52 : Turning Adversity Into Opportunity with Wendy Thomas

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[00:00:04] Adam Coelho: Welcome to the mindful fire podcast, where we explore living mindfully on the path to financial independence and beyond I'm your host, Adam Coelho and I'm so glad you're here.

[00:00:15] On today's episode, I'm joined by my new friend, Wendy Thomas. Wendy Thomas is the founder of Wendy Thomas coaching, which helps individuals and teams Excel in work and life by learning to harness the power of mindset. 

[00:00:28] An early stage breast cancer diagnosis gave Wendy the courage and perspective to follow her longtime entrepreneurial dream of establishing her own coaching company. Her authentic and vulnerable coaching style inspires individuals to discover their own potential and to achieve greater depths of personal and professional fulfillment.

[00:00:46] Prior to launching Wendy Thomas coaching. Wendy spent 18 years in financial services working at Bloomberg, thomson, Reuters and FactSet. Most recently, Wendy led FactSet Canada in developing effective strategies for growth, talent, acquisition, team building, and operational effectiveness.

[00:01:03] Wendy is a passionate mom of two young boys and cares deeply about helping people create a healthy work-life balance. 

[00:01:10] In this conversation. Wendy shares her story of climbing the corporate ladder only to have her life turned completely upside down by a cancer diagnosis just two days before her 40th birthday. 

[00:01:21] Wendy shares how getting this cancer diagnosis changed everything in her life overnight and force her to make some big changes and to really take to heart the advice that her father gave her, which was to turn adversity into opportunity.

[00:01:34] She shares more about what this means and the changes she made to move from what you call is living from the outside in to living from the inside.

[00:01:43] And we dive into this idea of how do we live from the inside out rather than the outside in to live true to ourselves and with intention each and every day, 

[00:01:54] I really enjoyed this conversation with Wendy and it really made me think about my own life and how I need to stop and really think about what's most important to me and how I want to move forward and live intentionally with each and every day.

[00:02:09] You can find the full show notes for today's episode, including any links, resources, or books we discussed in the episode at mindfulfire.org/ 52.

[00:02:17] And if you enjoy today's episode with Wendy, I invite you to please hit subscribe wherever you're listening to this, this just lets the providers know you're getting value from the episodes and we'll make sure that you receive all the new episodes as I released them.

[00:02:29] And if you're enjoying the podcast, I'd love to ask you for one simple favor and that's just to send your favorite episode to a friend or two who might be open to hearing it. 

[00:02:38] Thanks so much. Now let's jump into today's episode.

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[00:02:54] Adam Coelho: Wendy. Welcome to the mindful fire podcast. I'm so glad to have you here. 

[00:02:58] Wendy Thomas: Thank you, Adam. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me as your guests. 

[00:03:01] Adam Coelho: So I'd love to start by having you share a little bit about who you are, your journey and what you're up to in the world.

[00:03:08] Wendy Thomas: Absolutely. I'd love to share that.

[00:03:10] So to give you a bit of background, my name is Wendy Thomas. I may look like the girl from where the hamburgers, in fact, they're the same last name as her, but I'm actually not Wendy Thomas. I married a man who made me Wendy Thomas, but, I'm Wendy Thomas. I was born in Zimbabwe. I grew up in South Africa, which explains my interesting accent.

[00:03:30] I had the great privilege of graduating from duke university back in 2000. I started working at Bloomberg, the financial media company right after graduation and those, and I know that my love. great snacks and incredible food and amazing work culture would lead me down and almost 20 year career in financial services.

[00:03:49] I worked at Bloomberg for 11 years. After that, I worked at Thomson Reuters for four years. And most recently I headed up FactSet in Canada. And I always say, how do you marry a professional high with an old time personal low cause I honestly felt like I was firing on all cylinders. I loved my job.

[00:04:06] I had executive sponsorship. I was growing the region. I truly loved what I did, but interesting enough, I had this deep intuition that something wasn't right. And I'm going to be real. I'm going to be very vulnerable with you, Adam, because I'm going to tell you something that happened to be three years ago.

