- Hello Believe Nation.
Today I'm going to talk about seven effective ways
to beat stress.
And as always guys, if you hear a point that really
resonates with you please leave it down, comments below,
put quotes around it so other people
can be inspired as well.
And also writing it down, helps you lock it
in for yourself too.
Enjoy.
- [Announcer] Nine, eight.
(upbeat music)
- So being an entrepreneur is one of the most stressful
things I think you can do in your life.
It's going to be one of the hardest things
you will ever do in your life, is to start a business.
I don't think enough people talk about
the difficulties associated with it.
There's a reason why 80 to 90 percent of companies fail.
Because it's stressful, because it's hard, it sucks.
There's a lot that goes into building a company
that we just don't talk enough about
and I think entrepreneurs are among the most stressed out
people in the world.
And listen, we're trying to do big, bold, empowering
exciting things and so I'm going to share with you
seven ways that I hope will effectively beat
the stress for you.
Some of them are things you can do immediately.
Some of the things that will work over a longer period
of time as well and I hope you enjoy the video.
(upbeat music)
So way number one is ask yourself does this matter?
It's surprising how much of the stuff that we put
on our plate every single day, doesn't actually matter.
And the things that we stress about
are so little and so tiny that in the big picture
they don't actually matter.
So when you're in the stressful zone
the hardest thing to do is just step outside
and look at yourself.
Look at yourself and say, that thing that I'm worrying
about does that actually matter and more often that not,
you'll come back with a no.
Like, this actually doesn't matter and I'm being stressed
out for no reason and it's going to work out
in the big picture.
So as an example, I have mastermind groups in Toronto
and I used to keep meeting minutes and I used to keep notes
on what happened in the meetings and I would email it
to everybody after each session.
It took me a while to put the notes together,
a summary, I thought it was a value wide service right?
Evan keeps preaching add value, I thought this
was adding a lot of value to people's lives
and it would stress me out always to take notes
as quick as I could and then send it off to people
as fast as I could.
And there was time then when I just didn't have the time.
I was stressed out, I had too much stuff happening,
I didn't have the time to send notes out to people.
And you know what happened?
Nothing.
Nothing happened.
Nobody cared.
Nobody wrote to me and said where the notes,
where are the minutes?
And then the next month I didn't do it again, nobody cared.
I was doing all this work and stressing myself out
over something that didn't matter.
Nobody actually cared about it.
I convinced myself that it was important
but it actually wasn't important.
And so thinking about the things
that stress you out, how much are they really part
of the big picture, where you see yourself going,
does this thing actually really matter.
Usually it's no and just that awareness,
just asking that question can immediately help
reduce the stress.
(upbeat music)
Way number two to effectively reduce stress
is come back to it tomorrow.
Sometimes I find that if I'm in the moment
and I'm stressed out and I'm angry or agitated
and I'm not thinking clearly.
Sometimes the best thing to do
is just to leave it, go to something else,
and come back to it the next day.
And the next day to come back to it,
when your mind is fresh and you're in a different
head space and the answer comes to you.
And so I find that if I'm ever struggling on something,
I just, I'm not getting through, I'm not getting an answer.
Just push it off.
It's not like push it off forever,
unless it's not important, but coming back to it the next
day, I find often I come with a solution
that comes super fast and I just saved a lot of time
because I wasn't spending hours and hours and hours
frustrated trying to figure out a problem.
(upbeat music)
Way number three to reduce stress is finish it now.
This may seem counter intuitive and the opposite
of what I just talked about in finish it tomorrow.
And I think the context really is if you have an answer.
So if I'm stressed out but I know what to do,
then I will find it easier to get it done right now.
If I don't know what to do, if I'm frustrated
and stressed because I don't have an answer,
then you can leave it for the next day.
And so if you have a clear answer, you know what needs
to get down and you're just up against a deadline,
just get it done.
What I'll find is, if I know what needs to get done,
and I'm delaying it and I'm waiting till tomorrow
then I'm spending all that time thinking about, like I just
need to get this done, I just need to get this done.
And then you're not enjoying the rest of your day.
You're not present in any of your other meetings
or at home with your family, you're just always
just stressed out thinking about it.
So if you have a clear solution
then deal with it immediately.
If you don't know what to do next, then you can wait.
