#19: When Your Stress Becomes Their Problem — How Leaders Can Stop the Spillover

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dawn:  Okay. We're recording. Hold. Uh oh.

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It does not magically disappear. It leaks out through our communication. Sometimes manic urgency and very often creates unintended consequences. Your stress becomes the atmosphere that your team absorbs. And we like to say it this way. If you don't own your stress, your stress will own you. Mic drop, bam.

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We're all in this together. Yep. Nobody's immune to the stresses that come with the pressures of  life and leadership at every level, right? Mm-hmm. The difference is how we respond to it, how we navigate it. When we don't have an intentional way to process our stress, we will internalize it, we will transmit it, and usually both.

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That's a deep dive on the Kairo Circle Today. We just wanna give you a vision for how you can. Use this tool very practically. Yeah. Next time you feel that stress building, because this is a reality that we all experience, right? We have experienced the  stress spiral, we've seen the stress spiral in our clients, our leaders that we work with.

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All the leaders we work with are guilty of it. Right. I mean, the number of meetings, you know, I've sat in on with clients. And I, you know,  nowadays with all of the advances in understanding of science and our biology, we know that we're basically just a big ball of energy. And think of different frequencies when we're coming into any space and we're operating out of a high stress frequency.

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And then his friend, this girl comes to the street corner to wait with him to get on the bus, and she's all cheery and  happy and excited. And so she's carrying, she's operating with a totally different frequency. And what happens is after a few, snippets, all of a sudden now she's in the same place that he is.

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eric: we've gotta pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We've gotta muscle through. We develop coping mechanisms so that we can get onto the next task, the next responsibility, the next  meeting, the next call, the next whatever it is that we have to do. And then it's not just at work. Then we go from work to home and home to work, and then to whatever things we're doing with our friends.

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It gets transmitted. We pass it on, right? We call this  the negative form of paying it forward. I feel stressed and therefore I'm gonna transmit this stress, this energy into the relationships and the conversations and the emails and the text without even realizing a lot of times.

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What if we could see them instead as signals or indicators that something's going on internally for us, we, we've been  disrupted. The question is will we ignore these indicators or will we use them to our benefit?

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dawn: So what would it look like then, Eric, for us to engage  this stress, this pressure in a healthy way?

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Than our competitors. Mm-hmm. And so what we're talking about right now is  for us as leaders, I think it's important to think of it as how do we practice processing our stress so that our capacity to operate under even greater pressure increases? I, I would dare say that the real measure of leadership.

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This is practice, this is training, this is an opportunity for me to increase my  capacity, but how do I practice well to increase that capacity? Mm-hmm. So this is where this tool, the Kairo Circle and the we're, we're gonna unpack basically the principles of this tool and how we can leverage them in our lives.

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Paying attention to kind of our mental state of being, our emotional state of being, or even our physical state of being. And anything that feels disruptive is an indicator I'm under stress.  Okay? That's just an indicator. Doesn't mean I'm a bad leader. I need to pay attention to this. And then processing through that stress to ask the question, not only why do I feel this stress, but what is the narrative that I'm.

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And then. To give ourselves the opportunity. What does the best version of me do? Or how does the best version of me respond in a situation like this? That is, in my estimation, like the $64 million question that we have trained leaders and that so many people have come back and said, Eric, that is one of the most helpful questions that I now use whenever I'm feeling stressed and I start processing that stress.

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I'm stretching into a, an area of discomfort. And, and it feels a little scary. Yeah. And in those  moments, right, our coach would say what he'd say, what kind of team do you want to be? How do you wanna show up game time? Do you want to have a competitive advantage over the team we're playing against? Do you wanna achieve the goals that we set out to achieve this year?

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dawn: Yeah. I, I want to kind of, as you like to  say, double click on something that you said because that idea that we can choose how we're gonna show up.

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Is kind of that key that can unlock the prison for you because it, when you start to experience it, instead of saying, this is  out of my control, it literally gives us a path that we can walk down to regain control and put the best version of ourselves back in the driver's seat. It's a game changer.

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Mm-hmm. And that's the pathway that leads to greater freedom. Because we realize, wow, I'm the only person who can be in control of my attitudes and behaviors. I'm the only person who can choose how I'm gonna show up in the midst of distress. I'm the only person who can choose how I process and navigate what my internal  world the world doesn't get to choose that for me.

