I’m really happy to share my conversation with Lily Silverton, the writer, columnist, speaker, coach and founder of The Priorities Method Journal on today’s episode of Period Story podcast.
In this episode, Lily shares:
- The joy of getting her period back after losing it for two years as a teenager
- Her struggle with disordered eating and depression and how a trip to an ashram helped her begin to reset her mental health
- How she realised the power for her thoughts and that some thoughts aren’t true
- Her experience of painful periods and severe premenstrual depression after having her two children
- The transition she made from fashion and culture journalism to retraining to become a stress management and positive psychology coach
- Why stress isn’t inherently bad for you
- The reframe of ‘I get to’ and ‘I choose to’
- One of her coaching principles: live your life, don’t fix your life
- And of course, the story of her first period
Lily says there’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve or change, whether that’s your internal self or your external self but she says we should consider how we can approach this with real compassion, so that you can work from a positive point, rather than berating yourself.
Thank you, Lily!
Get in touch with Lily:
The Priorities Method Instagram
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Le’Nise Brothers: Hi Lily. Thanks so much for coming onto the show. I’m really excited to speak to you and hear about the work that you’re doing. You’re doing a lot of really interesting work in stress management and positive psychology. But first, let’s talk about the story of your first period.
Lily Silverton: Sure. Thanks Le’Nise.
Thanks for having me. So I have a pretty terrible memory. Uh, in general. I can watch a film and then sort of a week later suggest we watch the same film and not realise I’ve seen it. So I’m casting my mind back, but my memory is that I, I was about 13 and edging towards 14, so it would’ve been year nine, I guess, unless it was the year before, but I’m pretty sure it was, and I remember that I wasn’t in school that morning for like another reason. So I was going somewhere with my mum, um, maybe for an appointment or something, and that I got it then. And honestly, I remember just being really happy because I was, my primary school friends, so back when I was sort of nine, 10, that my little group all got it around then, so I really felt terribly left out and I remember, really, um, like telling one or two people in that time that I’d gotten it when obviously I hadn’t, um, because I really wanted to fit in with this group or, you know, just to feel like I was at the same stage.
And I remember that feeling of like, this feels like such a big important thing. And obviously in retro it’s like, it’s like how your GCSEs feel really big and important at the time. And then in retrospect you’re like, what the fuck? It doesn’t actually matter. Yeah, so I remember, I, I just remember really wanting to get it.
And again, even at secondary school, quite a few of my friends had it quite young. So I remember feeling very relieved and very happy. And I didn’t feel maybe shocked, I guess, as, as some of my friends who got it at nine definitely would’ve, would’ve had whiplash from, you know, that experience depending on what they’d done.
I, I definitely felt like I knew what it was. I didn’t bleed everywhere. You know, I didn’t have any of those experiences that I think some people can, um, which can be quite traumatic. I didn’t have that. I just, you know, started bleeding a tiny bit. And then I remember my mum buying me pads and tampons and I think I tried a tampon and just found it like absolutely impossible to do.
And then, yeah, went into school for whatever reason. I was off that morning and, and was very, very pleased. So that’s the extent of my memories there.
Le’Nise Brothers: How did you know about what it was and the kind of mechanics of having a period?
Lily Silverton: Mm, I grew up in a very open household.
With, uh, a very open grandmother and mother and cousins and everything. So I never felt like I didn’t understand what it was to like the process of growing up, um, and having that experience. I’m sure we learned it in school as well. I went to a Jewish school, which obviously wasn’t like big on its sex ed education in the way that religious faith-based schools are not, but I remember us having at least one class on it, one workshop. Again, I can’t quite remember how I learned, but I know that I knew a lot around it and I feel like I’d read lots of like the Judy Blume books and things like that as well, which would also really strongly influenced my understanding of what it meant to become a woman in inverted commas and have that process. Yeah. Now I remember actually that book, those books were quite big for me growing up.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Judy Blume. Well, my mind, that’s such a strong memory for me too. And actually they made a film of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. I haven’t watched it yet, but ’cause I have such a, like, strong memory of the book and it being so precious to me, and, and I kind of almost don’t want to kind of taint that by watching the film.
