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Challenges don't have to lead to stress. Hey there, Maureen Cherna here, founder of the Mindsight Academy, neurocoach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you deliver results by learning to work smarter, be in control of your brain, manage yours and others' emotions, change behaviors, flourish and exceed expectations. Welcome back to another episode of Lead to Excel Podcast. I am so thrilled to be with you today because we are going to be discussing a very important topic. But before we get into that, remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to it, because it will help other people find it and give them the opportunity to understand how they can rewire their own brain to enable them to achieve their goals. So without wasting any more time, grab your cup of coffee or your drink or whatever that might be, put your feet up and listen in. Challenges don't have to lead to stress. Our podcast this week is titled How to Cope with Stress. I am stressed. That word stress has become a descriptor for so much, including being tired. Is stress, fear, and negative thoughts holding you back? In this podcast today, I'm going to show you that you can actually change that. A survey done early this year by APA found that the happiness of workers has decreased by 75% since 2019. It found that 84% of adults said that they experienced at least one emotion tied to prolonged stress in the prior two weeks to the survey, with the most common being anxiety at 47%, sadness at 44%, and anger at 39%. Impulse, a consultancy firm, also reported that their findings from a survey conducted between 2019 and early 2021 highlighted that anxiety had shot up by 78% for those who answered surveys exploring mental health. Employee motivation also dropped by nearly a fifth over the past two years from an average score of 21% to 17% in 2021. Mark Stevens, founder and CEO of Impulse, noted that negative emotions and anxiety levels amongst workers are still increasing and levels of commitment, motivation, and focus are falling. Again, that's not surprising considering what the world has been through in the last 18 months. He said that findings show that businesses are experiencing negative emotions like never before, and that employers must take care to address the burnout and resilience problems of their workforces by accurately measuring and responding to employee sentiments. Stevens concluded that without a timely response, these problems will detrimentally impact engagement, productivity, absence, and retention. And this is why I urge you to listen to this podcast today and take appropriate action for yourself and for your employees. So I'm going to start this podcast by going into a bit of the science of stress. Stress happens when you feel under threat, when you are frightened by change, uncertainty, or anything new. When your self-esteem is attacked, that can cause stress. When you feel that the demands on you, internal and external, are beyond your control or capability, this can also cause stress. In a business environment, stress is usually psychological, that is, in response to how people perceive themselves and their work or their world. Understanding the causes and effects of stress is crucial for any leader in a volatile environment which we are in now. I'll give you a bit of statistics to guide us and make you see the impact that stress is having on people in the workplace and business owners as well. Prolonged stress persists at elevated levels for many people across the world, from unemployment to education. The fact is that we cannot ignore the mental health consequences of this global shared pandemic experience, and neglecting to address stress as part of a national recovery plan would lead to a massive mental health fallout for years to come. Burnout is one of the consequences of stress, surely prolonged stress. Burnout is defined as the result of an inability to cope with job stress, which then manifests itself in different ways, such as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and feelings of a lack of personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion presents itself by a lack of energy and feeling of depletion of resources. Research has also shown that stress has a negative impact on mental and physical health, and most people do not feel that they know enough or are doing enough to manage their stress. The stress from fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of not having enough time, fear of the unknown can be daunting. It can be very isolating and lonely when you feel this way. Constant stress suppresses our immune system, which can then result in diseases like cancer, stroke, or heart attack, not to talk of the mental health issues, which in most cases are not visible. So, and there are many factors that can cause workplace stress: the drive for success, changing work patterns, conflicts, uncertainty, underwork, overwork, relationships at work, responsibilities, change at work. I did a podcast recently on moving into hybrid working. That is causing a lot of stress for leaders, but also causing a lot of stress for employees who, in most cases, have found want the hybrid, but the employers are refusing because they want to go back to the way things were before. Which life doesn't work that way, as I keep saying. Some of the emotional symptoms of stress are bouts of depression, impatience, fits of rage, tearfulness, deterioration of self-care and appearance. So, how do we thrive in an uncertain world without the unwanted stress? The answer lies in taking back control of the most powerful tool in