These transcripts are AI-generated, and spelling may not be 100% accurate (especially for names, places, and methodologies).
Claire Wu (00:01)
I would say, maybe look at three things on your own. It’s around your self care that prioritize caring for yourself. Make sure that you get enough sleep, make sure you have a healthy diet, make sure that you are moving your body regularly and engaging in activities that you actually enjoy, you know, outside of your work. And so we can reduce that stress, have more relaxations. And I would say a lot of times self care can be in any forms.
Craig Minter (00:42)
So hello, and welcome to The Healthy Business Lab podcast, where we talk to allied health and related business owners to share insights, learnings and education for us all to basically learn more at the end of the day. And today, I’m super excited to have Claire Wu on the call. We’ve had a chat before this, and super excited to get further insights and share it with our community here. So Claire, welcome to the podcast, and how about introducing yourself a little bit more than what I’ve just done there? Yeah. Thank you. Great. I’m so excited to be on the profit first. So I’m Claire Wu I am a resilient speakers, a therapist and the coach, being a physiotherapist, working in the mental health for around 15 years. I work with a lot of people with anxiety, depression, and many to help them overcome those and build mental resilience by resetting the nervous system. We’ve got, like, physical product. We have coaching programs and also speaking keynotes as well. So yeah, that’s what I do in our show. I love it. And bit of a plug for your business to get that out there for people to be able to follow, yeah, sure, just my business, run, breathe into peace. Our vision is to empower 100 million people globally to overcome anxiety, build mental resilience by resetting the nervous system. Yeah, I love that. And again, that massive impact, massive results, and something that what you’re doing in the space of if I put it in the context of business owners in general, and even business owners in the health space, one thing that often gets put by the wayside at times if we forget to look after ourselves in many ways. And many people in this space often put their clientele first, and which is just that big hearted and the nurturing nature of the profession, but looking after ourselves is such a big impact that we can’t help people as much or as many, or have that massive impact like you’re talking about, unless we actually look after ourselves first. I’d love for you to sort of come from that perspective in what you do, and some ideas that people can think of about looking after themselves with the breath and managing anxiety and resetting that nervous system. Yes, I’ve seen a lot of time. I collaborate with a lot of doctors, specialists, like from psychiatrists to GPS, you know, practitioners to occupational therapists, to psychologists and physiotherapists and all the other allied health practitioners. And what I’ve seen a lot is that, because they have worked in the past in more of a traditional medical settings, a lot of people run on adrenaline and cortisol, so most of them don’t take breaks. Most of them are constantly on the go, a lot of them have burnouts and feeling really exhausted fatigue, and yeah, it can be quite challenging when that happens. It’s like when you cannot take care of yourself, it’s hard to take care of other people. Burnout is really common, and it’s something that I do work with, with some of my clients, and it’s almost like because our nervous system includes our brain, our spine and our peripheral nerves that connects to our hands, our lungs and our guts. So our body, naturally, we have this mechanism where we relax, where we rest after a stressful event, the vagus nerve comes in, and that nerve is again the longest nerve that connects the brain to your heart. Also that nerves kicks in, and then it relaxes your heart, it slow down your breathing, slow down the heart rate, calm the nervous system. But a lot of time, if we’re constantly in the stressful environments, that function gets lost, and then that’s why we feel this chronic stress and chronic anxiety, because we never allow our body to fully recover. And that’s how burnout happens. So we can see that being increasing over time. 70% of healthcare worker that’s experiencing burnout and it’s increasing throughout it’s something that is quite common. It could be a mix of like, long working hours, high stress levels, also this lack of support in the mental wellness at the workplace. So yeah, it’s fairly common. Yeah, it’s a very big number, isn’t it? When you say 70% of
Craig Minter (04:47)
people are experiencing it in that state and that phase, so I guess even from a very short aspect of bringing awareness to that for people is any ideas and tips of something that they can. To start to get that finding that connection again, to finding that function of reducing the stress and the pressures and bringing that to light. Any quick tips for our business owners out there,
Claire Wu (05:12)
if you’re running your own allied health clinics or practices, I think first is to kind of identify like where you’re at with your mental wellness, there’s some characteristic with burnout, like exhaustion, feeling like you don’t have any energy left, feeling like you’re really exhausted, mentally, physically, if you’re tired all the time, you feel really drained, or you feel really detached, like do you feel like you’re detached from your work, from your clients, from the job at hand, like you don’t have any engagement with satisfaction from the work. You feel like there’s a lack of accomplishment, like you’re putting in a lot of effort, a lot of work, but then there’s no outcome that you desire. It’s like could be a feeling like if ineffectiveness or lack of accomplishment, and you might even have physical symptoms like headaches, gastrointestinal symptoms, muscle tension and insomnia. Couldn’t sleep at night, even though you’re very tired. And yeah, just to really to monitor those and also check if you have any depressive symptoms, anxiety and irritability that might be associated with it. And that’s when you reach to a point where you okay, you really need to, like, slow down and rest.
