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If you're feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by the constant demands of your high-pressure job, despite putting in long hours and sacrificing personal time, then you are not alone! Many high-performing professionals struggle with the stress of striving for success. They may be engaging in coping mechanisms like drinking alcohol or overeating, but these actions aren't providing the relief they need. They also may be experiencing insomnia, anxiety, and physical health problems. It's time to explore some mindset techniques for stress mitigation that can lead to an improved quality of life, both professionally and personally.

 

In this episode, Steve and Jason discuss:

  • Introduction to Stress Mitigation
  • The Negative Effects of Cortisol
  • Tools for Managing Stress
  • Importance of Sleep
  • Relating to Stressful Situations Differently

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Discover ways to overcome stress and anxiety for a more balanced life
  • Uncover the science behind the stress response and the hormone cortisol
  • Learn about practical stress reduction methods that combine mindset and skill set
  • Find out why sleep is a key factor in managing stress and maintaining overall wellness
  • Understand how to navigate crucial conversations to strengthen relationships and reduce stress

 

 

“Don't ever do it unless you're prepared to change the world."

-Steve Scanlon

 

Connect with Steve and Jason:

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Listen to the podcast here:

Steve and Jason- A Stress Management Toolkit

Hello and welcome, everybody, to this episode of The Insight Interviews- Powered by REWIRE. This is your host, Jason Abel, and today we've got something a little different, a little special for you, and we hope you enjoy it and find it very valuable. As many of you know that follow Rewire or follow my co-host and co-owner at Rewire, Steve Scanlon and myself. We've been doing and experimenting with some LinkedIn live events, and we recorded a LinkedIn Live session that's been popular on LinkedIn and we thought we would bring it over to the podcast. And so, what you're about to listen to is a conversation that Steve and I had on stress mitigation, and you know, with the way that the world, the economy, the different industries are right now, we just thought that another conversation with some very specific stories, some very specific mitigation techniques and how that correlates with what's going on in our brain and how that engages our body and different things that we can do about that just might be really timely right now. So, what you're about to hear is that conversation that we had about a month or so ago over on this platform, on The Insight Interviews platform, and you're going to hear a very specific story about a client of ours that was dealing with some debilitating stress that some of you may even really be able to relate with. But more importantly, what specifically he did about it and what results happened that were pretty amazing from what he did about it. and I think you'll be able to pick out pieces of what he did that you might be able to use in your own profession and in your own life around stress. And then we also talk about the difference, one of our favorite topics, the difference between mindset and skill set, and what do we mean by that and why does it matter? So anyways, without further ado, here you go. This is the LinkedIn Live episode on stress mitigation, according to Rewire. Hope you enjoy it.        

Welcome, everybody, to our live event. We're super excited you're here. We are trusting that the work that we're going to do today, even in this half an hour, is going to be fruitful for you. Jason and I both believe that this topic is maybe and arguably one of the most relevant things of our time in business and in our life, and so just very briefly wanted to introduce myself. My name is Steve Scanlon. I am the CEO of Rewire, inc. and this is my business partner, Jason Abel. Together, he is the president. We run this company together.   We have now for almost exactly ten years. It was ten years just a couple of days ago. So, for those of you that know us, that always makes us feel a little old or young. Time gets distorted as we get older, but we're effectively a mindset coaching company. We do a handful of other things here at Rewire, but we've been coaching now for a long time in the space of mindset coaching. And so today, as we go live here, we thought we'd bring together a topic, and in a lot of ways, Jason, I think this is like, almost like inviting people into a conversation that you and I are having, right? Like, we have this conversation a lot, and it keeps creeping up in our coaching that we're doing with people, in the live workshops that we do with people, and we just thought, what better way to host a live event on LinkedIn than to really bring this topic to the table and almost give people the ability to hear about this offer some ways that we think we can help with stress and anxiety and what we're getting into, and so that's kind of what we're doing here today, right?

Well, one, it's fun to just do a LinkedIn Live deal, as far as I can tell, because I can see a comment or two coming in. It's working, so that's good. Secondly, yeah, ten years. Come on. But more importantly, this is a topic, stress and anxiety, it's always in the background, but it just seems like with the economy, the things that are happening in the different industries that we serve, whatever, it just seems like that's heightened. And you and I, we talk every day, and we have our weekly meetings on Fridays, you and me, and this particular topic we hear coming up from our clients over and over again. And so, we just said, okay, let's broadcast one of these, like, behind the scenes. Let's you and I have a conversation like we've had and really start to address this and help ourselves and help others.        