the world, your brain. The solution is to control the emotional center of your brain. Your emotional brain plays a substantial role in negative mental states such as the anxiety, depression, distress, and a whole lot of other emotions that trigger the fight, flight, or freeze response. Make the commitment today to start managing your thoughts and do not give up until you win. Many people kind of dissociate the brain or the mind from the heart, from the emotions. The fact is that when information goes into the brain, which can be through your thoughts, and I'll focus on thoughts here just for the sake of time. That thought creates an emotion instantly. And one of the first places that are triggered are in the body, the adrenal gland that sits on top of the kidney. And the heart is then activated, and that is why you find the heart pumping faster. The whole point is to get blood to the rest of the body, to get the oxygen to the rest of the body, to the muscles to help your flight, flight, or freeze response. So you cannot focus on just the heart. The heart is a response to what is going on in the brain. Your brain has the key to enable you to create amazing solutions for your success. You can easily and quickly be a high-performing leader, run a successful business, achieve your career, profession, or personal goals and dreams stress-free. The process starts with breaking that chain of stress and begin to enjoy a stress-free life. And I'm going to go hopefully a bit deeper into what I call stress-free because we do need stress to enable us to achieve excellence. We do need stress to enable us to achieve focus. But my focus in this podcast, when I talk about stress-free, is the negative stress-free that cripples people, that incapacitates you and prevents you from doing what you want to do. That fear that causes procrastination, that fear that ends up causing a lot of emotional torture and literally paralyzes you. All it takes to be able to achieve that success by coping or controlling stress is the commitment to rewire your brain for limitless success. Stress makes you make bad or poor decisions. Stress makes you procrastinate. It reduces your ability for creative problem solving. Neurologically, a brain consistently stressed is not capable of sustaining peak performance and taking the right actions for growth, thereby reducing your ability to progress. It's time to stop being a victim of life, but rather be the hero or heroine of your life. Stress is caused not by other people or external events, but by your reactions to them. In the workplace, many people blame their high anxiety levels on a boss, job, deadlines, or competing commitments for their time. But peers who face the same challenges do so without stress. It's also worth saying here that sometimes things can get really difficult at work, either because of the behavior of a boss or peers. The key here is that you have the control to make a decision. And that decision could be you changing to manage what the external influences are, or to take yourself out of that situation. My point is that you are in control of how you respond or react. It's also worth noting that pressure is not stress. And I've said this before. It can become stress when you start ruminating, when you keep thinking of the past or future events while attaching negative emotions to those thoughts. I'm not talking about your need as a leader to practice reflection, which is extremely important, and a positive short-term process. Rumination is ongoing and destructive, and it can actually result in compromised health, reduced productivity and well-being. Dwelling on the past or worrying about the future takes away from the present, rendering you unable to complete the work that is actually currently in front of you. So now let's look at three quick ways to break stress-inducing habits. Focus on what you want. When you focus on what you don't want, your attention gets caught up in an unproductive loop, like a hamster on a wheel. This is why it's important to be solution focused and direct your thoughts to areas in which you can take useful action. Here's one exercise that can help you achieve this. Draw a circle on a page and write down all the things that you can control or influence inside of that circle and all the things that you cannot control outside the circle. Then remind yourself that you can care about externalities, your work, your team, and your family without worrying about them. Avoid mind traps. Your state of mind, more than anything else, determines your level of success. But blockers can stop you from having the right state of mind. These are known as mind traps. I do talk a lot about this on the training in the Mindsight Academy, the emotional intelligence for leadership. So if you want to know more about this, go to the Mindsight Academy. And towards the end of this podcast, I'm going to give you some information on some training relating to stress. So go make another cup of coffee and keep listening to this podcast. A lot of nuggets for you here. Are you a leader that catastrophizes? You know, when you perceive a personal or professional event will undoubtedly come to a disappointing and unbearable conclusion. Or when you perceive things as a sign of a disaster on the way, you know when you say to yourself, Oh no, I'm going to fall ill. I know I'll mess this presentation up. I should not even have bothered starting my business. I know I will lose it. I know it will fail. It's when your thinking is distorted by your past experiences and you subconsciously sabotage new opportunities to confirm your negative belief. For those of you that have listened to my