company. Her authentic and vulnerable coaching style inspires individuals to discover their potential, and to achieve greater depths of personal and professional fulfillment.

Prior to launching Wendy Thomas Coaching, Wendy spent 18 years in financial services working at Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and FactSet. Most recently, Wendy led FactSet Canada in developing effective strategies for growth, talent acquisition, team building, and operational effectiveness. Wendy’s corporate experience demanded a strong focus on personal development, as well as a sense of vulnerability in the face of the pressure of a high-performing environment.

As a coach, Wendy not only helps clients cultivate the tools to define and achieve far-reaching goals, but also teaches the imperative skill of seeing life’s inevitable challenges as opportunities to excel rather than setbacks.

Wendy is a passionate mom of two young boys and cares deeply about helping people create a healthy work-life balance. Wendy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and Marketing from Duke University.

Episode Transcript
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