Hello, everyone, and welcome to the The Mindful & Resilient Nurse program. My name is Tom Klisiewicz and I'm the preside

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the The Mindful & Resilient
Nurse program. My name is Tom Klisiewicz and I'm the president and
founder of Smart Health Wellness and Performance. And I'm
incredibly grateful that you'll be joining us for this program. I'm
confident that the time that you're gonna put into this program is
gonna pay dividends in all areas of your life.
Whether you be a student, a nurse, a mom, a friend, a husband, a
wife, whatever it may be. You're gonna see a lot of benefits from
practicing the techniques that you're gonna learn in this very
program. To start, I wanna tell you a little bit more about myself
and about the program.
But I wanna do it in a unique way. In a moment, I'm gonna put up
a slide of a number of different famous people that you may know.
They're actually people that I have something in common with. And
we'll see if you can guess all these individuals, here it
comes.
All right, you may want to pause the video right now and take a
look. And see if you can guess each and every person on this slide.
And then I'll go through each of them after you're done.
[BLANK_AUDIO] Hopefully you were able to get most of these
individuals. Let me start off with the upper left-hand corner, and
we'll go across to the right.
On the upper left hand corner is Jerry Seinfeld, next to Jerry
is Jimmy Fallon, then Steve Jobs. And then next two are a little
bit harder, Arianna Huffington, and then the top right corner is a
woman by the name of Sara Blakely. If you're familiar with the
Spanx underwear, she's actually the founder of Spanx and is a
billionaire.
And that middle row there, you've got Michael Jordan, of course,
Michael, Phelps George Stephanopoulos and then Howard stern. And
finally on the bottom row, you have Oprah Winfrey, Clint Eastwood,
and that next one is hard, usually nobody gets that one. That's
actually Dr Herbert Benson, he's a professor at the Harvard Medical
School, we're gonna talk about him a little bit later.
And then the last one, of course on the bottom right is Kobe
Bryant. Now what do all of those people have in common with me?
Well, it's that they practiced the techniques that you're gonna to
learn about in this very program. That's actually how I first
learned about mindfulness and meditation, and some of the other
techniques we're gonna talk about.
Because I love studying successful people, really ever since I
was in high school, I would study successful people. I love
learning about what they did, what made them tick, and how did they
get to where they where they are today? What were their habits, and
the things that they were doing on a day-to-day basis to help them
be successful.
And one thing kept coming up over and over and over again, and
it was this mindfulness or this meditation piece. So I decided I
wanted to look further into this. If it's successful with all of
these people, is there any science behind it? Is anybody studying
to see if this is actually true, that this actually works?
And, sure enough, yes, I found that many of the most prestigious
institutions in the world are studying this stuff. And finding
many, many benefits. What are some of the benefits you may be able
to attain from practicing some of the stuff we're gonna do in this
program? Well, these are some of the items that they are finding in
these studies, that it is causing these types of benefits.
One, lower stress, improves health, people who practice them
typically live longer. They sleep better and they save money on
things like health care costs. They report being happier, they
perform better, they have more energy and focus, better creativity
and more positive relationships. And this just isn't one or two or
three studies, in fact, since the end of 2017, there have been
3,737 studies.
That were published in journals, medical journals and other
journals, similar journals. That had the term mindfulness in the
title, and they're finding all these benefits. So when I found this
out and I saw all these successful people they're doing this. And
all the science behind it and studies that are showing the
benefits.
I said, this is what I wanna do for the rest of my life. I wanna
teach people this because I started doing it, I saw benefits in my
own life. But then I was wondering, we'll talk about mindfulness
and meditation. Is there any really legitimate programs out there
that are teaching people to teach this stuff?
And sure enough, yeah, I found that many of those prestigious
institutions that are studying it. Also have programs to teach
people how to teach others to do it. The one that I actually went
through, is part of the Benson-Henry institute at Massachusetts
General Hospital. It was actually created by a number of
researchers from the Harvard Medical School.
Dr Herbert Benson that I talked about on the first slide there,
is one of those individuals. So that's a little more about me and a
little bit about the program. I wanna turn it over now to my
co-facilitator, Meredith, so she can tell you a little about
herself, and how she got into mindfulness.
Hi, everyone, my name is Meredith Burrow, and I've been a NICU
nurse for about ten years. I am also an instructor for
undergraduate nursing students. To start out, I thought that I
would give you a condensed version of my career thus far, and how
mindfulness has impacted it. The following are a few pictures that
I feel depict the different stages of my career.
This first one shows me as a new graduate nurse, having landed a
job on the night-shift in the level 3 NICU. Look at how excited and
resilient she looks, I'll be honest, I was extremely terrified, but
ready for anything. The next picture you can see me jumping
head-first in every experience I possibly could.
I picked up extra hours, became certified in NICU nursing.
Attended conferences and I was even offered a permanent charge
nurse position. I loved my job and it was great. Here you can see
me slowing down just a bit [LAUGH] at this point I'd decided to
take a day-shift position.
On my days off, I could recharge and go back to work providing
my patients with the best care I could give them. This was around
the time that I decided to go to graduate school. This next picture
you can probably tell where this was leading, school, work, life,
all was seemingly too much to bear.
