#49 – Biohacking Your Way To More Money & Growth In Your Business With Tanessa Shears

Biohacking your way to more money and energy in your business!

We often hear about biohacking for your health but did you know you can also biohack your business growth and success?

 

In today’s episode of the Wealthy Coach Podcast, Kendra Perry sits down with health consultant to entrepreneurs, Tanessa Shears, to help you optimize your body, so you can optimize your business.

We discuss:

•     What is biohacking and why it’s important for entrepreneurs
•     The biggest reason you lack focus throughout the day and what to do about it
•     How you can use your Chronotype to hack your workday
•     How to use your sleep cycle to increase problem-solving skills
•     Simple biohacks to increase productivity
•     And our mutual crush on Ben Greenfield!

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Listen to the podcast here:

Biohacking Your Way To More Money & Growth In Your Business With Tanessa Shears

A question for you. How is your energy throughout your workday? Do you find that you feel energetic, focused and productive? If the answer is no, I have an episode for you. I’m sitting down with fellow Canadian and biohacker, Tanessa Shears, to discuss how to biohack your way to business growth, success and more money too. I loved our conversation because Tanessa truly bridges the gap between business and health, which is my two favorite topics. Tanessa Shears is a health consultant that helps entrepreneurs scale their business by optimizing their health, focus and productivity with science and biohacking. Her passion is working closely with business owners to implement effective sleep, nutrition, workflow and stress management strategies to eliminate brain fog and help them get more done in eight hours than most people can get done in an entire week.  

She does this by optimizing the performance capacity of your body and brain so you can produce more meaningful and impactful work, and output and scale your business faster. In this interview, Tanessa teaches us what is biohacking, why it’s important for any entrepreneur, the biggest reason why you’re lacking energy and focus throughout the day, and what to do about it. How can you use your chronotype to structure your workday, and how to hack your sleep cycle to increase your problem-solving skills. She’s going to give us her top three biohacks that you can start implementing right now in order to see more productivity in your business. Plus, we may geek out on our common love of Ben Greenfield. All of that is in this episode. Let’s dive into it.

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Welcome to the show, Tanessa.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks so much for being here. I’m extra excited because I am hanging out with a fellow Canadian. You guys know I get super fired up when I get to hang out with Canadians. I’m usually talking to Americans, which I love, but Canadians, I feel like we have a special bond.

Yes, especially since we live in the same province.

We’re talking about business. It’s the intersection between business and health, which I love. I know it’s going to resonate and be meaningful for everyone in the audience. Tanessa, what’s your background? How did you end up in this space? Tell us your amazing story. 

It was a complete accident that I ended up in health and fitness. I was a lifeguard for the longest time. We were forced to teach hours and hours on ends of swimming lessons and it gets really cold. They made us this deal and they’re like, “If you want to become an aqua fitness instructor, you don’t have to teach somebody swimming lessons.” I was like, “Yes, sign me up.” After teaching aqua fit on the side of the pool deck for a while, my classes got big. I was like, “This is so fun.” I ended up becoming a group fit instructor and then a personal trainer, and then I switched my entire university degree over to Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology. I was like, “This is my jam.” From there, I opened the personal training business in 2014, and through self-education, it snowballed. You end up learning, “It’s not just fitness, it’s nutrition. It’s not just nutrition, it’s sleep.” I’m slowly starting to incorporate all the little nooks and crannies which created this business that I have centered around biohacking for entrepreneurs. It’s fun. It’s been quite the process.

Did you go to school in Vancouver?

I went to Simon Fraser University.

I started my university at Calgary in Kinesiology, but I lasted about a year and a half and then I dropped out, but then I went back. I am excited to learn from you because I consider myself a little bit of a biohacker. I love lots of these weird things and things you can do to optimize how you feel and with your health. I know we have some people who are still in school training to be health coaches. For people who are brand new to the health space, let’s define biohacking. 

Everyone has a slightly different definition of biohacking. To make it simple, it’s hacking your biology, not in an illegal way or something that’s dangerous or unhealthy. It essentially means, what are the solutions that we can put in play that are going to create more longevity, focus, productivity and health? It’s overall wellbeing. The way I love to do it is in a way in which we can measure the outcomes. I’m all about getting more energy out of something than what you put into something. If I try this biohack, is my sleep getting better? Am I getting more focused? For me, it’s all about solutions with a measurable outcome and creating an optimized human.

