Thank you very much, everybody. I appreciate you being here. My name is Amanda Velazquez and I am a life and wellness coach and consultant. I used to be in it for over 20 years. I retired out of it.Um Two years ago, I started my it career as a technical writer and then I went on to doing some programming and I also uh after I did programming, I ended up being a UNIX administrator and who would have thought I didn't know what UNIX was otherwise I wouldn't have been doing UNIX administration, right?

Um But it's been quite interesting the, the path I've taken um where life just throws Curves at you and you just go with the wind. Um You just, all you have to do is adjust yourselves. There's no point in doing anything other than that because otherwise you end up uh pretty much being stressed out of your mind here. Um So go with the flow, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not about, about how things get done, but that things get done, things that you want. OK. Um So as a UNIX administrator being a UNIX administrator, gave me the choice to go on to do security work. I, I was doing cybersecurity solution designs and implementations and yes, I am AC ISSP, I still have my CISSP. That was one of the hardest test I ever had to take and I'm going to continue to have it just for fun. So I start my sessions with the question of what do you want? What do you want out of your life? What do you want out of your career? What do you want in relationships? What is it that you're looking for? You need to know what you want in order to, to set it as a target and you shoot at it at it, you should OK?

This is what I want and the path that you start taking doesn't matter which way you have to sail, which way you have to twist and turn to get there as long as you get there. And that's what life is gonna throw at you. There are according to my mentor, Gary Douglas, there are four elements to create in your life. Question, choice, possibility and contribution. A question is OK. What do I want to experience in life? Experience as in the feelings? What do I want to experience? And when you ask the question, what do you want to experience? You start getting choices, you want to experience relationships, you want to experience success, define what success means to you and every choice that you make will create a different possibility. And if like, for example, when I started my career, I was a tech writer and as a tech writer, I said, OK, what else do I want to experience? And then I was given the choice to be a programmer. OK. What else do I wanna experience? I was given the choice to be a UNIX administrator? OK. What else do I want to experience? And, but each choice that I took gave me a different possibility and ended up being where I was doing solution design, cybersecurity solution designs, right? So it's all about how you take it. But it's that as you, I've been listening to other speakers today and the one thing, the one thing that's been going out there is forget about being perfect. There's no such thing.

And if you, if you get yourself stuck and I need to be perfect in something, you're gonna be frustrated because you're not going to meet your ex your expectations for it. But define what do you want? That is key. Now, the other thing about it is like I said, if you don't, if you try perfectionism or if you expect things to be one way and they look something else. Did you know that as many as 90% of all visits to the health care providers in the United States are stress related, 90%. That is a huge number, isn't, it don't want to be there because stress does not discriminate. It doesn't care who you are, it doesn't care about your race, your sex, your income or education doesn't care about any of that. It's an equal opportunity stressor and stress affects every part of your body, mind and spirit. It goes from headaches to stomach ailments, to heart disease and to death and everything in between. Don't get caught in that loop. If you start with you wanted something, it should show up one way and it doesn't. And that's what stresses. You don't let it go because the stress is difficult to define. It's very individually. It affects everybody individually. It varies what stresses you might not stress somebody else because stress is not what happens to someone. Those are those outside forces are the stressors.

Stress is the outcome of how a person reacts to the stressor, how you react. OK. What are your stressors? Do you know what is it that when something happens? You don't, you stop thinking and instead of responding, you react, that's a bad situation to be in because you might react and you might quit. You might, you might say, oh I quit and you let you let go of a promising career. You might respond physically which is not good for you or for anybody else involved. Understand your stressors, stressors also, when somebody knows what stresses you, they can use that against you don't let somebody else push your buttons, don't let him because when you are stressed we have more physical mental relationship, sleep challenges and domestic violence increases. There's a lot of road rage.

Have you paid attention when road rage happens the most? It's at the end of the work day and there's also behavior problems. Ok. Did you know that whatever emotion you experience? You carry it with you for the next 72 hours? Uh huh. What does this mean? If, for example, you get angry at work, you take that home with you. Now you're a spouse or enjoyable other, you know, they, something that's gonna really set you off and now you're gonna have an argument with them with your enjoyable other, your spouse, your, um, your Children.

