075. Good Stress vs. Bad Stress in Creating Long Life for Your Business

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lueck. And this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Well, hello, friends. Welcome. Thank you for being with me today. I'm so excited to get to talk with you, spend a little time with you. And it's a beautiful spring day here in Colorado and I've had the window open. I closed it just in case there's any outside noise. I didn't want it bleeding into our time together. But I just love this time of year, spring. And it just feels, it's like a whole different energy with new life popping up and I don't know, it's my favorite season. Anyhow, today I want to talk to you about stress. We're going to talk about good stress and bad stress. And so how I got on this topic is that recently, I guess it's ever since I turned 50 two years ago. So recently I've become obsessed with learning about longevity because I am bound and determined to live to be a hundred and be healthy all the way there, healthy and vital and like being able to continue to contribute and be active and all those things. And so I've been studying longevity on my own. And I'm not really going to talk to you about physical longevity as much as I'm going to talk to you about business longevity. But the study, for those of you that are interested, that are kind of like health geeks like me, it's like, you know, one of my side interests. But the study of longevity is an amazing field that is experiencing so much scientific breakthrough that it's very interesting. So if you are interested in that or a nerd like me on that subject, let me know. Right. But anyway, it's a field of study that's giving hope to those of us that want to live a long life, that we could live to be 120 years old easily with health and vitality and being active. And so the breakthroughs have just been amazing. But one thing that I've been learning about recently that's been really interesting is that there are beneficial levels of stress that we can intentionally put our body through that cause it to repair and become stronger at the cellular level. And I'm not a scientist or a doctor, obviously, so I am not going to get all scientific on you, but I've been learning a lot about the beneficial ways to stress our body and you already know this if you think about it, because it's like thinking about strength training or cardio workouts. We know they're good for us, but when we do those things, we're putting intentional stress on our body, right? Like when we're lifting weights, it's ripping muscle fibers, it causes soreness and pain, hopefully not injury pain, but you know, soreness from the, the ripped muscle fibers can be uncomfortable. But we know that that discomfort and that soreness, that pain makes us stronger and leads to more mobility, increased muscle tone, you know, all those good things. So there's other ways that you can stress your body, like heat therapy. You've heard of people and maybe you've been in a sauna before. And cold therapy is another way. And so like doing cold plunges, we've heard about the polar bear plunge and those types of things, right? And so each of those intentional stressors creates physical and mental stress on your body. But what that does is it kicks your cells into repair mode and it causes your body to repair itself from the inside out at a cellular level. If it's done correctly, like you can overdo it and cause injury. And so that's not what we're talking about here. But if these, these types of beneficial intentional stress, if it's done regularly for short periods of time, mind you, studies show that these practices can reduce disease and increase our longevity. And so that has been so interesting to me to learn about that. And just as a side note, like I take, you know, every time I take a shower, I do my 30 seconds at the end of cold water and it starts that, you know, it kind of shocks my body into that repair process. And I have a hot tub, as you all may know, because I love my hot tub. And that's another way of putting my body under stress that, that causes it to, to repair itself. So in learning about that, I was also thinking that there are ways to do this in our business, right? And there's good stress and bad stress in our business. Now just, you know, I mean, this is very basic, you know, good and bad, very binary classifications, right? And so what I think of as bad stress is like prolonged periods of stressors or stress stress responses in our body, stress, you know, responding to trauma that degrade our mental and physical health and can cause disease, right? So short periods of time of stress are, are okay for the most part. I mean, obviously trauma in some senses is never something we want to intentionally put our body through or our mind through. But what I'm talking about Here is like intentional healthy stress and then bad stress. I would define as prolonged periods of stress or stress responses to trauma. And so it's similar in our businesses. We have the good stress and the bad stress. And there's stress that we put on ourselves in our business that actually can serve us, right? So I talked about the physical, but if we're thinking about our mental and our business, I think of it like challenging ourselves to achieve a big goal. And that, that is okay, there's nothing wrong. Well, I guess there could be something wrong. It depends on how we think about the big goal, right? But it can be beneficial to put ourselves and our business under that kind of stress for a short period of time, right? Like thinking, it causes us to go to that next level of thinking, of problem solving. You know, putting that expectation, that goal in front of ourselves and our business. You know, it causes us to become more efficient, to repair our business. Just like our, our bodies repair themselves to be stronger. The same thing can happen in our businesses. So maybe it's like launching a new offering or expanding our business when our capacity is full. So there are certain kinds of stress or challenges that we can put in intentionally in our path, in the path of our business to initiate that, repair that creativity, that up level in efficiency and eventually growth. Right? So I wanted to just pose this to you as well. Like what are some of the ways that you might want to intentionally challenge or stress your business or yourself to initiate growth? And this is why I like setting big goals. And for me, it's like the big impossible goal. And I put the word