Creative Power: How Self-Care & Healthy Lifestyle Ignite Success

Ingenium Books is back with another podcast episode, discussing the challenge of finding time to write and be creative. But what happens when you prioritize the wrong things and forget about your own self-care? Join hosts Boni and John Wagner Stafford as they share their personal morning habits that have transformed their energy levels, focus, and joy in their work and creativity. But what surprising, life-changing moment prompted their commitment to self-care? Find out in this episode.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Explore how prioritizing self-care and a healthy lifestyle leads to outstanding creativity results.
• Comprehend the advantages of strategically blocking your calendar for laser-focused creative work.
• Learn to cultivate a positive thought process that enhances productivity and keeps negative self-talk at bay.
• Realize how to conquer obstacles and embrace challenges when pursuing your creative passions.
• Delve into the fascinating world of blending music with writing for an enriched, immersive experience. 

Positive energy, clear thinking, easy thinking. There's not a lot of clutter in my life and everything that I do, then the gym, of course, is interesting. Great habit if you can exercise regularly. —John Wagner-Stafford

Importance of Healthy Habits
Embracing healthy habits is fundamental for creative individuals who want to maximize their potential. A well-balanced lifestyle includes a morning mindfulness and gratitude focus, a nutritious diet, ample sleep, and regular exercise. This not only fuels the body but also cultivates a mindset that is primed for creativity. By maintaining discipline in their daily routine, creative professionals can optimize their productivity while nurturing their overall wellbeing. Boni Wagner-Stafford emphasizes the significance of self-care, specifically by avoiding sugar, artificial sweeteners, and processed foods. Instead, she advocates consuming abundant vegetables and portion control. Adopting these habits has not only given her more energy and focus but has also created a strong foundation for her creative endeavours.

"I always was putting the things I wanted to do, including my own health-focused self-care, last, and it showed. I was quite miserable. I just don't have that feeling anymore." — Boni Wagner-Stafford

The resources mentioned in this episode are:

• Start your day with a morning routine that includes meditation and personal creative time.
• Incorporate exercise into your daily routine for increased energy and focus.
• Prioritize self-care and make time—first—for activities that bring you joy.
• Consider making dietary changes that support your overall health and well-being.
• Take time to reflect on your goals and make a plan for achieving them.
• Consider working with a coach or trainer to help you stay accountable and on track.
• Check out

Transcript

Transcription

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:00:00)

We’re back. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:00:01)

Yes, we’re back for another Ingenium Books podcast. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:00:04)

Yeah. So today what we want to talk about is, “I don’t have enough time. I’ve been trying to write my book. I have too many things to do.”

John Wagner-Stafford (00:00:15)

“I’m stressed out, and I’m not effective in my work. I’m thinking …”

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:00:20)

Right. “I never have enough time to do what’s important to me. I’m always doing stuff for other people.” If any of that sounds familiar to you, this episode might be of interest. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:00:35)

Yeah, I agree.         

Introduction (00:00:36)

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:01:15)

Just the other day, I was being interviewed for another podcast called “The Habits of Influence Podcast”. And the reason that I was interested in doing this interview was because they were talking about habits of influence. And we got through the entire interview, and we didn’t talk about it. We were talking about business and Ingenium and how we named Ingenium and our journey, living on a sailboat and lessons learned in a previous business. And it was a great conversation, but we got to the end, and it was like, “Oh!”

John Wagner-Stafford (00:01:49)

Not focused on the topic of the podcast. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:01:50)

We didn’t talk about the habits. So I came off that interview and I said, “John, we should talk about that for our audience. So that’s what we’re doing. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:02:02)

Yeah. And we’ve got lots of experience at making mistakes. We’ve got lots of experience at making up for those mistakes, and we have lots of experience in being calm and not only making up for those mistakes, but kind of looking ahead and planning for some of those mistakes, if you can: looking forward and just kind of being prepared. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:02:28)

Right. But the mistakes aren’t really what I was thinking we would talk about. It’s really about the habits. And over the past couple of years – so we’re creative. “Ingenium” is Latin for creative mind, creative thinking. So this being creative and fostering the creativity that we each have as co-founders of Ingenium Books, and for each of us individually, is something that’s near and dear to our heart.  So we had to find a way, going way back, the name of our company, Ingenium Books – I just mentioned what the word “ingenium” means in Latin – we actually owned a sailboat and lived on her full time for a few years, and we were building our publishing company at the same time while we were living on the boat. But the boat came first, and the boat’s name was Ingenium. And we chose the name because of the creativity link. And so then when we were looking for a name for our newly incorporated publishing company, it had to be Ingenium. 

