22. Our 3-Step Stress Better Method
We’re super excited to dive into today's game-changing episode on how to unlock more time in your day, supercharge your productivity, and feel more calm and balanced by mastering stress management. Just imagine turning stress from a time suck into a superpower that helps you streamline your schedule, boost your focus, and reclaim hours in your week.
In this episode, we explore our proven three-step "Stress Better Method" that you can apply to any stressful situation to get out of overthinking and stressing out, so you can get more done, have more time, and feel better. We break down the key differences between disempowering "stuck stress" and empowering "useful stress" and how to shift your mindset.
Tune in to learn practical tips and powerful insights on how to notice and allow stress, identify the thoughts causing your stress, and rewire your brain to feel more calm and in control, even when you have a really big, full life. Get ready to transform how you handle stress so you can be more present and actually enjoy the life you've worked so hard to create.
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If you want to shift out of disempowered thinking and feel more calm, balanced, and capable from the inside out, get our 5-step Empowered Mindset Guide here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
The scientific definition of stress and why it's only harmful if you believe it is.
How to shift from a disempowered stress mindset to an empowered one.
Why high achievers have uniquely challenging tendencies when it comes to managing stress in a healthy way.
The one simple truth for understanding the real cause of your stress (hint: it's not your circumstances).
Our proven 3-step "Stress Better Method" to notice stress, identify stress-causing thoughts, and rewire your brain.
How mastering your mind and stress management helps you get more done in less time with more ease.
Why replacing your to-do list with a results-focused calendar can help you stress less and achieve more.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Download the Disempowered vs Empowered Stress Mindset Framework
Full Episode Transcript:
Kelle: Hey, high achievers, today we’re diving into a game changing strategy that you can use to unlock more time in your day, supercharge your productivity and help you feel more calm and balanced.
Nina: Just imagine turning stress from a time suck into a time sundae, sprinkles and all.
Kelle: I love it.
Nina: It’s a super power.
Kelle: Yeah, we’ll explore practical tips and insight on how mastering stress management can streamline your schedule, boost your focus and help you reclaim hours in your week.
Nina: Join us, let’s transform how you handle stress and pave the way for more calm and balance so you can actually enjoy the life you work so hard to create.
Kelle: Alright, if that sounds amazing to you, you are in the right place.
Nina: Yeah, high fives welcome to another episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina. High fives, Kel. I wish we could high five all of our listeners.
Kelle: I know me too, totally. We’re coming in hot today after having just presented one of our favorite masterclasses called How To Do Stress Better and Have More Time. It’s one of the most requested talks we do for groups and a masterclass we offer pretty consistently on Zoom.
Nina: Yeah. And today we wanted to bring the three step process we teach in the masterclass to the podcast, to you. This is our stress better method and you can apply it to any stressful situation in your life to get out of overthinking and stressing out so you can get things done, have more time and feel better. I think the big difference between what we’ll talk about today and the actual masterclass is probably the live coaching we offer in the.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s really fun and such a bonus for all the attendees, but also, I think the open format and participation we have and encourage too.
Nina: Totally, that’s one of my favorite parts, chatting with and coaching all of the attendees. It’s awesome because I think a lot of women and the women we work with especially, sort of think they’re unicorns, no one has the problems they have, right, Kel?
Kelle: Totally. We kind of isolate ourselves when the only way we know how to cope with our challenges is to suck it up.
Nina: Yeah, being honest and vulnerable isn’t really safe. That’s not the safe zone. So, we wind up keeping so much in and that’s where we meet so many of our clients, they’re like pressure cookers.
Kelle: In this masterclass, we take a deeper dive into the science behind why high achievers specifically handle stress the way we do, why we have the tendencies we have when it comes to stress and burnout.
Nina: And you’ve heard us say this before, and we’re redundant when it’s important. Nothing’s wrong with you, rock stars, nothing’s broken. We always want to remind you that what you perceive as your flaws or character defects, your tendencies as we like to say, are often just your survival mechanisms from childhood. A big part of what we do in coaching is help you understand that, and when you do, there’s no need to beat yourself up anymore. We don’t do that around here. When you understand yourself differently, you treat yourself differently and life feels better, we promise.
Kelle: So, if you like what you hear today, consider hopping on our email list to be the first to know about the next masterclass. We do a much deeper dive in the 45 minute class and you can get coached by us, hear from other women just like you, ask us questions and walk away with real life examples and strategies you can start to use right away.
Nina: But let’s back up for a second. Most high achievers look around and have a pretty great life. Stress doesn’t look like a problem from the outside.
Kelle: They might have a partner and kids, they’re creating success at work and they mostly look happy on the outside, but on the inside it’s a different story.
Nina: Maybe you too feel like you’re rushing through life.
Kelle: Yeah. You go to bed thinking about what you didn’t get done. You wake up thinking about everything you have to do and it feels like a grind, everything feels like a chore.
Nina: Yeah, you don’t have time to take care of everything else you have to do, let alone take care of yourself.
