Relaunch Yourself: How to Thrive in Your Life’s Transitions with Hilary DeCesare

Ashish Kothari: Hi, my dear friend. It is so lovely to have you with us here on the Happiness Squad Podcast.

Hillary DeCesare: Ashish, I've been looking forward to this because we have had this great connection from the moment we were both in a local Boulder magazine. Just by happenstance, they picked both of our books.

The first thing I said was, who is this guy who wrote this book? I need to meet him. We need to partner. We need to do as much as we can together. And here we are.

Ashish Kothari: Here we are. So my question for you is, I've loved your book, Relaunch. It was amazing that we were not only on the same page but also in the same magazine. When I picked up a copy of your book and you picked up a copy of my book, there was so much synergy, so much the same wavelength.

I want to talk a little about your book. It's called Relaunch, and I want you to share a bit of the story about what inspired you to write it and the core message you want readers to take away from it.

The Relaunch Book

Hillary DeCesare: Really the entire title, which is so important, is Relaunch: Spark Your Heart to Ignite Your Life. When I look at my purpose on what I'm supposed to be doing on this earth, it is to help individuals in what I call the midlifers. Brene Brown says it's 35 until we're dead. It puts a lot of us in this midlifer zone.

I want to help people understand that we're all going to have these relaunches, these transitions, these times where it's going to demand resilience out of us. The opportunity to just lay down on a bed or a couch and just say, head in the sand, you can maybe do that for a little bit, but eventually, you got to get back out there.

I had so many relaunches that I felt like I was on a relaunch rollercoaster and it was just beating me up. It was personal relaunches, business relaunches, and then the global relaunches that we know about.

There was one situation that happened that kind of literally took me out at the knees and it was my mom's passing. She developed cancer and within 14 months she was gone. My identity had always been around being on this earth into my hundreds, because every woman in our family had lived into their hundreds.

All of a sudden my mom was taken from us when she had just turned 78. We were locked up with COVID. We couldn't do anything. My mom had just passed. I started to just try to deal with how do you actually get through something so significant?

This book came to me in the middle of the night. It was one of those moments that I heard my mom's voice so clearly that “you've always talked about writing a book.” And my middle name is Hillary Jane. I heard her saying, “Hillary Jane, you've talked about writing this book. It's time.” It was very cathartic for me. It took me almost a year to write it.

I've been in the business world, Ashish, very much like you, very corporate high-tech Silicon Valley Oracle for almost 10 years. I was very left-brained, very much this left brain approach, analytical. Give me processes and procedures and steps, and I’ll be like “Ooh, this is my jam!”

But here's the thing. When I was writing this book, I realized my true success wasn't in the steps and the procedures. It's when I literally got out of my head and tapped into something that I had never really thought about, which was my heart.

So the book came out of that need that we all are going to have relaunches. But how do we get through them with grace and dignity? And like you say, happiness.

Ashish Kothari: I love that. And I'm going to recap that a little for our listeners. There are a couple of things here that you said that really spoke to me. They spoke to me when I read your book. I've now read it actually two or three times. It is literally marked up friends. It's such a beautiful book.

One, it's a really easy read, but at the same time, it's filled with such practical insights. I literally have it marked up. I'm going to show it for those who actually watch it on YouTube. Every page has little clips everywhere, underlines, links to our own work. But here's what you're just saying: this notion that we all will have multiple relaunches in our lives.

Relaunches happen. We make them happen. We might face suffering or obstacles, but it's our choice on whether we grieve for them, decide to learn from them, or chart a new life.

And there are not enough tools really available. And when we do have the tools, often, as you said, we go back to what we've always learned, especially in the business world, Hillary.

We believe so much in our head. “I can think my way, I can process my way, I can force my way through anything” that we actually forget to access the other three H's that you outline in your 3HQ method.

So I want to go there next and say, what was the method that you developed? Explain your 3HQ method on how individuals can really tap into not just their head, but two other important factors to support them in the relaunch.

The 3HQ Method

Hillary DeCesare: Well, what is so interesting is that people always think you've got this transition, and like you said, multiple. Some of you listening right now might be going through one as we speak, you might have multiple.

And here's what I know to be true. Every single person is going to have a significant relaunch. Whether it's happening now or it's coming down the pike, it will happen. We have an opportunity to say a transition, like a relaunch, like a life-altering or a business-altering.

You and I talked about some business examples that we’re like, “Most people would never have to go through anything like it,” but there it was there, it was so impactful. And you have a choice with transitions to make them powerful, empowering, or debilitating. They can be positive in nature and transformational, or they could be negative.

