In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Wendy Salajka discuss:
- The sages and saboteurs in our lives and how they affect what we do.
- How Positive Intelligence is relevant to running a law firm.
- Mental health in the legal industry.
- The 5 powers of the sage and building the human connection first.
Key Takeaways:
- Our brains are not reliable. Sometimes they are for us, sometimes they are against us, and, in an effort to protect us, sometimes they hurt us in their attempts.
- Giving into the thoughts of your saboteurs is not helping you, even if they feel like they are what is driving you to success. Your saboteurs are never right.
- Your negative emotions are one-second indicators to course correct, not a space to live in and have drive you forward.
- There is good and bad in everything we do. Even if that good is microscopic, it can be enough to power us through anything.
“The more you accumulate the positive, the more you realize that this thing that I’m stuck in isn’t going to last forever. But also, you build up a database in your brain so that when you are going through difficult times, you know you can get through it.” — Wendy Salajka
Thank you to our Sponsors!
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Episode References:
- Uncorking a Story – “So, How do we Begin? With Steve Fretzin” https://uncorkingastory.com/steve-fretzin/
- The Mel Robbins Podcast – https://www.melrobbins.com/podcast
About Wendy Salajka: My name is Wendy Salajka (suh/ /like/ /uh). I am a lifelong observer of people and a student of psychology and neuroscience both formally and informally. I have a BS in psychology and a master’s degree in Leadership Development specializing in Organizational Leadership. I have certifications in Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ), Neuroscience of Change Neuropsychology, DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy), ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), Life Coaching, Brain Health Coaching & Human Design.
Connect with Wendy Salajka:
Website: https://identifyandconquer.com/pq-home/
Email: wendy@identifyandconquer.com
Phone: 331-202-8367
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendysalajka/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wendy-salajka/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wendy.salajka
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/identifyandconquer
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wendy_salajka_pilcher/
Connect with Steve Fretzin:
LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin
Twitter: @stevefretzin
Instagram: @fretzinsteve
Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.
Website: Fretzin.com
Email: Steve@Fretzin.com
Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!
YouTube: Steve Fretzin
Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Show notes by Podcastologist Chelsea Taylor-Sturkie
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Wendy Salajka: There’s five powers of the sage, and the sage’s powers are empathy, Then exploration, innovation, navigation, and activate
[00:00:13] Narrator: your listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode, your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin will take a deeper dive, helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now here’s your host, Steve Branson.
[00:00:35] Steve Fretzin: Hey everybody, welcome to be that lawyer. I am Steve Fretzin and I am just so happy to be with you that you’re with me, that we’re together to enjoy some time together. This is your, you’re, you’re working on your business time, working on yourself time. Um, as you guys know, the show, be that lawyer is all about helping you, uh, to get your life as a lawyer under control and to lead the best life you can live.
[00:00:58] Steve Fretzin: And, uh, that involves competence and organization and being a skilled rainmaker. And there’s, uh, lots and lots of things that go on in your, in your crazy little heads. And we’re going to explore that a little bit today with, with my guest who I’ve known for many, many years, Wendy. Wendy, how you doing? Good, how are you?
[00:01:13] Steve Fretzin: I’m well. Happy to be here. All right. So, uh, I told you before we started that I, uh, you’re, you’re meeting number 11 today. Uh, I don’t know how that happened. I think cause I’m taking off tomorrow to go fishing with my boy, but I am, I might get a little loopy. We’re going to see where this all goes. I’m good with loopy.
[00:01:30] Steve Fretzin: Yeah. That’s, that’s just, it’s going to be how it’s going to be. I cannot control. Those emotions. Maybe you can help me how to control my loopy emotions after 11 meetings. But, uh, anyway, we’re going to come back to Winnie in a second. I, um, I just want to mention really quickly, um, your quote of the show.
[00:01:47] Steve Fretzin: And it’s a long quote, but a really good quote. And I enjoyed reading it. Enjoyed kind of thinking about it for a moment. And so here it is. And it is. What you can rely on, you’ve never relied on in your life. What you can’t trust, you’ve been trying to trust all your life. What you’ve been trusting has never been you.
[00:02:06] Steve Fretzin: What you’ve been ignoring has always been you. Try to trust what’s really you and see what happens. That’s a lot to consume it hurts your brain a little bit hurt my brain a little bit I felt a little pang on the side of my head. That’s not what rah ooh hah ooh hoo hoo
[00:02:23] Wendy Salajka: Rah ooh rah hoo rah ooh rah hoo is the founder of human design, which is a whole other story and a whole other conversation on another day All right.
