Category: Uncategorized

Part two: Improving your relationship with stress-How to establish safety and trust

Last week, I introduced you to my simple, yet effective, approach that I used to become a BFF (Best Friend Forever) with stress so it would no longer be such a barrier to my health and well-being. Following the cumbersome health complications that I experienced when I chose to ignore the effects of stress on my body, befriending stress has become the most effective health improvement intervention for me so far.

Although the idea of “befriending stress” may sound like an abstract concept, it is not very different from the process we use to befriend someone we meet that we like:

  1. We get to know them better.
  2. We create safety and trust between us.

In this section, Stress: Part Two, I will share with you the most profound and unusual pearls of wisdom that I have gathered in regard to how we can create safety and trust in our relationship with stress so we can enjoy a happier, healthier, and more productive life.

  1. Question your perceptions! We are built for fight or flight in response to demands from the environment. It’s nothing personal, just a matter of survival. One of our most primal needs is to connect with others, yet our brain and nervous system are built for war and not for love. This presents us with a great paradox that we have to somehow reconcile to reinstate a sense of safety within and without. Our brain has evolved to give us the greatest survival advantage and that translates into us looking at things from a threatened perspective. We can intercept this scientific truth by literally questioning our assumptions and that which challenges us. For example, if you did not get an “Exceeds” in your performance evaluation, does it really mean that you should have concerns about your job security?
  2. Make a regular practice of choosing the words to your own life story. We are what our experiences have shaped us to be. Most of our memories are stored in our brain without conscious intervention on our part. A memory of a negative experience will get triggered and elicit a response when a situation occurs that mimics sensations of that negative experience. As brilliant as we may be intellectually, most of our actions happen without our permission. For example, if we had a negative parent figure in our childhood, the moment we get close to someone as an adult, implicit memories will resurface of what it was like to depend on someone who was not dependable. Then the relational part of our brain will shut down to disrupt the perceived negative consequences of depending on someone again. We can start re-writing this story by assessing how much of our assumption that the present moment resembles our past is a truth or a story. We can also become a regular participant in deciding if bringing the past into our present is leading us to our desired outcomes.
  3. Embrace the power of your emotions—one emotion at a time. We have been conditioned to be afraid of our own emotions, because well, they have a life of their own! We need to embrace that it is biologically impossible to not make an emotional decision. Prominent neuroscientist, Joseph Le Doux, has shown us that when a threat is perceived by our thalamus, which relays motor and sensory signals, it only takes eight milliseconds for the message to reach our amygdala, which is responsible for detecting fear, but forty milliseconds to reach our prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of our brain. Instead of running away from our feelings, what if we fully embrace and trust them by giving them a name and choosing how we allow them to shape our behavior? Making intelligent use of our emotions (otherwise known as emotional intelligence) has been found to be more important than IQ in how well we do in life. You can access a free resource to help you with this endeavor by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen
  4. Reconcile differences between expectations and actuality. Our brain perceives difference, or change, as “errors.” When we are promised a sweet-tasting treat and we get something sour instead, two structures in our brain get activated that emit very strong error signals. The two structures are the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala. The activation of these structures draws our metabolic energy away from the part of our brain that supports higher intellectual functioning and results in us acting impulsively and often putting our foot in our mouth. To change this, make it a high priority to identify any parts of your life that present your brain with the taxing job of reconciling differences and, one by one, eliminate them. Do you support healthy living, but find that your health improvement initiatives end the moment you sit in front of the TV at the end of a stressful day with a bag of unhealthy snacks? Do you have a significant person in your life who says they love you but often minimizes you? Recognize all situations that aggravate your brain by showing up as errors, call them by name, and let them go. Your brain will love you for it!
  5. Treat your brain as the best part of yourself. Our brain is our best friend and the CEO of the amazing operation of our incredible body. Improving our relationship with stress involves improving our relationship with ourselves. Although we haven’t been taught how to do that, there are several practices we can learn that are simple, backed up by science, and take only a smidgen of our time. Mindfulness meditation is one of the most effective and well-documented methods to quiet down the alarming narrative of any story and allow us to infuse our present moment with safety and trust. We can chose any focal point that makes us feel safe and protected as an effective way to build an internal sense of safety and trust. We can simply focus on our breath and recollect all the amazing things the power of our breath accomplishes, like oxygenating our one hundred trillion cells, or activating the parasympathetic branch of our nervous system, which governs rest and digestion. If you are one of the many of us that needs some guidance meditating, I invite you to use some of my favorite guided meditations that you can find here: http://bit.ly/myndzenguidedmeditations.

