Stress Illusion

Welcome to building better developers, the developer podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our interviews. In this episode, we're going to wrap up our interview with Alison Graham. We had a really good first episode, set the stage, set the table as it were for a lot of value bombs that she's going to deliver to us. In this episode, I think we've got a good handle on her story. Some of her initial germs of ideas that grew into something that have now turned into a very good consulting organization, consulting company that she has. And we're going to talk about some of those specific things that you can do and some experiences she's had with some of her customers, some of these consulting engagements and how you can benefit from some of the stories and some of the advice that she's given to others. That being said, time to get to it. So get your pencil and notebook ready. Let's get back to our conversation with Alison. And that's a perfect segue into shifting gears a little bit. You have mentioned your book, Stress Illusion, a couple of times. I guess, especially because we've spent a bit here talking about stress and its effects and that is what is the illusion part of stress? What is it that is, and not to give it all away, but obviously to get everybody to want to buy the book, I guess. But what is the illusion side of it? I can tell you all of it and you'll still want the book, I hope. Yeah. So it's really how we're meant to feel about stress, how we're taught to deal with stress. The things that actually cause stress are part of the illusion. So let me unpack this a bit. First of all, not all stress is bad. And in most psychology and most, like if you've gone down the rabbit hole at all of stress, you probably think that there are two types of stress. We call it eustress and distress. So essentially good and bad. And those two categories, I used that for years. I thought, well, that's great. It is. And then some stuff happens with COVID and with my family and some different challenges that we were going through. And another challenge with my mom, she fell down 10 concrete steps backwards, which was not a wise thing to do if you want to keep your head from getting hurt, shall we say. So eight and a half weeks in the hospital. And as we were going through this, I was like, you know what? I'm so good at managing my stress. Why am I feeling all of the sensations of stress? And I was like, cause I always thought the stress that shows us that we're in danger is good stress. And the stuff that makes us feel anxious and overwhelmed is the bad stress. But in actual fact, we need to look at it as three buckets, empowering stress, which we can use to our advantage to be a more efficient, more effective, more productive, higher performing. Awesome. We can use that and harness it because it can take us in a great place. Then there's the destructive stress that we self-manufacture and causes the overwhelm and the anxiety and latches on to the things that we go through in our life and makes life harder than it needs to be. But in the middle is what I call survival stress. And it doesn't matter how good you are at managing your stress. When you or someone you love is in danger, you are going to feel stress. My challenge to you is how can you harness the power of empowering stress to be sure that the most important responsibilities of your life continue to get done when you're in the middle of those survival stress moments? And how can you ensure that you are not creating destructive stress that is going to make the survival situations even harder than they need to be? And so that model of three buckets instead of two is one of the pieces of the puzzle around the stress illusion. So how did you and I guess sort of did the stress illusion, essentially the content or the book or the concept, did this all come about while you were sort of resolving this for yourself or you're sitting there going, hey, I'm great at this, but I'm still not feeling it? Is that sort of how your process is? You got yourself to, for like a better term, sort of straighten things out and put them in the appropriate buckets and give them the proper amount of attention? Yes. So I often, all of my work came from my own experience. Then I tested on my clients, which is great. And then I can go out to the public with it. And there were certain things that, you know, along the way, it's like when you're a content creator and you're seeing things, you know, I sometimes like I find procrastination. I remember when I'm a proud procrastinator, sometimes it's the best thing you can do. Sometimes it's very destructive. And it's I've learned to figure out the right time because I can tell the sensation in my body when I'm procrastinating because I don't feel like doing something versus I'm procrastinating because I don't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet. And so I struggled to write the book in the way that I wanted to write it until my mom fell down the stairs and stuff was going on with my brother as well. And we as a family had this conversation about its survival stress because danger is upon us. And that and there are some models like very deep psychological models that have like 12 different types of stress. Well, the average person isn't going to go and learn that. I'm like, how do I make these frameworks so, so, so simple that we get it? And so that that becomes the process. But it was because of that. Now, the overall arching work that I do, like I've been teaching this for many years now. So I switched gears in about 2016, I think, from the networking and the business development training into the concepts around resilience and stress management and how do we do it? But therein lies the phrase. By the way, did that answer your question? Because I want to tell you another one of the illusions about stress that I think is so critical. Yeah, I think so. And I don't see anybody raising their hand in the audience right now. So I think we can keep going. All right. Well, they can they can come to the website and ask me a question. But one of the other illusions that was so frustrating for me, oh, gosh, which of the two I'm going to tell, I'm