How Powerful Resilience and Leadership connects to Physiology & Nervous System Mastery

Today I spoke with Jeff Benton of Paragon Performance. I thought our conversation was going to be physiology and leadership and the Fortune 500 people, the NASA astronauts, all of the extraordinary people that Jeff has coached with his business partner, Brett. But we actually dove a lot deeper and went into trauma and past experiences and how these can be trapped in your body and how learning to identify them through the process of inter-reception and moving them out of your body is the path to healing and successful leadership. Your nervous system sets the tone. Your energy speaks before you do. How you show up is the culture. I'm Dr. Tamsen Aster and this is Hot Habits, Conscious Leadership in Action. Hello and welcome to Hot Habits with Dr. Tamsen, Conscious Leadership in Action. Today I have Jeff Benton and I met in the depths of COVID when he was running an almost daily heart mass session online with his business partner and friend Brett. For those who remember that particular flavor of pandemic dread, those sessions were a genuine lifeline for me. A few moments of coherence practice that kept my nervous system tethered during a very dark stretch of time. I'm not sure if I ever truly thank you. So here we are, consider this over to you. Jeff, thank you for running those sessions. I beg your pardon. Jeff Benton and Brett Weinroth lead Paragon Performance Evolution, a leadership and peak performance firm blending applied neuroscience, emotional self-regulation and transformational leadership. For over two decades they've worked with Fortune 500 executives, astronauts, pro-athletes, special forces and global change makers helping them access clarity, resilience and influence under serious pressure. Their work integrates heartbrain coherence, inter-reception and science-backed tools to help leaders upgrade their human operating system, shifting from reactivity to presence, from stress to sustainable performance. Today's topic is basically my love language. Performance and presence starts with your physiology. Jeff, welcome to Hot Habits. It's so good to be here. Now, I still feel so connected to our soul family during the pandemic. It was, yeah, it was interesting times and it was such a gift for all of us to come together and really connect through the heart. And somebody was asking me about it yesterday because we started it because there was so much fear and unknown and the machine was going, with, you know, it really became politicized and we had a number of people say that they were maybe struggling in life before the pandemic but because they had community, I mean, connect. There was so many interesting things that came out of it from even relationships, healings and so forth. So you were such a bright light and, you know, positive impact for our group, so thank you. I know, we still haven't ever met in person. We've got to do that at some point. It's amazing that, right? It's amazing the depth of relationship that can be created when you create and facilitate a container where vulnerability and connection and being allowed to be deeply seen is, you know, a core feature. So at this start of every Hot Habits conversation, I asked my guests to bring an object with them, something that represents a hot habit in your life. It's a way of bringing leadership out of theory and into everyday reality. So tell me what object did you bring and why did you choose it? It's right in front of me. I don't know if you can read it, but it's a quote from William Blake and it says, if the doors of perceptions were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is infinite. And so it's a really good reminder that we are these divine beings, like we're perfect, but then we lay ourselves with these false beliefs, you know, these big slides, this trauma. So for me, for all of us, right, it's not about trying to add anything. It's just moving away from, again, these false beliefs that we acquire, as you know, you know, during childhood or whatever, that hold us back from our limitless divine self. And it's been a huge theme, more and more in my life. And I'm actually writing a book right now, and it's a big part of it. It's all about inspired that. It's all about thriving over the age of 50. And what has truly allowed for me to do that is actually the hard work. One, it's just, you know, getting out of stress into coherence. But it's been duly deep trauma work. You know, 85% of our thoughts and our system being run by the subconscious. That's how aspirational, how big of goals we set. If our identity doesn't match it, that we're going to continually be stuck. And so, I'm, you know, I've been fortunate to have incredible martial arts teachers and Chigong for my life. And I was just with one of my Chigong teachers three weeks ago. And he said something that represented, which I felt was very accurate with his quote, he said, 99% of enlightenment is about purification. And it is in within the body. So we think about it. Lightmen is us wanting God and all these external forces, both the other lightmen, right? So as we can move through and purify the body and the brain. And then we get back to this divine being, this divine self, where we already understand we are enlightenment, right? The oneness. You know, this reminds me when I, when I, you know, I grew up, you know, in the sort of classic British Anglican home, where we went to church for Christmas and Easter, right? And then I moved to the US and, you know, religion is much more literal and much more in your face. And you're in this group and you're out of this group. And if you don't believe what I believe, there's something