How to Spot & Manage Burnout

In this episode of The Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about how to recognize and address burnout. My guest this week is Garrett Wood, founder of Gnosis Therapy, whose work helps high performers understand and treat the effects of chronic stress and burnout. Here, Garrett shares how his own experience with chronic pain and overwork changed the way he understands burnout. What looked like isolated physical symptoms were actually signals of a nervous system under constant strain. That insight reshaped his career and now informs how he helps others address burnout at its root.

In our conversation, we talk about why high achievers are especially prone to burnout, how pushing through stress can shrink our window of tolerance and why so many people suffer in silence while assuming everyone else is doing fine. Garrett explains how stress blurs physical and emotional symptoms and why managing stress in place is often more effective than making drastic life changes.

We also explore practical tools for regulating stress, including simple nervous-system-based techniques that can be used in real time. Garrett shares how small interventions can widen capacity, restore balance and make it easier to function without adding more pressure.

About My Guest

Garrett Wood, NBC-HWC, is a clinical hypnotherapist and executive functioning specialist helping high-achievers turn burnout into breakthrough with his A³ Framework for sustainable success.

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Connect with Garrett:

Website: https://www.gnosistherapy.com/about

Assessment: https://gnosistherapy.scoreapp.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gnosistherapy/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gnosistherapy/

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Transcript

Kim Meninger

Welcome, Garrett. It's so great to have you here today. I would love to start by inviting you to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Garrett Wood

Yeah, Kim, thanks for having me. I'm Garrett. I'm the founder of Gnosis therapy. We opened in downtown Long Beach, California, 2018 to help people that were experiencing burnout. They would show up with aches and pains, muscle skeletal issues, you know, some rapid heart rates, trouble getting to sleep, some frustration in their interpersonal relationships. And most of it came down to their relationship with work. And more, even more than that, was the relationship with themselves and how they felt like they had to do their work to qualify it as good work. And so that kind of came out of the work that we were doing. We were showing up and just kind of doing tips and tricks about how to work through this muscle-skeletal pain and some stress responses. But the further we would kind of get down the line, you know, the more we would kind of all funnel everybody in from these very different aches and pains and fears and frustrations into this like core belief system that would always consistently show up, but more, more often than not.

Kim Meninger

What's so interesting to me about that, and what's so important, I think, for everyone listening to understand, is that it's easy to confuse physical, emotional, mental symptoms, right? And so I think, you know, I've certainly been there before where you're not sleeping well. Are you feeling some muscle aches? And you just assume that, you know, oh, I'm exercised wrong, or something like that. But it's how did you start to put the pieces together and realize what was actually happening there?

Garrett Wood

Yeah, my own experience with chronic pain, I was working a lot of hours. I was bartending at night and working in a corporate job during the day, trying to pay for school and all the other fun stuff, right? And so there was, like, pots of coffee a day and lots of personalities. And then when my personal relationship kind of took a toll, there wasn't a lot of outlet or emotional support for me because I was in a leadership position at my corporate job. And so it felt really isolating and alienating, and then I'd work out to kind of work through my stress. But after a while, I ended up having this really high interior groin pain on my right side. And one night on it was a Friday night after work. It was like, nine o'clock. I finally got off and was like, Okay, I don't have to go to the bar tonight. I can go to the ER and I show up. And the attending physician did a palpatory examination. At the end of that, he was like, There's nothing here. And there was almost this like accusatory tone that that was my excitement for my Friday night was going and having him do a palpatory examination. And looking back now, knowing what I know at the time, I didn't realize that very real physical pain can be coming from mental, emotional distress and chronic stress, typically, is where that stuff shows up in the body. And the tools he had, you know, prescription or surgery, aren't really the tools that I needed. And so that wasn't quite the wake up call I needed at that time. But looking back now, I'm like, oh, that's what was going on in that moment.

Kim Meninger

And so did you have a wake-up call? Was there something else that happened that sort of made you realize I can't ignore this any longer. I need to do something different than I'm doing today.