Kelle: That’s what our coaching, this podcast and all the work we bring to the world, that’s what we want to show you. You can actually feel sufficient, grounded and empowered and have time and energy even when you have a really big, full life.
Nina: To feel calm, more present with your kids and family instead of defaulting to that, I can’t turn off work and don’t know how to relax story.
Kelle: Yeah, to feel less stressed, less anxious, less overwhelmed by everything you have to do.
Nina: You can feel empowered like you actually have some choice in how busy you are. You can have time to do the things you’ve been putting off, or just have time and feel safe to actually relax and enjoy everything you’ve created in your life.
Kelle: Okay, let’s jump in. Two questions for you to answer before we get going here. Number one. What would you rate your daily stress or overwhelm on a scale of one to ten, so ten being maximum stress and one being no stress? And then question number two. What are the top three stressors, your daily stressors? So, think that through and then just jot it down.
Nina: Okay, let’s break this down. Let’s start by defining stress. I mean, what is stress anyway? We’re going to get super simple and quote some science. So Brené Brown is one of our queens as you know, and she’s a PhD in all things emotions. She says stress is an emotion we feel when we evaluate environmental demands beyond our ability to cope successfully so we feel overloaded.
Kelle: Yeah. Everyone tells us stress is bad for our health and longevity, that we need to work to eliminate it or reduce it with exercise and breathwork and meditation and nutrition and all the things. But our clients say and we agree that we do some of our best work under stress.
Nina: Yeah, here’s the thing, research has shown that stress is really harmful only when you tell yourself it’s a problem. So, for ambitious, driven smart women like you, we need to normalize stress a little bit and help you learn to feel safe when you feel it and move through it in a healthy, productive way to do stress better.
Kelle: It’s the difference between stuck stress and useful stress, or as we like to call it, disempowered stress and empowered stress.
Nina: Yeah. So disempowered stress is like a disempowered mindset. You may have heard us talk about this before. When you think stress is harmful, something to be avoided, I’m so stressed out, you create stuck stress. So, there are five different components here. We’ll walk through them and then we’ll also walk you through the empowered stress mindset. And if you’re looking to take notes here, don’t worry, we have a download for you. We’ll put it in the show notes in case you want to take a look at this and take a deeper dive later.
So, the first component of a disempowered stress mindset is that you blame others for how you feel. We have a killer episode on blame, I think it’s our most highly downloaded episode, it’s number 14. Check it out for more background here, but in a nutshell, blame sucks, blame takes all of your power away. It makes you feel shitty. Blame is really disempowering. So, the second component of disempowered stress is when you focus on things you can’t control. This can be other people’s behavior, the flight delay, all of the slow drivers when you’re in a rush, the weather.
The third component is rejecting reality. This is where the shoulds show up. You’re thinking something should be different about your circumstances. The fourth component is focusing on the problem, being problem focused like you won’t let it go. And the fifth component of a disempowered stress mindset is you’re fueled by fear based stress, stress mixed with anxiety, scarcity, worry and anger.
Kelle: Yeah. When you look at these, can you see how much time this takes up in your life? This mindset keeps you overthinking, self-doubting and circling the dream. Alright, so that was disempowered stress. Let’s talk about empowered stress. So, an empowered mindset, on the other hand, when you understand that stress is useful, you create empowering stress, growth stress, useful stress. So, this might look like focusing on what you can control.
So, an example is, I can’t control my co-worker, but I can control my own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Alright, the second component of empowered stress is accepting reality even when it’s challenging. This is what it is. Alright, the third component is solution focused. So being solution focused instead of problem focused. So, if you’re solution focused, it’s okay, now what. Instead of dwelling on a problem, consider possible solutions.
Alright, the fourth component of empowered stress is fueled by positive emotions. So, you’re being fueled by things like curiosity and possibility, confidence, respect. And then the fifth component of empowered stress is emotional responsibility. How I’m feeling is 100% my responsibility. My feelings are created by my thoughts, not the circumstances around me.
Nina: And again, in case you want to take notes here or you are and can’t ask us to pause because you’re listening to a podcast instead of joining our live masterclass, again, we’ve created this download for you guys in the show notes, so don’t stress about trying to remember all of this.
Kelle: I actually love this framework, having it on my phone or somewhere close so I can find it and look at it is super helpful for me.
Nina: Yeah. Again, there’ll be a link in the show notes, so just check that out.
Kelle: Yeah. We’ve said this a million times and we’re redundant, like Nina said, when it’s important, that high achievers have very specific tendencies that make it uniquely hard for us to manage stress in a healthy way. We overwork, we overserve, we people please and take our places at the back of the line and we have a nervous system that’s a tad outdated, like an A track in a world of Netflix streaming.
Nina: We’re living in this constant state of survival mode with all the worries and pressures of being a high achieving woman today and this impacts our health. Women have higher rates of autoimmunity and chronic pain than men. And how we feel mentally and emotionally, it holds us back from being able to think clearly, feel confident and present for what’s most important to us.
