You describe yourself as an “ex-stress” junkie. What is it about stress, busyness, and that “go-go-go lifestyle that become addictive (for yourself and for others)?
There are a few dynamics at play that can keep people very much caught in the stress cycle and go-go-go lifestyle. For one thing, stress very much becomes a habit, often beginning back in our early 20’s when we first start working (perhaps post-university) and want to prove ourselves or are in genuinely demanding roles are that are over-stretching us. It can also kick in at any age if we find ourselves in a role of high responsibility and/or high workload. I’ve seen this over and over again. Over time stress patterns creep up on people and then it becomes their new normal. They rush everywhere. They over-book themselves all the time. They get wound up about things, easily overwhelmed or short tempered and that becomes their norm too. They can literally forget who they were before their stress junkie status, or even that there was another version of themselves.
This ties in to another powerful dynamic at play which is that is that we have normalised stress in our society: we literally think it’s just part of life. People shrug their shoulders and say “Well, everybody’s stressed so why am I complaining?” It has also been glamorised. The checkout operator at the supermarket will ask you “How’s your day going? Been busy?” We all want to appear “Busy and important darling!” This normalisation of stress is probably the most insidious because being busy makes us feel worthy and approved of, and lots of people around us are also stressed and caught up in it.
It can take some mental gymnastics to unhook yourself from that culture and start doing what I call ‘being your own flow’. I often have to have very frank conversations with clients about the choices here. If you decide to de-stress for good, you will be going against the grain. Some people will think you’re having a midlife crisis because you’ve decided not to stress about certain things, or move to a 3-day work week, or put in better boundaries with people. I call it a midlife catharsis.
In our modern day lives there is a lot of talk about “Hustle Culture”, and the idea that success is possible only when a lot of other things take a backseat. Is it possible to have a successful professional life without this nose-to-the-grindstone mind set?
My instant response to this is that yes, it’s possible to have the success without the sacrifice, but I also know that the idea you have to ‘slog yer guts out’ to be successful (one of my own inherited family beliefs) is still alive and well in our society. When clients come to me, they’re often business owners who no longer want to be a slave to their business, who want more time freedom, or who simply want to enjoy work more by lowering their stress (and sometimes their temper). We look at their mind-set around this, as well as the practical ways to create the lifestyle they want. It’s often a process of transitioning from how things operate currently to the ‘new normal’ they’re after. The mind-set piece is usually crucial because so many of us are pre-programmed to think we have to work hard in order to succeed. It can be very hard-wired in!
An increasing number of people are realising this is not the way they want to live any more. The pandemic has magnified this and connected people more fully with what really matters to them and that they’re no longer up for the slog. I think that’s a big reason there are swathes of entrepreneurs all around the world now running phenomenally successful online businesses and earning great incomes – they’re doing it on their own terms.
This can also be very role and industry specific. The nature and flow of work can vary wildly between different jobs and businesses, and for start-ups work can be especially full on. For some there might be busy periods where they’re working to deadlines they have no control over and they’ll have nose-to-the-grindstone moments. The things to ask yourself are – is it in balance and is it sustainable?
I often talk about balancing – yes, the verb – because genuine life work balance is not really a noun and a thing that you have, it’s more something that you do. You might have a busy week or a busy month but what does the rest of the month or year look like? Having peaks of busyness is not such a bad thing when you’re balancing it with a healthy lifestyle. It’s when work is a constant peak of long hours and intensive working that it becomes unsustainable.
It’s also very much about defining your own idea of success and thinking outside the box. What is a successful professional life to you? For some people they don’t consider their professional life successful if they are not feeling physically and mentally and emotionally well or if their family life is not happy and healthy. For others, it is purely about how much they’ve grown their business or revenue or market share, or where they’ve got to on the career ladder. For others it’s about having work they love and a great lifestyle. That’s my kind of ideal professional life, and I think you can absolutely have both.
You’ve said that splitting yourself between your personal and professional lives is old school. Can you explain what you mean by this and how we can merge the two together in a healthy way?
I wonder if it was the industrial revolution that really embedded this idea that people can go to work like machines, and should go to work and just do their job, leaving life and themselves at the door. The corporate environment has also fostered a culture of the professional persona and we’ve all heard the expression ‘leave your problems at the door’. We now know so much about human performance that it feels truly out-dated to be thinking in this black and white way. Of course, we do go to work to work, but the whole self goes to work, whether you like it or not. The mental, emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of the self are all part of who we are – and they go to work with us every day. We can’t separate ourselves from any of these parts of us and we shouldn’t. It might pay to remember that people who do this really well are usually given clinical psychiatric diagnoses!