So creativity is important and then what happens? Life gets in the way. And of course there are lots of people for whom creative endeavours and the fruits of creative labours are the way they make their living, like us. And so it really is important to find a way to foster that and let it happen. And then there are people who want to have a creative outlet, but they’ve got families, kids at home, another career. We know lots of authors that we meet in the course of doing our work and that publish with Ingenium Books, who’ve got full-time jobs and have to do all the work of writing their manuscripts and dealing with their book marketing after they do all of those other things. So there’s no question that it’s challenging. 

And then I’ll just say one other thing to lay the groundwork and then we’ll dive into what our habits are and the things that we’ve found in the last four years that have made a huge difference. And that is that the pace of living is continuing to increase. Oh my goodness. We have to move so fast. We don’t have time for email. Social media messages are getting shorter and faster and the average length of books has come down as people have less time and patience with reading great, big, huge tomes. So span of attention. We’re busier. Things are moving at a faster pace and it’s harder for us to balance and to take care of ourselves so that we can feel like we are keeping space for our creative selves and taking care of us. Okay, so here we go. We’re going to talk about the habits. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:05:44)

Yeah, I’m just going to mention one more thing. Every year we do a retreat, Boni and I, and we go off and we take a look at our business. We take a look at the year in the past, the past year: what we did, where we can improve upon, where do we want to go this year with the business in particular. And this year was interesting because not only did we take a look at what we wanted to do with our business, but it turned into a discussion – and this is leading to habits – it turned into a discussion of what do we want to do with ourselves and how do we take care of ourselves? And that was an interesting moment for this year – it’s not only this year, but for this year – that kind of pushed us forward to be a lot more committed to adopting the right habits or readopting habits that we maybe used to have done years ago or with other companies or whatever, and now we’re back into it again. I am anyway, and it’s for the better. So kind of the driving force was taking care of us: How do we take care of ourselves? Therefore, how can we take care of our business, our family, our friends, et cetera? Yeah, I don’t know if that rings a bell. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:06:56)

Yes, and it was that conversation. I remember the day; I remember the moment. But the habits that we’re talking about were in place well before the beginning of this year, that we’ve been doing. There was something else I was going to say; I can’t remember what it was. That happens a lot at my age. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:07:18)

How many accumulative years of experience do we have? 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:07:21)

Too many. Yes. Right. We won’t go there. So the habits that we’re talking about cover everything from, I mean, it’s all lifestyle, it’s all mindset and it’s all priorities. And I’m going to sum it up, and then we’ll go into each element. 

So we have a bit of a crazy schedule where we are awake between 3:30 and four every morning. We are at the gym at 6:00 a.m. Monday through Friday, and we work out for an hour, and then we come back and we do our breakfast and whatever, and we’re usually working by nine. And then we put in a full day from nine until usually between four and five. We take a break, half an hour to an hour, for lunch, four or five in the afternoon, normally. There are times when it’s like, “No, sorry, I’ve got to finish this.” And we push past it to six o’clock. But it’s actually rare that we are working through an evening. And then, of course, we usually do a few hours of work on the weekend. Sometimes we work all weekend, but …

John Wagner-Stafford (00:08:36)

Often Saturdays we’re working. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:08:37)

Yeah, often Saturdays we’re doing a few bits of work. But it’s this morning habit period. And there are some other elements in there that we take care of. So the wake up. Oh, and then we’re in bed by eight because we’re so tired. We’ve been up since 3:30 or four o’clock. So whenever I share that – or when I share that schedule with folks, it’s usually met with, “You’re up at what time?”

