How I Went from Stressed & Anxious to Zen

Summary

Most entrepreneurs are affected by mental health issues due to the amount of stress they experience daily. From decision-making to managing teams and customers, financial pressures and keeping the business operating can be overwhelming and mentally exhausting for any entrepreneur. In this video I’ll share how you can redress this if you are suffering from anxiety & stress to zen-like.

Transcript

If you are in a permanent state of stress and anxiety and risking burnout while building your business, this video may very well change your life.

[INTRO] Hey, I'm Leon Castillo, founder of Selfmastered a high performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck their own performance. We transform the unproductive, overwhelming, unfocus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

Hello friends today I want to talk about how to go from stress and anxious to Zen like when managing your business because I believe this is one of the single most important things you can learn if you want to be successful in business because if you look at the science, entrepreneurs are way more likely to suffer from mental health problems than the average knowledge worker. In fact, entrepreneurs are twice more likely to suffer from depression 50% more likely to suffer from general mental health problems six times more likely to suffer from ADHD and three times more likely to suffer from addiction.

So how is this possible? How do entrepreneurs seem to be touched by fire? Well, essentially, it all boils down to mismanagement of energetic potential. In other words, they don't know most of them don't know how to manage stress in their journey. Because building a startup is very hard or a business going from zero to one against difficult odds is hard, especially if you take responsibility, you raise money or your hire employees, it is not easy to remain calm and collected, but everything is stacked against you. So if you do not learn how to manage stress, you will surely end up burning up now before we share what is the framework that I use and that we teach to help others lower their stress level, remind yourself that stress is not inherently bad.

In fact, stress is the key to growth every time that we are subjected to stress the body mobilizes an army of biochemicals that essentially strengthens the area of the body of your mind that you have submitted to stress. So you need to be working under conditions of stress. But conditions of acute stress, never long term stress. If you do not remove the stress from the system. If you're constantly operating with a cortisol, which is a stress hormone on the higher level, your body eventually breaks down and you become powerless, because you cannot perform if you do not remove that stress. So long term stress eventually leads to mental health problems, which is what we just share. So how to do this, how to make sure that a stress, anxiety and eventually burnout do not become part of your daily life, even if you're doing something very hard, which is building a business for the long term and, and having employees and having some all sorts of stakeholders that depend on you.

Well, by following this simple friend, step number one is knowing what is the plan, having a clear destination in a subset of systems that you know that if executed, you will get there. This means that without this clarity, it is very easy to fall for shiny object syndrome, which is where most people eventually fall into having a clear plan is the best way of fostering the clarity you need. That's step one, having a plan and knowing the systems you need to follow.

Step two is essentially pruning everything that is not aligned with that journey with that path with that destination. Everything that seems interesting, but it's not what you know, for a fact that will take you to the next level has to go because it's just a shiny object syndrome. Steve Jobs said that the key to focus is doing less not more by focusing on the Macron one thing that is extremely important for you, you become better at saying no, because everything you say yes to that is not aligned with the mission will create extra stress and you will become anxious. If you're not able to do the work. The more things you do, the worse the quality of the work you will perform and that will also create anxiety, right? So prune out, remove everything that is not alive.

Now,  number three, track your progress with adequate tools. If you keep showing up in your work with a to do list if the first thing you do in the morning is a brain dump to see what you should be working on. Let me tell you, you are already losing because that's how amateurs work professionals have ideally personal dashboards or project management tools and apps that Tell them how does the current worker actually performing relates to the end goal so they do not fall again for shiny object syndrome. If you're created to do this, and we have a video on this that I'm going to link somewhere here, you're prone to overvalue meaningless tasks and undervalued, crucial tasks that eventually end up bringing stress and anxiety into your work. So never use a to do list, use a dashboard or a project management tool for audit your environment. This is crucial, because in your environment, you have anxiety and stress triggers. And that environment can be physical, or it can be people or it can be digital, everything. And anything that triggers that stress and bad relationship or toxic co work, the ping and buzz of the your phone, whatever it is, that is creating stress in your life has to go. As you can see, it's all about just entertaining, the natural stress that comes from the journey and not accepting any stress that is not related to that journey. Right. So architect your environment. And then number five, work like a top performance. If you look at the science of peak performance, you see that every top performer out there doesn't matter if it's in the arts, in business, in sports, all of them work in the same fashion, which is either 100% on or 0% on. Either you're exerting extreme pressure in order to grow or to train or to perform, or they're resting very hard so that they give their bodies the ability to recover.

