Episode Summary

Have you ever felt like stress was hijacking your ability to think creatively and make the best decisions for your business?

This episode dives deep into how chronic stress affects your brain and hampers your entrepreneurial success.

By understanding and addressing this issue, you can unlock higher productivity, creativity, and joy in both your business and personal life.

In this episode, you will:

1. Learn practical strategies to regulate your nervous system and access your most creative and analytical thinking.

2. Discover the crucial role of dopamine in maintaining motivation and how to harness it for goal achievement.

3. Gain insights into transforming stress patterns and stepping into your full potential as an entrepreneur.

4. Listen to this episode now to learn how to break free from stress and operate at your peak performance!

Schedule a call with Jenna about joining the Clarity Accelerator to dial in signature offers and strategies and a first-rate mindset.

https://www.theuncommonway.com/schedule

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https://www.theuncommonway.com/talk

Find Jenna on Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/

The Uncommon Way is led by business coach Jenna Harrison, who helps women entrepreneurs feel confident, find their ideal clients effortlessly and avoid overwork so they can manifest money and abundance in their business and life.

This podcast empowers female entrepreneurs to overcome imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and limiting beliefs through somatics, mindset, and spirituality, create 7-figure offers, and build an online coaching business with clarity and alignment.

Episode Transcription

You know when a lot is piled on your plate, and you're trying to keep your cool, and then something else gets dropped on you, and then you're starting to lose sleep, and you notice yourself falling into the victim cave? Well, this episode is for you.

You're listening to the Uncommon Way Business and Life Coaching Podcast, the podcast that helps women entrepreneurs get clear on signature offers and strategies that sell themselves, so you can lean back and stop the hustle. You will learn to maximize your mindset, messaging, and strategy, and step into the uncommonly successful business and life you are creating. Here's your host, top-ranked business coach and reformed overanalyzer turned queen of clarity, Jenna Harrison.

Now some of you might be thinking, duh, I hate being stressed out, of course I want to move out of this situation. But for many of us, myself included, it's not just an innocent ebb and flow of life where things get a little crazy now and then, it's actually a habituated pattern that we ourselves contribute to. And there's a reason, because deep down, we might think this is what makes us succeed, or makes us more worthy, or many other things. So to help that part of you release its grip a little bit more, I want to show you what's available on the other side.

It is now very well established in the field of neuroscience that stress states cause us to lose access to the parts of the brain that you most need to access as an entrepreneur. Because obviously, if you're being chased by a tiger, you don't want to sit there and analyze the pros and cons and think creatively about the most creative solution that you could leave the tiger's path. So many other parts of our brain really just aren't needed in that moment. We need to zero in, we need tunnel vision, we need to get the hell out of there, and we need to not be thinking a lot. But as an entrepreneur, you do need those faculties, you desperately need them. You want access to your most creative thinking. You want access to long-term visioning. You want access to problem-solving. You want to be analytical. You want to think abstractly about the meaning of it all and create compelling intellectual property.

And as people who are serving others and collaborating with others, you want to have the most empathetic parts of your brains lit up, the parts of you that can really connect with other humans, that feel good seeing other humans, that get excited about your interactions with these people, that feel a sense of trust, that feel camaraderie, that feel more like collaboration instead of competition. Think about it. If you are in a high-stress situation, you want to have the most skeptical part of yourself, the potentially most aggressive part of yourself, available to defend yourself against a threat. So again, our brains have been wired in ways that make complete sense. They just don't fully serve us quite frequently. The parts of you that you really want are only fully online when the brain is in what is called a responsive state, which is when your nervous system has regulated, when you're not stressed out, when you're at your baseline.

But you know what else you want access to? Dopamine. Not just because it feels good, like that little hit you get when you're like, ooh, but because recently so much research is showing how critical dopamine is to us seeking out, to us going after big things, to setting goals and sticking to our plan and really continuing with what we say we're moving towards. You know how when you're stressed and you reach a point where you're like, ugh, why even bother? Did you just think that was a coincidence? It is not. And dopamine is released with a variety of activities that tend to happen when you are in your most relaxed, regulated states. Can you imagine where we would be if we were all more regulated and had been in the past? What different innovations might be around? What new ways of being? I mean, we need more people more fully tapping into their genius.

Now I bring on a lot of hard-charging powerhouse women who sometimes, especially in the beginning, really resist when I tell them to get some sleep or whatever the advice may be in the moment, because they've got to do more, not less, with everything going on. So I tell them, oh, I'm not suggesting this because I have some biased agenda of a simple, easy business. It's because for where I know you are going, I need you operating at P Performance, and this is not it. Luckily, the resistance goes away once they start seeing results.

