Women In Wellness: Bronwen Sciortino of sheIQ Life Pty on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Rest, because you need to. Somehow, we’ve created an environment where pushing harder, a lack of sleep and over-working is applauded. We wear our minimal sleep as a badge and turn it into a competition about who can achieve more with the least sleep possible. But when we sleep, this is when our bodies do the deepest, most extraordinary healing for us. If we take that option away, we deny ourselves the ability to thrive.
As a part of our series about “5 Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Dramatically Improve One’s Wellbeing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Bronwen Sciortino.
Bronwen Sciortino is an International Author and Simplicity Expert who spent almost two decades as an award-winning executive before experiencing a life changing event that forced her to stop and ask the question ‘What if there’s a better way to live?’
Embarking on a journey to answer this question, Bronwen developed a whole new way of living — one that teaches you to challenge the status quo and include the power of questions in everyday life.
Gaining international critical acclaim and 5-star awards for her books, Bronwen spends every day teaching people that there is an easy, practical and simple pathway to creating a healthy, happy AND highly successful life.
Sourced globally for media comment as an expert and working with corporate programs, conference platforms, retreats, professional mentoring and in the online environment, Bronwen teaches people how easy it is to live life very differently.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the story about how you first got involved in fitness and wellness?
I spent almost two decades in the corporate world, running around looking after everyone else — and running myself into the ground at the same time. I worked far too many hours. I existed on less than two hours a night sleep for over 12 years. And I triple scheduled every second of every minute of every day.
I was desperately unhappy, seriously unwell and completely disconnected from life … but I kept going because I believed that was what I was ‘supposed’ to do.
And then one day, I broke.
My life shattered into a million pieces around me and I was unable to cope with anything other than the basics in life. And I was unable to stop crying.
In less than 60 seconds, I was completely lost, unable to understand what was happening and unable to find a way forwards.
That one moment in time triggered my own wellness journey. The more I delved into the things that had created my own ill-health, the more I realised how many others were affected by similar issues.
It is in my nature to nurture others. That part of me had run unchecked for a long time and was a major contributor to finding myself in the middle of my own Armageddon. But it’s a big part of who I AM, so instead of trying to shut it down, I decided to embrace it in a way that would serve me as much as it would serve others.
I challenged all of the ‘life rules’ I had been given, and I decided what worked for me and what didn’t. I tried out new things, tested out things I thought might be great to experience and I generally allowed myself to play while putting myself back together.
I simplified every single thing I possibly could and noticed how much easier it was to live, but also how much more fun and laughter I got to experience every day.
I started to reconnect with who I really am, to come out of my shell and experience what living life is meant to feel like.
Because I looked so well, people started asking me what I was doing — they wanted some of that for themselves too!
I wrote my first book and found myself helping people from all over the world to find the simplest solution for their lives as well.
Today, I spend my time teaching people that there’s a very different way to live: one where they can be happy, healthy AND highly successful.
I do this by working with people globally through my books, corporate programs, leadership development, conference platforms, retreats, professional mentoring and in the online environment. I also write for online platforms around the globe and am sourced by the media as an expert on simplifying life.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Perhaps one of the most interesting things that has happened to me since starting my health and wellness career has been allowing my intuitive powers to grow.
We live in a world where we’re taught that anything that is even slightly esoteric is either inappropriate, or something to be feared — or both!
As I recovered from my breakdown and started to rebuild and reshape who I AM, I noticed that I began to turn more often towards understanding my intuition — how it works, its depth and the way that I can use it to support myself and others.
I stopped trying to control it, minimise it and/or delete it. Instead, I allowed it to be integrated into my everyday life.
To my surprise I found that it was highly supportive, and the more I allowed it its freedom, the more information it fed me in the exact moment I needed it.
Interestingly, I’m now finding that the articles and books I write are written almost exclusive with my intuition switched on. When I’m working with someone, or a group of people, I literally get fed the information and questions I need to give to them.
Allowing this element of myself to have its place in the light has enabled me to be a lot more powerful in the work that I do in the world.
I’m no longer afraid of having an ability that makes me different or unusual; rather, I simply use it to assist others to make significant change in their lives.
This means that every single day I am consciously and actively fulfilling my life destiny.
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
The reality is, when I first started out, I was still really broken and fragile and there weren’t too many hilarious or humorous moments.
When my first book was published, I was only halfway through my recovery. Writing my book was a massive part of my recovery process, but I still had a lot of work to do before I turned the corner and came out the other side of the trauma I had experienced.