A lot of times, we don’t think about that. We often think about just getting through. I often talk about when you're in hell, just keep going forward. But eventually, you're out of hell and then you're standing there, and what the heck are you going to do?

That's where I started to lean into this concept of what's next. What's next when something does hit you? How can you gracefully get through? As you mentioned, there's a concept in the book called 3HQ, the headquarters of you. Your three H's are your head, your heart, and your highest self.

When I refer to the highest self, I'm really talking about the best version of you, where I call your G zone, this zone of greatness, gratitude, and growth. If your business is struggling, it's a direct indicator of what's going on with you inside. It's so brilliant, literally a mirror.

Ashish Kothari: That is beautiful and I want to emphasize that for our listeners. Oftentimes, we feel “I am struggling because my business is struggling.” We think about something happening that's affecting us, but what you're saying is, stop, reflect back and consider maybe your business is struggling because you are struggling and not operating at your best.

That's a really important shift that most people don't actually think about. They always blame the external for their struggles. And you're saying, no, that's not true.

Hillary DeCesare: It's a mirror. If your business isn't performing the way that you always thought it would or should, ask yourself what's not performing in your own life, within your own self.

If your relationships are struggling — I digress here, but I'm going to do this with you because it's such a funny story. About 10 years ago, I was fascinated with the online dating world and the model. I had been a single woman and had done online dating, and although it didn't work for me, I know that it works for so many people. I was fascinated with these matchmakers out there.

Just like you, when I start thinking about something, it happens, and so I was immediate fascinated with this. Next thing you know, I'm meeting a woman who had a Harvard MBA, brilliant business mind, and she was a matchmaker.

I was so intrigued by this that I went and thought, what if I could do this in the business world? How does that look? What would the tools from matchmaking lead me to? So, I went to New York. I became a certified matchmaker with the New York Institute.

Then how I used it in my coaching practice with CEOs running Fortune 500 companies. I said to them, let's talk about you dating yourself. Would you want to? How would that look? What are you doing right now to build up this relationship? Would you have a second date with you as you are today?

It was one of those moments that I thought, this is where the magic is because everyone said, it isn't about the steps and the procedures. It's about the heart. It's about the connection. It's about this idea of if I was able to get out of my head, out of my own way, I was able to meet so and so. So, let's get you out of your way right now in just getting to know you. It's the best form of self-care.

So now when you look at 3HQ and you've got the head and the heart, and a lot of times we get spun up in the head and can't get out of our own way, it's when you've got not only limiting beliefs, you're also about positive beliefs, empowering beliefs.

It's those things that as I go back to dating yourself, we want to really cultivate. We want more of the really good stuff because when you focus on the really good stuff, what happens? It ends up being a direct indicator of what also can be in not just this area of life, but other areas.

Then you look at the heart connection and there's a song about the 18 inches from your head to your heart and that connection. And I remember thinking like, what's my heart feeling right now? And like asking it to tell me what's going on right now deep inside and just putting your hand on your heart and asking the questions around the why.

And I always say that you've got a wise wizard inside of you and I have a wise woman inside of me. When you start to really think about this concept around the wise. Why am I doing what I'm doing? And then you ask the secondary why, and then you listen.

Too many of us say “my intuition just isn't working. It's not firing for me.” I hear about people who have a heightened level of intuition. And a lot of times people will say “it's because you had your near death experience and you came back and that's why,” but I don't have that.

But here's the thing, we all have it, it's about “do we choose to not just hear it, but listen and take action on it?” That's the key when you start to put the head, the heart, it starts to bring almost like this everloop together. And that's when you feel in connection with that greater version of you. Your higher self.

Ashish Kothari: So I love that. I want to dig into each one of these over the next couple of questions because they are so beautiful.

Friends, listen to what Hillary's saying. It's about getting out of our head. It's about listening, not just hearing. Frankly, Hilary, there are 18 inches from our head to our heart according to the song.

Most people I coach are actually numb below their necks. Step number one is to know that you have a heart. Knowing how it's beating is a big indication of how you're feeling and from what state you are actually activating. Heart rate variability is a real thing, and often we are caught in the sympathetic, not being able to access that deeper intuition.

This notion that you have a heart, we can tune into our heart, we can activate our parasympathetic. Only when we silence the mental chatter, the noise, will you really listen to the heart. The mind screams, the heart whispers, but you’ll listen to it.

Over the next set of questions, let's start with the heart, go next to the head, and then to the higher self. In your book, you cover ways that listeners can start to tap into the wisdom of the heart. Where should somebody start? You have me convinced. How do I do it?