We modern humans are having such a hard time keeping our nervous system calm and available to serve our higher purpose and objectives in life. Part of the problem is that we have had to turn our brain into a warrior in order to survive throughout the ages.

Ultimately, we all strive to accomplish one, and only one, universal state—to be happy! However, there is not just one type of happiness.

We feel a primal type of happiness when we are in love and we make love to the object of our affection. But there is a different type of happiness that has been a secret until neuroscience uncovered it for us. This other type of happiness does not leave us, like the afterglow of being with the one we love. Instead, we carry this other type of happiness with us, and it shapes our perceptions of the world and how we expect the world to show up for us.

The foundation of this amazing, effervescent happiness hinges upon a baseline feeling of safety.

No matter how well we do in life, happiness will continue to be a fleeting target for us until we are ready to improve our internal sense of safety and trust. Changing the perceptual lens through which we view the world is a powerful way to improve our relationship with stress and increase our health and happiness.

Self Care for a healthier, happier and more productive reality.

I am celebrating my birthday this week, one of my favorite days of the year to give myself some much-needed self-love and care. I know I ought to be giving myself “birthday love and care” every single day of the year, but out of the 365 days per year, most days there seems to be something else that takes precedence over taking care of myself.

The truth is that optimal performance; peak productivity, happiness, and health are not possible without scrupulous self-care. Our species has achieved some amazing accomplishments throughout our history: We have uncovered the human genome; walked on the moon; and created masterpieces of art, like the Sistine Chapel. But we continue to fall short at practicing self-care, which is a major obstacle to realizing self-mastery.

Why is taking care of ourselves so hard for us to put into practice?

Here is a small collection of guidelines about self-care—possibly the most critical component to realizing all noble human pursuits:

  1. If and when the cabin pressure drops, you have to put on your mask first before you can help anyone else that may need your assistance!

Isn’t it time we got over the conditioned way of thinking that we are selfish if we take care of ourselves before we take care of the ones we love? If we have people we love in our lives, we need to remember that we cannot be there for anyone in our lives if we become ill.

  1. Re-think your “number goals,” and change them to ones that truly matter.

We often sacrifice self-care for the goal most of us make number one on our numbered lists of goals: money! But which of these number-related goals might be more important than money: Thirty minutes a day of physical activity? Five servings of fruit and veggies everyday? Twenty-five grams of fiber per day (if you are a woman) or thirty-five grams (if you are a man)? What unique, beautiful, body number goals should you be considering? Do you need to have a blood pressure goal, or an HbA1C goal if you are a diabetic? Re-think your number goals.

  1. When it comes to your physical health, strive for balance versus perfection.

If you don’t get your thirty minutes of exercise today, can you add an extra ten minutes per day over the next three days? Events happen that take us off-balance. Becoming good at reinstating our balance when it’s lost is one of the most important and impactful things we can do to take good care of ourselves. After all, we cannot eliminate the myriad of life situations that will often challenge us and in significant ways. However, becoming better at how we land back on our feet after each setback and regain our balance is key to arriving at desired outcomes.

  1. Nurture your mind everyday.

Self-care goes above and beyond the American Medical Association’s recommendations regarding our physical health. Challenging yourself to find one way to nurture your mind everyday will increase the grey matter in the parts of your brain associated with inner strengths like resilience.

It only takes a few minutes to listen to a TED Talk or a short, guided meditation, or to read a few pages of a powerful book. But the benefits of re-sculpting your brain toward a happier you last forever!