You said that when you got your period, you were relieved. And then as you went through the rest of your teens, what was your experience of your period like?
Lily Silverton: I remember it being reasonably okay. You know, like I don’t remember being one of those people who I remember having pain, but I, again, I know some friends who are really found it really debilitating and I can talk to you about that in my later experiences as well, ’cause things have changed. I don’t remember it being that impactful, you know, it was painful and it was awkward and it was definitely still a time, you know, I’m 40 now. It was definitely still a time where like it’s very much hidden. You know, you weren’t talking about it all at school. You weren’t going to swim if you had your period.
You were going to hide any of your bits away, and all of that sort of stuff was, and also in terms of like, actually the physical stuff that we used, we weren’t using like those terrifying strap belts that mothers did. But, you know, we were still using huge pads and, you know, really awkward things and none of like the really lovely organic things that there are around today.
I then did lose my period for two years, a year and a half because I was anorexic. So from when I was 16, uh, or maybe 17 to 19, I didn’t have any periods. Again, at the time it wasn’t my biggest concern and I didn’t really think about it. I was more concerned just with being thin. So, um, but obviously there was concern for a while of the impact that that had on my body. And there was some talk at the time with the doctors in terms of like, will I be able to have children when I’m older? What impact will that have had? It did have an impact, which is correlated on my bones.
So I did have osteoporosis when I was younger. Osteopenia, which is sort of when you have osteoporosis, but not on your entire body, just in part of it. So I had it in my hips and spine, which very, very thankfully, I reversed over 10 years. So in my early thirties or or late twenties that was fine again.
And I remember the actual, like the real joy of when it came back because I’d gone to India with one of my best friends and she’d said to me, I’m not going to do this trip with you unless you eat, really like, this is, I can’t do this with you. And so I’d agreed that I’d eat everything she ate.
And that was sort of the, the initial process of me starting to get better. And actually after that, I got much, much worse again, um, because I hadn’t really done the work to get better. I just said I’d eat. But over those six months abroad, I did eat and got to a sort of regular weight and then towards the very, very end of that trip when we were in Thailand, I remember getting my period back and that being a real celebration. I was with two of my female friends and we were, we were really, um, hippie when we were that age as well. So, you know, it was like this huge celebration of women’s bodies and, and all of that. So, yeah, I remember that as well.
Le’Nise Brothers: Can you talk a little bit about the eating disorder and the work, some of the work that you did to change your mindset and to heal?
Lily Silverton: I had anorexia and I had bulimia, and my anorexia was really from those years, those earlier years, and then a little bit in my early twenties, and then it was more bulimia when I was older, although I was still underweight and I guess I also had, I had, um, depression as well, which it’s a bit chicken and egg, right? Because if you’re very hungry or you know, have very disturbed eating patterns, it’s quite hard to be happy and it’s quite hard for the chemicals in your body and brain to be, to be settled. And then if your body and brain is, are unsettled, it’s quite easy to fall into patterns where you get into disordered eating.
So they were very closely connected bedfellows. I really believed that in that time and definitely like up until my mid to late twenties believed that this was just how I was, that they, like, I might take a medication for a bit and I might try another therapy and that, and those things might help me, but like, fundamentally, I was broken and my thought patterns were broken and, and this was the way that it was, and I was never going to feel or behave in a different way.
Again, I don’t want this to come across as flippant in the slightest ’cause it’s not, and obviously there was like a huge process leading up to this and lots of therapies and, and medications and support networks and everything that went on. But I did, I went to an ashram in 2012 and that was sort of the first point at which really my, my mind started to shift in terms of, okay, maybe you won’t have these thoughts. You know, maybe your thoughts are created in some way, not in all the ways that you can control. And obviously some everyone says like, oh, you have power over your thoughts and obviously your thoughts are the hardest thing to have power over versus other things in the world.
But it was this first opportunity of thinking, okay, maybe my thoughts aren’t true. Maybe this self-criticism isn’t, doesn’t have to be here forever. Maybe it isn’t an integral part of who I am, but something that I have developed for various reasons. And then seeing that like crack of light, I guess gave me the opportunity through various practices, and one of them strongly being yoga and mindfulness and meditation to think, okay, what’s the alternative here?
