Hey.

There. It's financial expert, Nicole Lappin. And I'm Magnify, your AI Investing Assistant. We're working together on this new podcast, Money Assistant, where we talk to people about their money problems and then help them create an actionable plan to solve them. If we take a look at how that will impact future of Paola, she will be dead free in under six years and have a million dollars in retirement. How does that sound? Wait, what? Meet Money Assistant, premiering September fourth, wherever you get your favorite podcast. I'm Nicole Lappin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. In recent years, there has been significant conversation about burnout and how to beat it. From those conversations, we know that mindfulness has a place in our work. But how literal should that be? According to Thomas to the Chief Mindfulness Officer at Tiffin, it should be pretty literal. Today, I talked to Thomas about why we all need a Mindfulness Officer. And at the end of our conversation, Thomas takes me, and now you, through a mindfulness exercise he does with top execs. The exercise is designed to help us see a situation clearly without stress or anxiety.

So be sure to listen to this until the end because this is a great exercise to have in your back pocket the next time stress strikes, and it always does. So here's Thomas. Thomas Drowge, welcome to Money Rehab.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It is.

A pleasure to have you. And I'm excited to hear more about your role. You are the CMO at Tiffin. Typically, when we talk about CMOs, we talk about Chief Marketing Officers, but that is not your M.

That is not my M.

What is CMOs down for for you?

Chief Mindfulness Officer.

That sounds amazing. I would love to know everything about that. First of all, what does that mean?

It's interesting. I think so far in the world, I'm the only one that I can find anyway. But my whole mission in creating this role was to make a model that other companies could use to put this a role into every C-suite in every company across the planet is my mission, I guess. What it really is this combination of sure, mindfulness-based practices and understanding of neuroscience, but also a lot of strategic and performance alliances as well. I do everything from taking a group through 60-90 seconds of meditation before every meeting. Then I also listen to how people are performing in the meeting, what strategy the company is using, what messages people are trying to communicate and how well they're doing it and where they're missing or where they're nailing it so that I can help them perform. Then that blends into a general executive coach performance role as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds super cool, and I am with you that this type of role should be in many C-suites, if not all. I'm really surprised, though. It doesn't make sense to me that no other company has that. All the Silicon Valley companies, even back when Steve Jobs had a guru, what did he have?

He had a guru.

On staff, right?

Yeah, on staff. I think there are lots of variations on the theme. I don't think what I'm doing is something that in one form or another doesn't occur. But the question that I asked myself was, Oh, could we actually define this role as what skill sets are necessary for you to deliver it? There's a very simple saying in order to know the world, you have to know yourself. Because if you don't know yourself, you can't parse out what's you and what's not you to understand the world more clearly. All the work I do is basically around self-awareness within this target of highly pressurized startup performance companies right now. I think it's particularly interesting to do it in a place like Tiffin because this is an intense, driven, financial tech company. Everyone's like, How do you get people mindful in that environment? It's like, Well, actually, because these tools make people better and happier in their lives here, and they perform better and faster because of it. Mindfulness isn't this fuzzy thing that means sit around all day and look at your toes. It's like, Oh, who am I? What am I doing here? How can I be here and show up 100 %?

In order to do that, you've got to know who you are and what you're doing.

Let's talk more about those tools and let's get granular with the framework. Can you explain what your day-to-day is as a Chief Mindfulness Officer?

It just sounds crazy, doesn't it?

Yeah, a little bit, but the best crazy.

Yeah. My day can run from 6:00 AM at the founder's house doing qigong practice before we start the day.

Wait, what practice?

So qigong is like a embodies movement practice, like Tai Chi, but it's wellness-based and it's rooted in Daoist traditions, which are similar to Buddhist traditions. It's basically a movement, breathing, and attention practice to get your body aligned and ready to go for the day. Kind of like a morning yoga, just different. But we'll often meet and we'll be there before the sun rises and it'll come up as we're practicing. At 7:00, we'll separate and then I'll see him back at the office at 8:30 or whatever it is. I might start with that and then I'll often do one-on-ones with a lot of the executive team and rising stars and all. I think that's one of the biggest things I learned here was that the organism of a company, which is made up of all these smaller parts, still has to function in two ways. It has to serve the needs of the individual, and it has to serve the needs of the larger company. When you look at harmony and sustainability, they're all built on this ecosystem model, and that's where companies do the best. How did you.

Figure that out? What were you doing before this? What makes you singularly qualified to be Chief Mindfulness Officer?

