Hi, I’m John Drury. I help professional business leaders achieve what’s important without losing what’s essential.
We’re also busy juggling demands at work and demands at home, and life is full of things that produce stress.
We all kind of expect that stress is normal, it’s part of our world if you’re a busy, high-achieving person who wants to make an impact.
How does stress show up for you? Did you get angry? Are you impatient? Do you get frustrated with people? Are you very task-focused and people tend to annoy you? Do you get overwhelmed and that can lead to either procrastination or try to multitask where you’re busy but not necessarily productive?
Do you withdraw inside your head? Some people get very stressed and they just withdraw a bit and become hard to connect to. Or if you’re like me, I would just fill this internal pressure and be doing, I was with very strong work ethic and getting things done. There was always more to do.
And I’d get to my day off or time out, away from business, and I wouldn’t know how to relax. So I kind of lost the ability to relax over time because it has a cumulative effect and that was difficult for me and difficult for everyone around me as well.
Stress is affecting as far more than we understand and in not in good ways.
A couple of things that you can do that I learned, I went through a burnout experience about 12 years ago that was very painful and I love to try and help people avoid what I went through if I can.
Two quick things, there’s many more, but two things that helped me: Firstly, exercise. I had underestimated the power of exercise. I went back to a regular half-hour exercise class three times a week and that helped no end. I could not believe the stress release I felt after that session, working on my body. After a few weeks, my muscles stopped screaming and I felt so much better physically but also emotionally.
Research is showing the incredible link between emotional health and physical exercise. I encourage you to make sure you’re working on that, at least be moving, at least be walking, doing something.
The second thing is you need something outside of work that you can do regularly that can completely distract you, that can get you totally absorbed in. Whether that’s reading or gardening or playing sport or maybe it is your exercise, going for a walk, whatever it is, we need something regularly.
Holidays don’t do it. You need something that happens week to week that you can do fairly easily for an hour or two that just helps you replenish emotionally and regroup mentally, so important to help deal with stress.
So how does stress show up for you? I’d love for you the comment below the video and let me know how stress shows up for you. And if you like this or share it, I’m very very happy for you to share this video as well. Thanks for listening.