going to tell them both, but one's really quick. There was this continual pressure to do less. So the doctors always said, Alison, you have to slow down, Alison, you need to, you know, stop working so hard. You need to pace yourself. Like the last time I watched the pace car doesn't get the trophy, right. The pace car allows everybody else to go win the race and get started. I did not want to be a pace car for my life. That wasn't the the direction I intended to go. And so there was this overarching expectation that for me to manage my pain, I had to quit on my dreams and my expectations for my life. An actual fact, my neurologist said, you need to reevaluate your expectations for your life, that you're never going to work full time. And I'm like, OK, well, that's true. How do I do what I want to do in less time? I find it quite fascinating that I was so productive back in the day. And now that I'm more able bodied, I have to like put boundaries in place so that I am as productive. But so that like the concept that we have to do less. The another illusion, there are like 25 of them, right, like these illusions. But just because something goes wrong doesn't mean it needs to be stressful. So those obstacles that we have, right, like so the adversities are our survival stress moments, those are going to be stressful. But the obstacles, if we're in business, if you are serving your clients, if you are trying to figure out how to, you know, like there's a client who's upset about your bill. Well, you know what, since the dawn of business, there's been a client who's been upset about a bill that's that's just called business. It's like travel, you know, since the dawn of time with traveling, airplane travel, have there been delayed flights? Have there been mechanical errors? Have there been lost luggage? Of course there has. And so people get so bent out of shape around it instead of just dealing with the obstacle without all of the excess fanfare that they make it harder than it needs to be. And so that that would be another illusion. But I think the most important illusion that I want people to be thinking about so passionately because this is just I've seen it time and time and time again, is people will say, I know that I should be working out and that I need to meditate and that I need to eat well and, you know, have social circles and be optimistic. Those are what I call the critical six of stress management. Their behavior based ideas that are meant to were taught in society are going to be the very things that are going to release our stress and or solve our stress problem. And as I was looking at those, I was like, but I can go to the gym and I can see a lot of people who are really stressed out. It's not the answer. It's an answer because we need to be healthy. We need to, you know, exercising nutrition, being with our friends. But when I talk to clients, they're like, go out with friends. I am so up to my eyeballs in my corporate career, my side hustle, my kids, my teenagers who are off the rails, my younger kids who I'm like, you know, driving around like I'm a taxi. I'm trying to be a spouse. I've got aging parents. They're like friends. I don't even think I have any of those anymore. Right. And I know we have to make time for those healthy lifestyle choices. But if the judgment of not being able to do that, oh, I know I should work, work out. Well, yeah, and you should also sleep. So if the only way you can work out is five o'clock in the morning, we got to have a strategic conversation about how you're designing your days, your weeks, your months and your year so that we can build it into what's happening already instead of causing this extra layer of judgment and angst because you can't figure out how to put the very magical fairy dust thing in your schedule that's supposedly going to help you with your stress. And it's not it's going to release the stress hormones. Gosh, it feels good to go to a boxing class or like kickboxing or some sort of karate class or workout or on the weights, whatever people love to do. Of course, it's going to release the stress hormones from firing. What I'm saying is let's take those tasks and obstacles and stop putting the stress application on top of them. Then we don't have to burn those stress hormones because they never fired in the first place. Yeah, that brings up something we we discuss on a moderately regular basis, because we'll go back every so often and talk about like particularly the beginning of the year, everybody's got all their resolutions and they're doing all their planning. And then we come back regularly and talk about scheduling and planning and thinking about this stuff. And it's amazing how often you sit down and you put out this gorgeous schedule and you say, this is what I'm going to do. And this is the year. It's all going to be awesome. And then a week later, you're stressing out because you're not hitting the boxes to check off that all that's like I had this perfect plan. And now I'm stressed out because I'm not doing it, where if you had not piled all of that stuff into your plan in the first place, you wouldn't be stressed. You would have gotten more done. And then life would be actually a little bit simple for you. It just feels like we want to complicate things way too often when instead it it does. It goes back to sort of what the doctor said to you about doing less. I think that's that's almost what all of us need to do is to is to not try to do more because it seems like that just you hit your limit and then you're still tacking up piling on top of it. It's like, why are you beating a dead horse at that point? It's like, I can't do more. But now I'm stressing out because I want to do more and I can't get it done. OK, so you've just opened up a can of worms. Are you ready for this? I actually believe you can do more. We need to stop doing the things we're doing the way we're doing them. And here's the difference between personal capacity design and productivity strategies, because we in business always think about do we've got to do this, got to do that. We got to do this. But we rarely ever just do something. We always are pulling from our. So I think of capacity is