Garrett Wood

Yeah, it was almost like seven years later, I was at a different organization, and we were working with health and wellness professionals, making sure that they maintained their performance. And it was a pretty interesting organization. Was really performance-based. So we would look at pianos, but then we would look at like, weekly sales reports, sometimes daily, sometimes hourly. And so if I was at the top of the list, I'd feel good. I would sleep good. My relationships would be good. My dog would be cute. If I was at the bottom of the list, my dog would be the same dog, but somehow more irritating that day. Anytime I kind of got down on myself and was like, wow, this is really like a lot. This is a lot, I would just be like, Okay, I need to work smarter. There's to be something I'm not paying attention to or I'm missing. There's something else I can do. And it was great, because if we had such a tight feedback loop, you could go make a change and see how quickly it affected something or not. But it almost gave me this false sense of control, where it felt like, Okay, everyone else is doing so well, I'm struggling. Must be something wrong with me. I must dig in deeper and try to work even smarter than I've been before. And so there was a colleague that had been with the organization for 20 of their 25 years. He was always at the top of this list, and he always had a smile on his face. Always seemed like unshakable, just the stoic, you know, leader, and we're like, oh, that's the guy. If we could be him, we'd be good. And he was let go really suddenly. And I was in a replace meeting with his replacement two weeks later. And it was in that meeting that we gotten word from another colleague that he had decided that he'd given so much of himself, his identity, his life, for so long that without that position, there really wasn't a whole lot left for him in his own life. And so he decided to have that be the end of his story. And so that was the real wake-up call. Was recognizing like you're not alone, even the people that are doing the best that seem to have it all together. They're struggling too, and we're all suffering in silence and thinking there must be something I'm doing wrong. And really, this burnout that everyone's going through is very real and very important to treat, because if we don't the worst case scenario, like what happened to my colleague, could happen to any of us.

Kim Meninger

It's so important what you just said about we're all suffering in silence, because I can't tell you how many times I hear from clients, from people that I talk to some variation of either, am I the only one who's saying these things right, or everyone else seems to be doing so well. Why am I struggling? And that, I think that facade that we all prioritize and, you know, pretend that we're all dealing well, is hurting all of us because we, we all think I should be more like that person without realizing, like you said, the behind-the-scenes of that person is likely very different from what they're projecting to the outside world.

Garrett Wood

Yeah, and some of that, I think, is comes from, like, a healthy place where they're like, things are tough. I don't want to make it tougher, right? Things are hard for others. If you're a leader, I want to make sure I can hold myself together, so that makes it easier for them to have their stressors. And there, I think there is some health to that. But if you're like, really faking it, then you're like, trying to hold that's not healthy or sustainable, and a certain point, like, even if you do get that success from those people, it feels almost like it's not connected to you, because it's connected to this false mask that you've almost put on. And you know that that's not the real you, but everyone else doesn't know. And so now you feel even more isolated than ever before, and that's its own special type of extra turmoil, emotionally, mentally, for people.

Kim Meninger

So for people listening, you've shared some of this, but I would love to really emphasize what are the kind of symptoms that we're talking about here, like, how? How do people listening know that's me, and I should probably think I'm pursuing some help here.

Garrett Wood

If you're questioning whether you're burned out or not, you probably are. The question isn't necessarily so much now, and obviously, I have a selection bias, because the type of work I do isn't, are you burned out or not? It's what stage of burnout are you? How severe is it at this point? Is it habituated to the point where it feels like, No, this is just how things are and we're like, in a state of learned helplessness, or are we like, really, like, trying our hardest and it just doesn't seem to quite be enough? And so we're trying to figure out how to double down on those efforts. Those are kind of both stages of burnout, one at the very end, you know, one of the very beginning. And so if you've been burned out before, you're more likely to burn out again. And so I think that's probably the biggest predictor of burnout.

Kim Meninger

And one of the things that I think about and hear when it comes to burnout is that the same forces that lead to burnout also make it really hard to do anything about because there's that fear of taking time away from what we feel we need to be doing in order to work on ourselves. And I think these are also people who are not just feeling overwhelmed at work, but also carrying a lot of personal responsibilities, family responsibilities. And so can you talk a little bit about sort of how to fit this into a busy life?