[00:02:31] Steve Fretzin: But tell me about that quote, because it’s still hurting my left side
[00:02:34] Wendy Salajka: of my head. So what I love about it is that, yeah, what you can rely on, you’ve never relied on. And that’s who we really are, what our real personality is and what we love about ourselves. We tend to hide that because we’re trying to compare ourselves to others.
[00:02:47] Wendy Salajka: We want people to like us. We want to fit in. And we kind of hide that and set it aside. And what it has to do also with the whole positive region of our brain, we’re not built to access that. We’re built to access our survival region. So, we think we can trust that, but that’s where our saboteurs live, and that’s a place that gets us stuck time and time again.
[00:03:08] Wendy Salajka: So, when we learn how to navigate away from that. And trust that positive side of us and trust that other part of our brain that we don’t know how to access yet. That’s where we live our
[00:03:20] Steve Fretzin: authentic life. Yeah, and I think we’re all trying to find it and it’s sometimes we need some help. We need someone to jog it out of us and uh, and maybe that’s where you come in.
[00:03:29] Steve Fretzin: So to introduce Wendy, it’s a Wendy Salika and she is someone that. Um, has a lot of titles, so I don’t want to go through, but mental fitness expert and my, you know, you know, you know, positive psychology expert and cognitive behavioral therapy person, like, I don’t know, is there a, is there a title that you like to go by or you don’t like to put titles
[00:03:49] Wendy Salajka: on things?
[00:03:50] Wendy Salajka: Um, I, for the most part, I’m a keynote speaker and a mental fitness expert and why I’m kind of walking away from the keynote speaker is part of, you know, why we’re here today is. You know, we’ve all heard great speakers and we’ve all gone on great team building events or great retreats and we walk away ready to change our life and two days later and sometimes even two days later, we’re over it because no one is showing us how and no one is continuing to feed that for us and that is what the whole positive intelligence program is about.
[00:04:18] Wendy Salajka: Let me take your hand and let’s change some neural pathways and change our life along the way.
[00:04:24] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, and I enjoy speaking at law firms and at law conferences and things like that, but I. My goal is to just give people like two or three simple things that they can do, because I know that it’s not going to change their life.
[00:04:35] Steve Fretzin: There’s no way, you know, you can, you can, you know, read a book on golf or, or, or listen to someone talk about golf for an hour and now you’re a scratch golfer, right? It’s just, that’s not how the game is played really. So I totally get that. Go go back windy to your background because I think it’s it’s such a great lead into our topic today and um, And I think it’d be good for people to get to know you the way I know you
[00:04:58] Wendy Salajka: so Do you want my degrees and all that?
[00:05:01] Wendy Salajka: What was that? We’re talking about right now. You could do that.
[00:05:04] Steve Fretzin: Okay You want to
[00:05:05] Wendy Salajka: show up? I want no. No, I don’t want to show off I want to illustrate my hyperachiever my saboteur my top saboteurs a hyperachiever So if you look at my, my degrees, my background is in psychology and then my master’s degree is in leadership development, organizational leadership specifically.
[00:05:22] Wendy Salajka: But along the way, when I feel like, well, I’m as a speaker and as somebody who’s coaching people, well, who’s going to listen to you? What do you have to say? You’re not relevant. You know, these are my saboteurs in my head. So my saboteur also tells me maybe go get certified in cognitive behavioral therapy.
[00:05:38] Wendy Salajka: So I did maybe go get certified in positive intelligence. So I did. Those are saboteurs. So that’s exactly my point that I want to illustrate is that these voices in our head that think that they’re helping us and we think that they’re our friends are actually sabotage sabotaging us. I like to call it creative procrastination.
[00:05:58] Wendy Salajka: It takes me along the wrong path where I feel like I’m on the right path. But 18.
[00:06:10] Wendy Salajka: I was at the train station in Palatine, Illinois, going downtown for the first day of a new semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And this was back before people carried cell phones on them everywhere they went. And as a series of events, a man and I were the only two people on the platform and he wound up getting hit and killed by a train.
[00:06:31] Wendy Salajka: And so I was the only one there. I’m there with the police dealing with all of it. And at the end, the policeman said to me, okay, you can go now. And I thought, well, where am I going to go? And he said, where were you going before this happened? Very matter of factly. And I said, I was going to school. And he said, well, go to school.
[00:06:47] Wendy Salajka: So I did. I went through the rest of my day and it was this very surreal experience, uh, kind of like you’re living in this bubble and observing your life instead of participating in it. So I got through my classes, went back home and I was in the kitchen making dinner. And I said to my mom, was there a story on the news today about a man getting killed at the Palatine train station?
