Dealing with Stress

SUMMARY

“As someone who has suffered from a lot of stress throughout my entire life, I know too well the damaging effects of stress.”

Come on this journey with me so you will be able to reduce your stress and have a much healthier stress response! In this fast paced VUCA world that we live in, one of the biggest challenges in life is that we tend to be always open for business and are too interested in what other people think of us. We are addicted to approval and this adds to our stress.

Stress is a silent killer. Chronic stress can lead to many health issues like heart attack and stroke. We all need to get that realisation and awareness about this and make the changes that you need to make now, before it’s too late.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hey everyone, this is Grant and I want to speak to you this week about STRESS.

As someone who has suffered from a lot of stress throughout my entire life, whether it be at school, in my military career or in my corporate career, I know only too well the damaging affects of stress.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people over the last few weeks, clients and friends, who are going through a lot of stress and so I thought, why don’t you focus on that topic for a while Grant in everything did you do- whether it be on social media, on Linkedin or on my live videos- have a conversation about stress.

I just want to start that off today and I invite every single one of you to come on this journey with me to be able to reduce your stress and have a much healthier stress response.

See, one of the biggest challenges I’ve found in my own life, and I find in many people’s lives, is that we are too interested in what other people think of us.

We are addicted to approval.

We perform on a daily basis to get others to like us, to like what we do - to put their seal of approval on everything that we do. That can create a lot of uncertainty, a lot of doubt, a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress.

In this fast paced world that we live in, this VUCA world, (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world that we live in), we tend to be always ‘open for business’.

You know, you’ve seen it before, you’ve probably done it. You go out to a restaurant to have dinner and you end up spending much of your time on your phone, checking emails and taking calls. Still plugged into the world outside instead of being present right there and then.

You know, technology was supposed to make things easier but in my experience it’s made it a lot more complicated and all these demands coming in at us all the time create stress.

Then there’s the conflict. Conflict is inevitable. People are different. People have differing views, people have differing ideas. The fast pace of change and all these things together means that there’s going to be conflict.

So it’s not a matter of there never being any conflict. We need to learn how to manage that conflict in a lot more resourceful ways.

There’s two types of conflict:

The first type of conflict is the one we always think about and that’s the conflict with others. You know, wrestling and boxing and fighting about things and negotiating and having differing opinions and ideas.

But then there’s the internal conflict, the conflict that we have with ourself, the conflict we have between that small inner voice that wants to keep us safe and that confident voice that wants to take us forward into achieve more.

There’s that incongruence between who we are and what we do because we are chasing approval and sometimes we can even go outside our own value system. And that creates a lot of stress.

Then we end up in a position where we feel overwhelmed. I have been there and I know you’ve been there as well. We just want to raise the white flag and go like, “you know what that’s enough. I’m not doing this anymore. It’s just too much. Everything is on top of me.” I’ve been there and I know you’ve been there too and it needs to change.

The end result of that is we end up burning out, we end up disillusioned, disenfranchised, disengaged. We’re not sure whether the career that we’ve chosen is one that we want to continue in and we just feel tired, we just lose energy. We don’t want to do anything.

And I’ve been there too. In my corporate career and my military career, I burnt out on more than one occasion. I remember the one time in my life where I just cried for four days. I just sobbed and cried. And it was just a release of all that stress. Burnout is becoming far too prevalent in the circles that I’m working in. And working with people all over the world, the difference in locality and culture and those things, don’t seem to make a difference. Burnout is a real thing that we need to make sure that we avoid. Because chronic stress for a long period of time has a major effect on your health.

Stress is a silent killer. Stress can be attributed to many major diseases like heart attack and stroke.

Chronic stress has led me in my life to many health issues.

Many negative effects can happen to your body when you are continually in stress mode.

There’s a few of them here, like fatigue, having that brain fog, decreased mood, not really wanting to do things, changes in our skin texture, narrowing of the arteries and increased blood sugar levels, decreased nutrient absorption which gives things like leaky gut and other digestive problems, immunity issues, hormonal imbalances, increased cortisol.

I myself have suffered from adrenal fatigue, where it got a point where my adrenal glands said: “Hey, give us a break. There’s nothing left.” And I got quite sick and I’m still on a recovery from that for many years down the track.

So stress has a major effect on the body.

And I really wanted to get your attention today before we go on this journey together. I want you to get that realisation and awareness now and make the changes that you need to make.

So what I want to do is introduce you over the next few weeks to some top tips, things that I’ve used, strategies that I’ve used in my life and learnings that I’ve learned from other people, from books, from my studies in neuroscience and positive psychology and emotional intelligence. And to help you to implement those so that you can reduce your stress fast because we can have different results.

We can go from being in that performance trap mode to self approval where we don’t really care what other people think of us. We can set some healthy boundaries and say no and yes appropriately. We can switch off and unplug and be okay with that. And instead of things and situations pushing our buttons and make us respond in a reactive way, we can take back control.

We can reduce our level of stress, we can manage the stress that we’re going through and have a much healthier stress response. We can rediscover our authenticity, we can take off the mask, start working with who we really are. And all these really reduces your stress.

I’m on a quest to help as many people as I can to reduce and manage their stress. Have a great week. You deserve it. Bye for now.