54. Stress Response Management

Foreign. Hey, my friend. Welcome back to leadership in a nutshell for home service. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. I'm super pumped to be with you here today. Why? Because we're talking about something that's near and dear to my heart. Might be near and dear to your heart, too, when it comes to stress response. So, you know, there's all kinds of things we can study, we can read, we can discuss, we can get in, you know, online forums and different things. We can always talk about how, you know, there's different stressors in home service. And today, what I really want to share with you is a strategy that I've been using for myself and for my clients that really is helping to kind of interrupt the pattern around stress, because it's obviously proven that stress creates all this chaos, all this pain, all this challenge. And what I want you to think about as a leader, though, is how is it impacting your team? How is it impacting your culture? How is it impacting your clients? How is it impacting your results? Because what if I told you that the stress level that you have that you personally carry directly impacts sales, directly impacts install efficiency, directly impacts the management of your team, regardless of the size of your business and how many leaders you may have in your organization. What if your particular response to stress had everything to do with all those results? Would I have your attention then? Because evidently, it's not enough to get your attention with the fact that stress is killing us. Guess what? We're dying because we're stressed. We're. Yeah. Okay, you go. Wait a minute, Kenny. The studies show that we're living longer. Yeah, from medicine. We're not living longer because of the food that we put in our bodies and the exercise and the movement and the mental awareness and the mindful states that we create and the peace and happiness and joy and love. That's not why we're living longer, my friends. It's called Big Farm, and it's here to stay for a minute. Now, don't even get me off on that track. So those of you that are like, wait a minute, where's he going? All right, let me pull back for a moment and let me just share with you what we're talking about here today. It's about stress management. So I just want you to think about your own stress. I'm not here to tell you that you're not going to have some. I actually come from the belief that some stress is good. I think it's important. I think we need to be pushed out of our comfort zones. I think we need to be challenged. I think we need to. To create situations for ourselves to learn and grow. And so what are some things that can cause it? Certainly times of uncertainty can cause it. Make sure you tune in next week. Next week I'm going to be hitting you with certainty and confidence, and we're going to wrap uncertainty in there as well. So times of uncertainty can cause it. Guess what? Board leaders can create stress. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you get to the office, you go in, everything's kind of working, you got your leadership team rocking and rolling? Or if you're a service manager, all your techs are out. If you're install manager, all your installs are set for the day and you go sit down and you're like, huh, I'm not exactly sure what to do. I know there's a ton of stuff to do, but I'm not exactly sure what to do right now. That creates stress. You know, if we're out of our zone, if I've got overwhelm in my responsibilities. Overwhelm. Write that down. When we get overwhelmed, things get ugly quick. And I want you to just kind of be mindful of that and think about that, like, where are you possibly overwhelmed in your life right now? And just make a list of what those things are and how's it influencing you? Because overwhelm leads to worry. Worry is a massive stress creator, and a lot of people worry about things that never happen, right? We can if, you know, maybe we've got some challenges, maybe we have some external things that are happening, maybe we have internal changes and challenges that were intentionally creating ourselves. But those can be, you know, be stressful. And at the end of the day, if I feel like I'm under just a lot of pressure, I can have this kind of stress. Now, I'm a big fan of emotional regulation is what I call it. And that is being able to consciously understand what's going on in my body, mind, and spirit and choosing my response. So today I want you to just think about emotional regulation with yourself. When you're in traffic, do you get pissed off? Are you leaning on the horn? Are you cursing people? Are you throwing the. The bird? Different things like that. Guess what? That's not emotional regulation. That's you going on an unconscious roller coaster ride because somebody else is making an action or an activity. How about when a team member comes in late? How about when a vendor doesn't deliver on time or a supplier challenges you? How about when the weather Rains on your parade, for lack of a better word, right? Oh, man, we got our installs pushed. We had this hap. Anytime these external things happen, and if I lose my cool, we'll call it right, that's lack of emotional regulation. And I know for me, it's one of the biggest keys to unlocking happiness in my next level of greatness in my life is being able to consciously and then more importantly, rewrite a program subconsciously to emotionally regulate. Now doesn't mean that if you're an emotionally regulated person that you don't get pissed off and slam the dash and go, dang it, they cut me off. The key is that you catch it right away and you return to a state that you choose. That is