Helping Your Wellness Programs Take Flight with Mark Whittle

In this episode, Nick Steiert interviews Mark Whittle, a life coach and the founder of Take Flight. Mark is all about mindset and motivation and has an impressive record of coaching CEOs and athletes - helping them step into elite environments.

Mark is a former city worker turned lifestyle coach, entrepreneur, mental health advocate, and productivity / bio-hacker – the founder and host of the UK’s No.1 peak performance podcast, Take FLIGHT, and the host of the unique ‘Take FLIGHT’ events and seminars. Mark is on a mission to help you find your inner strength, pursue your true purpose and take that leap of faith towards the life you’ve always dreamed of living.

Mark built a successful career in London with two of the biggest companies in the world, but after 10 years found himself searching for his true purpose. After hitting rock bottom, in one enlightening moment, he realized happiness and fulfillment will never arrive through the accumulation of material things – and it is only felt when you are aligned with your true purpose. He has been helping people pursue their purpose ever since!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

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Speaker 2: 0:26

Thanks for tuning into the HR Chat podcast. I'm your guest host today, Nick Steart. In this episode, we consider talking about the effect of mindset and wellness. My next guest is Mark Whittle, who is a life coach and the founder of TakeFlight. He is all about mindset and motivation and is used to coaching CEOs and athletes and helping them step into elite environments. Mark, please introduce yourself and tell us about your company and what you do.

Speaker 3: 0:54

Hey, Nick. Thanks so much for having me on, mate. Yes, I'm Mark Whittle. I am a coach who works predominantly with entrepreneurs and professional athletes. My business is called TakeFlight. It's all about understanding yourself, understanding who you want to be and then putting the practices, routines and the perspectives in place that you need to in order to get there.

Speaker 3: 1:14

I started my journey from having my own experiences with mental health and depression and being in large corporations and, I suppose, waking up to a life that I wanted, which I wasn't in at the time, which forced me into making slightly different changes in my life. It's led me to where I am today. I also do a lot of speaking on stage where I share the philosophies in my coaching practices with the audiences, which is some of my favourite work and has actually probably become my favourite platform to share on. Recently, my podcast, TakeFlight, is what's originally called a peak performance podcast. It's moved more to a kind of wellness and healthy, optimal living movement of a podcast where I've spoken with some of the biggest athletes and entrepreneurs in the world, like Eddie Hearn, Barry Hearn, Sistea Regrave, Sir Clive Woodward, many, many athletes that play professional sports in and around the world in varying games like football, rugby, surfing, boxing, and I could list off of those more, but I'll keep my intro short because I know it's a fairly short episode.

Speaker 1: 2:24

Thanks for tuning in to the HR Chat podcast. If you're enjoying this episode, we'd really appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. And now back to the conversation.

Speaker 2: 2:41

You mentioned you work a lot with entrepreneurs, so what can you tell us about the wellness lifestyle of an entrepreneur typically?

Speaker 3: 2:49

What I can tell you is that, before I work with them, there usually isn't much of one. There's certainly a desire to have wellness practices. That's how you want to talk about them, but the lack of balance is one of the biggest reasons that people come to work with me. Initially, it's having all of their eggs in the basket of wanting to achieve success and a desire to drive their business in a certain direction. And, of course, as an entrepreneur doing a business, you and I both know this. It's incredibly challenging and incredibly difficult and it does take a lot of time. It does take a lot of focus I could believe all of your focus.

Speaker 3: 3:25

So entrepreneurs that I work with, they want to find practices and things, usually a quick fix, which is very rarely the case but they want to find ways to continue to have the success that they're having but to feel better about themselves and feel healthier in themselves while they're doing it. So a lot of the work that we would start with is probably quite basic advice really, about how to find a little bit more balance, find a little bit more solitude, move more, not sit and sit all the time connecting with the right type of people and the right types of energies and, depending on how far you want to go with it, different types of practices like cold water exposure and things that you can then start to go beyond just finding wellness but then also to finding ways to be optimal and understanding a little bit more about how the brain works and the body works to do that. So, yeah, it starts with, I'd say, a lack of a wellness routine and then we start to incorporate some of those practices to support them in what they're trying to achieve.

Speaker 2: 4:25

And you mentioned a few tips there in terms of how they can incorporate more wellness into their day-to-day life. What would you say is the best ones in terms of maintaining a work-life balance? So what would you advise is you know, if you're to give some tips, why should they start?