Tapping into the wisdom of the heart

Hillary DeCesare: Ashish, this is so important to realize, and unfortunately, in the last two weeks, I've had to witness this.

I'd like to share a little story. When you think about your body and the fact that it is all energy, when people have heart attacks and when things happen where you have to start the heart back up, what do we use? We use what's called electro setting, and what they perform is called a cardiac version. It’s the paddles that get your heart to beat again.

Unfortunately, and fortunately, I had to witness this procedure not even two weeks ago with one of my family members. Their heart was beating at 165 beats and they needed to regulate it. I was given a document to sign that basically said this procedure could kill the person, give them a heart attack, or a stroke, or it could work and get the heart beating again.

What the TV shows don’t show you is the violence of the shock, the energy that goes into the paddles. The body literally jumps out, but it is the most painful, with screams coming out. I saw the monitor start to beat again at a normal level. Fortunately, it worked.

But here's the thing, when you think about your heart, the emotions we all have, I expressed this before, we all have these limiting beliefs about ourselves. I call them bugs in the book, beliefs underground surfacing. These are often emotional blocks.

When you are depressed, stuck, feeling stressed out, your energy level based on your emotions is at a low vibration. So, from a heart capacity, especially if you're a goal setter or trying to accomplish something that hasn't happened for you at this point in your life, or trying to get through a relaunch and you're feeling very low, we have to work on elevating our emotional energy. That's heart, heart, heart.

So I have these tools in the book around the belief blaster, around elevating your energetic level, and the fastest one, which I've taken you through, is the “tune in” process.

Tune in process

Ashish Kothari: Let's go through that. Let's share that with the folks because it's so powerful.

Hillary DeCesare: It's so powerful. Anybody can become a master in two minutes or less. That's the greatest part. So, there are some things I teach in the book that take 62 to 67 days, all based around science. You have to put in the work to do it. But this one is fun.

Tune-in allows you to energetically increase where you are at that moment and for a brief amount of time elevate you to get through a meeting, connect with the audience on a show like this, write those social media posts, or negotiate whatever you're going to do. Instead of tuning out, which is easy for all of us, I'm asking everyone to tune in instead.

Four steps. The first step of tune in is to think about the challenge you're going through right now in your business or personal life. So, Ashish, what is the challenge you're going through right now that you could share with us?

Ashish Kothari: A challenge in my business is how we scale our offering, the Rewire offering, which is built on the science of habit formation. We want to rewire our brains through the yoga community to make it accessible to all the yogis, to take them from physical well-being to accessing the emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being aspects of yoga that are so lost in almost all studios today.

Hillary DeCesare: Outstanding. To net it out, how do we scale your incredible program in the yogi community? That's the challenge. It's something you're thinking about because it's not happening yet. Why isn’t it happening yet? Where is that? How do I access what I need to do to make it a reality? So that's step one. What's the biggest challenge?

Step two is to change the channel, elevate your energy. And the way that I get people to do this, Ashish, is I want to know what is a song that when you hear it, it lights you up? You can't have low energy when you hear this song. What’s the song?

Ashish Kothari: For me, that song is "Happy."

Hillary DeCesare: I knew it! I love it. We all are listening to it now. Now, here’s the thing: We're on a show right now, so we'll do this in our heads. But if you were alone in your office, you could put it on with your ear pods or out loud. The key from a neuroscience perspective is to listen to it for 20 seconds.

This is how we change our state, from our head to our toes. And I want you to hear "Happy." Think about it, hear it, turn it up right now. Take it from your head and move your body. Okay, are you hearing it? I see the big smile. He is in his element, as we know, as Ashish used to be. He loves this state.

Okay, so now, we have elevated ourselves above the energetic level of a challenge. So now we go into step three. Step three is where I create you into the star of your own movie. You are the star, you are on stage. And guess who’s out in the audience?

The opposite of what has been the challenge is out in the audience, which is, 'Hey, I want this product to start scaling in the yogi community.' I've got thousands of yogis surrounding you on the stage. They are cheering and they all want what you have right now. So I want you to see a color, whether you're wearing it or looking out, what would that color be?

Ashish Kothari: It's orange.

Hillary DeCesare: Okay, I want you to intensify the orange. It is so vibrant, so bright. We are lighting up the brain right now. Think about that song, "Happy." You're seeing the orange, seeing all these people out there. You're creating the Academy Award version of this mini movie in your mind. Tell me how you're feeling right now. What's an emotion you're feeling?

Ashish Kothari: Oh, I mean, so much joy and gratefulness.