Push it off till tomorrow, come back when you have
a fresh mind.
(upbeat music)
Win number four is model success.
One of the things that really helped me in my first business
got me through the most stressful part of my life really
was understanding that I wasn't the first person
to try to solve this problem before.
Now when I told my business partner that I quit
and I wanted to leave the company and then hearing me
say those words just stressed me out and I knew the next day
that I had to go back and do this.
I couldn't quit on this, I had to find a way to keep going.
But I had to find a different way to stand.
And the realization of hitting rock bottom,
the realization that come to me
was that somebody else had figured this out before.
Whatever thing you're stressed out about right now,
whatever problem you're faced and it seems insurmountable
that it's impossible to overcome,
many many many people have already figured it out.
Many people.
It's one of the founding reasons for why I created
this Youtube channel.
Was to share the strategies of successful entrepreneurs.
And it's from two angles.
One, the strategy, what do I do?
I'm facing this problem, here's a solution.
Every time I watch one of the top ten videos,
or meant to be videos, or Believe Life videos,
I learn something, I learn a new strategy
that I can apply to my life and to my business.
Even if I've heard it before, sometimes it comes
from a different voice, a different angle,
and I see it a slightly different way then I can apply it.
The second thing it does though, it also gives you
just motivation.
Just for me knowing that I'm not the only person
in the world who's ever gone through this.
Seeing other entrepreneurs have hard times and fail
and struggle, made me feel like this is normal.
What I'm dealing with is normal.
If they can through it, then I can get through it too.
A lot of these people started with less
than what you already have right now.
You already have more money, more resources,
more connections, more opportunities than a lot
of these successful entrepreneurs had when they started.
You're starting with more than what they had.
And so I would tell myself, listen if they could do it,
why can't I?
They don't have any natural advantage.
If they can do it, I can get it too.
And so by modeling success, one to figure out
the specific strategies and tactics, things that I can apply
but also just the motivation to know that these
successful people went through the same thing I was.
That dramatically helped me reduce my stress.
(upbeat music)
Number five is join or start a mastermind group.
I think one of the biggest challenges of being
an entrepreneur is that you're alone.
You don't have other entrepreneurs to talk to.
So many entrepreneurs that I connect with and meet,
they're the only entrepreneurs in their circle.
Their family, they're not entrepreneurs.
Their friends are not entrepreneurs.
Everybody's telling them that they're crazy,
they should do the safe thing and stay with their job
or they should take a professional career.
And sometimes, you know those people around you
are hating on you but sometimes it's just out of love.
The way that they see success is a normal typical
corporate career and that's not what you want.
And so when you don't have people around you
who are like minded in that capacity,
it could be really hard to move forward
and it's easy to get stressed out.
And so I find that being a part of a mastermind group,
if there's one in your area or you could join
an online one, we have an online one,
or you could start your own.
When you're connecting with like minded people,
a lot of the people in my group call it
entrepreneurs anonymous because half of it
is about strategies and tactics, here's the problem
I'm facing, what do you guys think, do you have connections
or ideas to help me and half of it is just about having
people around you who understand you.
Coming to a monthly meeting where you're connected
to people who get what you're going through,
who've gone through it, who are facing some of the same
challenges and just that emotional support.
So being a part of a mastermind group,
again from the strategies and from the emotional side
can dramatically help reduce your stress.
(upbeat music)
the sixth way to reduce your stress is to create
a better schedule.
I live and die by my schedule.
I find that if I don't have it scheduled in
and I don't have a plot somewhere in my week
to deal with something, then I get stressed out.
I get antsy, I get nervous.
Like, when am I going to do it, I force myself to do it now
and it may not always be the best time to do it.
This happens maybe once a quarter on a big scale.
Maybe once a month on a smaller scale
where just something happens in my life
or in my business or just I want to grow and I want to
learn something else and to do it I need to take
time from somewhere else.
I recognize your time is limited, you only have
so many hours in a week.
You have other interests as well
and so if you want to add something to it,
you have to take something away.
When I took over Toronto Dance Salsa and acquired
the business last year, I knew it would take up
a lot of my time.
And so I had to dedicate a single day in the week.