Speaker 3: 4:43

and why? Yeah, I get this question a lot, nick. I guess it really depends on what the person is struggling with. So, you know, we all have our own unique lives and our unique experiences. Some of those experiences and lives are a result of things that have happened in our earlier life. So I tend to start with most people on the general approach of understanding self, to understanding who we are. A lot of our behaviors, as I said, are driven from those experiences, and some of those are more traumatic than others, but we often don't realize the effect it's had until we start to look at it a little bit more closely. So I start with helping people understand who they are, and those are the things that happen and take place within our sessions specifically. But then, if you wanna talk about generic practices, the things that compliment that outside of the session are things like meditation, like I mentioned the word solitude earlier, like we don't really have a lot of that in today's world.

Speaker 3: 5:38

So meditation, that can be a host of different types of meditation. There's so many fantastic apps out today that can support people who have never meditated before, like Calm and Headspace and Insight Timer and many, many others. 10% happier. Sam Harris has a really good one as well the Waking Up app. So there's loads of apps that you can use and I know a lot of corporations invest in these for their staff as well. But I tend to use Transcendental Meditation. That's been the most consistent form of meditation that I've used and it just gives me a consistent period of 20 minutes each morning to get quiet, to not be distracted by my phone, to teach myself how to focus. A lot of people use meditation for escaping the thoughts, but I try to encourage my clients to use it to integrate. So the work that we do will often or always, lead to insights, and it's important to then integrate those insights. So if you realize a behavior pattern in yourself, or you realize a habit or something that you don't necessarily like about what you're doing day to day, using meditation to integrate that and then habitually during the day, in the moment, thinking differently about that behavior and trying to change that in real time, is how we start to shift who we are. So meditation is a really great one.

Speaker 3: 6:58

Journaling is a really fantastic practice. That is looked at as a bit of a wishy-washy, woo-woo practice you know Deirdirey sort of stuff but it really isn't. It's a way to move the emotions and the things that we hold onto in our body. It's a way of moving that stuff onto paper and being really objective and the space between you writing out the thought that you're having, or writing out the feeling that you're having or the view of an event that you had, and putting that on paper, the gap you get between the thought itself or the feeling and actually writing it down allows you to be more objective with your own experience rather than being super emotionally attached to that thing. So meditation is one, journaling is a really great one.

Speaker 3: 7:36

Always exercise, you know, movement. That's a very literal example, but it's how to move your body, how to shift state. If you're having a particularly stressful time, you literally move your body into a different state and a lot of these things just very quickly. What's happening, you know if I wanna go into the science of it is we're adapting the way that our nervous system is responding. So we go from what's called the sympathetic nervous system or the sympathetic response, which is a stress response which a lot of us spend most of our day in today, into the parasympathetic, the rest and digest, or the relaxed state. So these practices can support that that's three there. I wouldn't wanna suggest any others, but again from a time perspective, In one minute or less.

Speaker 2: 8:25

How can leaders and managers set an example by promoting wellness initiatives and encouraging employees to prioritize their health?

Speaker 3: 8:33

I'll do it in one sentence. They can do it more themselves. So simple as that. If you wanna set a good example of a wellness practice, you do it more yourself.

Speaker 2: 8:41

So, mark, in terms of my next question, how can we utilize technology and apps to stay motivated and maintain a healthier lifestyle?

Speaker 3: 8:51

Yeah, I think you know mentioned some of the apps that can support us from a wellness perspective, and if we talk about apps to help us to stay motivated, it depends. I mean, you know I'm a host of a podcast. I think it's a very, very good podcast. Some of the conversations on there are incredibly inspiring. It's available on all platforms, so you can use the Apple podcast app or the Spotify podcast app to listen to those conversations to inspire you or encourage you to stay more motivated on your journey. You know we all think that we're on our own with this journey of entrepreneurship or this journey of trying to be the better version of ourselves or reach our full potential, but a lot of people are in the same headspace and on the same journey themselves. So listening to those stories, I think, is a really good example of staying motivated. You can use different apps to hold you accountable to things. So if you wanted to achieve a particular goal, then there are different apps out there that allow you to. You know, put those goals specifically into the app and then they hold you accountable to what practices need to take place each day. For example, my coaching app, which is actually a white label, but it holds you accountable to the way you want to feel. So that's how I start with my clients is what is the emotion you're trying to feel, or what's the state you're trying to feel. So if that is more relaxed, then it will hold you accountable to the practices that we commit to. So, again, there'll be like the things that I started to talk about earlier. Audio books will be another way to stay motivated listening to sort of person development books, nonfiction on audiobook, and then fitness apps are really great.

