In this episode, we'll cover:

Why this podcast might be for you
Why I started the Mindful Productivity Podcast
Who I am and how I came to where I am today
My educational background
The importance of owning your success
What I'll be covering in future episodes
What it means to be mindfully productive

Why You’re in the Right Place

Think of this podcast as a welcoming new cafe where you can feel at ease, stay awhile, and dive into a “menu” of tips for calming your mind, managing your time, and cultivating self-awareness. You’re in the right place if:

You’re tired of the endless push for positivity without actionable steps.
You’re ready to move away from chaos and create solid, practical plans.
You believe there has to be more to daily life than just “getting by.”

My goal is to hold space for you to feel all your emotions, to move at your own pace, and to live a life filled with more clarity and purpose.

Who Am I?

I’m Sarah Steckler—a certified health and wellness coach, mindfulness practitioner, productivity strategist, and, yes, a serial sticker collector (Lisa Frank fans, unite!). My journey to mindfulness and productivity wasn’t always smooth. For years, I felt lost, overwhelmed, and stuck in a cycle of anxiety and insecurity. Learning how to own my thoughts rather than let them control me was a long process, but it led me here.

I studied at Western Washington University in Communications and Sociology, then pursued a Master’s in Health and Wellness Coaching with a focus on integrative health practices. It was through this journey that I not only gained the tools for mindful living but also the passion for helping others take control of their well-being.

Why I Started This Podcast

Years ago, I would have loved to have a resource that shared insights on mindfulness and productivity in a conversational, accessible way. I created this podcast to be that resource for anyone feeling overwhelmed by life’s demands. We’ll cover practical techniques and strategies for integrating mindfulness into your daily routine and explore what it truly means to be productive without compromising your well-being.

What Does It Mean to Be Mindfully Productive?

In this podcast, we’ll explore how to align productivity with mindfulness, challenging the traditional idea that productivity means constant “go, go, go.” Here’s what mindful productivity means to me:

Intentional Action: Mindful productivity is about understanding your values, focusing on what truly matters, and setting goals that align with who you are.
Balance Between Structure and Flow: It’s important to have a structure in your life, but mindful productivity also means creating space for flow, spontaneity, and ease.
Awareness Without Judgment: Inspired by Jon Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindfulness—awareness that arises by paying attention in the present moment, without judgment—this podcast encourages you to observe your thoughts and actions with kindness and curiosity, rather than criticism.

What You’ll Get from This Podcast

This isn’t just a podcast about getting more done; it’s about learning how to live with intention, find purpose, and manage your time in a way that feels authentic. Whether you’re here to integrate mindfulness into your business, improve your relationships, or make your home a sanctuary, each episode will provide you with insights, actionable steps, and inspiration for leading a more mindfully productive life.

The Power of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has the power to tap into the wisdom, enthusiasm, and energy you already possess. It’s a tool that helps you reconnect with your true self, foster self-compassion, and redefine success on your own terms. Mindfulness allows you to truly embody your strengths, embrace your unique qualities, and create a life that feels deeply fulfilling.

Thank you for tuning in to this introductory episode of the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I’m so excited to go on this journey with you, sharing tips, stories, and insights that will help you become your most intentional, balanced self.

Stay tuned for our upcoming episodes as we dive into practical mindfulness strategies, productivity hacks, and inspiration for cultivating a life that feels both productive and peaceful.

Welcome to the Mindful Productivity community—I’m thrilled to have you here!