[00:04:22] And that is I felt this random feeling on my right-hand side and something inside of me had myself get checked out. And two days before my 40th birthday, I was sitting face-to-face with radiologists to . You came in here because you thought you felt something on your right-hand side, but the reality is there's nothing there.

[00:04:41] We found breast cancer on your left-hand side. And with that, my whole life just came crashing down on me. And, I started to panic and I started to think. What is this like, what is happening? I felt like I'd been swallowed up by a giant monster. It was like, what is going on? And in that moment, I realized that my late father had sent me this intuition to get things checked out.

[00:05:04] And his words always, you have to look to turn adversity into an opportunity. And that moment just allowed me to really dig deep and think about what the opportunity behind this all was. And for me, it was really about appreciating my life, as it was instead of living my life in the future or living my life in the past or living my life, according to what other people wanted from me, I had to fight for my own life because in that moment, I realized that I wanted to live on this beautiful tenant for as long as possible.

[00:05:35] I'm a mom. Two young boys and I needed to be around. I need to focus on myself. So the days and the weeks and the months were incredibly long. Challenging. But at the end of my journey, I've done a lot of self study and reflection. And while I truly loved being in the corporate world for almost 20 years, what really filled my cup about being in the corporate world, it was my ability to connect to people and inspire people to be their best selves, because I felt that my energy was contagious.

[00:06:04] And then when people were around me and I was able to inspire them to believe in themselves, they felt happy. And when you're happy, You productive and that ultimately leads to, revenue gains in a company. I Took a huge step. I did something that was incredibly hard, probably one of the hardest things I've ever done is that I resigned from my corporate job and I followed my true passion and that is coaching people.

[00:06:25] And I started my own coaching company focusing on the power of positive mindset and that started two and a half years ago, but it's actually morphed into a lot of public speaking engagements. I'm speaking to companies about how to manage your mindset in a time of fear and uncertainty, because really what we're going through in this pandemic at the early stages reminded me of my cancer diagnosis and how it's so easy to panic and think we're drowning and not realize there's a lot of things that are in our control.

[00:06:59] And I see this pandemic as a time to. Really use the power of mindset and to not focus on things that aren't in our control, but rather focus on whatis in our control. That's the power of our mind and living each day with intention. Living each day with gratitude. And what I say is living from the inside out and not living from the outside in, and that is having your emotional happiness driven by outside circumstances.

[00:07:26] Instead of you being happy when your boss is happy, maybe find other ways to be happy. That's living with intention. That's gaining a lot of happiness and satisfaction from working out or for writing out gratitudes and appreciating everything that you have. We don't typically appreciate everything that we have until it's gone.

[00:07:44] For me, I had the second chance to really look at my life and think, how do I want to live my best life? I need to be present. I can't be living in the past. I can't be living in the future. Like the time is now. And since my diagnosis, three years ago, I can confidently say that I live. Every day with intention and I never, every day I'm in the moment.

[00:08:04] And I'm grateful for so much in spite of everything that's happening around us. So that's a bit of a long story and then long introduction to who I am, Adam, but I'm incredibly passionate about what I do. And I'm really excited to be your guest today. 

[00:08:16] Adam Coelho: Well, that's an incredible story and I appreciate you sharing it with me and the audience.

[00:08:20] One thing that really stood out to me that I'm curious about, and I think applies to what is going on now with the pandemic and just the world at large is the idea of turning adversity into opportunity. Can you talk a little bit more about what that means to you and how people can practice doing that, given the world and pandemic situation that we're in. 

[00:08:41] Wendy Thomas: Absolutely. So I think this is all about perception and how you see things. We actually gifted as human beings with six higher mental faculties that separate us from our friends in the animal kingdom. Those are our imagination, our memory, our intuition, the willpower that we have, our perception and our reason.

[00:09:00] And I'd like to talk about one that being our perception. There's always a positive and there's always a negative way to look at something. We can choose to focus on the negative, or we can choose to focus on the positive. And for me, my diagnosis was all about perception. My father's words were you turn adversity into an opportunity.

