How to Eliminate Stress

Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede. Executive Vice President with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. I want to encourage you to go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. There you’ll see that there’s a link to the blog that’ll go along with this podcast. You can download the learner guide right there, or you can actually leave us a thought, a question that we can unpack in a future episode. Well, today’s topic is titled How to Eliminate stress. Wow.

Chris Goede:
If that doesn’t bring them running, I can’t wait to hear what Perry’s got in store for us today. It’s going to be amazing. But it’s about really trying to figure out really what’s the source that’s driving the stress. How do you eliminate stress at the source of what you’re dealing with? Not just managing the symptoms that we all have around the stress. And so this big idea comes from Travis Bradberry, shared by George Stern on LinkedIn. And it hits leaders like right where we are. Like, if you say that to me, I think all of us go, I get it. Yeah, me too.

Chris Goede:
I feel that type of stress. So really the secret in beating it, and we’re going to unpack this today, is how do we become proactive in the things that we’re doing? It’s not just about your mindset. It’s actually about how you design your day and what does that structure look like. And so if your calendar is packed like each one of us are, then so is your nervous system. And so it’s a leadership issue. It’s not your personality issue. And John Maxwell says this, I love this. You don’t manage time, you manage your priorities.

Chris Goede:
And so if you don’t protect your priorities, then stress is going to show up. Perry, I cannot wait for you to tell me how we’re going to eliminate stress.

Perry Holley:
Well, I’ve been worried about you.

Chris Goede:
Us. Us.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. Yes. People say, are you— how do you manage? Do I look stressed? I mean, do I, you know? But I don’t feel it like I guess some people might. But this was helpful to me.

Chris Goede:
So some of us hide it better than others. We all have it, right? Yeah.

Perry Holley:
But before go to something practical. I definitely want to give you some practical ideas, but the authors kind of laid the ideas out in 3 areas to kind of frame the discussion. Number 1 was that calm is designed, it’s not reactive. And so I think this one really hit me was low stress isn’t something you rise to, to come up to in the moment. It’s an invisible kind of preparation for things and that you can’t just be reactive. The more reactive you are, the more stress you’re going to feel.

Chris Goede:
I believe that.

Perry Holley:
I think so. The second thing they brought up was that stress comes from friction, not workload. This one was really surprising to me because calm leaders aren’t doing less, they’re just switching less back and forth to things that are coming and going. And the switching costs they talked about, rush transitions, decision fatigue, that’s kind of where stress lives. And John teaches that energy, not time, is a leader’s most valuable asset. So I think what I took from this was it’s not doing a lot of work that stresses me out. It’s kind of doing the wrong kind of work or work that’s not fulfilling or work that’s outside of my area. Number 3, they talked about white space is a leadership signal.

Perry Holley:
And this was when leaders protect margin, they communicate that they have boundaries, they control, they have long-term thinking. And I thought that was so impressive. I’m going to do next week’s podcast on margin. I just thought this was something my wife challenged me on about 20 years ago, and I struggle big time with putting margin into my day.

Chris Goede:
You’re going to need somebody else to help you with that.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, I think we are both— yeah, I see your calendar as well, but, uh, we’ll get to that next week. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
Well, so let’s look at some of these practical secrets as Perry kind of set that up for us of people who never seem stressed. Now, they probably are, but, but they have a little bit of stress. So this one has your name written all over it. It prep the night before. Preparation is a leadership behavior because it does protect what Perry was saying. It protects how much you are reacting throughout the day, throughout a situation, throughout a meeting, whatever. And as you plan and you prepare, it can have a little bit more structure. And if not and it’s chaos, then you kind of feel like you’re playing catch up all single— I know that’s something that would would drive stress.

Chris Goede:
John says it with the phrase of you’re either preparing or repairing.

Perry Holley:
Oh man.

Chris Goede:
And that could be a meeting, a relationship, your day, your schedule. And so make sure that you are preparing for what’s coming up and you’re spending time preparing for all that you have to do the next day. And I know for you, and why I thought about you immediately, is that all the way back to one of our lessons we did with Tuesday’s coming, right? Like, you know it. You know when you’re with clients, you know when you’re coaching calls, you spend time preparing, you have a schedule in the morning of, of, you know, preparing. And, and it just helps reduce the stress when that moment arrives.

