Transcript
Why do we experience stress? Gosh, because we have so much on our plates. Let’s just start with that. For me, this comes down to a really great quote by McKinsey and company. So they had a paper called ‘Centered leadership, how talented women thrive.’ And they had this quote that said, it’s about having a well of physical, mental, intellectual and spiritual strength that drives success and achievement in women and inspires other people to follow. So, and notice that I don’t say intellectual and physical strength, it’s having a well of all of these things that helps us to thrive. And stress comes in when we don’t fill up that well. So this comes down to our basic needs. And again, I have a model for this that I can share with you, but essentially we have the core of it where a need is something that we need to be just okay without which we are hungry.
We are not our best selves. We are irritable. So we talking about in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you know, food, sleep, water, fresh air and interaction with other people. Now, everyone’s basic needs are, you know, different for each person. But they will include these things. Now, if we think about phone battery as an energy level, now we’re aiming to charge ourselves up to a hundred percent somewhere. Okay. You know, just okay every single day, but certain activities will deplete our energy. And we’ll need to keep topping it up because if we start to give when we are not okay, we’re in the realm of sacrifice. And if we keep sacrificing over time and there will be people we sacrifice for. So those in our heart space, we will give our energy to them. Like my kids, like my parents, like certain friends.
But if I give my energy to everybody that asks for it, I’m going to be in the realm of not okay. You know, completely deplete sacrificed. So if I topped myself up to a hundred percent, then I can be generous with energy I’ve got. Now we have desires as well, like chocolate wine, food, you know, all these kinds of nice stuff. And if I’m not okay and it gets and I’m not had enough sleep and it gets to two o’clock in the afternoon and I go, Oh, just going to have a Coca Cola and a chocolate bar and top myself up with these desires in order to get through the day. Now that can become bad habits over time. I’d love to know what your bad habits are, but we all have them. But if we make ourselves our needs and we are consistently meeting these needs, like sleep is a huge one.
And we add in it desire, we can have the realm of enjoyment and by taking really good care of our needs, we can avoid the stress burnout cycle. Because what we see mostly in burnout is it starts with, you know, every three months you might have a bit of an illness, you might even develop tonsillitis from it. But we quickly reset and we get back up and running full power after two days. And this cycle repeats every few months. Now that’s the precursor to burnout. So be aware of that. And if you really get good at this stuff, concentrating on those basic needs, then that cycle will not perpetuate into full blown burnout. So be aware of that.
How do we notice if we are on the road to stress and burnout? So, if we are not meeting those basic needs, there will be three people who show up and we each have a special relationship with one of these ladies. So I’d love to know what it is for you, but we have the bitch. So that might look like bitch mama. When you come home and you’re like, you stepped on a piece of Lego and you’re like Ahh! would you just put them away? And we have the martyr who is silently seething. So she is making the food, she’s putting all the washing away, she’s doing all the bags for the next day, but she’s not asking for help and she is seething inside cause can you not see what I’m doing here? You’re walking past, you’re getting yourself a snack and I’m doing all this. That’s the martyr at work. And then we have the victim. So over time, the bitch and the martyr can start to lead into the victim. I can’t change anything. I can’t do anything about the situation. I’ve tried. It won’t, nothing changes.
You know, they’re kind of like resigned themselves to the fact that this is it now. So, you know, if we make, you know, if you’ve had eight hours sleep, really good food, fresh air, you’ve spoken to someone and you’re never going to be the bitch, the Martyr, or the victim on that day. It’s always the days where I’m not had enough sleep and I’m cranky. I’m running out of energy and I’m the bitch or, I’ve not taken care of my exercise or fresh air and now turn into the martyr. We start to have a series of prerequisites for falling into these archetypes, these disempowered archetypes. So we can start to tune in. You know, when you find yourself in the Martyr, look backwards, what was the trigger? And nine times out of 10, it will be one of these basic needs that is repetitively being missed.
So, do some digging and trigger tracking of your own because. So, we cannot do it all. That’s a given. And many, many people when they tried to do it all, that’s when it starts to collapse in upon them. And we turn into superwoman. This was me before I started coaching. I was running at 200 miles per hour. I was pushing to prove myself at work, trying to make the next level. And actually I can feel adrenalized just talking about superwoman being at that pace for a long period of time it’s gonna feel stressy it’s gonna lead to burnout. So it’s actually noticing when you fall into that stressed out superwoman and consciously choosing to come from a different perspective. So in my line of work, we use what’s called the five women’s power types. You know, so in this particular case, we’d want to bring to the forefront what I call the queen power type, so we can set boundaries, maintain boundaries at ease. We claim space where we let boundaries slip in the past. And the key to this is other people we got to delegate. And that doesn’t mean hired help. It means the people who we already have around us. You know, the first piece of delegation I ever did effectively was to get my children to be in charge of the toilet rolls in each toilet. You know, it doesn’t have to be big, but it can be age appropriate too.
