Adam Torres and Sepideh Saremi discuss psychology and entrepreneurship.
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Show Notes:
What should entrepreneurs focus on in terms of their psychology and mental health to improve their businesses and lives? In this episode, Adam Torres and Sepideh Saremi, Founder of Run Walk Talk®, explore the Run Walk Talk® story and entrepreneurship.
About Sepideh Saremi
Sepideh Saremi introduces herself as a psychotherapist and executive advisor dedicated to assisting entrepreneurs, high performers, and their companies in achieving their utmost potential. Her expertise lies in empowering individuals and organizations to become more powerful, connected, and effective versions of themselves. With a focus on fostering meaningful, healthy, and satisfying lives, she aids people in the business realm in constructing better, more successful companies.
About Run Walk Talk®
Run Walk Talk therapy method – an approach which combines mindful running/walking with talk therapy to maximize mental and emotional wellness. Providing running therapy and psychotherapy for entrepreneurs and overachievers. Featured in LA Times, Fast Company, and Runner’s World.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. Alright, so today’s guest is Sepideh Sarimi, and she is the founder over at RunWalkTalk.
Sepideh, welcome to the show. Hi, Adam. Thanks for having me. All right, Sepideh. I’m excited about today’s topic. So really talking about psychology for entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs business owners and executives that listen to this show. So excited to get into that. And also the, the run, walk, talk journey.
before we do that, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minutes. All right. So Sapiza, our mission over at Mission Matters is really to amplify stories and to get them out there for entrepreneurs and business owners that we feel need to be heard.
So that’s our mission. Sapiza, what mission matters to you? I have a lot of missions that matter to me, but the one that I’m talking about today is mental health. And I really want to make mental health as practical as possible to take it out of the conceptual and the theoretical and bring it into real life.
And the way that I do that is with entrepreneurs and I also work with therapists training them and how to do that. It’s great. Great having, I love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and really what we can all learn from that. So great having you on.
And I guess let’s get us kicked off here. like when did you get interested in, in like helping people specifically with mental health? like how’d that come about? I actually pushed it away for a long time, Adam. I grew up in a family where my dad was a therapist and an entrepreneur and he was actually pretty troubled.
So I had pretty negative associations with. With therapy and therapist, and it wasn’t until I did some of my own therapy that I started to see the value in it when I was in my early twenties and had a family crisis and everything is fine now. But I had a sister who was really sick and. Had some fallout from that, but I had to deal with myself just mentally, emotionally, and that’s where I found lot of value in therapy.
And I actually became a runner at that same time as well. So it’s part of what the genesis of run, walk, talk was and I think, you know, from a family where I had a dad who was a therapist and an entrepreneur and was really troubled. I have a heart for those people. So I really like working, working with entrepreneurs.
I really care about them. It’s, you know, my dad now is, is older, he has dementia, he’s not well. So kind of watching his trajectory, which, you know, he was a brilliant man. because of his own mental health issues, wasn’t able to fully create the vision that he had for his life. So. I would like people to have the tools that they need to heal from things that have happened to them so that they can, so that they can fulfill their own missions.
So I know a lot of you know, as entrepreneurs myself and many others that are listening to this, you know, we get ideas, right? Where we come up with ideas, we think of things, I probably thought a 10 YouTube channels yesterday that I won’t start. It’s okay. Right. That being said how did you know that RunWalk Talk and just this project, like, how did you know that this was going to be an important part of your life and something that you were gonna, like an idea that you were going to pursue?
So. think really where it started was with this combination of finding therapy useful for myself and then and then discovering running for myself in my early mid 20s. It was just one of those things that the universe kind of lined it up for me and it happened that I got serious about both those things at the same time and thought, man, I feel so great when I see my therapist may feel great when I go running.
Maybe I should combine these. Like, I wish somebody would do this, and I actually wasn’t even a therapist at that point. It was right around the time that I was applying to grad school. And when I got to grad school, I realized there’s all of this evidence for movement and exercise. And therapy is all about evidence based practice these days.