[00:07:07] Wendy Salajka: And she said, and I stopped what I was doing and I turned to her and I said, you know what, maybe it didn’t happen. And that to me, then the next morning I got up and she had the article like ripped out of the paper and yes, certainly it did happen. But that to me was a huge revelation that our brains are not reliable.
[00:07:27] Wendy Salajka: That sometimes they’re for us, sometimes they’re against us. And sometimes in an effort to protect us. They actually hurt us and make us feel a little crazy. And that started my whole life on really concentrating on psychology and
[00:07:40] Steve Fretzin: neuroscience. Well, I’ll tell you something that people find interesting. I find interesting that, you know, I was in a very traumatic and many people know I was in a plane crash back in my twenties.
[00:07:49] Steve Fretzin: And when I tell the story and I, I was on a great podcast called uncorking a story and told the whole story. So guys, if you’re interested in hearing that it’s on my LinkedIn profile on corking a story or you can look it up. And when I tell this, it’s not coming from me. It’s coming from like, if you’re watching a movie, right?
[00:08:09] Steve Fretzin: Like I had to disassociate myself from my, my eyes looking out in order for me to handle the trauma that I went through and how I tell that story. So even, and you know, and who knows how much of the story that I tell is and how accurate it is because the way it all went down and all that. I mean, it’s crazy.
[00:08:29] Wendy Salajka: It’s, and it’s crazy because our brain is trying to protect us, but our brain in an effort to protect us, our brain sees anything new. As danger, so even if the new pulls us out of a painful experience into a successful or happiness experience, it still will do whatever it can to sabotage us because it thinks that that new is dangerous and and that’s a great.
[00:08:55] Wendy Salajka: I love that. And that’s how I felt too. Like, I, I describe it as when I was sitting on the train, you know how when you’re falling asleep and you’re watching TV, Yeah. And the sound just all of a sudden seems a little bit weirder and a little bit tunneled and a little bit further away. That’s kind of how the rest of my day was.
[00:09:09] Wendy Salajka: So yeah, I get that. That’s just association and disconnection from your own self. Yeah.
[00:09:14] Steve Fretzin: Well, interesting. I mean, I don’t know if it’s the best lead in, but it, it is what it is. Um, our time, our topic today is one of the things I want to ask you about is your knowledge and expertise on a thing called positive intelligence.
[00:09:28] Steve Fretzin: And first of all, so what is positive intelligence and let’s break it down further from there, but, but let’s start off with just what is that? What, what
[00:09:36] Wendy Salajka: is it? So positive intelligence or PQ as it’s called is. The bringing together of neuroscience, cognitive behavioral therapy, performance science, and positive psychology, and it creates what’s called the positive intelligence quotient, which is the measurement of your mental fitness.
[00:09:54] Wendy Salajka: And what is mental fitness? I haven’t heard that before. You’re sure we have physical fitness, but mental fitness is your ability to move through life, especially during challenging times with a positive rather than a negative mindset. And, you know, if you think about it, we have 60, 000 to 80, 000 thoughts a day and 80 to 90% of them are negative.
[00:10:13] Wendy Salajka: So how do we kind of separate that? And, you know, figure out which ones are sabotaging us and which ones are, are, are real life. So positive intelligence really at its core is about how do I break away from this survivor survival negative area of my brain and redirect my neural pathway to this positive region of my brain, which in positive intelligence, it’s called your sage region of your
[00:10:40] Steve Fretzin: brain.
[00:10:41] Steve Fretzin: Yeah. And I feel like in, in working with lawyers, I’m no therapist. I have no degrees, but I have to sometimes be, you know, like a little bit of a therapist, you know, because they’re dealing with so much stress and so much work and so much pressure to achieve and a pressure to, to grow business. And, and, you know, there’s, there’s all types of concerns.
[00:11:01] Steve Fretzin: So how is positive intelligence kind of relevant to running a law firm or being a lawyer? How does it impact like in my space?
[00:11:08] Wendy Salajka: Yeah. And what I love about working with lawyers is, and this is going to sound weird that I just started that with what I love about, but I want to read some, some statistics to you that I got actually out of May’s ABA journal.
[00:11:19] Wendy Salajka: And this is from a survey conducted by American lawyer. 71% of the 3000 attorneys that were surveyed in 2023 reported suffering with anxiety. Thank you. That’s 5% increase from 2022. So 71% are suffering from anxiety, 38% reported suffering with depression. That’s up from 35 from last year. And generally speaking, depression comes from being haunted from your past, haunted by your past where anxiety is more of the fear of the future.
