Episode Summary
Have you ever felt like the weight of the world was on your shoulders, juggling multiple tasks until stress overwhelms you?
In this episode, discover why thinking your way out of stress might not work and what neuroscience reveals about overcoming overwhelm.
Are you struggling with stress and overwhelmed in your life or business? You're not alone.
In today's fast-paced world, getting caught up in the chaos is easy. But did you know that stress can hijack your brain, limiting your access to creative problem-solving and long-term visioning?
Join us as we delve into the science behind stress and learn practical strategies to regain control and find clarity amidst the chaos.
In this episode, you will:
Understand the neuroscience behind stress and its impact on your brain's ability to function optimally.
Learn practical techniques to effectively regulate your nervous system and overcome overwhelm.
Discover mindset shifts to cultivate resilience and navigate challenges with clarity and confidence.
Ready to reclaim control over your stress and overwhelm?
Scroll up & press play now to gain insights and strategies to empower you to thrive amidst life's challenges.
Leave a voicemail for Jenna: https://www.theuncommonway.com/talk
Schedule a call with Jenna to talk about joining the Clarity Accelerator to dial in the pieces of your successful business and first-rate mindset (the precursor for Power & Potency) https://www.theuncommonway.com/schedule
Sign up here to get on the waitlist for Power & Potency, the new mastermind for accomplished women entrepreneurs, and hear all new information as it's released: https://www.theuncommonway.com/waitlist
The Uncommon Way is led by business coach Jenna Harrison, who helps women entrepreneurs feel confident, find their ideal clients effortlessly and avoid overwork so they can manifest abundance in their business and life.
Have you ever felt like the weight of the world was on your shoulders, juggling multiple tasks until stress overwhelms you?
In this episode, discover why thinking your way out of stress might not work and what neuroscience reveals about overcoming overwhelm.
Are you struggling with stress and overwhelmed in your life or business? You're not alone.
In today's fast-paced world, getting caught up in the chaos is easy. But did you know that stress can hijack your brain, limiting your access to creative problem-solving and long-term visioning?
Join us as we delve into the science behind stress and learn practical strategies to regain control and find clarity amidst the chaos.
In this episode, you will:
Understand the neuroscience behind stress and its impact on your brain's ability to function optimally.
Learn practical techniques to effectively regulate your nervous system and overcome overwhelm.
Discover mindset shifts to cultivate resilience and navigate challenges with clarity and confidence.
Ready to reclaim control over your stress and overwhelm?
Scroll up & press play now to gain insights and strategies to empower you to thrive amidst life's challenges.
Leave a voicemail for Jenna: https://www.theuncommonway.com/talk
Schedule a call with Jenna to talk about joining the Clarity Accelerator to dial in the pieces of your successful business and first-rate mindset (the precursor for Power & Potency) https://www.theuncommonway.com/schedule
Sign up here to get on the waitlist for Power & Potency, the new mastermind for accomplished women entrepreneurs, and hear all new information as it's released: https://www.theuncommonway.com/waitlist
The Uncommon Way is led by business coach Jenna Harrison, who helps women entrepreneurs feel confident, find their ideal clients effortlessly and avoid overwork so they can manifest abundance in their business and life.
Full Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] You know when a lot is piled on your plate, and you're trying to keep your cool, and
then something else gets dropped on you, and then something else, and you feel like you need three of you to even begin to make a dent in it all, and then you're starting to lose sleep, and you notice yourself falling into the victim cave or the shame cave?
Well, this episode is for you.
You're listening to the Uncommon Way Business and Life Coaching Podcast. The podcast that helps women entrepreneurs get clear on signature offers and strategies that sell themselves, so you can lean back and stop the hustle. You will learn to maximize your mindset, messaging and strategy and step into the uncommonly successful business.
And life you are creating. Here's your host, top ranked business coach and reformed over analyzer turned queen of clarity, Jenna Harrison. [00:01:00]
Hey, welcome back to the Uncommon Way. How are you? I'm doing pretty good, thanks for asking. But two weeks ago, I was seriously in it. And by it, I mean the stress and overwhelm. So I realized that I needed to do an episode, now, while I have this fresh perspective.
