Do you feel stress? Do you get stressed?
Wow. What kind of question is that?
Of course, you get stressed. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.
We can’t control when things in life and in our business come along and stress us out, but we do get some choice in how we respond to the stress.
It’s this stress response management I want to talk about today.
Let’s get started, friends, and change our lives and business for the better.
What Does Stress Create?
We’re talking about something that’s near and dear to my heart, and it might be near and dear to your heart when it comes to a stress response.
There are all kinds of things we can study.
We can read, we can discuss, we can get in online forums and different things, and we can always talk about how there are other stressors in the home service business.
Believe me; I get it. I worked as a leader in the space for decades before transitioning to coaching in the same space.
Today, I want to share with you a strategy that I’ve been using for myself and for my clients that is helping to kind of interrupt the pattern around stress.
It’s obviously proven that stress creates all this chaos, all this pain, all this challenge.
As a leader, I want you to think:
- How is it impacting your team?
- How is it affecting your culture?
- Is it affecting your clients?
- How is it affecting your results?
The stress level you have that you personally carry directly impacts sales, install efficiency, and the management of your team at work, 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?
Do I have your attention now?
Your stress response impacts all areas of business. As a leader, it’s our responsibility to handle the response as best as possible.
Stress Is Killing You
I hope you’re convinced to tackle this stress issue.
Most people don’t seem to care that stress is killing you.
I mean, literally, stress is killing us.
We’re dying because we’re stress.
Don’t studies show we’re living longer, Kenny?
Yes, but this comes from medicine, not from actual physical and mental, and emotional health.
We’re not living longer because of the food that we put in our bodies, in the exercise, and the movement, the mental awareness, and the mindful states that we create in the peace and happiness and joy and love.
That’s not why we’re living longer.
If you don’t want to tackle stress management for your life and health, maybe you’ll want to for your business.
Stress Is Good For You…If You Handle It Well
It’s about stress management.
I 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 essential.
We need to be pushed out of our comfort zones.
We need to be challenged.
I think we need to create situations for ourselves to learn and grow.
Times of uncertainty create stress.
Board members create stress.
Team members create stress.
You create stress.
Life creates stress.
We might as well learn to handle it and grow from it, right? Now it becomes good for us.
It’s like exercise. You may not always like it while you’re doing it, but it’s good for you and healthy for you.
Stress Overwhelms Easily Unless You’re Ready To Handle It
If we’re out of our zone, if we’ve got overwhelming responsibilities, the stress piles on and shuts us down quickly.
When we get overwhelmed, things get ugly quickly.
I want you just to be mindful of that and think about that.
Where are you possibly overwhelmed in your life right now?
Make a list of what those things are and how’s it influencing you.
An overwhelmed leader leads to worry.
Worry is a massive stress creator.
A lot of people worry about things that never happened.
At the end of the day, if I feel like I’m under a lot of pressure, I can have this kind of stress.
But when the overwhelming meter starts to rise, what can I do?
This is where emotional regulation steps in, where I’m able to consciously understand what’s going on in my body, mind, and spirit and choosing my response.
Emotional Regulation In Your Stress Response
Today, I want you to think about emotional regulation with yourself.
When you’re in traffic, do you get off?
Are you leaning on the horn?
Are you cursing people?
That’s not emotional regulation.
Losing your cool is going on an unconscious rollercoaster ride because somebody else is doing 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?
What about when the weather rains on your parade?
If I lose my cool, that’s a lack of emotional regulation.
For me, it’s one of the biggest keys to unlocking happiness in my next level of greatness.
Now doesn’t mean that if you’re an emotionally regulated person, that you don’t get off and slam the dash someone cuts you off.
The key is that you catch it right away, and you return to a state that you choose.
That is a major difference.
When a team member calls in, and all of a sudden you got more calls than you know what to do with, stress comes in, right?
Now, you can’t get installs done.
It’s going to lose revenue.
It’s going to impact the budget.
I understand our immediate response to this stress is going to be to get mad or frustrated or upset.
My friend, when it comes to emotional regulation, it’s about choosing, and then it’s really about rewriting the program.
You catch yourself in that moment and have the emotional strength to move into a different state.
But this won’t happen without awareness and work whenever stress happens.
Am I saying it’s bad to get mad? Do I want everyone to be chill and at peace all the time?
That’s not how life works. But I’ve learned from my own business and in working with so many others that the decisions you make when you’re overwhelmed with stress are almost never the right ones.
