Mastering Stress: The TACK Framework to Thrive Under Pressure

This is episode 311 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we unlock the secrets of self mastery for leaders who want to elevate their impact in both leadership and life. Your journey to being your best so you can give your best starts here. And now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider. Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast. K. Schneider. I am here to help you live your empowered life, especially, especially in times of stress. So it's fall for me here when I'm recording this. And this is a time of year that historically has been so full of change and that has brought so many differences, so many adaptations and so much stress. So I'm sure that you don't want that and I don't want that. So I want you to have a stress recovery framework. That's what I've created is this stress recovery framework. But first of all, I want to remind you why. Why do you want a stress recovery framework? Because we're operating under the premise that you're empowered. That I'm empowered. What does that mean? That means that you take care of yourself, you take care of others, you take action and you're up to larger than yourself. Now, that last piece, you're up to something larger than yourself typically means that we're challenging ourselves, we're adapting to things, we might be mentoring or leading other humans and all of that tends to bring stressors into our lives. So I'm going to give you this fantastic framework that I developed for you specifically to have something quick to be able to draw upon and be able to make a difference just for these stressful times. So I did this in our team mastermind. And the reason I did this is because we were doing a exploration, a reflection workshop to figure out when are we getting stressed. And that's the per first part of this framework is figuring out when. So the name of this framework is tac. It's T, A C, K. And the reason that I made this name tack is because I kept thinking about the resistance that we have when it comes to stress. When we go into a scenario and we find that we feel like we hit a brick wall, we feel like we are going into the wind, we feel like we're going uphill and it's hard. And that's how I personally have felt for the last couple weeks in this transition of times. For me, I it's a ball. I just got back to my home in southern Ontario. But prior to this it meant we were on family vacation in August that was 10 days of family vacation. And despite always having the intention of using family vacation to rejuvenate, to recharge, to reconnect, I love family vacation for those things. And yet it usually ends up being so busy with, with a family of. There were eight of us on this trip. We traveled to Iceland. There was time zone changes, there was driving and rental cars that were standard so stick shift over across an unknown country, going to different places and it was all the amazing things. It was wonderful. It was fantastic. What it wasn't though was recharging. What it wasn't though was rejuvenating. It was reconnecting. But it wasn't some of those rest, recharge, relax kind of vacations. It was one of those go have fun, adventure, explore, reconnect, vacations. That's what it was for us. Followed up by coming home, my husband and daughter heading back to southern Ontario, while I remained for another week at the, the, the site of Wick Cliff Lodge where we're doing the entire restoration. I remained to bring docs in, work with contractors, close up certain projects, keep other things going and meanwhile winterize the entire site. So that took a fair bit while I packed up my stuff from living there for over three months and then driving back to southern Ontario, which is two day drive. Now. If any of those things, if any of those things gave you that pang of, oh, a little bit of a stress like, oh, that's a lot, oh, that packing, oh, getting out on, oh, the 18 hour drive, any of those things gave you that stressful pang. They certainly gave me some stressful pangs. And one of the reasons we want you to have this framework is so that you have the tools to be able to identify and deal with the stress in your life. And the word tack comes from tacking in sailing. When I was a kid, my mom used to take me sailing on her sailing boat. It was this. I don't even know what kind of sailing boat it was, but it was pretty cool to me in some ways in that it had this underneath area, cabin area that you could sleep in. And I thought that was the coolest place. In fact, it was my favorite place to hang out, was that underneath cabin there's a tiny little window I could look out and otherwise it just felt like a fort. It was really neat. But the actual sailing and the actual being on the boat on the water was not my favorite part. In fact, that part I found incredibly stressful. And when we were sailing into the wind, that meant we had to do this Thing called tacking. The only reason we could go into the wind was so that was. It was by going at these angles in order to catch the wind. Because if you think of sailing, you're using the wind to propel the boat in a direction. But easy to do with the wind at your back. Not so easy to do when you're going into the wind. You have to tack. You have to zigzag back and forth to catch the wind, to go in the direction that you want to do. And I found this very stressful because my mother would be hollering at me, pull in the line. Get the jib, Duck. The boom is coming