Like, we really try to do things that science supports, but I wasn’t seeing it in practice anywhere. And so I decided that I’m like, somebody should really do this because are a lot of people like it took me years to come to therapy. Like, I really needed it. And was avoiding it because the thought of sitting in a room with a stranger talking about my feelings has just made my skin crawl.
Right? But if somebody had said, Hey, there’s an option where you can go for a walk and you can be on the beach and it’s much more low key and you’re, side by side with your therapist. I might have gone sooner. So for me it just made a lot of sense. Yeah. I like that. We’re tying entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs to this concept of psychology and therapy and otherwise, because I feel like.
feel that conversation needs to be had more. The, you know, after the, you know, COVID, the pandemic, all of that, I feel like our society kind of moved forward a bit in terms of being able to have these conversations. Before that, I would say it was much more like taboo or this or that. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but.
You know, kind of just suck it up, you know, move forward. This is just part of the way entrepreneurship works. There’s ups and downs and we couldn’t, I feel like have that dialogue as healthy, or maybe we could have, but we chose not to as a collective, I would argue for many entrepreneur you know, segments I’ll say.
But that being said, being able to have that open dialogue now, and for people to acknowledge that they’re human. I mean, that piece of it is, it’s kind of refreshing for me. It’s different. Yeah. It’s awesome. And it’s, exciting for me. And I think you’re right. I think the pandemic did, because it was a collective experience, it really freed us of that taboo and that stigma of being able to say I’m not okay.
And everybody was not okay, right? It was not, it was not an okay time. Of course. So we got a little bit of practice talking about, you know, what it’s like not to be okay and realize, hey, I feel a little bit better when I’m able to say this out loud and not feel ashamed about it. Which sounds obvious now, but for, you know, everybody that didn’t have that opportunity prior, that’s why I laugh.
It’s refreshing. Yeah. And you know what, you know, Adam, I think you’ll, relate to this. Your listeners will understand this, but. Entrepreneurs are in a tricky spot because they have their customers or their clients and their employees and their investors. Who do they talk to if they’re not okay, right?
Those are not necessarily audiences that are, that want to know that they’re not doing well. Those are audiences that they’re serving. And so it’s really important for entrepreneurs to have each other. So if they have a co founder, That’s wonderful. And having a good relationship with a co founder, it can really save your life and save your business.
If they have a therapist, that’s good. If they have a spouse or partner, but really having other entrepreneurs that they can talk to is super valuable. There’s just not a lot of spaces for, for them, for us to do that freely. So that’s kind of what I’m doing, too. Yeah, and I grew up, I mean, my, my mother was a social worker for, I don’t know, 50 years or whatever retired, so I grew up in that environment of definitely talking it out, right?
Like, whether I wanted to or not since I was a kid, right? So we always had, you know, really healthy dialogues and I was an only child, so I mean, combine those two things and we had pretty healthy dialogues throughout my whole life, and so I was kind of shocked at how much people kind of sometimes held in.
Yeah. But I guess when it comes to entrepreneurs, what should they focus on in terms of whether it’s their psychology or mental health to improve their business and their lives? Like what are some things? So there’s three things and they all roll up with something that I call self management. And the three things are self awareness, self care, and self regulation.
Self awareness is this idea that you know who you are and you know where you come from, how the way that you grew up affected you, how you’re continuing to act out things that may be helpful to you or may not be helpful to you, and how all of that shows up in your business. That’s self awareness.
The second piece is self care, which is self regulation. Having systems in place that support your self as a human, so sleeping properly, eating properly, all of the stuff that we know, all of the sort of, I call it like, like the Hebrew lab stuff. like knowing kind of physiologically what your body needs and getting that to yourself.
And then the third piece of self regulation, which is having strategies for in the moment upset. So it’s very normal and natural for us through the course of our lives to have moments where we don’t feel good. What do we do in those moments when we don’t feel good? So those are the three pieces that I work with.
Almost everybody in the world needs help with at least one piece of it. Most people need help, some help with all three. A lot of us didn’t get those tools growing up. They don’t teach them in school. If you grew up in a family, like you’re so lucky. I’m a social worker too. That’s in the background. So you’re, you’re very lucky to have a social worker mother.