Craig Minter (06:17)
And so that’s probably the follow on question from that was definitely going to be that notion of awesome tick to, you know, a couple of those boxes, or in some cases, many of those boxes. What are the quick wins that people can get, as far as trying to then take a step, and I know it’s often baby steps, but what are a couple of those, those baby steps to then start to turn that around.
Claire Wu (06:42)
Yes, again, if you run your own clinic, I think it’s a lot easier than if you’re working for someone else, if you’re running a clinic, I think it’s really to look at a couple things. I would say maybe look at three things on your own. It’s around your self care that you prioritize caring for yourself. Make sure that you get enough sleep. Make sure you have a healthy diet. Make sure that you are moving your body regularly and engaging in activities that you actually enjoy, you know, outside of your work, so we can reduce that stress more relaxations. And I would say a lot of times, self care can be in any forms. It can be meditation, it can be breath work. It can be going in nature, going to hikes, but, yeah, something you can do really simply is just 510 minutes during a day. It’s really focusing on your breathing. Because, in a way, when we slow down our breathing, we extend the exhalations, it is significantly reduce our stress and anxiety. So it activates the vagus nerve. Yeah, it activates the vagus nerve and calm the heart rate.
Craig Minter (07:41)
I’d love to just delve into that touch more knowing from my own experience of I’ve done a bunch of meditation and different things in the past as well, but more recently, having found breath work and being more conscious of my breathing. And even before I jumped onto this podcast, it was being super conscious of my breath. And even as you were talking, it was just triggering myself to go breathing in through my nose and being quite conscious of where I’ve come to a point of being conscious of I’ve probably got to a phase where I’ve done more mouth breathing than the the nasal breathing. I know that’s it’s been an interesting insight. As you go to bed and concentrating on nasal breathing rather than mouth breathing, I’ve noticed marked difference in my feeling and comfort and that exhalation part as well. I’d love for you to delve a little bit further on that.
Claire Wu (08:30)
Yes, there are hundreds of breathing techniques. I think breathing is the central of what we do as human we often breathe every single day. We take 1000s, you know, 10s of 1000s of breath and a lot of time if we’re not breathing properly, it can lead to many problems with our muscle tension, with our high blood pressure and all of that. So they are again, hundreds of them. So some breathing can energize you. Some breathing can relaxes you. Some breathing helps you connect more deeply with your higher self. Some breathing can help release the past. And I think just to put it very simply, turns it’s like, when you breathe in, it tend to increase the heart rate, and when you breathe out, it slow down the heart rate. I usually recommend, if you’re already really stressed and anxious, you want to focus on the exhalation on, like slow breathing out. And we usually recommend you do it through the mouth, like you’re blowing a candle, because when you do that, you kind of the air resistance is pushing him back, and that forces your long sex to open so then it there’s more oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange. If you can practice with me, that’ll be great. We can do this together. I’ll probably take around a minute.
