It's no secret that stress sucks. We're all very familiar with the negative impacts that
it can have on our emotions. But what we oftentimes don't realize is it can physically kill us.
It's linked to the six leading causes of death in the United States. So knowing how to reduce
and how to eliminate our stress is one of the most valuable life skills that I can think
of, and that's what this video is about. It's about the three levers that each and everyone
of us has to eliminate the stress in his or her own life.
But before I get into that, we got to cover the biggest misconception that I hear all
the time, and I even am guilty of myself when it comes to stress, and that is externalizing
stress, saying that it comes from an event; that it's this job interview that we have,
that it's the conversation that we have coming up that we're nervous about, or, maybe, we're
just nervous about flying on an airplane, and we think that that is creating the stress.
The truth is, there are people all over the world that just do not get stressed about
those things, right? People that can walk into a job interview cool as a cucumber or
who can fly on an airplane without caring. I happen to be one of them. It doesn't bother
me. But there are other triggers that I have and that I'm sure you have.
So for the rest of this video, I encourage you. Play along with this. Go through the
exercises for one particular thing that you know causes you stress in your life and let's
see if we can eliminate it for good.
So let's start by defining what stress actually is. It's a mindset and it's this. Stress comes
from needing to have something turn out a certain way that we feel that we can't control
and that we worry could go badly. Those are your three levers. That sentence has all
three components that we can use to destroy stress.
So let's start at the beginning with this first part. Stress comes from needing something
to happen. If we stopped needing things, if we stopped getting so caught up in what we
wish would happen and trying to control so much, we wouldn't feel stressed. This is the
whole Buddhist philosophy is letting go of desires.
Now I don't advocate going that far. I do believe, though, that the quality of your
life is going to be directly impacted by how many things you think you need. And trust
me, fewer things is going to be better here.
So, if we can eliminate feeling like we have to have things to happen, that's going to
save us tons of stress. So the first thing to let go of is the past. If you have done
something in the past that you're regretful about, and that you wished you could do differently,
and you turned over in your head. You can't control it, right? You're not going to be
able to influence it that way. So it just got to be let go.
For things in the future that we need to turn out a certain way--a job interview. I feel
this all the time when I'm on an airplane, and I had a connecting flight, and I need
to get to that flight on time. The best way to handle this is something called "fear setting."
And this is something that Tim Ferriss discusses in his book The 4-Hour Workweek, but it goes
like this.
Let's take the example of the airplane. So I'm on an airplane, I'm going somewhere. I have
a connecting flight. It's got an hour and 45 minutes and we took off 45 minutes late,
so I'm going, "Crap, this is going to be a really tight lay over. I don't think I'm gonna
make it. I got to rush off this plane." The way that I calm myself, that I deal with that
stress in that situation is by stopping needing to make that flight. And I do that by fear
setting. I go, "You know what? Let's assume the worst thing happens." I'm not going to
make this flight. I'm going to be stuck all day in this airport, maybe, even through another
night. I have to get a hotel. I'm going to be a day late to my vacation or my meeting
or wherever it is I am going.
And then, all of a sudden, even though that's doom and gloom, and that's not what I want,
I can relax, because I clarified what's going to happen in the future and I go, "You know
what? That would suck, but I can deal with it." That is the best way to deal with neediness.
If you're worried about breaking up with someone, right? Go through fear setting. Go what would
happen if I broke up? Would I actually die or would I be sad for a while and get over
it? If you left your job or we're fired, would you starve, live on the street, be left out
in the cold? Probably not. You probably have to move in back home or with a friend, or
take a smaller apartment and a pay cut at a job that you didn't like, but you would survive.
When you start to fear set, truthfully, things are not as bad as they seem. That's the first
piece. You want to get rid of feeling like you need things. Second piece, moving on to
the control part. If we can increase our feeling of control. If we can increase the feeling
of certainty, we can actually reduce stress. And this is why most people feel safer when
they're driving than they do when they're flying. When they're flying, they have no
control. When they're driving, even though it's more dangerous, and way more people die
driving, they feel like they're in control, so they don't get nervous.
So if we can increase that feeling of control, that's going to reduce the stress. The best
way to do this is something called tree planning. And I did this when I left my job for the
first time. I was very nervous. How would I pay my rent? How would I make any money?
And what I had that I just dug up for this video is a 5-paged document of all the things
that I could do that could generate money.