And it's not just theoretical.
I'm very excited to share with you what neuroscience says about your stress, and why you're not going to be able to think your way out of this, and what to do instead. I'll tell you how to clear out the fog and come up with your best solutions for dealing with everything you have going on. And actually, I swear, hear me out, Feel hopeful about this situation.
Plus, I want to let you know how to not get stuck in the trap of [00:02:00] attracting this to yourself over and over. It's going to be juicy. But first, I have two quick things for you.
First of all, thank you. It turns out our retention rates are through the ceiling, thanks to you. Now, retention is a podcast term that just means how long you listen to the episode. And so, if there's an 80 percent average, people on average are sticking around through 80 percent of the show, that is amazing in podcast land.
And it turns out, We regularly hit that and in fact have many episodes with an average a hundred percent retention rate,
and since the algorithm sees all that, along with the number of downloads and the reviews are what help us get seen by more and more women who need this. and can receive help regardless of economic circumstances. So I know there are a lot of amazing [00:03:00] podcasts, and I'm so grateful to you for sticking with this one and listening to this one.
And I just wanted to share that with you from the bottom of my heart. Now, speaking of receiving help, the second thing. Last episode, we did that episode where Peggy had called in with a question so I want to encourage you to follow her lead and do the same thing. This is really the best deal in the industry, at least that I've heard of, where you can get an episode made for you and, of course, everyone else. Thank you, Peggy, because I had a couple people tell me specifically that episode was so helpful.
So every time you have a question, someone else needs to hear the answer. It's really an act of extreme, giving. and kindness to step up and be the one to ask the question.
Now, the [00:04:00] value of this coaching that you're going to get is well over 500, even more if you implement it. There are some small tweaks that I've had clients implement and they begin pretty immediately seeing revenue increases
or lifestyle increases or clarity increases,
and that can be yours. You've got to head over to the Uncommon Way forward slash talk. There's a link in the show notes. And leave me a voicemail.
And in case you're having trouble narrowing in on what you want to ask me about, here is a prompt for you related to today's episode.
What tends to overwhelm you most in your business, and what do you see as one main obstacle to changing that situation? You got it? Of course, you can ask me about anything at all, but that's something to get the wheels spinning. [00:05:00] Okay, let's get down to it, shall we?
I am going to start with a quick primer, giving the full picture of why we even want to move out of these stressful situations as quickly as possible. Now, some of you might be thinking, duh, I hate being stressed out. Of course I want to move out of this situation. But for many of us, myself included, it's not easy.
Just an innocent ebb and flow of life where things get a little crazy now and then. It's actually a habituated pattern that we ourselves contribute to, and there's a reason. Because deep down, we might think this is what makes us succeed, or makes us more worthy, or many other things. So to help that part of you release its grip a little bit more, I want to show you what's available on the other side.
It is now very well established in the field of neuroscience that stress states cause us to lose [00:06:00] access to the parts of the brain that you most need to access as an entrepreneur. Because, obviously, if you're being chased by a tiger, you don't want to sit there and wait. there and analyze the pros and cons and think creatively about the most creative solution that you could leave the tiger's path, right?
So many other parts of our brain really just aren't needed in that moment. We need to zero in. We need tunnel vision. We need to get the hell out of there and we need to not be thinking a lot.
But, as an entrepreneur, you do need those faculties. You desperately need them. You want access to your most creative thinking. You want access to long term visioning. You want access to problem solving. You want to be analytical.
You want to think abstractly about the meaning of it all and create compelling intellectual property.
And as people who are serving [00:07:00] others and collaborating with others, you want to have The most empathetic parts of your brains lit up. The parts of you that can really connect with other humans. That feel good seeing other humans. That get excited about your interactions with these people. That feel a sense of trust. That feel camaraderie. That feel
more like collaboration instead of competition. Think about it. If you are in a high stress situation, you want to have the most skeptical part of yourself, the potentially most aggressive part of yourself available to defend yourself against a threat. So again, our brains have been wired in ways that make complete sense. They just don't fully serve us quite frequently.