Garrett Wood

Yeah. And so I think there, I mean, you have responsibilities at home with your family, right? Whatever that looks like for you, friends, whatever that may be, and you have to keep the roof over your head, so you still have to show up and be responsible at work, and you probably have people that you don't want to disappoint there either. So now it can kind of feel like there's too many demands, too high of expectations, not enough hours in the day. And there's some real truth to that, because those are all very real stressors. And there's times in our life where they get really challenging, and there's times where they get easier, but regardless of the stressors that are in our life, our skill with being able to handle this stress is a different skill. We might be able to change we might be able to get a new job, different boss, healthier relationship at home. You might be at a better bed so you can sleep better at night, whatever the thing may be that can help but how you respond to stress, and how you manage your own stress response seems to be the most impactful way to sneak in all this, like, helpful things into a busy life without having to, like, you know, get a new partner or a new boss, because those are sometimes more stressful and unnecessary changes that people feel like they have to make, because it's like, Oh, it must be this problem, when really it may not be. It might just be the tolerance you have to navigate that volume of stress is so diminished because your ability to actually mitigate the effects of stress on your body is where it shows up.

Kim Meninger

Yes, and I think that's a really important point too, is that you can learn to manage stress in place, because they think that, you know, and I'm. Certainly someone who has fallen into this trap many times as well as that, all or nothing, thinking that you're describing, I'm either going to continue to do things exactly the way I'm doing them now, or I'm going to overhaul my whole life, right? And since I don't have time for that, I'm just going to, you know, stay the course. And so I think thinking about how you can make changes without dramatically, you know, get, like you said, changing relationships, jobs, etc, is very hopeful. I think that gives us a lot of, you know, maybe inspiration to try to think differently

Garrett Wood

about this, yeah, and I've seen it work with a lot of people. It's amazing, like there's the window of tolerance idea Dan Siegel, where your ability to function optimally is inside of these extremes of hyper and hypo, and it's your nervous system's ability to regulate and always goes up and down through that. But the window of tolerance, even as it goes up and down, if you have a wide one, it's really easy to handle those stresses. But the narrower it gets, the more challenging it is to not experience hyper and hypo arousal. Where you're it's like too much or not enough, where you're just like, dead on the couch and can't move unless there's an emergency, then there's an emergency, you rise to the occasion, and then you crash back down again. And it's like we're skipping over that place where you can actually be a real human being that enjoys the fullness of life. But the longer we've been in a stressed-out state, the smaller that window gets. And so any intervention you can do to widen that window just for a little bit, makes it easier to stay there, makes it easier to find it again when you get dysregulated, makes it faster to get back in. You know, it's like training cardiovascular strength. How high can you get your heart rate? Great, but how quickly can you recover back down to a normal heart rate afterwards? That's kind of the measure we're looking at when we're talking about the skill of stress management. I guess.

Kim Meninger

What are some of the interventions? Like, what are what does it look like to better manage stress?

Garrett Wood

Yeah, I think the progressive relaxation response that you can get from your body is a really powerful one. It's an innate one that innervates every part of your body and it clouds how you can think about things. It's kind of like Midas golden touch. Everything you touch turned to gold. When you're stressed out, everything you touch turns to stress. It doesn't matter if it's good thing or bad thing. You're like, Oh, I got the promotion. Oh, wait, I got the promotion. Oh, no, and no, oh, I got the house that we wanted. We closed the deal. Oh no, right. So the idea is, okay, what can we do to make it easier? And so some of the most practical things I've seen is eliciting that relaxation response from your body. So nice, easy way to do it that you can do while you're driving or in a board meeting or in a conference call, is clenching and creating a bunch of tension in your body and then letting it go and noticing the difference between those two. If you create a bunch of voluntary tension and then you create the relaxation response, it drops you deeper and deeper into that parasympathetic state, almost on demand. And so one of my favorite ways to do that is to clench your jaw, hold your diaphragm and like someone's gonna suck you in the gut, and then contract your pelvic floor, the anterior and the posterior, and squeeze your fist as tight as you can, and you're just holding it, just full Max tension, and then let go, and then full Max tension and let it go. And every time you let go, that baseline tension that you're feeling in your muscle skeletal system drops just a little bit more, a little bit more, little bit more. So it's easier to access that relaxation response.