Kelle: And while it makes perfect sense, evolution and social conditioning and our families of origin, there’s another way to be, do and have what you want in your life.
Nina: So, whether your stress comes from work, your relationship with your significant other, your kids, your health, your finances, your family, what’s going on in the world, maybe it’s a combination of all of them. Stress is affecting you on a daily basis.
Kelle: Yeah, this leads us to our one simple truth. Your thoughts create your feelings. I’m just going to repeat that. I know we say it a lot, but I’m going to say it again. What you are thinking is creating how you’re feeling.
Nina: Yeah. So how you think about your circumstance, stimulates your feelings about it.
Kelle: Stress isn’t caused by what’s happening around you. It’s created by how we filter or label our circumstances, what we make them mean.
Nina: We think our stress is caused by our jobs or our spouse or our to-do lists or other circumstances.
Kelle: The solution, it’s not to quit your job or get a massage or buy the latest beauty tool or even read the latest self-help book or listen to the most up to date podcast.
Nina: Yeah, it’s not about bringing in more information or changing anything outside of you at first.
Kelle: Yeah, it’s about managing your mind by what we call thinking on purpose. It’s a practice of becoming aware of how your thinking impacts your emotions, your behaviors and the results that you want to create in your own life.
Nina: Yeah, let’s take a sec and revisit what you scored your stress levels and what your top three stressors are.
Kelle: Yeah. We’re challenging you to consider, it’s not those things that are causing you to feel stressed, it’s the way you’re thinking about them.
Nina: Yeah. So, with that in mind, let’s dive into our three step process to do stress better and to have more time. This is our stress better method and you can apply this to any stressful situation. So, the first step here is to notice and allow the stress to feel it. Allowing your emotions means feeling them. So, awareness is the first step in any change process. We talk about this a lot. It’s the first step to any long term behavior change.
And everyone has a unique personal stress profile, this is where we get clear on yours. Your personal stress profile is a tool we use with clients that’s designed to increase your understanding of your triggers, stress symptoms and coping behaviors. The purpose of building this awareness is to help you cope with stress more successfully. When you meet us for a consultation, which you can schedule on our website, this is one of the takeaways we give you for free. We’ll share a link to schedule in the show notes. While we won’t dive into this full on right now, we can start by just asking yourself, how does stress feel in your body, what happens?
Kelle: For me, when I am stressed, I’m feeling tense, a tightening feeling. I have this heavy, dense feeling in my shoulders and in my chest, so it might be similar for you or you might feel something completely different than me. What we want you to do is notice it and allow it to come instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, pretending it’s not happening. We want to notice the feelings and welcome them in, both the positive and the negative ones.
Nina: Yeah. When we work with our clients, we help them notice emotions and allow them because when clients come to work with us, often they want to feel better. That’s the number one thing they want from coaching, they just want to feel better. So, we teach our clients to feel emotions, identify them and allow them. Allowing again, just means feeling, feeling your emotions.
Kelle: Yeah. Negative emotions are a part of being human, but you don’t have to let them run the show. You can understand your emotions and change your relationship with them. You can allow them to come and process them and then they calm down and you calm down. If you decide to work with us, we have an in depth process on how we do this.
The second step of the three step process to do stress better is, identifying what’s causing the stress with a thought release. So, we want you to write down your thoughts. This is called a thought release or some people call it a brain dump. Write everything down that’s going on in your brain and then take a moment to look at your thoughts. This will help you identify the cause of the stress, the thought that’s causing the stress.
Nina: Yeah. Remember, we think the stress is coming from our work or our partner or everything we have to do. And this is where we go back to that one simple truth, your thoughts create your feelings. So, there’s a thought that you’re having that is creating stress.
Kelle: Yeah. Your brain is going to want to blame something for how you feel, someone else. It wants a reason for why you feel stressed, maybe a co-worker or your spouse, your workload, the schedule that you’re trying to keep and by default this is what we do.
Nina: And what we’re challenging you to consider is checking in on how you’re thinking about it, how you’re thinking about the situation by writing it down in a thought release. It’s important to write it down to give some distance between you and your thoughts.
Kelle: For example, say you get an email from your boss that makes you feel stressed, instead of hating on your boss or the harsh tone in the emails.
Nina: We want to show you that the email is not what’s causing the stress, it’s your thoughts about the email.
Kelle: Thoughts like my boss is so demanding. I have so much to do already. I can’t keep up. They’re out to get me.
Nina: Let’s take another example. Your to-do list is longer than you have time for and things just keep getting added to it. What we want to show you is that your list is not causing you to be anxious and stressed, it’s the thoughts you have about it.
Kelle: Thoughts like I don’t have time. I’m already behind. How am I going to get it all done?
Nina: Again, you have evolutionary pressures about what happens if you’re not able to get it all done. You have society telling you, you should be able to do it all and what it means about you if you can’t.
Kelle: Okay, and PS we don’t love to-do lists. We use what we call results plans. A to-do list is great for shopping in Target. But to really get things done we schedule the results we want to create on our calendars and follow through. So more on this later. Alright, so we gave you a couple of examples.