And this is very important because it gives you two benefits. The first benefit is that it allows you to do higher quality work, if you're working with 100% intensity, meaning that you're not context switching, you're not checking your cell phone, you're not entertaining bullshit, you're essentially doing what you need to be doing with extreme focus and intensity, the quality of your work will naturally go up. So you will need less hours to achieve your goals where today which leads me to number two, you reduce your workday, because when your instant your rest or recovery periods where then your week, you naturally become more adept at performance, right. So work as a top performer.

Step number six is master your big five. And this is crucial, because even if you have the perfect plan, even if you use perfect tools, even if you're absolutely ruthless in pruning out and trimming away everything that doesn't help you reach your goals. Even if you know how to work as a top performer, you will not get very far if you do not take care of yourself. And mastering the Big Five is crucial to be able to achieve and more importantly, sustain peak performance in business

. And the Big Five is you guessed it, sleep, nutrition, movement, breathing and meditation focus on having the perfect sleep I gene. And ideally by an aura ring or whatever tracker you prefer to see how consistent is the quality of your sleep, go to a nutritionist and get food that fosters your performance, hire a trainer or start training in a way that you get more energy every day institute a meditation practice. So you're able to train your brain and for focus and learn how to breathe so you can maximize your ability to calm your nervous system. All of these things is what we teach our clients so they can become crazy effective on their day to day, these are the six steps that I suggest you do to go from anxious and stressed out to Zen in your business. But even if I know this, even if we train people into this, oftentimes you slip and that's what happened to me three or four months ago.

And now I'm going to share why did I ended up totally stressed out and anxious and more importantly, what I did it to get out of it.

But before we share that number to like subscribe and hit the bell because this video needs to get out to more stress entrepreneurs so they can create the change they need in your life in order to remain calm and achieve that zen like status. So share.

So three or four months ago, one of our most valued members of the team Yanni who used to be a client before I was in charge of growth, marketing had to take a step back and go back to a family business that he had, right. So he couldn't stay for us for a few months. And I decided and instead of hiring someone else, I needed to learn what he was doing. I needed to step up and keep honing my marketing skills. The problem is that I was involved in a lot of other work. So I essentially doubled my workload all of a sudden, and as you also remember, six months ago, I published a video about what my 2022 was going to look like in terms of my sports achievements. I wanted to run a 10k half marathon, run a marathon, run an Ironman and climb one of the seven tallest peaks in the world, either Kilimanjaro or Elbrus, so by the time Yanni I left I had double my workload. And I had also been running a couple of half marathon, Alicante, and Madrid. And I was about to run a full marathon in USA. But I also started training for the Ironman, which is, which I was supposedly going to do in August in Estonia. And about that same time, one of our clients came for this Khurana from an AI and pitch me on this idea of climbing one of the tallest peaks in the Himalayas, will also be right next, whoever is next year in May 2023. And I love climbing. So I said yes. So all of a sudden, a couple of weeks, I went from having a normal work and just training for a marathon, to training for a marathon and an Ironman and also going climbing with Francisco to the Pyrenees. And we climb in Monte perdido, which is one of the most famous peaks here in Spain, I in winter conditions, which was fantastic, but it wasn't ready. So I injured myself put on work properly for a couple of weeks.

Essentially, I was overloaded with cortisol, I was tackling a double workload, I was physically impaired from the climb, and I still had to keep running and training and swimming and going biking for the Ironman, it was just too much stress, too much unnecessary stress. And I eventually collapsed. So it can happen to anyone.

So I really challenge you to think about what are you doing in your life that is not strictly necessary, because if now I think about it, and it was obvious that lots is pretty cool. Climbing loves is pretty cool, but it is not realigned with IP owing self mastery. In Europe, Stock Exchange, which is the world Ironman and marathon is pretty cool. But it's probably again, not the number one priority. What I'm trying to build is IPO booster company. So I started slashing away everything that I knew was not aligned with the goal. And eventually my stress levels went down. That doesn't mean that I stopped exercising quite the contrary, it went back to the gym and it started to bodybuilding. The point of the story is that it's very easy to deviate from what we already know and start doing things that are just not aligned with the goal.

So please, if you want to go from anxious and stressed out to Zen like you know what to do define a clear direction, trim away everything that is not aligned with that. Use tools that prevent you from falling to shiny object syndrome. Audit your environment to remove all anxiety and stress triggers have learned to work as a top performer and master the Big Five healthy habits if you do this.

There's no way you do not stop performing in a zen like state at the peak of your potential which is the number one step you need to achieve. If you want to make success a possibility.