You don’t feel stressed out.
You either feel distressed or eustressed. Stress, you see, is neutral. Stress is simply a challenge that promotes growth. More stress than you can “comfortably” handle, feels like distress. Living here day after day can result in hyper-stress and severe burnout. Less stress than the system can manage leads to boredom,stagnation, and complacency. The sweet spot is eustress where you are out of the comfort zone “reaching” but it feels like you gotta chance. This is how you grow…
One persons hyper-stress is anothers challenge. One persons ho-hum, is anothers reach. The magic to managing your stress levels is two-fold. First, you’ve got to improve your tuneage. Finding your eustress, high performance, sweet spot requires fine tuning your capacity and matching it to the proper kinda challenge. Too easy and you’ll soon be bored and quit. Too hard and you’ll soon be burned and out. Once you’ve tuned in, you’ve got to push on. This is the second half of the equation and the one that STOPS most of you. You cannot increase your capacity without increasing your challenge. And, sometimes, this results in you falling. When we do pulls in the 3PP I see people embracing the push. Going from the sissy bar to the high bar and then jumping up on the beam is a stress to each of us. Good.
The key to you experiencing more of the helpful effects of stress, requires you embracing one of your deepest fears – the fear of failure. You cannot lead a team of high performers without celebrating your own missteps. You have to model the way and the way forward always involves falling – always involves pain. Most of you have developed a very low tolerance for pain and this is the biggest limiter to you and your team. The younger you are reading this rant, the higher the probability you are soft. Yup, we are soft and getting softer as a society. Not good, friend. Not good.
Today, push yourself outside your comfort zone and see what happens. Tune into how it feels. Push toward something that energizes you. And push toward something that has felt like it’s always just outta your reach. Embrace the fall and get up again. Pretty soon, the sissy bar that used to own you will seem like childs play. Go on, jump up and grab onto the high bar. Feel the roughness of the bar digging into your soft hands. Pull. And, why not take the leap and grab hold of the high beam. Feel the steel put some kinda incredible pressure on the tips of your fingers, grit your teeth, and pull yourself up anyway. Feel the rush of blood through your body as it does something it felt it could NOT. Your brain is now on a natural high. You are tasting some proper stress. You are growing. You are, in fact, eustressed out.
Good…
BUILT TO LEAD 