If you decide you want to take a deeper dive, take this into all kinds of situations in your life, that’s what we do in coaching. But these should give you an idea of how you can look at what’s going on in your brain and understand how you were socialized and taught to think and how that impacts how you’re thinking about a situation and approaching it.
Nina: Yeah. Okay, so the third step of our three step process to do stress better is replacing the thought creating the stress. This is how we rewire your brain. This is called neuroplasticity. So, you are actually in control of how you feel because like we mentioned before, your thoughts create your feelings. We want to assure you, it’s not your fault you feel stressed, that’s not what we’re saying. It’s just because of the way your brain was wired.
Kelle: It’s kind of like the operating system of a computer. Like an old computer, it’s no longer necessary for you to run MS-DOS. I mean, is that aging me, or Windows 95. You get it. You need an upgrade.
Nina: You have to teach your brain what to think on purpose. So, if you get an email from your boss and you look at it and have a stress response, if you want to stress less and feel more calm, you have to change your thought pattern. You have to think on purpose.
Kelle: You can use ladder thoughts to step your way into believing you can get it done and your boss is just doing their job.
Nina: You lose the mind drama of thinking your boss is out to get you, or that they have unrealistic demands.
Kelle: You can work up to believing that you have enough time and that you don’t have to do it all alone. You can feel more empowered and less overwhelmed and less stressed out.
Nina: Yeah. When we look at our thoughts, the thoughts we learned often from a very young age, how we grew up and what we learned through society, they are often recycled.
Kelle: I hate to tell you this, but your brain, it’s lazy. Sorry, you all, that’s just how the brains are, they seek comfort, safety and pleasure. This is called the motivational triad.
Nina: It wants to do what it’s always done and think the way it’s always thought, those brains of ours. We have to create believable thoughts intentionally. We have to put our prefrontal cortex online and think on purpose. So, let’s review this three step process. You have to, one, notice and allow the stress. Two, identify the thought causing the stress, this is our one simple truth. And then three, rewire your brain and replace the thought causing the disempowering stress. We want to feel empowered.
Kelle: Okay, let’s take another example. I just love examples. So, pretend you own your own business and you’ve hit a slower season of getting clients. So, this was one of our clients. She felt the emotion, which is shame, and when she looked at why, when she did the thought download, she had the thought, success in my business defines my worth. So, what we needed to do was just call BS on that thought. I mean, come on, success in my business defines my worth. No, absolutely not.
Nina: You were born worthy.
Kelle: Yeah. So, we just feel that shame, we want to feel the emotion and now we know why, it’s because of a thought. We want to replace that thought, so call BS on it and then replace it, my worth has actually nothing to do with how many clients I have and clients are coming. Because if you’re wanting more clients and you’re thinking how many clients you have defines success and you feel shame. It’s going to be really hard for you to have the thinking that you need in order to actually get more clients.
Nina: Yeah. Again, if you decide to work with us, we go more in depth here so that you really understand this and practice it. And then you start to be able to catch the default subconscious thoughts that you think unwittingly, the really sneaky ones. So, these three steps will make you feel more empowered and more calm. And that’s when you can accomplish so much more. Your work is that much better because you’re working with a calm, clear mind, not a stressed and anxious one.
Kelle: These three steps work in so many different situations and areas of our lives. You can do this at work, at home, in your relationships. So, let’s take a second and think about your everyday stress and overwhelm again, your stress score and those top three stressors. What would life look like if your stressors weren’t triggering for you, if you could manage your emotions, stress, and more with ease and with grace?
Nina: What we’re offering you here is a new way of problem solving from the inside out. When you can become aware of what you’re thinking, you can begin to see how you might be holding yourself back.
Kelle: And when you learn to question your old stories, the thoughts in your head, and to manage your mind, you spend less time overthinking. You’re less anxious about what other people think of you. You stop taking things so personally, stop people pleasing. You have less doubt and insecurity. You stop second guessing yourself. You feel less worry and less stressed, especially that un-useful stress. You’re more intentional about what you’re saying yes to and what you’re saying no to. And you actually enjoy the life you work so hard to create.
Nina: Yeah. So, if you want to take this work to the next level, consider meeting us for a free consultation. You can schedule on our website or we’ll put a link in the show notes.
Kelle: On a consultation, we talk about your specific situation and show you how our coaching process will get you from where you are today to where you want to be. These calls are a great starting point, 60 minutes free of charge and it’s Nina and I talking all about you.
Nina: I feel like clients get a lot out of these calls, whether they sign on with us or not, right, Kel?
Kelle: Oh, my God, totally. Coaching isn’t always the right fit, but a lot of times it is. And either way, clients reference these consults often as a killer starting point on their journey.
Nina: So, think about scheduling a call, there’s no obligation.
Kelle: Alright, did you love this episode? We sure did. And if you did too, think about forwarding it to a friend or someone you think might find it useful.