I love that you mentioned measuring. I am obsessed with tracking and measuring. I want to know how many steps I take in a day. Sometimes, I do a cyclic keto diet and I have my little blow sticks. I want to know like, “Am I in ketosis?” I find it empowering because it helps you stay on track when you have no idea how you’re doing. When I was a health coach, I use functional lab testing. I love to be able to track. I still run labs on myself a few times a year, blood work, gut testing, all that stuff because I love the numbers. I love to get a marker for where I’m at and how I need to shift. 

I geek out over my client’s sleep numbers all the time. I’m like, “Have you uploaded the week’s data yet? I need to analyze it before we talk.” I love seeing the changes you put in place and have an effect. It’s not walking around with your eyes closed anymore. I can see if what I’m doing makes a difference so we’re not wasting time. We’re busy as entrepreneurs. We don’t have time to spend time doing stuff that’s not going to have an effect.

I’m impatient. I don’t want to wait around like, “Tell me, is this working? If it’s not, we can let it go and do something else so this is going to be awesome.” Tell me the importance of focus and productivity when it comes to building a business. You could also talk about what productivity means for you because I also feel like people look at that one a little bit differently. 

For me, productivity is how much bang for my buck I’m getting out of the time I have allotted. I became a new mom in 2020. My business had to essentially compress from a full week into her naps and everything before 8:00 AM. It’s not about how many random things I can get checked off my to-do list. I’m looking at my calendar and now I’m going from 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM every morning. I need every minute to count. I need to be fully optimized and fully present. I need to be able to understand the difference between the tasks on my list that are getting me tangible results versus the busy work that we think makes a difference, “I don’t know what I’m doing now, so I’m going to do some emails or I’m going to do some bookkeeping.” Nothing moves the needle.

Productivity is getting the big bang for your buck, stuff is done in the time that you are given. We only have so much time as entrepreneurs and we want to make the most out of that all the time. We want to be making sure that the time we’re using is effective so that we can shut off at the end of the night. Not that we ever stop thinking about our business, but at least when we turn the computer off for the end of the night, hopefully, we can let it be. We’re not working until 10:00, 11:00, 12:00 every night, grinding and hustling, trying to burn the candle at both ends to make it work.

This will be relevant for people in the audience who have kids. That’s always a topic I struggled to speak to because I don’t have kids. I’m like, “Do it.” They’re like, “You don’t get it.” I’m like, “I don’t, I’m sorry.” The challenges where some people are homeschooling, I know we have people in the audience who are now homeschooling and running a business and trying to keep their marriage afloat. It makes this focus in productivity piece extra important. Would you agree?

One hundred percent. I have a baby. If you know you have a two-hour block of time, you don’t want to spend fifteen minutes scrolling and then replying to an email. If that’s not the tasks that are going to move your business forward and if you aren’t fully optimized and your brain is not firing on all cylinders during that time, you’re losing so much time in which you could be getting ahead.

When I was looking through your little application bio thing, you mentioned focus, productivity and energy all in the same little blob. I loved that because I feel like productivity and energy go together. A lot of times, people are being productive because they’ve maxed out their energy doing something else. Maybe the busy stuff and they’ve gone cross-eyed trying to do admin stuff. They don’t have the energy to do the creative stuff, the social media, and the stuff that moves the business forward. When it comes to online entrepreneurs and coaches, what are the top things that are causing them to lose their energy throughout the day? 

Number one is experiencing brain fog. For those of you that don’t know what brain fog is, it’s the inability to remember little things all of a sudden. You’re like, “I can’t remember the person I wanted to get in contact with it. What is their name?” You’re staring at your screen and you want to make some sales copy, and there’s nothing creative. You’re getting energy crashes mid-day. You’re forgetful. There’s a lack of clarity. You feel overwhelmed and confused all the time. It’s that overall sense of low energy. It makes it so hard to show up effectively to your business. The worst and most scary thing is we look around at everyone.

Entrepreneur or not, we’re all getting out of bed tired in the morning. We all have five cups of coffee to get going, mid-afternoon crash, and struggling to get off the couch, watching Netflix at the end of the night. We think this is normal how life is but it’s not. It’s so much of the input that’s going on whether that be in our sleep, movement, stress management or nutrition. These factors are all compiling to create systemic levels of inflammation and brain fog which we think is normal.