[00:09:18] As hard as it was I had to really see the opportunity behind it. And for me, the opportunity was to reset and to focus on the now. The other way of seeing things, the other perspective would have been, why me, this is horrible. Why do I have to go through this? And then, when you focusing on the negative, you're in this constant negative vibration and mode and everything just spirals down and you notice that when you're not happy and when you're just in this negative mood, it's very hard to be productive. So sometimes the pandemic, yes, it's really scary. And there's some terrible things that are happening out there. But if you are glued to the news and you're thinking about all the negative, you're always going to be focused on the negative and you always going to be in this negative state, as opposed to thinking about the negative.

[00:10:01] Really write down some positive things that have happened in the pandemic. Most notably is, the ability to work from home, the ability to connect with people globally around the world, the ability to actually see how our kids learn. My kids went back to school for the first time in six months, yesterday after being at home for 18 months on and off, and as hard as that was having my kids in the background.

[00:10:25] To juggle everything with him around, I actually had the opportunity to, see how they learn and instead of focusing on the negative what a drain, it was on me and my schedule and my time, I thought, gosh when do I ever get the opportunity to really see how a sixth grader and a second grader learn?

[00:10:41] And I picked up a lot of really interesting things about my kids. I could go on about a bunch of things. The pandemic brought that were positive. But again, it's all about how you see something because there's always a positive and there's always a negative. And how has your mind trained to look at something the positive or the negative side?

[00:10:59] Adam Coelho: It sounds like focusing on the positive allows you to tune into opportunities that may present themselves, right? For example, your ability to see how your kids learn, how they take in information and make sense of it. That's an opportunity in itself. 

[00:11:15] Wendy Thomas: Yeah, exactly. It's it's definitely an opportunity to see that. Another way to look at it was, oh my goodness. It's all this work that we have to do. And it's the constant, the kids in the house, they messing everything up all the time. And I thought, you know what? Instead of focusing on the negative of being a drag about nagging people to clean up all the time, what if I act. Try to incorporate, mindfulness in this and put on my AirPods and listen to a podcast or listen to a great audible book while I did, tasks that were considered, taking me away from my Workday as opposed to, getting really upset about the kids messing up the house or, thinking about, oh, it's another meal with the kids at home, really focusing on how many recipe books I have at home.

[00:11:52] And. Creative I could get with, different recipe books at the time. So again, it's definitely challenging and can push you down a lot of the time, but if you look for the good, there is always a good in this situation. 

[00:12:03] Adam Coelho: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Can you talk a little bit more about this idea of living from the inside out versus the outside?

[00:12:11] Wendy Thomas: Yeah. We are typically living from the outside, in, as in that we're surrounded by the world around us. So our conscious mind is connected to the world around us, through, things. We hear what people say to us books. We read, we're always connected through our five senses. But as I mentioned before, we have these higher mental faculties that we often ignore.

[00:12:33] There are mental muscles and Ines may actually sharpen them and B become attuned to them. It's very easy to put those aside.and to live life through our five senses, so for example, your intuition, you have to be so in tuned with your intuition to actually be guided from the inside out, because that is an example of really living.

[00:12:52] From the inside, out being in touch with how you are feeling for me, it was my intuition that basically saved my life. I had this intuition that something just wasn't right. And I followed that intuition and I got things checked out, but it was very easy for me to say, when I'm too busy, I've got so many things happening around me.

[00:13:09] I've got deadlines, I've got all this stuff to deal with. That would be living from the outside in, but I stopped and I actually listened to my. That's an example of living from the inside out. Another example of, these high mental faculties is our imagination. When we're kids, we taught to dream, we're told to dream a lot, kids are always, going in and out of the idea of what they want to do, who they want to be.

[00:13:31] I want to be a doctor. I want to be a fireman. I want to be a teacher. I want to do this. I want to do that. And they're planning and dreaming. That is. We don't really use our imagination to dream. We use our imagination against us. We think about the worst case situation, as opposed to, thinking about imagination, to really dream up what we want.

