Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to Bubbling Out, where we're popping the norms of leadership and creating new, sustainable, powerful ways to lead. This podcast is your sanctuary for discovering how to lead with resilience, manage change depletely and handle stress effectively. It's a show for leaders who want to navigate high pressure environments with confidence and success, while also protecting their personal well-being. Because this is meant to be fun, not exhausting. Join me for a series of breakthrough conversations, practical tools and mindset tips and a peek into my weird and wonderful life as a leader and entrepreneur, all aimed at helping you lead without compromising your time, energy, values or lifestyle. Each episode is a personal invite to play, learn, shake out the day and recharge. You'll leave feeling confident, energised and resource for whatever's next in your day. In Bubbling Out, we prove that life and leadership truly is better in the bubble. I'm so excited to have you here Now, before we begin. If you like the show, leave us five stars and hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also sign up to my newsletter to get exclusive content, tips and strategies to help you lead without the burnout and the formal Direct to your inbox each week. Plus, you'll get full access to exclusive leadership and coaching Q&As, free workshops and all the Bubbling Out podcast episodes in one place.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Let's get into today's show. Welcome back to Bubbling Out. It's so nice to have you here, guys. It's so nice to be recording podcasts again. It's been ages, and it's been ages since I felt this kind of excited energy to record a podcast. If you've listened to the trailer, you'll know that we recently rebranded to Bubbling Out, so go ahead and listen to that if you want to know why we did that. Big reasons, really, about energetic shifts and interest shifts, really. And so here we are. We're here in Bubbling Out. Thank you for popping in. I hope that you love that tagline as much as I do.

Speaker 1: 2:22

And today I wanted to do a quickie one. I wanted to help you as leaders and anyone who leads and I define a leader as someone who leads people. So you might be a founder with their first team member, you might be a senior manager, you might be a director. Whoever you are, if you lead someone, you're a leader. Okay, and so today I wanted to talk to you about stressors, right, what we can do to increase and identify what is stressing us out, and then what can we do to increase our capacity to manage that stress. So I used to feel stressed all the time. When I was a marketing director. I used to have what we call high performance anxiety, and that would mean I felt absolutely fine on the outside, but inside I had this constant like ugh, like bubble, like sick feeling in my chest, and they would now identify this as high performing anxiety. You can do really great work and be super productive and get results, but you're literally ruining your nervous system. So I was very dysregulated and it's no wonder I burnt out and you can listen to the whole burnout series. I've done it a few podcasts ago. But what I really want to focus on today is how do you approach stress? Now I identify stressors when I work with my clients. We look at this A stressor is something that is causing your nervous system to dysregulate.

Speaker 1: 3:53

A normal nervous system is when you feel calm, you feel at peace. It's not an emotion, it's just your body is calm. You usually have a good resting heart rate and you're feeling pretty chilled. You don't have any anxieties, you don't have any racing thoughts, you're pretty calm. Usually you're in the state maybe after meditation or maybe when you first wake up, maybe after you've done something like exercise. But then we have these stressors that come in, and I'm not a doctor and I'm not a functional practitioner, so we're not going to go into environmental stressors, but we are going to go into stressors that we can manage. So a stressor might be something like I actually have one that I'll give you an example for.

Speaker 1: 4:33

I get really irritated when my dogs are barking all the time. You might have heard them on this podcast, and so it drives me up the wall. The reason they bark so much is we live in a big, echoey apartment and they hear every single noise and we have people who maybe walk outside, even though our walls are brick huge. We live in this apartment that's like 200 years old. They hear the tiniest sound, honestly, and I guess there's like mice in the walls and there's like creaky floorboards. They hear everything. So, especially if I'm trying to concentrate, it can just get fucking annoying.

Speaker 1: 5:06

And now I was thinking about it like, ok, this isn't going to go away. I work from home. On time. He goes to the office. I don't have anyone to take care of the dogs. If I put them in a room together, they have a nervous breakdown. They're both well, the poodle's not a rescue, but he may as well be, but the other dog is a rescue and he's had a really difficult life and so I don't want to put him through all this stress of being on his own.

Speaker 1: 5:29

So what can I do? So I identified what the stressor was. So that's step one. Actually, let's do it through in steps. I identified that my dogs bark all the fucking time. So if you're going to go along with me on this, write down what is the stressor that I can identify right now. It might be the dog's bark. It might be the kids doing your head in. It might be work slack going off all the time, right. It might be people just texting you all the time. It might be people not doing the job the way that you do it right. Whatever it is, figure out what is the stress. Then let's have a think about how can we narrow that stress down.

Speaker 1: 6:05

Ok, what is the real stressor really underneath the stressor that you think it is? Well, for me, with the dog example, I get stressed because I think if the dogs are barking, I can't concentrate, I'm not going to get work done, and then I'm going to be fucking useless all day, not be able to do anything right, and then I'll never move the business forward and all this kind of stuff. That's the cycle. So ask yourself a few questions. This stressor is a surface stressor. What is underneath it? Why does this stress me out so much? Grab your journal. Actually, this is a good journaling question. What is it about this stressor that makes me so irritated? Ok, maybe, if you are getting irritated by slack. Ok, I am getting irritated by slack. Hmm, why? Well, because it means that I'm not focusing. Ok, and what happens if you don't focus? Well, you're not going to deliver on your deadline. Ok, and then what? Well, if I don't deliver on my deadline, then the team is going to be let down. Right, ask yourself these questions, then.