I was an alternative medicine doctor for 25 years in New York at a medical practice in Midtown. I spent a lot of time training doctors in Western medicine to understand how to use these principles as they're operating. I treated a lot of patients. I was the alternative medicine director for this cancer center. I basically spent 25-30 years working with individuals. At some point, it became very, very clear to me that if I could reach their thought process and their emotional content and teach them how that connects to their body that I could keep them from going far enough out of balance that it turns into what we would call illness. I opened a movement studio in Tribeca, and actually the founder of this company came to me one day out of the blue on a recommendation, I don't know, four or five years ago in New York and said, I've been working with this coach who says there are these four things that are critical: journaling, meditation, solo time in nature, and qigong, which is this mindfulness movement practice. He came to me to study qigong, and that's how we started connecting. He became the founder of Tiffin.

Eventually, I started working with the leadership group here and everything. I eventually said to him one day about a year and a half ago, Hey, I think we should create this role and build this into the organization. I explained everything logically around why I think that's such a good idea. Then in all caps in the bottom of the email, I just said, But my heart says, let's do this. I think 20 minutes later, he emailed me back and said, Let's do it. 18 months later, I think we've really seen a pretty profound effect on how people operate, how they communicate, how they function, how they feel, how they treat each other. That's been really rewarding for me.

You have regular sessions with executives, the entire employee base. Do you have your office door open? Is it like the resident shrink of sorts? I'm trying to imagine what the formula is. Who are you?

For a long time, I used to describe it as Wendy from Billions.

Oh, I was more thinking of Lucy and Snoopy, the doctor is in type thing, but your analogy is better. Wendy and Billions. Okay.

In the early seasons before she went really sideways. One of the things we realized was that it's important that I work with the leadership team, and it's important that I work with people who are being recognized for driving themselves and being rising stars and really contributing because we want to move them on a growth path. I don't work with the whole company one-on-one. I just work with those people one-on-one. It's not like the resident shrink. I think that took me a long time because the founder was like, You can't talk to everybody. There's too many people. You don't have enough time. We need you at high impact. We don't need you talking to everybody. We need you talking to the leaders because then they can amplify the signal through their teams and the culture starts to build a behavior. That's crucial. Can you just.

Define mindfulness? We've all heard of mindfulness, but might not be able to articulate it.

All it really means is being able to pay attention to the present moment and what you're doing through as many or all of your senses in real time.

I like your definition, and I think of it as paying attention to what you're paying attention to.

That's a great way to say it, actually. I like that quite a bit. Okay.

Do you need an apprentice? For people who are ambitious and busy and stressed, what are your specific routines or behaviors or practices that you recommend they integrate into their everyday life? By the way, these practices, my favorite part of all of this is that it's my favorite price. It's free.

Yeah. I think one of the struggles that we have as humans living in especially consumer society is that we want the next best thing in the magic bullet. We keep adopting lots of things and trying them out for a little while. I think the first piece is when you're thinking about any practice, what do you like to do? How much are you going to commit that feels right to you and be honest with yourself about those things? When I take people into meditation, I'll often start them if they've never meditated before with what's called non-sleep, deep rest, which is a 20-minute guided practice that allows someone to go into the value proposition of meditation. Downregulate the nervous system, clear the mind, rest the body, regenerate without them having to sit upright and find bliss, which is a much more challenging concept. I'll often start them there, and it'll often lead to meditation, or that'll be enough as they'll get the benefit they need. So be honest with yourself about what you're willing to do, what you want to do, and how you like to do things because your practices should fit into those spaces or they won't stay with you.

And then with my teams, very simple things that I teach them are you have circadian rhythms. There's times when you need to sleep. There's times of day when you're at your peak energy. There's times of day when you need to take a break. We know adrenaline rising and cortisol rising and cortisol descending all happen in relationship to your sleep cycle. If you want to optimize your work and your ability to do it, then track your time for a week and know where your peak energy is. Wherever your peak energy is, is where your peak mitochondria availability is. That's your powerhouse of the cell. Mytichondria is directly linked to willpower. You pick the things that you hate doing or that are really hard, and those go into that slot of when you have the most energy.

I mean, for everybody, it's different. But isn't it supposed to be something like the midpoint of the time you fall asleep to the time you wake up plus 12. If you go to bed at 9:00 and you wake up at 12:00 midnight plus 12:00 at noon is supposed to be the time where you lull.