[00:13:49] And to think about big inspiring goals and to be guided by a bigger purpose and a bigger goal. And to live every day with intention is living from the inside out as opposed to. Living from the outside in and be constantly guided by what other people want from you. Like you're just jumping from one opportunity to the other and you not having this chance to really sit down, take a deep breath and step back and think, hold on a second, like, what's my goal?

[00:14:17] Where do I want to go? Who do I want to be? And that is really, living from the inside out. Living with intention as opposed to living from the outside in and doing everything that other people want you to do because we're bombarded by demands every single day. Especially in this ever evolving technology world that we live in.

[00:14:35] Turn on our phone, first thing in the morning, and we're suddenly looking at our emails and we're looking at social media and you don't keep your calendar. And all of a sudden you're definitely living from the outside and you're not thinking about, hold on a second. How do I want to start my day?

[00:14:49] What do I want to do today? What are my goals? What am I gratitude's. Am I starting my day working out? What am I doing as opposed to turning on your phone and suddenly boom, you've invited the outside world, literally into your bedroom. And I think, with technology, it's amazing the opportunities that it's given us, but at the same time, it takes a lot of, that ability to focus on ourselves, away from us because we're constantly pulled in so many different directions.

[00:15:15] Adam Coelho: Yeah, I totally agree. Even that specific example of turning on your phone, first thing, and looking at social media or. Email or anything in the news, it sets the tone for your entire day, sometimes even before you get out of bed before you even really stretch your body, open your eyes you're getting the input from the outside world and not even the world around you, but the whole world. And that can be overwhelming and just set the mood for the whole day, depending on what you first take in .It's like what you eat, right? If you ate a box of Oreos for breakfast, you're going to have a different day than if you had oatmeal and fruit. 

[00:15:53] Wendy Thomas: Absolutely. And it's so interesting, right? Because back in the day we would wake up an alarm clock, you either have a little traveling alarm clock, or you'd have one of those alarm clocks that you'd plug in with like a flashing light in the middle of the night.

[00:16:05] But now we typically wake up to a phone. And the first thing that most people do is pick it up and basically invite outside world into their room. You're like well, I have my phone here when I'm waking up. I'll just look at my email. And then all of a sudden you're like whoa, hold on a second.

[00:16:21] I'm already like freaking out and stressing out because I've read an email. I've literally started my day, according to what somebody else wants from me, or I'm going to take a look at social media, for example, while I'm waking up and then suddenly I'm just not feeling so great because somebody posted a picture of their incredible vacation and I'm feeling a little sad in Genesis.

[00:16:41] What I have to do today versus what they have to do. And it's just not a good way to be living as opposed to, maybe giving yourself, 20 minutes before you actually look at your phone in the morning and actually accounting for that time to, maybe write out what you're grateful for. When you're writing out what you're grateful for there's a lot of science behind that feeling that it makes your body feel when you're truly writing out the small things that you're grateful for. It elevates your overall mood and happiness, and it puts you. Solid, productive, and happy state, or whether you're, doing some meditation or whether you're working out first thing in the morning before you look at your phone, like resist that temptation to actually, live your life, according to what somebody else wants from you.

[00:17:20] It's interesting. I did a presentation and just a little while ago, and I spoke about. What is your tie moment? Growing up, I always used to know that when my dad had his tie on, or my dad was like putting his tie on for work, I knew not to approach him because that to him symbolized the start of work and his mind was already in work.

[00:17:38] He was really thinking about what he had to do that day. But before he put on his tie, I knew that I could approach him because he was present. He was literally like living in the moment. But now I don't think that there's very few tie moments because. From the very second people wake up, they turn on the phone and boom, they're ready.

[00:17:55] Like, living somebody else's life the work day before their days actually started. So that's a bit of a tangent to your question, but I do get really passionate about just living every day intention and focus. Cause if you don't set those intentions, somebody else will take that day away from you.

[00:18:12] Adam Coelho: Yeah. And I really love this idea of stepping back, taking time to reflect on what do I want, where am I trying to go? What am I trying to make happen in my life? It's so important because we get so caught up, not only in the social media and the email and the busy-ness of life, but also things that we're trying to achieve. And if we're just sprinting forward without thinking about where am I trying to go and why am I even doing this? It's easy to get lost and just get on like a hamster wheel. I'll give an example, like with the podcast, I love doing the podcast, but I've found recently that I've just gotten caught up in this cycle of editing.