Nina: Yeah, we’re trying to change the world here, everyone, trying to help all the badass high achieving women out there, feel better, more empowered, so they can actually enjoy the life they work so hard to create.
Kelle: So, good. Thank you for being here. See you next time.
Nina: Yeah, thanks. See you next time and at our next masterclass.
Kelle: Oh yeah, bye all.
Nina: Bye.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
Nina: Just imagine turning stress from a time suck into a time sundae, sprinkles and all.
Kelle: I love it.
Nina: It’s a super power.
Kelle: Yeah, we’ll explore practical tips and insight on how mastering stress management can streamline your schedule, boost your focus and help you reclaim hours in your week.
Nina: Join us, let’s transform how you handle stress and pave the way for more calm and balance so you can actually enjoy the life you work so hard to create.
Kelle: Alright, if that sounds amazing to you, you are in the right place.
Nina: Yeah, high fives welcome to another episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Burnout? Check. Daily overwhelm? Check. Resentment rash, stress, and a complete lack of well-being? Check, check, check! You’re not alone. We’re your hosts, Kelle & Nina, and we are here to help you feel calm, balanced, and empowered so you can redefine success, make choices that feel authentic, and ACTUALLY enjoy the life you work so hard to create. You ready? Let’s go.
Kelle: Hey, I’m Kelle.
Nina: And I’m Nina. High fives, Kel. I wish we could high five all of our listeners.
Kelle: I know me too, totally. We’re coming in hot today after having just presented one of our favorite masterclasses called How To Do Stress Better and Have More Time. It’s one of the most requested talks we do for groups and a masterclass we offer pretty consistently on Zoom.
Nina: Yeah. And today we wanted to bring the three step process we teach in the masterclass to the podcast, to you. This is our stress better method and you can apply it to any stressful situation in your life to get out of overthinking and stressing out so you can get things done, have more time and feel better. I think the big difference between what we’ll talk about today and the actual masterclass is probably the live coaching we offer in the.
Kelle: Yeah, that’s really fun and such a bonus for all the attendees, but also, I think the open format and participation we have and encourage too.
Nina: Totally, that’s one of my favorite parts, chatting with and coaching all of the attendees. It’s awesome because I think a lot of women and the women we work with especially, sort of think they’re unicorns, no one has the problems they have, right, Kel?
Kelle: Totally. We kind of isolate ourselves when the only way we know how to cope with our challenges is to suck it up.
Nina: Yeah, being honest and vulnerable isn’t really safe. That’s not the safe zone. So, we wind up keeping so much in and that’s where we meet so many of our clients, they’re like pressure cookers.
Kelle: In this masterclass, we take a deeper dive into the science behind why high achievers specifically handle stress the way we do, why we have the tendencies we have when it comes to stress and burnout.
Nina: And you’ve heard us say this before, and we’re redundant when it’s important. Nothing’s wrong with you, rock stars, nothing’s broken. We always want to remind you that what you perceive as your flaws or character defects, your tendencies as we like to say, are often just your survival mechanisms from childhood. A big part of what we do in coaching is help you understand that, and when you do, there’s no need to beat yourself up anymore. We don’t do that around here. When you understand yourself differently, you treat yourself differently and life feels better, we promise.
Kelle: So, if you like what you hear today, consider hopping on our email list to be the first to know about the next masterclass. We do a much deeper dive in the 45 minute class and you can get coached by us, hear from other women just like you, ask us questions and walk away with real life examples and strategies you can start to use right away.
Nina: But let’s back up for a second. Most high achievers look around and have a pretty great life. Stress doesn’t look like a problem from the outside.
Kelle: They might have a partner and kids, they’re creating success at work and they mostly look happy on the outside, but on the inside it’s a different story.
Nina: Maybe you too feel like you’re rushing through life.
Kelle: Yeah. You go to bed thinking about what you didn’t get done. You wake up thinking about everything you have to do and it feels like a grind, everything feels like a chore.
Nina: Yeah, you don’t have time to take care of everything else you have to do, let alone take care of yourself.
Kelle: That’s what our coaching, this podcast and all the work we bring to the world, that’s what we want to show you. You can actually feel sufficient, grounded and empowered and have time and energy even when you have a really big, full life.
Nina: To feel calm, more present with your kids and family instead of defaulting to that, I can’t turn off work and don’t know how to relax story.
Kelle: Yeah, to feel less stressed, less anxious, less overwhelmed by everything you have to do.
Nina: You can feel empowered like you actually have some choice in how busy you are. You can have time to do the things you’ve been putting off, or just have time and feel safe to actually relax and enjoy everything you’ve created in your life.
Kelle: Okay, let’s jump in. Two questions for you to answer before we get going here. Number one. What would you rate your daily stress or overwhelm on a scale of one to ten, so ten being maximum stress and one being no stress? And then question number two. What are the top three stressors, your daily stressors? So, think that through and then just jot it down.
