As our world evolves, we’re constantly bombarded with the need to elevate our performance in life and business. In this month of stress awareness, we thought to provide you some insights on stress and how it negatively impacts your performance.

One survey question we’ve been asking business owners and leaders for the past 4+ years is “Is your work and business making you experience stress, overwhelm, anxiety and burnout?”

Most of the time, and we mean 95% of the time, the answer is positive.

We also ask a follow up question “How important is being productive without jeopardizing any aspect of your life?”

Using the 1-10 rating system, the response to this is over 90% between 9-10.

This article is to share our innovative harmonious life insights on stress and how leaders can navigate it effectively.

Before we proceed, let’s find a connection between:

  1. stress
  2. overwhelm
  3. anxiety
  4. burnout

We believe the last 3 issues on the list all stem from No 1 and represent different levels of progression from the first.

  1. Stress happens when there’s a lot of things (both pleasant and unpleasant) you’re trying to handle.
  2. Overwhelm can result from taking on excessive load from life’s demands and obligations.
  3. Anxiety can happen because you’re now burdened by the weight you’re carrying.
  4. Burnout occurs when you can’t handle the weight anymore that you begin to crumble under it. Read our last article on business burnout

The challenges of these times continue to create more stress in our lives, especially for those who lead. Without managing stress, it’s almost impossible for business leaders to achieve sustainable and peak performance both in life and business. These historically precarious days are more than ever, exposing the necessity for optimally performing leaders.

In as much as we can’t avoid anxiety-producing situations in life and business, we must learn to overcome them if we want to build long-term success. We can all agree that anxious leaders who are not effectively equipped to handle uncertainty, might struggle with navigating a team and business to safety and flourishing, during intense challenges.

Let’s start with understanding how stress affects you personally.

It reduces your focus, depletes your energy, negatively impacts your judgement, attitudes, psychological state, cognitive development and physiological health. The downsides of stress, especially when prolonged, are simply enormous.

Let’s proceed with understanding what stress is.

Stress is a psychological reaction to physiological events and situations. This psychological reaction can manifest in biochemical processes that increase our heart rate, raise our blood pressure, slow down our digestive system, weaken your immune system, impacts other systems in our bodies and in the long run, affects our entire body.

Consequently, it’s been medically proven to create blood clots, cause a stroke and ultimately lead to death.

Why do we experience stress?

There are many medical and sociological explanations for stress but we’ve decided to focus on the most common factors that affect business leaders.

Based on research and learning, we have come to find that leaders name these factors as the cause of daily life stress: obsessive passion, workaholism, excessive demands, uncertainty, confusion, intense pressure, lack of control and work-life imbalance.

Where do we start as leaders?

A guaranteed way to navigate stress is to gain CLARITY of LIFE and SELF. Your life and self awareness is a guaranteed antidote for navigating daily unavoidable challenges. Let’s face it! Pressure and adversity are a consistent part of life. We must accept this truth. However, it is not enough to concede to the fact that we cannot control everything, we must critically learn how to find discernment and clarity through the challenges.

Understanding adversity vs abilities

Here at TOA, we often teach that stress isn’t a circumstance or event but our reaction to adversity. We define adversity as challenges and crisis – the later being an advanced version of the former. A negatively inclined reaction to aversity is majorly as a result of the inability to discern and handle it. When adversity match our abilities (strengths and skillset), we experience a flow state where it becomes easier to overcome. This will eventually lead us towards downscaling and handling problems in a strategic step by step approach. Ultimately, adversity simply becomes a rumbling that can lead to great possibilities.

When adversity doesn’t meet the right abilities, we experience confusion and chaos in our minds, which can affect the rhythm of our heart beat, thereby producing feelings of stress, overwhelm, anxiety and eventually, burnout. Confusion and chaos, as harmless as they sound, can harm us in great ways. Anything that can create agitation and irritation, can cause anxiety, affect our blood pressure and trigger unhealthy conditions.

You ask how one can experience the state of flow. It’s simply by getting rid of all forms of mental clutter and developing mental clarity. Mental clutter creates so much noise in our heads and chatter in our minds. Noise magnifies confusion and chaos and weakens our ability to manage uncertainty and challenges.

Many of us have mastered the art of calming our bodies but not our minds. Did you know that when our bodies are resting, our minds can be intensely noisy? It takes intentionality to equally rest our minds.

 

In July 2020, the World Economic Forum published a paper titled “Digital Transformation: Powering the Great Reset.” While we are trying to reset our businesses, business leaders who think they can “Reset” simply by adopting technology are missing the critical factor required for a sustainable transformation. The ‘humanity first’ factor means that we must primarily hit the reset button within ourselves.

This reset must start with getting the life tools we need to look inwards and master the ability of ensuring our own well-being and mental resilience so we can operate from a place of courage, navigate change in our daily lives and keep harnessing our human potential.

Stress and your leadership potential

All business leaders carry incredible POTENTIALS within – transformational insights, great ideas, innovative solutions to previously unresolved problems and currently ineffectively-solved problems. This potential is the building block of PRODUCTIVITY, according to Arianna Huffington. However, we can’t tap into our infinite potential when we are stressed and anxious as most business leaders currently are. To access our creativity in the midst of changes, uncertainty and chaos, our personal needs have to be met first.

We can’t create and implement new business solutions for the future of work, if we are struggling to simply get through our day. It’s harder to be composed (influence change), compassionate (demonstrate empathy), inclusive (ensure equity), innovative (unravel new ideas) and perceptive (explore alternative perspectives), when we’re consistently operating in stress and it’s related issues.

This is the reason what many of us have known as “personal effectiveness” is more important now than ever. It’s always been a critical part of business leadership, but now it’s highly imperative.

It’s time to thrive, leaders!

If you want to do so in these rapidly changing and pressure-ridden times, you must invest in personal effectiveness and peak performance skills. In order to develop these critical skills,  you need 3 key abilities:

  1. Gaining Clarity: Learn how to clarify your life and calm your mind in order to reduce stress.
  2. Finding Life Harmony: Master the art of flourishing in all areas of your Life Harmony Wheel.
  3. Managing Your Priorities: Make smarter choices, enhance your decision making and manage life’s obligations and opportunities.

 

If you’re a visionary business leader, we have The Flourishing Life mini course and Workbook to help you elevate your performance. It’s FREE. Check it out here.

If you want a more customized approach, we have one-on-one coaching solutions for you. Learn more via the business strategy session link below.

If you are a CEO and COO leading a high growth business and with a need for data-driven and deeper insights on how to boost your performance in life and business? Book a FREE business Productivity Strategy Session today.

 

Why we’re the best productivity solution for your business leadership

We spent over 4 years conducting research and learning the productivity challenges of business owners. The massive data we’ve collected and our deep insights coupled with proven solutions, is what our programs are built on and they will be of immense value to you.

We mix business productivity with behavioural psychology and infuse it with transformational strategy. It’s the special peak-performance cocktail to give you the sustainability advantage others are missing.

Let’s talk via this link.

Looking forward to serving you more.

 

To a more Harmonious Life, Leadership and Business

Jesmine Onyeukwu