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Welcome to the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life.
If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live, and it all starts now.
Listening to a new podcast often feels like walking into a new cafe.
You open the door, you feel the vibe, and you instantly feel welcomed, connected and intrigued by the menu.
Or you might want to turn around and dart right back out the door. So let me tell you why you're in the right place.
You're in the right place if you're tired of that constant pressure to be more positive without the action steps and the science behind the how, and you're also wanting a little bit more space to be held for feeling negative and just really feeling like a human, you're also ready to move away from constant chaos and overwhelmed two solid action plans that instill a feeling of ease and flow instead of an imaginary drill sergeant in your head.
And you've also thought, you know, it's gotta be a lot more simple than this. You're over things being overcomplicated, and you know there's something more to daily life than just getting by.
Thanks for joining me in this brief episode, I'm gonna be introducing myself and laying the foundation of this podcast.
You'll find out what it means to be mindfully productive. Why I started this podcast and a little bit more about me and why I consider myself qualified to talk about what I talk about and why I'm here in the first place.
I'm Sarah Steckler, and I'm a certified health and wellness coach and a mindfulness practitioner.
I'm also a wife, a bulldog, mom, an author, blogger, serial sticker collector. I love me some Lisa Frank and a productivity strategist, but let's take a second to backtrack and I'll tell you a little bit about how I got here.
So I wasn't always as in tune with my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions and the communication between my body and my mind.
I always have felt kind of this, like, intuitive connection to things like, You know, if I eat a bunch of sugar, I noticed how that would impact my mood or lead to anxious feelings, or I would notice, like how different foods made me feel in my body. But connecting with mindfulness practice was a much longer journey, I actually spent, you know, years of my life with my thoughts, owning me instead of me owning my thoughts.
I didn't even realize for so long that you can become an observer for your own thoughts and everything you think leads to beliefs and actions and can completely change your mind.
So the years leading up to realizing all this and studying mindfulness and really becoming aware of this, I felt miserable constantly. I was always anxious. I was insecure pretty much any time I got up out of bed in the morning.
I'm sure you know, ah, lot of this was due to being younger, you know, going through the motions of adolescence.
But I always felt like there could be so much more so to give you a brief little history of my education. And, you know, I won't give you my whole story, but I went to Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where I studied communications and minored in sociology.
This was an amazing four years of my life. When I was there, I dabbled a little bit inthe e school radio program and hosted a news radio show, and I also realized how much of an introverted extrovert I really was.
We'll get into that another time. It wasn't until later that I actually discovered that, but things I was doing in my life were not really connected to my true purpose. And I had the most amazing job in Seattle.
I still love all the people there. I still connect with them constantly, and in that job I took on the role of chair of the health and wellness team for this university. And it was there that I really fell in love with health and wellness.
But not only that, also leading people inspiring people and really allowing people to feel everything they needed to feel and to really help guide people into taking ownership of their health and well being.
After about eight months on a dating site, there's so many stories I'll have to tell you guys, I met my husband on plenty of fish, which is not one of the nicest dating sites. It was surprising that I met my husband on that one. We ended up getting married three years later and moving across the country, and it was this time that I was like, so overwhelmed. I felt like I was having like, 1/4 life crisis. I ended up quitting a series of jobs back to back, and I really felt lost, and I ended up pursuing my master's degree.
And that's when I really found myself. And I really found this connection to mindfulness toe wellness to everything.
And I knew I knew this is what I wanted to Dio and I studied, um, health and what I got A master's in health and wellness coaching from Maryland, integrative, Um, Marilyn, University of Integrative Health Practices and I had a focus on integrative health practices as well, and this program was amazing.
It really changed everything and learning how to coach, learning about mindfulness, learning about just so many things in, you know, in terms of wellness, so many things that, you know, we just should really be taught in our schools should really be curriculum for our lives as we grow into adulthood and beyond.
And it was really, really life changing. I was able to really get into starting my own meditation practice, really get into, you know, letting go of judgment and really incorporating all the areas and components of mindfulness into my daily life. It changed everything.
And from there I have started my, you know, helping one. This coaching practice. I have started my blog and it's really just taken off from there, and it's always still a process, right? But I wanted to create this podcast. More importantly, because there are so many people out there when I think about myself, you know, years and years ago I wish there was someone that was talking about things in a conversational way.
I wish there was someone that was not so much telling me what to do, but just allowing me to feel the way I wanted to feel, allowing me to do everything I wanted to do on my own terms, in my own way, at my own pace. We have so much going on in our lives.
I know that you feel this way to where, even when people have the best of intentions, it often feels like people are leading with their egos and telling us what we should think or do or should feel or what it means to be successful.
And I want you to know, as you dive into this podcast, that it's so about owning your own truth and owning what you want to define success in.
Each of these episodes will be diving into not only areas of mindfulness and how to instil and create that and cultivate that in your own life. But I'll also be talking about productivity so a little bit about that real quick. What does it mean to be mindfully productive?
While there's an amazing definition that I love to refer to from Jon Kabat Zinn, and he says that mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment.
Non Judgment is really about knowing what is on your mind, and when we think about productivity, you know, it's often, I mean the definition of it is, you know, being consistent and getting more done right. But I really want to challenge the notion that productivity is simply about that. I want to challenge the notion that to be productive, you have to be go, go, go constantly.
I want to really challenge the notion that being productive means that you're not taking the breaks you need. And I don't think anyone in that space, you know, the talks about productivity would disagree with me. But I really want to bring attention to how to be more mindfully productive.
How to bring up the core elements of mindfulness into the ways that you lead your life, whether that's whether you're here because you want to be more personally productive, whether you're here because you're you've heard about mindfulness and you're like cool.
But how do I really integrate that into my business or into my management style? Or how do we bring that to my team? Or how do we bring that home? How do I make our home feel more productive but mindfully without, you know, having all these rules and strict things in place?
There's a time and a place for that, and I want to talk about the balance between having structure in their lives and also having this flow and ease and really feeling in tune and really feeling intentional with our daily lives.
That's what this podcast is all about. And I want to tell you real quick, too, that you have so much in you.
So much wisdom, so much information, so much capability, so much enthusiasm and passion and mindfulness will really help you tap into that and bring an ownership to that.
And it will really allow you to embody everything that you're wanting to bring forward all the things that you may seek or seeing other people and go Oh, I wish I had that you do!
It's a matter of really cultivating that for yourself. Welcome to the mindful productivity podcast. I'm so excited to connect with you. I'm so excited to get to know more about you. I'm excited to share some things about my personal life with you because I think that they will help you as you progress in your journey towards living a more mindfully productive life. Thank you for listening to this intro episode.
I hope it gave you a little bit more information about me. And when I do and I'm so excited to go on this journey with you together as we listen to this podcast.