  1. Self-talk matters.

How do you talk to yourself? Often, we are our self’s worst critic. We camouflage self-criticism under the label “high standards.” A helpful antidote is to picture yourself as your BFF (your best friend forever). How would you talk to them? If your self-talk does not pass the “BFF test,” it’s time to revamp the elements of your internal dialogue. Reframing is a fabulous way to calm our nervous system and bring us back home. For example, if we try something and fail, we can look at it from this perspective: “We are a fabulous person simply having an experience of failure.” Although it may seem like semantics, the act of reframing a negative to a positive is enough to allow us to support our nervous system to work with us towards our health and not exhaust it by employing it for our defense from imaginary threats.

 

  1. Give yourself the gift of connection and human touch everyday.

Regardless of how many ups and downs each day may bring, make the time to hold your loved ones up close and personal. When we hold or touch a person we love, the hormone oxytocin floods our blood stream. Oxytocin is a potent modulator of critical nervous system functions involved with anxiety, depression, and pain perception. If you feel that life becomes a little too much at times, don’t forget oxytocin—the most natural and potent anti-depressant, which is free and has no side effects. All you have to do is reach out and touch the ones you love!

  1. Take an active stance against negative thoughts, words, and people.

We don’t often consider the negative consequences of the vibrational frequency of any type of negativity. But if you think of a time in your life when you nurtured a plant, you know how toxic it would have been if you had chosen to water your plant with an acidic fluid, like bleach or vinegar. We, too, are delicate flowers easily taken off our optimal levels by any threat that sounds our alarm! There is nothing more alarming than negative thoughts, words, and people.

Each and every one of us has a very special purpose, regardless of our background, history, or humble beginnings.

We often believe that the economy, unique life situations, or circumstances outside of our control are responsible for us not living the life we want and deserve.

The truth is that we have everything we need to arrive at all our desired outcomes.

All we have to do now is focus on effectively closing the gap between the optimal results we expect and the quality of care we provide ourselves.

As it turns out, the love we put into anything important at work or at home will determine our results.

But the one thing we need to always remember is that we cannot love anyone anymore than we love ourselves.

The time to start loving yourself more is now!

Performance Excellence and Frazzle

Have you ever had a day like this?

  • You are working hard, yet you cannot complete tasks effectively.
  • You forget what you were doing a minute ago.
  • You have difficulty concentrating, and—as much as you try to—you cannot keep your mind on one task.

If you have days like these, you are not alone. Many of us feel frazzled (hopefully, only occasionally) when stress becomes so great that it starts interfering with our performance.

Contrary to popular belief, stress is not all bad. In fact, stress can be a positive, motivational force that gives us the ability to sharpen our performance and rise to a challenging occasion. However, the relationship between stress and performance follows a predictable bell-shaped curve, where optimal performance deteriorates as stress increases (1908, Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson).

DRAWING OF YERKES DODSON BELL CURVE.

What is frazzle?

Frazzle is the performance zone associated with what we know as distress. It is the part of the Yerkes Dodson bell-shaped curve just beyond optimal performance, where stress increases to a point that results in deterioration of performance. When in frazzle mode, the quantity of hormones released by our stress response lead to a cascade of events, which have the ability to interfere with our ability to learn, innovate, be creative, or even effectively manage our time. Furthermore, if we hang out in frazzle mode for too long, our body systems start malfunctioning, making us susceptible to illness and potential long-term damage to organs and bodily functions.

A different perspective on why employees don’t do what they are supposed to do

When I was first nominated to enter management development, I was expected to read a dozen best-selling leadership books as part of my mandatory training. As much as I enjoyed learning from this incredible list of experts, I noticed something interesting: Every single one of them looked at employees a bit like they were “problems” that managers had to “solve” in order to achieve individual and organizational performance excellence.

The truth is, most of the time the real culprit causing poor performance is not bad employees but negative, physiological consequences, which take place when we humans are stretched too thin without adequate time in between to reset.

We are not machines, but beautifully complex body systems requiring ample time to rest and digest experiences in between jumping over hurdles. Research has proven that performance is negatively affected when the demands of work and life become greater than our ability to bounce back to our calm, balanced state, known as homeostasis. When we are in our neutral state, our heart is beating at the correct rate (80-100 beats per minute), our temperature is just right (97-98 degrees Fahrenheit), we have access to the executive part of our brain, and our immune and digestive systems are working well. Every demand we place on an organism produces stress—a temporary state where our body goes off-balance to meet a demand.