And what was the root of the problem? Whatever happened at work and now you have this other anger building up. Now what tomorrow you go to work, you're caring the day before the anger or the whatever emotion you felt at work the day before whatever happened, emotions you, you felt at home now you're taking it to work again and anything can set you off to get a reaction out of you. Work is not always a happy go lucky place. In some instances, it could be places where people want to get rid of you being in a particular team because the team is high profile. Don't let them push you away from it, manage your emotions, manage your stress. So you don't re you don't react, you respond just um a quick symptoms of what stress looks like is irritation, anger or, or being in denial, feeling uncertain, nervous or anxious, lacking motivation, feeling tired, overwhelmed or burned out, feeling sad or depressed, having trouble sleeping, having trouble concentrating at the, the last gig that I did in it, I was doing um proposal work for public sector, state and federal and local and proposal work.

It's full of deadlines. You must meet deadline. Otherwise, if you're a minute late or second late, they will not take your proposal. OK. So it was high stress and people were getting burned out. People were having trouble sleeping because it's just so much work. You don't just work in one deal. You work in many deals and there's trouble concentrating, know the symptoms and take action. How are you reacting to what stresses you in your life? That's something for you to keep in mind. Something for you to always be watchful for. There are three things you can do today to reduce your stress, set work hours. There was a time in my, it work in my life where I was working on a project, high visibility project. And this project I was going in when the moon was out, I was coming home when the moon was out. That's not how you want to do it. Be smarter than I was set your work hours because there's always gonna be work in this one company. If you work 60 hours. That was, oh, that was the minimum. You could work, but set your hours, don't let others set it for. You. Take breaks also. It's easy to go to the cafeteria, buy your food, come back to your desk, eat while you're responding emails because every other time it's all about meetings don't take breaks.

Go to the cafeteria, stay there, eat your lunch there or go for a nature walk if you can go and walk your dog if you're working from home, but take breaks away from where you normally work. And what I'm gonna talk about today is the mental fitness because we're gonna focus on blocking the mind matter, the mind chatter in order to let your brain reset and allow for positive response to life challenges, positive intelligence, mental fitness framework brings out the best in everyone and quis the worst so that the individual not only performs better, but also there's more personal fulfillment and less stress.

Remember what we said about expectations, right? Drop them and this is the way to do it because sometimes you say I'll be happy when I'll take a break. When no, now is the day that you do that we all have what we call saboteurs. These are these motivate you through negative emotions like fear, stress, anger, guilt, shame, and security. If I don't do this work, I'm gonna get fired if I don't do this, my team's gonna be angry at me and we also have SAGES who motivate us through positive emotions, like empathy, curiosity, creativity, passion, and purpose. But the end game is to increase happiness in all facets of life and positive intelligence. PQ um was it's a mastermind by Shira Charming. He's another one of my mentors as well. He has a best seller uh booking um in the New York Times whatever. So we have mindful mindfulness options to pay attention to and all you need to do is 10 seconds at a time to quiet your mind to quiet your brain. OK? You can do it through breath in, through the nose, out through the nose 10 times. And then that quiets your brain, your your chatter, your mind, chatter, quiet. You can also do it touching something if you touch your fingers and feel everything be present and the key is to be present at all times.

Feel every reach in your finger or wiggle your toes inside your shoes, wiggle them. See if you can find all the all different 10 toes or touch a pen. How does a pen feel? How slick is it? How smooth is it? What is the ridge? You can also do it by hearing. What do you hear close? What do you hear far and be present when you do these exercises? And you and there's also the visual, you can look at something in so much detail that you know every line that goes through it and the saboteurs that I was talking about. We are so good at judging ourselves, aren't we? We judge ourselves like crazy. And with the ghost, the avoider, the controller, the hyper achiever, the hyper rational hyper vigilant, the pleaser, the restless, the victim. We are a combination of all these different percentages for all of us. But we have a, a little bit of all of this. Think about hyper achiever.

