20230310 Better Practice Podcast Ep 2 - Ron Barger "Re-energize and Re-focus: Self-care for Entrepreneurs"

Lisa Sretenovic [00:00:00]:

Hello, I am Lisa Sretenovic, the Velocity Detective and this is the Better Practice podcast where we empower entrepreneurs to create a thriving business while they focus on the family. And today I have with me Ron. Ron, tell me a little bit about you.

Ron Barger [00:00:19]:

Well, I am a health coach and also a personal trainer. I work with clients mainly that want to look at losing weight but also gaining more fitness in their lifestyles. And most of those clients are business owners. And so there's a big issue with business owners right now. When they get a little bit stressed out or feel tired or don't feel like they have enough energy to run their businesses, what do they do? So I try and help them with.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:00:50]:

All that that makes total sense. We spend so much of our energy focused on getting through the marketing and actually working with our customers and our clients that oftentimes our physical well being is compromised. And in order to I mean, always you have a triangle that is made up of who you are and one of those pieces is your physical well being. You've got your mind, body and soul type thing and having a good physical presence is key to running a really effective business. One of the things that I find myself even is that I'll get up at five and and I'll be going full steam. Then I'll break a little bit for lunch and I've hit a wall. I am dead tired. Somewhere around two or so. Sometimes I can pick myself back up again or whatever substitute though. I mean, it happens like 10:00 in the morning for no apparent reason. So why do they get tired like at different times during the day?

Ron Barger [00:02:19]:

Well, there's a few things that happen and all of us as business owners look at this as being just basically exhaustion. As we know, we put in several hours to make our businesses successful, but do we put in time to take care of ourselves? So one of the main things about exhaustion is the very biggest thing that most business owners face is lack of sleep. We've always got our minds, it's hard to turn off our minds just going at a million miles an hour trying to figure out our next thing that we're going to do in the business or something we have to deal with at work or the business that just takes us away from taking care of ourselves. If you can get 8 hours of sleep every night, that would very much help your exhaustion state up until a certain point during the day because it helps reset our mind, helps clear things out of our body so that we can now function going into the new day. But I also recommend if you write at lunchtime or around lunchtime, if you can just take a cat nap for around 20 minutes, if you can do that. And it will actually help re energize yourself a lot more too. And to kind of pick up for that second half of the day that we always feel a little bit tired, a little bit run down, a little drug out because we had a busy morning. But another major thing that a lot of people overlook is hydration. And the biggest thing that I found with my clients is folks aren't drinking enough water. We drink enough sodas. We need to drink enough coffee. We sometimes drink an energy drink to keep things going and keep us energized. But the major thing for your body, if you got rid of the majority of all of that, the sugary drinks, the caffeine drinks, and just drank pure water, you would feel much better. So rule of thumb in that is to drink half your body weight in ounces every single day of just nothing but pure water.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:04:23]:

Half my body weight?

Ron Barger [00:04:25]:

Half your body weight. So let me give you an example. Yeah. So let's give an example. So, if you weigh 100 pounds, half of that would be 50. Want to drink a minimum of 50oz of water, pure water, every day.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:04:41]:

And just like so that my brain does all of the math, right?

Ron Barger [00:04:46]:

Yes.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:04:47]:

50Oz divided by 8oz is a cup, right? That's just six and a quarter cups. That's not even those eight cups that everybody said, of course, no longer the 100 pounds that I was when I was a teenager, but still, it's not a lot of water. For instance, I have here a water bottle that I keep next to my desk all the time, and it's 24oz, which means that if that were my body weight, I would only have to drink just basically two of these a day. That's interesting that hydration is such a key portion of that, of why we might feel a little bit tired. Can I get away with drinking all of the water front? Can I just double it, or do I need to space it out? How does it actually work?

Ron Barger [00:05:57]:

Well, it's better for your body to absorb it over time. So if you drink it throughout the day, periodically throughout the day, then your body will actually react to it. But the key glass of water that you want to have is first thing in the morning, after you wake up, before you have a cup of coffee, before you have a soda, whatever. Your body gets dehydrated at night when you're sleeping, because, of course, you're not putting fluids into your body while you're sleeping. So when you wake up, that glass of water actually helps hydrate the body, get it re energized and started. But it also lubricates all the organs in your body so they function properly.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:06:37]:

Okay, I hadn't thought about that part. Right? Get me energized, so on and so on. That kind of made sense to me. But the organs needing stuff also didn't occur to me at all. So that's cool. Well, for sure, drinking drinking more water right when I get up is an easy thing to do. I mean, brushing your teeth, you just spit the water. Spit and then guzzle one cup of water. And that's easy enough, right?

