When stressed you make poor decisions. When stretched you get creative and find better ways forward. Stress is not caused by a full calendar - it\'s caused by the wrong kind of mental stimulation. Varied activities, meaningful conversations, and creative challenges keep your brain performing at its highest. Clarity requires being stretched, not stressed. Build varied stimulation into your schedule, take deliberate breaks, and you gain the perspective to make sharper decisions.
Are you spending your days stressed and overwhelmed, or stretched and creative? Stress has less to do with how full your calendar is and more to do with how you stimulate your brain. In this episode, I explain why you have to create space in your day for a variety of stimulations and stop trying to escape through mindless activities. You'll also hear why finding clarity is the most important thing you can do to set yourself up for success. Don't miss this episode if you want to supercharge your productivity by making a few simple changes in your routine.
How Do You Know if You're Stressed vs Stretched?
When you're stressed, you make poor decisions because your thinking gets foggy. When you're stretched with varied stimulation, you get creative and find better ways forward. Stress isn't caused by a full calendar - it's caused by the wrong kind of mental stimulus. A packed schedule of varied work, exercise, meaningful conversations, and creative challenges keeps your brain performing at its highest level.
In this Episode:
- What's the difference between being stressed and being stretched?
- You're trying to escape from stress with the wrong things. Try this instead
- Things you can do throughout your day to stimulate your brain, including one odd thing a friend of mine swears helped in building a highly successful company
- Why a personal vacation can be your key to clarity
- What my team spends more time on than any other task to ensure success
- The number one rule for clarity
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Transcript
It's true - when we're STRESSED we make poor decisions, but when we are STRETCHED we get creative and find new better ways to keep growing.
Now my day is stretched to the limit every day and that's by design. Because I know that 'down-time' can literally cause stress and slow down our performance. And I've got too much to accomplish to perform less than at my best at all times.
But most people get this point wrong and when they feel stressed they think they need "an escape" like watching TV or some other MIND-NUMBING experience like that.
That kind of an escape literally slows down progress and makes you perform in a less effective way.
What Simple Strategy Clears Your Mind When You're Overwhelmed?
Instead of trying to escape with mindless television or passivity, add varied stimulations to your day. Exercise, a walk, listening to music, reading something challenging, or having thought-provoking conversations with other leaders all change the type of mental input your brain is receiving. This variety allows your brain to process the problems you've been working on while it receives a completely different stimulus, which is far more effective than numbing escape.
What Do High Growth Entrepreneurs Do Differently?
When you're stressed, you make poor decisions because your thinking gets foggy. When you're stretched with varied stimulation, you get creative and find better ways forward. Stress isn't caused by a full calendar - it's caused by the wrong kind of mental stimulus. A packed schedule of varied work, exercise, meaningful conversations, and creative challenges keeps your brain performing at its highest level.
Successful people know that to CONSISTENTLY perform at their BEST - their schedule needs to be stretched - and it needs to include a lot of "different stimulations" because having a variety of stimulations in our lives gives our brains the ability to process information better and faster.
So if your work requires you sit at a desk in front of a computer most of the day then stimulations that could drastically improve your cognitive performance or your brain's ability to be effective and creative might be:
- Spending a night laughing with your family
- Exercising
- Walking on the beach
- Hiking in the mountains
- Listening to someone play the piano
- Reading thought-provoking books
- Or having thought-provoking conversations with other leaders
All these things are different stimulations than your brain is used to when you're sitting at your desk all day.
What Do You Need to Perform at Your Best?
Stop trying to escape and start varying your mental stimulation instead. Passive escape like television slows your brain. What works is switching the type of mental input you receive - exercise, a walk, a conversation with another leader, reading something challenging. These variations allow your brain to process background problems and return with clarity it couldn't reach by grinding harder.
So to perform better than you are today, you don't need 'an escape' at the end of your day, you need to add a variety of stimulations to your life, because your brain functions better when it's given a task or challenge, then allowed to gestate on solutions while it's being stimulated in a different way...
Which is why so many great business decisions are made NOT in the office or in the boardroom -> they're made on the golf course or in the gym or hiking or sailing.
Why Do You Need Both Work and Varied Stimulation?
High growth entrepreneurs build varied stimulation into their schedule deliberately. They don't try to escape their business - they change the type of mental input they're receiving. This is where major business breakthroughs happen, away from the office when the brain processes problems during different activities. A thought that won't surface in a boardroom often emerges on a walk or at the gym.
For years I took a personal vacation once a year that fully recharged me and helped me to be super clear on exactly what opportunities I should be taking advantage of in life.
So many times, we get bombarded with opportunities, I have literally dozens (maybe even hundreds) if I'm being honest with myself of opportunities that come to me each week, and I'm sure you do too.
And it becomes very difficult at times to be clear on the best path to MEET OR EXCEED YOUR TARGETS.
Click here to see the video on exactly how I manage those personal vacations (Here's the perfect vacation for business growth and entrepreneurship), because they're super powerful, so very well worth it, and the leaders that I've taught the system to have all become super achievers in their life too.
Why Is Clarity Your Most Valuable Asset?
To perform at your best you need both working your ass off AND deliberate breaks with varied stimulation. Your brain needs the space to process information and become clear. When you give your brain a task then shift to a completely different activity, it continues working on the original problem in the background. That's the condition clarity needs to emerge.
And using tools like this are vital to your success because if we fail to do this we set ourselves up for being stressed, and when we're stressed our thought process gets foggy, but the moment we break free of that we get CLEAR on what the best use of our time is and what actions we can take to exceed our expectations in life.
Getting clear is so important to success that in my companies that we spend more time on getting clear than we do on ANY other individual task.
- Clarity as to where you are and where you're going.
- Clarity as to what team you need to get there.
- Clarity as to the relationships you need to get there.
- Clarity as to the tasks needed to get there.
- Clarity on the daily actions that need to take place to get there.
- Clarity as to who's going to help you short cut your success curve.
Rule #1 about clarity is that you cannot be clear if you're stressed.
Rule #2 is that clarity is far easier when you're stretched, and you can do that by changing the stimulation you give your brain throughout the day.
How Do You Build Varied Stimulation Into Your Day?
Both work and varied stimulation are non-negotiable for top performance. You can't reach peak decisions by grinding harder without breaks, and you can't reach them by pure escape either. The combination of intense focus and varied breaks is what produces the clarity that governs every decision that follows. That's how you perform at your highest level.
Take a minute and list 2-3 tips you think are helpful to change what you focus, even for just a few minutes during the day, that could help refresh your brain.
Like do you have a favorite song you listen to that changes your mental state. Or do you stop your day for 5 minutes and do pushups and jumping jacks. Or do you look away from your computer every 20 minutes and look outside at the green trees.
I have a super successful friend who built one of the largest companies in his industry who keeps a joke book on his desk and flips through it until he finds one that makes him laugh twice a day.
What do you do, or what can you do to stimulate your mind in a different way that helps refresh your brain each day?
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