STRESS and How To Conquer It!

I'm going to start with a conversation about thunder and lightning. Everyone say thunder. Frenzied stress is not your destiny. All the frenzy and the stress you feel in your life that can be commanded, that is not something that lands on you and you have no control over. Your ability to deal with this at a higher level is what gets you to a higher level. You don't unlock more success, abundance, joy, or love without first learning to deal with this fact. The thunderous question is, are you getting better at life? I appreciate so much of you, the Growth Day community, the ultra community, coming here to be live in person with me. It is a great joy and honor of my life to have you at these events, doing this work together. You inspire me. Your energy lifts me. As much as I hope I can transfer some of that energy right back to you, you're an incredible audience and I love you. Growth Day, thank you for being here. I appreciate you guys. I'd be remiss without reminding those who are here even that we've got thousands of Growth Day Mastery members watching live right now. We've got ultra groups in multiple countries watching with us right now. We've got dozens of countries who are going to participate with you today. And I think that that is an incredible blessing and it is an incredible opportunity for each of us to remember you are not alone when you are dealing with stre. You're not alone when you're going for those big, ambitious goals. Brendan says, live an extraordinary life today. Sucks. What do I do? Well, why does it suck? Well, so often we lose our own self regulation. For those who were this last month, I went deep into helping you understand One of your great superpowers in life is gaining greater control of yourself. That concept in psychology that we call self regulation, regulating one's emotions, not ending them, regulating them. Today's topic about stress is gonna answer that for you. How do you regulate this? This feeling that comes up that there's like, there's too much and there's too much stress and there's too much going on and it's like, too much, too much, too much, too much. Sometimes when I'm at home with Denise and she's like, how's it going? I'm like, too much, too much, too much, too much. And she knows, oh, oh, oh, he's in that mood right now, you know, it's like, y' all feel that sometimes. It's like there's so much going on in the world, there's so much on your plate. There's so Many obligations. You still gotta get the kids to school. You still have to do the thing to start the side hustle. You make the marketing thing. You have to make this deal. You have to do all these things. And it comes overwhelming and the stress is just building up. But what I'm here to tell you, and I always speak to Growth Day audiences a little different than my keynotes out in the regular world because I have a higher expectation for you. There's a higher standard in this room. You all, you're the leaders, you're the role models. And if you're not yet, you're coming right up and you're ready to do the work. Can I get a yes? You ready to do the work? Because here's what I'm going to share with you right off the bat. Frenzied stress is not your destiny. All the frenzy and the stress you feel in your life, that can be commanded. That is not something that lands on you and you have no control over. We get to escalate from kind of watching and passive to developing really mastery in our life, to going to the ultra level. That wasn't just a naming convention for our company. I believe that happens in our own personal development. You know, at first you kind of read a few books, you listen to a few podcasts, and then you're like, I'm going to set up my life better. I'm going to master these emotions better. I'm going to get a hold of my life again and I'm going to succeed and I'm going to drive. And then when you do that, sometimes you don't figure out the stress and overwhelm part. So you burn out. Even though you're driven, you're burning out. You're driven, but you're out of fuel. You're driven, but maybe you're on the wrong road. And at some point then you say, well, I wanna become ultra successful. Which is. It's a higher level of flow and personal power. That's all. And so I name our offerings in Growth Day for that. But I believe that's our journey with stress and overwhelm, too. Cause everyone complains about stress and overwhelm today. And we've done a terrible job as a culture of teaching people to manage it and to regulate it. So instead we try to erase it. And it's like, oh, you feel stressed and overwhelmed. That's crazy. You shouldn't feel so stressed and overwhelmed. Here's the pill. And listen, I'm gonna start right off the bat. I am not A psychologist. I'm not a psychiatrist. I study a lot of that work and I train a lot of them in coaching and human behavior change. But I'm not one. So everything I say today, I'm not a doctor. But I am here to say we have a broken system. And I think they'd all agree. I think our system right now, when it's dealing with stress and overwhelming, it does the craziest thing, says, oh, you feel stressed over, here's the pill, but no plan. A