I had to keep things very simple, and chunk everything down into bite-sized pieces for me to be able to cope. It’s probably not the most conventional way to start a business, but it certainly taught me the importance of setting things up on a platform that would support my health and wellbeing on an ongoing basis.
Can you share with our readers a bit about why you are an authority in the fitness and wellness field? In your opinion, what is your unique contribution to the world of wellness?
I am known for my ability to help people turn everything they thought they’ve known on its head.
We’re taught as children that asking questions is an annoying trait, so we shut it down as a way to fit in. We’ve all heard the saying ‘curiosity killed the cat…’. That’s a message that so many of us are given from such a young age. And when you’re little, it’s scary to think that being curious might get you killed.
One of the biggest turning points in my life was when I discovered the power of questions. When you learn to ask questions, you give yourself the time and space you need to make informed and conscious decisions about YOUR own life.
When you make your own decisions, you take a personal and conscious role in directing the course of your life. So, actually being curious gives you back control — to rein in or ramp up as is appropriate for you at any given time.
That’s the power behind my work. That’s what I’m known for. And that’s why so people around the world now live their lives in a very different way.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Most of us are surrounded by a number of people who play significant roles in our lives and I am no different. There is absolutely no doubt that the person I hold the most gratitude for is my husband, Jon.
He traversed the storm with me when my life broke. While the breakdown didn’t happen to him, the fallout from it certainly did. He went from having an independent, highly active wife to having a fully dependent and seriously unwell person that he became responsible for.
While I had lots of assistance available to me to help me recover, there’s not anywhere near the assistance available to a carer, and he had to find his way through the minefield pretty much on his own.
Despite that, he was there for me. He allowed me to take the steps I needed to so I could create the ‘new me’ moving forwards. He never complained. He never made the situation about him.
But mostly, he reminded me every day that he loved me — no matter what.
To have that level of support, in the most traumatic time of my life, was one of the greatest gifts I have ever been given. I will be eternally grateful to him.
Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s move to the main focus of our interview. We all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, exercise more, and get better sleep etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s often difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the 3 main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?
There are a number of key things to remember when you’re trying to change your habits.
- There is no one perfect solution for everyone. There’s an overload of information available that tells us all the things we ‘should’ do, ‘need’ to do and ‘have’ to have for us to be ‘healthy’. The problem is this: there is just as much information telling us that the first lot of information is incorrect. The speed of life accelerates every day. At different times we have different demands and challenges in our lives. That means that at different times we need different things. But we push ourselves to try and adopt a way of living, eating, breathing and exercising that someone else has told us is right for us. There’s no personal connection or conscious decision making involved, and that makes it almost impossible for us to give ourselves the things we need, when we need them.
- We’ve been taught that change is hard. As long as we believe that making changes is hard, we’re starting every endeavour to introduce new things into our lives on the back foot. We first have to overcome the challenge of stepping into change before we can even think about the thing we’re trying to change. This makes it almost impossible for us to introduce new things because the load this adds to our already over-busy lives is too heavy for most of us to carry.
- We’re really hard on ourselves when things don’t ‘work out’. Nobody likes to fail. In our highly visible, constantly switched on lives we have to constantly prove how successful we are. How many programs out there tell you it’s imperative that you need to share what you’re doing with the world to help keep you accountable? So, you share the start of your weight loss or your new diet for the first few days … and then it becomes ‘embarrassing’ because you ‘fell off the wagon’ and you find yourself in a spiral of self-recrimination because you failed — yet again. The reality is that the program probably wasn’t right for you to start with, so you had no connection with what it was wanting you to do. It was never meant for you, so it was never going to work for you.
Can you please share your “5 Non-Intuitive Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Dramatically Improve One’s Wellbeing”? (Please share a story or an example for each, and feel free to share ideas for mental, emotional and physical health.)
Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t take throwing your whole life out and starting again to make significant change occur. Here are my five tweaks for dramatically improving your wellbeing:
- Understand where your stress comes from. Stress plays such a massive part in our overall health and wellbeing. Until recently, it was generally accepted that you had to be stressed to be successful. Advances in technology saw the introduction of increased working hours, severe workloads and continual challenges.
In direct correlation with this, and because of the physical pressure the body experiences whilst under long-term stress, we’ve seen an increase in cardiovascular events and diseases such as strokes angina and heart attacks. There’s also been a sharp rise in the occurrence of auto-immune disease and Type 2 diabetes. We’ve also seen an increase in the occurrence of mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression due to the psychological pressure that comes from being constantly stressed.