I have, on there, I could lower my student loans by casting them over 30 years. I could
reapply to college so that I didn't have to pay my loans for another year. I could bask
on the street playing the guitar for tips. I could bartender. I could wait tables. I
could do odd jobs. I could AirBnB my bedroom and sleep on the coach, which I did.
I have 5 pages of things that I did. And the weird thing about this is that even though
I left my job, and this is a longer story, but got down to $300 in my bank account, sleeping
on the floor, I wasn't ever stressed, because I knew, okay, if I get to the end of this,
and this business doesn't work, all that I have to do is go back to this sheet and start
at the top, and work my way down, and I'll be fine. It won't be pleasant, but I'm not
going to die.
So when you can kill that uncertainty by tree planning-- The reason I call it tree planning
is because most people have a stick plan. Here's where I am, here's what I need. If
I don't get there, I'm screwed. It's terrible. A tree plan has different divergent paths,
right? If it doesn't work, I'd go here. If that doesn't work, I'd go here.
When you have If-Then statements in your plan, you have more certainty that it's going to
work out, that's going to reduce your stress. That's the second thing. We got fear setting,
we got tree planning.
The third part, you think will go badly. Now, for this, I know that I've used airplanes
a lot, but actually because my roommate inspired this, and he is somebody who is really not
stressed in his life. But when he gets on an airplane, he gets very nervous. He's worried
that it's going to crash. I always found that interesting about him, which made me start
thinking about the ways that stress occurs in our life. And for him and me, the difference
is not that I need my life any less than him. The difference is not that I control the airplane
more. The difference is that he thinks it's gonna crash and I think it's gonna land safely.
So the best way to change our beliefs, yes, he's read the statistics, he knows, but we
want to do that on an emotional level and the best tool that I know of for this is an
NLP Tool called the Swish Pattern. You can YouTube this, Google it in greater detail,
but I'm going to give you the 1-minute version right now.
Basically, what you do is, on this hand, you place the image that you do not want to happen.
You failed the job interview, the plane goes and crash and burn, the conversation goes
terrible, the girl rejects you, whatever it is. And you play it out on this hand.
On this hand, you have the good things that you'd like to see. The plane lands safely,
the job interview goes well, you got a date with the girl, whatever it is. And you look
at this hand and play it in your head vividly as you see it in the way that makes you nervous.
And as soon as you start to feel that heart race, or get a little bit nervous, in your
head and with your hands, in your mind's eye, you swish them out, right?
You have this image. Explode through this image coming towards your center of vision,
right here. And what that's going to do after you do it 10, 20 times; it can take several
minutes to do. But it starts to train your habits, right?
You'd get in the habit of every time I think of the plane crash, and boom! Think of the
plane landing safely and having a great vacation. You do that consciously. You direct your brain
to say, "This is what I want you to do," for 10 minutes, for maybe 20 minutes. It's not
that long of a time. It seems like it. But, then, even unconsciously, when you're sitting
on that plane and you start to go here, your brain will automatically go down that new
route. I don't know, when we do that, Boom! We see this new image and you won't feel so
badly about it.
So, those are the best three things that I have for eliminating stress in our lives.
It is a mindset. It doesn't have to be part of our every day existence.
And those are--just to go over them again--Fear setting. That will kill neediness. You'll
feel like you don't need things to go in a certain directness or certain route that you
have your overarching goals that you can achieve in a ton of different ways.
Tree planning. That's going to give you all the different paths to get to those goals.
And then, of course, the Swish pattern, which is just going to make you more optimistic
and feel better.
That's it for stress. That's all I got right now, but I do have an announcement. I want
to thank two people for actually setting up Charisma on Command channels in different
languages, and those people are Jose and Eric. Jose for the Spanish channel and Eric for
the Russian channel. If you want to check those out in those native languages, if you
speak them, go ahead into the description. I have links to those.
If you like this channel in English, go ahead and subscribe. Of course, I'll be doing all
of the English. Those guys are doing the dubs, but we have this kind of Q and A style that
I take from my roommates and from the Comments. We've also got Charisma Breakdowns of fictional
characters, real life people, so that you'll know how the most charismatic people among
us do what they do, how they speak so eloquently, how they feel so confident, how they tend
to magnetize people towards them.
If you have any suggestions for videos like this, Q and A style, go ahead, write them
in the bottom, or people you'd like to see me break down, I'd be happy to do that. And,
of course, I hope that you guys have enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one.