Rory Mitchell from the Mitchell Report Unleashed Podcast is a certified life coach specialising in self-improvement and development. His podcast touches on diverse topics relating to entrepreneurship, fitness, culture, and building peer-to-peer relationships. I am ever so grateful to be invited to be in his podcast, where I get to talk about how to deal with stress and many more.
In this article, I share what Mitchell and I talked about. If you’d rather watch our conversation, head down to the bottom of the page and hit the play button!
2 Things to Do to Minimize or Declutter Stress & Maximize Productivity
If you find yourself to be always “stressed” you are not alone. In our society, we tend to bucket every hard thing or experience into the word “stress”. However, just because something is going wrong, doesn’t mean it has to be stressful.
There are two things we can do to minimize stress:
#1 Classify what you’re really feeling.
Whenever you think you’re stressed, its best to classify what you’re experiencing into three things:
Tasks
When we have a lot of tasks, we often find ourselves saying, “I’m too busy, I’m so stressed.” or “This day is stressing me out.”
We put so much emotional contribution to when we have a lot on our plate, but in reality, we just have so much to do that we have to get done. Yes, you may have a lot of tasks to do, but the truth is, you don’t really have to get stressed about it. You just need to come up with a plan on how you’re going to get them done!
Read: How to Be More Productive & Get More Done In Less Time
Obstacles
Most obstacles that we face in our lives are just stuff that we have to deal with. For instance, you have a big meeting but before leaving the house, you spilled coffee on your shirt. You may get “stressed out” because changing your shirt might make you late. But really, you just have to solve this obstacle. Think of the solution, solve it, and carry on with your day.
Also read: Stop A Bad Day: How to Deal with Daily Negative Obstacles
If we put a high intensity of drama or negativity – what I like to call “barriers to performance” to an obstacle, we are stealing our capacity to do, to be, to feel, and to process what really matters which are…
Adversities
Adversities are the real things that we need to process, these could be grief from a loved one’s death, a health diagnosis, getting fired from a job, having a business closed down due – situations or experiences that actually affect our course in life.
Whenever we face adversities, we need to have the emotional capacity to process them to move forward and deal with them effectively.
The sad truth is, society has reversed where to spend their emotional capacities. Tasks we glorify, adversities we minimize and diminish. We have to be aware of how much we’re putting into tasks and obstacles, when in fact they should be used for processing adversities.
#2 We have to change our thinking.
So often when we’re stressed or facing adversities, we are often told to “bounce back”. I really don’t like that phrase – I think it’s worse than bucketing every negative thing over the word stress.
The very notion of change is that “what was, no longer exists.” When we’re trying to bounce back to go back to where we were, there’s really no place for us to go. When we’re trying to go back, we can’t. Change already happened and we have to deal with the present. Our life has forever changed, and we have to be resilient to move forward, not bounce back. We have to make peace with the new path that changes brought back.
Video Timestamp
0:00-5:00 Who is Allison Graham?
5:01-16:59 How to Deal With Stress
17:00-18:13 Busy vs Productive
18:14-23:54 It’s not about recognition, it’s about impact
23:55-40:10 How Important is Social Media to Networking?
42:22046:14 How to Do More and Stress Less
46:15-50:05 Take Back Your Weekends
52:28-58:25 Closing