Well, and that's exactly right, and I think you and I do this quite a bit. It's what we call a desired end result. We're super grateful to have the group that we have on the call, assuming that if you're here, this topic was relevant to you or people around you, and just so you know that the topic that we're talking about is just like the title says. How can we think about stress and anxiety and worry and fear and this pick a word, and we're going to talk a little bit about that. But how do we- we all know that it's a problem. What are some of the things that we can do about that? And I think we want to walk away with what we're calling a toolkit, and so, it's our hope that this isn't just a dialogue, but it's actually the beginning of something. Maybe it's some way that you're going to become transformed, because that is what we do, and I one time heard it said, Jason, that if you ever get up and speak in front of people, even if it's on a live event like this, don't ever do it unless you're prepared to change the world. And we really hope that people change as a result of this. And like I said, I think it's just been coming up so frequently that it caused us to go, hey, let's use this vehicle and this tool to be able to bring it to people.

Yeah, right on.

Well, and in fact, I will say that the full impetus of this came because of actually a coaching session that you had, right? And so clearly you're going to disguise one thing people should know about coaching is it's phenomenally private and there's a lot of confidentiality. I think Jason's going to tell us a little story about a coaching session that he had, but no one's going to guess who it was, and he's hiding. He's going to do his best to do that. But tell us about that because it really launched us going, whoa, it was such a cool way to look at this problem. Tell us about what went on there.

Yeah, so it wasn't a specific coaching session, it's been a particular client, and of course I'm going to change the name. Of course, I'm going to change some of the details, but the crux of it is the same, and it wasn't one coaching session really started back last fall, and so we'll call this client Jim. But this is a real-life scenario that's happening in real time right now. So, Jim is first of all, this guy's a stud, both professionally and personally, right? So, he enjoys amazing relationships inside of his organization, at home with his friends and family, and the guy is fit as a fiddle. Professionally, he just executes like a superstar. He leads a team of superstar producers. The guy's just an overall rock star, like, he does really well. It's a joy to coach this guy. And last fall, he was having challenges with the mortgage and real estate market just like anybody in that industry is having, and so, we're working through those things, and he's doing well, but it's still challenging. And then he got notified that one of his dear friends, who actually is his boss, was resigning, and it was a little bit unexpected, and so he had to go through a little bit of emotional, like, okay, this is a surprise. You're a real good friend of mine. Then he actually got offered that job. The organization came to my client and said, hey, we'd like to offer you the job. Okay, that's quite a compliment. That's great. A little stress inducing. Instead of leading a small team, he's leading a massive organization right now. Well, then the challenges of the industry really started ratcheting up even more, and I noticed towards the tail end of last year, like, around the holiday season, Jim's coming into coaching sessions, and his countenance is very different. Literally, because with this particular client, we do our coaching sessions via Zoom. He looks gaunt. His eyes are sunken in. I mean, you could feel the stress on this guy. Sometimes, literally sometimes his head was in his hands, his face was in his hands during the coaching session. And we're like, okay, we've got to do something to turn this around. But I watched him over several week period, really, like, not sleeping well, not eating well, his exercise routine went into the tank. It wasn't good. So, Steve, does this sound like stress to you?
Untitled design (43)

Yeah, I don't know that there's anybody on the call, I mean, Jim's story it's not everybody's story exactly like that, but how these situations in the world and it could be with your children, it can be with your job, it can be whatever. I would hope there are people listening to that going, this happens, and in fact, it's happening a lot, right?

We have no idea what kind of audience we had. We had 100 or so people that registered for the event, but if you're on right now and if you can relate to this, I'd love to hear the comments. Let's try out the comments a little bit. But yeah. So, Steve, I'd love to hear from you. You are a master when it comes to okay, what exactly is happening in our bodies? Why is this happening? What is the stress response all about? I think knowing at that level what's physically and emotionally and mentally going on with us, I think that helps us then focus on some solutions. So, what the heck's going on with us?

Yeah, calling me a master is a bit of a stretch. It's obviously something, you know, I'm very passionate about. I think the true masters are people that study this stuff. Neurobiologically. Neurochemically. I've done my best as a layman to do the studies that I can with it. Look, the brain has certain number of neurochemicals in the brain, depending on how some are histamines and others are hormones and different things, and they're categorized differently, and like everything else in the brain, Jason, it's fairly complex. I got hooked into one particular chemical that I began to study, which is cortisol, also known as the stress hormone.

