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8 Mar

Ep. 137 – Serena Poon – Entrepreneur in the Culinary, Health & Wellness Community; Celebrity Private Chef

“I think it’s pretty much an equal balance of everything. I believe in balance all the way around. I would say it’s equal. You need a little bit of everything to really live well and live optimally.”

Serena Poon – Entrepreneur in the Culinary, Health & Wellness Community; Celebrity Private Chef; Healing her parents; Managing time; Replenishing our mind and body; Self-care; Gratitude; Experiencing a health wakeup call

Segment 1: (Length :04:00) – General Updates; Introduction to Serena Poon; Healing her parents; Going to culinary school; Becoming a celebrity chef.

Serena’s finer points:

“my whole culinary journey and sort of diving into health and healing through food and healing ourselves really started years ago, when my parents were diagnosed with cancer.”

“It happened when I was in college. My dad was diagnosed and he was really young, he was like 48, and then he was with us for about a year, a year and three months and then my mom was diagnosed, and she was 45. That is a huge sort of … it changes your life and you start looking at everything through different lens.”

When we were going through that process, they give you meds and there's chemo, but I was looking at natural and holistic ways, and what herbs and what were other things we could do to help them.

“That was why I went to culinary school and started that journey, and of course I studied nutrition when I was at Berkeley too, and so while I’m going through this I have my own health issues, which come from, as you’ve talked about, a lack of self-care.'”

“You know when you’re hustling so hard to take care of everyone else, because if something like that happens in your life, all that it boil down to is health and happiness of the people that I love.”

“That’s my goal in life, but in the process I wasn’t taking care of myself, which as entrepreneurs we realized we do that a lot as well, as we’re putting our time and energy into our babies, our business. I realized we need … I needed to create ways to help people … help myself support our body, giving us ourselves the nutrition that we need, the love that our body needs through food, and then obviously through mindfulness as well.”

“It’s definitely a balance of everything. You can eat all the right foods, but if you’re not sleeping, if you’re not giving yourself some downtime and being grounded, you’re not going to have that balance.”

When you're an entrepreneur you're working 24/7 basically, you have to give yourself that day off. You have to give yourself and your body the nutrition it needs.

“While I’m working with some of my high-profile clients who, their schedules are crazy, I mean they run an empire. They are in on a plane in a different city or country four or five times a week. I realized that they’re overworked, they’re exhausted, and they have to be on all the time.”

“They’re not always getting in all the right foods and nutrition in their meals, and so I started creating this little blend of all the super foods, greens, at least your basics, and herbs to support your adrenals and your stomach or gut, which is really the core of our health.”

“I was doing this for years, especially because of travel, and just recently over … about a year ago, when we were over in the Cannes Film Festival I had … there were friends of some of my clients who sort of saw this little magical concoction that I was making them, and they wanted to know what it was.”

“I told them, “This is the super special recipe. I created this blend and this gets you through your long days.” It gets you through … It checks off taking care of your body, taking care of yourself so that you can continue to take care of everyone else and take care of your business. It just exploded and everyone there was like, “We need this. We want some.” That was sort of how Just Add Water was created to come to the public.”

Segment 2: (Length :08:00) – Talking with Serena; Managing time; Replenishing our mind and body; Self-care; Gratitude.

Serena’s finer points:

“I have little rituals that I do, and I think it’s really important, something that I guide my clients with as well. Rituals or routine really, they sort of stabilize our minds, whether or not you are in town or you’re on a plane or you’re traveling in different country there’s certain little things that I do.”

“I believe in detoxing our body and also replenishing our body on a daily basis. That just sort of help support our body as we go through the day. All the toxins that we put in, whether or not it’s from the food we eat, from the stress, the inflammation that we create, little daily rituals.”

I start my day with mindfulness. I go through a gratitude and I take just a few moments before I get out of bed, before you check all your e-mails, just to ground yourself and think. Thank yourself, your angels, just everything that you have in your life.

“I start that off every single day, and then I go downstairs or wherever I’m at, and I do a warm cup of lemon water and I have a little ritual that I do for myself, and I do for my client as well. It’s a little blend of detoxifying elixirs that they have in the morning, and then you can go on to either your workout or your coffee or your tea, or whatever it is that you have.”

“That is part of holistic healing, it’s taking that moment to take care of yourself, which obviously comes in, in the form of nutrition. It comes in the form of food. It comes in the form of taking a moment for yourself, and that’s how you can balance out and give back to everyone else in the way of giving to yourself.”