[00:11:47] Wendy Salajka: So it makes perfect sense that attorneys are going to have a higher level of anxiety because they have a lot riding on what is yet to come. Yeah. Yeah. So those who stated that they suffer, suffer with, quote, Other mental health issues and quote more than doubled. So it went up to 31% in 2023 from 15% from 2022 and when push for specific.
[00:12:11] Wendy Salajka: Specifics more than 50% said they quote felt a sense of failure. Self doubt loss of emotions feeling increasingly cynical and negative have a decrease decreased satisfaction or sense of accomplishment and over 60% feel overwhelmed irritable and exhausted. Instead. And just imagine the ripple effect of that.
[00:12:33] Wendy Salajka: So this is your life in your office and then you go home to your family, your children, your friend group, whatever it is, and you’re bringing that with you and vice versa. Whatever’s happening at home is going to work with you. And it’s
[00:12:46] Steve Fretzin: actually, but it’s actually worse than that, Wendy, because the way that, that lawyers are working today, their, their phone is now their, their, their computer.
[00:12:55] Steve Fretzin: So right. So now they’re living out of their cell phone weekends, evenings. And it’s become almost like, you know, Hey, you know, like a, like a badge of honor, like my clients know they can reach me anytime they want. And I go, is it though? I mean, that’s not how doctors work, right? I’m not calling my doctor because my back hurts.
[00:13:13] Wendy Salajka: Right. And that’s the precedent you set. And that’s probably your hyperachiever. That’s how my hyperachiever used to talk to me. It would say, if you want to make this much money, you need to work till 3 o’clock in the morning, and then you need to get up at 7 in the morning and you need to do it all over again.
[00:13:27] Wendy Salajka: And you can’t take weekends off and you can’t enjoy your family until you’re making this much money until this until that. And that’s not true. It really breaks down to, if I actually stop and take care of myself and turn everything off and don’t answer the emails and don’t answer the texts, get a different phone.
[00:13:45] Wendy Salajka: If you need to go and enjoy my weekends, I’m actually so much more productive and, and so much happier, the more important
[00:13:54] Steve Fretzin: one. But is it, is it, is it in part though, the negative sort of emotions and thought, can’t they then act as a, as a driver for people to be better? Like if I have a negative thought, maybe that’s my impetus to, to do something that I didn’t do yesterday.
[00:14:14] Wendy Salajka: Yeah. And this is my favorite question. I love when I’m running a PQ program and people will say, well, aren’t the saboteurs sometimes right? And the answer is no, they are never right. They’re just amazing. Wait a second. But
[00:14:25] Steve Fretzin: you went to, you got all those extra certifications because of it. Yeah. But
[00:14:30] Wendy Salajka: did I need them?
[00:14:31] Wendy Salajka: Probably not. So then that’s the point. I probably did. If I probably didn’t need all of those and I probably got, I could have gotten to success faster. Yeah. I definitely could have gotten to success. Through walking through a lot less fears and lot less worrying, that’s the whole point of it. So across the board, they’re lying and they are 100% responsible for all of your stress, all of your anxiety, all of your depression, all of your negative emotions.
[00:15:00] Wendy Salajka: So, you know, and maybe the end result is the same. Maybe you and I take the same journey and you go through your saboteurs. I’m going to make you go through your saboteurs in this, in this fake scenario, you are going to be dealing with, yeah, you’re navigating your fears, worrying, sacrificing your happiness, sacrificing your family, dealing with self doubt where I’m going to go through with my sage, which is all about ease and flow.
[00:15:24] Wendy Salajka: It’s all about gaining wisdom, learning. And it’s a journey of building confidence and not questioning yourself. So let’s talk about a negative emotions, like you just said, if I put my hand on a hot fire or on the hot stove, instant notification of pain causes me to pull it away. If I keep my hand there, it’s going to cause significant damage.
[00:15:45] Wendy Salajka: I look at all of our negative emotions exactly like that. They are one second indicators for us to course correct. But if we stay in them, we’re not meant to stay in them, no, we’re not meant to live in that. But if we stay in stress, anxiety, depression, anger, you know, negativity, loneliness, overwhelm, we’re going to have significant damage, just like if we kept our hand on the stove.
[00:16:10] Wendy Salajka: So if you look at negative emotions as, or negative, yeah, feelings, emotions, whatever you want to call them, as indicators to course correct, that’s
[00:16:20] Steve Fretzin: all. So, let me ask you this, this is, this is maybe a curveball question, but are negative emotions… How are they different than someone who’s maybe a pessimist, someone that’s more negative versus an optimist?