the limited resources we have to do to think, to feel and to be. So what are we doing? The actual activity of it, the feel, does it feel good? Is it lighting our soul? Is it serving our capacity design like our sensations like does it? Is it feeling inflow? Then it's the what am I thinking about it, right? Like, am I pulling negative storylines? Oh, God, I got to do this again. And now we're resenting it and we're angry about it. But, you know, if you just did it, it would take less capacity out of our cylinder, capacity cylinder. And then the being is it serving my overall essence and inflow. And that's why if somebody is a developer and they love, love, love writing code and they just get lost in it and they look up four hours later and they didn't even know, like they thought three minutes went by. And I think we all have that right. Well, that isn't stressful. That isn't stressful. That's going to light your soul. Doing something if you hate gardening, I don't know, just looking out like it's time to start gardening and you resent it, then you could do that same thing for four hours and it can feel like it took you 40 in terms of draining your capacity cylinder. And so when I look at and I start working strategically with people, it's like, OK, so you say you're going to go to the gym every morning. This is your plan. OK, great. I love that you want to get healthy. I love that you want to go to the gym. But did you not tell me that you absolutely hate going to the gym? But yes, I do. Well, why can't we find something that's going to serve the need of getting you healthy that you're actually going to like to do? Well, I never thought about it. OK, fair enough. Well, let's find something that's going to light you up so it doesn't feel like it's drain. You want to do it and then it's going to be easier. And there are always things that we're going to have to do that we're not going to love doing. But how can we streamline those so they don't take out as much of our our capacity? As they would, they would typically. Well, this goes to one that was perfect, because that was one of the things I was going to ask about, was the your your concept of personal capacity design. But then another thing is that you refer to and it sort of gets into some of this is your negative inner critic. And this is I think a lot of times for for those that are high performers or especially if you've got a job and a side hustle and things like that and family, it's maybe a little different from what some people think of the negative inner critic. But it's that one that's like, hey, while you're doing this, there's this other thing you got to do. Or like, you know, you talk about your clients, you're like, I can't have friends. I got too many other things to do. So then you're not enjoying the friends when you're hanging out with the friends because you got too many other things to do. So how do you how do you quiet or address that that that voice in your head that says, hey, there's something else you need to be doing right now? You got to give it an X, your internal voice, an external presence. So what I mean by this is we all know there's a voice going on up in that head. And what I found is that when it's going on in our head, it just kind of gets lost in the ether. And it becomes like you can just ruminate on it and attach on to thoughts and it becomes quite negative if we lean that way. And so I'm a huge believer in just grabbing a post-it note and scribbling it out. Oh, I'm noticing I'm saying something really negative and writing it out and then looking at it. Object objectively and saying, like, is that true? Like, is that really accurate? And I know so often with the power of positive thinking and all of this, people want us to like counteract it right with a positive thought. So we've got this negative thought and then we're supposed to counteract it with, you know, magic, fairy dust and unicorns and rainbows. And, you know, somehow or other, our brain is going to go, oh, it's not bad. I'm going to take it to this. OK, no, that's not how we work. If we have a negative thought and we give it a really positive thought and we only offer two ideas, what ends up happening is our brain will always latch on to it'll call BS on the on the positive thought. No, no, no, no, I like this negative one instead. I remember I was working with a group of executives and they're like, my God, it is so exhausting to prop up the team because they're so afraid of everything that's going on with the changes and potential layoffs and the restructuring. And I'm like, OK, well, why are you propping them up? And like, well, you know, they taught us to be positive. And I'm like, you don't think they're seeing through that and thinking that's absolute bull. Like, they don't believe it. You don't believe it. It's probably written all over your face. It's exhausting and it's not serving the thing. So what if we were to acknowledge the negative? And say, OK, maybe that's all right. And then we come up with something that's really, really positive. But we come up with a third option. That's in the middle. Like, all I'm asking for people to do with that inner critic or even if it's a negative storyline with other people is to neutralize it. We don't have to counteract it. We just have to start neutralizing it. So I with my pain, whenever I was resting and I know I'm telling a lot of my stories today, but like, I guess I just am in the mood to tell some of them because I live them. But, you know, all my clients have their own stories. And, you know, Rob, I bet you you have some stories, too, that you'd love to share. But I think we all go through this. You know, we go through these times in our life of just beating up on ourselves and never thinking we're good enough. Like, it's part of the human condition. And I always figure if I can be as vulnerable and transparent about my own story and still being able to create a, you know, a very successful business, right, in my work. And I've got another really significant program that I'm part of in the supply chain. And that's probably not public knowledge by the time this comes out. But like, I've been. Able to continue despite all of this. And so