So I’m sure that you learned a lot of growing up though. Hold on. You don’t know that growing up when you’re young, you’re like, Oh, we kind of talked about this again. I don’t want to talk about it. Just punish me, please. When you’re a kid, you just punish me like my friends. They just have to go to their room and not I want to talk about his painful but now you’ve got all these wonderful And now you’ve got a podcast, Adam.
That’s not an accident. Oh, my God. We’re talking about That’s a big joke. Come on, Zabita.
You’ve become your mother, Adam. I, I know, I’m aware. Show that all the time. I was like, man, we shoulda have been recording. It’s great. She’s great. . . Yeah. I’m crying over here. Thank you. So, yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s my job. you know, those tools are really important and you’re learning them all the time, right?
You’re kind of uncovering them all the time. So it’s not a thing where. You know, kinds of that to me, sometimes they’re very sort of think, you know, the type, but they’re very sort of like engineer type. They’re like, okay, what are the things that I do to be a healthy human being? You know, I’m like, okay, well, I can give you I can give you a checklist.
But it’s a checklist that you’re going to have to reset every single day of your life for the rest of your life they don’t quite understand that. Right? Or they get really rigid. Right? So they’ll, they’ll have self care routines that are, you know, it’s like, I go to the gym for 45 minutes every morning and I do exactly this routine.
And there will be no change, right? Or they, you know, they get really kind of rigid about it and that’s not really the way either. So , there’s a lot of nuance in this stuff and the self management but it’s very, very important. that’s really what I, what I preach and what I’m practicing and what I’m teaching my clients and, we all fail at that over and over again and need to kind of get back on the horse.
So I know only so much you can do on, you know, a 20 minute podcast or so, but like, what are some things that, you know, people can do that are entrepreneurs or otherwise that are high impact in terms of kind of just leveling themselves up a bit. So something that they can kind of take away from this podcast, like if they don’t go to a therapist or they don’t want to go to a therapist.
For self awareness, be curious about your strong reactions. So strong reactions are really helpful, important clues, and they usually point to something historical. A lot of entrepreneurs will over index on being rational, like they value being rational, but everyone is actually irrational sometimes, and often, actually.
So be curious about why. , instead of pushing away strong reactions, When you have them be curious about where they come from, what they remind you of, they can help you become more self aware and they can give you clues about ways that you’re operating that you might not be aware of, and that can really save you, , then you’re less likely to kind of repeat patterns that, you know, happened when you were younger.
And then now you’re asking about your company. And I see this constantly all the time, all day long. When it comes to self care, I mentioned this a little earlier, but have systems, but be flexible. Make sure that your systems are responsive. You’re a human being. you know, people get very obsessive about things like morning routines.
What is the perfect morning routine? And I think, well, what morning is it? What happened the night before? What’s happening that day? So, so don’t think that you can like turn yourself into a robot and everything’s going to be okay. Be again, be curious about what’s going on and what you actually need.
Right. And self care may look different over the course of your lifespan. It may look different over the course of your business, over the course of a year for women often over the course of the month, right? So be curious and be flexible. And then the third piece is self regulation. And this is the one where for my clients who are kind of more checklist oriented, they.
You know, some of them really like this piece because I say, okay, you’re going to learn this breathing exercise and you’re going to practice it three times a day. Right. You know, those are the ones where, it’s really helpful to be doing some Googling and YouTubing about like, what are ways to calm down my nervous system and calm down my body?
And then what you’re doing in the self regulation is you’re increasing your capacity to pause. So. You know, we all have kind of stimuli that come at us and maybe trigger us or upset us or make us whatever, like, put us in a state that’s not calm or maybe make us numb out, right? So, when you’re in that moment, can you catch it?
Can you notice it? And then do you have tools to be able to manage it? And so breathing is an excellent one. And sometimes it’s not about becoming calm. Sometimes you’re in that numbed out state and you need to elevate yourself up out of that. And you can certainly use breathing for that, but going outside for a walk can be really effective or going for a run.