pill should be a temporary remedy from a pain, a discomfort, something's challenging. But along with that pill, no matter how long that has to last, that's not my job. That's the doctor's job. My job is to say, though, if that doctor gave me a pill and did not give me a plan, a training regimen to train my mind, my body, my spirit, to look at my nutrition, to think deeply about how I manage life and life's emotions, then guess what? I'm walking out that door. Don't give me a pill and no plan. And I think we've done that. So instead of helping our children learn how to deal with this very difficult concept, what we do is we just medicate them. But we don't educate on how to deal with these emotions because will these emotions always be there? Stress doesn't go away. I was feeling a unique kind of stress backstage before I began. I was feeling a unique kind of stress when I landed last night after shooting a six part series in another state all the way across the country, after I'd flown from the other part of country, after doing two strategic off sites for teams and right before that I was on this stage. So I've had two days at home with my wife this month. That's not normal. It's also not a surprise. And that's what I want to talk about today with thunder and lightning. Too often you're surprised by the strike of stress. I didn't see it coming. I'm like, there was noise. Everyone put your hand up and go, there was thunder. There was thunder. Everyone goes, there is thunder. There is thunder. Stress should not knock you off your feet as an adult. When you're a kid, it's a surprise. What's this feeling? Oh my God. But maturity says, I recognize this feeling. This feeling is coming from how I'm dealing with life. This feeling, this emotion that's swelling up, it's happening. Cause I feel insecure or there's too much uncertainty or I feel overwhelmed by the number of things I'M supposed to take on right now. And those things are flooding my system. All the incoming is flooding my system. All the thoughts over the last three days and the food over the last three days, those have flooded my system. And my system is going, hey, do you know how serious this is? That's your system just talking to you, making sure, hey, do you recognize this is important and urgent? That's what stress is doing. Hey, mobilize yourself. Something is going on here, but most people are surprised by it because they haven't been listening. There's been noise in the system. You didn't have that sudden stressful feeling and emotional outburst for several weeks. You heard an internal thing going on in your head. You know what? I gotta get some better rest. I better not drink so much. I gotta eat healthier. You know, I gotta get back on my practices. Maybe I should do a workout. You know what? Maybe I should delegate this thing. You know what? Maybe it's time to ask for help. You know what? There's been noise in the system preceding the stressful event. And when we don't understand ourselves, we are always at the whim of stress versus realizing. We can condition ourselves. We can condition ourselves to feel not only less stress, but when it strikes. And will it strike? There's. Everyone say there's always lightning, but they don't say, but there's thunder. There was noise in the system. Your projects were backing up before you got overwhelmed and you knew it. Your relationship was in trouble before that super stressful conversation came up and you knew it. Now people don't like this. They'll go, no, no, Brandon. Emotions are automatic. They're physical, they're impulsive. And that is true. But they're also often lagging indicators. They're often symptoms. There's been stuff going on. And what I want for adults is not to be so surprised. I'm never surprised when I'm stressed. Never. I go, well, that's part of it. When somebody who's important in my life passes away, that's not a surprise to me. Death, randomness, bad things happening, they're not a surprise to me. I think that's a benefit for me of having been a young man who had faced my own death because I was suicidal. And when I realized I didn't know how to be happy, my first thought was, well, other people are happy. There must be a guide, There must be a plan. There must be something that I can do to be a little happier. And the same thing happened when I started dealing with bouts of stress. And anxiety and overwhelm. In my mid-20s, I was like, gosh, this feels terrible. I hate this feeling. And I don't even have to describe the feeling for anybody in this room. You already know when we say stress and overwhelm, you immediately know it. But I'm here to tell you, your ability to deal with stress and overwhelm is the great unlock to your next level of success in life. Your ability to deal with this at a higher level is what gets you to a higher level. You don't unlock more success, abundance, joy or love without first learning to deal with this factor. Most people say, I want more success and I have to say, bet you can't handle it yet. You're already flipping out on your 14 year old week after week after week. You haven't figured it out. You're already late on seven projects and you're asking