Craig Minter (09:44)
Yeah, let’s do it. Yeah, yeah. You can rate kind
Claire Wu (09:47)
of like your stress level at the moment on a scale of zero to 10. When it’s minimum, 10 is excruciating. So just rate a number in your mind. And from here, I just want you to just sit up. Right place, both feet underneath your knees and just sitting upright, lengthening the spine. And from here, I want you just to breathe out through your mouth like you’re blowing a candle for eight seconds. 2345678,
Claire Wu (10:18)
and breathing naturally through your nose and exhale out through your mouth. 2345678,
Claire Wu (10:29)
good. And inhale again through your nose and exhale out through your mouth as slow long as possible, very good. Just keep breathing out and breathing into your nose. Now we’re going to exhale out through your mouth for 16 seconds, 234, and just keep the breath slow and long, like you’re breathing out a string. Keep breathing out and inhale again through your nose and exhale out through your mouth, slow, long and consistent. Just let everything go all your worries and your stress float away. Just keep breathing out. One more here, breathe into your nose and exhale out through your mouth like you’re blowing out the candle. And just keep breathing out. Keep letting everything sink down. Let everything go. Let go of the attachment, let go of the outcome, good. And now just take your time. Resume your breathing. Just come back to your usual breathing. And just feel the floor underneath your feet, feel the seat underneath your buttock, feel that you’re supported. You’re coming back to this present, to this moment, and just checking with yourself again where you’re at with your stress level on the scale of one to 10. One is minimum. 10 is excruciating. You might notice it’s dropped. If it hasn’t dropped, you can practice this again. Yeah,
Craig Minter (11:51)
definitely that’s a great little practice that people can hopefully they’ve done along gone along with at home, I just did as well. And whenever I do an exercise like that, it definitely harms things. I love the visual that you shared all I see things in pitches, so that notion of breathing in speeds up the heart sometimes, sometimes it does. And then that slow breath, and how you’ve just gone through a process to be able to have that slow, controlled breath out, which is longer than the in breath just and makes sense as well. He said that while I know sometimes I’m doing that, I just started to think about that. And she’s like, Yeah, I’m slowing myself down. And then you can, you literally feel the physiology of your body being in that space. So thank you for sharing that. That was a great little exercise. I’d love to sort of change tack a little bit now, in essence, moving from that notion of business owners looking after themselves to then looking after their business as well. And you know, at the healthy Business Lab here, we’re very much about having experimenting in business with experiments that work, some that don’t. And we always learn from those in your business life and running businesses and being involved in businesses, I’d love to learn just a couple of experiments that you’ve potentially done and the outcomes of those in the learnings that you’ve had that other business owners might get some benefit from the insights. Yes,
Claire Wu (13:15)
absolutely. So run breathing to peace, or we’ve developed, like a couple product that’s hyper patented. One of it is the the breathing necklace. What you we’ve just done with the breathing, like some people forget about to do it, but that’s why we create this breathing necklace, so people can use this to slow down their breathing. So when they get stressed, they reach for the necklace. They breathe out through it, they slow down the breathing and slow down the heart rate and calm the body. And it’s a token of the reminders at the beginning, we really focus on a lot of the markets, like the local markets when it comes to selling this product. And we have some success in some market and some that we don’t, I would say like 10 20% of the market were successful, and a lot of them are not. We basically spend, like, the whole day at the market, and sometimes selling less than $1,000 in the day. And that kind of hurts in some way, because you’re going out there and you’re hoping at least I need to make around 500 to 1000 a day or more. Then I realized that this retail part is not working, and we start shifting to wholesale. So when we shift to wholesale, that means we start reaching out to clinics, to spas to gift boxes and whole food shops, and this is when we start to gain traction. So we have our first 10,000 orders that came through, and that just really helped us. Took off the business. That was a big learning curve for me, because I never really tap into wholesale in the past, and I’ve learned so much along the way how to prepare your catalog, your order forms, even the website and reaching out, sending the sample and everything even going to defeat going to read skife, Mind Body Spirit festival and other trade shows. And so that has really helped us to position ourselves as the go to brand when it comes to using reading tools. And I mean, we have other tools. With like journals and cards as well. But you know, that really helped us to open that new market for us where we can actually reach a wider audiences. Instead of selling 10 products at the market, we’re now selling 1000s, 10s of 1000s.
Craig Minter (15:15)
And that’s a nice insight, that it’s going selling from one to one in a certain style of market to that one to many approach and the shift from that. So I’m probably curious around, how long did you spend going to the markets and doing those sorts of things? How often, how long did you sort of do of that before you started to start to shift that thinking?