[00:18:55] Where I have to get an episode out every single week because I set that goal for myself. No one else told me to set that goal for myself, but I got myself in this cycle where I just have to keep churning out episodes. So I need to edit edit, edit, and get it out there. 

[00:19:10] But recently I've decided, and credit to my wife for helping me think about this a little bit differently. What would happen if I just repost it an old episode that other people might not have heard, or just reposting a meditation that people really liked before and might like again, what would that do to. Free up some time for me to step back and say, what am I really trying to achieve with this?

[00:19:33] Because it's so easy to get caught up in, oh, the podcast stats that got to grow. And if I stop at all, then they'll stop growing. And I'm like getting my happiness from these podcasts that I have no control over and. I am totally losing the fun of it. I'm not doing this to make money immediately.

[00:19:53] It would be nice at some point, but that's not the purpose. It's to connect with awesome people like yourself, it's to learn and grow. And to really, explore what I might want to do after I retire, at some point ' cause, I'm not going to just sit around, but getting caught up so much in the podcast stats and the doing what everyone else is doing to grow.

[00:20:15] all of that just takes me away from the fun of it and really so important to stop and think what am I doing this for? 

[00:20:22] Wendy Thomas: You're not living in the present. Then if you just keep on thinking about the stats and then you're going down that comparison. Train as well, like comparing yourself to other people.

[00:20:30] And then it, again, it's just about taking it back to what was the intention of starting the podcast. It was living in the moment meeting great people, being happy and creating more of a fulfilled life because you're learning so much, you're meeting so many interesting people and expanding your mind.

[00:20:46] But it's very easy to go down that trap of comparison and, the future. And what does it look like and everything else. Again, it's just a constant reminder to be pulling it back to the present. So again, good for your wife for reminding you about that. 

[00:20:59] Adam Coelho: Yeah. I'm not always the most open-minded when she's pointing out the obvious truth to me, so credit to her for helping me get past that. 

[00:21:06] Yeah, so are there areas you want to dive deeper into that you think would be valuable? 

[00:21:10] Wendy Thomas: I think, just really to point of that hamster wheel, that it's so easy to continue on the hamster wheel. If you don't have goals for yourself. You just going to always be doing the same thing every day and living your life, according to what other people want you to do. And I take it back to, getting in a car every day. You don't just suddenly get in a car without any purpose and drive around the block.

[00:21:34] Like you're very intentional about where you're going. Like you have direction. And, I think that. That fundamentally gets a lot of peoples through some hard times. It's about thinking about what is the big picture? Who am I, where do I want to go? And what's driving me here because the happiness that you feel along your journey.

[00:21:54] To getting a goal should empower you every single day. With you, creating this amazing podcast and thinking about the future and how awesome the stats are going to look, that is that's exciting and it's empowering you, but at the same time, the journey is along the way and all the people that you're meeting and how much satisfaction that brings you.

[00:22:14] So a lot of happiness is felt in the every day in the moment. That's what mindfulness is. It's really about being present and enjoying the journey, but then also like looking forward to what's driving you at the same time. Cause that's, should get you excited and motivate you, but at the same time, not completely derail you from what the overall purpose is.

[00:22:35] Adam Coelho: Yeah, I totally agree. I think a lot about this idea of envision. Envisioning the ideal future that you want and setting your mind towards that ideal future. And just having that idea in your mind and practicing the beliefs and ways of being that help you move in that direction. 

[00:22:55] do this affirmations practice where I say the belief that I want to have. So for instance, the world is abundant with opportunity. And then I practice visualizing, how is that true in the past, the present and the future. And then that essentially gives us my brain evidence that this is already true.

[00:23:11] Because it is. And so then I start acting that out in my everyday life and that starts to move me in the direction of the vision. And I think a lot about that. I actually created a course at Google. I'm going to have a couple sessions coming up. I talked about it a lot on the podcast and then a friend of mine at Google helped me actually make it happen and held me accountable.