wrong with you. I ended up falling through yoga into the world of Buddhism. And one of the things that when I became a mother for the first time, 22 and a half years ago, was I found the concept of original sin. It became abhorrent to me when I saw this divine human. I was like, how is this like sin to me felt like such a, like of the wrong use of the word for this amazing human, right? And I, as I started digging into Buddhism, one of the ways that they talk about it is that we all have basic goodness. And the kind of representation they use to help you understand that, is it's like a tarnished silver pot. And as we, as when we're born with this perfect silver pot, and as we live, we get tarnished. And we forget that we're inherently good. And so part of our worth, which is what made me think of this like the purification, part of our work as humans is, and on our journey of enlightenment, is to polish the pot, right? And remember that we are inherently basically good, as is everyone around us, but life has tarnished us. And that is an image to me, just always felt like such a beautiful way of describing, you know, trauma, experiences, all the stuff that happens to us. And the sort of the societal lens of, I have this degree, I'm a woman, I'm married, I'm not, whatever, all the things that we layer on top of us, you know, could be considered tarnished, right? And our job is to get rid of all of that, right? I love that. All the things we do with meditating, or Qi Gong, or getting out of a stress response allows for us to observe the thoughts, to observe the emotions, and really, they're not them, right? And it's such a subtlety, but we think we're our thoughts. Yeah, we talk to ourselves, we'd never talked to anybody else that way. So back to the thing of the body, I think this is really interesting, because one of the things that I find in my work, and in interviewing all of the epic people I've been interviewing for my podcast, is this sort of almost the shift between the mind and the body, right? Like, I feel like a lot of corporate America, it's like all about the mind, it's like the KPIs, the numbers, the intellect, the success, the productivity, right? And what I think we're all starting to realize, that if that is not meshed correctly with, in alignment with, the inner workings, right, the physiology, the heart rate, the way your energy is projecting into a space, it's not going to work. So in Paragon, like, how did physiology become the focus, or the piece that a lot of people don't include in leadership, development, and consulting? Why do people skip the body? And what do they miss when they skip the body? Yeah, it's such a good question. I mean, inner society was so linear, and we put so much emphasis on the brain, and even the way we study the brain. There's been so much incredible research about the body, right, and somatic. And I think, I mean, for all of us, when it connected was my own personal experience, right? For so long, you know, I wanted to be good and all this, and I would read these books and feel motivated for, you know, half a day a day, but then I would just go back into the same pattern. And I didn't realize that I was kind of in this stress response. And so when we work with any of our clients, if it's, you know, leaders within our organization, SWAT team, special forces, professional athletes, we always talk about performance and presence is about getting your physiology, right, in the moment. Because if we don't, then if we're in a stress response, doesn't matter how positive we want to bake, right? You know, it's basically biology. When we're in a stress, adrenaline's running the cortisol, then it limit the ability to think clearly, to connect with others, to have empathy, right? All these things we need as leaders and really, to have a deeper human experience. But, you know, for both of us, heart math has been such a game changer, because you can actually start to, what they would say, get into this coherent state. And really, there's, you know, from a scientific standpoint, we can do yoga, we can meditate all this, and we can still be in a stress response. When we can apply some of the heart math teachings, you know, something specifically called quick coherence, first, we change the rhythms of the heart, since we're signal to the brain, which that amizes these key brain centers, right? And we can do this within seconds, we can do a little time, we can do it in the most challenging, changing situations. And then here's where the magic happens, and where we can, where we really have superpowers, when we can start connecting with these renewing emotions, like grad, love, joy, there are 1,800 biochemical changes that happen in our bodies. So we go from producing stress or cortisol and adrenaline, to think these magical hormones like DHA, the vitality that literally vitalize the body. So we have a different experience. And for me, I think for a lot of us, we get, we witness our parents, our bosses, whoever who are always being in a stress response, and we just think that's normal. And then get addicted to those. And then there's the story of I have to feel tired, I have to feel stressed, and that's being productive. To work with clients, and they actually start to get in coherence, and they feel good, then it's not a known feeling. So they start to look for the anxiety and the fear and whatever, because they start to associate that with them being successful. So learning to shift it physiologically, but it's like you and I were talking about before we jumped on, we're also changing our identity that we can ask the present, great, relaxed state, and be not only productive, but three times as productive. And we can see it