Is there an alternative? Yeah, and for me, in my own personal experience, everyone has a very different experience with mental health. I did find a way to somehow argue those thoughts to a point where now I do get them. Very rarely, and you know, they are still there. And definitely I get stressed and definitely I, you know, get angry and frustrated and, and all of the normal realm, you know, wide range of emotions that everyone should experience.
But I don’t, I don’t feel like my brain is broken anymore. I don’t have that thought anymore.
Le’Nise Brothers: That’s so interesting what you said about the power of our thoughts and being able to say, oh, is this true? Is this like, is this something that I should actually believe? Because with different types of meditation, Vipassana, they talk about the thoughts coming in and out and being able to observe those thoughts and being able to just kind of watch ’em float away. And actually what you said it really struck me. You know, like, is this thought real? Is it true? You know, should I attach any meaning to that that thought, wow, I like that’s actually really. That really resonated with me, what you’ve said there.
Then you mentioned that now your period is different to how it used to be. So you lost your period, it came back and can you tell us a little bit about what your relationship is with your period now?
Lily Silverton: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think like a lot of women my age, I was on the pill for a very long time and for me that felt fine. But I did come off it whenever I did, I can’t remember now, 30 early thirties, and I tried the coil, which was an absolute disaster for me. And then, but generally, you know, my period was, uh, it came off the pill and my period was still fine and very manageable and not much impact.
And then I had a child, and after my first child, I couldn’t believe how painful my periods were when they came back. I think they came back about five months, six months afterwards, or maybe a bit longer actually, with my first, and yeah, I couldn’t, I couldn’t believe how. How painful they were and that obviously my body had processed something and then either I had very painful birth, so I don’t know, or I experienced very painful birth and I don’t know whether that, you know, whether there’s some correlation there in terms of like memory and my body and felt experience.
But yeah, I was, I was really thrown. And then after my second child, my periods got even more painful and heavier. And also now, actually it’s been, it’s been much better the last couple months, but that I was getting like really, really, really intense, uh, depression the day before. So really, really severe version of PMS, which obviously as someone who used to have depression, really threw me the first couple of months.
But I grew to understand that that was it. But I think I had been, and I have apologised to a couple of my friends, I think when I was younger I couldn’t really understand when people felt completely debilitated by their period. I was like, you know, come on, get, get yourself back up, basically, which was my was my mentality, is my mentality for lots of things still, and having this experience where it’s wildly unpredictable and it can be really heavy and then suddenly very light and so like leaking is a lot more possible. There’s a lot more potential for that. And you know, emotionally that it really throws me in physically that it throws me has, has been a important learning step for me.
And I don’t know whether I’m going towards perimenopausal, um, because definitely I have periods where they’re, where they’re light, and I’ve had a couple where I get pain for the whole time, but no bleeding and things like that. So there’s definitely changes happening in my body somewhere.
Le’Nise Brothers: Just thinking about what you said about when you apologised to your friends, how did they respond to that?
Lily Silverton: Well, I think they responded as anyone would. It’s not that I was like incredibly cruel to them and telling them to like, you know, pick themselves up when they’re incredibly unwell.
It’s just that internally, I don’t feel like I had that, that I hadn’t built that compassion, those compassion muscles around that particular thing. They were happy to be seen and understood. I think as anyone is when they’re in pain and it feels like perhaps they’re the only one to have someone else validate that and say, no, you know, no, you are not mad, or, you know, the experience that you are having, I’ve had it too, is incredibly soothing to anyone in any circumstance.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. And so just shifting gears a little bit to the work that you now do. So something I’m very interested in because it’s been my own experience, is this transition that people make from one career to another. So you were a fashion and a culture journalist, and then you retrained as a coach. So specialising in stress management, positive psychology, and neuroscience.
Can you talk a little bit about this transition? Because you were in your presumably thirties. Thirties. Yeah. At that point where people are typically moving up to the next level in their career. So can you just talk a little bit about that transition?
Lily Silverton: Hmm, sure. So, I, I didn’t actually want to be a journalist when I was much younger.