Perry Holley:
A few weeks ago, I had something on my calendar that you and I were doing together, but neither one of us had really talked about it, attention to it. But I— but 7, 8 days in advance, we started, look, like, what’s that about? And what do they expect? And that preparation, I would’ve been freaking out a little bit. Like, you’re putting me in front of an audience I don’t really know doing what I don’t know. No, I have time. And so I was able to prepare for that. So I think it lowers that level of— and I noticed that preparing, repairing comes from Today Matters, John’s book. I swore I’d never read it, and then somebody said, you need it. So I read it and it changed my life.

Perry Holley:
But about how John says your success is determined by your daily agenda. So what are you doing today? Are you repairing from all the things you didn’t do yesterday? Preparing for what’s to come. And that’s preparing for what’s to come is what helps bring the stress level down. Number 2 was always arrive early. And I was known for coming in on 2 wheels late, in a hurry, hair on fire, and stress just flies from that. I’m not prepared, I’m not on time, those types of things. In that event that we’re talking about, you and I, we arrived, I think, 40 minutes, 30 minutes early. That gave us time.

Perry Holley:
And then people had things going on, but you and I were calm because because we had done some prep and we got there on time with plenty of time to get set up and to go with it. So I think you can start to invite calm in when you said, I’m prepared and I’m early to do that. That sounds so basic, but it’s true. It’s 101, but we don’t do it. We’re not prepared and we come in fast and come in hot. I’m going to be stressed enough.

Chris Goede:
And even a benefit of that in this example was that we were able to gain some additional intel that helped you.

Perry Holley:
That was big.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. Set up the content because we were there. We didn’t come flying in and whatnot. So it was good. Number 3 is schedule what matters. If it’s a priority to you, but it’s not on your calendar, at least in my world, it just feels like that’s not a priority. And so I need to make sure that everything I have with appointments, think time, project time, downtime, my calendar is blocked out. Now, you then have to follow through with what’s on there.

Chris Goede:
And that’s something I’ve had to learn over time too, is I’m going to schedule it. I have great intentions. I just got to keep it on the schedule because it matters.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. Tell me this before I go to number 4. Just thinking about if we set it up right to say, why does this even matter? Why is your stress level or how you show stress level affect your leadership? I mean, the reason I brought this is that I’m thinking so many people I’ve worked for over the years were hair on fire, out of control, and I was not influenced positive by that, I kind of back off. Are they a wreck getting ready to happen, or are they in control of their surroundings and themselves? Is it self-management, self-leadership that makes you have more influence than they have? Do you see that?

Chris Goede:
And don’t you say that you’re making everyone feel something, right? And so you know it when someone’s stressed. You can feel it, you can sense it. So how approachable do they feel? Right? And so I think the fact that you are making people feel something and it’s contagious. We talk about this too. Leadership is contagious. And so the last thing I want is for my team to be leveled up and stressed when they don’t have to be. And so, yeah, I think you’re making them feel something. You got to be aware of that.

Chris Goede:
And then it’s contagious. So then all of a sudden they’re going to start being that way as well.

Perry Holley:
Calm is contagious. And so is anxiety. If I’m watching my leader, they’re freaking out, maybe I should freaking out. I thought, oh no, I don’t want to be passing this on to the team to do that. Number 4, I just wrote down, reset quickly. So if you do find yourself that this isn’t a, I’m never going to be stressed, I’m never going to be freaking out, I’m never going to be anxious. But when I find myself there, is there something that resets me that I can go to? Is it a walk, get up and walk around the building one time? Is it go get a cup of coffee? Is it go sit down and talk to a trusted friend? Is it go listen to some music during lunch hour? What is it that helps reset you and makes you calm? I was thinking about it for me was I tend to want to just get up and go walk. And if I can walk and maybe talk to myself a little bit, but I don’t really want to be around others.

Perry Holley:
Do you know what it is for you? What resets you?