Hillary DeCesare: Okay. You're going to take joy and gratefulness and intensify that orange color. We're going to lock in, anchor in this moment in time where you're having these people screaming at you, “I want that product!” I want you to take a selfie of yourself internally. Hold your hand up your arm and take a picture. When I say click, take a picture internally. Put your hand up, click, open and close your eyes. Do you have the picture?

Ashish Kothari: Yes.

Hillary DeCesare: Now we're going to go on to step four, which involves micro pops, micro actions. For every pop, we'll have a small action you can do. Listen to your song again, tune into the song. What is one pop you could do right now as soon as we get off this call that would move you closer to that image, that mini movie in your mind? What would that be?

Ashish Kothari: I need to call the person who's organizing the Awake festival in September where we are presenting.

Hillary DeCesare: Awesome. That’s as small as it needs to be.

Ashish Kothari: That's it.

Hillary DeCesare: What if, Ashish, you did three pops in a day? What would that look like in five days? Fifteen pops, fifteen movements forward. This is the power of the tune-in process. I just want to cement this in.

There was a time at Oracle when we had just closed one of the biggest transactions in Oracle history and the client gave me a bottle of Dom Perignon. I took it, put it on the top shelf in my office, and said I’d drink that when I close the next big deal. Well, guess what happened? The next big deal happened, and I said, now I’m going for a promotion, I’ll pop it then.

Ashish Kothari: We keep playing that when game.

Hillary DeCesare: Exactly, that when game never panned out, I never popped the champagne. Then I’m leaving Oracle, almost ten years later, I see the bottle, I pull it down, had to blow off the dust. That day, I went home and popped the champagne and promised myself never again would I wait.

I want people to celebrate the small pops and pop the champagne figuratively, literally give yourself a high five, dance around, whatever it is that is your form of celebration. Because what that does is it encourages you to do more tune ins, to have more pops and to have a better process towards achieving the goals we're actually seeking.

The more you can put this on your calendar, and it's two minutes or less, the more success you'll have.

Ashish Kothari: Love it. It's so powerful, and I loved it when I read it. It’s so powerful practice, friends because at the heart of it, what it allows you to access is when we are burdened by challenges, the challenges don't go away.

I know some might think, "Oh, that's so woo-woo, that's not going to change anything," but it actually does. Let me tell you from my own experience why it works. When we are dealing with an obstacle, we tend to go into fear, anxiety, worry, resentment, because things aren't happening the way we want and we struggle with that.

From that lower energy state, creativity is not possible. Our brain starts ruminating, playing back over and over on prior strategies that we have run and get stuck in it. So the first thing this process allows us to use the power of music and visualization to take us to a different place.

When Hillary asked me to move my body and listen to the song, that energy pulls you from your lower state to a higher state. From there, when you visualize, everything we experience out there, we experience it in our minds first. No innovation happened out there before it got created in our minds.

What Hillary did is connect, imagine it's already happened. So it happened in our minds. You put an energy out there. Some people call it manifestation. Till six weeks ago, manifestation was still kind of this weird thing people talk about. Get a copy of the book "Mind Magic" by James Doty, a neuroscientist out of Stanford. It's all on the power of manifestation. That’s what Hilary did.

And then she didn't stop there. She then made it actionable like any good business person would. What are two or three small things that you're going to do, pops, that will move you there? Because guess what? It doesn't happen from the low energy state. We don't take action. We like to think, we don't do.

And nothing moves you forward like momentum. That is the power of tune in. And I loved it then Hilary. This was amazingly powerful.

Share another tool and you can choose from any of the others. Choose another one because this book is filled with so many practical ways that when people are stuck, they can get unstuck. So what's another tool you would share with our listeners?

The Daily Dose from the Tune in Process

Hillary DeCesare: Well, based on what you just said about "Mind Magic," you and I are both junkies around neuroscience and if people know about the happy hormones in your brain that get released, these neurotransmitters, the dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. I refer to these as your daily dose — D O S E.

And what's incredible is that in the tune in process, you get a daily dose. All four of these neurotransmitters, these happy hormones are actually released as you tune in each time. It's mind-altering, what we have inside of us.

So I had to share that, that you actually get a daily dose every time you tune in. It really truly is so good for you. Okay, when I think about another one, and I know we've talked about the heart and one of the biggest challenges for people is to get out of that head.

Let's talk about a really simple way for you to get out of your head. I call it the pause principle. We are all very busy, busy being busy, and many times I've heard so many people say, "I don't have any time." Just like you learned with tune in, it takes two minutes or less to have such a massive impact on you.

The pause principle is literally about breathing. For those who have watched life being taken out of people, like I held my mom's hand as she passed on, you realize the significance of the breath. As you pass, it starts to get more shallow, and it's a very interesting guttural and then it goes shallow and then gets more shallow.