Nina: Okay, let’s break this down. Let’s start by defining stress. I mean, what is stress anyway? We’re going to get super simple and quote some science. So Brené Brown is one of our queens as you know, and she’s a PhD in all things emotions. She says stress is an emotion we feel when we evaluate environmental demands beyond our ability to cope successfully so we feel overloaded.
Kelle: Yeah. Everyone tells us stress is bad for our health and longevity, that we need to work to eliminate it or reduce it with exercise and breathwork and meditation and nutrition and all the things. But our clients say and we agree that we do some of our best work under stress.
Nina: Yeah, here’s the thing, research has shown that stress is really harmful only when you tell yourself it’s a problem. So, for ambitious, driven smart women like you, we need to normalize stress a little bit and help you learn to feel safe when you feel it and move through it in a healthy, productive way to do stress better.
Kelle: It’s the difference between stuck stress and useful stress, or as we like to call it, disempowered stress and empowered stress.
Nina: Yeah. So disempowered stress is like a disempowered mindset. You may have heard us talk about this before. When you think stress is harmful, something to be avoided, I’m so stressed out, you create stuck stress. So, there are five different components here. We’ll walk through them and then we’ll also walk you through the empowered stress mindset. And if you’re looking to take notes here, don’t worry, we have a download for you. We’ll put it in the show notes in case you want to take a look at this and take a deeper dive later.
So, the first component of a disempowered stress mindset is that you blame others for how you feel. We have a killer episode on blame, I think it’s our most highly downloaded episode, it’s number 14. Check it out for more background here, but in a nutshell, blame sucks, blame takes all of your power away. It makes you feel shitty. Blame is really disempowering. So, the second component of disempowered stress is when you focus on things you can’t control. This can be other people’s behavior, the flight delay, all of the slow drivers when you’re in a rush, the weather.
The third component is rejecting reality. This is where the shoulds show up. You’re thinking something should be different about your circumstances. The fourth component is focusing on the problem, being problem focused like you won’t let it go. And the fifth component of a disempowered stress mindset is you’re fueled by fear based stress, stress mixed with anxiety, scarcity, worry and anger.
Kelle: Yeah. When you look at these, can you see how much time this takes up in your life? This mindset keeps you overthinking, self-doubting and circling the dream. Alright, so that was disempowered stress. Let’s talk about empowered stress. So, an empowered mindset, on the other hand, when you understand that stress is useful, you create empowering stress, growth stress, useful stress. So, this might look like focusing on what you can control.
So, an example is, I can’t control my co-worker, but I can control my own thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Alright, the second component of empowered stress is accepting reality even when it’s challenging. This is what it is. Alright, the third component is solution focused. So being solution focused instead of problem focused. So, if you’re solution focused, it’s okay, now what. Instead of dwelling on a problem, consider possible solutions.
Alright, the fourth component of empowered stress is fueled by positive emotions. So, you’re being fueled by things like curiosity and possibility, confidence, respect. And then the fifth component of empowered stress is emotional responsibility. How I’m feeling is 100% my responsibility. My feelings are created by my thoughts, not the circumstances around me.
Nina: And again, in case you want to take notes here or you are and can’t ask us to pause because you’re listening to a podcast instead of joining our live masterclass, again, we’ve created this download for you guys in the show notes, so don’t stress about trying to remember all of this.
Kelle: I actually love this framework, having it on my phone or somewhere close so I can find it and look at it is super helpful for me.
Nina: Yeah. Again, there’ll be a link in the show notes, so just check that out.
Kelle: Yeah. We’ve said this a million times and we’re redundant, like Nina said, when it’s important, that high achievers have very specific tendencies that make it uniquely hard for us to manage stress in a healthy way. We overwork, we overserve, we people please and take our places at the back of the line and we have a nervous system that’s a tad outdated, like an A track in a world of Netflix streaming.
Nina: We’re living in this constant state of survival mode with all the worries and pressures of being a high achieving woman today and this impacts our health. Women have higher rates of autoimmunity and chronic pain than men. And how we feel mentally and emotionally, it holds us back from being able to think clearly, feel confident and present for what’s most important to us.
Kelle: And while it makes perfect sense, evolution and social conditioning and our families of origin, there’s another way to be, do and have what you want in your life.
Nina: So, whether your stress comes from work, your relationship with your significant other, your kids, your health, your finances, your family, what’s going on in the world, maybe it’s a combination of all of them. Stress is affecting you on a daily basis.
Kelle: Yeah, this leads us to our one simple truth. Your thoughts create your feelings. I’m just going to repeat that. I know we say it a lot, but I’m going to say it again. What you are thinking is creating how you’re feeling.
Nina: Yeah. So how you think about your circumstance, stimulates your feelings about it.
Kelle: Stress isn’t caused by what’s happening around you. It’s created by how we filter or label our circumstances, what we make them mean.
Nina: We think our stress is caused by our jobs or our spouse or our to-do lists or other circumstances.
Kelle: The solution, it’s not to quit your job or get a massage or buy the latest beauty tool or even read the latest self-help book or listen to the most up to date podcast.
Nina: Yeah, it’s not about bringing in more information or changing anything outside of you at first.