I know, especially for my audience, most people get into health coaching because of their own health issues. Personally, I was in a deep state of chronic fatigue. I built my whole business through chronic fatigue, which is crazy. Luckily, I’ve come out of that for the most part now, but I know a lot of our audience are challenged with wanting and trying to build this business, but also juggling with their health issues. This is going to be helpful. For brain fog, what’s are some of the primary driving factors of that? What are the pieces that typically contribute to that? 

There are top three and I always call these the foundation that you want to work on first. It’s chronic stress and being unable to manage, to overwhelm what you’re experiencing in your business. That’s one. Two is the food we eat that’s creating inflammation in our body, whether that be at the gut level, brain level or fluctuating blood sugar levels. The third one is poor sleep. If you could put your effort into one thing, it would be getting adequate sleep. It is so undervalued for how powerful it is at creating clarity, energy and focus, especially the impact of the dreaming part of our sleep, our REM sleep and the different phases we go through in the night have on the different areas of our business. We’re losing out on them thinking, “It’s okay, I got more done in my business.” The time you spent was completely ineffective and your work is crappy because you’re barely there anyways. You’re all foggy, you’re tired, and all you can think of is how you want to go to sleep.

I’m someone who had chronic insomnia for almost a decade. It was super intense. It doesn’t matter what other good things I do. I’m doing all the other good things for myself, but I’m not sleeping so I feel like shit. It negates all these other good things that I’m doing for myself. You mentioned something there that piqued my interest. You mentioned the stages of sleep and how they relate to different areas of your business. Can you go into that a little further? 

The beginning part of the night is when you experience most of your deep sleep. Deep sleep specifically is if you think during the day when you’re maybe making a webpage and you’re screenshotting a billion things to your desktop, that’s essentially what’s happening to your learning during the day. When you go and experience deep sleep at night, that’s like moving stuff off the desktop and onto the hard drive. It’s creating that long-term storage. That is super important. On top of that, our brain gets a nice little bath at night. Our cerebral spinal fluid gets to get in there while we’re having deep sleep, clean it out and allow you to think clearer during the day. That’s your restored phase. That’s what helps with your memory. REM sleep is our dream sleep where our eyes move back and forth fast. The rapid eye movement sleep, that is what I like to call entrepreneurial gold.

There are so many things that happen during REM sleep. One of them is our ability to solve out-of-the-box problems. We know that our success as an entrepreneur is directly related to the size and the quality of the problem we solve. If you’re constantly stuck copying everyone else’s stuff online, you can’t think of creative ways to market or say your own message, then you’re running in circles all the time. This allows you to think outside of the box and develop that creativity. That is super important. When we look at our brains, as humans, we’re supposed to get 20% to 25% of our night in REM sleep. If we compare that to a monkey, which gets 9%, we can see that when we’re not dreaming enough and we’re not getting enough quality sleep, we revert to a monkey brain.

We lose creativity and problem-solving. The most important one that happens while we’re dreaming is our ability to manage our emotions. Our ability to read facial expressions and body gestures is improved with sleep. Our overall intelligence is enhanced and our social intelligence. If you get criticism from a client or a negative review online and you have well slept, your ability to respond to that professionally is heightened. You are less reactive. Our ability to remain neutral and not react with overwhelm and stress all day long is essential to our longevity as entrepreneurs.

I agree with you because now that I sleep, I can handle so much more. I can get a troll comment and be like, “I’m sending you love, troll. I love you. I hope you are doing okay,” instead of being in the shower crying. You’re going to tell me about some biohacking things, but if people aren’t dreaming, is that a sign that they’re not getting into REM sleep or is it because they’re not remembering their dreams? Can you speak a bit to that?

 

It’s not so much about remembering dreams or not remembering dreams, but the actual experience of REM is a frequency of brainwaves that happens during the night. It’s neat. Our dreaming brainwaves and our awake brainwaves are super similar. What usually happens is when you are remembering your dream, there’s a good chance that you were woken up in the middle of it.

I remember all my dreams. 