Kim Meninger

What's interesting to me, hearing you say that is how, and I won't speak for everyone, but how often I catch myself clenching my jaw without realizing it, and so just being able to recognize when you're tensing up, and having an alternative to that, I think, is, is really helpful too, because that just, just that shoulder tension that comes or the thing that just the way in which you're carrying yourself and you don't even realize it, I'm sure contributes even more stress.

Garrett Wood

Absolutely, I think that's where most of the muscle skeletal issues that you see show up and chronic stress states come from is that, like baseline tissue tension, like the arm, can't fully relax. It's got tension in it. It's like the muscles are slightly contracted, bracing to be ready for the next threat, wherever it may be. And so it's really interesting, if you lean deeper into that threat, voluntarily clench it, go even tighter with your jaw. You clench the teeth down even more, and then you fully relax, you're able to notice the difference between the two, versus just that low-grade tension all the time just becomes our new norm. We're almost like unaware of it, until you're like, Oh, what is clicking in here? Well, oh, I can't get through this steak. Is it tough? Notes, fine, whatever the thing is.

Kim Meninger

Yes, exactly. I can't even tell you. I mean, I went to the dentist probably three or four times in a three-month period, convinced that I had a cavity because my teeth were hurting so much. They're like, nope, nothing's wrong. It's just you're clenching your jaw. Geez, I really gotta work on this so I can see, too, like you said, how it would show up in other headaches. Right neck and shoulder pain, things that we might otherwise think are, you know, attributable to some outside force, as opposed to just the stress and the way that we're reinforcing it.

Garrett Wood

Absolutely and stress does have physiological effects on our body that do show up. Dehydration makes it easier to experience stress. Lack of sleep makes it easier to experience It's distressing in of itself, but then every experience you have is more distressing as well. So there are some like bio budgets that we would need to pay attention to, to help support our body, to give it the types of resources it needs so it can metabolize that stress faster for us. And if we don't have that in place, we're working against ourselves in that bro. So that's sometimes the low-lying fruit. But if you have a history of like insomnia and sleep issues, maybe that's not the easiest place to start, but it may be an important part of navigating the burnout symptoms.

Kim Meninger

So if someone comes to you, what are you, what are you doing with them?

Garrett Wood

Yeah. So there's so many things that can be helpful, and there's not one thing that works for everybody. So the most important part is finding who that person is, what they have going on, and then move from there. So really, we do this kind of a three framework, which is just a cutesy name for assess, accommodate and align. And so we go through a full assessment. What's going on with you on a sensory threshold level. Are you someone who, like needs to be in a library setting to be able to focus? Are you someone who you someone who like could be at an arcade in the 80s, all the dinging of all the machines going on and you're still like, no. This is great. I love this. This is amazing. Those are very different types of people. And if you're in a mismatched of your nervous systems, threshold needs from what that environment is, just to do the simple task is gonna be so overwhelming for you, almost everything else is a joke, if that's not accounted for. And so something as simple as that, as one of those kind of a seven assessments we would put people through, and then nobody know it. We can be like, Oh, okay, can we accommodate your unique nervous system needs in the way you do your work or have to do your work, and then can we align how you set up your day, your week, your month, to make sure that it's maintaining that accommodation, so it's easing the effort, lowering the friction, you know, increasing the ease.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, does it maybe requires too strong a word. Would it be helpful to talk to your manager about what you're trying to do? I mean, obviously it's going to depend on the relationship and the circumstances. But do you think that this is something that works better if you have external support around you?

Garrett Wood

Yeah, I think burnout. I mean, it is a workplace phenomenon, right? So if we're not addressing it at work, then we're in trouble. The hard part is, is there's so many different types of people, and there's certain personality profiles that are more akin to burning out than not that one person that you're talking to at work, they're like, I'm fine, and the next person's like, I am broken by this. And the workplace isn't necessarily as flexible enough to accommodate all of those people from like, a top-down system. So if you have a really close, amazing relationship with your supervisor, and there's a lot of trust there and some advocacy for them, then, yeah, absolutely. If you have a really innovative corporate culture, creative team that, like, wants the best for everybody, it's definitely something to talk about. But in the meantime, we can't wait sitting on our hands, hoping that eventually they'll create an initiative, and then it'll get picked up, and then it'll roll out, and that it'll be feedback, and it'll actually be perfectly designed for what you need in that moment. That's like, the long way around. I'm hopeful for that, but, you know, I'm not gonna wait, I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, yeah. That's a really good point, too. I think that there's an individual and a collective opportunity here.

