Master the Stress of Success

Your journey towards success often feels like an uphill climb - full of challenges and escalating stress levels. Watch this video to arm yourself with strategies to manage your energy, harness your stress, and ultimately transform it into strength.

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Harnessing the Stress of Success

Do you ever feel like you just get busier and busier the older you get? And that life seems to get more stressful instead of less?

The reality is your responsibilities increase the higher you climb, and the more you continue to climb, the more the stress of success starts to build.

And at a certain point you start to wonder how you're going to be able to keep it up. You want to continue to achieve, but it comes with a price: the stress of success.

Today we're going to explore the stress of success and whether you can prevent it, and then I'm going to share a game plan on how you can master your stress.

And right now you might be thinking "Why does success have to be stressful? Shouldn't achieving my goals make me happy and fulfilled?"

The truth is, enduring success involves managing the success tax - every new level brings its own set of new challenges.

For example:

Becoming a home owner is awesome until you have to pay for a new roof or water heater (like I got to do this week). What a fun way to spend your money!

The boat is so fun until all you do is spend your time cleaning it and making repairs.

And the dog is so dang cute until you're picking up its poop on a daily basis or paying expensive vet bills.

These achievements bring joy - but also demand more energy, more money and more time.

More people are depending on us, we've got bigger bills to pay and there's more on the line. Hello stress tax!

And we have to pay it.

In order to do it without going into debt, there's one very important equation:

ENERGY IN = ENERGY OUT

You're climbing the mountain of life everyday, one foot in front of the other, steeper and steeper, with more and more difficult terrain. It's a never-ending push and it's exhausting!

Which means you've got to be getting good sleep. You've got to be hydrating. You've got to be refueling yourself. You've got to disconnect from work occasionally.

Because when you're not managing your energy, life feels like a grind. It's exhausting and not very fulfilling.

But when you're managing your energy, it turns into a glide. You're in the zone, the pistons are firing, and the climb feels a whole heck of a lot easier.

Another thought you might be having is whether or not you can prevent the success tax. Is there a way to avoid it?

And again, the answer is no.

Stress comes with side effects.

Stepping outside of your comfort zone, taking on more responsibility, and learning new things creates stress on both your body and brain.

And stress usually weakens a system.

But, instead of letting stress make you weaker, you can also use it to make you stronger.

Here's how: when you're exposed to stress, it creates micro injuries. And if you don't let these micro injuries get recovery, they turn into large injuries.

But luckily for you, when you're exposed to stress and then follow it with recovery, it actually gives your body a chance to grow and get stronger.

Over time, you're expanding your capacity for stress - and for life!

It's a lot like lifting weights to get a stronger muscle. When I lift weights, it's putting micro injuries in the muscle fibers. In the following 24 to 48 hours when I give my muscles and my body some rest, my body goes in and repairs those tears and leaves them in a slightly stronger state.

Unfortunately for many of us, life is a lot of stress with very little recovery. So instead of climbing the mountain, and we end up falling off the cliff because we're so exhausted and burned out.

Life demands a lot of you. You demand a lot of you. And nobody said it's going to be easy. In fact, it gets harder and harder the higher you go up the mountain.

Life's challenges are stepping stones, not stumbling blocks. As you climb higher, the terrain gets tougher - but so do you. As you master your stress, you'll not only be ready to reach the summit of success but also conquer mountains even higher than you ever dreamed possible.