When I went into private practice as a coach following a corporate career, I worked with a lot of clients around stress, anxiety, depression and trauma. I learned very quickly that what was happening for people personally was often impacting them at work. Or to put it another way, their goals for their professional life were often reached through doing very personal work. Our professional self is not a separate person, and it’s all personal.
There are so many examples of this such as a CEO wanting to have more impact on others as a leader who got to that through clearing some old perceptions from childhood of being an ‘unimportant person who shouldn’t get too full of himself’ (a very common pattern). For someone else their short temper at work was connected to some traumatic work situations during their latter teenage years. For somebody else their stress about the economy in recent years was connected to a very difficult time they went through during the 2006 recession in London. So, many of our personal experiences and unconscious conditioning can be holding us back as adults. Helping people to transform these patterns and liberate themselves from their stuckness is one of my favourite things to do!
Tell us what inspired your business name, “Start With You”?
The name came from a lot of soul-searching, I can tell you! Its roots are in a very simple idea – that you can’t control everything in the world, but you can take charge of yourself. Whatever we want to achieve, feel or experience in life, it starts from the inside. We each deserve to know how to take care of how we think and feel, and truly be in charge of that. This is the basis for personal growth and mastery in any area of life.
It’s really easy for us to blame the traffic, our boss, the economy and of course the pandemic for how we feel or what we have going on, but every time we do that we take our hands off the steering wheel of our own life and are at the mercy of circumstances.
Stress is an inside job. Joy is an inside job. Contentment is an inside job. It’s all an inside job.
You’ve had feedback from clients that you have worked with during the pandemic that they are actually in a better space now than they were before the pandemic! What tools do you offer to help your clients “steady their own ship” during these unpredictable times?
Yes, this has been a wonderful phenomenon to see and it has largely been from the tools I share around taking charge of your internal state how you think and feel and to be able to choose your response to situations. When we are being at the mercy of our circumstances, as I alluded to above, we really are like a ship on a stormy sea getting battered about. I teach specific tools that help you to access the nervous system in order to calm the body down, flick out of the stress response (fight-flight-freeze) and to come back into equilibrium. (There are a number of free resources on my website to help people do this, see below).
I also work with clients to reset their nervous system through the guided processes I utilise so that they are not triggering into stress so easily in the first place. A lot of people right now have what is called cumulative stress or chronic stress and they are very easily triggered into the stress response during the day. When this starts to happen it can be very hard to settle the body down and feel calm again. Once we remove those trigger responses it’s easier for the person to stay calmer in the first place. This is what I define as resilience. A lot of people consider resilience to be about being able to handle more stress. I believe it is about being less stressed in the first place.
Right now with the pandemic and lockdowns and so on we are all getting plenty of opportunities to spot our fears and stress patterns. It can feel scary or daunting to face them and change them, but people often say to me that it was easier (and even more fun!) than they were expecting. I’m so proud of my clients who have really stepped up and really grown themselves over this time.
You offer so many coaching programmes, plus your blog and other online resources, and on top of all of this you’re also a public speaker! What are some of your “non-negotiables” that keep your own energy levels up so you can deliver your best to your clients?
My non-negotiables include working a certain number of hours a week (eg. I work a four-day week), scheduling my coaching sessions in manageable blocks and allowing myself to be in one mode at a time – for instance, on a given afternoon I will be either in coaching mode, writing mode or marketing mode, and not trying to do all of those things at once, plus resting regularly. I used to ‘push through’ all the time but now if I feel a little brain-fried or weary, I pause and rest.
I eat very clean most of the time, and while I had a boozy youth I no longer drink. I do drink heaps of water mind you! I have a daily spiritual practice. I spend a lot of time in nature. I generally don’t engage in media (with the exception of great mags like Dish, NZ Gardener and Verve of course!).
I’ve realised that it’s not time or money we really need, it’s energy. This realisation means I’m pretty fussy now about what I let into my world; whether it’s what I eat, drink, listen to, watch or who I spend time with. Sometimes fussiness can be a good thing!
These are the things that help me manage my energy well, help me feel good and keep my tank filled. But … what makes all of this happen is a decision I made some time ago to prioritise my own well-being first; something I try to instill in all of my clients too.
Tel: 0800 TO START