And so this is why when we're looking to really reinvent ourselves, really engage in mindset work and an overhaul of sorts, it's not an in-and-out process. It's sort of like getting into the pool where you dive in, but then if you jump right out, you never really acclimated to the water and you actually need to be in that for a while, be in that soup for a while so that it just starts to feel normal. But again, back to the movement of some sort, something that really gets your heart rate up. It could be a good run, it could be a great orgasm, however, whatever floats your boat. But you know, right, you've been in times where maybe you've had a great yoga class, and then afterwards, you're reflecting on all these things that you had and you're like, you know what, it's really not as big a deal as I was making it into, right, or oh, I know how to, what I'll do, I'll just delegate this or whatever comes up. That is the power of helping your nervous system re-regulate and being able to tap into that higher thinking.

All right, now I want to share the mindset tip. So you've got so much that it feels overwhelming. Hey, if you want true clarity about your secret sauce, your people, your best way of doing business and how you talk about your offer, then I invite you to join us in the Clarity Accelerator. I'll teach you to connect all the dots, the dots that have always been there for you, so that you can show up like you were born for exactly this. Come join us and supercharge every other tool or tactic you'll ever learn, from Facebook ads to manifestation. Just go to theuncommonway.com/schedule and set up a time to talk. I can't wait to be your coach.

Okay, good. You are in a capacity-building phase. You are stretching yourself to be able to hold more than you have previously. That might look like more content that you're creating now. It might be more plates that you're juggling. It might be more emotions you're experiencing or heightened emotions than you've typically carried in the past. It might be more patience or more tolerance that you're being called to hold, but it's okay. We can do hard things, right? Now, this advice is not for you if you are in a continually stressed-out state. If it's sustained, there's likely something else going on, and you want to move heaven and earth to work with a coach or another mental health professional to really get to the root of that. This advice is for you if you have overall a more balanced, sustainable baseline, and then things spring up. Because what's not helpful is the thoughts of, oh no, I'm regressing, or I should be beyond this, or I'm a hot mess, or why can't I ever get ahead, or why does this always happen to me?

No judgment. I have thought every one of those. I've thought every one of those countless times. We are all on a journey shedding that mentality, that old mentality that gets us nowhere. I like to think instead about what is waiting for me on the other side. What if this thing right now, what if that were a breeze? What if my husband were asking me, so what's your day like tomorrow? And I was saying, meh, pretty mellow. But it was exactly what I have to do today. What if my future actually looks nothing like this at all? But because of the muscles I've built, the sheer capacity I've built, when that live webinar before was a big thing, well, now I'm on stage in front of thousands, and it's manageable because of all of that back then.

We don't get to there, right? We don't get to our future goals without passing through discomfort. All of those big dreams you have, have you thought about what it would feel like if you had to do it tomorrow? Walk out on that stage, or whatever it is, hold that retreat, or have the booked out client roster, wherever you might be. Yikes, right? When things are far in the future, all we feel is anticipation. We aren't thinking about any of this other stuff, typically. But the stretching required along the path to that place probably won't feel great, all the time, just because of how we're wired.

So along the way, you might find yourself, you start dragging your feet. And of course, really smart, how could you even argue with them ways, naturally? Which leads you to take longer than you need to on your path to where you're going. Or you might just have heightened negative experiences of these growth phases, both of which are great reasons to work with someone that can give you outside perspective and help you get where you're going faster, better, and easier.

So what if you are down for the growth when necessary, but you really want to make sure that you don't attract more of this by accident? Well, just the mindset tip that I gave you is helpful, because what you're doing is you're turning your attention to the future desired state, rather than the current stressed-out state. But there's more. Because how you deal with what's going on right now matters, too. You want to deal with the things efficiently, but without creating huge emotional space for it or drama. I love this metaphor that I heard from Danielle Eiman. These circumstances are like something blowing in through the screen door to your house. And you want to just open the back door, the back screen door, and let it pass through. Because often what we tend to do is keep that back door shut. So it's sticking around and reverberating, and our increased attention very easily attracts more of its kind.

So remember, it's not not thinking about it. Don't think of a pink elephant. Instead, it's very gently choosing to spend your mental energy on what is working, what is going well, what you are learning. Not in a gaslighty, spiritual bypassing way, but in the way where you give your brain the task of finding where you do have things that you believe are positive in your life. Or at least even if they're neutral in your life, other things you can focus on. And this is really why gratitude, I mean the genuine gratitude where you're really feeling it, is so powerful.

Okay, my friends, that is it for today. Was it helpful? If so, share this with someone who could use it. And remember, you know who you are, and each day you are stepping further into what you're here to create. Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the clarity first strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit TheUncommonWay.com. See you next time.