Listen to the full interview:
1. You have a podcast called Fine is a 4-Letter Word. What inspired the title behind your show, and why aren’t you “fine” with the word fine?
“Fine is a word we’ve been conditioned to believe. It’s a response to everything:
‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine.’
It requires no thought and covers up a lot of stuff. People often say they’re fine when they’re not fine at all. They say it because they’ve been conditioned to respond that way. It’s automatic, and they don’t want people to know they’re not fine. They don’t want to burden other people with what’s going on in their life. They may not even want to admit it to themselves.”
2. You have a business called Zen Rabbit. What inspired the name and how do you help your clients?
“I started my first business in 2003, and the company was initially named Zen Rabbit Baking Company because I was making a product called the Gratitude Cookie. Gratitude Cookies were based on a family recipe; they were a cross between a butter and sugar cookie. Due to my marketing background, I was presenting it as a way for businesses to say thank you to clients, to people who supported their success. I ran that business for 11 years and couldn’t quite scale it the way I would have liked, so I ended up shutting it down.
I started my second business, teaching networking strategies. I initially named the business something different, but people associated me with Zen Rabbit. It’s the kind of name you never forget. So, I switched back to using Zen Rabbit.
Then the pandemic came along. No one was going to events, so they didn’t really need the same kind of networking strategies. I got called back in to talk a lot about gratitude in business. So now we’re on Zen Rabbit 3.0, essentially, talking about these strategies. I’m a consultant and an employee well-being expert. The name Zen Rabbit is even more appropriate than ever because I’m helping people find their calm, so they can be more focused, productive, and profitable. There’s also mythology around rabbits representing prosperity in business.”
3. How do well-being and communication come together in the workplace? What have you seen and what have you been helping your clients with?
“If people can’t communicate with each other, if they’re not in an environment where they feel safe and can communicate what’s really going on, their real feelings, that’s going to impact their well–being. It’s interrelated with the whole idea of bringing your whole self to work and not having to compartmentalize your work self, home self, or personal self. That’s virtually impossible. We’re not designed that way. We’re designed to integrate and be who we are at all times. When you’re not able to do that, it causes a lot of problems with your health. A part of well–being is your physical, mental, and emotional health. That’s where I see them being completely intertwined.”
4. How can people become more vocal and set clearer boundaries?
“I believe everybody has a responsibility for themselves. It’s your responsibility to find the tools and techniques that work for you in maintaining your well-being. If a manager or a leader can bring those tools into their team, that’s great. Not everybody knows where to go to find them. I think it’s a joint responsibility for leaders to bring information to their team and it’s also each person’s responsibility to find the tools and techniques that contribute to their own well-being, to not be reliant on somebody else to tell them what to do or how to be or ‘use this because this worked for me.’ Maybe what worked for me doesn’t work for you. It becomes your responsibility to find what could work and to seek it out and become self-aware. I think that’s missing, especially in corporate. People don’t necessarily take responsibility for their own well–being. That’s not a knock on them. They haven’t been exposed to the same kind of information entrepreneurs have. Get curious and find out what others use to make a better version of themselves. Or somebody told me earlier this week that she didn’t particularly like that term: ‘a better version of yourself.’ She threw out ‘creating your favorite version of yourself.’”
5. What personal tools have you used to support your wellness in your career?
“I had a very early introduction to meditation, but 10-year-olds quickly turn into teenagers, and they don’t want anything to do with anything like that. I didn’t practice it for many years, even when I knew what the benefits were. I knew how it could change outcomes in my world, and I still didn’t use it. I would start practicing meditation for a couple of days, and then I would skip a few years and then I would go back to it and do the same thing.
I was never consistent until 2014 when my mom passed away. It was around the same time I was closing that first business, the baking company. I needed something to help me manage through that time. I was mourning the death of my mom, the death of my business—there was a lot going on. I came back to meditation and that was when I finally got consistent with it. Now I can’t leave the house in the morning without doing my meditation. It almost feels like I haven’t brushed my teeth. It feels weird.
Meditation is one of the tools I teach, and people ask, ‘So what’s the best time of day?’