Chris Goede:
So for me, it is being by myself, which it’s interesting as you think about my personality, I can come across as extroverted, but I’m right in the middle. And so I can go either way. And for me, it is to just have some self-time, quiet, nobody around. Similar, obviously, what you’re talking about with walking around. I would also say, too, I love being outside when the weather’s appropriate, right, to be able to do that. But you got to figure it out. To your point, figure it out what it is that can reset you. Breathing techniques, all kinds of things.

Perry Holley:
It’s a secret sauce for you.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, for you. The next one is— and I’m going to laugh about this one— keep one list. Because I mean, I am notorious for sticky notes and, uh, give me that paper, and oh, now I’m using a reMarkable and I’m going to send myself an email. And so, man, what I found is that I have to kind of reset. I have to take all of my notes sometimes when I’m moving fast, and then I have to put them in one place. And when I know that they’re there and I’ve cleaned up all the scrap paper and put it on, that reduces my level of stress. And so it’s so true, right? So how do we keep keep one list. And for me, the importance of keeping a list is getting it out of my brain and getting it out of my head, because if not, I’m thinking about it.

Chris Goede:
I don’t want to forget about it, right? And so your brain is created to help solve problems and to creatively think. It’s not created to store a ton of information. And I mean, I don’t know about you, but the older I get, the harder it’s getting to keep all that stuff stored up in there. So I got to get it out.

Perry Holley:
I’m just saying, I’m just older you get. I’m just saying, I don’t know if you’re there yet, but I feel that you’re a child. But that leads into another one that this is— I called it Capture Your Inputs. And this is probably David Allen and Getting Things Done type of stuff from years ago. But saying that, like you said, I’ve got all this stuff coming at me. I’ve got text messages, I’ve got emails, I’ve got phone calls and voice messages. I’ve got people stopping by the door and jumping into your office and sliding into my DM. Can I say that right? I’ve said that twice today already.

Perry Holley:
I’m proud of you. Yeah, that’s so good. I’ve never said it, never. And now I’ve said it twice in one day. Trying to remember things is dangerous because it adds stress. Because then you just hit on it. Your brain is trained to close loops. This is David Allen.

Perry Holley:
Close loops. And if I have an open loop, like you’ll do this, don’t forget to take the trash out. Don’t forget to take the trash out. Oh yeah. Don’t forget to take the trash out. Your brain keeps going on it until you say, I’m writing it on the sticky right next to the, on the kitchen counter. It says, don’t forget to take. Now my brain can let that go.

Perry Holley:
I can close that loop. And so I capturing my inputs and keeping one list. You and I both have gone to electronic paper. We’ve gone to electronic notebooks, and I struggled with that at once. But I had files everywhere. I had paper everywhere. I had notepad. I had sticky notes.

Perry Holley:
I had to-do lists. Now I just open up my reMarkable, put it in there. I can search on it. It’s there. I know it’s captured. So by you making the list one list, capturing your inputs, closing the loops in your head, it brings your, your stress level down to— I know it’s all captured. I know I didn’t have to remember that. I didn’t— what am I forgetting? I didn’t forget anything because it’s written.

Chris Goede:
It’s written down. Yeah. Number 7 is, man, how do you choose your top 3? I think this is so important. Not your easiest 3, but your top 3. And for me, most of my days will fall apart because I’ve just had way too much to do. And then I get to the end of the day and I don’t really even feel like I completed anything. How many of you felt that way? Well, that’s because there’s no— like, for me, what I realized, no finish line. If I knew that I say, okay, these are the 3 things I’ve got to get done.

Chris Goede:
Back to David Allen and getting things done, the 3 most important and then 1 must, he says. Right. And so everything else is not as urgent as those things. And we got to make sure we focus on— if you do that, you go, man, I feel like I crossed the finish line today, even though we know we’re going to get up tomorrow and there’s going to be a ton of work there. And so the other thing is with the Eisenhower Matrix, when you look at this and you start talking about the, the urgent, what’s important, and what are you focused on, and where are your priorities, try to still it down, right, to, hey, what are the 3 most important and 1 must that I do? And then knock that out so that you feel like you accomplished something.