There might be a good chance that you’re waking up in the middle of them a little bit. Naturally, during our sleep cycles, we have little periods of awake time that most of us don’t recognize are happening during the night that is affecting our sleep quality. REM sleep is super important for developing all of those characteristics that make us great entrepreneurs.

I’m a vivid dreamer. It feels like dreams of eternity every night. I dreamed we were at the ski hill and everyone was partying. There were bands and I was like, “No one cares about COVID, sweet.” I was so excited and I woke up. I’m like, “That’s not going to happen when I go to the ski hill.” 

Do you ever have lucid dreams?

I have some crazy lucid dreams sometimes. Not all the time, but usually a few times a year.

I used to be able to do it all the time as a child, but it’s slowly decreased as I’ve got older.

Mine are usually pretty dark so I don’t particularly enjoy them. It’s about being attacked. I don’t like to wake up screaming. 

Good thing you can choose to run faster then.

When it’s happening, I know it’s happening. I’m like, “I’m dreaming.” I have to rip myself. I feel like I’m tearing through consciousness and ripping myself out of the dream. It’s bizarre. Sleep is important. I’d love to know what people can do to get more of this juicy REM sleep and what tools can they use to get them there.

One of the best investments I always think we can make in business is some type of sleep tracker. There’s a lot of debate on the accuracy of all the different brands out there. There’s Fitbits, Oura Ring, Garmin tracker, the Apple Watch, and everything will tell you something. Nothing is going to be accurate as polysomnography, which is when they stick all the electrodes to your head and read your brain waves. However, what I like to do with my clients is when we get the readings in the morning, we see them on the spreadsheet. If we’re getting 18% dream sleep in October, can we bump it up to 20% in November? We’re looking at relative improvement. One of the best things that you can do is find a way to track it because when we wake up in the morning, we don’t have a way of knowing our quality of sleep. We don’t have a printout that goes, “Great job.” We do need to rely on something to help us see those actual numbers. That’s the first thing. It’s investing in something to give you an idea of the quality of sleep you’re getting.

What’s your favorite?

I use the Fitbit. They all have inaccuracies in them. At this point, I have a Fitbit Inspire Heart Rate, something simple, not bulky. I can wear it while I sleep.

It’s too bad. I used to have a Fitbit and then I sold it. I’m like, “Why did I do that? That was so stupid.” Now I want to know everything. 

There are some other things that will help out too, especially getting enough quality sleep, deep REM. That is to have a consistent circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm being the time you naturally get tired, go to sleep, and wake up every day. Much of our body functions around the daytime, our hormones, our body temperature. Many things follow this clock, and so does our sleep-wake rhythm. Naturally, when you go to sleep at roughly the same time, you don’t give or take 20 to 30 minutes and you wake up. Our brain bathes in the deep sleep and the dream sleep equally throughout the night. We get exposure to it all.

What happens is if we stay up a couple of hours late one night, we know that most of the deep sleep happens in the earlier part of the night. When we’re cutting off 1 or 1.5 hours of sleep, we’re knocking out 25% to 50% of our deep sleep, which is significant. The same thing happens when we get up early in the morning. By having a consistent circadian rhythm and generally following that, there’s always going to be a time where we’re launching. There are exceptions where we need to get up. Finding a rhythm that you stick to is something that will ensure you’re getting enough of both types of quality sleep that are contributing to your ability to have energy and focus the next day.

I’m clockwork. It must be 9:00 because I feel tired. When I stay up a little bit later, even an hour until 10:00, I feel so different in the morning. I don’t have the same level of energy, and it’s so significant. It’s super annoying. It’s best for me to try to get to bed at 9:00.

I’m like that too. At 9:00, I’m asleep. My Fitbit says that it was 8:49 that I was asleep. This doesn’t say that you can’t get good sleep if you are not a consistent 11:00 to 7:00 sleeper either because it has to do with your chronotype and genetically how your body is set up to sleep.

Can we talk about chronotype?

The idea of a chronotype is it optimizes certain activities at different times of the day. For example, I naturally am asleep by 9:00, but I’m up by 5:00. This is without an alarm clock, fully energized, feet on the floor. This is not because I’m trying to be part of the 5:00 AM club, but I genuinely am up at that time. It means I also do my best exercise around 4:00 PM. It also means this is when I should have my first meal and my second meal, when my focused work happens, and my light work happens. The whole idea of chronotype is it’s about 50% genetically determined, but there is some room for wiggle-in there. If anybody is interested in getting an idea of where they stand on that, Michael Bruce wrote a book called The Power of When. There’s a quiz on his website. It’s 20 or 30 questions and it’ll tell you naturally based on the answers what your chronotype is when you’re naturally drawn to go to sleep, wake up and exercise.