across. We're coming about. She'd be yelling these things to me. I remember these clear instructions and. And. But barked out at me. And I'd be this little kid kind of ducking from the boom, swinging across and trying to find the right sail as it was flapping in the wind and pulling on the rope. No, that's the wrong rope. Do the other rope. And. And I just was doing whatever I could to follow instructions and stay alive. So I was in a fair bit of stress. Meanwhile, for my mother, going into the wind was the stress, and the solution was tacking, Zigzagging that boat back and forth in order to catch the wind, in order to use the wind, in order to have the wind help us go in the direction that you want to go. Now, if you're not getting the parallels here, I'm going to spell it out. We know that stress can set us back. We know that stress feels hard, and at the same time, it's that very stress that can help us overcome ourselves. It's that very stress that helps us grow. It's that very stress that helps us actually go in the direction and achieve the things that we really want to achieve. Go figure. So that's why I used this word, tack, as a very, very simple acronym for you to have a stress recovery framework. So the first thing is T. T is for timing. And timing. This. Timing is critical when you're tacking on a sailboat, because if you don't get the timing right, you don't catch the wind and be able to go forward. So. So the thing I want to explore first about timing is the timing of when you are stressed. Now, I gave the example of the sailboat, but you could clearly see I was stressed by the urgency of my mother's voice. I wasn't really stressed by the boom coming across. I was kind of oblivious to it. But she didn't want me to get hit by the boom coming across, hence her yelling at me to duck. So the timing is key for being able to adapt. But the timing is also key in when you are getting stressed. If you can discover your stressful times, your stressful triggers and the timing of when they happen in your life, you can prepare yourself, you can support yourself. So there's a couple ways I want you to use timing. Number one, when you use timing, you want to discover when am I typically stressed? Is there a certain time of day? What about the days of the week? Is there a certain day of the week or days of the week when I feel more stressed? Am I stressed at certain times of the year? Is it a season that brings back memories that were crummy in my life? Is it a season of quarter end in a business that brings on certain stressors like reports that need to be done? What is the timing of my stress? When does it occur? Do I feel pressure at the end of the day at 4pm because there are certain things that needed to get done for that day that I want to clear off my desk? When is the timing? Discover this for yourself, write it down for yourself. And then the second part of the timing for T is the pre, the during and the post. What do you tend to do before that stressful time, during that stressful time, and after that stressful time? This is all about understanding. You so understand the timing of what can you do to prepare re, during and post that stress, that stressful time? That's T. Let's go on to A. A is all about the awareness. We want to be present and mindful. So the awareness is partially served by what we did in T. When we did T, we looked at the timing and it was when is this happening? What time of my year, my month, my quarter, my day? What is happening? And then we looked at pre, during and post. What do I tend to do before, during and after? Well, now with the awareness, now we have more because of that timing. But we want to go deeper with this. We want to understand where am I feeling it in my body? What tends to happen? What is my body's response? Do I feel tightness in my shoulders? Do I feel a tingling in my hands? One of the people in our team mastermind in our group coaching, he would feel tingling in his fingers when he was really stressed. Typically, what happens for us before we're cognitively aware of the stress? We're often feeling something in our bodies but we ignore it. And we've practiced ignoring it for Quite some time. What I'd like you to do now with the A instead is literally become more aware. This is the first step in really addressing the stress before it becomes chronic, before it becomes overwhelming, before we have really adverse byproducts of the stress. We don't want that. We don't want the chronic stress that leads to problems in our relationships or real health difficulties. So where do you feel it in your body? Do you feel it in your chest? Do you feel it as a headache? Maybe a tension headache? Maybe in your forehead or your eyes? Do you feel it in your lower back? What tends to happen when you feel this way? Become more and more aware of your body. When I get the tightness in my shoulders, I tend to. To feel like my hands are tense. When I get the tightness in my chest, I tend to speak more quickly. When I. When I get the tightness in my throat. Notice I'm saying tightness a lot, then it must be tightness for me. When I feel it in my throat, I speak more quickly. I'm less grounded or less relaxed. Become more aware. That's the A. The next part of the tack framework is C. And C is all about control. Usually stress is about us perceiving that we have more in our lives than we can handle psychologically or physically. That's the pre, the, the prerequisite to your stress feeling is that there's more there than we perceive