for more dreams. Sometimes we gotta get our house in order before we get more. Sometimes we gotta step into that maturity that says, okay, I don't like this. Let me master this. Notice I didn't say erase it. I have no expectations of perfection in this room. But the standard I'm trying to set for you is to go. When this strikes, don't be surprised. When stress, no rum strikes me, I never go. I go, I wonder what noise has been in the system. When was the thunder, when did I first hear the thunder that led to this level of overwhelm? Was it last week? Last month? Did I say yes too many times when I meant no? What has been filling up the system with so much stress that at some point I freak out? Right? What indicators have been there? What is the thunder? Have I been hearing it? Because sometimes it's just rolling in the distance. And the good news is that that's true. There's always thunder in the distance. There's always noise. There's a storm coming. It's a big storm. But you've survived storms before. Yes. It's immature to think no storms are coming. When we get mature, we go, oh, a lot of storms they hit, they're surprising. But I grew up in the Great Plains. I grew up in Montana, off the plains of the Rocky Mountains. We knew we could hear it, we sensed it, we felt it. There was rumbles going on. It wasn't even like the traditional thunder of the Midwest. It was like that thunder that comes off the Rockies and it's a rolling thing and it's almost like an earthquake. It's like something's going on. Something's going on. Get the cattle in. Something's going on. Let me prepare myself. And I want you to not be surprised by the lightning strike so much anymore. If I could give you a gift anymore. It's like when that lightning strikes, instead of feeling victim, be an analyst and go, huh? Where's the thunder been? What led to this? What made me feel this? What's this coming from? How would I like to deal with this? How would my best self deal with this? Now I'll give you some tools today to knock that feeling out. Because it is a feeling. It's an emotion. It's in your body. So we'll talk about how to like shake that thing out and feel in a better place. But intellectually, we have to know it's coming and that storm is coming. And it's gonna be hard. Someone will get sick. Something bad will happen in the future for every single person. There's no Pollyanna in my personal development. There's this belief no one knows what that means anymore. Okay, people, you all still know what that means. Okay? Sometimes you think you're getting old. I don't know. I was like, no one knows that. Show no more. There's no hype and hope in my story. Without telling you, struggle will be there forever. And the bigger things you want, the greater impact that you want, the struggle amplifies. It doesn't mean it amplifies always. It just means the critical incidents as we talk about in psychology or performance coaching, those critical incidences, they kind of get bigger, right? When you're a 10 person team and there's an emergency on the team, it's 10 people when you got 100. It's a different kind of thing, isn't it? Same thing with your wealth. Same things with your levels of vibrancy and influence and impact you're going to have in your life. It gets bigger. The storm sounds louder. The storm feels so impending that rolling thunder is like boom, boom. And now the stress is magnified at the next level. That's why everyone here must make that decision. To master these things, you have to make the decision. You'll never perfect it, but you can start to master yourself in those moments. To flip this metaphor, a little bit of thunder and lightning. Some of you remember in our first growth day la, I said there's this thing called the thunderous question. The thunderous question in life is the rolling sound of thunder. Everyone say there's sound the thunder. And the thunderous question is, are you getting better at life? That's the question I have for my coaching clients. Are you getting better at life? That's the demand of growth. That's demand of leadership. That's the demand of real impact. That's the demand of real parenting. You should be a better parent by the time they're 20 than you were at 1. Please, somebody this generation soon. It's like, you gotta get better. Turn to the person left, right, shake them and say, time to get better. Everyone say, there was thunder. I'm telling you what? Well, the lightning, the strike. So the thunder is, are you getting better? The lightning, the strike is, I'm making a decision to live an extraordinary quality life. I don't want to just get better at my emotions. I want emotions that are excellent. I want emotions that are joyful. I want emotions that are peaceful. It's not like, see some people go, I'd sure like to deal with stress better. They're the browsers in personal development. Mastery in personal development has a different question. It goes, I need to learn to master this emotion, not have this emotion master me. Ultra level says, I don't want to deal with this emotion better. I want to manifest, live and experience inner peace. It's not just solving the thing, it's building a better life.