Yup.

We don't really get to do all of this in our coaching calls because maybe people aren't interested in neurochemistry. You might not be interested in all the books that I'm reading on neurochemistry and what cortisol does in the mind and in the body, because maybe people, they're going, I don't have time for chemistry, but what you might want to know is how does it affect you? What's really, really going on? And for many years, actually, I would go and do these live events or talk to clients and tell them that cortisol is this chemical that's this stress hormone or whatever, and I'd call it this negative chemical, and I remember distinctly one time I was at an event and a neuroscientist guy actually came up to me and slapped my hand, and he's like, do me a favor. He's like, appreciate what I was saying and how I was bringing, but he's like, don't call cortisol this bad neurochemical. And the reason is because it's a neurochemical. It's a hormone that's released by our adrenal glands, and it's there by design. It's not a bad thing. It helps our heart rate. It helps digestion. However, it does get released when we're under duress and stress. And as best I can tell, Jason, I think with regard to how it exists in neurochemistry, in our mind and in our bodies, I think a huge part of it was designed to keep us out of a threatening and dangerous situation. Really life threatening. So really, what's gone on over the course of time, maybe some people live in life threatening situations. For the most part, I bet not many people on this call actually woke up today and had life threatening stuff going on. There could be. But most of us know that we're going to find food and have shelter and clothing and stuff, and so what happens is that we, over time, held on to cortisol, and when we do that, it's like telling our body we're in this constant state of threat. Life threatening threat. And it's gone on for so long that we perceive it to be like, I got to take a test at school when I was young, and that's life threatening and what are my kids doing and what's happening? And am I going to close the next deal at work? And we've actually embraced this in a way where we're taking events that I'm not saying are easy, but they're not life threatening. But if we perceive them to be life threatening, then we hold on to cortisol.

And so, Steve, how would you define stress and what does it do when we're trying to- I'm going to give you the rest of Jim's story. But before I do that, how would you define stress, and how would you say it affects us getting to where it is that we want to go?

Again, I'm a little sensitive. I actually think at least Dr. Sarah actually signed up for the call. She might be on it. I'm a little sensitive to some people that are really experts at this, but defining stress, that's so interesting, Jason. I've had people in the workshops that I've done tell me things like, I'm not stressed, I just have a little anxiety, and I'm like, okay, well, look, stress, anxiety, worry, fear, fret, concern. Pick a word. Those things probably have clinical differences. Maybe you'd get a psychologist out going, actually, there are some clinical differences to anxiety and threat and how I would define stress, and then I've had people come up to me and go, hey, isn't there some good stress? Because they've read about use stress, right? The kind of stress you feel at the beginning of a race that you're going to go endeavor to be in, and that's motivating.

                                                                                                         
"Yes, there is use stress, but we're talking about distress and how lots of people feel in this thing. And so, I would define it as anything that we consider a threat. And whether it's real or perceived, that's the crazy part, right? Hey, am I going to do good at work? Well, again, I'm not saying that's nothing, but it's not life threatening."

Yeah.

And so, anything that when we perceive something to be life threatening and it turns into anxiety or fret or fear or concern, that stress, and it increases cortisol. And when we have increased cortisol, apart from all the nefarious health effects of that, right, cardiovascular disease. This is why, Jason, when you go to a doctor, almost any doctor, you could be going for a physical health checkup or whatever, and how about, I mean, test this for yourself, folks. They're always going, how's stress?

Yeah.

They could be looking at your tonsils, and they're asking you how’s stress? Or your back or whatever, because this has such an effect on our overall body and our mind. But here's the cool part. There are things that we can do about it.

Right?        

But we can get there. We do want to offer a couple of tools and things that we can do about it, but I'm sort of curious, back to your story. Tell me about Jim. How'd that go? What went on there? You can bring that up and then talk about some of the tools that you were using.

