Hey professionals! Look, if you'd like to have less stress in your
professional life and more inner peace then hang around, because
in this video I'm going to talk about the two qualities I know
every professional person can develop to help you achieve that.
So let's go! My name's Steve and I coach professional people just
like you on combining your personal brilliance with unshakeable
emotional freedom, so that you can create a happier and more successful
experience of your life and work. Now, for professional people, what
really gets in the way of experiencing less stress and more
inner peace? Yeah, it's work right! The pressure, the deadlines, the
constant demands, but what if I told you it was possible to show
up to even a high pressure corporate job and do brilliant work, and make
a significant contribution that's meaningful, and still experience a
peaceful balance of mind and emotion? Well it is! A lot of people think
you have to quit your corporate job in order to be happy, and in order to
experience inner peace, but you don't! When I worked in a global
Fortune 50 corporation, I got a lot of senior executive praise for
a difficult program I was working on, that had a lot of conflict in
the program, and I helped resolve that conflict because I was able
to bring these two qualities to that work. Now the first of these two
qualities is what I call groundedness. Now I know what you're thinking: what
the hell is groundedness? It's about having some grounding beliefs at
your core. A grounding set of beliefs that you live and work from. They
include experiencing that your value and worth in the world is a given.
It's not up for negotiation, it's not at risk. You don't have to earn
it, you cannot lose it. You see, there's nothing that we can do to
be worth more or less as a human being. It's there, it's constant
and knowing that means knowing that we're not gambling that
value and worth with the things that we venture to do. Groundedness
typically involves knowing that we're loved unconditionally by
at least one person. It means knowing deep down and experiencing
the incredible capacity that all human beings have, including us!
You see we often fear that we'll be helpless in difficult situations,
so we avoid those situations, but in actual fact we're more resourceful
than we know, and you can probably identify times in your life when
you've been incredibly resourceful. Maybe when you've been facing adversity
and you've had to find resourcefulness, but it's there and you know it's there.
And groundedness means being able to see through the thinking traps that
we fall into. The idea, for example, that nobody likes me, or the idea
that everybody else is having a happier or more successful life than
me, the idea that other people have all got their stuff sorted out
except me, things like imposter syndrome where we doubt our value,
where we doubt how good we are. These are all well-known thinking
traps and the grounded person can see through them, and have a more
level-headed experience of what's going on in life. And perhaps most
importantly of all, the grounded person acts from the utmost
respect and loving kindness towards everybody and everything.
There is no competition of ego. There's no sense of I have to win
and somebody else has to lose. There's no sense that my ego
is on the line. There is only doing the best work we know how
to do with the utmost respect and loving kindness for everyone and
everything. And in fact living from groundedness is the opposite
of living from ego, fear and insecurity, which is where lots
of us have spent most of our time living. And ego, fear and insecurity
are the places that those negative behaviors come from, including being
hard on ourselves, because when I talk about acting from the utmost
respect and loving kindness towards everybody and everything, that means
you too! By the way if you are enjoying this video so far do give
it the thumbs up, and also don't forget to subscribe to the channel
and click the notifications bell so that you'll know when new content
like this arrives. The second quality which partners with
groundedness is equanimity. Now again I know what you're thinking:
what the hell is equanimity? Yes, it's not a word that is used much
in professional circles. Now I've seen a few definitions but the
one that suits my purpose here best is it's a peaceful balance of mind
and emotion that's retained even when under pressure. That does not
mean apathy! You can still care about things you can still be moved to
action, it's just that your circumstances, and the behavior and
the words of other people are not rocking your boat! That people can
throw sticks and stones but your mind space, your heart space, your
emotional space remain clear, and the thing is when you live and work
from both groundedness and equanimity, you are able to be focused, you are
able to be resourceful, and you will not be emotionally reactive. You get
to keep your head when other people around you may be losing theirs!
You get to be the calm in the storm. You get to be the calming
influence in the storm, like I managed to be in that major program
in that global Fortune 50 corporation. And in my experience groundedness
and equanimity not only make you happier and healthier in yourself,
but it actually increases your impact and influence in the
world. It actually increases your professional performance, because
that kind of person is the person that people turn to when they need
leadership, when there's a problem that needs to be solved. So now
the big question: how do you develop groundedness and equanimity? Well
it's not an easy step one, step two, step three kind of thing. It's not
like I can give you three simple steps to become grounded, to gain
equanimity. It's a little bit like getting fit, it requires a program
of work that will require some repetition, and some investment
of time, and the results will appear gradually, but the important thing
is there is work I know you can do to develop these properties and of
course that's the work that we do on my coaching programs. Now the
actual work can vary from person to person but here are some of the
common things that you can do to develop groundedness with equanimity.
Number one every single day you can make a decision about how
you want to be that day. You see nobody gets up in the morning deciding
to be stressed, and deciding to be reactive, and deciding to be out of
control of their working hours. Nobody chooses to be stressed and
reactive. They happen because they're an unconscious default that we slip
into. Making the conscious decision every day about how you want to be
that day will help you not slip into those defaults. Now I'm not
saying that that alone will miraculously change everything either
but it's a good place to start, to make a conscious decision about how
you want to be each day, and to program that into your mental satellite
navigation system. The second piece of work you can do is to learn to
correct yourself anytime you feel that you're getting triggered by
something. And I have a particularly specialized routine for that, that
you can access from a link down in the comments. Number three, in
addition to correcting yourself when you get triggered by something
is to deal with those triggers, if they show up a lot. So for example if
there's a thought or something that somebody, says or a situation that
you emotionally react to, you can do work with fields such as
neuro-linguistic programming or hypnosis to take the potential out of that
trigger to create that response. Number four for creating groundedness and
equanimity is to spend contemplative time, quiet time contemplating the
connectedness of every human being on the planet, the importance of every human
being on the planet, the importance of the things that we're doing with our
work, and most of all the amazing capacities that people have in the world.
You can do that by reading about amazing people such as Victor Frankl, Anne Frank,
Gandhi. People have made significant achievements in the world, people who
have come through terrible adversities, because the personal power that these
people demonstrate is a power that resides within all of us. It's not
something that some people have and some people don't. It's what we all
have, and that means we have the capacity through looking at other
people to see what's possible for everybody, and that's grounding,
and it's inspirational. Number five is to learn about the thinking traps
which we all fall for from time to time, traps like imposter syndrome, where we
think that we're not deserving of the position that we have, or impact
bias, or survivors bias, because when you know how they work you, can see
through them and have that more level-headed response to life,
for instance this video here will tell you more about survivor's
bias. And number six is self-care! Take time out, exercise, sleep, relax,
spend time in nature and with your family doing recreational things.
Self-care is key to groundedness and equanimity, and if you think your work is
too important for you to take time out for self-care, then it's too
important for you not to! Now one recurring problem with professional people
is the inability to switch off from work and to stop thinking about work
outside of office hours. If you want to know how to master that watch this
video up here, or if you've already watched that video then watch this
one down here. This is steve wishing you health and happiness.