[00:16:33] Wendy Salajka: They’re just living in with their saboteurs controlling. Okay. So
[00:16:36] Steve Fretzin: the pessimist is a pessimist because the negative emotions are controlling that
[00:16:40] Wendy Salajka: individual. Right. I mean, yeah, we talk about like, you know, there’s assessments that you take to figure out who your saboteurs are and what level you are. Well, if your level is low, then their control, I worked with a woman the other day, her score was a nine.
[00:16:54] Wendy Salajka: That means 9% of the time she’s in control of her brain and her emotions. The rest of the time her saboteurs are
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[00:18:06] Steve Fretzin: out. So then what are, what are some ways that lawyers who are experiencing negative thoughts, they’re, um, you know, in a dark place or they’re just, they’re just procrastinating, they’re letting their saboteurs, you know, control them.
[00:18:20] Steve Fretzin: What are like two or three simple things that they can do to pull the hand away from the fire to start identifying that that’s happening and, and taking better control of that
[00:18:30] Wendy Salajka: situation? First and foremost is there’s, there’s five powers of the sage and the sage is, powers are empathy. Then exploration, innovation, navigation, and activate the two more most powerful ones and the two that we neglect the most.
[00:18:45] Wendy Salajka: But I always say pick these up the fast as fast as you can is empathy. Practice empathy for yourself. So at the end of the day, when at six o’clock and I wanna be done for the day, if I didn’t get done the things that I wanna get done. Give myself by practice forgiveness. Okay. What can I do better next time?
[00:19:01] Wendy Salajka: What can I do better tomorrow to be more efficient? Ask these empathetic questions and these. You know, questions that are more curiosity and more creative than judging myself and beating myself up for not getting that done. So, empathy is, is the first and foremost, and even when you’re dealing with other people, you know, see them from an empathetic point of view, and then you won’t be so quick to judge them and so quick to judge the situation or judge yourself in interacting with them.
[00:19:29] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, what’s so what’s so and so empathy, I think, is good. And I think I would add, I don’t know if it’s the same or probably different, but gratitude, you know, just. Not only great gratefulness for what you have, like thinking about, you know, that I have a successful business. I have, you know, people that I’m taking care of in my firm.
[00:19:46] Steve Fretzin: I’m, you know, I’ve got, you know, help, you know, where other people don’t, right?
[00:19:51] Wendy Salajka: Huge. Yeah. Huge. Huge. Dialectical behavioral therapy. There’s a thing in there called accumulate the positive. And if I am sitting here in the middle of what seems to me to be a horrible situation, There’s still something good in it.
[00:20:05] Wendy Salajka: There’s good and bad in every single thing we do. And even if the good is microscopic, it’s still strong enough to carry us through. So if we can just take a minute when we’re in a horrible situation, okay, what is the good in this? And that’s part of the sage perspective that every opportunity brings us a gift.
[00:20:20] Wendy Salajka: You know, every situation we’re in brings us a gift or certain opportunities. And if we pay attention to that, It can carry us through anything. So that’s great. I love it. Yeah. And the more you accumulate the positive, the more you realize that this thing that I’m stuck in isn’t going to last forever. But also you build up a database in your brain so that when you are going through difficult times, you can go, yeah, but I got all this stuff.
[00:20:42] Wendy Salajka: This list and list of great things that I’ve done and I’ve been through and that I have in my life that this is okay. I can get through
[00:20:49] Steve Fretzin: this and I’ll tell a personal story. My, uh, my mother had a stroke at 56 and had some complications where she ended up as a paraplegic and we had, and I was 18 at the time.
[00:21:00] Steve Fretzin: And so here I am, you know, with all my friends, everybody’s healthy, everybody’s running around and I’m at home, you know, helping my mom move from a bed to a chair, helping her, you know, clean up crap, you know, whatever I had to do as a good son. And it’s dark and it’s negative and it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of, of things that maybe a teenager, you know, going through that, the maturity and the, the, the time that I spent with her was so valuable and the lessons I learned and how to grow up.
[00:21:28] Steve Fretzin: And actually take care of another person in that, at that level, that wasn’t the full time nurse, but when I was home and I was there, she wanted me more than the nurse. Sure. And so I stepped up and did the stuff I had to do, but, you know, it so crafted my life in the way, and so when, when other things happen.
[00:21:48] Steve Fretzin: And people are sick or people need help or whatever, like, I don’t feel like I get phased the way maybe other people would, you know, that’s great, right? So there’s, there’s just that, just an example, I think of, of the power of that, of that gratitude and that positive spin.
[00:22:03] Wendy Salajka: Yeah. And it’s also comes back to, I think we have to stop treating each other like we’re all living in a state of neutral.