[00:23:31] It's called envisioning workshop. first time I did it, the feedback was really good. And I'm excited to do it a a couple more times. 

[00:23:39] I'd love to have a whole separate conversation with you about your business and how.

[00:23:45] Think about and go about creating this business being a speaker and doing trainings and empowering people at companies. Because, when I think about the after Google, life I think , that's going to be a big part of it. But it seems like how do you even get into this and seeing that you have done it, would be really interesting to explore.

[00:24:05] If you're open to it. 

[00:24:06] Wendy Thomas: Absolutely. I'd love to talk about that. Just to continue on your point about, this visioning and your subconscious mind, I find it so fascinating that we're so habitual in the way that we act every single day. And that really stems from our subconscious beliefs and that we're programmed as human beings to act a certain way.

[00:24:26] And a lot of our programming comes from when we were kids, our conscious mind is wide open. So that everything just flows right into your subconsciousness. So a lot of the things that were said around us growing up have become my beliefs, but they may not necessarily be our beliefs that they could be holding us back a lot of the times.

[00:24:45] Envisioning is really so important because your subconscious mind has no ability to deduce whether something is fictitious or whether it's real. So we have to really think. Big and dream bag and drill these visions and concepts into our minds so that our subconscious mind starts to believe it.

[00:25:02] We act like the person that's already achieved those goals. So it's really important. And I love that you brought that up because I'm so passionate about that stuff myself. A really great app out there as well, called think up. You record a couple of affirmations and you listened to them every day.

[00:25:18] And when you start to listen to things, your subconscious mind picks it up and you start to believe it. It's the same as habit. Like the more you do it, the more your subconscious. Believes it. And you just get to the point where you act like that person, or, if you build a new habit, you ingrain it in your everyday routine that you become so dependent on it that you can't live without it.

[00:25:38] It's hard to do. It can be done and it takes a lot of practice. So I love that you were doing work on envisioning. It's so awesome. 

[00:25:46] And speaking of that I think it's timely because of the U S open women's final tomorrow. Being Canadian. There's a Canadian and the final tomorrow. And there was two years ago, Bianca and dress good beats Serena Williams and she attributes a lot of her success in winning that final to the power of visionary work, because she said that in her mind, she'd gone there before and she'd beaten Serena Williams.

[00:26:11] And you realize the importance of, a strong mindset in the sporting world. You have to just believe it and own it and know it. And I just find it pertinent in the world today. And especially with the us open, final happening tomorrow. I just went on a bit of a tangent there, but I get really excited about this and I love that you do not add.

[00:26:29] Adam Coelho: Yeah. I also, I get very excited about it as well. And it's incredibly powerful. I think about it as planting and watering seeds. Each time you practice these beliefs or these visualizations it's like watering the plant, watering the seeds, they grow into the plant and then it blossoms and becomes your reality. I'm sure. She had seen herself beating Serina Williams in the U S open final hundreds or thousands of times.

[00:26:57] And there's a lot of neuroscience backing this, that the fact that our brains are predicting. And that's the lens through which I teach this course at Google and we'll hopefully be teaching an outside of Google at some point.

[00:27:08] It's super powerful stuff. 

[00:27:10] Wendy Thomas: I can't wait to take the course. I want to take the course.

[00:27:12] Adam Coelho: I'm sure we can make it work. 

[00:27:13] Let's shift gears now into what I call The Mindful Fire final four.

[00:27:17] The first question is related to this idea of living from the inside out and really living in the present. Choosing how you want to show up and living intentionally each and every day.

[00:27:30] What practical advice would you give for somebody to get clear on how they want to live each day and then how do they actually make that happen? Cause I will be the first to admit, I want to live intentionally every day. And I don't really feel like I am living intentionally, everyday. Maybe that's having a two-year-old and working full-time and parenting full-time and, but everyone has a busy life.

[00:27:52] So how would you advise me and others who would like to live more intentionally to actually do that? 