Having a bout of exercise can help you get your brain in a state where then you can operate and function again. having those tools is very, very helpful. Sometimes people just skip to that piece, but if you don’t have the self care, you’re going to need to. Use tools all day long, you’ll be exhausted.
And if you don’t have the self awareness, you won’t know what’s going on with you and what you These are all great, I’m taking notes, and I feel like people need to re listen to this one. And you’re probably driving in your car right now, and you’re like, you know, oh man, this is good stuff.
It is good stuff. So we want to listen to this one again and get some of those notes down that Sepideh has given us here, because it’s super helpful. I want to So we’re going to spend some of the time we have left here talking about RunWalkTalk specifically. So maybe tell us more about the, you know, the organization and how people can get involved.
I would love to. So RunWalkTalk started as my private practice. And in the last year, we’ve pivoted it from private practice to a training program for therapists and wellness professionals who are interested in incorporating movement into their work. So it’s really a method of psychotherapy and coaching that combines the traditional talk based approaches with mindful movement, usually in nature, to support mental health and personal growth.
And it works on three levels the level of, like, the method, the framework of how you actually work with the client, and then modulator, which is some of that self regulation piece that I talked about. And then metaphor, right? Because what you’re doing in a run, walk, talk session is that you are moving your body and being aware of your body and really telling a new story with your body and then can extend into the rest of your life and into your business too, because I do work with a lot of entrepreneurs and in this way are really on a mission to make running and walking therapy as widespread and well known as traditional therapy approaches that are indoor and seated.
Like, I would love for people to come into therapy and have running and walking therapy be the default. And for the conversation to be, does it make sense for us to stay inside today? Right. Rather than does it make sense for us to go outside? I really want to make it totally, totally ubiquitous because it really works and it helps people.
And so at this phase, we’ve trained 20 therapists in 2023, 2023. Therapist and coaches amazing. Congratulations. That’s amazing. Thank you so much. Yeah. They’re certified level one. Yeah. I was super proud of them. It’s very community oriented because a lot of what happens in, therapy training or coaching training is you’ll go for a weekend somewhere and then you’ll get some knowledge and then you like.
Let’s you out into the wild and who knows what happened though. So for us, it’s not that way. so we’re going to do another cohort in September and people can go to runwalktalk. com to sign up for a newsletter and, and the Instagram is runwalktalk so they can follow along there as well. But we’re going to do another cohort in September.
That cohort is going to be 12 weeks of once a week instruction and homework for the practitioner, and then a full year in 2025. Of monthly meetings, so we all meet as a group every month. We talk about cases. We talk about what’s coming up in terms of, like, people having trouble getting run walk talk launched in their own practices.
So it’s a really supportive, like, loving community. We all boost each other. I have a lot of experience in my past life around press and editorials. So I support them and things like talking to reporters or pitching. So it’s a really like loving, supportive community and that’s what I’m trying to create.
And eventually I would love to have like tens of thousands of people doing run walk talk. That’s really, that’s really what I want is. It’s going to take a while. It’s going to take a long time, but we’ve got a wonderful start. It’s very exciting. Love it. It’s amazing. If people want to learn more, is there a website or they connect with you or like, tell me a little bit more about that?
Yeah. , the RunWalkTalk website is RunWalkTalk. com and we’re on Instagram at RunWalkTalk. And then there’s also I just, yeah. Created therapy for entrepreneurs. com, which is for people who want to work with me personally. And then that’s that instagram is like little baby instagram.
There’s a lot on there But it’s therapy for entrepreneurs is the instagram. So hope to see some people on there. We’d love to amazing and then for the audience, just so you know, we’ll put the links in the show notes so that you could just click on them and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives, and having them share their mission, the reason behind it, you know, why they do what they do and what we can all learn from that so that we can all grow together.
So if this is your first time with us again, and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, do it. Hit the subscribe button. We have a lot of amazing guests coming up and we don’t want you to miss it. And if you’re a long term listener and you haven’t left us a review yet, come on, pitch in with that review.
We really do appreciate that. Zapita, it has been an absolute joy talking to you today. I’m going to have to let my mom listen to this one so she can crack up too. So thank you. Thank you so much. It was so fun talking to you. I really appreciate it.