The best time of day is: when are you going to do it? When is the best time for you? It doesn’t really matter. Personally, I like the morning because it sets you up for the day. It helps you set your intention. It helps defrag everything and gets you ready to go. At the same time, if you’re feeling a little out of sorts or stressed because you just had a really difficult conversation or you just finished a project that’s been driving you crazy or you’re still trying to get through a project that’s driving you crazy, take five or 10 minutes in the middle of the day to do some breathing, calming, grounding exercises. Or maybe at night before falling asleep. A lot of people have trouble sleeping, and doing a little bit of meditation before falling asleep can help you sleep better. Regardless of when you meditate, people who practice meditation sleep better.”
6. How does prioritizing our wellness and using tools like meditation help us make better decisions at work?
“The fear of making a wrong decision is the biggest factor that keeps people from making decisions. I’m glad we talked about meditation because making good decisions involves getting in touch with your inner voice and your inner truth. One of the best ways to do that is through meditation. You’re allowing yourself to get quiet enough to hear your own voice, to hear what is true for you. You are the only one who can hear what is true for you. We’re so inundated with everybody else’s opinions and viewpoints and distractions of what is right for us, even though they don’t know. They’re just going to tell you how to live your life. Only you know what that inner voice is telling you. When you get quiet enough to hear it, lots of good things happen. One of those good things is that you get better at making decisions that are the right decision for you.”
Decision-Making Exercise
“There’s an exercise I’d love to share that’s quick and can help with making decisions. It relies on your intuition.
This works if you have two choices. It could work if you have more than two choices, but the exercise itself is between two.
Is there a decision you’re in the midst of making? Name it. Get a coin and say heads is option A and tails is option B. Now flip the coin. Your initial reaction when you see how it landed is your answer.
It works almost every time. If you had three choices, you could do the first two and then take the other two and keep going.
That is a quick way to get in touch with what your inner voice is telling you. It’s that initial gut reaction.”
7. You teach the idea of living a sabbatical life. How can career professionals use this as a tool to help them discover what’s next?
“The sabbatical life doesn’t require you to take a month–long, week–long, or year–long sabbatical like I did. I took a month-long sabbatical two years ago and that’s how I came up with this whole idea. I was not working at all. I took off the entire month and I had freedom. I recognize I had freedom and the ability to do that. Not everybody has that.
At the same time, what you can do is look at your working hours and say, ‘I’m going to take a lunch.’ People don’t even allow themselves time to take a lunch. At the end of your day, turn the computer off. Put your phone down, get away from it, and give yourself the ability to go do something fun. Whether that’s rock climbing or kayaking or playing with your kids in the yard, allow yourself complete downtime. That means you’re not looking at your phone every 15 minutes to check if there’s another email that came in.
You’re not saying, ‘I’m just going to finish up this project,’ and ‘I’ll address these three emails before I go to sleep.’ No. You are giving yourself a complete break. There’s work and then you’re done. This has to do with setting boundaries too because people you work with are going to ask you for things because in the past perhaps if they sent you an email at 10 o’clock at night, you were responding. But setting boundaries teaches people how to treat you. If they send you an email at 10 o’clock and you don’t respond until 8:30 the next day, they’ll start to learn that that’s when you’re going to be heard back from. They’ll stop asking for your time.”
Interviewer
Finka Jerkovic
Career Advancement Coach and Founder of Finka Inc.
With 25+ years in leadership and sales and the financial services industry, she has witnessed the power of recognizing and celebrating people’s unique strengths and differences (a.k.a Brilliant Differences™) within a workplace. When everyone’s unique talents are appreciated and people work together using them, that’s when the real magic of career and business growth happens. Fast forward 10 years. Finka has established programs that help mid-career professionals and leaders grow in their careers by tapping into the full potential of their personal brand, so they can clearly define their strengths, value their differences, and perform at their best.
Interviewee
Lori Saitz
Founder of Zen Rabbit
Lori Saitz is the leading authority on improving productivity and engagement through workplace well-being. She is the founder of the Zen Leadership Program for results-focused professionals. With a comprehensive background in wellness and communication strategies, Lori helps executives create focused, resilient, and collaborative teams that can move projects forward with less stress and drama. Listen to Lori on her own podcast too, called Fine is a 4-Letter Word, where she engages guests in conversations about how they’ve grown from a time in their lives when things were decidedly NOT fine.