we can control. There's more physically there than we perceive we can physically manage mentally or physically. So we want to make sure we have a clear understanding and we actually articulate, we can say it out loud what is within my control, what is not within my control. And this is a little bit of a spectrum. There's no control. There's some control and there's complete control. Now there's very few things that you have complete control over. Most of the world and other people are in the no control zone. And yet we find a lot of stress when we're trying to control things out of our control or we become overwhelmed when we're even perceiving that we're supposed to control all these things and we simply can't. There's a few things in some control, but most of the or there's very small amount. Most of the things are in no control, but there's a very small amount in what we can control. We can control our actions. We can control what we say. That's part of our actions. We can choose our, our thoughts. There might be many, many thoughts that are Outside of our control that just pop into our brains. But we can also control our emotions. We can regulate our emotional status. So consider what we can control our emotions. It might feel out of control sometimes, but eventually we can get those in control. We can control our actions. That includes what we say. We can even control choosing which thought we tend to, which thought we choose to focus on. We have choice over that matter. We can control that. However other people, circumstances, what happens in the world we don't have control over. Go figure. So the sea is really becoming aware of what can you control in your specific stressful situation? The context that is offering stress in your world, what can you control? And then lastly is K and K is kindness. Kindness is being kind to yourself. Because in this situation there's very little that you can control. We know that now that you're becoming aware and you've got your timing around the stress, the likelihood of stressful events not happening in your life is zero. There's so much that's going to come up that brings upon stress. Everyone is going to have some level of stress in your life, even good stress. There are lots of great, great things in your life that cause you stress. That is a good thing. But it still can become overwhelming. It still can feel like too much. Maybe you have a big workout, might be a great stressor, might be good for you. Maybe you have a wedding coming up, Maybe there's a big work project that's about to be completed. Now these might be all great things in your life, however they're bringing on some stress and it might feel a little bit overwhelming. Be kind to yourself. Add some kindness into the mix. This is where you're looking at back up in the timing that pre, during and post the stressful event. How can you be the most kind in that scenario? What can you offer yourself mentally, physically? How can you care for yourself? What does it look like to love yourself in that situation? Instead of looking for other people to give that to you, how can you give that to yourself? This self compassion is essential in stress recovery. Instead of beating yourself up and how you're supposed to overcome it in pushing yourself harder, practice the kindness towards yourself so that you have more likelihood for getting through the stressful event with success. Meaning you come out of it without feeling frazzled, without feeling exhausted, without feeling like you don't know how you're going to make it through the next thing without needing a week's worth of recovery because of that thing. Plan your recovery. Be kind to yourself during the event. Do something for yourself to set yourself up for success when you know the stressful event is coming. That last little bit of kindness, this last point on that tack, stress recovery framework is probably one of the most important things that we neglect the most in our lives. Isn't that the way that's so frustrating. Sometimes the thing we need the most, some self compassion, some kindness, is the thing we likely deprive ourselves the most. So there's your TAC framework. What I encourage you to do is explore it, take a look at it, use it for your stress recovery framework, share it with a friend. Let people know that there are simple, simple ways and easy tools that are highly, highly successful in managing the overwhelm, managing the stress that's coming at you. Give yourself that gift. All right, workshop this out. By all means. Use it with your teams. Use it with your family. Workshop it out so that you can prepare. When is the timing of your stress and what are you going to do to be able to help yourself ahead of time and deal with it? I know that you're an empowered human. Keep being empowered. Keep helping yourself. Keep helping others. Show up for yourself in this life so that you can live the life you really want. Go get it. If you enjoy listening to the Empowered Team Podcast, you'll love being on the Empowered Team. The Empowered Team is our group coaching and accountability program where we provide the tools, skills and community for you to grow your self mastery as a leader and optimize your results alongside other leaders. The Empowered Team runs year round to learn more about our leadership consulting for business and our Empowered Team group coaching. Head to www.thempowered.ca empowered learn more. That's www.theempowered.ca empower-learn-more we can't wait for you to join us. Let's go.