The parts of you that you really want are only fully online when the brain is in what is called a responsive state, [00:08:00] which is when your nervous system has regulated,
when you're not stressed out, when you're at your baseline,
but you know what else you want access to? Dopamine. Not just because it feels good, like that little hit you get
when you're like, Ooh,
but because recently so much research is showing how critical dopamine is to us seeking out,
to us going after big things, to setting goals and sticking to our plan and really continuing with what we say we're moving towards. You know how when you're stressed and you reach a point where you're like, ugh, why even bother? Mm hmm. Did you just think that was a coincidence? It is not. And dopamine is released with a variety of activities that tend to happen when you are in your most relaxed,
regulated [00:09:00] states.
Can you imagine where we would be if we were all more regulated and had been in the past? What different innovations might be around? What new ways of being? I mean, we need more people more fully tapping into their genius. Now, I bring on a lot of hard charging powerhouse women who sometimes, especially in the beginning, really resist when I tell them to get some sleep or whatever the advice may be in the moment. Because, they've got to do more, not less, with everything going on. So, I tell them, oh, I'm not suggesting this because I have some biased agenda of a simple, easy business. It's because for where I know you are going, I need you operating at P performance. And this is not it. Luckily, the resistance goes away once they start seeing [00:10:00] results. I was talking to my client, Lauren, and she said, you know, it's as if this were really working. Like, yeah, it's as if I knew what I was doing.
So, okay, then great. You might be thinking, well then, okay, what do I do about it? And the fact that I've still got A, B, C, D, and E going on at the moment.
Well, you have got to start with the nervous system. You can't think your way out of this. Because it controls everything. By the way, if you are in the clarity accelerator, You have got to go check out that new training on somatics. Somatics, for those of you that don't know, is anything based on the body rather than the mind.
And I've been talking about it on calls for years, but now I've created this training and it's in the Getting Started module.
for those of you that want to hop in there after this episode.
Hey, if you're a [00:11:00] coach who wants true clarity about your secret sauce, your people, your best way of doing business, and how you talk about your offer, then I invite you to join us in the Clarity Accelerator. I'll teach you to connect all the dots. The dots that have always been there for you. So that you can show up like you were born for exactly this.
Come join us and supercharge every other tool or tactic you'll ever learn. From Facebook ads to manifestation. Just go to theuncommonway. com slash schedule and set up a time to talk. I can't wait to be your coach. Now, just through the physiology of our nervous system, it is always quicker to activate than it is to regulate. You can get spun up a lot more quickly than you are able to relax and come down from it.
And the level of your activation is really important, because sometimes despite all your deep breaths, you might remain stressed the fuck out [00:12:00] for a while.
And that's where I found myself two weeks ago.
You've already heard about some of the things going on for me. We are moving to Spain in a couple of months.
And there's just a tremendous amount of paperwork that needs to happen for me to get my digital nomad visa. And not only do we need a lot of paperwork, but we need to get it apostilled, which is this process that every single state and or the federal government needs to do to say that, yes, this document that we're submitting is valid.
is, in fact, from the organization that we say it is. Well, as military family, we've moved all over the place. So we're dealing with, I think, five different states plus the federal government. And as if that weren't enough, it all has to be done within a certain time frame. So if we order the paperwork too early, then we may not be able to submit it when we're in Spain.
And if we order it [00:13:00] too late, then we'll be late. Not be here. It will be sent to the wrong address. There's also, , just a lot of downsizing. There's selling furniture, there's deciding what goes where, what we might ship to Spain someday, what would be something that we just wouldn't want to ship and would want to store at my mom's house.
We also, in the last month, have had my son's official ADHD diagnosis, which has just required a lot of extra involvement with his care team and with setting things up with the school and, getting him some outside help.