So Tuesdays is my Toronto Dance Salsa day,
all day I'm working on TDS stuff, I'm working with Alex,
I'm mentoring, I'm training, doing all this stuff
that needs to get done to build and grow this business.
It also means that I'm out three nights a week
in coming to class, in having meetings, and going to parties
and entertaining and hosting.
So it's a big time commitment that I need
to be prepared for.
So one it was talking to my wife Nina
and saying here's what I'm thinking of doing
and getting her support that this is something
that I'm committed to and two, in order for me to free up
the Tuesday, I had other stuff planned on that Tuesday.
But I had to take away some other things
and say you know, this is not as important a priority.
And I think too many times we just jam our schedule
or we don't have any kind of plan for a schedule.
We just get it filled up with things
and then when you want to add something new to it,
you can't because it's jammed full and so whenever I feel
stressed out about something and it's consistent,
like every week I'm feeling stressed out about something,
I know that I need to make more time for it in my calendar
and see if I can find a way to schedule that in
so that I will be less stressed every week.
(upbeat music)
And then number seven effective way to beat stress
is to get some help.
You can't do everything yourself, in your business,
and you're likely doing things that you shouldn't be doing.
And so I mentioned earlier on that I used to take
meeting notes and it wasn't effective
and I should've stopped doing that a lot earlier.
That's not something that you want to get help on,
that's just something you want to eliminate.
First rule is eliminate.
Look at where you're spending your time
and eliminate the things that are not adding
the most value.
When you're especially at the early stage of the business
and everything is new, you need to really focus your time
because you're everything from the CEO
to the janitor in your business and so, you need to make
sure that the time you're spending is having the most
impact possible and you're eliminating the things
you don't want to be great at.
So eliminate is number one.
Automate is number two.
Look at the task that you're doing,
if anything is happening consistently
that should be automated, you shouldn't go to somebody
else, it should just be automated, it should go
to a software program, a computer system, a website,
right, making something so that there's these tools
that automate things for you can really free up your time
because those tools, they don't take sick days,
they don't require vacation pay, they're a lot lot cheaper
than having somebody working for you
and so eliminate is first, automate is second,
third is delegate.
If you're doing something important,
you have to build a team.
The first person I hired was for one hour a day
and he freed up more than an hour of my time a day
because he was better at the work than I was
and then I slowly built up my team.
And so you can hire somebody, you may not have enough
money to have somebody come on full time on your business
but to hire somebody for an hour a day
or a couple hours a week to help take off some of the
tasks that you shouldn't be doing will really help.
You want to spend as much time in the CEO role
as possible, that's where you want to be.
So looking at your schedule and seeing where am I spending
time that should be eliminated, what things can be
automated and then whatever's left that still has to get
done how do I delegate some of these other things
so that I can focus on what I'm great at?
So when I started my Youtube channel, I did everything
myself, I'm a big advocate of not spending money
to make money, don't go and start hiring somebody
if you're making zero with your business.
But as soon as I started making money on my Youtube
channel, I was doing everything, I was the camera man,
I was the editor, I was the researcher,
I was in front of the camera, everything.
As soon I started making money on my Youtube channel,
I poured it back in and the first person I hired
was an editor.
Because editing took me a long time, I wasn't very good
at it, I didn't want to get good at it, more importantly.
And then as I started making more, I hired more people,
more editors, the camera man, I bought more gear,
I got cameras, I got microphones, I got researchers,
I got people to help me on the Youtube channel
with the comments so my team grew as my business grew
but the thing that really helps skyrocket the early
growth was getting my first editor so as soon as you can
afford it bring in somebody on to help alleviate
some of the task that you're not good and more importantly
don't want to get at good either can really help you
quickly scale up your business and reduce stress
because you get most stressed out
when you're doing work that you don't want to do.
So those are my seven ways to effectively reduce stress.
I'd love to know what did you think.
Which way resonated the most with you.
Do you have an eight, nine, ten that you want
to add to the list, leave it down in the comments below,
super curious to find out what you have to say.
I also want to give a quick shout out to John Sonmez,
thank you so much John for picking up a copy of my book.
I really really really appreciate it
and if you're doing that review, means a lot to me man
and I'm glad you enjoyed the book.
So thank you guys so much for watching,
I believe in you, I hope you continue to believe in yourself
and whatever your one word is, much love, I'll see you soon.