the major difference. When a team member calls out and all of a sudden you got more calls than you know what to do with, you can't get installs done. It's going to impact revenue, it's going to impact budget. I get it. Like, their immediate response is, crap. We're not going to hit budget. Dang it. I'm not going to have this happen crap. We've got a stress payroll. Whatever the situation may be, it's okay. Honor your truth. I'm not saying don't feel. I'm saying feel and choose, my friend. When it comes to emotional regulation, it's about choosing. And then it's really about rewriting the program to where you can go. Huh? Wait a minute. How does that feel? I'm going to share a story with you in a couple minutes about how this really happened to me recently, and I was working with my personal coach, sharing the experience, and he said, man, you need to write a blog about that. You need to. You need to record a podcast about that, because that's a. That's a real challenge. So I'm going to share that with you in a moment. But when I. When I think about, you know what, why do certain things seem to stress me out? Have you ever noticed that, like, certain things just, like, press your buttons or trigger you and it seems like other people are just like, yeah, no big deal. No, it doesn't really. There's certain things that kind of trigger us, if you will, when our stress response comes in, that we get to the opportunity to manage. So certainly your own belief about the situation. And for many years, I subscribe to the philosophy that perception is reality. And many of you may have heard that, and some of you have probably heard me say that many times over my career of coaching and training. But here's the reality. Belief creates reality. So if I believe it to be true, it is true to me. And if I believe this is stressful, then I'm going to react with a stressful response. And so some of that can be tied to my own self worth, my own experience, how I interpret things like, oh man, this is going to be terrible. Is it terrible or is it that I really need to raise the accountability and make sure that Susie shows up when I ask her to show up, or Johnny makes sure that he gives notice before that he calls in. Or I might need to realize that I'm driving illegally in the car, the carpool lane or whatever it is. Right at the end of the day, it comes back to my own personal responsibility of taking ownership for my results. And that's a choice that you get the opportunity to make. So your own belief of the situation really decides, you know, how, how stressful is this going to be? The experience factor comes in too, like, okay, well have I experienced this before, man, last month we missed three days in stalls and we still made budget. Or last month I didn't make budget because of these things. Then what is the lesson that I need to learn? What can I garner from the experience so when I get stressed, I don't just waste it, don't waste stress. Most of us in the, in the world that we coach and train in, which is the United States, Canada and Australia, many of us are running around stressed out and so much to do and so many things going on. But we're not learning the lesson that is there for us. Therefore we continue and we perpetuate. We have the stress of somebody called in. We have the stress we couldn't get the install in. We have the stress a truck broke down and I can't run calls. But we don't do what's necessary from the lesson. I don't add an extra truck. I don't make sure that I, that I have somebody that's hybrid and can jump over into install if necessary. I don't recreate the policy or the procedure around my, you know, team member engagement policy or what my attendance records are, whatever that is. Right. I just want you to think about how this looks and how you, how you think about it because labels are important and stories are important and we create labels and stories about just about everything that we do. And so the last thing I'll leave you with here and then I'll just share a quick little thing that happened to me recently and that is reminder of your confidence. Cash. I believe that Confidence is like currency in the universe and I think that it gets taken away from us. So if I'm coaching or training your sales team, or your selling technicians, or your call takers, or your dispatchers, you have your confidence cash, little purse or wallet that has your currency in it. And when a client goes off on you, or a client says no, or a client doesn't buy, or a client challenges you, they take some of that cash out of your wallet. Your job is to continuously make deposits back into your confidence cash. So we have this currency to spend. So when I have an experience, I want to make sure that I get the return on my investment. The investment is the situation, the investment is the stress, the investment is the pain. Now to get the return, I get to look at what can I learn from this? Where can I grow from this? How can I step into a new level of greatness? How can I embrace my greater self a little bit more? Right? Stress response management, it's all tied to emotional regulation, is what I call it emotional regulation. So at the time I'm recording this, we recently ran at Blue Collar our twice a year acceleration days event. Two days virtually. You know, now that we're in the virtual world at the moment, we did, you know, it's six hours or seven hours of just speaker after speaker, session after session. We've got strategic partners that come in and share. We do workshops and breakouts and all these different types of things. It's a big event, moves the needles for our, for our membership and some people that, that come and take a look at