Claire Wu (15:35)
Yeah, I am someone who is quite resilient in the way, as I mentioned, the markets on and off, right? It’s good and bad. So there are times where you sold a couple 100 in a day, the time you sold 1000s a day. So you kind of like giving it 90 days. And some does well, some didn’t do well. So I, overall, I think I gave it around that 12 months. And between those times, I actually invited some of my friends to join me at the market. And a lot of them, they just did it once and they give up. Like, for example, they did it once, they didn’t sell much, or they didn’t sell anything, and then they just give up. So I think you need to have a strategy, have a plan in place, but again, you got a experiment, but also set a time or threshold where you stop and then you move on to the next strategy. So if you have like, three strategy in place, give that a try. Yeah? Give it 90 days. And because for us, it’s still working some parts. So then we keep, continue to experiment for another 90 days, and then up to a point where, okay, now we’re getting consistently not hitting $1,000 then, okay, let’s, let’s let that go and then try another stretch.
Craig Minter (16:42)
Yeah, love that. Love that. And what I’m hearing is that notion of, have a plan, have some numbers around that, have something, have the timeline around that, and then you’ve got something to notionally Mark yourself against, to then go, Okay, what was the good? What was the things that could have improved? Where to from here. So I love that again. This podcast is an example of for me, for an experiment in my notion. Okay, we’re going to do 100 episodes, see what the impact is, see what the outcome is, and then we can make an assessment of, is it achieving what we want to do? Is it getting the reach? Is it, you know, having the impact and the life? And you’ve shared an example of that there. So that’s great example. Have you got another one there? By any chance
Claire Wu (17:26)
there’s another one I can share with so other than running my product business, I also do coaching. I do my coaching for again, helping people overcome anxiety by resetting the nervous system. So I think at the start I was really focusing on outreach on social media. So we have a lot of marketing posts, and we have a lot of engagement from from 1020 to hundreds of engagement each post. So we start reaching out to people that have engaged with the post. And the process is really slow, so the goal is to to get people to book a 30 minute call, and from there to see whether they might be a good fit for the coaching program that I offer. And it was so slow. It was really slow because it’s like, you’ve got like, 10 to hundreds of people, and then you got an outreach. It’s like, you’re opening a lot of message. My Messenger is full really, every day is like hundreds of messages, and you lose track, and then it becomes really slow. Like I did have like, one or two clients, but after 100 outreach, so I was bit like, okay, they could be something that’s a little bit better. So I started hosting my own master class in the explain what I do. It’s all about reset nervous system and thrive. And in the master class, I literally will get, like, from 50 sign up to, like, 200 sign ups, so there’s a lot of sign up and from there, I explain what I do. I explain the process. I showcase my clients results and showing them people the steps how to reset and thrive, including, like, mapping out their nervous system state, their triggers, and then recommendations on how to get back to the flow state, and that was really working really well. I’ve got at least three, five clients just from running master classes. And in a way, when I’m speaking in the master class, you also position me as an expert, compared to reaching out to people and then trying to build that connection and start the conversations.
Craig Minter (19:18)
Yeah. Awesome again. Another great example of looking at things in a certain way, having a plan, having a strategy, working to it, and then just keep on tweaking it. And it’s kind of like tweaking the experiment to go, Well, what’s going to land, what’s going to have, the effort versus reward kind of thing. I love that. That’s, again, another nice insight, I think, for people just to have it in their back of their mind, and as you were doing that, you’re talking about your master class and the life something that we love to do again. That’s it. It’s the education piece. Yeah, we get to educate as well as then for those people, some people go, Oh, I can go do that sort of stuff myself. Or they can say, actually, I want to only make that happen so much quicker. I’m going to start working with you, for example. But, and you also touched on. Sharing the client results. I’d love for you to sort of share one of those here, if you’ve got a case study of whether it’s for coaching, or whether it’s for the breathing product, or the like of somebody that’s coming to your world and they’ve had certain challenges, and then as a result of what you talk about, resetting the nervous system and the breathing and those sorts of things that turn around story. I’d love for you to share an example of that.