I studied politics and global health and wanted to work as a human rights lawyer, um, before starting to train and then realising that my memory again was very bad as we discussed earlier. So, I pivoted and ended up in journalism. I’d always written, my father was a writer and a journalist, so it’s very much in my DNA and I set up a magazine with some friends who I happened to live with at the time, and then from there moved into bigger magazines and, and all that time it felt, you know, I absolutely always loved fashion. I’d done night courses at Central Saint Martins and things like that. It really felt like, this is the path for me and I want to be an editor, an editor in chief of a big, you know, UK or maybe International magazine and that, you know, that’s really, really my drive.
And then when I got to my early thirties, I had a big breakup and as these things can do, it put things into perspective, put my priorities into perspective. Then even before that, like a year before that, I was definitely thinking like, is this really the place for me and. It wasn’t. The magazine I worked for was fantastic.
I worked at Hunger with Rankin and my team were amazing, absolutely amazing, and I loved them, but I just didn’t really seem to care about the fashion anymore. And I’d sit there at Fashion Weeks and look around me and there’s no judgment here because everyone’s path is very different. But I look at the women who are, maybe, you know my age now, so 40, 45, and I think, you know, do I really want to be thinking about having children and needing to spend months and months away sitting at fashion shows?
And for me, that answer was no. For other people, it would, it could absolutely be. Yes. And you know, now that I do have children, I really miss the fact that I couldn’t go, I’d love to go to the odd fashion show, um, in Paris. So that’s sort of what happened for me and Rankin was very supportive of my sort of start to change in my change in thoughts and I wanted to go and do my yoga training.
I’ve done yoga since I was a, since I was 12, and so he, and he let me go off India and do my training over there, my hatha training and meditation training whilst also working for the magazine. So I did my training and then I lived over there teaching on a beach, which was very dreamy for six months whilst doing the magazine.
And that was sort of just about workable with the wifi. And then I came back and sort of over, I’m trying to think how long, maybe over the next year, I did both for a while and then, and started to do health writing and , and, being commissioned to do sort of health pieces for Vogue and places like that.
And then at some point was like, okay, I need to, I need to step off of this, you know, I’m not in it. And also I really had this feeling of, okay, I need to make space for someone else who’s really hungry as well. Like, I’m holding this very great job in fashion and art and people as I did when I was younger, you know, would’ve killed for this job.
And so I need to step off of this ’cause if I’m not in this and if I’m finding it, you know not that rewarding except for loving my team and loving the people, you know, the interest. Generally then, then I have to step off. And so for me, the transition was like very gentle. I feel like I didn’t just quit my job and go, okay, what am I going to do next?
Which I know some people do do and that’s great. You know, especially they’ve got gardening leave. I’ve lots of people come to me in that situation. But for me it was, okay, this is yoga is a huge part of my life, and I really wanted to train to teach and to integrate it in. And it was from yoga and from, you know, that initial experience in, in the ashram with, you know, the, at least with the traditional hatha yoga that I trained in and meditation. They talk a lot about the power of the thoughts and, and the way that our beliefs create our reality. And, and again, I, I think reality is also very real. So I’m not, I’m not saying that you know that all the onus should be placed on the individual in terms of that. But that element of it was really interesting and that’s how I came into coaching.
So I went straight to stress management coaching. From there I did a lot of yin and mindfulness trainings and then into stress management coaching and for a while did all of the things was doing like yoga, writing, coaching, meditation, anything. Basically I do. And then over the years, and especially I guess from the beginning of COVID when I couldn’t teach yoga and also had small children, had then had another small child and, and I started moving away from that physical practice of teaching and doing meditation, mindfulness and coaching, and then more and more coaching.
Le’Nise Brothers: It’s quite an interesting career path and I think these things are going to be more and more common where people don’t just stay in one job for 25 years and it’s just so interesting hearing like the winding roads that people take. And now you’ve landed on this fantastic, very meaningful, not that your other work wasn’t meaningful, but in a different way, career where you’re focusing on stress management. And that’s really interesting because I think, people think about stress and there’s, oh, how are you, oh, I’m so stressed out. And it’s become almost this word that has not lost its meaning, but has a lot, even more meaning to it. And you wrote recently, you wrote a post on Substack about how we should stop trying to avoid stress. Can you say a little bit more about that? Because I think that might be for some people like, what do you mean by that?