John Wagner-Stafford (00:09:04)

Ridiculous. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:09:05)

Yeah, it is quite ridiculous. But what’s happening there? So, waking 3:30 or four; we get a cup of coffee. It’s half calf: half caffeinated, half decaf. And we’ll bring that coffee to bed. And then before getting out of bed, we will meditate anywhere between ten and 25 minutes, and then we go our separate ways in terms of what we’re doing a little bit. 

My routine is from there, after the meditation, I do some personal journaling; I write a list of ten things I’m grateful for that happened the previous day. And then I take off for the remaining time before we go to the gym at 06:00 a.m. And I do personal writing. And lately, for the last several months, I’ve been working on a novel that I’m writing, and I’ve got 50,000 words. And in two months – another two months – I’m going to have my target draft of 100,000 words because it’s every day, it’s happening. And John, what do you do after the meditation? 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:10:19)

So, in the morning, the most important thing is I make a second cup of coffee, a second pot of coffee. But I come down to my office and studio and I practice my piano and my music. I study music and I write music for a couple of hours every morning. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:10:39)

So these are creative things. The writing of this novel, I’m going to come back to that. I have to finish the … So then we go to the gym and we have a personal coach and trainer that work with us. And when we get back from the gym, it’s breakfast, shower. And if we’re done those things and there’s space before nine, we each retreat back to that personal: me writing my novel, John working on his music. 

And nine o’clock is pretty much, “Okay, that’s work start time.” So by nine o’clock, when we’re starting work, we’ve already put in five hours. Not into work, of course, except the benefits – and you and I were talking about this earlier when we were talking about this episode – the benefits are: I’ll speak about myself and then you can speak about what the benefits are for you. 

So for me, I have way more energy and focus to put into my business and my work with clients. I don’t start at nine o’clock feeling exhausted; I start at nine o’clock feeling invigorated. Because I’ve done all this great stuff that I want to do: things that are important to me and that I know are helping me care for myself. And I can go all day. I don’t have – in my past life, when I would do it the reverse, I would try to do the things that I owed other people first. I would go to work first: I would take care of my kid first. You have to take care of your kids. People with young kids at home, I know this is – I’m not suggesting anybody should do this schedule; I’m just talking about how this works for us. But I would do the work, and then if I had energy left at the end of the day, then maybe I’d work out, then maybe I’d do some writing. Well, it never happened. So I always was putting the things I wanted to do, including my own self care, health wise, last. And it showed. I was quite miserable. I was one of those people who – and this was back when I had a corporate job – I would literally feel sick on Sunday, knowing that I had to go back to work on Monday. Literally like throwing up, feeling so sick about it. And I just don’t have that feeling anymore. I wake up and it’s like, “Yay, it’s Monday.” I love Mondays now. So the energy that gets paid back for me, the ability to focus, the commitment and the joy, it’s just way more joy. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:13:38)

Yeah, and likewise for me, many of those things are the same or similar. I have always taken care of others first in my life, and I still do. But in the last year or so – two years, maybe – I’ve been spending a little more time with me. And the meditation in the morning is about me and taking care of my positive thinking and my clearing my mind of everything that’s yucky. And there’s always yucky stuff that comes up, but I get to clear it every morning, and so that leaves me with a very good positive attitude when I come down for the second pot of coffee. And then I work in my wonderful world of creativity, in my music. I am a creative person. I have been all my life. I’ve been a musician since I was six, playing guitar and drums. And I lost music for many, many years. 

Family got in the way, and I decided to take care of my family. Good choice. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:14:45)

Yeah. It’s important. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:14:46)

But I neglected my creativity in my music. So music fell by the wayside, and I was probably not as happy about that as I am today. Music is back in my life, and I couldn’t be happier. So positive energy, clear thinking, easy thinking. There’s not a lot of clutter in my life and everything that I do. Then the gym, of course, is interesting. Great habit if you can exercise regularly. This gym, especially for us, or me, in the morning, I come out of the gym and …

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:15:26)

Bouncing. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:15:27)

I’m breathing like crazy and I’m saying, “Oh, my God.” And five minutes after that’s done, I feel great. And I say, “I can’t wait to go back to the gym.”