with entrepreneurs. We work with a ton of entrepreneurs and YPO and other groups, where they reach out to us and they've started to accompany it's their baby, the work in 16 hours a day, stressed, their health is impacted, their relationship with the family, they're not able to engage in community. When we get them into this more coherent state in this present moment, there's that identity adjustment, but then we start to see them being able to increase their capacity to sometimes vulnerable companies, deeper relationships with their families. You know, all things contribute, you know, nonprofits and whatever, and you know, but it's an identity thing also to get there. Right, and it's interesting to think about heart math. So I have a six week program that I run called Conscious Leadership Edge and it has five days of videos for six weeks. And I've got heart math licensing. So one of the days I teach heart math, one of the days is how to ask better questions, one is breath work, meditation, all these things. And I do it with companies and it's really interesting seeing their responses. And one of the best bits of feedback I had was a woman, it was in a university, I was running it as a professional development program. And she said, I've had this stressful relationship with a colleague for years. And I thought, this is just what it's going to be. But she said, after the module, the first module you taught on heart math, I decided to do a heart math practice before I had my meeting with her. And she said, I went into that meeting, having got into that, you know, into that state, having done the practices you taught me, and she said the interaction completely shifted. And she said, it blew my mind. She was like, I had always thought it had to be both of us playing to make a change. And she said, simply by changing my own nervous system, my own heart rate, generating a different energetic presence in my interaction with her, completely altered our interaction. And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It, right? You think it's a real thing. Yeah. And you've now seen it thousands of times. Like this again, where we can activate our superpowers. And like you just said, our heart has a magnetic field that literally broadcast emotions. And so because we're, every is running in the subconscious, we are feeling the nonverbal and the energy all the time. I have so many stories around it from SWAT teams that, you know, would go into dangerous situations and be amped up. And then they would, you know, be creating maybe more combative situations when they get into coherence and they show up to a difference to a situation. And there's somebody that's out of control. And when that person experiences the SWAT team, they change almost out of that claim. And it's almost like it's done. It's like a stun gun. You know, we've done a lot of work within the autistic community. I don't know if you remember Susie Elvar. She's just done a thing where, but when we have taught the parents of autistic children how to get into coherence, they oftentimes tell us that their children are speaking and being affection for the first time, because we're so interconnected. I mean, I even worked with recently, and I've shared the story, a senior executive at one of the big consulting companies. And she talked about, so we'll do these choice points, right? And it's like ongoing stressor. And you know, a lot of times you think it's going to be something very big in the workplace. You like my teenage son. And so she says she's been having this interaction for years where she's working from home, where son comes in, acts like, you know, an ass. She reacts, right? They go at it. He leaves upset. She's just fired up. The adrenaline's running. The stress response. So we do an exercise that we're like, we identify as there a different way to show up. Now that she starts to understand the science of her ass, she's having her own experience of being coherent. So she's like, okay, I'm going to get into coherence when he comes in. And then I'm going to be curious about why he is acting the way he is. Actually, when you're curious and coherent, then you can actually ask deeper questions to get to the, of what's really going on. Because nothing real fears as it is at the surface level. So he comes in, she can feel herself, get a little agitated. She does the coherence because the beautiful things she can do with your eyes open and she gets into a coherent state. Instead of, you know, projecting that story of this is how he's going to act and frustrated at him, which only creates one outcome, right? It's curious and she feels appreciation for him. And he's still being a little snippy. And then she asks him deeper levels of question with real love and real intention. Finally, he gets to a deeper place where he said, I miss you and I wish we could spend more time together. So by her being in coherence allows her to ask deeper questions and a couple of years of a dynamic changes in 30 minutes. No, and it's huge. And I think that's the kind of impact. I mean, what's interesting, and I'm seeing that with the conscious leadership work that I'm doing is, you know, most people come to me for business reasons, right? That they want to, you know, I define conscious leadership and the way I work with it, I mean, conscious is aware, leadership is influence or impact, right? Am I aware of the impact I'm having on others, regardless of job title, etc. But that's what so often comes up when I teach my six-week program is, I came to you for business, but oh my goodness, like my conversations with my 16-year-old with my partner, with my, you know, my, but all of those are going so much better because it's