whatever somebody is going through right now, that doesn't make me special. That makes me a student of resilience and human nature and problem solving. And if you can be compassionately curious with yourself, if you can go, hmm, and that interesting that I always call myself, you know, lazy or I call myself an idiot or embarrassing or fat or whatever the word is. We all have a word, by the way. We all do. Sometimes we don't even know the word that we have. But when I would relax because my pain would make me collapse, I used to go into the storyline, the negative storyline of you're so lazy. You don't deserve to be relaxing. You've got to do more like this was the pressure I was putting on myself. And so all I was doing was creating this internal fight. This fight inside my own body. Like. Just even if you have a negative insight in your listening right now, imagine that you were saying all of that stuff to other people like you're literally creating this internal battle between you're doing something and you're such an idiot or you're awful or whatever. Like I was coaching a client and in our first meeting, you know, two hours and she goes on and I said, my goodness, wow, this has been impressive. Can you give me a cheat sheet on all the things that you are awful at? She's like, what do you mean? And I'm like, you've told me you're awful at sales, awful at HR, awful at this, awful at that, awful at that, awful at being a mom, awful at. And I'm like, she's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, do you have any idea how many times you describe yourself as being awful? She had no idea. I just need you to take your notepad. She likes to carry a notepad and every day write down the word awful. And every time you hear it come out of your mouth, do a little tick mark. To bring awareness to it. Not helped her bring awareness and then be compassionately curious. Am I really awful? Well, maybe I'm not the best. Rainbows and unicorns, but I could learn or I'm good at this part and I've got to figure this out. Right. Or here's an example where it was OK and then start to neutralize that storyline. Yeah, I think that putting those things in that in a consulting form of like putting it on a notepad, putting it in front of you and having to step back and say, is that true? Is is really it really is a cathartic kind of thing. And even if you think about that, even in a conversation with somebody else, if you're in an argument with them and you say something about them that they disagree with, when they come back to you and say, Is that what you think or is that what you how you really see it? Then you sort of unwrap it a little bit and you saw a lot and say, well, now this is really where I'm where I'm at. This is what's going on. And I think you can do that. Yeah, as you point out, you can do that with yourself and find that it's it's not just a magic thing that you can help you understand somebody else that can help you understand yourself, too, and some of the things you're going through. And particularly something like that, where you don't know that that that client where they're they're using this word all the time and that it's just become part of who they are, that they don't even recognize it. And it's it is it's such a it's it's such an interesting point of view when you you see it from somebody else's and say, oh, wait a minute. Well, I am very negative about that or I am very focused on that. Why am I focused on that? Is that something I need to be focused on or is it something that I inherited? Am I just having a bad day or what does it happen to be? Those kinds of things. So I think so much. It's one of those I don't want to I don't want to take up the rest of your day because there's so many different places to go. But one thing I do want to I do want to touch on because we teased it all the way at the beginning was. The idea of burnout and you touch on a little bit like the idea that you're you know, you were basically collapsed and you were still telling yourself, you know, you're lazy, you need to get up, let's get going, let's do stuff. Which is sort of it's it's simplifying, but it is somewhat when you fall into that actual burnout kind of period. And so how do you recommend, and particularly with your consulting, that if somebody that's hit that, you know, they hit that brick wall of burnout, how do you sort of work your way out of it? And as I know from some of the stuff you've you've already talked about, I think you've got some some pretty good ideas there. I'd like you to sort of talk through how you consult people to get out of that situation. Yeah, everybody's a little bit different, but it really does begin with gaining perspective and understanding situational awareness, what's actually happening. So is it the doing we likely have too much to do, but that's just the reality of our lives. And if you want to be successful, you can't. Right. You can't get rid of you can't delegate everything off of your life. So we got to look at what are you doing? How are you spending your time? So for the very first week with most of my clients, what ends up happening is I say, look, just let's just get a sense. I need you to carry a notepad around with you and write down everything you're doing, not like an exhaustive list is going to be overwhelming, but just let's get a sense of it. And I want you to energetically write not not energetically. Sorry, I want you to write down a number subjective one to ten. How much energetic like a vibe it has with you? Is it draining you? Is it lighting you up? And really, let's just get a look at what's the situation happening right now. Because unless we know situational awareness, unless we have absolute clarity on what's really happening, we actually can't fix it. See, for some people, the reason they have burnout, like one of my one of my clients, and she's a senior executive and she had a head injury last year. And so she's back to work and expecting herself to work at the level that she used to work. Well, because of that self-awareness, we had to go down the path of redesigning how she's actually working. So what can she delegate? What can she delete? What can she ignore? But also, more