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:15:35)

 Yeah. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:15:36)

And I never thought that I would be like that. But after having been coached and really working hard at it, that habit has now turned into a wonderful daily, positive, energizing tool that I use to get me going. And all of that positive energy runs right into Ingenium Books. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:15:58)

Yeah. And we – again, I always want to say “we” because I know that likely it is the same for you as for me, but I have to catch myself and not speak for you. For me, it’s visible. My son said something: My son was just visiting from Vancouver, and he said this the first time I saw him after COVID shutdown, which I thought that was interesting, but he said it again when he was here, which is, “Mom, you’ve changed. You’re so much calmer now.” And he says, “I think it’s because you were living on the boat.” And I’m like, “No, it’s because of my morning habits, my routine.” 

And then there’s another thing in here that is really important, for me anyway, and that is we didn’t really talk about the food.

John Wagner-Stafford (00:16:54)

I was just about to mention that. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:16:55)

Yeah. And so I don’t drink alcohol. I haven’t had a drink of alcohol in 16 years. I don’t eat sugar. I don’t eat any artificial sweeteners. I don’t eat anything processed. I don’t eat wheat or soy. Various health reasons for this. But I eat a lot of vegetables: 12 ouces of vegetables at lunch, 12 ounces of vegetables at supper. And all my food is weighed and measured, and I have essentially the same portions every day. 

And that probably sounds crazy to many people. Very little restaurant eating. When I travel, I pack my own food just because I know what I need. And the way that our society is structured around food and fast food and restaurant food, I don’t know what I’m getting. And if I wind back the clock to five years ago, before these habits started, which started about four years ago from the time of this recording, I felt horrible. Physically in pain.

John Wagner-Stafford (00:18:15)

Not exercising. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:18:16)

Not exercising because I was in pain. My body hurt. I was significantly heavier than I am now. So it’s just another element of the taking care and cutting out all the excess stuff. And yeah. Do I eat chocolate? No. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:18:34)

Yeah. So another great habit. And I have been fortunate to have adopted the same habit with my food. I’m not quite so strict with it, but wow, what a difference. A great habit of eating food for the right reasons and healthy food and all of these habits might seem to be like, “Oh, my God, that’s way too difficult. There’s no way I can do it.” And it might seem like that, and it probably did for me a long time ago. 

But once you decide – and it’s up to you – but once you decide to change or adopt a habit, it’s up to you. And you can decide to leave it behind because it’s not working for you. Or you could decide, I want to stick with it because I know it’s going to reap some positive benefits. And my experience has been it is difficult sometimes, but I stick with it, and I am reaping the benefits. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:19:39)

Yeah. And so how does this all tie into whether you’re a publisher or an author or … [Crosstalk; indiscernible.] Well, right. Great question. But it is because we want you to achieve your goals. We want you to find space and energy in your life so that you can foster your creative output. And whether you’re a publisher and you’re running a publishing company or whether you’re an author-publisher or you’re trying to figure out how to write your first book or you’re a changemaker and you’re thinking about some gifts that you have, that you want to share with the world, and you’re thinking that maybe writing and publishing your book is the way to do that: taking a look at your habits, how you structure your day, where you spend your time, what do you put in your body, what do you ask your body to do, what do you allow into your head, what are you asking your head to do, are your thoughts working for you or against you? That will make a huge difference in your ability to say, after whatever period of time, “I did it. I’ve got the space in my day and in my life to do the things that are important to me and to get them done.” 

So thanks for letting us share that. One of the questions we were asking ourselves, was, “Is this too much information?” 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:21:08)

And for some of you, it might be. We apologize. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:21:10)

That’s right. Listen to it at three times the speed. I heard that on another podcast the other day. 

People are listening to it at three times speed. I can’t imagine. But there’s another habit that I want to talk about that has a little bit more to do with time management. And I remember we had a business coach in a previous business that we were in more than a decade ago – well more than a decade ago now, because we’ve been doing Ingenium Books for seven, yeah. And the business coach at that time was saying, “You’ve got to block your calendar.” 