[00:27:58] Wendy Thomas: I think it's about making time for yourself every day. It's about building habits. To be comfortable being alone. I think we, as humans are very uncomfortable being alone a lot of the time, whether that's building in a meditation practice every day, starting off with just five minutes every day to really be intentional and to stop and to take a breather, whether that is, spending five, 10 minutes every single day to write out what you're grateful for.

[00:28:25] Writing out what your goals are. Having a workout every single day and just being comfortable with yourself. I think that's a really great start just to be mindful and, writing out each day, what is your intention for the day to remind yourself that it's important to be in the present?

[00:28:42] And yes, there's always going to be stresses and things that are out of your control and events that are happening in the future. Worrying about something and having it circulating your mind is not going to fix the outcome. So what's in your control now and know that you can reach for a thought that feels better.

[00:29:00] Thoughts aren't permanent. They come into my mind and we attach meaning to them in our subconscious mind. And when you attach meaning to something that impacts your behavior and that ultimately impacts your results. Being intentional about what you think about and not inviting negative thoughts that really don't serve you well into your subconscious mind.

[00:29:19] I think it's just about having that understanding of the power that your mind really has over, your overall feeling every single day. 

[00:29:27] Adam Coelho: Yeah. I love that. I love that idea of carving out some time for yourself and really setting yourself up for success each day and just making a practice out of what is my intention, that takes two seconds and can change the course of the day and gives you a little bit more agency rather than just getting caught up in the river of events that happen from the start of the day. Just taking a moment to say, what would I like to do today? How would I like to feel today?

[00:29:56] I really like. 

[00:29:57] Wendy Thomas: Totally and waking up with an alarm clock, try and move away from the phone. I think that would make a huge difference to many people. 

[00:30:04] Adam Coelho: Yeah. I wake up to my son screaming the ABCs, which is pretty cute too, but the timing of it, it's basically just getting up and going straight into the river of events.

[00:30:14] The second question is what piece of advice would you give to someone early on their path to financial independence?

[00:30:21] Wendy Thomas: I'd say my advice here would be to think about what you really want in life and then be intentional with saving as much money as you can every single month. And then looking back at that year after year and being really proud of the amount of money that you're able to save.

[00:30:39] I know that my first job right out of university I saved just a little bit every single month because. I knew that I needed to save for something big, not too sure what that was, but ultimately it helped me out in life and, 10 years down the line, I was really happy that I started saving when I did.

[00:30:56] Adam Coelho: Great advice. Yeah. 

[00:30:57] The third question is what piece of advice would you give to someone getting started with meditation and or mindfulness? 

[00:31:04] Wendy Thomas: I'd say be easy on yourself. It's a skill that we haven't learnt. It's not taught in high school or university. And sometimes it can feel awkward and you're not getting results right away, but be really patient with yourself and start slowly, give yourself, two minutes at first and work yourself up.

[00:31:23] No, that it is having an impact on your life. Maybe you can see the results in a tangible way right away but know that this is having a tremendous impact on your overall emotional well-being 

[00:31:34] Adam Coelho: Great advice. And the final question is how can people connect with you online, Wendy, and learn more about your.

[00:31:41] Wendy Thomas: Sure. So I have a website it's www dot Wendy Thomas coaching. You can reach out to me through there. You can follow me on Instagram at Wendy Thomas coaching or connect with me on LinkedIn. I love meeting new people, so feel free to reach out to me. 

[00:31:56] Adam Coelho: Fantastic. I will link all of that up in the show notes.

[00:31:59] I'd just like to say thank you so much, Wendy. I know we've been trying to make this happen for a while, and I'm so grateful that you were able to make the time to share your experience and knowledge with our audience. Thanks so much, 

[00:32:11] Wendy Thomas: Adam. It's so lovely to chat with you and thank you for having me on this wonderful podcast.

[00:32:14] Adam Coelho: Thanks so much for joining me on today's episode of the mindful fire podcast. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Wendy Thomas, the founder of Wendy Thomas coaching. 

[00:32:24] As a reminder, you can find the full show notes for today's episode, including all of the links, books, and resources we discussed in the episode at mindfulfire.org/ 52.

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