[00:22:09] Wendy Salajka: You know, we interact on a daily basis, like, give me this report, give me this deposition. When’s the schedule? Where’s this brief? What’s happening? Instead of being like, maybe there’s something going on in this person’s life right now. Maybe just take a breather and be like, how you doing? Good. Okay. Let’s have a human connection first.
[00:22:24] Wendy Salajka: Yeah. And just understand, because really when it comes down to it. We’re all going through something. Yeah, we’re all going through
[00:22:30] Steve Fretzin: something. Yeah, and people people dump their crap on you and they get angry at you and they get, you know, whatever. And you think it’s because of something you did and it really may not be mostly could be just what they’re going through.
[00:22:44] Wendy Salajka: Oh, right. I think most of the time it is more about that person than it is about
[00:22:48] Steve Fretzin: you. Yeah. Yeah. I got upset because somebody wasn’t responding to my email and I was like taking it personally. Like, this is a friend of mine, we worked together for years. What the hell? And finally he came back to me like three months later and said, look, I just went through the worst possible divorce I could ever go through.
[00:23:05] Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Nightmare upon nightmare, like you can’t even believe. And I said, we need to, you know, if you want, let’s grab a beer. I’d like, you know, I’d like to hear about it if you wanna talk to me about it. And. All that, but at the end of the day, you know, like I, you know, I just didn’t realize what he was going through
[00:23:19] Wendy Salajka: and I am not the most important thing in everybody else’s life and running my business and getting clients is not the most important thing to my potential clients lives.
[00:23:28] Wendy Salajka: Yeah,
[00:23:30] Steve Fretzin: so what are, what else is on that? Um, on the, the powers of the powers of the sage.
[00:23:35] Wendy Salajka: Yeah. So then the other ones are innovate and then navigate. And activate. I love navigate is one of my favorite ones to use when in a difficult situation because I just had a speaking engagement a couple of weeks ago and the people were not very good at communicating anything.
[00:23:53] Wendy Salajka: I didn’t until a day before I didn’t know if I could use a PowerPoint and how much time I had. I don’t need to use a PowerPoint, but I have a different speech. If I don’t do a PowerPoint and I have a different speech, if it’s 30 minutes versus an hour. Yeah. Well, it was 30 minutes, no PowerPoint. And I found that out a couple days beforehand.
[00:24:10] Wendy Salajka: So I don’t get nervous when I speak, but I was a little, oh, I also didn’t know how many people am I talking to 10 or 4, 000. I don’t know anything about this. They were horrible. And so I was kind of anxious about it. So I do what I call what’s called practicing. Um, flash forward. So I thought I want to look ahead to being in the car ride home.
[00:24:31] Wendy Salajka: So that kind of then lets me see that this is only a couple hours of my life. This is not this huge monumental thing that’s going to take over my life. But also when I’m sitting in the car ride home, I want to be proud of myself. I want to be proud of the job that I did and that the lives that I impacted.
[00:24:48] Wendy Salajka: That’s how I want to feel. And I embody that feeling to get rid of the anxiety and walk in that room and. Do a good job.
[00:24:57] Steve Fretzin: That’s great. Great. What else? What else? We got a couple, we got, we got a couple minutes. What else? What else is on that sage?
[00:25:04] Wendy Salajka: So the sage, the, the whole thing with PQ, let’s go back to PQ go to the sage because the whole point of it is building up what are, what are three mental muscles.
[00:25:14] Wendy Salajka: And our three mental muscles are our self command, so my ability to command where my brain is going and what it is doing in any given moment. The other is the saboteur interceptor. So I can recognize the different personalities of the saboteurs. And again, there’s, there’s 10 saboteurs. One is the judge and we all have the judge and he judges ourselves, judges situations and judges others.
[00:25:33] Wendy Salajka: Then there’s these nine accomplice ones. If I can recognize the personality of each of my saboteurs and when they’re going to attack, I can intercept them a lot faster and not let them take over and control and change where, how I feel about myself or what I’m doing with my time. Then the third one is that sage muscle.
[00:25:50] Wendy Salajka: So I can be really good at intercepting my saboteur and I can be really good at flipping my brain away from that negative region. But I have to work a little bit harder of finishing the cycle and connecting to my sage and, and practicing empathy for myself and practicing curiosity. And instead of saying, why me say things like, what can I be learning from this?
[00:26:13] Wendy Salajka: What could I have done better? What was my contribution to this? So those are empathetic questions and they’re more like from discernment and not from judgment. So that’s kind of the, the, the whole practice is strengthening these three
[00:26:28] Steve Fretzin: muscles. Well, I think that the whole idea of, of controlling the brain, I mean, people don’t think that way.
