Me MySELF & Isolation - Martin Tucker at SaaSGrowthLive

Hello Martin Tucker here, I don't know how you found it, but I've certainly seen in the conversations I've had with business owners, health leaders, salespeople over the last week or two weeks, there's a much bigger level of fatigue, people feeling mentally drained, and the monotony of doing the same thing day in day out has really started to hit home. And so I'm going to take a look at the importance of focusing on self, okay, so self-awareness, raising yourself awareness of what's happening for you, and some of the things that you might be able to do that for myself winners perspective help with your with your mental well-being and the way that you are looking after yourself because that inevitably is really really important and has a huge impact on our performance, and undoubtedly what's been happening with lockdown and isolation has really put this under the microscope so it's always been important, always will be important but right now it's even more important than ever before.

So the first thing is stories; have a think about are you creating any stories in your head that are causing you to be experiencing much higher levels of stress and anxiety, and what I mean by that is if we have 60,000 thoughts every single day, and when things are very certain for us and they're very familiar there's no threat attached, then majority of those thoughts are subconscious. But in the environment we've been operating in and it's still existing because of what's happening with the economy, the news we're hearing about job losses, all those sorts of things, a lot of those thoughts now are more conscious thoughts, or they're very stress-related thoughts. We lost the time we're being kicked back out into what I call our emotional red brain, our limbic system, and we're going round and round in our thinking about what's really happening you know, how good am I, you know am I going to survive, what’s really going to happen.

And we're starting to make a lot of projections and a lot of stories a lot of things that feel very real to us about what's going to happen in the future, when in actual fact we just don't know what's going to happen in the future. Sure we can predict, we can create models, we can have an idea, but even then we just need to work with the facts that are there and not project too much into that because our red brains, this limbic system our emotional Center starts to catastrophize, it starts to get paranoid about stuff, and it starts to judge ourselves, we started to label ourselves particularly negatively about how rubbish we are, how difficult this is going to be, how we can't cope and all of that distracts us down. So I'm just offering you the thought of are there any stories that you're creating for yourself which aren't really helpful at the moment and if we're not careful starts become a self-fulfilling prophecy that are affecting your yourself talk, and maybe making things more negative than they perhaps need to be. And actually stopping you from taking the actions that you need to take to try and avert some of the things that you think might be happening.

The next thing then is energy when we are having a lots of stressful thoughts, the stress hormone cortisol gets pumped into our brain, and and that actually stops serotonin the happy drug, and dopamine the motivational drug from from operating, it blocks it out. And so the feelings of lethargy or feeling demotivated are not surprising if you've been experiencing high levels of stress, so in terms of managing your energy, that you do some of this look at the the obvious things in making sure you're staying hydrated. We can get a bit lazy working from home in terms of getting some bad habits, food choices we make 35,000 decisions every single day, 226 of those are associated with food. Just make sure you're making the right food choices, get a start and a finish time to your day when working from home, don't use the time that you used to have for commuting which in my views was really good things that the start of lock down, to help you with your mental health don't use those to just work extra hours. That's not going to be a great situation for you get into the habit of a start and a finish time. Look up the Pomodoro Technique, a Pomodoro Technique, I think it actually is pronounced. Have a look at that in terms of how you can manage your day with some little bit of urgency and momentum and get some things that you can look forward to lock downs easing up a little bit be creative with that, so have something to look forward to to give yourself some energy.

The next thing then is labelling. Labelling is about putting a name to the emotion that you're experiencing when we do that it becomes easier to deal with the emotion we can then start to think about what's the trigger event for that emotion happening, why is it actually happened, and what's in my thing that's that's caused me to get emotional, can I shift my thinking, can I say well rather than failing am I learning how to cope with this, simple things like that. And also emotion, that the word emotion comes from the root word to move, so what is the emotion if you know what the emotion is what's that's what's that telling you into the direction you need to move in. You know, if I'm feeling a sad emotion a bad emotion what do I need to do to try and get rid of that and then what possibilities are open to me, or is a good emotion, what do I need to do to keep on feeling that sort of emotion.

And then finally we have flow; flow is the state where we are working really effortlessly, if things were really easy time flies by we getting loads done, be aware of anything that's knocking you out of your flow state so interruptions now there are some interruptions particularly for working from home that we probably can't control. Perhaps the Amazon person who if all is something else online to get rid of the boredom and traps to meet somebody, you know perhaps they're knocking at the door, your children are running in with a maths question and asking you about it, we can't really control those. But what you can control is your technology, manage your technology don't let your technology manage you the notifications from your app social media platforms, slack, LinkedIn, all those sorts of things you can manage those and decide when you're actually going to engage with them. When we get knocked out the flow state we go from being an alpha and theta brain waves to going into beta brain waves and we get sucked down a wormhole if we're not careful. On average it takes 23 minutes to get back to that flow state so think about how you can manage your technology so you don't get the interruptions that are causing you to be knocked out of flow.

Okay so look I hope that's been useful - focus on what stories am I creating, how do I manage my energy, can label the emotion, and can I keep myself in flow states, speak to you soon.