In this episode, we discuss how we allow acute stress in our lives and not chronic stress to you want to progress in life.
Full Transcripts
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how we shouldn’t strive for a stress-free life. The right type of stress means that you have opportunities in life. Chronic stress typically means you have no control over your life and there are limited opportunities.
I feel like the right ratio for your day is 20% stress and 80% not stressed out. For me, this stress comes from trying to make something work in my business or a family issue that I need to overcome. These stressful moments come to teach me how to become a better person.
When it comes to family and personal matters, I used to run away from problems and when I used to do this, it just makes the situation worse because I’m dealing with something that I should of let go a long time ago. Then the problem just gets worse. Now I try to go into the mindset that this uncomfortable thing that I have to face is an opportunity to get better.
Same thing at work. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been grinding trying to put together these presentations on financial planning topics, and I gave myself a tight deadline. I want to make sure that I do a good job, but I also don’t want to wait six months to do something. I gave myself two weeks and I was able to get 19 people to sign-up for my webinar. So now I have to go out and produce to make sure I deliver something.
Now after I finished these two webinars, I told myself that I’m going to take it easy with the webinars for a month before I decide to create another one. Hence the 20% stress and 80%, not stress. I feel that a really good life is a combination of sprints and periods of rest.
In the sprints, you learn a lot of stuff and you get a lot of stuff done, but we can’t keep up this pace forever. This is why we need to schedule breaks, but in these sprints, we can learn a lot about ourselves and test our human potential.
People in developing countries don’t report the same levels as stress as people in developed countries and a lot of that has to deal with opportunities. A person in a developed country has fewer opportunities to lead a team of individuals on a project that could lead thousands or even a million dollars.
Now if you don’t know how to manage these opportunities, then they can be overwhelming and cause us to breakdowns. Also, we could be working on something that we think is important and it’s not really that important. I remember visiting my brother-in-law’s office for a happy hour and then he showed us his office and there were two people still working on stuff on a Friday night.
My brother-in-law and I talked later and we discussed how that extra work isn’t really created that much extra value, it’s just showing that they are in the office more. This type of mindset of thinking that more time in the office can lead to chronic stress because they are not taking to relax and be creative. They are probably not going to eat well because they have to eat out and can’t prepare meals at home cause they will be so tired when they finally get home. And this will seem normal to them because they’ve been doing it for so long. Then the chronic stress starts to creep in and they will start to get higher blood pressure and other heart-related diseases.
This is not the type of stress you want in your life. You want the type of stress that pushes for a short period of time to accomplish something, not add marginally better improvements to the system. The need to be average is over, and we need to know how to move up the value ladder if we want to give ourselves more control over our lives and we start with that by stopping the inferior decisions we make in our day that bring in chronic stress.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, don’t live a stress-free life. Our day, week, and month should be roughly 20% stressful with the other 80% being in our control to the best of our ability. Now, this isn’t a perfect number but I think it’s a good rule of thumb. We might even have a stressful year, but hopefully, this stress is leading you to great things and not a dead end. Acute stress can make us stronger and wiser. If you go to the gym, you want to put stress on the gym, but if you turn that stress into chronic stress, then every day that stress is chipping away at the foundation and then you can end up with an overuse injury. The same concept applies to our relationships and career. So look at your day and see how you need to design it so you have the right balance of stress in it.
If you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday, and as a bonus, you will also get my time management course and my personal development cheat sheet. You can get all this for $13/mo, which is less than the cost of an audible subscription and it’s less work to gain more wisdom. You can get this offer at growwithjoe.me/journal
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my Audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
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