Ron Barger [00:07:15]:

Yes, it should be fairly easy. And if you want to, you can add like, fresh lemon into it. Just squeeze a lime of lemon into or I mean a slice of lemon into your water to help with flavor. Because some folks have a hard time just drinking pure water. You can do a lime. You can do any type of fruit, like infused. If you have an infusion bottle you want to put the water in, those are all fine too. What I don't recommend is adding in artificial additives such as like a meo or some other type of flavoring that you're going to put into your water, because those come with different types of man made chemicals in them, which doesn't really help your body digest things and actually absorb the water. So if you can at all possible, it's got to be just nothing but water. But you can add some natural fruit flavor in there.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:08:10]:

Okay. Seems easy enough though, right?

Ron Barger [00:08:14]:

It's very easy. We got to get disciplined in doing it.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:08:19]:

Those atomic habits, right? Just little steps.

Ron Barger [00:08:23]:

Exactly.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:08:24]:

Okay, so I get my one glass of water in the morning, and I'm feeling better already. How can I keep that amount of energy throughout the whole day, not just right there at the morning?

Ron Barger [00:08:42]:

Well, little tricks that you can do throughout the day to keep yourself energized. Not only the water is going to help you stay hydrated, which is going to increase your energy level partially. It's not going to cure the whole thing, but it'll get you going again, is to just eat some micro snacks or small snacks in between meals. So usually most people will eat three meals a day. So you have a breakfast, a lunch, and a dinner. Usually in between there. Our body still craves or needs some foods for it to digest and absorb to give us energy. What I recommend in those things when we do snacks is eat just small stuff like nuts, a palm full of nuts, maybe halfway between the two meals that'll help pick up your energy. But I recommend them be raw nuts. If they're roasted and salted, you kind of drain some of the oils, the natural oils that you need for your body to stay energized out of the nuts themselves. So that's one thing you could do. You can also eat a fruit. It's recommended to eat at least one fruit a day, whether that be a banana, an apple, some strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, any of those things. Again, just about a palm size. A bananas, if you broke it down, would be about the size of your palm. And that has some natural sugars in those fruits that will help energize you but at the long term, if you ate a candy bar or you had an energy drink, you're going to have a fall down at the end. You're going to have where that sugar runs out and then your body's going to feel even more tired because of that sugar. Where a fruit has natural sugar which will keep you, it won't give you that drain at the end of when its source, food source runs out. Right?

Lisa Sretenovic [00:10:33]:

Yeah.

Ron Barger [00:10:34]:

And the other piece you could do if you didn't want to do nuts or fruits is just vegetables. The good thing about vegetables is you can eat as many of those as you want. There's no limit to a palm size or anything. If you wanted to do a whole plate of vegetables, you can. I recommend things like celery. Sweet bell peppers are amazing. If you used them like in hummus or even just eating them alone, they're really good. You can do any types of peppers are really good. Just some type of carrots, anything that's a vegetable base. You can do salads, any of that. Just don't put salad dressing on it. Put some lemon juice or something on it.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:11:18]:

Okay.

Ron Barger [00:11:19]:

But if you eat those things, then you're going to actually energize your body and it's going to be a healthy meal. But you can eat as much of that as you want. And if you feel like you're not getting enough to make you feel full with the nuts or the fruit, you can eat as many vegetables as you want without ever overeating them. And it will actually make you feel really full until you get to your next meal.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:11:48]:

Some of my favorite are those little sweet peppers. But they're kind of small and they're red and yellow and green. I love those. Love those.

Ron Barger [00:11:59]:

Yeah, those are fabulous. Especially if you have a little, some hummus or something to dip them into and just eat them that way. Or you can eat them alone. I just love snacking on them out of a bag.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:12:12]:

Yeah, that's where I'm at. I do love a good hummus, but just straight up. Just those little peppers are really yummy.

Ron Barger [00:12:23]:

Really good.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:12:26]:

So now I've had my little boost of my glass of water in the morning. I've had my little snack periodically in between my major meals. And I'm still not feeling that, I don't know, I'm better. But there's always stress. Even if I'm more energized, there's always something that wants to try and pull me down. How can I manage that a little bit better?