Life is that breathing. There are all these different ways to breathe, and I'm not going to teach you how to do that right now. But what I want you to realize is that scientifically, when you pause for a moment, you're feeling within yourself and you can ask the question…

Again, you heard me say about the wise woman or the wise wizard inside of you, I want you to really think that if you don’t pause, you cannot access the wise woman or the wise wizard. You can’t. They speak when it's quiet.

Why do we wake up at two o'clock, three AM, and you're like, "Oh my God, I have the greatest ideas flowing through my body right now."? It's because you're allowing yourself to pause.

So what I like to do is throw in some of the pause, like exercises throughout the day, just moments of check-in, of “where am I right now?” “Wow. I'm breathing so shallowly.” It's known that when you are high stress, it's these short.

So maybe just giving yourself like, I literally take a deep breath in. I bring in white light, clean breath, clean light, nd as I'm breathing out, I can see the dark, the gray coming out. It's a visual in with this bright, clean sense and out with the darkness, with anything that's holding you down from being creative, but you got to give yourself.

And literally, this takes less than a minute. I got all these very short, but the pause principle is one that awakens you. It awakens your creativity. It turns on the right brain, matter of fact, this is what I need to do. And I often just put my hands on my stomach as just the first one. I form a heart when I put it on my stomach. I just literally place them.

So you have that heart because again, what we're trying to do is bring the heart in connection with the entire body. And I breathe in and I feel my tummy, like a Buddha belly expand and that clean, fresh light —- orange light for you Ashish, that wonderful light — and then I breathe out to the point where there's no breath left in my body, almost to the point where I'm coughing at the end and those little pieces of dark light being done.

And that's one of the greatest things that I can do. Cause I can do it even when I'm walking from a meeting to another meeting, even when I'm like, "Okay, I need a pit stop for a second." I can do it then.

So again, it's giving you some of these, but I like to tie things into really, how does it, how does it work with 3HQ? How does it all tie in together? Because if you're just thinking about pause, head, “I get it, Hillary.” But when you're really tying it into the rest, it becomes even more powerful.

Ashish Kothari: It's beautiful. Pause and mindful breaks are the core part of the programs we run. They're so scientifically backed, friends. Reading the book, I was struck by how we were on the same wavelength because we were discovering through our research the same set of truths. If you apply them to your life, they will make a big difference, as they have for Hillary and me.

I'm a big fan of Thich Nhat Hanh and his teachings. I was reading a book. There's a phrase he says because a lot of us believe that we just have to keep moving to get things done. If you're sitting, especially in the face of a challenge, the most common advice is, don't just sit there, do something.

His invitation is, don't just do something, sit there. Take a pause, tune in, listen to your heart, see how you're feeling. You will notice in your body if you're in an activated state, which is not where you want to be operating because it's caustic for you and your body. You can't access your intuition.

One to two minutes, as Hillary outlines, place a heart, really breathe in, breathe out whatever's the tension, the struggle that's holding you down and breathe in the good.

We breathe so shallowly all the time. We're not even fully using the capacity of our lungs. And that's so powerful of what just Hillary shared.

Thank you, Hillary. I know we could go on, but you have to head out, so I want to pass it back to you. What's one piece of advice, Hillary, that you would have for our listeners?

Advice

Hillary DeCesare: I would challenge everyone to start with tuning in once a day, then three times a day, and see what actually happens. From startups to selling businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars, we all have limiting beliefs.

There's only been one person who ever said they had no more limiting beliefs, no bugs. And to her, I said, I've never heard of that, but people who work for you have bugs. They have limiting beliefs. How are you going to be a great leader if you don't understand what happens to people and the triggers that happen?

It starts with you, and the tune-in process allows you to start with you and say that tuning out isn't getting you to where you want to go. That lifestyle of success, that includes a business you're so proud of, relationships you're so proud of, and that most important relationship within yourself that you should be so proud of.

Ashish Kothari: Thank you, my friend. Such beautiful advice. I am grateful to have you in my life and as a neighbor. I can't wait to get our families together in June. Thank you for all the beautiful work you're doing.

Hillary DeCesare: Ashish, thank you for everything you're doing. I do have one special gift for your listeners. If they want to read more about the science behind the tune-in process, I have a free downloadable PDF at tuneinpowertool.com. It will give you the steps again and also the science behind it.

Ashish Kothari: Wonderful. Take care, my friend. Bye.

Hillary DeCesare: And for all you're doing.

Ashish Kothari: Cheers.