Perry Holley:
Well, I had a— yesterday I was, uh, I had something I wanted to do, but I had something that I was required to do, and I had a deadline and something I had to get done, and I knew I needed to get done, but I was really enjoying working on something that I could use down the road somewhere, but it was a little creative moment and I really had to kind of call myself on it because what’s going to happen is I’m going to play with the thing that I wanted to play with. The day’s going to end. I’m going to be required to be at the dinner table and be with the family. Now, instead of preparing, I’m now going to be repairing tomorrow, having to do the thing I shouldn’t have done, which is going to raise my stress level, raise my anxiety level when I should have just done the right thing, the priority thing. This is the problem with these lists that we make, these to-do lists, is that they’re not in priority order. That’s right. They’re in random. I just thought of that.

Perry Holley:
I wrote it down. And then when I have a moment, what should I do? I look over there and I don’t— do I go to the most important thing? No, I go the easiest thing.

Chris Goede:
I want to scratch that list off. I mean, I want to scratch something off.

Perry Holley:
I’m taking off, but it raises my stress level because now I’ve got important things that are hanging out there. So this is this 3 most important and 1 must. It frees you. Are you ever going to get all the work done in the day?

Chris Goede:
No, it’s always going to show up.

Perry Holley:
There’s always going to be more tomorrow. I just say if I start my day with an idea, actually what I do is I close my day. I’m not at my desk, but I have index cards and I just grab an index card and I really look real quickly at my to-do list and my calendar and what’s coming. I’ve been planning for a week or more about what are the 3 most important things I need to get done tomorrow. And then I’ll just circle one of them that says that’s my must. The must gets done probably before 10:00 AM because the more I get past 10:00 AM, the more my day gets out of control. That’s right. You know all about that.

Perry Holley:
And so if But then if I don’t get any of the other things on my list done, I look at that and said, did I get my 3 most important? Yes, I’m okay. I can go home, have an enjoyable evening, and get up tomorrow and come back and do my next 3 most important things. Will the list ever be empty? No. Will I ever get it all done? No. But I will have gotten the most important things done. And that was what relieves this pressure off of me that says, I’m so far behind. Chris is going to call me and I’m not going to have it. Well, why don’t you have it? Because I was playing, you know, mahjong or something.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, yeah, I love it.

Chris Goede:
No, I’m sure you weren’t. All right, number 9. Leading into this, one of the things that Perry and I talk a lot about is the fact that, hey, what are the things that you’re doing that only you can be doing for your team and for the organization? And this one is in alignment with that, which is how do you protect the deep work, right? How do you protect the stuff that where you’re creating value for the organization and the team and you’re thinking and you’re innovating, things that can’t be delegated, you’ve got to protect that. You got to block that time and you got to make sure that you are making a little bit of progress in that, that you’re taking the next step, that you’re thinking on it. If just like you mentioned, if I go throughout my day and I’m just doing the busy work, And then I get home, I’m like, you know what, I’m going to spend some time tonight getting in my deep work. Road to hell was paved with good intentions. I get home and I eat and maybe I work out. I’m like, right?

Perry Holley:
Like, I’m like, what?

Chris Goede:
No.

Perry Holley:
But also, if you’re super disciplined and you, you eat and then you go get your laptop out and start doing deep work, I mean, what a message you send it. Now I’m stressed for a whole nother reason.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, well, yes, and maybe more stress. That’s right. Yeah. And so you’ve got to protect your time.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, but it’s hard. Do you schedule time with yourself? And things kind of jump on your calendar and people want it, but I give that away. No, I can reschedule it, but I need to keep the time with myself because that’s when I do my work. I had a leader once, I said, you’re on every call. He was this very senior guy. You’re on every call all day long. You’re on your phone. When do you do your— you take to-dos.

Perry Holley:
When do you do your to-dos? He said, I schedule it. I go, I can’t even get lunch because I schedule that too. What? That’s why I’m not getting lunch, because I don’t block time. And so by blocking the time set, I don’t have to stress about not getting things done because I know I’ve got time coming up to get things done. Now, the temptation there is going to be that people are going to steal those. You’re going to give away those slots because nobody knows you canceled the call but you. Yeah, no, no, I have a real rule. I can’t cancel.