that, it's that creating that little bit of space. And I use a technique, pause, notice, choose, like pause, like that's just regroup, notice what's going on. And then maybe, you know, we get, make a choice that's more an alignment with who you are and what you value most, like the relationship, right? Can I add something to that? Yeah, sure. It's all personal, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We have a talk at Comcast last year, and they said, just kind of share your personal story. And I said, one of the truths is every time I grew, did the personal growth, my business expanded. It wasn't what I was doing business programs. You know, one of the things we really work with clients now, and you do such a good job with this is, and, you know, other people have influenced me, other teachers. But anywhere we have resistance, you know, we tend to go outside, we can blame others, be victims. But when we can fully become the creator and realize anywhere we have resistance is where we're not free, it changes the lens. And helping people get into coherence is incredibly helpful. And one of the things we're doing more than ever is also helping people identify these stories, right? Because, you know, so many, especially the, you know, all of us, but we work with these a lot of, a lot of high performers who are working themselves to the bone, they're exhausted, they're actually female leaders, right? Like who are taking care of children and teams and husbands. I mean, and some of it is just the society we've created. And, you know, I've worked recently with, you know, several female leaders where they, well, one in particular, grew up with a bunch of brothers, and the only way she could get her dad's attention was by performing, right? And so because of that, it becomes an unconscious belief that's still carried out and she's 50 years old now. And so it's created all these other things around health and, you know, not being her full self and relationship. So when you can get coherent, you can realize the pattern. And then you can identify your dad, your flawed. You love him, but he's flawed. And you can take that power away. And then you can connect with your divine being. It literally allows us to have a different way to operate, make this and just be our true selves. Well, and the other thing about that too, I run these monthly salons, which are free and no marketing, no sales, where I just, you know, teach a concept and then we do lots of journaling and breakout. And the one I did on Monday was on the three kinds of conversations we have, the transactional, promotional and transformational, and how we spend most of our lives in transactional and promotional. And again, what was really interesting was the reflections of a couple of people who said that they realized that growing up, their parents' relationships with them were transactional. Or which was, you know, like, I will love you if you perform for me, right? Like you deliver something that wasn't just like you could be loved for your own inherent value and worth. It was, you needed to get the grades, you needed to lay the table, you needed to be beautiful, you needed to be the head of the debate team, the sauce socket, whatever the thing was. That was the sort of transactional part of what you then grew into and understood relationships and love to be in, right? And, you know, a lot of this work, as you said, is the sort of breaking down of it. But I would love to dig into a concept which, you know, is language and concept that people may be familiar with the concept, but not with the language, which is something that you and Brett spend a lot of time in that space, which is inter-reception. An inter-reception is, for those of you who've not familiar with the definition, is it's the ability to sense what's happening inside your own body, right? And for me, a lot of what we've been talking about requires training in that, right? Like, if you're not able to sort of stop and go, I'm feeling angry. Actually, maybe it's not anger, it's sadness. I'm feeling confusion. I'm feeling, you know, oh, I'm addicted to the dopamine, the adrenaline, the, you know, the, the oxidose and whatever it is, that sort of, can I slow down enough and, you know, turn off my phone, put away TikTok, you know, not respond to all other incoming things, which for many of us become such a way of feeling like we're being productive and successful, because we're responding to all of these needs of everything around us, right? Interception, for me, meditation was one of the best ways to really dig into interception, because suddenly I wasn't filling myself with other people's thoughts and ideas and I had to kind of go, huh, you know, like, what's really going on here? And, and where does my mind go when I don't fill it? How does my body feel when it's not, you know, in motion or I'm ignoring it? Right? Which women are taught to do from such an early age? Like, you know, ignore that, that, in a sense, that intuition, that whatever. So I would love to know how you, you know, introduce this concept and work with this concept with your clients, because to me this feels like a sort of very inherent part of the way that you move through the world, Jeff, particularly with all your like martial arts and all of that stuff, too, yeah. Yeah, it's, so this is, I mean, even more excited about this. So I'm going to share sort of even beyond Paragon, you know, I've always been interested in more of the metaphysical, the quantum physics. So, you know, we work with a lot of high performers and I've always been an athlete and my dad represented pro athletes, but I was always very interested in the metaphysical, the quantum physics and the