Garrett Wood

Absolutely, yeah, and the more we know about it, the more we recognize it, I think the better it will be in the future. Because I don't think people want to burn people out. I think they just think right now, we don't know what to do. And so it's the cost of doing business is kind of the Oh, that's a you issue. That's a you issue, instead of seeing it as a big hole that we're all experiencing it. And so we're like, what triggers it for one person versus another looks so different, it's hard to be able to be like, Oh, this is what it all is. But when we notice the mismatch between the person and their environment and what they actually need, regardless of what that person needs, that's where that burnout shows up at.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, one of the other things I was thinking about, too is just this, this physical and emotional, you know, sort of synergy, or how they, how they work together. And I think it's important we've been talking about the fact that sometimes stress shows up in physical symptoms. And you gave your example of how the ER doctor said there's nothing wrong with you, right? Sometimes there is something wrong with us, right? I mean, I've talked to people who've had an autoimmune disorders that maybe we're stress-induced at some point or, you know, there are, there are physical conditions that, that we live with. Do you recommend thinking? I mean, not. I. Yeah, I'm trying to think of how to, how to frame this without over-complicating things. But do you recommend if you are somebody who's maybe seeing themselves in the profile of people that we're talking about, not just stopping at a physical diagnosis, but actually thinking about some of the stress management to like, what? Sometimes when you go to a doctor and they give you a diagnosis or a medication or something, it's like, Oh, phew. Now I know what I'm dealing with, but there's still probably some stress involvement, or at least the possibility of stress could make it worse. So how do you see the relationship between, sort of the relationship your physical doctor and what we're talking about here?

Garrett Wood

Yeah, pain, I think is a really fun example of that, because it's very strange. And so that there's like, the rubber hand experiment, where they put your hand underneath the table, and they put a rubber hand on top. They stroke your hand as they stroke the rubber hand, and then they'll do some like nefarious things, like smash the rubber hand with a bat, and your hand will have pain, and you'll be like that hurt, but yet your hand was under the table. There's no damage being done physically, but yet it still causes distress to your system, and that distress carries a physiological response. And if we're really high acute version of stress, and then we get a long recovery, excellent, we get stronger, we get more resilient. We can handle more stress in the future. But if we have like low grade stress consistently for a long period of time with no recovery. Our nervous system, our social systems aren't evolved to really handle that very well. And so that's where I think we see some of the more flare ups of like autoimmune conditions or even pain flare ups. People are like, Yeah, I'm doing pretty good. And then all of a sudden it just came out of nowhere. And it's like, Sure, so you've had Hashimotos or graves your whole life, but like, right now you're having a flare-up, but what was going on the three months, six months prior? There's something that you were getting that you're no longer getting, or there's a stressor that wasn't there, that is now. And so we have to be able to make sure we're navigating that stress response, to be able to give your body as much support as it possibly can, if we can dump out that little chronic inflammation every day from the stress, then maybe we'll have less flare ups, or less intense flare-ups, which would be really nice for people.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, I think that is important for one of the recommendations that I always make before even taking action is really observe yourself and in spaces where you experience stress, right? Because we don't really know what those stressors are until we pay attention to them, and sometimes it's just your day is a blur. So I like your, your point about what's been happening in the last three to six months, so that you actually slow down and say, Oh, I got a new manager and that's been really stressful, or, Oh, I've been working longer hours, things that you can physically point to as contributors to change.