Claire Wu (20:23)
So most of our clients, they come through, they usually buy the product, and after they purchase the breathing necklace, or we have our journals and cards. So these are the journals that we collaborate with the First Nation artists. They usually purchase the items. After that, it helps them improve. And then they want to go a little bit deeper in their healing journey or recovery journey. So one client that I have, her name is Julia. Julia is occupational therapist, and then she reached out to me online, yeah. So when we have the chat, Julia just, you know, come in, and then she say, you know, Clay, I’ve got nothing. Literally, I have nothing in my life. I’ve got no money. I’ve got no support from my friends and family, and I just, I don’t know what to do. I’ve got nothing. And I sit there, and then I was like, I look at the screen, we’re on this zoom call, we’re on the screen, and I can see that she’s in this really beautiful house, a very big wooden house. And then with the wall art, with the very high, lifted ceilings, and then with the flowers, with the decorations. And I was a bit surprised, as she says she’s got nothing. We we work together for around three months, and we help her to reset her nervous system. And after that, she started to see that she actually have everything she’s she applied for the funding to start her a product business, and she got the support from her friends and family, and then she actually launched a product in New Zealand. Now she’s selling her products globally. She’s still doing her therapy work, but now she’s got the product on the side, which is bringing extra revenues and where she can actually travel the world. I’m just really happy for her. So that’s just the power of the nervous system. Because a lot of time, our limiting belief, a lot of people think that it’s in our mind, like with her, she has got this money, trauma and scarcity, and things are not enough. Things are never enough. And it’s actually stored in parts of the body, that adversity is stored in parts of the body. So if she tried to think her way out of that drama, that story, actually, I had enough. Actually, I’m abundant. It’s very challenging. So what we do, or it takes a lot of time. It takes hours and days. But what we try to do is we map out the way the adversity is stored in the body, and then we focus on the movement that’s customized to that, and help to release and relieve all of that out of her body and then out of her mind as well.
Craig Minter (22:35)
Love that, and that’s a great again way to, I guess, round off the conversation of that visual of being able to get in and unwind all this historic stuff that’s held in the body, and coming back to that, putting up a picture to what resetting the nervous system can actually look like. And so love that story that you’ve shared of how you’re able to, three months or so, being able to transform the outlook. And again, the idea of then, by taking some of those stresses and the pressures away, then the world has become the oyster for Julia there to be able to go see other opportunities, and by the sounds of it, go on and do some pretty amazing work. So that’s great. Well, 30 minutes on the.as we come here, and it’s around the time that we have for these episodes and these podcasts. And I’m sure there’s plenty of things that you’ve talked about there. I know I’m going to go away off the back of our previous chat and this chat here now and follow you. And so if people do want to follow you further, follow your content and hear what you’ve got coming up, because you did give me a little teaser before, as well as to some cool things that you’ve got on the radar, love for you to share, where people can find you, connect with you and what you’ve got coming up in the next couple of months.
Claire Wu (23:53)
Yeah, sure. Well, time flies. I am on across social media, so you can add me on Facebook, Claire Alvera o or on LinkedIn with Claire O, and you find our brand breathing to peace on Instagram. But yeah, Facebook is the easiest way to find me. I’m very active on Facebook. What’s something that’s really exciting is that I finished my book and it’s now with the publisher. So this is my book. It’s called How to Get over your beep issued. So yeah, it’s giving people, helping them reclaim their life with proven strategies, sustainable techniques. This is the book that I’m really excited to to launch with my journey and 20 years of healing and also working with clients over 15 years. It was just the right time to launch.
Craig Minter (24:41)
Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that information, and we’ll include all those details in the show notes. And when the book is released, we’d love to get those details here. We can add those notes to the to the show notes, and the pre order is all the pre order is all priority. There we go. Well, make sure offline. We’ll grab those. These links for those as well, so we can add them to the show notes for our audience as well. Once again, I really appreciate you joining the conversation today and for all the allied health business owners and related health and wellness related businesses out there, then there’s definitely a few key takeaways that you can start to implement from today that can probably start to make some progress and incremental steps in your own life, specifically, but then also the impact that can then flow on to business and the experiments that you might start to look at. So thanks again, Claire, for your time today. Yeah, nice little
Claire Wu (25:35)
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And I just want to say I do offer a 30 minute chat where, if anyone is a bit unsure of where they’re at, or feeling really stressed or overwhelmed, I do offer 30 minute chat just to to understand where you’re at, where you want to head to, and how I could potentially help you, feel free to booking a call to chat further.
Craig Minter (25:56)
Awesome. Thank you for sharing that and for providing that offer to the audience, and we’ll see everybody on see and here we’ll interact with the video and the audio side of this podcast, but looking forward to sharing more stories in the upcoming episodes. See
Claire Wu (26:11)
you soon. Yeah, see ya. Bye. Bye. Thank you for
Craig Minter (26:15)
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