I’m a bear and I knew that. Our schedules sound similar. Early bed, early up, no alarm, and 4:00 PM is when I exercise. I’m not good at exercising in the morning. I like things to feel slow and easy. 

It’s fascinating when you start working within your optimized time windows and you start to recognize. For me, that 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM window for work, I am on fire during that time, but if I try to work around 2:00 PM, that’s what I like to save things. My creative work happens in the morning, but then if I’m doing interviews and client calls, I usually love to do those between 12:00 and 5:00 because I don’t need super creative work, but I’m in the mood for having conversations and client sessions.

I save all my admin, brainless where I’m typing away for the afternoon. I like to have a long morning routine. I don’t start work until 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM, but then between 10:00 and 2:00 or 9:00 and 2:00, I can get a lot done, but by 2:00 PM, I’m spacing out. I noticed I’m scrolling and that’s when I need to do the to-do list and be done for the day. It messes with me in winter because I want to go skiing every morning. I’m trying to work from 12:00 to 5:00. I make it work but it is not the same, but it’s worth it for the turns. We’ve talked about the sleep biohack using a sleep tracker or something like a Fitbit or an Oura Ring. What are some other biohacks that are easy that our audience could implement to help them have better focus and productivity? 

I probably found this one and it has been the single thing that has made the biggest difference to my focus. It is an app called Brain.fm. Have you heard of Brain.fm?

I used to have this app on my old phone. I forgot about it. 

It’s based on the idea of audio brainwave entrainment. Our brainwaves sync to external things, whether that be electromagnetic pulses, light or audio. The premise is when we are highly focused, our brainwaves are in high beta. When we are relaxed and meditating, we go from alpha, even into theta a little bit. When we deep sleep, we’re in delta brainwaves. What this app does is it uses AI to build the frequency of the brainwave of focus into the audio. I’ll put that on the focus track. It has the frequency of beta brainwave specifically. I noticed that after about ten minutes of having this on, I have tunnel vision on my work. I feel like I have flames coming out the back of my brain. I’m like, “Click. Type.” There are mornings where I have written out full ten email funnel sequences in an hour and a half. That’s one of the ones I’ve found. This one has helped a lot of clients get into a deep sleep. I like to also put this one on when I’m lying on my pillow at night reading. It’s fascinating watching my heart rate while it’s on deep sleep. I watched my heart rate dropped down to 51 while I was reading and awake.

Are you listening to this while you’re working?

Yes. They have all kinds of things. There’s beach, forests, actual music you can listen to, but it sounds just like normal music. There’s an AI that put a certain frequency into the background. You can’t hear it. It doesn’t sound any different, but ten minutes in, you notice the difference. All the clients that I’ve told about this app are like, “This is the best.”

What else? Tell me more. I’m loving this. 

 

The thing that I find makes the most difference for my sleep quality which feeds back into productivity the next morning is getting red lens, blue light blocking glasses. When I talk to people about blue light blocking glasses, they’re like, “I have those, but we have the clear lenses or the light-yellow lenses.” The ones I got were called Sunset. They’re red at the top and they fade to a dark yellow. They imitate sunset on the eye. If you didn’t know, when our eyes receive blue light from all of our screens, it puts a break on melatonin production. It’s not going to work when we want to go to sleep and have quality sleep during the night if our brain is not able to be ramped up for melatonin. Essentially, these blue light blocking glasses work well. I use them in reading. It’s amazing. Within 30 minutes of wearing these, I will get so drowsy and I fall fast asleep. I have fallen asleep in mid-conversation with my husband at the end of the night a couple of times. I wake up and I’m like, “Sorry.”

I have a pair of those orange ones. People laugh at me. My partner laughs at me, but I don’t care. I’m like, “These are great.” When I was struggling with insomnia and my health in general, they made such a significant difference. I don’t notice it as much anymore because I sleep better now, but I still try to make a point of using them because I know they help. If I watch a movie before bed, I’m not going to sleep well unless I’m wearing those glasses. Sometimes, you want to watch Netflix. 