Garrett Wood

Yeah, and there's that perceived stress scale that people can fill out, which I think is really fascinating. But even when you put someone through a physiological stressor, sometimes consciously, that won't be enough to register that they're under distress. They'll be like, fine, nothing change. But cognitively, on their tests, the performance will suffer. And so by the time it does show up to your conscious awareness, it's been there for so long and uncared for that, you know, I don't know, you know, for anybody out there who has a kid and that's crying, they're like, Okay, cool, I'm gonna check their diaper. That's one of the things I'm gonna check, like, are they wet? Do they need to be changed? Are they hungry? Are they tired? It's these normal things, but sometimes by the time it becomes conscious awareness, it's been sitting there for so long, unattended to, uncared for, that we didn't even know it was even there, because we are really resilient, and we are these kind of overachievers, high-achieving, high-masking people. And so the question is, is, like, not, how much can you do with how little? It's, How much better would you feel if we gave you more?

Kim Meninger

Yeah, because I think to your earlier point, a lot of us wait until a crisis point because we either feel like we don't have time to deal with it right now. There's something more important or it's not registering, like you said, we're just, you know, sort of not paying close enough attention. So you mentioned, you know, the, and I forget what you called it, about kind of tensing up voluntarily and then relaxing. Yeah, are there other things that we could maybe do a little bit more proactively, even though, even if we don't necessarily see ourselves in, you know, a really high stress state right now, that can be helpful in maintaining a lower baseline or getting ahead of it, so to speak.

Garrett Wood

Absolutely, yeah. And I think one of the easy things to they have a bunch of wearables now that can track, track your heart rate variability, and that's like a really nice physiological response of like chronic stress in your body or chronic resilience, depending on where we are on that scale. And noticing trends over a period of time is really a powerful tool. And being able to have some type of feedback. But we're not waiting for, like, frustration with the dog or a strained relationship or a missed deadline or a couple sleepless nights. We might be able to see that change in the physiology sooner, instead of waiting for, like, you know, where that line is and we're crossing it, trying to come back and then anything that can improve that. HRV is really powerful. They've done a lot of studies for soldiers that are being deployed, that the people with the highest Heart Rate Variability are less prone to develop post-traumatic stress syndrome after they come back from deployment. And these are people that are stationed in the same unit. They've been trained doing the same thing. They're doing the same tasks, the same jobs. Obviously, they're different people, so you can't control for everything, but it does seem that there's a high correlation between heart rate variability and your resilience to developing like a stress response diagnosis.

Kim Meninger

Interesting. So is that similar to what you were describing? Is about, about the that window, so the greater variability is a bigger window.

Garrett Wood

Yeah, yeah. So the more highs and lows you can handle without it overwhelming your ability to metabolize it for, you know, a nice catch-all, and now an analogous term there.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, I'm, I'm curious. I have, like, just this, this personally curiosity-based question, because I hear people talk about it, what are your thoughts on the whole cold water thing, in terms of, like, voluntarily stressing yourself out? Is that something that you, you recommend, that you think is a good way to kind of just introduce a really stressful thing? And do you see it working?

Garrett Wood

You would have to have such a nice baseline of recovery in the first place for that to be effective. If you're stressed out, and we're adding more stress to your nervous system, we're just going to get more stress from it. If you are doing really well, and we add some more incidental stress, and we give you a chance to recover from it. Now you're more inoculated against that type of stress in the future. So there are a bunch of studies out there that verify that, like, cold immersion is interesting to help anti-inflammation. Post long endurance, power endurance sports. So like, if you ran a marathon, you swam a race, getting in some cold water afterwards is going to help speed along that inflammation. Anti-inflammatory process, it seems to be who knows what's actually happening, right? But doing that like hot, cold shower contrast, lots of people report that it wakes them up, it makes them feel good, like gives them a sense of energy that they don't need to drink their coffee because they have that. Great. I don't know if we put a bunch of Heart Rate Variability monitors on everybody that was doing that or not doing that, what the results would show, but I do think if you were on the lower end of the heart availability, you would see it tend to dip lower, not necessarily rise up higher into the middle.

Kim Meninger

Interesting. So it sounds like, generally speaking, you don't benefit from introducing more stress until you've gotten your actual stress under control, because otherwise you're just aggravating.