And I'm planning my honey's retirement party. Twenty eight years in service. Actually, yesterday was his last day in uniform. He now has some leave that he's accumulated that he'll be taking before he actually retires. But it was very significant.
But there's a party [00:14:00] that we're planning. We're going back to West Point for the very day that he was commissioned 28 years ago. And we're going to stand in the exact same spot. And that's where we'll have his retirement ceremony. So it's very beautiful thing. All of these are very beautiful things, right?
Talk about first world problems, but it's a lot. And then there's a business, right? Business where I've been bringing on new people, we've been creating new systems, we're going through a massive rebrand right now. And we have A lot of growth happening and in our future and a lot of preparation that needs to take place for that to happen.
So there's a lot going on. And then there were some extra fun little things like our email server. The host just had an issue and it just shut down for a while. And then when we were trying to get it back up and running, the clients just wouldn't connect [00:15:00] anymore. Basically, I think it was about four days and through a weekend where I was on the phone with tech support and I was really migrating, we ended up migrating all of our email over to Google Workspace and , I'm at that part in my business where there are some things yet that I don't have the right person for in order to handle it.
And so there's some things I have to do for myself. There's some turnover going on. There was an assistant we had that had, had so many mistakes happen, bless her heart. Some of them were just like, you know where things you just like, you accidentally press the wrong button and like delete all the client's information?
And there were so many things that she finally resigned, saying that she wanted to put me and my COO out of our misery, basically, and that there had just been [00:16:00] so many instances that she felt like something maybe was just not energetically aligned. And so all of this kind of happened at once, that we were shorthanded, and that there were tech issues, and it really felt like Mercury retrograde, even though it hadn't actually hit yet.
I think we were kind of on the front end of that curve. The point is, I got very stressed. I didn't really get stressed in my mind, because I have Well, one of the things that I'm going to share with you, and just the way that I've, conditioned myself to deal with all sorts of things,
so I thought I was maintaining perspective and, , people usually tell me , that I seem unflappable. My COO was like, I do not know how you are staying so calm right now.
But what I started noticing is that I was losing sleep, and my digestion was [00:17:00] just really awful. And there were other indicators that told me that even though my mind was in a fairly, and by my mind I don't mean my brain, I mean my way of thinking,
was pretty solid, I was definitely activated. And
I was talking to someone about how You know, I was maintaining this solid mindset. I was doing my breath work. I was Meditating I was doing all the things Trying to go to bed early enough. I was doing all the supposed to's right and the should's and Yet all of this I'd reached a level of activation and it finally dawned on me.
Oh, yes From my somatics training, that thing was that when we reach a certain level of activation, then no amount of breath work will help us come back down. We really need to [00:18:00] move. We need to move our bodies. And, if we were running from a tiger, we wouldn't be able to just sit there and breathe and hope that we could, engage the parasympathetic nervous system and everything would return to our homeostasis state in our body.
Our system would remain activated until we got the fuck out of there.
Again, this is what I mean about not having access to our best thinking. When we're in this state.
I didn't have access to that analysis, to that memory.
And also, this is just how neuroplasticity works in our brain. Neuroplasticity meaning the way our brains change, and can change, first, maybe you're just hearing about a different way of responding and you're thinking that's a good idea. Then maybe you realize you could have done that, but you didn't do it. Then you start thinking after the fact, Oh, . I wish I had done that instead. And then [00:19:00] eventually once in a while, maybe you remember it until finally it becomes so integrated with you that you just, that's your go to response.
Right, to the stimulus. And so this is why,
when we're looking to really reinvent ourselves, really engage in mindset work. And an overhaul of sorts, it's not an in and out process. It's sort of like getting into the pool where you dive in, but then if you jump right out, you never really acclimated to the water and you actually need to be in that for a while, be in that soup for a while so that it just starts to feel normal.
But again, back to the movement of some sort, something that really gets your heart rate up. It could be a good run. It could be a great orgasm. However, whatever floats your boat, but you know, right? You've been in times where maybe you've had a great yoga class and then [00:20:00] afterwards you're reflecting on all these things that you had and you're like, you know what?