And I was like, “Ach, yeah, that’s for other people.” Well, I’m blocking my calendar now. It’s like, “Okay, this manuscript needs an edit. This submission needs to be reviewed. This project needs to be taken care of. Our business meeting needs to happen.” So what is on my calendar now is, obviously there are meetings on the calendar, but my calendar is full with planning the work that needs to get done. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:22:13)

Including your personal stuff. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:22:15)

Including my personal stuff, that’s right. My personal projects. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:22:19)

And that’s not a new notion. That’s not a new habit. That’s been around for ages and ages. I come back to what I was mentioning earlier: It’s difficult to try something new or do it. I tried many times to use my calendar and block it out. And the thing that you have to – or that I had to – do is I just had to decide. It was all up to me because no one’s going to do it for me. No one’s going to block my calendar for me. No one’s going to say, “Hey, John, you’ve got this meeting; you got that meeting,” unless I hire an assistant. And so I decided. And what a difference. It’s just simply following your decisions. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:23:02)

Yeah. And I want to come back now to Ingenium Books is a publishing company. We’re co-founders of our publishing company; we’re publishers and that involves books. And so what the heck is a musician doing as a co-founder of a publishing company? And I think that’s an excellent question, and we are so excited about this. And we have episodes planned for the not too distant future where we’re going to be coming back with something that I’m very excited about. And I won’t give it all away here. 

So dividing the focus of what happens as co-founders in Ingenium Books is very simply down two lines. If it’s a written-word thing, I’m responsible for it. And if it’s a database, technical, musical, audio, systems thing, which is all creative stuff – I mean, I don’t think about it as creative, but you do. And so that creativity notion of, you were talking about the important thing is music is your passion and obviously we have space for you to create your music. But you’ve also been creating relational databases for us and creating the approaches and how we’re handling some of our systems or project management software and stuff. 

But the music thing: So if you listen to the beginning of the podcast, there is music at the beginning of it. Now, the music that we are using for our theme music is not John’s original, but we just might be changing our theme music for season three because John’s been writing some excellent music. And audiobooks: the audiobooks that Ingenium Books has produced, you’ve been handling all of that editing. And there’s a very exciting audiobook project that you’ve been hard at work on that is super exciting. Should I say anymore? Because we’re going to come back for a whole podcast and talk about it. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:25:12)

Yeah, I think we should say enough to make it interesting for someone to come back. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:25:16)

Okay. Good idea. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:25:20)

Well, so just very briefly, the teaser here is – and I’m going to kind of back up a bit – audiobooks are exploding and continue to explode in their popularity, in their use, in their growth.  I’ve spent over 35, almost 40 years working in film and television, producing soundtracks and music. And an audiobook is somebody speaking; it’s a story. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:25:52)

Oh, the video games. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:25:53)

And I did a lot of video games. But an audiobook is just another medium of telling a great story. We read, we watch a movie, we watch a TV series, we listen to an audiobook. And all of those other mediums have supporting music. Why do audiobooks not have music? Well, they do. And that’s becoming more and more popular. So we are getting into that realm. And in an upcoming podcast, I don’t know when, maybe in the next two or three weeks, we will tell you all about it. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:26:29)

Yeah, there’s one of our books in particular that is very well suited. We have different character voices. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:26:37)

Yeah. In this audiobook, over five character voices. It happens in a few different locations, which fiction books do as well. Not many nonfiction books do. And so it’s just a perfect storm for producing fantastic music. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:26:56)

Yeah. So I think that pretty much sums up what I was hoping we would talk about in terms of setting yourself up for creative output success. To feel like you are giving the gift to yourself, laying the groundwork and the foundation for you to feel creatively taken care of and that you are giving yourself space to do the things that you’re most passionate about. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:27:36)

Yeah. Just decide about how you want to take care of yourself and how you want to be creative and go ahead and do it. 

Boni Wagner-Stafford (00:27:42)

And if you have any questions for us about any element of this crazy routine of ours, feel free to send us a note. There’s a contact form on the website: IngeniumBooks.com. You can send either of us an email: John@IngeniumBooks or Boni@IngeniumBooks, both of those ending in a .com, of course. And yes, we’ll be back with another episode and look for that music soundtrack audiobook episode coming soon. And thank you so much for tuning in. 

John Wagner-Stafford (00:28:16)

Yeah, thank you very much. Have a great day. 

Outro (00:28:19)