Garrett Wood

Aggravating. Yep, which we all do, right? You know, you have, like, an open wound in your mouth and your tongue keeps playing with it. You know, it's like a natural thing. We see an ax on the side of the road. We're all looking Oh, you know, we like to aggravate things when they're already bad, instead of, like, letting them be. But it is interesting if, like, people talk about the growth zone or the comfort zone, and they say, oh, growth and all the things you want comes outside of your comfort zone, and they're not wrong, but the hard part is getting outside of the comfort zone, to go to the growth zone when you're already in a state of distress is almost impossible. And the longer you've been in that state of distress, and the more things you've tried, the harder it is to believe that trying is even worth the effort, and the more reasonable and rational it becomes to conserve all of your energy to just bear down and, like, wait for it to end and just and then sometimes a lot of situations, you may be in a situation where you can't do anything About that stressor. And so that is a rational, reasonable thing to do. But if we can figure out small, little ways to add more safety, it makes it much easier to leave your comfort zone. If you know you're on top of a building walking a plank, for some reason, I don't know why you'd be doing that, and you look down and you're like, Okay, I've been walking since I was, you know, however many months old. I know how to put one foot in front of the other, but the stakes feel so high. Having someone yell at you or threaten you or like splash cold water in your face isn't going to make it feel safer or make it easier to move forward. In fact, it's probably going to make it harder to take that first step, and even if you get halfway across, it may not be enough to continue to get all the way to that next point of safety, but if we like, strap you in, we put a net underneath there, you know, we get everybody encouraging you, it might feel a little bit different to take that first and second step and a little bit easier to get through. And so I think a lot of times we think performance is about like doing more with less when really. It's about adding more safety, a larger runway, to make people feel easier, to get more performance from themselves.

Kim Meninger

So to that point, and I know we talked about managing stress in place, right? Not, not feeling the need to make a lot of changes, but at what point do you decide, yeah, this isn't really going to work unless I change my environment. Like, is there a line there that you think people should pay attention to, because some people are in really psychologically unsafe work environments or really damaging personal relationships, right? And I'm sure there's no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. But is there a recommendation you have for like, how to think about, Yeah, you this is probably going to require an environmental change too.

Garrett Wood

Yeah. And so if you think about making that environmental change and that overwhelms you, right? And kind of slows you down, maybe the question is, okay, if I was to decide to do that big change, what are all the things I would need to have in place to make that as easy as possible for me to make that transition. Okay, if I do those now, why wait? Okay, how many of those can I do with what I have available to me? Now? Great, maybe you do three of the 10 things you could do, and maybe everything changes. Maybe it doesn't, and you do another three, then you got six of the 10 things you can do, and it does then. Or maybe you have 10 of the 10, and you're still like, No, this is terrible. But now you have prepared yourself to feel safe enough to make that big transition and that change, and you're probably going to feel more confident because you're like, man, I've done everything there is to do. Still, no good, very bad thing. Okay, so this is not me anymore. It may not even be that person, but it's definitely this dynamic isn't healthy for either of us. So now we need to need someone needs to make a change, right?

Kim Meninger

Yeah, what I love about that too, is that it takes the stress of making the change off the table temporarily, but puts all the pieces in place to prepare you for it if you reach a point where you conclude this is what's going to be required. So yes, you win either way, right?

Garrett Wood

Yeah, you win, or you prepare for a bigger change that you will also now be more prepared for.

Kim Meninger

Yeah, exactly. So for people who are listening, I have a quick question that I'm going to ask you, where they can find you. Do you see people virtually, or do they have to see you in person?

Garrett Wood

No. Virtual is primarily most of my business. Now, it was different prior to 2020 but now, you know, I'm lucky enough to have some people that are in Thailand and the UK and all over the states. So yeah, it's kind of fun trying to navigate the time zone. So I'm still not crazy. We make it work. We make it work.

Kim Meninger

That is great. So for anyone listening who wants to learn more about you and your work, where can they find you?

Garrett Wood

Yeah, if they want to be really professional, they can follow me on the professional social media LinkedIn. If they want to be a little bit more personable, they can follow me on Instagram, or they can go to my website. And all of those are Gnosis Therapy.

Kim Meninger

Excellent. And I'll make sure those links are in the show notes. Thank you so much, Garrett, I've learned a lot. This has been a really great conversation, and I appreciate you being here.

Garrett Wood

Kim, thanks for having me. It's really fun to talk about all of this stuff, so it's important.