importantly, how do you shrink the amount of capacity that each thing you do takes from your day? Now, that could open up a whole other podcast. But think about this. If you worry about a meeting that's happening at the end of the week, and it's three days away and you start worrying about it now, it doesn't take you an hour for the meeting. It takes you an hour and three days of your capacity because you're worrying about it. Now, not the whole time, probably, but it's in the back of your mind draining. Well, what if we can notice that you're worrying and now you instead of worrying for three days, instead of worrying for three days, you worry for two. And then we worry for one and then we get you down to an hour of worrying. And then we get you down to 10 minutes and then we can turn off the lights when worrying. We can get rid of that barrier to performance. And that's what I mean by shrinking the amount of capacity. And it becomes very, very obvious when we work through this entire methodology around how to identify the things that are actually draining your energy. Because a lot of people think that the way that they have to fix their burnout is they need to quit. Right? Quit their job. Do less. But they're like torn because it's like, yeah, but I want to do the thing I'm doing and I want to have this extra side hustle and my dream and building that. And I don't want to quit. Well, how do you do everything you're doing without having the negative vibe, which would be the feel and the negative storyline, which would be the thinking. And we do, and we tilt your life and design your life so that you can fit into the parameters that you have available to yourself. Excellent answer. I think for everybody listening, I think they'll see that there is this, there's definitely that common thread through all of our discussion. And so obviously they're all going to want to buy the book, probably two or three of them sharing with their friends. But I'm sure they also, especially with you being a consultant, some of them out there are like, hey, I might want to check out this whole consulting. This may help me out. Absolutely. And thanks for that. Come to aliceandgraham.com. That's my main website. And depending on your circumstances, I work with people individually. I tend to cap the number of people who I can work with privately at a one-on-one time, just because of the depth of the work. But I do do training programs, I do do a lot of training programs, I do a lot of training programs, I do a lot of training programs, I do a lot of training programs, I do a lot of training programs, I do a lot of training programs, I do a lot of training programs. So that's just because of the depth of the work. But I do do training programs, I'm looking at launching group coaching programs, and I have online courses as well. LinkedIn is my main area where I focus in terms of social media. So I would love to hear from anybody to say you heard Rob's podcast in our conversation, and you want to connect with me there, I'd love to explore that. But I really do make your point, well, we don't want to give it all away because, you know, we want them to buy the book. I am on such a mission, like I believe people are making life harder than it needs to be. And I know that when I speak, this stuff rolls off the tongue, but and it can feel like, oh my gosh, like I'd probably listen to this a couple times, right? Like there are a lot of little pieces of the puzzle, but I really encourage people take what's going to resonate with you. Not all of it will, but if it can just be a different way for you to think and to feel like, you know what, maybe I don't have to keep living life the way I've been living it in the areas that aren't working and don't mess with the things that are, because there's a lot of good, definitely, but take those pieces that are causing you angst and let's be strategic about them. That's my message to people. Like you can eliminate those moments of angst as you go through. I agree. I think there's way too many people make things much more complicated than they need to be. And then they either put it on themselves or it ends up getting put on other people. And it's just life is not as complex as we make it sometimes, but time is a little bit complex and we're sort of running out of it. So I do want to thank you for your time. This has been an incredibly good conversation. I know people have been, they're probably like putting, they've got Post-It notes all over the place now. They're taking notes because there's a lot of good stuff that came out of this. So I want to thank you for your time and I hope that you have a good rest of your day. Thank you so much. And that will do it. Pencils down. You can go up and check your notes later. There will be links for show notes for all of these kinds of things. So that should help you out. So you don't have to write down so many URLs and things of that nature. This was, once again, I think it's just, it's great changing gears a little bit and talking about things that are maybe a little outside of our technology, but are useful in helping us get better, do better as a professional, as a person, as living life. And hopefully you've taken a few things away from this, some action items that you can do where you can maybe review your inner critic and some of those kinds of things and figure out where it is that you need to adjust or that it will make it better for you. You'll be more effective, more productive if you do make those adjustments. We're not done with our interviews though. We will come back next episode. We're going to have a whole new person to talk to and a whole new set of notes to take. But as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Please check out school.developineur.com. That is where we are starting to pour a lot of our content. We've taken the lessons, the things that we've learned, all of the things that make you a better developer, and we're putting it there. We have a range of courses from free short courses up to full paid boot camps. All of these include a number of things to help you get better, including templates, quick references, and other things that make us all better developers.