You make a bad situation much worse. Find the emotional regulation and make the clear-headed decisions to actually solve the problem.
Why Do Certain Things Stress You Out?
Why do certain things seem to stress me out?
Have you ever noticed certain things press your buttons or trigger you?
And it seems like other people are like, “yeah, no big deal.”
There are certain things that kind of trigger us, if you will when our stress response comes in that we get to the opportunity to manage.
It’s a very personal thing, and we’ll learn a lot about ourselves by taking a look at that.
For many years, I subscribed to the philosophy that perception is reality.
Here’s the truth, though: belief creates reality.
So if I believe it to be true, it is true to me.
If I believe this is stressful, then I’m going to react with a stressful response.
Why do certain things stress you out more than others? Because you believe they will.
Oh no, this vendor dropped the ball on an order, and now the whole week is doomed.
I’m saying it’s inconvenient, but is it worth the stress you’re putting into it?
Let’s face it: Stuff like that happens often. It’s happened before, and your business and others went through it just fine.
Don’t let the stress rule you. Handle the situation, not the stress.
Reevaluate later on if this vendor is worth the effort too.
You Decide How Stressful An Event Will Be
You decide: how stressful is this going to be?
The experience factor comes into play too.
If we’ve dealt with this before, we’re less stressed.
Why? Is it because it’s less important this time around?
No, we know better. We know we can handle it, how to handle it, and what’s on the other side.
Let’s use this attitude to approach all of our stress.
What is the lesson that I need to learn?
What can I garner from experience?
Don’t waste stress.
We run around all the time, perpetuating our own stress.
I think it’s the worst in the home service industry.
A truck broke down, someone called in, this new model has a faulty wire, etc.
There are a million different pieces and everything running full tilt all the time.
Stress happens. But what do you do when it comes?
I want you to think about how this looks and 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.
Stress Pays Out Confidence Cash
I believe that confidence is like the currency of the universe.
We all have a wallet or purse or pocket or bank account filled with confidence cash.
Every time we hit a goal or learn something or do something well, we put in a deposit.
But when a client says no, you get a bad review, a trusted team member quits, it takes some of that cash away.
Stress takes the cash away, but handling and learning from stress puts it back in with interest.
Think about it:
A truck breaks down, and now you’re short on the calls you make that day. Confidence cash is withdrawn.
You keep your cool and come up with a new schedule that allows for close to the same volume of calls with one less truck. Now, your business and team are more efficient.
Confidence deposited with a better and stronger business.
Your job is to continuously make deposits back into your confidence cash, so we have this currency to spend and invest in stress.
I want to make sure that I get the return on my investment.
The investment is the situation.
The investment is the pain.
You’ll Always Need To Manage Stress
At the time I’m writing this, we recently ran a Blue Collar virtual event for our clients on acceleration and business.
It’s 6-7 hours of amazing speaker after speaker, session after session, and 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 that moves the needle for our membership.
So here we are, we’re getting ready to rock and roll. It’s a Thursday morning.
My team gets in.
We always jump on early for the event to test technology one last time.
We test multiple times.
As an organization, we cannot be more prepared for this event.
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.
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.
We start to realize no one is able to log in.
Please Step In Emotional Regulation
Now the team around the country starts firing off.
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.
My stress level was high, folks.
This was a potential opportunity for Kenny to throw emotional regulation right out the window. You bet your backside, ladies and gentlemen.
This is one of the biggest events we do a year. We only do it twice a year.
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.
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.
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 is our opportunity?
Obviously, my team is just a rockstar team.
So they’re sending emails to all the attendees, letting them know we’ve got a challenge.
I jumped over on Facebook and went live.
At the end of the day, we started half an hour late.
30 minutes. That’s it.
I shudder to think about the confidence cash, the stress, and the mental anguish I could have spent if I let the situation get the best of me, of us as a team.
In the middle of all this, 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?”
I happen to work with a couple of them individually.
And I said, “So, you know, we’ve been talking about emotional regulation lately. This is your coach, practicing it right now.”
But I have more confidence in myself and my team than ever before.
We now have a plan for when tech doesn’t work right in a million different ways.
We took the stress and made it work for us.
Final Thoughts
Your stress response management is key to your long-term mental, physical, and business health.
Don’t give in to it; learn from it.
Every time you rewrite the program and step back to a place of emotional regulation, you make a deposit in your confidence bank account and come back stronger with a big return on your investment.
Let’s make this part of our everyday and step into our greatness.
Now go and make it a better-than-fantastic day!