I'll be happy when I get the next promotion. You can still be happy today. You don't have to wait until tomorrow to be happy. You can be happy today and still uh work towards achieving that promotion. There's no need to wait. So, but we also have the sage and sage is about empathy. If you were talking to a child, the way you talk to you, would that be kind to, to the child or if you were to talk to your best friend, the way you talk to you from you to you. Would your best friend still be your friend? Empathy when you talk to you, when you talk to others, imagine them being five year olds, five year olds who they need to be taken care of. Also explore, you're working on a problem. I was working on a proposal, let's say. And I would ask, what would it take for somebody to give me the content? I need to, to fill the two pages I need to fill on this solution. And I would ask that, go take a shower, go for a walk, whatever. And I would, I would be browsing the web. I will find the solution. I would get emails, people saying, hey, I'm working on this. What do you know anything about that?

Oh, by the way, I just finished this other stuff and now asking you if you shall receive be in the question being in the wonder of what else is possible, you know, everybody's gonna solution the same thing, right? What else is possible? What else can you do and still be within, within the price um to win so that you are able to, to do the solution that you want? And then there's innovate. Yes. What else is possible? Yes. What else is possible? And there's navigate where you go forward because you have not created a single problem in life that you don't have an answer, but you have to go inside and get that answer and activate. When you have the judge come out, you tell it, go to a corner. I don't need you right now. Our process is quite easy. We notice the judge, whatever voice in their voice is talking to us or whatever feeling we're, we're um we're experiencing, we do the mindful exercise and then at night we journal what made that emotion, that feeling show up? What was it? And keep a journal of it here is the, you can get the, the your own assessment and I'm gonna put that link in the chat as well as my linkedin.

If you guys want the linkedin with me, that way you get your own PQ score and see how you, how you rating yourself in the different in the judge and all the stuff, ok? If you're interested, but the practice that you can do is choose the stressor that might be an emotion, a feeling um and rated 0 to 10 0 being nothing 10 being extremely high. Where are you with that emotion? That feeling that, that instance and then do a 12th practice, do a 12th practice. And then is it the same or different? More than likely it's change? Even if it's one point down, it's change. Do it again, go in a continuous loop until you get to the number you can and you can do this in a meeting. That's the beauty of it. If theyre if they change your deadline to more aggressive deadlines, you can do the breath and nobody knows you're doing it. That's the beauty of it all. Nobody knows you're doing it. Remember one thing, your point of view creates your reality, your reality does not create your point of view. Be the creator of your life.

If you see if you, if you think you cannot do it, you cannot, if you think you can, you can, nobody can change your mind on that. You are the creator of your life. People who practice this, um this comp competencies that I told you about, they have success in their life, in their work, uh in their sales, in their, their businesses. Um So it's really good to, to do this. Um This is progress, stress management programs that my company has and I appreciate you. I know you have choices on what you can do, what you can listen to and I appreciate you being here today. Let's see. Um Does anybody have any questions or I think we got about a minute or so of questioning if anybody Bruna? Thank you, Steph. Thank you so much. You're welcome guys. You're welcome. Nobody will watch out for you other than you in it. I'm not saying it is bad. I'm not saying it is anything uh bad against women. If you think it is, is not good for women, that's your point of view and that's what you're gonna take on. Change that in my it career. It wasn't that bad and it was when it was in the, you know, uh when there was was 120 years ago when I started. Um But you can make your career what you want and you can take it as far as you wanted to take it.

You have to have the point of view that you can, nobody can walk you, nobody can pull you out of a room that you should be in. If you choose to stay there, nobody and allow people to be who they are, they can say and do whatever they can, who cares? They're not paying your bills. Who cares? Stay in the room. You're as good or better than them. Don't be intimidated by that. Ok. And I wish you best. Let's keep in touch. Thank you very much. I think it's about to go off, so I'm not sure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, Bruna. Yes. Use the breathing exercise. Yes. Awesome. Awesome. How does it get any better? Thank you. Thank you, everybody.