impossible in there because it kind of tricks my brain because it's like, yes, I already see that it's impossible. So my brain can't say, well, that's impossible. I'm like, well, yeah, it's already labeled as a big impossible goal, right? And I do this because it puts that intentional stress on my creativity, on my problem solving skills, on my thinking and how I could possibly create. For example, you know, my big goal is to have a million dollar business, to create a million dollar business. And so that, that is my big impossible goal right now. And so when I set that and when I think about that, it's like it requires a whole different level of me, right? So that is putting stress on all of the current ways that my mind, my body are behaving. And I do this not because I'm a masochist or crazy, but because it forces me and it calls me higher. It forces me to think and believe and create and become that next level version of myself. And that's what I want. I want to live my life. And this is why I want to live to be 100. I want to live the next 48 years continually challenging myself to that next level of thinking, creativity, belief, invention, right? So that I can help many, many more women to achieve financial freedom through entrepreneurship. And that is why I intentionally am choosing to stress myself in my business, right? And so, you know, stress can be such a bad word and so many of us try to avoid it. But what I am offering in this podcast, in this discussion, is that there are certain types of stress that are good. And so growth, you know, the type of stress that creates growth is good stress. That creates longevity and repair and healing. That is good stress. And let me just point out, we all know this, right? But it's, it bears repeating that growth is not supposed to be easy. Growth is not supposed to be cozy or fluffy or comfortable. I mean, I talk about this all the time with my clients, right? It's like we didn't start a business because it was the easiest thing to do. We started a business because of who we wanted to serve and what we wanted to accomplish. And it's usually painful, difficult and uncomfortable to be an entrepreneur, but it's also incredibly rewarding. It's also unlimited possibility for making money and making a change in the world. And it's also we get to determine how we want to work, what we want to do, who we want to serve. It's completely self determined, like we get it aside, right? So it goes back to the idea of 50, 50, right? Just like life, business is 50 50. There's half of it. That's the uncomfortable, painful, difficult growth stress part. And then there's the other part that's like, you know, the joy of being an entrepreneur, the exhilaration of creativity and the excitement of getting to see your clients succeed and get what they most want, right? And so I really just want to call you to this next level of growth, right? That love is calling you to that next level of growth. And so it's okay to choose to bring in and put yourself and your business under good stress, right? To stress yourself a little bit and see what you're made of and challenge you and challenge you to get to that next level. And this is why one of the reasons I love launching, like, I don't think I'm really good at it yet, but I love launching because it is like this short burst of putting something out into the world and really concentrated focus on promoting it and selling it and talking to people about it. And it's that short burst of creativity and creating and thinking, okay, if I do this, then what is the result going to be? And you do something and you see the result right away. And so I love kind of that, that immediate feedback and problem solving. And so think about how you can maybe choose to do a sprint in your business or where do you want to see that growth? And where can you challenge or stress yourself in a good way to get to that next level? And that is definitely something that having a coach by your side can really help you to choose a great and beneficial growth and stress situation. Right. And that's why I love working with my clients for six months at a time. My private clients, we work together six months at a time, one on one, and we can set a result, some specific results that you want, and then use that short period of time to go for them to put that little extra stress that you know that we're going to meet each week and you're going to have things that you got to get done and your brain's going to freak out and you're going to reach out to me and I can coach you. And so it's in those times you will experience the most growth because of that stress that you're putting yourself under. And it forces you and your company to become more efficient, to become more creative, to be able to serve more clients, to increase that capacity, to test the capacity that you actually have. I feel like we only can see a small amount of the capacity that we're capable of, that when we put ourselves in these times of where we're stressing our capabilities, we actually get to see what we're made of and how amazing our capacity is and how it is so much greater than we even know. So after all of that, I want to challenge you to lean in and to some good stress in your business. And specifically think of one area where you want to challenge yourself and what would that challenge look like? What would be the result that you want to create from that? What might be the time period that you want to give yourself to complete that challenge? Right. And I would love to hear about it. Reach out to me on social or if you're on my email list, which you should be, reply to me because I always email you about my podcast episodes. So you probably received it email about this episode. If you didn't, or if you're not on the email list, you can go to my website, Melissam Kellogg.com and sign up to get on the email list and I would love to hear from you and if I can support you in your growth in putting some good stress on yourself and your business and getting to that next level, I am here for it. I love it. Let's do it. And I hope you have a beautiful week. I'll talk to you next time. Bye. If you like this podcast, then you have got to sign up for my free on demand video training Grow youw Sales Doing what yout Love where I teach you in depth my simple process that you can implement right away to harness your mindset and your skills to grow your sales to whatever level you want. So go grab that now. The link is in the show notes and I'll see you next time.