[00:26:34] Steve Fretzin: We just, we just, we are and we live and we do. We don’t think about, you know, what is this brain? What is my brain? I mean, I think about dreams and like, that was weird. Like that was a weird dream. And why did I have that dream? And what does it mean in the real world in life? You know, we’re not really thinking about our brains and how to control them.
[00:26:54] Steve Fretzin: And so that’s, that’s something I think most people would get a lot of benefit out of is, um, you know, deciding, making a decision or training your brain to do the things that are going to be productive and that are gonna make you
[00:27:05] Wendy Salajka: happy. Yeah, I mean, that’s right on my business card. You can change your brain.
[00:27:09] Wendy Salajka: And when I say that, people are like, what? I don’t have exactly. I don’t have to live this way. And, and, and people do feel like. There’s they have to live that way. And that’s, and that’s sad because you don’t, there’s so many things that we can do to, to change it. It just takes time. You can’t walk into a gym and get the assessment and walk out the door.
[00:27:29] Wendy Salajka: You have to make the fitness plan and you have to go back. You can’t just lose 10 pounds or be tone by going one time. I wish, but we can’t. And it’s the same thing with our brain. If you really want to change your brain, okay. Yeah. It takes, it takes about, you know, 33 days to create a new neural pathway, 66 to get it to stick, but about 90 for it to really become a reliable thing.
[00:27:49] Steve Fretzin: All right. So let’s, let’s, so how do you work? Like what’s your, what’s your deal as it relates to, all right, I’m a, I’m a lawyer. I’m recognizing I’ve got saboteurs all around me. I’ve got more than one judge yelling at me at my own judge and the other judge.
[00:28:04] Wendy Salajka: Exactly. Everyone says judges are attacking me too.
[00:28:06] Wendy Salajka: Yeah. And that’s how do,
[00:28:07] Steve Fretzin: yeah. Like what are, what are, what are, what are you helping that, that lawyer with? The
[00:28:11] Wendy Salajka: thing, the other thing too, of that survey that I looked at, it said that like 76% blame their work environment for where they are. And they also said that 51% say they appreciate attempts at onsite wellness professionals, but they don’t take advantage of them because they’re worried that when they walk in the door or interact with that person, that people are going to notice it.
[00:28:30] Wendy Salajka: And that’s going to affect their, you know, performance reviews, their partnerships, their promotions, their pay raises and all that stuff. So the great thing about my program is that I come in and people either run their entire law firm through the program or they take their leadership team or they take their entry level associates.
[00:28:48] Wendy Salajka: You know, they pick a pocket, a grouping of people and, and they all go through it and they all go through it together. So it’s this team building event, but it also gives like lasting positive impact on them. And there’s no stigma to it because. They’re all doing it, you know, so yeah,
[00:29:04] Steve Fretzin: and it’s not psychotherapy, right?
[00:29:06] Steve Fretzin: They’re not laying couch. What
[00:29:07] Wendy Salajka: it is is this is yeah No, the way that the program works. It’s really like it’s it’s about an eight week program. It’s it’s eight Mondays with me and then seven Saturdays lessons will drop on the app. So we have a there’s an app that positive intelligence has that you get into through Me signing you up for it and yeah, it’s just about walking through step by step, how to integrate these changes to your brain.
[00:29:30] Wendy Salajka: And then on Mondays, we have meetings where I kind of dig a little bit more into maybe the neuroscience of it. And we go around the room and talk about a couple of things. And the cool thing about it is. You can be as vulnerable as you want or not, but you’re still interacting and you’re still making changes.
[00:29:46] Wendy Salajka: So, and then there’s the, the app is all gamification and simplification. So it’s something really, really easy to implement and it takes about. 15 minutes a day to do some of the exercises and then one hour on your weekend, but it’s broken down into bits. And then the Monday meeting is usually, you know, depending on how many people we put in what are called the pods, it could be between 30 to an hour, 30 minutes to an hour.
[00:30:09] Steve Fretzin: Well, and I’d love people to do it before they talk to me because if they can get their head in the right place and then work with me, holy mackerel, what could we do together? It’s. You know, if I’m dealing with someone who’s negative and has saboteurs all around very, very tough for us to do business development and really work and not only intelligently, but efficiently and effectively at gaining ground.
[00:30:30] Steve Fretzin: So I think we’ve got to get our heads together and be in a good place to build business because otherwise it’s a lot more challenging. And I don’t want to be the, and I don’t want to be the therapist by the way. No,
[00:30:41] Wendy Salajka: I agree. And if you’re stuck in your rational mind, which probably I would be willing to bet that’s one of the top saboteurs of a lot of attorneys.