Yeah, I don't actually know the math on that. That's interesting. But I think people are different, and especially in the media environment that we all live in, the circadian cycles are thrown off by sunlight and electrical light at night. Again, I like to have people track it themselves, but sure, it's somewhere between when you wake up in the morning. For a lot of people, the 6:00-9:00 AM or 6:00-8:00 AM, or for some people, it's 9:00-11:00 AM is this peak window where they have the most energy. I tell them like, Okay, go and do the things that you hate to do that you know you have to get done today because it's going to be off your plate and you're going to have the energy to do it. Or do the most complicated tasks because you're going to be able to think most efficiently. Then notice how the rest of your day is going.

It sounds like you recommend whatever somebody is going to stick to, which I often do with finances too. I don't care what app you use. My favorite app for you is the one that you will actually continue to use. Oftentimes, we bite off more than we can chew, or we make these big proclamations that we're going to meditate 30 minutes a day. Or I have supplements that I think I'm going to take all the time, and I've taken them for five days, and then the full bottle is basically of turmeric or I don't even know whatever supplements is like sitting in my shelf because I got over it. I was gung ho about it. It sounds like starting small and with something that you can stick to is better than getting really ambitious about it.

Yeah. I think you just said something really interesting. By the way, I'm exactly there with you on the five days of supplements, and then I don't go back to them.

I think we've all been there. Yeah.

But what you said was when we're suffering, when there's pain, we're motivated. We're often extremely motivated because we're unhappy or in pain or whatever it is. We dive into this extreme response. But then when we're out of pain, we no longer have the motivation that we had to do that level of commitment. Understanding what you think can carry on is really important. But even more important is to start these practices when there is no particular pain point that's driving you.

Oh, 100 %. I am most proud in my mental health maintenance, I suppose, that I go to therapy religiously every Friday at 10:00 AM, whether something is going on or not. In the past, I would use it as a triage method. Like when shit was getting really bananas, I would go and do the things because that's typically how we approach this. We're reactive versus proactive. We rarely put good stuff in the bank when it's not an emergency. And so, yeah, sticking to something when it's not in dire straits is hard to do, but a really great investment in your future self.

Yeah, I think the therapy analogy is actually one of the best ones because somewhere along the way, and this is a big piece of what I try to teach people, the ROI of doing therapy converted from you having to fix something that was broken to, Oh, I could never be broken again. I know that's a very simplistic view of therapy, but I think it's important to understand that the maintenance of something over time converts in its value for you. These practices are all like that. That's why it has to be something that you're either curious about or it fits into your schedule or you want to do it or something like that. Otherwise, it won't stay when you're not in pain.

Yeah, well, now you're talking my language, the ROI and the conversion.

Yes.

Thomas. Come on now. I do work in a finance company.

Have you bound yourself using more finance jargon when explaining mindfulness practices?

It was always very important to me that everything I taught was from our world and not some mystery, fantasy thing that a person in red robes could teach you if you climb the mountain. But that it was, hey, this is a practice. This is what it does. This is how you use it. Yes, it comes from... Sure, I dove deep and apprentice and was an adept in Daoism and deep student of Buddhism. But these technologies are the technologies that come out of self-awareness practices that naturally evolve in those kinds of ancient religions in every indigenous tradition around the world. That's because they work.

Yeah, but it's hard to go chill in an ashram all day and get stuff done right. What I found to be the most challenging thing when I was teaching myself a lot of these practices was it's all well and good when you're sitting at Miravol in equine therapy and not working, or hanging out in Bali with a 100-year-old healer and totally off the grid. But how do you incorporate that type of stuff when you're really stressed out and you're working all the time? How do you take that and put it into real life? I think a lot of these practices that I've studied are like, Yeah, I'll totally do that when I get stressed, or I'll do this exercise. But then the real final test is actually incorporating that into real life when those stressors happen, that's when it really matters. It's easy to do it sitting in India, in a silent meditation retreat. It's harder to do it in the thick of the fintech hustle and bustle. Yeah.

I remember in our studio, we shared a floor with the yoga studio, and I would see all these people come in and they would do all these things for this yoga studio. Then they would come out and be mean to the person at the front desk. I was like, Oh, we need to translate that off the mat. That became a big movement in yoga was like, Take this off the mat, put it into your life, not just in this room. I think one of the things you just said is a deep component in what's called intentional change theory, which is this idea around how we change. One of the things that we've learned is that in order to change, you have to have this ideal of what you're striving for, and you're going to get all your dopamine from thinking about it. I want to be this person, or I want to do this thing. Then you have to have this reckoning moment of, Well, this is where I'm at. Then you build a pathway. Okay, I'm going to try this practice. The piece that is critical in those moments is that you need an accountability partner or a community or something that's going to keep you on track long enough for you to build a habit or a behavior or get to the ROI side.