healing space. So I've studied a spoiler for many, many years and, you know, I'm now talking about it more, but there really was kind of the church and stay because it's still a little out there. Although, as you know, with our group that we had during COVID, with so many healings that somebody that ran research at Hartford Medical School did a white paper around us, which I can talk about later. Back to what you were saying, I have studied with these two amazing women in their 80s and they actually worked with Peter Levine. I don't know if you know, Peter, you know, and they're very close with him and really around the nervous system. So it's really interesting because one of the things they talk about is when we have a traumatic experience, especially as a kid and we can't process it, it stays in our bodies, right? Almost like a computer chip in that memory and that it's always playing out, right? And different ways. So, I mean, you know, you and I could give a lot of different examples, but you know, a simple example is if you got bit by a dog when you were younger, right, and you've got the trauma around it, then let's say you see a cute golden retriever of the adult and you're scared of it, right? So, right, but like this happens in all areas of our lives. So, run, you know, I mean, Paul Young says it's perfect, right? Until we make the unconscious conscious, we call it fade, right? It runs our lives. I'm telling you, like as we can really start to identify the sensations in our bodies, the trauma, and we release it, it literally creates a new lens for our walls. And so, one of the things that I've been doing with more from the healing standpoint with clients is we have these pressure points on our bodies. And as hold them, they can start to relax and activate things. So, here's a story like a month ago, I'm working with a gentleman and he was referred to me and I said, oh, well, what's going on? How are you doing? And it's like everything's great. I don't even know I'm here. Mike, okay. So, he lays down and I have him create awareness within the body, right? That's so to have him get saved, get him coherence. And I'm like, where are you feeling sensations? Right? He starts to identify it. And then he's like, oh, I've had chronic pain in my shoulders and my back for 15 years. Mike, okay. So, my hymn just dropping any identifies it. Then I have him continue to feel different sensations, relaxing, and all of a sudden I could feel this energy going through his body and I'm like, what's going on? I'm like, oh, I'll be more. So, this is great, right? This gets really powerful. And he's like, I remember 15 years ago, I was in a hit and run. So, now he's getting into that trauma that he had remembered for a long time. And I even have him push against my hands, right? It's a real thing, right? To move it out. And then he's even expressing it and feeling it. And all the sudden he says, oh, I feel all this heat. And now all this cold, my shoulder, and in my back. So now since they're coming, right? That have been nut because of the trauma. This whole experience, he's breathing hard. And then he finally comes out of it. And I let him just relax for 20 minutes. And I'm like, okay, you good? It's off the table. He says, I have no pain in my shoulders and in my back. So, I say that because we hold this trauma, the story, and ends up creating our lens to how we see the world. And there's nothing. All this consciousness is within us. Sometimes it's a lot of sight. But from a macro level, we have leaders that are, we give power to, but they are literally making decisions from the past, from their experiences. There's nothing more than that, right? From the most inspirational to the dictators, right? Like it's their own trauma that then is being played out into the world. And so if we truly want to be liberated, it is such a gift to go in and do this work because it can be scary as hell. And this, and it literally changes our biology and our brain and it creates what I think about more than anything is freedom. How do I free them in my world? And when we, and we can go to anything we want, I love that you said that because freedom is my highest value. And not in the kind of second amendment where it's like emotional freedom, intellectual freedom, physical freedom, educational freedom, financial freedom, like a real sense of the ability to move through the world. And that's really why I do what I do. Like that's my driving force. So question with interception. Like what is that for somebody who's never really slowed down and paid attention to themselves or those people who go, oh, meditation doesn't work for me. Breath of work doesn't, doesn't work for me. Like I can't sit still. Like, what's the first thing that you would get somebody to do or that you encourage somebody to do who is sort of curious, but is it being resistant in the past, but kind of knows that this is, this is where they need to lean into. What's the first thing you have them do, Jeff? Yeah, I would say two things. One is quick coherence, right? And people that have a really hard time meditating love quick coherence because it gives you instructions, right? Breathe into the heart to connect with a renewing emotion, so it gets you into the body. And we should figure out, we can send you recording of it for any of your listeners that want it. And the second thing is to actually sit in silence and just curious around what sensations you're feeling in the body, right? So, and one of the keys is, so let's say you're feeling something in your chest, right? Or something, or a lot of times because of the thinking feeling loop, we'll want to put a story with it. I would say just think about the physical