They were such a great investment in how I feel every night. My husband always looks over me at the end of the night. I’ve got my headphones in and my red-light glasses on and my night guard.

I feel like your husband and my partner are similar. They’re like, “I love you but you’re weird.”

I’m healthy.

It’s amazing which makes all the weirdness worth it. We’ve got a Brain.fm and we’ve got blue blockers, the orange ones, not the clear ones. What else do you got for us? 

One of the things that I to do at the end of the night is a two-combo thing because there are two things that lead to enhancing melatonin production besides the blue light. The other one is allowing your body temperature to drop 1 to 2 degrees Celsius. About an hour before I planned to sleep, I drop the temperature in my bedroom to about 18 degrees Celsius or 65 Fahrenheit. I’d combo that with a shower. If I’m coming off of a late workout, which generally I don’t like to do because cortisol is up, body temperature is up and it’s harder to sleep, I’ll combo that with a cold shower specifically because it reduces inflammation. I found one of the most fascinating things about it is my brain rebelled against the idea of a cold shower for a long time.

The fascinating thing is recognizing our human ability to withstand discomfort. I find that they weren’t as bad as I thought they were. There are two strategies. You can either do the twenty seconds of cold, ten seconds of hot, and cycle through that ten times. I go 2 to 3 minutes straight cold. I’d rather get it over with at that point. Getting out of the shower, if it’s not too cold in the house, letting your body air-dry, allowing that natural cooling temperature, not jumping in with a heating bottle, heating pad or big fuzzy blanket, but allowing your body to naturally cool and have that temperature drop at the end of the night. These are all things that enhance your sleep because ultimately, these are the things that are feeding into your energy and productivity because if you’re not sleeping adequately, you’re not getting out of bed energized the next day.

We have a cold plunge on our deck that we use. We’ll have to chip the ice off with an ax in the morning, which feels crazy, but I’m into it. We have an infrared sauna. I’ll do that in the morning. What you’re saying here is it would probably be beneficial for me to do a dunk before bed. That sounds gnarly, but I’m going to do it.

A lot of the work of Ben Greenfield who’s got a book he put it out. It’s like a textbook. It’s called Boundless. I’m still working my way through it. It is full of many good things. He recommends morning and night cold showers. I’m currently doing the cold showers post-workout. We’re working up to two a day. I’m proud of myself that I’m even doing that right now.

It’s a huge achievement. 

Yes, especially when you live in Canada.

There’s snow outside and it’s cold. Now, I’m chopping off the ice.

You think we’d be better prepared.

It’s interesting. I and Ryan, my partner, were talking about this because we do a lot of ski touring. We’re like, “This would be helpful to adapt us to cold so that in an emergency situation, we can hunker down and be cool with the cold.” 

That’s adaptation and cold thermogenesis, being able to generate heat from brown fat.

Can you give us one more? 

This one would have to be how to biohack your nutrition while you’re working. When we’re going through our day, our job is to have consistent energy and stable focus throughout the day. One of the priority principles that I go through is we need to maintain stable blood sugar while we are working. If you’ve ever had that afternoon crash, it’s likely because you had a lunch that caused a big blood sugar upswing, a big insulin upswing, and then a big crash. It’s like after we eat a big pasta dinner and we want to go to sleep. That’s not helpful in the middle of our day. What I’m doing is I’m choosing foods that have the lowest stimulation on insulin.

For example, I’ll be looking at my meals during the day. They are healthy fats like avocados, eggs and lots of vegetables. I’m sticking with the proteins. That is during my workday. At nighttime, that’s when I choose to get my complex carbs. That’d be sweet potatoes or rice. It adapts to the diet or the lifestyle that you’re on because there’s no wrong way to do it, but I always like to think during the day. I need to have stable energy that comes down to managing my glycemic variability during the day, fats, proteins, and lots of vegetables.

I feel like we have so much in common. I find that it works so well if I do the low carb during the day and then do a bit heavier at night, the complex carbs, the root vegetables. That’s a powerful thing. When I used to work with health coaching clients, that was the single biggest thing that made such an impact on their lives. 