Hit your conversion hour. How many hours does it take to reach conversion? I think that's a big piece of what I do here. On Wednesdays at 12 o'clock, everybody stops working, and we all start either meditating or jumping around and doing some practice. We do it right in the middle of the office. You can't stay and work at your computer. You got to jump in. Sometimes you really don't want to. But afterwards, everyone's like, Oh God, I really need you to that.

But mindfulness isn't just helpful for our attitudes around work, right? Thomas, it's also helpful for our attitudes about money.

Yeah. I mean, money, talk about an emotional word. We live in a capitalist system. The first thing everyone should be learning is how to thrive in this system. If our jungle is capitalism, then we should learn how to live well in this jungle. But I think oftentimes we don't. I know I didn't. And then at some point, beasts started coming out of the jungle in the forms of student loan debt. And all of a sudden, I thought, Oh, I don't even know how to get around in this jungle. So yeah, these techniques can help you to understand like, Oh, if I know that I'm going to look at a tax bill and it's going to put me into a mygdala hijack, which means that-.

Fight or flight.

Fight or flight or freeze, right?

Freeze, yeah.

And then I'm going to make some irrational decision based on that, which is probably to run away. That's not going to work for me. Even with my partner, we make appointments with each other to talk about money because it's so stressful for us. Oftentimes, we talk about energy, but a simple way to understand energy is if I'm feeling anxious about something, if I say it to my partner, I'm discharging it to her. Then she has to carry the weight of that, which, of course, ups her anxiety a little bit. We make a plan to have that conversation and we set goals around what that conversation is about. We feel good at the end of it versus a little bit traumatized if you just wing one at the other person when they're not looking.

Do you have a little agenda that you guys follow?

We do it on Saturday mornings.

Every Saturday morning?

No, but when we do it, we do it on Saturday mornings. We do it outside of the house in a neutral space that has something that we like. It might be breakfast or coffee or park or whatever it is. Then we have an agenda before that of what's our goal? What's the thing we're going to try to get out of this conversation? We don't stray from whatever the topic is going to be. That seems to be the biggest thing because in the past, someone would be upset, resentful, angry, scared, whatever the emotional content was that was driving whatever that experience of some financial issue. Once we put that level of constraints on it, we actually started to reidentify the experience as we're having a proud of us moment that we can talk about money without going after each other or being terrified. We can actually build something. It made it something that we were happy to do instead of terrified of.

I think that's what mindfulness does when it comes to money matters. It's also what AI does when it comes to money matters. It takes this crazy emotion out of it. Money is a mindfuck. Whether you have it or you don't or you had it or you didn't, and they're so much tied into financial trauma and all of that stuff. I think in the same way that AI takes the emotions out of buy low, sell high because that's the opposite of what you want to do. Your impetus is to do is to buy high and sell low. I think the same thing happens when you employ mindfulness tactics. And one of the things you do is guide your team through some of these exercises. So if you don't mind, I would love if you took me through and our listeners through one of those exercises that could help us at work.

I'd love to.

Hold onto your wallets. Money Rehab will be right back. And now for some more money rehab.

This is a practice called, for lack of a better word, it's called the neutralization practice. One of the most critical things that we learn when we start doing mindfulness practices is that we experience our thoughts as reality. What that means is that our senses take in information all the time around us: door, reach for handle, pull, walk through, dog, barking, step back, jump left. We take in all this information, and it's critical for our survival and our ability to thrive. And it's translated. The sensory data is translated into thoughts that are, again, our software coding for the hardware. And the thoughts tell us what reality is. But at some point, this merging happens where we believe that our thoughts tell us what reality is all the time, but it doesn't take into account the fact that we have an imagination. That like AI, which is modeled after our own brains, we can predict models of the future and then test them by walking through the future. We can regret or fear things that have happened to us in the past. This practice is about taking a really charged question that you're dealing with and building these two basically piles of thoughts on either side of it until you reach a point where you hit a neutral tone.

It's an ancient technique to neutralize fear and desire and put you in the present. We're going to do that. Sign me up. You're going to be my test subject. You have to use something that's real. Think about a question, and you don't have to reveal what the question is, but think about a question that you're struggling with that you either really want or really don't want.

Okay. Got it? Got it.