It's really not as big a deal as I was making it into, right? Or, oh, I know how to, what I'll do, I'll just delegate this or whatever comes up.
That is the power of helping your nervous system re regulate then being able to tap into that higher thinking.
All right. Now I want to share the mindset tip that I mentioned earlier. So you've got so much that it feels overwhelming. Okay? Good. You are in a capacity building phase. You are stretching yourself to be able to hold more than you have previously. That might look like more content that you're creating now.
It might be more plates that you're juggling. It might be more emotions you're experiencing, or heightened emotions than you've typically carried in the past. It might be more patience [00:21:00] or more tolerance that you're being called to hold. But it's okay. It's okay. We can do hard things, right? Now, this advice is not for you if you are in a continually stressed out state.
If it's sustained, there's likely something else going on, and you want to move heaven and earth to work with a coach or another mental health professional to really get to the root of that.
But this advice is for you if you have, overall, a more balanced, sustainable baseline, and then things spring up. Because what's not helpful is the thoughts of, oh no, I'm regressing, or I should be beyond this, or I'm a hot mess, or why can't I ever get ahead, or why does this always happen to me? No judgment.
I have thought. Every one of those. I've thought every one of [00:22:00] those countless times.
We are all on a journey shedding that mentality, that old mentality that gets us nowhere.
I like to think instead about what is waiting for me on the other side, right? What if this thing right now, what if that were a breeze? What if my husband were asking me, So what's your day like tomorrow? And I was saying, eh, pretty mellow, but it was exactly what I have to do today. What if my future actually looks nothing like this at all, but because of the muscles I've built, the sheer capacity I've built.
When, that live webinar before was a big thing, well, now I'm on stage in front of thousands, and it's manageable, because of all of that back then. We don't get to there, right? We don't get to our future goals without passing through discomfort. All of those big dreams you have, have you [00:23:00] thought about what it would feel like if you had to do it tomorrow?
Walk out on that stage, or whatever it is, hold that retreat, or
have the booked out client roster, wherever you might be. Yikes, right? When things are far in the future, all we feel is anticipation. We aren't thinking about any of this other stuff, typically. But the stretching required along the path to that place probably won't feel great, all the time, just because of how we're wired.
So along the way, you might find yourself, , you start dragging your feet. In, of course, really smart, how could you even argue with them ways, naturally,
which leads you to take longer than you need to on your path to where you're going. Or you might just have a heightened negative experiences of these growth phases, both of which. are [00:24:00] great reasons to work with someone that can give you outside perspective and help you get where you're going faster, better, and easier.
So what if you are down for the growth when necessary? But you really want to make sure that you don't attract more of this by accident. Well just the mindset tip that I gave you is helpful because what you're doing is you're turning your attention to the future desired state rather than the current stressed out state.
But there's more, because how you deal with what's going on right now matters, too. You want to deal with the things efficiently, but without creating huge emotional space for it or drama.
I love this metaphor that I heard from Danielle Eymann. These circumstances are like something Blowing in through the screen door to your house, and you want to just open the back [00:25:00] door, the back screen door, and let it pass through.
Because often what we tend to do is keep that back door shut,
so it's sticking around and reverberating
an hour increased attention very easily attracts more of its kind.
So remember, it's not not thinking about it. Don't think of a pink elephant. Instead, it's very gently choosing to spend your mental energy on what is working, what is going well, what you are learning, not in a gaslighty spiritual bypassing way, but in the way where you give your brain the task of finding where you do have things that you believe are positive in your life, or at least even if they're neutral in your life, other things you can focus on. And this is really why gratitude, I mean the genuine gratitude where you're really feeling it, is so [00:26:00] powerful.
Okay, my friends, that is it for today. Was it helpful? If so, share this with someone who could use it. And remember, you know who you are. Bye for now. And each day you are stepping further into what you're here to create. Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the Clarity First strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit TheUncommonWay. com. See you next time.