So here I am with two more classes away from obtaining my MSN,
and I was considering a complete career change. This is actually
around the time that I started hearing about all this mindfulness
stuff. I will admit that I was a little skeptical about it, I'm a
nurse, I like science, facts and evidence.
But once I started researching it and started my own practice,
something changed. I was totally hooked. I started thinking about
how differently my career and life would have been. If I had
started my mindfulness practice much earlier in my career. I
decided to focus my grad school capstone project and new career
path around teaching nurses and nursing students mindfulness.
To help them balance work, life, and prevent burnout. Now, here
is a mindful nurse, I'm so grateful that this is the picture that
better represents me today. I truly can't wait for you to start
your own mindfulness practice. Right, now you know a little bit
more about Meredith and myself.
At this point I wanna move on and have you start to think about
all the stressors, the things that are stressing you out in life.
If you take a moment now and pause the video, maybe take out a
sheet of paper and a pen. Or maybe on your phone you could type it
out, and I want you to write down everything that is causing you
stress in your life.
Go ahead and do that now. [BLANK_AUDIO] Now that you got that
list, let's take a look at it. I bet I could guess some of the
things that are on there. Because they seem to come up over and
over and over again, in the presentations that I do on this
topic.
One that comes up pretty frequently as health issues, people
might have health issues that are causing them stress. Financial
issues potentially, maybe family issues, they've got kids or aging
parents. Maybe professional issues, they've got a really stressful
job, or a difficult boss, or difficult coworkers. For myself, I can
actually sum up the stress in my life in one simple picture, and
here it is, a teenage daughter.
This is my oldest here, you can see that look on her face, the
roll in the eyes. Oh, God, Dad you don't know what you're talking
about. I get that look a lot, but it's actually this girl and my
wife that made me and encouraged me to create this program.
You see that girl that you're looking at right there, she is
actually studying to be a nurse, and my wife is a nurse. And I saw
the stress they were going through and in their lives. Whether
through their studies to be a nurse, or in the nursing profession.
And I wanted to do something to help them, and their are
co-workers, because nursing is such a stressful job.
And that's when I decided, I wanted do a program like this The
Mindful & Resilient Nurse program. So that's the stress in my
life, and a little bit on the other stressors you may have. But
you're probably gonna be dealing with a lot of stressors that
Meredith deals with.
Let me turn it over to Meredith to talk about her stressors, and
the stress to being a nurse. Let's talk a little bit about what
nurses and students experience when compared to other careers and
majors. First of all, nursing is one of the most demanding
undergraduate programs that one can pursue.
Not only do you have to attend class, turn in projects, and
score well on tough exams. But then you have to go do a clinical.
We all know that hospital settings, ironically, can be an unhealthy
learning and working environment. You're on your feet all day for 8
to 12 hours, sometimes unable to take a sufficient meal or bathroom
break.
Nurses deal with extremely ill patients, families, and we place
pressure on ourselves to provide the very best care we can. Not
only that, you have a life outside of work where you need to figure
out how to leave work at work and home at home. Which is a very
difficult challenge.
All right, thanks Meredith. Now that I'm sure I've got you
stressed out about thinking about all of your stressors. Let me
take a moment to give you your first mindfulness technique, to help
you calm down from thinking about all those stressors. I'll show
you another video now that will go through a mindfulness technique,
called the 4-7-8 breathing technique, here it is.
I've got the technique for you today that I wanted to share with
you that when, practiced consistently. Will help you to be more
focused and present, so you can provide great patient care. And
also help you to manage that stress in your life, so you can take
care of yourself, too.
This is actually called the 4-7-8 breathing technique,
essentially how this works, is you're focusing on your breath. So
initially you'll start off, and you're gonna breathe in, as you
breathe in, you're gonna count to 4. Then you're gonna hold your
breath, and count to 7. And then as you breathe out, you're gonna
breathe out counting to 8.
So let's try that a couple of times together, you take a couple
of easy breaths to start out. And now what I want you to do is, I
want you to breathe in, 2, 3, 4, hold the breath 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
Now exhale 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.
Let's try to get one more time, again, breathe in 2, 3, 4, hold
it 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, breathe out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The last
thing I wanna talk about with you is what to do going forward as we
end the first part of this class.
What I want you to do is starting today, to practice that 4-7-8
breathing technique just for a couple of minutes. Maybe two to five
minutes every single day. You could do it maybe in the morning, or
in the evening, whatever works best for you, and try that just for
two minutes.
And then also, you'll also notice in the course that there is a
meditation log. I'd like you to print that out, and fill that out
each and every day. There's instructions on the log on how that
works. Well, thanks for joining us for part one, I look forward to
seeing you next time.
And again, remember, practice that four, seven, eight breathing
technique. Because it's with the consistency of doing these types
of techniques on a day-to-day basis. That the benefits really start
to multiply and build up.
A number of health habits were discussed in this weeks’ video.
Which, if any, of the healthy habits do you already use in your
daily regimen?
Are there habits mentioned in the video that you do not
currently use?
Which habits will you consider adding into your routine?