Ron Barger [00:13:03]:

Well, stress is natural in a business. Even at work. We all deal with it because of pressures of what we are up against. Assignments we have to get done sometimes meetings that we have to prepare for or just attending meetings can be stressful. And a lot of people that are introverts, it could be stressful interacting with other employees or other business owners or just people in general. So stress is an everyday occurrence no matter what environment you're in. But mainly in the business environment it can be added to, right? So there's some recommendations to do is make sure you get plenty of rest. We talked about that at the beginning. Get your 8 hours of sleep in, possibly take a quick cat nap in the afternoon just after you eat lunch or somewhere in your lunch break. Or miss lunch and do the cat nap. So you can re energize yourself so your body gets going. But the other main source of energy or eliminating the stress pieces of what we do is exercise. Yeah. And when the word exercise gets mentioned, right? Everybody goes, oh no, I haven't got time to go to the gym or I haven't got time to do this stuff. Well, there's some simple things you can really do. It doesn't take long. The main thing is that you do it for a minimum of 20 minutes. 20 minutes, if you do it properly, will get your heart rate up enough to where that 20 minutes actually reduces your stress. Okay, easy thing to do, make sure.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:14:38]:

I understand that increased heart rate through exercise, not through anxiety, will reduce my anxiousness.

Ron Barger [00:14:48]:

You said it perfectly. Yeah. So the main thing you could do is just take a 20 minutes walk. Now, we all do walking around. We may be walking from office to office to office or going out and doing things like visiting sites or whatever we do in our business. We are moving in movement, but we're also in a work environment, we have to separate from that. So separate yourself from your office, get away from the desk, get away from the vehicle that you're traveling to a site in and go do a 20 minutes walk. Now the walk needs to be a brisk walk. Brisk walk means faster than a normal pace that you would walk if you were going somewhere. If you do a 20 minutes brisk walk, it elevates your heart rate and it'll help bring down your stress levels. Plus you get some benefits from that for exercise. If you're trying to lose weight, then you can always that walk will help eventually, over time, help you start to decrease or it'll help you burn up calories, which will help you eventually decrease in weight as long as you're eating healthy and eating properly and drinking your fluids. Another thing you could do is just do a light workout. Body workouts are fine too, so you don't have to be at a gym. You can do close the door separate, you can do jumping jacks, you can do squats, you can do push ups. There's a lot of things you can do in body weight workouts that will help you relieve your stress level and separating yourself from that office. It has a good opportunity to make your mind clear because you're not stressed about what you have to do next. And you can focus on taking care of your body. And if you want to get into a full workout type situation where you're at a gym or something like that, yeah, by all means join a gym or build a gym at your home, a home based gym. But you have to be consistent and you have to get it into your routine for it to really work for you to help you reduce your stress levels.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:16:46]:

I like the idea that you said we have to separate, right. One of the big things in being an entrepreneur is that you need to separate your business and your personal finances. Well, guess what? You have to separate your business and your personal fitness, if you will, because there's not much. Well, it depends on what it is you do, right? But for me, I am in a chair almost all day long and there's not a lot of fitness involved with that with regards to my business itself. And separating that fitness so that I focus on myself is really key in order to gain more beyond just separation needs to be there. And I like how you mentioned that it clears your brain. Now, it may give you the opportunity to mull over a problem also.

Ron Barger [00:17:48]:

It could, yeah, you can do a lot of things when you separate from the office, right. You can start thinking about other things during the day that bring you energy. It can also give you opportunities to think of things that you would like to do that you haven't been taken the opportunity to do, like gathering with friends or having a meet up at your house, or what are you going to do that evening with family? Or even by yourself, maybe go to dinner or what are you going to cook? It takes you away from the business mindset and lets you think about things personally that you can actually do to have some fun, to relieve stress and actually enjoy life.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:18:27]:

Which brings us back around to that focus on your family. And guess what? You individually are part of your family, and supporting your family means that you need to be in as good of health that you can possibly be given yourself. Now I feel like, okay, I can drink that one glass of water in the morning. That's an easy thing to do. I can grab some of those sweet peppers that we talked about during the middle of the day. And it really is fairly easy to slip on some shoes and walk around the block or go up and down the steps of your building if you're in a high rise. Or close the door of your office and dang it, do some jumping jacks. Right?

Ron Barger [00:19:17]:

Yeah, exactly.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:19:19]:

Those things really easy to be able to energize yourself and make sure that you are on track to being physically fit in order to focus on your business as well as yourself. And your family.

Ron Barger [00:19:41]:

Exactly. And the more you take care of yourself, the more you can help your business thrive. That's the main key. And we forget that as business owners, right?

Lisa Sretenovic [00:19:53]:

We do. We work ourselves to the bone and then somehow or another get mad at ourselves for not producing better silly cycle. And having these really easy steps to help eliminate that craziness seems really easy to implement. So do we have any questions from the audience on any of the topics that we covered around health? I mean, we talked about why we feel exhausted during the day and what to do about that. We also talked about how to stay energized once we get past being exhausted. We still need that energy throughout the day. And then finally, how we can sort of reduce stress. Do we have any questions from the audience?