Understanding where YOUR stress is coming from is the first step in reducing your stress. Once you know what’s causing it, it’s so much easier to start putting in place simple, easy and practical steps to help you reduce your stress load. - Know your unique energy flow. We all have a unique energy pattern that flows throughout our body. We have high and low energy periods each day that provide us with information about when, and how, we need to nourish ourselves. Understanding what your own energy profile is will help you to not only give yourself the people, places, activities and things that allow you to refuel your energy, but it will also give you an insight into knowing what time of the day you need high and low energy tasks AND what time of the day you need to nourish your body with food.
Start to challenge the status quo about what your mind, body and soul ‘needs’ and decide for yourself what your unique energy flow requires. - Give yourself what you need. Be flexible with what you do so you have room to match what you do with where you are at. For example, so many of us stick to a timetable that says we must do this exercise class, on this day, and at this time. But what if what we really need is to spend some recovery time in a spa, steam room or sauna or even relax in a hot bath with some epsom salts and essential oils?
Having a routine can be great — it can help you to carve out time that is just for you — but it’s essential to check in and make sure you use that time wisely and for the benefit of yourself. - Make self-care a priority. Self-care hasn’t been top of mind in the last decade or two. As life has increased in intensity and busy-ness, it’s become something that is a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a necessity. In general, self-care simply refers to our ability to take care of ourselves without relying on an external party to help us. But with more and more information freely available to us through the internet, it seems we’ve moved to handing over this responsibility to others. We follow what others tell us is good for us: we do, eat, breathe and sleep (sometimes) the things and the way that people tell us we should. Yet our health globally continues to decline at a rapid rate.
It’s time for us to get back to owning our own self-care and giving ourselves the things that make it easy for us to take care of ourselves, every day. - Rest, because you need to. Somehow, we’ve created an environment where pushing harder, a lack of sleep and over-working is applauded. We wear our minimal sleep as a badge and turn it into a competition about who can achieve more with the least sleep possible. But when we sleep, this is when our bodies do the deepest, most extraordinary healing for us. If we take that option away, we deny ourselves the ability to thrive.
You can only survive for a small period of time without sleep before you impair so many functions within your body and your mind. We push ourselves to over-perform physically when we don’t need to. We skip meals, steal hours from sleep time and force ourselves to work in an over-stimulated environment for too many hours a day. Why? Because somewhere along the line we’ve mistakenly believed that if something is good, then more must be better. We’ve forgotten that rest is an important — nay, critical — part of the process.
So, change it up. Try it for yourself. Replace a bootcamp session with a yin or restorative yoga session and see the way it strengthens and lengthens your muscles. Steal an hour from work and give it to sleep and see how much better you feel when you wake up in the morning. Choose to eat a nourishing lunch in your lunch hour instead of skipping a meal and see how your clarity and focus responds in the afternoon.
Rest, because you need to.
As an expert, this might be obvious to you, but I think it would be instructive to articulate this for the public. Aside from weight loss, what are 3 benefits of daily exercise? Can you explain?
Although I am a health and wellness expert, I don’t hold any formal qualifications in fitness so I can’t answer this question from a professional standpoint. However, my own personal search for information in this area has taught me the following about daily exercise:
- It’s great for your mental health. Exercise has been shown to assist in boosting our mood, increasing concentration and alertness and can also assist in helping us to sleep better. All of these elements are essential in helping us to reduce the stress load carried within our body.
- It’s fantastic for supporting your lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is our body’s waste disposal process. It’s important for the optimal functioning of all of our immune responses. Exercising daily can help the lymphatic system flow more effectively and therefore helps prevent infections and other diseases. During steady-state exercise — things like walking, running, biking and hiking — the lymph flow has been shown to increase to levels approximately 2–3 times greater that when at rest.
- It can support your health and wellbeing over the long-term. The health benefits of daily exercise are hard to ignore. Everyone, no matter their age, can benefit from engaging in steady-state physical activity daily. Some of these benefits include assistance in controlling weight, combating health conditions and diseases, improving mood, boosting energy levels, promoting better sleep, creating fun and social activities. These all add up over the long term to feeling better, having more energy and even adding years to your life.
For someone who is looking to add exercise to their daily routine, which 3 exercises would you recommend that are absolutely critical?
There’s so much information out there about what you ‘should do’ and how you ‘should be’ doing it that it can be really confusing to work out which direction you need to go.