When we are burning the candle at both ends—going to work early and then working late at night to meet yet another work deadline—we don’t consciously think how, in order to meet that deadline, we are actually taking our body off-balance temporarily. For example, whether we are an Olympian running to win a Gold Medal, or a mere, corporate executive giving a presentation to our peers and boss, our heart rate and body temperature will increase above and beyond our normal, balanced states to meet that demand. If we keep this up for too long, we spend less and less time at an optimal heart rate or temperature level.

The sum total of all the adjustments an organism has to make to return the body to its’ balanced state in the face of stressors is called allostatic load (McEwan and Stellar, 1993). The higher the allostatic load, the more our performance deteriorates and the higher the probability is that we will experience functional organ and body damage.

How do we incorporate all the insights that science has lent us regarding the impact of stress to increase individual and organizational health and optimal performance? Here are the most valuable lessons I learned from the team of eight people I had the privilege of leading in my very first job as a manager.

  1. 
 We need to start living our values outside of employee handbooks. Are we really supporting work-life balance if we are expected to give up our lunch to meet yet another deadline, or to take a Sunday night red-eye flight to be at a noon meeting across the country? Work-life balance initiatives sound great inside the pages of our employee manuals, but they actually lead to peak performance when these values are supported by actions.

 

  1. We need to invest in building a culture of community at the workplace. When life’s demands become too high, we humans tend to find comfort in the support kindly offered to us by people who care about us and show up at times of stress. Beyond revenues and corporate objectives, one effective antidote to frazzle is to create time and space to connect with employees as humans, above and beyond corporate meetings and performance metrics. Let’s face it, we all spend a significant amount of our life at work. It is unlikely that we will go the extra mile for a boss or a company that does not really care about us as human beings.

 

  1. We need to start talking about stress openly. We cannot possibly eliminate stress in life, but we can increase our stress resilience. How can we build stress resilience though, if we turn a blind eye to the hidden, negative impact of stress? What if our annual business plans included SMART (specific, measurable, action-oriented, results-oriented, and time-specific) goals around stress resilience?  We need to stop seeing stress as a sign of weakness in employees, but as a larger problem and a significant health and safety issue in the workplace.

 

  1. We need to put down the stick and give more carrots. Despite the robust evidence that behaviorism does not work, fear-based leadership still appears to be the king. In fact, carrot and stick leadership is wreaking havoc in corporate America, costing a staggering amount of dollars in lost productivity and health issues. It’s time to truly see employees as valuable assets. After all, nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, “Today is a great day for me to be a low performer.” Isn’t it time we see with eyes wide open how much a threatened brain hampers performance?

 

  1. Happy employees really do make productive employees. When we review the philosophy and strategies of the companies that continually make the list of the best companies to work for, we can clearly see that these companies provide their employees with unconventional perks that go beyond additional pay. These perks can include on-site gyms or childcare, flex-time options, or even providing employees with designated time to meditate or get massages at work. The common thread amongst these exemplary organizations is that they realize the importance of providing the time and space for their people to rest and regroup in order for them to do amazing things for their companies in return. And they often do!

 

I was extremely frazzled and stressed out when I was given the honor and responsibility to lead a team for the first time in my career a little over a decade ago.

As it turned out though, my people shone for me, and in nine months our team moved from ranking at the bottom of our company to being the number one performing team in the nation! Although I was somewhat unconventional in my leadership approach (I cooked Greek food for my team at my home and even succeeded in changing company policies a couple of times to support my teams’ needs) it was not really me, but my people who actually realized this great accomplishment.

Every organization in any industry needs to perform well in order to remain profitable and survive against market variables. That means we all have to stretch ourselves to meet performance expectations.

But if we wish to see exceptional performance then active steps—such as the five steps listed above—need to be implemented to neutralize the negative impact of frazzle and stress.

And, if we are truly serious about performance excellence, here’s the most potent thing we can do to launch our employees’ superhero: We need to actively reflect that we “have their back!”