Speaker 3: 10:29

I use MyZone, which is brilliant, which tracks my workouts, and that certainly keeps me motivated in keeping me consistent, for sure, but keeps me motivated because I monitor the zones that I'm in for my heart rate and I can see how intense a particular session is, and it also allows me to choose when is the right time to go for a more intense session or when is the right time to maybe dial it down if I'm feeling really tired, like I've got a four week old son and a three year old daughter.

Speaker 3: 10:55

So at the moment, my workouts are far less intense as they used to be, because we need to manage our energy and we need to ensure that we have enough in the tank to support all areas of our life at a particular time. And then Woop. I use Woop, which is a really great wearable which tracks all sorts of things, including resting heart rate, heart rate variability tractors, sleep protractors, stress or as they call it, the strain. So all these things can support you and help you to stay motivated. I think again, I think that's enough, mate, if you're happy.

Speaker 2: 11:26

And you made a great point as well about being busy and finding the time to focus on wellness activities. How, yeah, how, would you say, people can actually, you know, force themselves? People might think, oh, I've got another meeting, then another meeting. How can I actually, you know, find the time to put wellness activities into their day to day life? But what tips would you recommend for that?

Speaker 3: 11:53

Well, usually, I mean, the way that I learned is the way most people sadly learn, which is you have to be in a bad enough state to wake up to the fact that you need wellness routines. And it's even I even find it funny calling it a wellness routine right, it's just actually living, but it's living with deeper awareness and understanding of what you need. So, for me, I was. I made myself ill a number of times and was in a pattern of overworking and making myself unwell, so it was, you know, five or six times around that hamster wheel. I decided I had to change, and that's, as I said, sadly what happens to many people. But the answer to your question really is discipline. Once you've had the insight and you have the awareness of your pattern, or what is that's causing you to not have a wellness routine, then you need the discipline in order to keep it going. You need the discipline to check in with it every day. You need the discipline to be able to get up and, for you know, even with not changing from the day before practice, still be committed to the practice of exercise or still be committed to the practice of meditation, Because it's an interesting one, right? There's no measurement of how beneficial meditation is to you. You have to trust yourself that it's working and you have to be disciplined and dedicated to the practice day in, day out.

Speaker 3: 13:09

Now I'm at the stage now where I've done it long enough that if I don't do it for a few days, I do notice it, and that's almost a prompt in itself to go again and again. You know, these apps are really nice and they're a good way of holding you accountable, like we spoke about earlier. If I mention one more, there's a really great one for meditation which is I'm actually blanking on the name, I think it's called the Muse app and it's like you get a headband with it as well. It's really great and it shows you when you're dipping into deeper states of meditation. So all those things are really great. But yeah, as I said, you know sometimes you need that sort of wake up call of the reality of what's happening in your life, and that's what causes the initial change in behaviors, but then it's the discipline that allows you to maintain it over time.

Speaker 2: 13:57

Amazing Mark. Thank you for all the answers you gave today. It's been super insightful. In terms of the people listening to this podcast, how can they connect with you?

Speaker 3: 14:10

It's my pleasure, nick. It's really great to connect, and thanks for having me on. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm a one-to-one coach and I also have my group coaching, which is based out of London, called Flight Club, and that's a group full of entrepreneurs who are going through a six-month program right now. But the one-to-one coaching is done with people all around the world. I have a lot of US and Canadian clients, as well as Australian clients, and we do some of that in person when I'm on location, but mostly remote. So that's one way people are looking to understand a little bit more about themselves and where they want to go in their life, like deeply. If they deeply, really want to do that, then please reach out. My website is takeflightworldcom, my Instagram is at markwittle underscore TF, and then, of course, in the meantime, the podcast is called the Take Flight Podcast. It's on YouTube at Take Flight TV and it's on all podcast platforms as well, so you can listen to that in the meantime as well. And that's it, mate. That's me.

Speaker 2: 15:13

Okay, awesome Mark. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast.

Speaker 3: 15:17

Thanks, Nick.

Speaker 1: 15:22

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