Well, it's just a cool story because we got to a point in our coaching sessions where we both agreed, Jim, you're not yourself. We got to do something about it. So, he was able to name all the things that were happening, right? We've heard in workshops before, name it, detain it. I think Mr. Rogers used to say, if you can mention it, you can manage it, right? And so, we got through that. Like he was naming what was going on, which was a huge first step because he had awareness around it. Then we were able to come up with some very specific things that he was going to do. And it was really just Q & A. It was fun to coach him because he came up with these things and we just got back to some basics. So, one is he just wanted to get back to some of the basics of his health and wellness, get back to his workout routine and what that did. And because this was a guy, it wasn't like he didn't work out. No. He wanted to start working out, because of all those things that I described, he just got out of his routine and so he committed to himself. Let me get back to my workout routine. Well, guess what? That started helping him sleep a little bit better, right? So those two things went hand in hand. His boss, his friend that had resigned, they're still really good friends, by the way, but he found a different mentor at his organization that was helping him understand how to lead at a bigger level, more people. This new mentor was helping him figure out the PNL and financials and how to understand that better. One of the things that I think I forgot this in the beginning of the story, one of the real stress inducing things that Jim had to go through, one of his first projects was to lay off a bunch of people, right? And so, he was just like, oh my gosh. But we talked about that, and between coaching his mentor, some of the reading he was doing, he leaned into having some of the crucial conversations that he needed to have through layoffs. Instead of like avoiding it, he leaned into those things. So, what do we have so far? We have really leaning into health and wellness, sleep, the community of people that he surrounded himself with, with his new mentor at the organization, with myself, with colleagues and peers of him, he was able to just talk about what was happening. And then I know that we've all heard this before, but one of the things that he also leaned into was, hey, there's all these really hard things that are happening, but what am I grateful for every morning? And so, he started a journal where he was writing it down. He's starting every day, hey, you know what, I hear about other people doing this, but I'm going to literally do it myself, put pen to paper and start writing a gratitude journal every morning. And so, there were a lot of other things that he did, but those were the main things. Community, health and wellness, gratitude, mentioning it to manage it. And I will tell you, and I know you're going to get into more of a toolbox also, but I will tell you since he started to do those things. And this is just January, February time frame, and now it’s March. It was hard, but he was able to take care of the layoffs that he needed to take care of. He was able to turn the red ink of losing money in the organization that he was responsible for already back into the black, so he's profitable again. He comes on the coaching sessions now and his face doesn't look gaunt. His face looks full and he's smiling, and he's got energy back again, and now the old Jim is back and now we can really start to thrive. And so, is all the stress and anxiety over for Jim? No. Is it over for any of us? No. But he was able to reach into the toolbox, grab a few tools to help him with the stress and anxiety, and it ain't perfect, but, man, he's getting different results. And instead of going down that downward slope where stress and anxiety can just get worse and worse and worse, he was able to reach in the toolbox, grab a few tools, and now he's on the upward slope, which is really fun.

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Thank you for that. I hope that's helpful for people. Jason is not just telling that story to let you know about Jim and what he did. Our hope is obviously like, you might be listening, going, you know, exercise. Now, we realize that's not novel. That's not the first time you've heard this. But it might be time for you to get back to that. Maybe you're going to start walking a little bit more. Jason, I do note that Emma is on the call. Dr. Sarah is on the call, and that makes me makes me slightly nervous. I just want to put her picture up there. She can teach us quite a bit. I will tell you a couple of things that I note from your story. First of all, sleep. Again, as you said, we have other tools in the toolbox because there aren't just four tools of dealing with stress. Folks, this is a really complex issue. It's been going on for a long time. Jason and I can't spend a half an hour and give you here's the five only ways to deal with stress. Like, no, it's complex. We can offer you a few that we've seen that we know, that we've studied, and it might just be that you're in a position right now, which is always what we hope in coaching, to be listening and going, hey, rest or exercise. I love the community. We saw stress. This has been researched now. And even though it takes time to do good, statistically valid, longitudinal research, they have researched some of the stuff in pandemic, that when we were in that. In the isolation, and we all know this, you don't need to read the research because this was self-evident, but the research is also bearing out that our communities did for a small period of time go away, which increased cortisol, and we all felt it, right? And that's why when we come back onto these things, like, we're back together again, and we all felt that. So, community might be the thing. Who will you reach out to? Right? So that might be a thing. But sleep, as far as I know, sleep might be the single greatest tool that we have in our toolbox to loosening the effects of cortisol, partly because of the glymphatic system. You can write that down and look it up. There's this system that basically in our neurochemistry, where it's our glial cells and our lymph nodes that operate together, and you can forget all that, just know this. When you're in good slow wave restorative sleep, the glymphatic system opens and it drains neurotoxins, dead cells and get this, cortisol. So, interestingly, one of the things that Jim was doing is he did go work out. Sleep is a little bit complex because ironically, and I don't want to bring this problem up, but there are some people like, what if I'm too stressed to get good sleep? And I do want to honor that conundrum, but the degree to which there are things that he did, like community and exercise that promoted healthy sleep, I got to say that those might be things to look at, because we can coach people to get back on an exercise plan and have a plan and put things together. Coaching people to get better sleep is hard, and so we really talk about it in terms of promoting good sleep hygiene. You can't just go, hey, go to sleep at nine, right? So you can't do that. And then the other thing that I would just say is I did a workshop this week for an organization, and everybody in the organization that came to the workshop was looking for the answer, right? We even offer a toolbox. What's the answer to this? Again, it's probably a little bit more complex. We do hope you walk away from some tools, but I want to say that you said something interesting, Jason, and I just want to call it out.