[00:30:48] Wendy Salajka: It’s again, one of my top saboteurs too, but when you’re stuck in your rational mind, you cannot access your empathetic and your creative, you know, and your exploration part of your brain. So how are you going to talk to someone? Yeah.
[00:31:00] Steve Fretzin: If people want to get in touch with you, they want to hear more about the program.
[00:31:02] Steve Fretzin: They want to explore it for themselves, for the firm, what, what are the best ways for them to reach you?
[00:31:06] Wendy Salajka: Um, they can email me, my email is wendy at identify and conquer. com or they can call me.
[00:31:14] Steve Fretzin: And what’s that number?
[00:31:17] Wendy Salajka: 331 202 8367. And I really, you know, I love my website because I built it myself, but I love it, but I really just want to talk to people.
[00:31:26] Wendy Salajka: I just, you know, I know people are afraid to answer phone calls and answer emails and talk to people. Um, but yeah, feel free to reach out. This is my favorite conversation. Yeah.
[00:31:36] Steve Fretzin: No, and it’s, and it’s important one because you know, game changing, life changing. I mean, there’s, there’s things that we can, we can say, but that’s.
[00:31:43] Steve Fretzin: You know, again, if you’ve got something holding you back and it’s, it’s causing you to not have the life that you want to, you know, and I’m, I’m one of these guys, it’s like, look, you got one shot at this damn thing, you know, and if you’re blowing year after year on the negativity, on the excuses, on the procrastination, all the things that hold you back and be in judging yourself and being hard on yourself.
[00:32:01] Steve Fretzin: Man, it really, and you know, alcohol and drugs, I mean, the list goes on and on.
[00:32:05] Wendy Salajka: Yeah. Um. You can get to where you’re going so much faster when you eliminate the whole saboteur part. And if you go to my website too, the, the links to the assessments are on there too. So one assessment is about who are your saboteurs and how strong are they?
[00:32:17] Wendy Salajka: And the other one is who’s controlling your brain more, them or you.
[00:32:21] Steve Fretzin: Yeah, very cool stuff. And, um, we’ve got a new segment. Um, you guys know Game Changing Books. We’ve got now Game Changing Podcasts. So, um, you mentioned, uh, Mel Robbins as your Game Changing Podcast. What is that podcast about?
[00:32:36] Wendy Salajka: It’s about kind of what we just talked about.
[00:32:38] Wendy Salajka: How to get out of your own way and just stop letting anxieties and things like that, um, stop you and slow you down.
[00:32:46] Steve Fretzin: I’m creating a podcast playlist for my wife who comes from a long lineage of worriers and I got to get my wife out of her head a little bit. She took your test, by the way, and yeah, there’s there’s a bunch of saboteurs happening for her, but at least she’s aware of it now.
[00:32:59] Steve Fretzin: She knew it when she read him. She’s like, yeah, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. And all that. I was like, okay. So, you know, I think it’s like half the battles knowing, right? I think that’s absolutely something. Hey, before we wrap up, just want to thank Get Visible, our sponsor, and Money Penny, our longtime sponsor.
[00:33:16] Steve Fretzin: Appreciate you guys. You’re the best. And, uh, thank you, Wendy. I just so appreciate you. I appreciate what you’re doing for the legal community. And, um, and just helping change those brains that need changing. Yeah.
[00:33:27] Wendy Salajka: Thank you for your time and for your space on this platform. And I think you and I have the same mindset with it.
[00:33:33] Wendy Salajka: You know, they’re not, attorneys are not taught how to build a business and they’re not taught this kind of stuff in law school. No. So
[00:33:41] Steve Fretzin: let’s, that’s what the show’s about. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Wow. What a way to kind of segue to close the show, you know, be helping people to be that lawyer, confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker.
[00:33:51] Steve Fretzin: Very hard to do when your brain isn’t, uh, working at, uh, at the right, in the right way, the right level, and you’re in control. So, uh, listen, everybody. Hopefully you got some great ideas today. Um, I think, you know, Wendy was so, so wonderful in sharing her wisdom, and, um, hopefully you guys are giving us some positive views on, uh, on your phone, on whatever platform you’re listening to the show, and tell people about it.
[00:34:12] Steve Fretzin: Tell lawyers about it. Let’s… You know, we’re 300 plus shows and, and we’re, we’re moving, we’re moving forward. So, you know, please keep listening and hopefully you keep getting some great takeaways. And listen, everybody, be well, be safe. We will talk again real soon.
[00:34:30] Narrator: Thanks for listening to Be That Loyal, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website fretzin.com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.