Perry Holley:
I can only reschedule. Oh, yeah, I can give you 30 minutes now, but I’m going to take 30 minutes later to do something else. But if our viewers at home, if you were keeping a scorecard, that we skipped number 8. So number 8 says sync your calendars. This was huge for me because I said I have a weekly alignment. I just noticed I have a calendar for my work and my family has a calendar at home, and maybe I have a calendar for something else. You know, all these ways I track. And so I started having Sunday night calendar talks we call it time to have a calendar talk at our home where I take my work calendar with all my commitments.

Perry Holley:
And we travel and we’re about, so she needs to know when I’m not going to be there and what she needs to plan for and all that. But I also need to know what’s coming up with the family calendar. Where are the kids going to be playing ball? Where’s the dance recital? Where does she have a ladies meeting that she needs to go to that I need to cover and all these things. And so we map this out a month to 6 weeks in advance. And can things change? Of course they can change. Do they flex? Yes, of course they flex. But yeah, I got to go back and say, I see I committed that I could be here. Then I have an opportunity to go and speak at this thing.

Perry Holley:
What do you think about that? And then she’ll say, yes, I can move this and do that. But by having different calendars, there’s a lot of surprises, which then causes a lot of stress. A lot of we’re not on the same page, and now my stress is going up at home and at work. And so I just find have one calendar, but sync it with everybody else’s calendar. You may have kids that don’t live at home. I have kids aren’t at home. They might be counting on me to do something. Where, where are all my commitments?

Chris Goede:
That’s good.

Perry Holley:
So I can track all that to do that. But let me, before I flip with you to close, the idea of these small things— I’m going to tell you, if you listen to this podcast, well, that was a bunch of easy stuff. Uh, no, it’s simple stuff. It’s not easy.

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Perry Holley:
And it requires a lot of discipline and effort to say, I’m going to reduce my stress and anxiety because I’m going to take a few steps to self-manage and decide once and manage daily how I’m going to do things. Yeah. I think that some of these tips were— I didn’t just make them up. They came from a long life of trying to figure out how to get it all done but not freak out about doing it.

Chris Goede:
So I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to spend the morning with an organization, and we rolled out the resilience content that we’ve talked about here and had Valerie on. And again, I want to encourage you to go to the forum and just put resilience in there if this is right for you or your team. But it was a great conversation. We get to one of the rules, right? We were talking about, hey, what would the future self thank you now?

Perry Holley:
For doing.

Chris Goede:
That’s what you’re talking about, right? You’re like, the preventive measures of being able to do that. And what are those things? Instead of saying, you know, I’m just gonna keep playing the game, or I’m gonna keep doing this, I’m gonna keep doing— okay, you go ahead and do that, but your future self is going to be under stress. And that’s what you’re saying here. And that’s part of that resilience. A lot of times I think leaders feel like stress is a badge of honor. I got a lot going on, right? No, it’s a design flaw or discipline that you don’t have, that even sometimes I don’t have, that I fall back into, that I need to make sure that I fix. Because it’s not about surviving chaos, because then your team feels that, that we were just talking about, because it is contagious, right? It’s about creating clarity. And we’ve said here that if you have lack of clarity on what’s priorities to you, what’s driving stress for you, then you’re going to be confused.

Chris Goede:
And if you’re confused, then you’re going to have some failures, which we are going to call stress today. So my challenge for you as I wrap up, not only to go and put resilience in the form and so we can come help you and your team, but also do you have clarity on what is causing you stress? And we just gave you 10 items to go back and say, I want you to self-assess, where am I at on this? Because I know Perry and I would sit here and say, man, if we were to do that, there’s some areas on here that are pretty low. We have systems in place, but maybe we get a little bit complacent. So go back through and figure out, man, where are the root causes of my stress and how do I make some changes so that your future self will thank you for doing that?

Perry Holley:
Great catch on that one. Thank you, Chris. And as a reminder, if you’d like the Learn Guide for this episode or you’d like to learn more about our offerings, especially that resilience offering, you can do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question there. We love hearing from you. Very grateful you’d spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

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