Why You Need More Stress
SUMMARY
The most successful people seem to thrive under pressure.
THE KEYS TO THRIVING UNDER PRESSURE:
1. Stop over-stressing over wrong things.
2. Realize that pressure is good….makes you stronger/better.
3. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Embrace good stress and pressure as path to success. It is.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Without pressure, without risk, without the chance of failure, there’s no chance of success.
If you want more success, you need more stress. That’s right, you need more stress in your life. Now, I know you probably don’t want to hear it, but I’m going to tell you something, stress is underrated. We’re in a world where nobody wants stress. And yet if you look around you and you look at history, the most successful people in the world are those who seem to thrive under pressure. It’s when the pressure is on, when they are under tremendous stress, that they actually come through and shine the brightest. Pressure is how diamonds are made, pressure is how the best become the best. There is no greatness without pressure. Without risk, without the chance of failure, there’s no chance of success. What I want to tell you today is that stress is awesome, and I’m going to share with you in this video three keys for how to thrive under pressure.
It’s just you got to do it, you got to learn how to thrive under pressure. Three keys for thriving under pressure, and not folding under pressure. Number one is stop over stressing over unimportant things. Stop over stressing or stressing out at all over things that don’t matter. See, the problem is, is that we get stressed out over things where; one, we have no control. And two, where there’s actually no threat, there’s actually no danger. The danger is not real, it’s just perceived. It’s that whole idea of fear is false evidence appearing real, where we get stressed out by things that really can’t hurt us, that can affect us. But we dwell on them, we think on them, we focus on them. And as we focus on those things, we go like, “Oh, what if? What if?” And we live in this world of, “What if this happens?” And it’s always goes negative. We literally can stress ourselves out, freak ourselves out over things that are never going to happen. Stop doing it.
See, one of the things is, is we live in a world today where there’s so many things that are actually true dangers in our life. So we don’t stress over actual dangers, we stress over perceived dangers. When we do that, it just freaks us out. The way to overcome that is to begin putting yourself intentionally into those situations that make you stress, embrace that, move into it. Because what happens is stress becomes bad when stress turns into distress. When stress turns into distress, now we panic, we lose perspective, we lose control of our emotions, control of our judgment, and we start falling apart. So ask yourself, “Is this really something to stress out, or am I just making a big deal over something small?” In other words, what is the worst possible thing that could happen? And if you can live with that, there’s nothing to worry about.
Just go like, “Okay, I got this.” So stop stressing over the wrong things, because all that does is it just adds to the cortisol, the stress hormone that builds up in your body that can lead to all kinds of literally leads to health problems. So stop stressing over things that don’t matter, that you can’t control, over things where there’s actually no danger or no threat.
Number two is just simply to realize and acknowledge that pressure is good. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing. We’re in a culture now where pressure is considered to be something to be avoided, when the reality is that pressure is what makes you stronger, pressures is what makes you better. If you want your muscles … if I want to build a muscle, if I want to build my muscles, if I want to get stronger, how do I do that? Pressure. Stress. When you put your muscles under a load and you stress them, that is the only way you can build muscle, it’s the only way you can get stronger.
It’s the only way you can get stronger physically, it’s the only way you can get stronger mentally and tougher mentally, and it’s the only way you can get stronger emotionally, is by literally putting yourselves in situations where you are under stress. Because stress helps you build yourself, it does not weaken you. What happens not only does it make you stronger, it also makes you more alert. Whenever the pressure’s on, all your senses are turned on, you are totally present in the moment.
So not only does it give you more power, it also gives you better presence when you embrace pressure and learn to survive and thrive under pressure. One of the things that’s happened is that a lot of places in pop culture, media, parenting is that we’ve made pressure a bad thing. We’ve made stress a bad thing, and we treat it like it’s something to be avoided at all costs. One of the things that a lot of parents try to do is they try to keep their children from being in situations where they’re under pressure.
Because they’re like, “Well, I want to protect my children.” Well, the problem is you’re protecting your children from the very things that can make them strong and able to handle pressure by not putting them in situations where there is pressure. Pressure is great … when children have to compete, when children have to perform, young people at all ages if they do that and you put them under situations where there’s some control … where you’re in control, you’re able to monitor it and you’re able to protect them, but let them be under pressure. Let them learn that that’s a great thing. They’re going to they’re going to do great, you encourage them through it, and they will win through it. As they get stronger over time, they begin to have more confidence in themselves, they build their self image, their self esteem. They realize that, “I like pressure. I want to be the one that gets the ball in my hands.” When the game is on the line, and you’re 10 seconds away, who’s going to take the game winning shot when everything is on the line?