                                                                                                   
"We're not going to stop stress. There's nothing that we can do that's going to get the stressful situations out in the world, like our job and our kids and our people. Those things are going to happen. And so maybe we can ask a different question rather than seek for the full answer. And the question is this: how do I learn to relate to stressful situations differently?"


That's right.        

That's a way different question than how do I get stress out of my life? How can I learn? How did Jim learn? Well, guess what? Sleep, whatever those situations, as you said it, they didn't go away, he still has those, but I trust what you were saying was as a result of some of these things in his toolkit, he began to relate differently to those situations. Because last I looked, the economy is still kind of jacked up. Things are still kind of screwy. Maybe people would like us to come in and go, okay, if we could just fix that and her and him and she and this and that, then we don't have to stress.

That's not how life works, right? Yeah. Very well said. Very well.     
   

Maybe, again, other than the toolkit community and these things, I want to offer a different question, and that is for the people on the call. How do we learn to relate to stress differently? And so those things that Jim did, I think from the way you were describing it, gave him an outlet and a mechanism and a means to relate to what was going on differently because we're not going to really go out there and change the world.

Yeah, that's exactly right, and that it was a privilege to serve and continue to serve as Jim’s coach. It was such a stark thing watching it go from yeah, there's stress happening as there is for everybody. Now, his spiked, right? Like new job, had to lay people off the economy and the industry is jacked. Like you said, it was a lot of things at once. But to watch him go from down that trough and then use some of these techniques and come out of the trough and is thriving. Now, you're right. There'll be other stressors tomorrow that come up for Jim, but he's got a toolbox that he's reaching into. And I guess I would say this as we start to wind down our time, this is what we do. Steve, the reason the reason you started Rewire ten years ago is because you were my coach at the time, and you had plenty of Me’s out there. We were crazy and we had stressful things going on, but you saw that mindset is where it was, not necessarily a skill set. I just want to take the opportunity to say this is what we do. We've got 18, 20 coaches on the bench ready to go for people. We are coaching people one on one. Maybe I'm biased, but I think we have the best leadership program out there and then we do all kinds of live events. And so, if any of this strikes you as like, hey, I want to know more about that, go to our website, rewireinc.com. I'm actually going to put up QR code here. If anybody is interested, get on my calendar. We can talk about your stress toolbox. We can talk about coaching, leadership program, live events. But yeah, there's a fancy QR code. I don't know, Steve, is the QR code even fancy anymore? I don't even know. But anyway, Steve, any closing thoughts?        


At, at least on the left coast over here, it's 1059. I'm good. We're done for now. And I want to do more of these to the degree to which these can be helpful for people and bringing people in and not just giving you a story but giving tools and how can we do it? But to your point, Jason, coaching is I don't know, maybe you don't want me to say this, but the community thing. That's part of what a coach is, right? And if you're not going to get coaching through rewired, you get coaching somewhere.

Right on.

We shouldn't be the only people doing this. I think what we do is really special, and we've got a great team, but surround yourself with good people, keep growing. And just know this. We do have the ability to rewire. We absolutely do. We were given a brain that gives us the ability. That's what the entire field of plasticity is all about. And so, we have a brain that can do this. Hard to do it alone, but we do have a brain that can do it. So, we're grateful for your time and we hope this was helpful to you. Good luck with your toolkit and obviously if there's anything we can do, let us know.        
            

Steve, great way to end. Thanks, brother. And dude, we did our first LinkedIn Live. Come on.

We hope. I have no idea if we did. It was just talking to you.

I'll put the QR code back up. But thank you very much, everybody, and we will see you all the next time because I think there's going to be a next time.        

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