It's something that you really have to practice. It's like going to the gym, you can go to the gym, but if you don't exercise you're not going to get the benefits. Mindfulness and self-care, it's the same thing, you have to sort of carve it out and make that effort for it, as much as you're making the effort towards your business, and bringing more sales than creating new products, it's the same thing.

“These methods that I’ve developed for my clients and this product that we’ve developed in Just Add Water, the point of it is, it’s to make that self-care as easy as possible.”

“With Just Add Water all you have to do, it’s a powdered blend, you literally just add water to it, and you drink that and you’ve given yourself that amount of nutritional self-care that you need for the day.”

“If you want to add another great foods and salads, and juices or what, what-have-you, awesome, but at least you’ve checked off this one thing that will help your body. Sort of like taking that two minutes in the morning, and grounding yourself before you start your day or taking two minutes in the middle of your day after a big meeting or a rough call, and just re-grounding yourself.”

Because all our days are super demanding whether or not you're a busy mom or an entrepreneur or ... just everyone has a crazy, full day from when we wake up to when we go to bed.

“The two big things I get a lot are, “I don’t have time. I don’t want to do it, and it’s not as important as X, Y, and Z.” I don’t have time is the number one thing that I get from everyone across the board. “I don’t have time to make myself a smoothie. I don’t have time to eat that salad that’s already sitting right on my desk. I don’t have time. I just don’t have time.”

“I don’t have time is really sort of the mentality. We can always make the time. Time is just … it’s just space, it’s just about creating the space.”

“What I do for them is I simplify. “I don’t have time.” “Okay, great, I break it down into you only need 30 seconds for this, one minute for this, and here is where we’re going to put it.”

I do need to audit them sometimes. It takes a little ... It takes at least a week, sometimes two, depending on the client to sort of figure out what their personality is, what their habits are, what they like and don't like because you have to customize. It has to be sustainable. It has to fit this person's lifestyle.

“If this person is a morning person I can add everything in the morning. If this person is not a morning person and kind of comes to life more after three or four hours of being up, that’s when we add in the little improvements that they need.”

“A lot of it is reading and understanding who you’re working with, which actually we can apply to ourselves, because we know ourselves best. We know when it maybe impossible to take out 15 minutes for yourself, and have something like Just Add Water or have a juice or just sit there and turn off your phone for 10 minutes.”

“We also know when we can do it. That’s what I would say, those are the biggest things and diving into why they don’t want to do it and why they don’t think it’s important. There’s a lot of coaching, that’s more than just nutrition and food, that goes along with some of what I do for my clients.”

Well, it is that and also a lot of gratitude. We do a lot of work with that. People sort of ... they get so busy and they sort of spin into this world and this reality that they live in, which maybe different than other people's and ours. . .

“The basics starts with self-care, and that’s what we do sometimes, and it just sort of … that helps to reground them, and also it calms them down because that kind of anxiety and stress that they’re running on all the time, sometimes what we call adrenalin, that’s creating inflammation in our body, which is also not healthy.”

“I mean if I could get everyone to drink a warm cup of lemon water every morning it would literally change their lives, and it’s simple and it doesn’t cost anything, and it takes two minutes, but I a lot of people fall off of doing it after five days.”

Like I said, the whole, just stopping and being really grateful for what you've got going on, it could be anything. Just the fact that you're here and you're healthy, and it's great, it's beautiful outside right or you live, wherever it is that you live. As simple as that, I do every single day.

Segment 3: (Length :10:00) – Healing herself; Experiencing a health wakeup call.

Serena’s finer points: 

“Listen, we all … I love tequila. I have it on ice, it’s my thing, and is alcohol good for you? I mean not technically, but I think everything is a balance. You need to have balanced nutrition and you make an effort to eat well and support your body whenever you can, so you can enjoy yourself and your friends and have cheat meals or go have a night out whenever you want, and it’s not going to throw you off completely.”

“It’s the same thing with mindfulness. Listen, if you don’t do it every single day, you’re okay if you do it almost every single day, and same with exercise. You need to exercise a few days a week, if you have a week off because you’re on vacation and you come back you’re going to be fine.”

“I think it’s pretty much an equal balance of everything. I believe in balance all the way around. I would say it’s equal. You need a little bit of everything to really live well and live optimally.”

I'm almost fully recovered, but I'm recovering from my seventh surgery for something that had been going on in my body for years. The most recently this has been the other shift, because I do ... I obviously preach a lot about self-care. I'm really healthy, doctors have no idea how I have maintained the kind of health I've had with what was inside of me all these years, and it's because I'm doing all the right things nutritionally, but I'm also ... I was grinding so hard with launching this brand.