previous podcasts or been on my trainings, you'd have heard me talk a lot about how I ran a business that I had to close, and I literally felt like a failure. And I vowed to myself that I'll never run a business again. So when I started this business, the neuroleadership consultancy that I'm currently doing, oh yes, my subconscious brain kicked back into gear and said, what if it fails? What if it doesn't work? What if, what if, what if? But fortunately, by this time I was equipped. I was in control of my brain, and I had to rewire my own brain so that my subconscious has new information. It's basically, you know, the catastrophizing is when you anticipate disaster from minor threats or even from past experiences. There are so many other mind traps to avoid, such as unrealistic expectations, taking things personally, the all-or-nothing thinking, exaggeration, and rigid thinking as well. Emotionally intelligent and resilient leaders keep things in perspective for themselves and their teams. Some ways to avoid catastrophizing of these mind traps is to use contrasting technique where you compare a past stress to the current one, that is, a major health issue, for example, versus a missed sale or not getting a job. And asking yourself the question, how much will this matter in three years' time? And what's the worst that could happen? How would I survive this? Reframing it so that you're looking at your challenge from a new perspective. What's an opportunity in this situation that I haven't seen yet? Or even what's funny about this situation? Learn to put things in perspective. Your brain will review events until it feels that you've gained something from them. So you need to ask yourself, what have I learned from this experience? Sometimes it actually helps to just take an action that you've been putting off. Ask yourself, what action is required here? And that's really important to be solution focused. So before I conclude, it's worth noting again that there are two types of stress. The positive stress, where stress can actually have a positive effect by spurring motivation and awareness, providing the stimulation to cope with challenging situations, to keep you focused, and to actually help you take the necessary action to achieve something. Stress also provides a sense of urgency and alertness needed for survival when confronting threatening situations. Negative stress, which is what I've focused on a lot in this podcast, which is the stress that I explained that can be crippling, that can affect your mental health, and that can really prevent you from taking the actions that you want to take or even making you freeze or procrastinate, self-sabotage. So how you focus your attention plays a critical role in how you deal with stress. When your attention is widened, you can more easily let go of stress. You can put in perspective many more aspects of any situation and not get locked into one part that ties you down to superficial and anxiety-provoking levels of attention. A narrow focus amplifies the stress level of each experience, but a widened focus turns down the stress level because you're better able to put each situation into a broader perspective. We now know that neuroscience has identified a solution to stress that goes far beyond conventional stress management that generates the neurological conditions that stimulate the growth of new connections within the higher brain, which is known as neuroplasticity. It helps us expand brain capacity, makes us smarter, more innovative, and emotionally intelligent. So, again, if you really want to know more about this, do head to the MindSight Academy and look at the training on emotional intelligence for leadership. I've also got a course coming out soon on how to cope with stress. If you're interested in this and to also enable you to get it at the launch price, just pop me a message, send me an email. I'm gonna put my email details in the description. Send me a quick email and just put that interested in coping with stress online training. So that once it's about to launch, I'll let you know. So, in conclusion to this podcast, the solution to coping with stress lies in your power to rewire your brain. When you change your brain, you change your life. Changing your brain or changing your mindset can literally change brain structures to extinguish stress reactions and amplify higher brain function. So I really hope this podcast will help you put things in perspective, take control of your brain, and don't succumb to stress or pressures or let pressures end up leading you to stress. And even if you're in a situation where you feel stressed, there is hope you can get out of it. And if you do need any information, if you need help through the brain-based coaching that I offer, do reach out or reach out to someone that can help you, but there is something that you can do about it, and that's that is powerful in its own self. So do look after yourself, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode. We'll be sitting with a guest to have some important discussions that will really help you take control of your life and your leadership and your business. Okay, three things before we finish today. Have you subscribed to this podcast? If you haven't, make sure you click that subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast. Because once you subscribe, you will not miss an episode. And as usual, if you have a topic you would love me to speak about or bring a guest on, do let me know by leaving a review. Finally, do have a fantastic week and remember that you are limitless. So I look forward to seeing you in our next episode. Bye for now.