I believe that simplifying the process is crucial to making sure you get the exercise you need now, to support you for decades to come.
Similar to the above question, I can share what I have learned from my own personal experience. This has taught me that the following three activities are essential to ensuring that your health and wellbeing are looked after for the long-term:
- Base fitness level. Make sure your base level of fitness enables you to walk for a sufficient amount of time to be able to complete your own lifestyle activities: things like shopping, cleaning, cooking and generally being able to get out and about and socialise. This base level of fitness can be achieved through something as simple as regularly walking for 30 minutes throughout the day.
- Flexibility. If you look after your flexibility now, you won’t have problems trying to do everyday lifestyle activities (like being able to dress yourself, put your shoes on or tie your shoelaces) as you get older. These seem like simple things, but they become big things when you need to have someone there constantly to help you do them every day. So, adding things like yoga or pilates now can help you to retain your flexibility and keep you living independently for years to come.
- Strength. From the age of 30 you lose muscle mass consistently year on year. That’s why it’s really important to engage in activities that assist you in building the strength and condition of your muscles regularly. Again, think of the independence you maintain over the long term if you look after your muscles now. Simple activities like hand weights or even body weight exercises can help you to maintain muscle mass as you age.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
I am an eclectic soul and to feed that part of myself, I consume a lot of information from a lot of different genres. There are so many books that have inspired me throughout my lifetime, but the ones that have the most significant impact are the ones that give me moments of massive clarity.
‘Kokoda’ by Peter Fitzsimmons is one such book.
This book taught me about thriving in the face of almost insurmountable odds. It taught me about the courage and dedication that people bring to a challenge when they truly believe in what they’re doing. And it taught me that no matter what someone else says you’re capable of, the truth of whether or not you can do something lies within yourself.
This book touched me at a soul level and I will be forever grateful that it came to be in my hands.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I would inspire people to view the world with a filter of love.
We’ve been taught to compare, judge and criticise as the primary way of determining where we are at in comparison. We’ve been taught that competition — and getting to the top no matter what it costs us (or those around us) — is the number one objective in life.
Instead, if we could view everything in front of us as a projection showing us the direction of our next step, maybe we’d see the end of war, the end of greed and the end of a life full of ill-heath and misery.
We’d be aligned with the things that are important to us, and simply let go of the things that aren’t. We’d be happy for everyone else’s achievements while still chasing our own. We’d move to living life from a place of abundance for all, instead of lack and competition for scarce resources.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
Quotes play such a big role in our lives. They appear when we need them to, give us a boost, present a new perspective, provide motivation and help us to step forward in our lives in a different way. There are so many quotes that have provided me with life lessons. One of my favourite quotes is:
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed
without changing our thinking. (Albert Einstein)
Most of us have been taught from an early age that life was meant to be hard. I accepted this as truth and I believed that a challenging life was my lot — that a hard life was mine to carry.
And while ever I carried this thought, my life was hard; I spent all my time and energy trying to overcome what was in front of me.
But then I learned that life is actually a mirror, reflecting back to you the things that your thoughts have created. It is an interesting concept. I found myself wondering if it could be true … and then one day I decided to test it out.
I started creating time in my diary to consciously connect with what I was thinking, and then look at what I was experiencing and seeing in my life.
I noticed that as I consciously stepped into creating thoughts, the world moved in sync. So, with a deliberate and conscious formation of thought, the world shifted in response.
Life isn’t something that happens to you, it’s a direct reflection of the thoughts you carry. It made me realise that if this is the case, then it was time to get very deliberate about the reality I was creating.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
I’d love to have a yarn with Patty Mills.
Sharing stories with someone who has been so influential in changing the way that professionalism, dedication, courage and tenaciousness in sport would be an extraordinary opportunity.
Plus, he just seems like a completely cool person — who wouldn’t want to spend time in his company?
What is the best way our readers can follow you online?
I spend a lot of time in the online space and am frequently sought as an expert for media across all channels. I share a lot of my work through my online platforms that readers can access by connecting with me:
Website Link: https://www.sheiqlife.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bronwensciortinoauthor/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bronwensciortino_author/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronwensciortino/
Free Email Series: https://www.sheiqlife.com/7-steps-email-series/
I also have an online program to assist busy professional women reduce stress and beat burnout that can be accessed here: https://sheiqlife.com/kiss-fbpw/
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Women In Wellness: Bronwen Sciortino of sheIQ Life Pty on the Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.