Ron Barger [00:20:57]:

Hi. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. All right, perfect. So I missed the tiring part, by the way. My name is Milan. Welcome. Thank you. So if there's any chance we can go over that, that would be great. Why do we get tired in morning? Well, most of the reasons that we get tired through our business day is very simple. We've heard it all before. One is lack of sleep. Most of us, as business owners don't get a full 8 hours of sleep every night. And it's recommended to be eight. Everybody type is a little different. Some can get by with six or hours. Some can get by with seven. Some need nine or ten. But the rule of thumb is try and get a solid 8 hours of sleep every single night, and that will help you. The other piece is hydration. If you are not hydrated, your body will actually start to tire throughout the day because it doesn't have enough fluids in it to keep it energized. And the key point to that, as we discussed a little earlier, is making sure that you have a glass of water as soon as you get up before you have any other fluids. Reasons for that is, number one, it hydrates your body after sleeping, because if you slept for 8 hours, you were not taking in any fluids while you were sleeping. And it needs that to energize and wake up. It also helps to provide fluid and re energize all the organs of the body so that they function properly. And that'll help you stay from getting tired at least through the first portions of your day and then stay hydrated throughout your day, which is rule of thumb, is half your body weight in ounces. So again, if you're 100 pounds, you want to drink at least 50oz of water every day. Figure out yours as far as how much you weigh and what yours needs to be as far as in ounces. And then that'll help you throughout the day. And it needs to be just pure water. You can add like a fluid, I mean a liquid, like from fruits, like a lemon or a lime. Or you can add, if you have an infusion bottle, add fruits or vegetables into that to where it infuses into the water if you need that, to change the flavoring of the water. Because some folks, I find, have a hard time just drinking pure water. But that's what the body needs. Not coffee, not orange juice, not energy drink, but just pure water. That's what it thrives on. Hopefully that answers your question. Yes, sir. Thanks so much.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:23:37]:

So, Ron, why do so many people absolutely have to have that cup of coffee first thing? If water is what we should have, why does that caffeine, why is that so much more appealing to us?

Ron Barger [00:23:56]:

That's a great question. So all of us have created habits that we need to follow. Of course, some habits that we've created need to be broken so that we don't follow them all the time. And one of the habits most of us have created is that you've got to have that cup of coffee first thing in the morning. We trained our brain to tell us as soon as we get up, we've got to have that cup of coffee in the morning. Personally, I don't drink coffee. I drink tea. But it's a caffeine based type product, and, yes, we like it. So right now, I know you can't see this on a podcast audio, but I'm holding a cup of tea. I like having my cup of tea. It's just something we train ourselves to do, and we love the flavors, and we love how it reacts with our body. But aside from those, like a liquid tea or a coffee, that does not include the liquids that you need to put into your body. So when we're talking water intake, yeah, we make coffee with water. Yeah, we make tea with water, but that cannot be included because you've added something to the water that's not natural for the body. So we need to make sure that it's just pure water that we drink in that recommended amount that we put into our body of water of the half your body weight and ounces. So you can have as much coffee or tea or whatever you want, but you have to have the ounces of pure water for your body to really function also.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:25:24]:

Right.

Ron Barger [00:25:25]:

And the worst thing you could put in your body, and I know it's very common today, is an energy drink. The high amounts of caffeine and sugar that it produces to the body increases the rate of the heart beyond where it's healthy for the heart to function. And what that'll do is actually create more stress for your body, which then.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:25:47]:

Turns into stress for your business, which decreases your net profit. We don't want that where we're going here.

Ron Barger [00:25:56]:

Exactly.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:25:58]:

It has been uber super good to have you on. I feel like these are easy things to implement in our everyday lives, and we'll definitely get that improvement that we're looking for in our businesses. So how can we get a hold of you?

Ron Barger [00:26:16]:

Well, the best way to get a hold of me right now is my business name is Health through Fitness. You can look that up. Best way is straight through my email. I interact with potential clients and clients all the time through my email. Right now, I have so many clients coming in through word of mouth that that's the best way to reach me. So my email address is runnerron262@gmail.com. So that's runnerron262@gmail.com.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:26:47]:

Awesome.

Ron Barger [00:26:48]:

Easiest way.

Lisa Sretenovic [00:26:50]:

Well, it has really been a pleasure to have you on the Better Practice podcast. I am Lisa Sretenovic, and we will catch you next episode.