Dealing with Stress

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.

Cortisol is excreted from the adrenal glands on top of our kidneys and it’s there to be sent out in a short burst. What a lot of us are finding, is that across the world people have cortisol shooting through their bloodstream regularly. Well that has a major effect on our entire system: Our brain and all our bodily functions can be totally out of whack.

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.

A lot of times we just want to get in and learn, “What do I need to do?”

Well, here’s the thing that I’ve found: If we do that without first having a reason why, then the extra things, all the different things that we need to do and change, can become all too hard.

But I want to get your attention right now.

You know, my health got my attention, my doctor got my attention, you know, the situation got my attention and I had to make some change and I want to help you to get there before I did. 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.

Now, I’m not saying that from an arrogant point of view where we go, “Hey, I don’t care what you think, I’ll do whatever I want.”

No. We still need to be humble and teachable, but what I’m saying here is: “What you say doesn’t define me and I’m okay with who I am. I know what my strengths are, I know what my areas for development are and I’m okay with that.”



From there, 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.

For years I would put on this mask - I would try to be this person to please everybody else and that was very stressful. It was like playing an act where I had to remember a different script to the internal dialogue that was going on.

Well, we can rediscover that. I want to help you to to escape that performance trap where you end up having an abundance of energy instead of being disengaged. You will have the energy that you need to have in every area of your life - not just work because you were born for a lot more than that.

And you can be happy and you can be healthy.

And when that permeates around us, those people around us can be a lot happier and healthier as well. Because stress doesn’t just affect you, it affects the people around you. And I know you know that.

So I really invite you to come on this journey with me over the next few weeks and we’re going to look at the things that you and I can do to reduce stress.

See, the first thing we’ve got to understand is that changing is a process. 

It’s a two step process. 

The first thing we’ve got to do is look at the triggers.

What are the buttons that are pushed that caused our stress?

When we’ve identified those and we look at the ones that are unhealthy, we deal with those things and we then develop new strategies, and stress responses.

Every single one of us already have strategies that we’re running and we already have stress strategies. Some of them are good for us, some of them are not.

So it’s a matter of mapping it out just like in a game of chess. It’s a matter of having the moves ready to go. It’s a matter of preparing. It’s a matter of changing some mindsets and beliefs and behaviours and developing new strategies. So then when this happens, I would respond this way rather than react like I used to.

So that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about today. I wanted to make sure that I just laid the foundation of where we go on.

Stress is a silent killer. Stress is a steal-up of a quality of life. And I want to do what I can to help you to reduce your stress.

For those of you who really want to get a head start on this, what I’ve done is I’ve put together some thoughts and written an ebook. That ebook is called the Stress Reduction Maximiser. One day I want to turn it into a full hard cover novel-like thesis. But for now it’s an ebook where I’ve added some thoughts and I’ve given you those three hot tips and you can just grab that from my website.

Just below this video ( you could be looking at this on on my blog or on social media or Linkedin), there’ll be a link to go grab this e-book.

It’s for free.

It’s something that helps me to get my thoughts out. There are visuals there that might help you to have a better understanding of stress and how you can reduce it.

So, Hey, this is Grant Herbert and I want to help you to reduce your stress fast. Over the next few weeks, we’ll step through those principles- those tips that are in the book.

So go ahead right now, grab yourself a coffee and  grab yourself a copy of my e-book and I shall see you in next week’s video.

Have a great week. You deserve it. Bye for now.