Lily Silverton: Yeah, for sure. So I guess any stress management program, at least with me, that starts from this idea of stress isn’t inherently bad for you.
We have this idea culturally in terms of our environment and our culture, that stress is very bad and we should avoid it at all costs. But the reality is that we can’t avoid stress. That stress is, is a part of living both the sort of stressors that are around in the world, um, like the experiences and also the internal experience of stress of that state of worry and tension is, is part of our evolutionary biology.
You know, that’s not going anywhere completely. So it’s more about how can we work with our nervous system. And our nervous system is incredible. It’s pretty old. We have advanced hugely in the last a hundred years, 150 years, particularly last 30 with the internet. And our nervous system has evolved over hundreds of thousands years.
So we haven’t really necessarily caught up with what we’ve, with the environment that we’ve created. So it’s how can we support our nervous system through the daily stresses that we, that we do face, that are less physical as they used to be, or you know, in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and sort of the basic needs that we might have.
Those stresses for many people in modern cultures are, are quite rare. But in terms of the non-physical, psychological, intangible stresses that we face, those are absolutely huge and numerous and new ones every day. So the amount of things that we sort of have to hold in our brain and the amount of small stresses that we need to navigate every day have grown in that in that way, and I think this idea of like, how can I avoid stress? How can I get rid of stress? Just makes us feel more stressed because then we fear stress and we, and we get stressed about feeling stressed. It’s called an secondary emotional disturbance in coaching and a much more helpful path if you want to think about like what’s actually helpful and what can actually help us, and a much more realistic path as well for any of us and a much more sustainable one is to be thinking more about, okay, yes, there are stressors, but like what, first of all, stress isn’t necessarily bad, you know, it’s a good thing. Or it, it’s there for, for a, a response that we have to stressful things, is there to help us meet a challenge or a threat or an opportunity. So it’s how can we reframe stress? Well, it’s like not ignoring stress, and I’m not talking about like toxic positivity at all here. Very, very against that. But how can we, if stress is, is still going to be there, then how can we reframe it? See it as, as part of living as well as part of opportunities and challenges and what can we do.
So I definitely know that I have it when I’m working on like a big workshop. I can think or, or even I ran a retreat last weekend, a de-stress retreat. So you know, I can think, oh, this is really stressful preparing for this retreat. So I can think that, and then that will have one physiological response in my brain in terms of like what happens with my hormones.
And I know you are really big on hormones and so knowledgeable in this area. Or I can think, okay, this is a big challenge. This is a big opportunity in terms of getting this done. You know, I actually had it that my son got chickenpox the week before I was leaving for the retreat. So I really did have these tangible stresses that were being laid on.
Okay, can either see this as really stressful. This was, this is the physiological response that my body and brain will have. Or I can think, okay, this is a challenge, this is an opportunity. I’m trained for this. I’ve been, you know, literally trained for this. And you know, this retreat is an opportunity to share what I know with my community in this situation. And that’s really exciting. And, you know, aren’t I fucking lucky that I get to do that as my job and, and all of these thoughts. So I’m not ignoring the fact that my son has chicken pox. And that’s really inconvenient for my week. And I’m not ignoring that there’s like a lot of work to be done on a project, but I’m seeing where I can have acknowledged that reality and then see how my mindset can also support me through it.
Le’Nise Brothers: You said something interesting there, you said. I get to, and I really love that. That’s something I use a lot where I can get into my head about things and it’s like, well, actually I get to do this. You know, I get to. I get to do this, this, and this. And you know, it’s such a simple thing, but it helps you reframe and, you know, just have a better attitude about what you’re doing
Lily Silverton: Completely.
It’s that if you we’re always saying to ourselves, I have to do this, I have to do that. And yeah, if, if, at least now and again, you can think I get to or I choose to, or I’m able to, you know, if you can even think, you know, I’m able bodied enough to be able to do this. You know, thoughts like that. I think has sort of maybe the side of gratefulness that I really go for.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I love that. Thinking about that, the idea of I get to, I choose to, it’s this idea of showing, showing up for yourself in a really positive way, and again, something really interesting that you wrote about was this idea of talking about you show up for yourself rather than fixing yourself.