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Like when I wrote it, I was like, okay. Yeah. And now, like a couple days later that we're processing it together. This isn't working, and I'm getting a sense of that. You were getting a sense of that. You were trying to jump in and start making some edits. And what happened in that  moment was the stress started crushing in on me.

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dawn: Yeah. I mean, as probably many of our leaders can appreciate, I. Am a driven, you know, leader  that likes to be a high performer. And when I don't live up to my own standard, I have a sense that my lack of perfection disqualifies me from participation.

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dawn: Right. So all of this now is crashing in on me as we are processing this podcast that is not going to plan. Right. I start to feel internally hijacked. I'm not listening a lick to what you're saying.  You're like clicking along and trying to start trying.

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eric: what, so what you're saying is I  led really well in that

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We found  a path that we wanted to go down for that episode. And it was awesome. It was a great experience.

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I start to withhold what I should be bringing to any situation because I'm just so stuck in myself. In that moment, right? Where I  become a taker instead of a giver like that. That's, that's what's at stake here.

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'cause we can only be givers when we're not consumed with ourself, when we're not overly  preoccupied with, you know, our own emotions and our own thoughts. Right. And so, and I think as leaders, that's an, that's a really, I mean, we can do a whole series of episodes on. The challenges of being a giver and taker and how quickly we can cross the line between one or the other based on how we're experiencing our situation.

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Yeah. So that we don't get stuck in a taking posture and we can return back to being givers where we're, we're ready to show up and bring the best of ourself to the environment. Wow. Wow. That's awesome. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for the  vulnerability. Authenticity. I think that's what we need.

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I think you guys are full of, full of crap, whatever. Like, we just wanna hear how this is landing on listeners so that we can better, we can better share you guys. All right. Lemme just share briefly my own experience with this. I'm gonna share again, vulnerably and, and authentically, started this business in power coaching  years ago with a couple of friends and and it was just a blast for the first, two, three years until tensions start to arise, right? Because in any partnership, tensions are gonna arise because. And we spent so much time and energy trying to resolve some of these conflicts and difference of opinions and perspectives about where the business was going and how we wanted to operate.

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And it got to the point where, they made a decision that they felt like these were unresolvable differences and decided that they  would. They wanted to part ways. And so I'm now, I mean, and the pressure for me internally is just compounding and compounding and compounding. And I am absolutely guilty of having tried various coping mechanisms forms of medica medicating against the pain, the stress, the angst of what I was going through, which all.

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eric: You were able to navigate it within a few minutes and we moved forward and it was,  it was resolved and it was amazing and it, and it, it led to a greater outcome.

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Is

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Right. There's a difference between that and self-loading,  self-condemnation, self-flagellation. Right. There's a, there's a massive difference between those two. Yes.

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But I'm so grateful for  some of these tools that gave me some practical handles to, to press through in, in healthy ways, in productive, constructive ways. That eventually over time led to a little bit of the sun, started to break through, the clouds started to dissipate, and eventually I came out on the other side feeling really like I had learned a ton.

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eric: They just provide simple,  clear tracks. If I will just stay in this process, if I'll just keep, stay on this track, I will the, the there is light at the end of the tunnel.

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dawn: That's all right. Well help us understand. For our listeners, what are some things we can start to do this week?  Obviously, obviously you and I are passionate about this tool, this process, but if you're, if they're, if our listeners are new to this Yeah.

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Yeah. But just learning to identify the indicators, the signals that, Hey, I'm under. A stress that is disruptive. And then secondly, identifying, okay, some of these are worth processing, right? Some of these we can recognize if these are the  top one or two stress points for me right now. These are worth processing, which by the way, is what we spend most of our time doing with clients, right?

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I get to choose, okay, then how does the best version of me wanna  respond to this? How do I wanna operate in the midst of whatever the stress is that I'm experiencing? Which gives me a chance to choose. That's right. The version of me that I wanna put forward. And so I think for our listeners, like that's actually something we can practically do here.

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That's exactly it. And I just wanna remind our listeners as well and ourselves that our people don't need us to be perfect.  We often sense that that's the case, but our people don't need us to be perfect. They need us to be present, they need us to partner with them.

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We're grateful for the journey that we're on with you. If you know a leader who's struggling with stress right now. Send this episode their way. As always, subscribe, like, comment, let us know what you want us to talk about. What do you want to hear more about? We're all in this journey together. We're all in the  same boat.