So close your eyes. Feet on the ground, hands in your lap or wherever they're comfortable. Let your body get comfortable. And with your mouth closed, start to cycle the breath through your nose. You're no stranger to these practices. So breathing in, feel your abdomen expand, your chest expand. As you exhale, feel the tension drain down out of your body. We'll take a couple of breaths like this. As you keep breathing, drawing in oxygen, breathing in life, exhaling, tension draining down from your head and neck through your torso, down through your abdomen and hips, through your legs, down your feet, toes, and the tension in your shoulders draining through your arms, pouring down like water draining off the side of a mountain, down through your fingertips. As you're feeling your body calm and supported in the chair, come into the practice. Take that question or problem you had at the beginning, and I want you to visualize it at the center of your forehead. Hold it clear there in your mind's eye. Then keeping your eyes closed, go into your left visual field. It was though you were looking through your left eye, but it's closed.

You're going to make a list, starting the top of this list with the heading why this is the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Literally in your mind's eye, in the left visual field, you start writing down all the reasons why this is the worst thing that could ever happen to you. It's usually pretty easy to do this list. But as you're going through it, push past all the normal reasons that you normally come to and see if you can dig deeper into even the worst-case scenarios of why this would be the worst thing that could ever happen to you. About 30 more seconds. Since you're writing all these things in your mind's eye, maybe you notice the feelings that are going with that. Maybe there's heaviness or fear or constraint. Finishing that list on the left and just keeping it there in the left visual field, come to the center again, question of the problem. Now we go into the right visual field, one of your right eye. Let me start at the top with the header why this is the best thing that could ever happen to me. Just make a note that usually as you start making this list, there's a tendency to feel like, especially if you don't want this thing to happen, that this list doesn't feel real.

You go through the habitual, Well, I guess it could be the best thing becausepushes. But start making that list and then keep pushing and look for ways in which this could be the best thing that ever happened to you. I thinkyour creativity and your curiosity push into this question of why it could be the best thing that ever happened to you. Maybe you've reached the end of that list and you feel satisfied, I want you to push a little more. What else could you find? Totally unforeseen, unpredictable outcome of why this could be the best thing that ever happened to you. Then finishing up the list, bring your attention back to the center to this question or problem at the third eye, center of your forehead. Feeling an awareness that all of the thoughts on either to the left or the right side are all of your memories and your predictions, your desires, and your fears. As you exhale, imagine both of those lists on the left and right just turning to dust and blowing away in the wind. All of your thoughts, patchments around this single idea. Back to this center question. Now that you ask this question again without all of those futures and pasts, what's the feeling you have in your body?

The way that you want to engage. What's the who in you? Let's come into this question and take another deep breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. Put your feet on the ground, your hands in your lap, body relaxed and open. Your mind clear. Question at the center of your forehead, drift into the wind, also turning dust. And your next breath in as you breathe in slowly, open your eyes.

I'm going to fall asleep.

We'll say that a lot, that they're going to fall asleep. You usually have people write down what they experienced. But I think for the group, it's more valuable for you to actually just share. If you noticed anything, did you notice anything?

I think it's really helpful to visualize these thoughts as if they are in your mind's eye in a particular way versus just being all jumbled in your mind. You're like, It's just so overwhelming. I think of it sometimes too, with my thoughts as logs down a stream and I see them and I'm like, Yo, nice to see you, Rubination. It's helpful to list out when problems, issues, big questions feel really overwhelming and chaotic. That brings me a lot of clarity and calm.

Yeah, that's good. I think for this practice, the goal I usually have for people is once you realize that most of the feelings that you're having are built on these predictions of either fears and desires or both, you're left in a neutral space. Let me explain it through an example. It's probably easier. Oftentimes I would come out to Tiffany in the early days and I would do a three-hour class. Before I did my three-hour class, I would sit and do this meditation and I had a tremendous desire for it to have huge impact and be incredibly valuable and a terrible fear that it would be horrible and nobody would get it and it would just be a waste of time. At the end of that neutral experience, what you land on is, Oh, there's just me bringing what I can of me into this room or this group or this task right now. That's the only thing that actually is here. I think once you're in that situation, there's a lot of freedom to be yourself.

That's the best person to be.

It's the only real person to be.

Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Laffin'. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan LaVoy. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab@moneynewsnetwork. Com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me. And follow us on Instagram @moneynews and TikTok @moneynewsnetwork for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. Seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make. Hey there, it's Financial Expert, Nicole Lappin, and I'm Magnify, your AI Investing Assistant. We're working together on this new podcast, Money Assistant, where we talk to people about their money problems and then help them create an actionable plan to solve them. If we take a look at how that will impact future Paola, she will be dead free in under six years and have a million dollars in retirement. How does that sound? Wait, what? Meet Money Assistant, premiering September fourth, wherever you got your favorite podcast.