Lily Silverton: Hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: Can you say more about that? Because self-improvement, fixing yourself, that just seems to be like wellness, you know?
Lily Silverton: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: In in a nutshell. And the idea that you don’t need to fix yourself is so interesting. So say more about that.
Lily Silverton: Mm-hmm. How long you got? Um, yeah. It’s one of the really big principles that I work with, with the Priorities Method, which is, which is my approach to coaching, is this big idea of like, live your life, don’t fix your life. We are just encouraged full stop with everything from when we’re tiny as well in various ways to fix ourselves and to change ourselves. And I feel this as well, I feel it from having eating disorders for a very long time and working in fashion and, and also just innately I do.
I am not immune to it either. I’m not immune to wanting still to fix myself or to change myself in various ways, but it’s trying to think about this, how can you approach your self-development? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to improve or change, whether that’s your internal self or your external self as well, depending on how that’ll, you know, if that will make you feel good and that will make you feel more yourself, how you can approach it with this real compassion. So it’s not that you’re berating yourself in terms of like, need to fix this or need to change this.
It’s more how can you work from a positive point. Whether it’s changing the physical body. You know, I get, as I said before, I get to move my body and how, how can I move to a place where like I’m really physically able to do things in a different way. You know, I get to run and I, you know, I want to improve my health alongside perhaps some of the other benefits that, that some, you know, some of the physical changes that might happen in my body. So something like that where someone can, if they’ve got health goals, can really, because I’m trained as a health coach, so if someone can really shift that thought process of like being angry at their self for various things to a place where they’re really moving from compassion and we see it with external things and we also really see it with internal processes in terms of like when you start challenging your thoughts and saying, is this thought helpful?
You know, is this thought true initially that can feel like you’re really berating yourself as well like you’re just trying to fix your inner world and it’s all really broken. So having had that experience myself, I really tried to work from this. You know, you’re not broken, you’re not fixing something, you are, you are living it, and you are living it in the most authentic, involved, compassionate way possible.
And when you do that, you’re going to want to see change.
Le’Nise Brothers: Wow. Self-compassion. Just something like about being grateful for what your body can do. That’s something that I talk a lot about in my yoga classes, at the end, just this idea of can you find a bit of gratitude for your body and everything that it did for you today, and because yeah, we are so like, fix this, must do this, put on muscle, do this, do that. But what about where you are right now?
Lily Silverton: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: It’s such an interesting way of reframing just little small things that you think about every single day.
Lily Silverton: Mm. I bet your yoga classes are great.
They sound great.
Le’Nise Brothers: Thank you. So thinking a lot about the way we think and the thoughts and truth that we attach to different thoughts. I read an interview with you where you talked about your daily meditation practice, and so as, as a fellow yogi, I want to ask you about your daily meditation practice and what, what do you do?
Lily Silverton: I’ve meditated most mornings or days, but generally mornings, I think for about 10 years. Where are we? Yeah, 10, 12 years. And I see it like brushing my teeth that it’s not necessarily that I’m always going to want to do it. Sometimes I will, and sometimes it’ll feel really great and sometimes it’s just something I need to get done in order to maintain the health of my mouth in the case of my toothbrushing and in the case of, of meditation, in terms of my mind.
So I feel like it’s kind of in some ways a big maintenance piece for me and that sometimes you don’t necessarily feel the impact in the moment. Like, a lot of people come to you as, as you’ll know from your classes, you know, they, they’ll say, oh, I can’t meditate ’cause I can’t get my mind to be still.
Or, you know, I, I just, I meditated, but I, I felt, you know, I felt crappy and then I didn’t do it again because I just felt crappy during it. You know, the point isn’t how you’re going to feel in the meditation, as you know. It’s, it’s what you’re going to take, how that’s going to impact the rest of your life on a day-to-day basis.
Same with yoga. You know, it doesn’t matter if you’re flexible in the mat, it matters if you’re flexible in your conversations another time. So it is very much like how I can take it out and sometimes I’ll enjoy sitting there and that will feel lovely. And um, often I wear a red light mask as well for half of it.