“I had a family that wasn’t well, and it all kind was happening in less than a year, it was a lot of stress. I was putting everyone first, which is, I think as entrepreneurs we have a habit of doing that, which is why I do what I do for my clients, but I wasn’t always doing it for myself, and it is taking that time.”

“I had to have surgery to be like, “Whoo, okay, I need to practice everything that I preach,” and now it’s sort of in this … It’s almost like it was like a month vacation. It was like a month off where I needed to just focus on me, so that I can be at my 100%, 1000% for everybody else.”

“As entrepreneurs, we’re doing that for everyone else first and ourselves last. Even for me, in this process and this journey, and for everything that I’ve created for other people, all these methods and these products and my coaching, all of it is something that I have to constantly remind myself of too.”

“Unfortunately that is what brings a lot of clients to me, initially it’s because of exactly that, there is something huge that happened. There is a health scare or someone close to them had a health scare, there had to be there was a huge sort of shift in their life, where they sort of woke up and said, “Okay, I need to take care of myself. If I want to be here for the next 20, 30 or 40 years, whatever it is, if I want to be here at my best for the people that I care about, I need to take care of myself. Help me.”

“Equally, though I believe in preemptive, I believe in living in a way that you don’t have to have that sort of huge wake up call before you make a shift, but anytime you’re ready to make a shift it’s great.”

Our body makes new cells every single day, so wherever we start, wherever we're at, we're good, and it will just get better, and that's the experience that people have had. We, sometimes we do it in baby steps, we add one or two healthy meals to the day or a healthy snack, and we shift you over instead of ... I don't believe in doing things in an extreme level. You started, you're here, you're great, and it goes on forever.

“That’s sort of how our mind works too. That’s why, and you know this and I’m sure you believe in this too, even with gratitude, if you can do a list of 10, pick one thing. Wake up and say thank you for one thing or thank yourself for one thing or three things, and then go from there.”

“Then it’s not overwhelming, it’s completely attainable, completely doable, and in a couple of weeks you will realize such a massive difference in your life. Creating that support around you is one of the most important things as well, and surrendering to that, allowing the support to come in and receiving that is very important as well.”

“Segment 4(Length :03:00) – Hustler Thought of the Day:

No one is you and that is your power.

GENERAL NOTES:

Serena Poon – Entrepreneur in the Culinary, Health & Wellness Community; Celebrity Private Chef

Based out of Los Angeles, California, USA, Serena Poon is a successful entrepreneur established in the culinary, health and wellness community.

Doubling as a classically-trained chef and nutritionist to her clientele, she is known for curating healing and wellness programs using integrative health, holistic nutrition and culinary alchemy.

Her passionate focus on the importance of whole body and mind wellness is inspired by the profound effect of cancer on her family when both her mother and father were diagnosed within two years of each other.

So, after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, she went onto pursue an education in the culinary arts at the esteemed Le Cordon Bleu, graduating at the top of her class.

Serena began her culinary career working for Hugh Hefner and Playboy Enterprises at the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills.  She took that exposure into the world of fine dining and started her own personal chef and private catering business

What began as a career in fine dining with an emphasis on specialized dietary needs, developed into a flourishing health and wellness lifestyle brand.  Over the years, Serena has established herself as a top high-profile personal chef and nutritional consultant in Los Angeles and has built a strong clientele strictly by referral

From the likes of Steve Bing, to Sean “P. Diddy” Combs to Jerry Bruckheimer, her clients span the globe and her travels expose her to new methods and sources of nutrition to add to her customized techniques. Serena’s philosophy for living an optimal healthy lifestyle can be achieved by integrating nutritional and physical therapy, focused mindfulness and balancing the body’s support system

With the launch of her health and wellness line Just Add Water™ in 2018 and the ceaseless expansion of her lifestyle brand Serena Loves, Serena has truly brought her philosophy to life and continues to build on her mission to help others live their best life through new methods of self-care and wellness.

Check out Serena HERE |  Social for Serena: Instagram

Episode Sponsored by:

https://felixgrayglasses.com/hustle

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Matt Gottesman

Matt Gottesman is a global digital strategist and technology advisor, creator and editor-in-chief of Hustle & Deal Flow™ - an online magazine dedicated to the world's entrepreneurs, creators and makers, a Social Media Influencer and a consultant on New Media and go-to-market strategies for investments in digital marketing, technology, websites, mobile applications, eCommerce, social media and content.

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