sensations, right? So you're closing your eyes and let's say, I would say, you know, where is it most prevalent in your body? Where are you feeling something? Say, okay, I feel my heart. And then only connect with the physical sensations around it. If you start telling the story, it's actually information of what's tied to that area of the body, but I would say the first piece of it is to be like, okay, it feels warm, right? As I breathe, now it's increasing, now it's decreasing. Oh, now I, and to have this body awareness helps stuff move through the body. So even that alone has been incredibly powerful for a lot of our clients. I love that. Well, I could continue talking to you all day about all of this stuff, but I'm going to start moving us towards the finish line. And one of the questions I have, which I think I suspect is partly because of all of this work you do, is you run a business and has successfully run a business with somebody who started as your friend. My question to you is like, or question, sort of question area is that friendship and business partnership are different nervous system contracts. They won't have a different way of, one of a way of describing it, right? How do you protect the friendship when the business gets hard? Yeah, it's such a good question. So my business partner Brett, we've been friends for 30 years. And we started in the sports entertainment world. And we were both really chasing the dream and probably very externally focused around identity and probably being driven by fear, anxiety. So there was a lot of we go for both of us. And it's been such a beautiful journey because we have both been through our own tragedies with my mom, with his son, and it's been really powerful. So I think because of the work we do, I have seen us both less and less separate business and personal, right? Like whoever we are is the priority of what we want to embody to ourselves into the world. And I find us showing up with each other this way. So if things are good, we can celebrate. If things are challenging, I find that we are both very intentional with each other. And most of the time, because of we've been on the journey together, we actually offer each other more empathy. And also we realize the personal will always take precedent over it. The work is the vehicle for us. It's just an extension of our own journeys. And so it goes away where it doesn't change. We'll go do something else. Now, every once in a while, because we've known each other so long, I can find that sometimes I will tight cast him or project something on him of maybe how he was 15 years ago. And then when I really go into a thoughtful place, I realize it's a false story and it's something with me. That's project. But it's easy to project to the people we're closest with. Particularly when we're with somebody all the time. It's a little bit like somebody's hair grows or they lose weight and you're seeing them every day. You don't notice it. And so you then, as you say, I have that with my children who are in college. When they come home, I'm like, you grew or you're looking awesome, which is like, you know, because I'm not seeing them every day. You know, when I don't see them for a couple of months, like the changes become so apparent. But then I have to watch that I'm not referring to them as they were before, right? Yeah, exactly. And I mean, it's been such a gift with Brad. And a lot of my friends, like, it's such a gift to go on this journey together. I mean, through, through a lot of challenging times. And men, it's a gift. I mean, we've really created a company that is fully aligned with our purpose and passion. I think I'm able to recognize his gifts and his talents more than ever now as I gotten more comfortable with myself. Yeah. I mean, this is a great reflection question. I and I want to reflect on it also. This has been such a GC conversation. And it went to places that I didn't expect. And I think that the thing that really stayed with me during our conversation is the importance of listening to your body, releasing what is stuck there that is no longer serving you, making sense of it, letting it move through you. And the more you have done that, the more you have practiced that, the more you've studied that, the more you've worked with people around that, the more that has allowed you to respond to, listen to, acknowledge the messages from other people, which may not be verbal and explicit. And so, you know, I think I hadn't really expected that to be the emerging theme, but that seems to me to be like a core of who you are and how you move through the world, which is to really, you know, slow down and notice what's going on, allow it to move through and that in turn allows you to engage with others in a much more subtle way. Absolutely. This was, this was nice because a lot of times we're talking about high performance in dynamics and what creates that, which I'm really passionate about. But ultimately, you know, we always talk about the number one thing that really enhances team dynamics is each individual, each leader, taking ownership of their own potential, being able to relate their emotions, have greater awareness of their thoughts, and then everything else comes from that. So, we really try to get to, you know, the deeper things that create more immediate change and then everything else shifts and transforms. Thank you so much, Jeff, for joining us today on Hot Habits with Dr. Thompson. Thank you. This is wonderful. Thanks for being here and thank you for taking the time to listen. Until next time, remember that the way you lead your inner world shapes how you lead on the outside. I'm Dr. Thompson Esther. Thanks for listening to Hot Habits.