So that’s like my half point timer and I enjoy that ’cause I feel like I’m maybe doing something to the health of my skin in the long term. I don’t know. I’m easily influenced clearly. but yeah, I do it first thing in the morning. I wake up at six because the kids wake up a bit later, you know, um, they’re sort of up shortly after that.
So for me, I get up then so that I have that quiet and stillness in the morning. You know, I don’t do it very long. We do it for 10, between 10 and 20 minutes. But if I forget to do it in the morning, I often forget for the rest of the day until the nighttimes. That’s always interesting for me in terms of habit setting, which is a lot that I do with myself, with with my work because it’s one of those habits that I clearly have very, very attached to sort of initially waking up.
And then if I miss it, it seems that I completely goes outside my head until evening and then I’m like, oh fuck, I gotta meditate before I get to sleep. But yeah, for me it’s very much the morning. I always say to clients if, if it’s something that you want to do, there’s lots of studies that, you know, do have shown how it changes the brain networks and how supportive it can be for the areas of the brain that are, that are helpful, um, in terms of bolstering critical thinking and reasoning, and all the things that we need to overcome stress and to better navigate this chaotic world.
But it’s very much like what you will do. So if you will do one minute a day, if you can commit to that, then do that, you know. What often hear is, I’m going to do 20 minutes a day every day for the next month and, and then obviously someone does like three days and then they give up because life becomes life and, and then the dispirited.
So I always think with any of those practices, I’m sure you feel the same way with yoga when you’re telling people, you know, yes, you can come to one class a week with me and that’s great and definitely do that, but you know, if you could also do just two, three minutes a day yourself, that’s when you’ll start to really see change.
And is that cumulation and that repetition, I think with, with meditation, that makes the biggest difference to life. Yeah. What do you think?
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Yeah. I, I completely agree. I, it interesting, like the, the actual practice, the sitting down and doing it for 10, 20 minutes, because I have to admit that. I find that extremely challenging.
And so now my approach is very much about moving meditation. Like this morning I went for a swim and I just focused on just the act of like just moving my body through the water and just if thoughts came in, I observed them. And just really noticed what was coming in and out of my mind and I have a dog now, and so he needs like at least two good walks a day. And I do this without music and without podcasts. And at first it was really hard because my brain is constantly active. But now I look forward to that because especially now when it’s so nice outside, this act of like moving and being really observant of what’s around me and just noticing where my mind goes and is a kind of, it’s not, I guess, meditation in the traditional sense of it, but for me, as someone who I find, I know it sounds weird as a yoga teacher saying this, but like just that kind of what you think of meditation, I find it so hard, and that’s what works for me.
Lily Silverton: Mm-hmm. That’s, I mean. Thank you for sharing that. That’s, I hear that so often and I actually hear it from yoga teachers a lot as well. You know, like, oh, I can’t sit for meditation. Uh, that’s definitely a step too far. Um, yeah, again, it’s that what works for you, right? Yeah. And what are you going to experience on, on the retreat on the weekend, we did a walking meditation and we did seated meditations and, and some people were saying that they found the walking meditations much harder than the seated meditations because of this sort of, they felt like the actual movement got their thoughts moving and it was much harder to stay present. We did a mindfulness meditation where you’re kind of just listening to the birds and feeling your feet beneath the ground and that sort of basic mindfulness.
But for them, for some of them, they were like, oh, my mind just got really busy. ’cause as soon as I started walking, I associated that with with movement in the mind.
Le’Nise Brothers: Right. That just shows you that, like you have to figure out what works for you just because, you know, this is something I say a lot to my clients, just because it works for your friend or your favorite influencer doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.
And, you know, same as meditation. This kind of leads on nicely to talk about habits, and you’ve talked about meditation as a habit that you’ve kind of set in the morning. And now you’ve created a journal called the Priorities Method, which is based on the method that you use for coaching. And this is about helping people create habits.
So say a little bit more about the inspiration about behind creating this journal.
Lily Silverton: Sure. So the journal was, it was sort of twofold, like, first of all, I couldn’t find a journal that worked for me both visually because again, I’ve got this background in fashion and art. So I think any of like the very, um, fluffy, friendly, girly stuff just doesn’t, doesn’t resonate with me.