Well, the only way you’re going to get comfortable doing that is putting yourself in that situation over, and over, and over, and over again. That’s how you get stronger, that’s how you build confidence. Embrace pressure as the way you get better, and as the way you get stronger. The more we try to protect ourselves from pressure, the more we try to protect our children from pressure, the weaker we become, and the weaker they become. We’ve actually created a whole vocabulary of making pressure, making stress evil like, “Oh, I’m so stressed out.” Really? Well, you’re stressed out because you’re stressing over the wrong things, and you haven’t trained yourself to embrace and thrive under pressure. “I just want to be comfortable. I don’t want the stress. Please don’t don’t, I don’t like pressure.” That is a way that many people communicate. It’s the way they feel, and it becomes a whole way of behaving and being in the world is we avoid pressure. We reject stress as evil, as bad, that it gets damaging.
And the reality is you don’t have pressure, you don’t have stress, you’re going to be weak, and you’re never going to be able to perform, and you’re never going to be able to to succeed. The third key to thriving under pressure is to embrace getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Get comfortable being on uncomfortable, just embrace it. When you embrace the right kind of stress; the situations that puts you on your toes, the situations that make you perform at your best where’s there’s actually the possibility of failure. If there’s no possibility of failure, there’s also no possibility of great success. In those situations, you embrace them. You embrace them until you get comfortable being uncomfortable, that’s when you become great. That’s when you have the opportunity to become the best. I was watching the movie recently Free Solo. And if you’ve not seen the movie, Free Solo is a documentary film about Alex Honnold, who is a rock climber.
The difference between Alex Honnold and most rock climbers is he loves what they call free soloing, and free soloing simply means you climb these huge mountains of cliffs, of sheer rock without any safety devices, no harness, no safety ropes, you’re just your hands and feet, and that’s it. And you’re climbing these massive hundreds and thousands of feet tall stone faces of mountains with just … if you fall, you’re dead. I watched that movie, the movie Free Solo, and I’m watching it and I’m literally sweating. I watch, my hands, my palms are sweating. Even thinking about it, my palms get sweaty. I just I sweat for him because I know he ain’t sweating because if he sweats he loses his grip. So he’s out there doing it. But my fear, my stress watching him climb is totally irrational. I’m under no threat, there’s no pressure on me. There’s no danger, and yet I’m sweating. What it exposes is my fear of heights, right? But I avoid heights because I don’t like them, because they’re scary to me.
Well, if I wanted to master and I needed to master being a free climber, being able to handle heights, what do I have to do? I have to expose myself to the things that I’m afraid of. I have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s true in business, it’s true in sales, it’s true as real estate agents, is if you want to master talking to people and you’re uncomfortable talking to people, you want to master prospect, you want to master objection handling, put yourselves in pressure situations where that you’re actually them on the edge of your comfort zone and even beyond your comfort zone. Because as you get outside your comfort zone, your comfort zone literally expands. You put yourself in those positions. In the military, it’s exactly what boot camp is designed for and what boot camp does, and that it is designed to put soldiers under intense pressure, pressure that is so intense that they think they can’t handle it, that they think they’re going to break. Yet they don’t break, and in the process they learn that they are capable of more than they ever dreamed.
They learn that they can push their limits, and when they push their limits, they have more. They can dig deeper, and they can accomplish more so that when they get into the real battle, when they get into real life situations, they don’t fold under pressure because they have trained themselves to be resilient, to be courageous, to be strong, and to thrive under pressure, to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Stop avoiding stress. Please stop looking at stress as a bad thing. Embrace good stress as the path to great success, and you’ll get it. Now if you liked the video, if it’s for you, please give it a thumbs up. If this is your first time here on my channel, make sure you subscribe to the channel, recommend it to other people. If you got any questions, comments, thoughts, I’d love for you to put them in the comments below and carry on this conversation. You need more great stress in your life because I know you deserve more success in your life.