Reframing Stress to Positive Purpose - Wisdom4Humanity with Patrick Mosher

What words would you use to describe stress? Awful? Bad? Get rid of it? Don't want it? Well, let me offer a different perspective. Stressors carve us out of our comfort zone. They spring us into action. They make us reach for something better. They drive us to success. Stressors motivate us to improve ourselves, our conditions, our world. Does it feel like our world views stress as a productive force? Well, let's reframe it then. I'm going to geek out here a little bit and, and dive into a physics perspective on stress. Stress is a restoring force inside an object resulting from an externally applied force. I'll say it again. Stress is a restoring force inside an object resulting from an externally applied force. So this definition reveals two great wisdom gems. Number one, stress is a force inside an object. We talk about being stressed by situations or people, According to science, this is just not a true statement. Stress is your reaction to an outside force applied to you. You have external force applied on you all the time. Stoplights, people cutting in front of you, people cheering you on, tripping upstairs, shaking hands and hugs are literal external forces on your body. Clearly, it's your reaction to these forces that defines stress. Whoa. And the second wisdom gem here: stress is a restoring force. When you feel an external force which you feel knocks you out of your rhythm or equilibrium, you have a natural reaction to restore your rhythm or equilibrium. So you push back. How hard you push back defines how much stress you feel. If you're late for a meeting and that red light stops you, you feel anxiety, your blood rises, and you get really angry at the red light. Well, you know what? That red light yesterday was the same force. You stopped, not bothered, right? Were you? So the bottom line is you have power to define the amount of stress you feel by taking full responsibility for your reactions to any externally applied force. So just sit on that for a second. And, and, well, let me repeat it. You have the power to define the amount of stress you feel by taking full responsibility for your reactions to any externally applied force. Wow. So here's another aha. The level of stress is defined by how rigid you push against that external force. Lots of rigidity, lots of stress. Lots of fluidity, very little stress. Think of rigidity and fluidity on opposite ends of a continuum. If you wanna decrease stress, build fluidity. Now I could get all geeky here with my chemical engineering background, talking about fluidity and rigidity, but I'll leave that for a future topic or book. For now, let's just focus on reducing your stress by becoming more fluid. How do you do that? Well, let me demonstrate with a lesson from tai chi. Hold one end of a pencil and it is not stressed. You can wave it around and it moves freely. But when you hold the other end of the pencil and you apply a little bit of force, well, now hand B becomes a stressor on that pencil. When you flex it a little bit and you grasp tighter with hand B, you have to hold on tighter with hand A or else the pencil will go flying. So if you look at this, stress is not in the ends of the pencil. It's not defined by the stressors. It's defined by the reaction of the pencil. And where's the stressor in the pencil? The stress in the pencil? Yeah, it's in the middle of the pencil. So going forward, you now have 5 options when you're in this place. You have 5 options. Let go with hand A, which creates a new equilibrium with hand B. You can let go with hand B, which gives you— goes back to the old equilibrium defined by hand A. You can continue to hold the stress on both ends, maintaining that stress in the middle. Ugh, yuck. Or you can increase stress on both ends until the pencil breaks. Where? Well, it breaks at the stress point. And this is like an escalating argument that no one wins. And then the fifth option that's always available to you is to let go with both hands. And that creates a whole new universe for both hand A and hand B and for the pencil. And that's a novel approach to conflict management, isn't it? So, isn't it refreshing to know that whenever you feel stress, the next time you feel stress, Scientifically speaking, there are always at least 5 options. I find this incredibly empowering and, and useful too. And I applied this principle frequently in my consulting career. I started every project knowing there'd be a major conflict somewhere along the line. Disagreements over budget, deadlines, scope, resources, designs, commitments. Keeping the environment Being fluid was key to navigating creative and productive results. Challenge deeply held assumptions. Include wildly diverse perspectives. Envision higher purposes. I'd like to think I help people break a lot more assumptions than pencils. Maybe thousands to one ratio. So if you want to reduce stress, well, Between these two, choose fluidity. Live 100% empowered.