Kelle: Yeah, it’s about managing your mind by what we call thinking on purpose. It’s a practice of becoming aware of how your thinking impacts your emotions, your behaviors and the results that you want to create in your own life.
Nina: Yeah, let’s take a sec and revisit what you scored your stress levels and what your top three stressors are.
Kelle: Yeah. We’re challenging you to consider, it’s not those things that are causing you to feel stressed, it’s the way you’re thinking about them.
Nina: Yeah. So, with that in mind, let’s dive into our three step process to do stress better and to have more time. This is our stress better method and you can apply this to any stressful situation. So, the first step here is to notice and allow the stress to feel it. Allowing your emotions means feeling them. So, awareness is the first step in any change process. We talk about this a lot. It’s the first step to any long term behavior change.
And everyone has a unique personal stress profile, this is where we get clear on yours. Your personal stress profile is a tool we use with clients that’s designed to increase your understanding of your triggers, stress symptoms and coping behaviors. The purpose of building this awareness is to help you cope with stress more successfully. When you meet us for a consultation, which you can schedule on our website, this is one of the takeaways we give you for free. We’ll share a link to schedule in the show notes. While we won’t dive into this full on right now, we can start by just asking yourself, how does stress feel in your body, what happens?
Kelle: For me, when I am stressed, I’m feeling tense, a tightening feeling. I have this heavy, dense feeling in my shoulders and in my chest, so it might be similar for you or you might feel something completely different than me. What we want you to do is notice it and allow it to come instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, pretending it’s not happening. We want to notice the feelings and welcome them in, both the positive and the negative ones.
Nina: Yeah. When we work with our clients, we help them notice emotions and allow them because when clients come to work with us, often they want to feel better. That’s the number one thing they want from coaching, they just want to feel better. So, we teach our clients to feel emotions, identify them and allow them. Allowing again, just means feeling, feeling your emotions.
Kelle: Yeah. Negative emotions are a part of being human, but you don’t have to let them run the show. You can understand your emotions and change your relationship with them. You can allow them to come and process them and then they calm down and you calm down. If you decide to work with us, we have an in depth process on how we do this.
The second step of the three step process to do stress better is, identifying what’s causing the stress with a thought release. So, we want you to write down your thoughts. This is called a thought release or some people call it a brain dump. Write everything down that’s going on in your brain and then take a moment to look at your thoughts. This will help you identify the cause of the stress, the thought that’s causing the stress.
Nina: Yeah. Remember, we think the stress is coming from our work or our partner or everything we have to do. And this is where we go back to that one simple truth, your thoughts create your feelings. So, there’s a thought that you’re having that is creating stress.
Kelle: Yeah. Your brain is going to want to blame something for how you feel, someone else. It wants a reason for why you feel stressed, maybe a co-worker or your spouse, your workload, the schedule that you’re trying to keep and by default this is what we do.
Nina: And what we’re challenging you to consider is checking in on how you’re thinking about it, how you’re thinking about the situation by writing it down in a thought release. It’s important to write it down to give some distance between you and your thoughts.
Kelle: For example, say you get an email from your boss that makes you feel stressed, instead of hating on your boss or the harsh tone in the emails.
Nina: We want to show you that the email is not what’s causing the stress, it’s your thoughts about the email.
Kelle: Thoughts like my boss is so demanding. I have so much to do already. I can’t keep up. They’re out to get me.
Nina: Let’s take another example. Your to-do list is longer than you have time for and things just keep getting added to it. What we want to show you is that your list is not causing you to be anxious and stressed, it’s the thoughts you have about it.
Kelle: Thoughts like I don’t have time. I’m already behind. How am I going to get it all done?
Nina: Again, you have evolutionary pressures about what happens if you’re not able to get it all done. You have society telling you, you should be able to do it all and what it means about you if you can’t.
Kelle: Okay, and PS we don’t love to-do lists. We use what we call results plans. A to-do list is great for shopping in Target. But to really get things done we schedule the results we want to create on our calendars and follow through. So more on this later. Alright, so we gave you a couple of examples.
If you decide you want to take a deeper dive, take this into all kinds of situations in your life, that’s what we do in coaching. But these should give you an idea of how you can look at what’s going on in your brain and understand how you were socialized and taught to think and how that impacts how you’re thinking about a situation and approaching it.
Nina: Yeah. Okay, so the third step of our three step process to do stress better is replacing the thought creating the stress. This is how we rewire your brain. This is called neuroplasticity. So, you are actually in control of how you feel because like we mentioned before, your thoughts create your feelings. We want to assure you, it’s not your fault you feel stressed, that’s not what we’re saying. It’s just because of the way your brain was wired.
Kelle: It’s kind of like the operating system of a computer. Like an old computer, it’s no longer necessary for you to run MS-DOS. I mean, is that aging me, or Windows 95. You get it. You need an upgrade.
Nina: You have to teach your brain what to think on purpose. So, if you get an email from your boss and you look at it and have a stress response, if you want to stress less and feel more calm, you have to change your thought pattern. You have to think on purpose.