It resonates with lots of people, which is great, doesn’t resonate with me. So I wanted like really clean lines, but I didn’t want that like tech bro journals. So I wanted to create something in between for myself. And I wanted something to keep myself accountable and also wanted something to keep clients accountable while they were working with me and also after they were finished with me, ’cause I’d see this, you know, great work and then obviously as soon as you’ve got someone checking, like everything just falls away very easily. So it was like, how can we create something that that can support people through that? And then the third piece was making coaching more accessible. So the beginning of the journal has a lot of questions around setting your priorities and and goals and intentions and habits for the year ahead. It’s undated so you can start at any time and the whole thing is undated, so you can stop it anytime as well and pick it back up, which is what people do, which is what I do as well. And I also wanted to create one that was weekly rather than daily, ’cause I felt like who has time to keep a daily journal more than a couple of months, you know? I feel that really falls away and something that people could just really sustain and that they didn’t feel when they hadn’t done it, that they felt really guilty about it. So I really wanted that messaging behind it as well.
Like, I haven’t filled mine in this week yet, and I don’t feel guilty about that and that, and, you know, this is my job. So I, I want to sort of put that, I wanted to put that across to people that. Yeah, just because you started something doesn’t mean you had to keep it going absolutely for life. And then if you didn’t that, then you felt so demotivated that you never picked it up again, which is again, what happens with all our habits, right?
Someone does something for a while, they don’t do it for a couple of days, and then they’re like, oh, they feel shit about that. And then all the thoughts come in, and then they’re like, what’s the point of doing it? Whereby obviously the way that we actually see change in life with absolutely anything is through this consistency.
You know, we have this idea, I think we overestimate how much can happen in like a week or two weeks, and we really underestimate how much can happen in three months.
And I think that’s, you know, that’s what I see, in my own, you know, I know that my brain does it, you know, we like to think short term. Um, we’re less keen on thinking about long-term goals and future plans, really in a very, very sustainable way. And yeah, so that was, it had lots of aims, I guess, the journal, yeah, in one. But those were the three, those were the three main.
Le’Nise Brothers: How can people get their hands on the journal?
Lily Silverton: They can get it through our site, which is the prioritiesmethod.com, or through my Instagram, which is @lily_silverton, and it’s also sold at Soho Farmhouse. So that’s sort of the only place if you at Soho Farmhouse you can get it there as well.
But that, that’s it for now.
Le’Nise Brothers: Great. So what’s the one thought that you’d like to leave listeners with?
Lily Silverton: I guess I would say when we do coaching, we do a lot of what’s called Socratic questioning and as in based in Socrates. And there’s one question from that, which is when you are having a thought or when you are, or even when a behavior or an action to some extent. But I’m, maybe let’s focus on thoughts.
When you’re having a thought, thinking to yourself, is this thought helpful? And sort of what we were talking about earlier, Le’Nise, in terms of maybe it is fact, you know, maybe the thought is fact and it is true, and, and, and that’s all very true and logical. But is the thought helping you? Is the thought helping you have more compassion?
Is it helping you stay aligned with what’s important to your priorities? Is it getting towards where you want to be? Is it strengthening your relationship with yourself and others, you know, is, is it helping you? And if it’s not helping you, then what is it doing? And I think that question for me is definitely always the one that I come back to over and over and over again in challenging situations?
Le’Nise Brothers: I love that.
I love that. How can people get in touch with you?
Lily Silverton: My website, lilysilverton.com or socials, @lily_silverton on Instagram. I’ve got other ones. I never touch them at the moment. And we’ve got a priorities method at Instagram, which I’m also not great at the moment at keeping up, which is @theprioritiesmethod.
And yeah, I do some events. I have a residency with Soho House, so there’s any Soho House members. I do a monthly residency at the one in White City and I do various little events.
I’m also writing a book, which is coming out next year. And that’s sort of where most of my energy is going at the moment, as you can imagine Le’Nise having written stuff.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah . Amazing. You have shared so many interesting little gems and I’m really excited for people to hear this and get in touch with you. So thank you so much for your time today.
Lily Silverton: Thank you so much, Le’Nise for having me.