One of the things that I love to do with my clients, they’ll kick and scream at the beginning, but it’s their favorite thing of working with me. I always tell them, “Let’s do 30 days, no sugar, no flour.” Their brains go, “What?” It’s not because we stick to no sugar, no flour for the rest of our lives, but I need you to back off of the three heavy carb meals a day. I love seeing them understand how much discomfort they can sit in and be comfortable. I can manage discomfort. I know that when I make a decision. It’s almost like the mindset you develop. When you have something on your calendar, you do it. When you say you’re going to do something, you do it. It’s developing that skill at the same time as stabilizing your blood sugar, which makes for better productivity all day long.

That’s helpful for every aspect of health. Which one of these has probably been the most impactful for you in your business and productivity? What’s the one that stands out to you?. 

It’s managing my sleep, but that’s more like a habit-based thing. It was going to sleep and waking up at the same time single-handedly because that made the difference in the energy that I had the next morning, especially in the morning or your working hours. If I wake up at 5:00, I can’t take until 6:30 to get into the swing of things. It needs to happen. Doing that circadian rhythm reset, spending three weeks dialing that has the biggest effect, but in terms of desk time, it was the app, Brain.fm. It’s how much that helps.

I’m so excited to try that. What does it look like when you work with clients? Can you take us through that process?

I love to look and be like, “What’s going on in your life right now? How are you sleeping? How are you eating?” Most people come in and they’re like, “I’m doing a pretty good job.” I always like to look at the numbers of it. I’ll strap some sleep monitor to their wrist and then I’ll start recording the data. We always start with sleep first. I always like to fix the thing that’s going to have the biggest impact first because if we’re under slept, we’re not doing a good job on everything else. Essentially, we’ll do that, and then I have the one-on-one calls with everyone every week. I’m looking at analyzing what we did, what worked well, what didn’t work from last week, and what we do differently.

It’s identifying what we implemented that didn’t work, which is what is saving us time because if we keep adding layers in all these different health things that we can do, there’s so much going on. We end up getting overwhelmed. We need to constantly be evaluating. Let’s say we did Brain.fm and circadian rhythm last week. What worked well? What didn’t work? If you’re like, “I had trouble going to sleep at this time,” let’s adjust it a little bit. We’re constantly making little tweaks and then watching how our productivity changes. Do you have trouble staying focused? When is the energy dropping off? We’re constantly checking in with that process along the way and seeing how much we can grow the business because of the extra stuff we’re getting done in that same amount of time.

Did you find your clients end up making more money in the long run because of this?

For sure. I have a client who cleared up enough time in her schedule to make a $96,000 proposal to a different company. We have enough time to take on another proposal. That’s a big amount of the income.

How can our audience connect with you if they want to work with you, reach out or chat with you? What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Everything is on my website at TanessaShears.com. I’m active on Instagram all the time, which is @TanessaShears.

Thanks, everyone. Shoot Tanessa a message if you have questions or feedback, or you can also tag me or DM me @KendraPerryInc at Instagram because that’s where I hang out too. We will be back with the show where I help you become wealthy as fuck. 

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Thank you so much for reading. I’m wondering, do you want to help me with my mission to end health coach poverty? If you do, I need all the help I can get. All I need is two minutes of your time. If you could leave me a five-star review on iTunes, that would help so much. These reviews help get my show in front of more people, which means I can reach more health coaches and complete my mission. Thank you so much for your help and I can’t wait to see you in the next episode.

Important Links:

• Tanessa Shears
• Fitbit Inspire Heart Rate
• The Power of When
• Quiz – The Power of When Quiz
• Brain.fm
• Boundless
• @TanessaShears – Instagram
• @KendraPerryInc – Instagram
• iTunes – The Wealthy Coach

About Tanessa Shears

I teach you to optimize your sleep environment and habits using real time data so you can get quality rest each night. Why does this matter? Entrepreneurs that are serious about growing their business need to have the energy and clarity to stay completely focussed and produce high quality work output.

I show you how to easily upgrade your nutrition so you can balance your hormones and eliminate brain fog and midday energy slumps. Ultimately, inflammation equals brain fog and brain fog slows you down. (This is the secret sauce!)

I give you highly effective strategies to optimize your work environment and manage your stress so you can stay in FLOW. Your highest quality work comes when you are in the zone. More of this means more impact, more results, more customers served, and a faster growing business.