Kelle: You can use ladder thoughts to step your way into believing you can get it done and your boss is just doing their job.
Nina: You lose the mind drama of thinking your boss is out to get you, or that they have unrealistic demands.
Kelle: You can work up to believing that you have enough time and that you don’t have to do it all alone. You can feel more empowered and less overwhelmed and less stressed out.
Nina: Yeah. When we look at our thoughts, the thoughts we learned often from a very young age, how we grew up and what we learned through society, they are often recycled.
Kelle: I hate to tell you this, but your brain, it’s lazy. Sorry, you all, that’s just how the brains are, they seek comfort, safety and pleasure. This is called the motivational triad.
Nina: It wants to do what it’s always done and think the way it’s always thought, those brains of ours. We have to create believable thoughts intentionally. We have to put our prefrontal cortex online and think on purpose. So, let’s review this three step process. You have to, one, notice and allow the stress. Two, identify the thought causing the stress, this is our one simple truth. And then three, rewire your brain and replace the thought causing the disempowering stress. We want to feel empowered.
Kelle: Okay, let’s take another example. I just love examples. So, pretend you own your own business and you’ve hit a slower season of getting clients. So, this was one of our clients. She felt the emotion, which is shame, and when she looked at why, when she did the thought download, she had the thought, success in my business defines my worth. So, what we needed to do was just call BS on that thought. I mean, come on, success in my business defines my worth. No, absolutely not.
Nina: You were born worthy.
Kelle: Yeah. So, we just feel that shame, we want to feel the emotion and now we know why, it’s because of a thought. We want to replace that thought, so call BS on it and then replace it, my worth has actually nothing to do with how many clients I have and clients are coming. Because if you’re wanting more clients and you’re thinking how many clients you have defines success and you feel shame. It’s going to be really hard for you to have the thinking that you need in order to actually get more clients.
Nina: Yeah. Again, if you decide to work with us, we go more in depth here so that you really understand this and practice it. And then you start to be able to catch the default subconscious thoughts that you think unwittingly, the really sneaky ones. So, these three steps will make you feel more empowered and more calm. And that’s when you can accomplish so much more. Your work is that much better because you’re working with a calm, clear mind, not a stressed and anxious one.
Kelle: These three steps work in so many different situations and areas of our lives. You can do this at work, at home, in your relationships. So, let’s take a second and think about your everyday stress and overwhelm again, your stress score and those top three stressors. What would life look like if your stressors weren’t triggering for you, if you could manage your emotions, stress, and more with ease and with grace?
Nina: What we’re offering you here is a new way of problem solving from the inside out. When you can become aware of what you’re thinking, you can begin to see how you might be holding yourself back.
Kelle: And when you learn to question your old stories, the thoughts in your head, and to manage your mind, you spend less time overthinking. You’re less anxious about what other people think of you. You stop taking things so personally, stop people pleasing. You have less doubt and insecurity. You stop second guessing yourself. You feel less worry and less stressed, especially that un-useful stress. You’re more intentional about what you’re saying yes to and what you’re saying no to. And you actually enjoy the life you work so hard to create.
Nina: Yeah. So, if you want to take this work to the next level, consider meeting us for a free consultation. You can schedule on our website or we’ll put a link in the show notes.
Kelle: On a consultation, we talk about your specific situation and show you how our coaching process will get you from where you are today to where you want to be. These calls are a great starting point, 60 minutes free of charge and it’s Nina and I talking all about you.
Nina: I feel like clients get a lot out of these calls, whether they sign on with us or not, right, Kel?
Kelle: Oh, my God, totally. Coaching isn’t always the right fit, but a lot of times it is. And either way, clients reference these consults often as a killer starting point on their journey.
Nina: So, think about scheduling a call, there’s no obligation.
Kelle: Alright, did you love this episode? We sure did. And if you did too, think about forwarding it to a friend or someone you think might find it useful.
Nina: Yeah, we’re trying to change the world here, everyone, trying to help all the badass high achieving women out there, feel better, more empowered, so they can actually enjoy the life they work so hard to create.
Kelle: So, good. Thank you for being here. See you next time.
Nina: Yeah, thanks. See you next time and at our next masterclass.
Kelle: Oh yeah, bye all.
Nina: Bye.
Nina: Hey everyone, if you want more live access to me and Kelle, you have to join our email list.
Kelle: Yes, we’ll come to your email box every Tuesday and Thursday.
Nina: You can ask us questions, get clarity and get coached.
Kelle: We offer monthly free email coaching when you’re on our list and you’re the first to know about trainings, events and other free coaching opportunities.
Nina: Just go to kelleandnina.com. That’s K E L L E and nina.com to sign up.
Kelle: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of Ambitious-Ish.
Nina: If you’re ready to align your ambitions with your heart and feel more calm, balanced, and connected, visit https://www.kelleandnina.com/ for more information about how to work with us and make sure you get on our list.
Kelle: See you in the next episode!
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