Blue Collar and some of those types of things. And so here we are, we're getting ready to rock and roll. It's a Thursday morning. It's kind of early on the Pacific time zone when we're kicking off and my team gets in, we always jump on early for the event to test technology one last time. Because we test multiple times, we cannot be more prepared as a, as an organization for this event than we are. And here we go. All right, let's jump in. Let's start logging on. I'm at the Blue Collar headquarters. We've got some clients that came to town. Even though it's virtual, they wanted to attend in the conference room. I've got my fulfillment team here on site. Everybody's going to log in. And those of you that use Zoom know all of a sudden it's connecting and it says connecting. And there's this little clock thing that's spinning and it's connecting, connecting, connecting. And pretty soon I Say to Natalie, are you getting a connecting. She's like, all I'm seeing is a connecting thing. Ash, are you having the same. Wait a minute. We're all connected. All of a sudden, now the team around the country starts firing off. I can't get in. Anybody else having, oh, I'm restarting my computer. Zoom, as a company, was having a major issue at the time that we needed to launch this event. So here we have tons of clients that want to jump into this event. Everybody's ready to rock, and we've got no way to get them in now. Stress response, potential opportunity for Kenny to throw emotional regulation right out the window. You bet your backside, ladies and gentlemen. Like, oh, my gosh. This is one of the biggest events we do a year. We only do it twice a year. We. What are we going to do? It's out of our control. And so it was really fascinating to watch my team trading text messages on the group thread. Here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm going to do. Here's what's jumping in. And I took this moment where I believe in conscious awareness, and I took this moment to just really ground myself and realize what was happening. And I had this conversation with myself in a very, very rapid manner, and I just went, huh? We might not be able to pull this event off today. Well, can we stream it live on Facebook? Can we look at different things? What. What is our opportunity? Obviously, my team is just a rock star team, so they're sending emails to all the attendees letting them know we've got a challenge. I jumped over on Facebook, went live on. On Facebook to share people with what's going on and some different things. And what was fascinating is we ended up. We lost about a half an hour, so we started a half an hour late. We ran a half an hour late that day because Zoom finally got their platform figured out, and we were able to to get live and get going. But what was interesting is in the middle of all this chaos and everybody's stressing and everybody's not sure what we're going to do. And I walked into the conference room where a few of my clients were, and I just sat down and they're like, what's going on? And I happen to work with a couple of them individually, and I said, so you know how we've been talking about emotional regulation lately? This is your coach practicing it right now. And we all had a nice laugh and different things. And I just want to share with you. You know, there I Used to have this alter ego. You know, Eminem might have, Slim Shady, Kenny had Bad Kenny. And it used to happen, he would show up on stage, he would show up in workshops, he would show up in relationships, he would show up with his own self talk, his own self worth, all the. And bad Kenny. If there was ever a time in my recent history for bad Kenny to show up, it was right then and there, man. Like, what in the world? And how can we not be more prepared even though we've tested like five times to get ready for this event, Right? And so I just wanted to share openly and transparently with you where, you know, for me, I just really started when I made self care a priority. And quite honestly, when I got sober quite some time ago is when I. When I made my self care a priority and I had challenges with emotional regulations and I personally use drugs and alcohol to try to smooth those out. And I was very functioning and I was very high level producer achiever, all those things. But I didn't really tap into my greatness until I got super clear about that. And I just want you to realize wherever you are in your walk of emotional regulation, there's always an opportunity to go deeper. Certainly I had some things well up in me and some stress response kick into my body and different things, but I just wanted to share with you openly, like, hey, you're going to have these opportunities. No matter how much you prepare, sometimes there's going to be an opportunity to learn from that situation. So what about you? What is the. The choice that you can make? Stress is a choice, but it's also run by subconscious programming. So if you don't get off the hamster wheel of stress, you don't get a chance to look in and go, huh, Wait a minute, how did that happen? What can I learn from that? What are the things that I can garner from that? Make sure you check in with yourself, see what you feel about this. Would love to hear from you, make sure you rate, follow, subscribe. I know some of the platforms are changing from subscribing to following and rating versus liking. Whatever it is, show me some love, my friends. Make sure you get notified when we drop a new episode. I'm Kenny Chapman, your host. This has been leadership in a nutshell for home service. Get out there, stay great. And until we talk, make it a better than fantastic week stay. See you soon. Thanks everybody.