Speaker 1: 7:11

What is your current reaction? What are you currently doing to resolve this stressor? Going back to the dog situation I'm ignoring them. I am trying to distract them, which takes time. I am trying to put music on, put my headphones on. This is what I'm currently doing. It doesn't really work. What are you trying to do in your stressful situation? If it's the kids driving you mad, are you trying to distract them? Are you trying to like, do you just get a babysitter? Like, I don't know? What do you do with your current stressor.

Speaker 1: 7:47

And next, what can you do to reduce the stressor? How can you reduce the stressor? If you had a magic wand? What would you do to reduce the stressor? How would you eliminate this if you could? So for me, I would have a sacred space. The doggies would have a doggie daycare and they would go to doggie daycare every fucking day. Unfortunately, doggie daycare in France is a lot more expensive than in Vietnam, so we don't do that. So that's what I would do. That's how I would manage this, just differently. Now, that's the ideal. Maybe your ideal is something that you can do, right? So let me think of a more realistic example of what I would do with the dogs. So I would calm them down. They would have a great big long walk and they would be absolutely shattered. And that's how I would deal with it. Right, I would focus on them. So how can you really deal with your stressor? And how can you manage your stress differently? Right? So you're dealing with the external by reducing the stressor. Okay, so I would go on a big, long walk with the dogs and that would tie them out. That's dealing with them.

Speaker 1: 8:53

How would you manage your stress, your internal stressor inside the bubble. What would you do so To help you understand that a bit more? When you're feeling stressed, your body feels tight, it feels hostile, it feels like you feel like unwelcoming your body. Sometimes you tense up, your heart rate increases, you feel a bit sick, right? These are all symptoms, if you want to call them that, of feeling stressed. And so, when the dog's back, as well as being pissed off and stressed about it, I feel anxious in my chest and I get like a burning feeling. Right, that's how it shows up in my body.

Speaker 1: 9:31

So, identify how the stress feels in your body, right, do that now, and then have a think about how you can manage this, these physical and psychosomatic feelings that you have. What can you do to manage them a bit better? So for me, I know that to reduce the stress inside of me, I could go in a quiet room for five minutes. I could just leave the house. To be honest, I could leave the house and I could do some big deep belly breaths, like breathing in through the belly and into the chest and out, and I could shake it out. I could do my somatic shaking, okay, so there's things that I could do to deal with my stress in my body.

Speaker 1: 10:09

Okay, so separate to the external. What can you do to manage the stress? Even if you can't manage the external right, how can you manage your own internal stress? So we're getting quite far here, right? We've identified the stressor, we've understood what the real stress is, we've understood what you're currently doing, we've understood how you can reduce the external stressor if possible not always and we've understood how you can manage your internal stress, physically and psychosomatically. We could call it in your mind.

Speaker 1: 10:40

And next, the thing that's gonna help you later is understanding how you can increase your capacity to deal with that stress in the future. And these are a few techniques that I use to manage my own stress. And managing my own stress is something that I feel like I've got pretty down to a T now and I think that this is something that I work a lot with on clients. And the way I did it was increasing my daily mindfulness practices, and by mindfulness you can categorize that as meditation, your gratitude practice. It's by going out in nature, it's by exercising Sematic dance actually really helps me. I have a cool actually maybe I'll do an episode on this, but I have a really cool ritual that I did with my group coach in the other week and it was like shaking it out, and it was inspired by Neitha Bhushan, who's a doctor and she works with leaders, and it was inspired by her Sematic practice to shake out the stress. So can you do something like that to help you be prepared for future stress and be capable of dealing with more? Okay, so your body is not at breaking point when you meet that stressor. It is grounded and it's balanced and it is fueled and you have tools to now help you deal with the stress.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Now, something that really really helps me actually is belly breath. So I mentioned that before and that is simply breathing in through your nose, all the way through your belly, all the way through your chest, and then you breathe out, and you can do that a few times every day. I always implement belly breath in everything I do. And also, something that I started doing without realizing is outward size. I mean, it's normal size, but it's like audible size. So breathing in and in Sematic practice we actually call this Haa size, and so you're breathing in and you're making a Haa sound. Can you implement something like that? Do you need to do more? Exercise? Is exercise what helps you to manage stress.

Speaker 1: 12:46

Many people who are already on the brink and like stress as fuck. They can't sit and meditate. That is not for them right now. Meditation has its time and its place. What can you do to bring yourself back to that the feeling of peace, calm, my nervous system is regulated and how can you do that more often? Now, if you follow me on Instagram, I talk about this quite often. You'll see my reels talk about different ways of managing stress and go back through some of my podcasts, because I've got a lot of episodes in there about all the different rituals and meditations and stuff I do, and I'll do that more often and I'm also gonna be bringing on more leaders who can talk about that and what they do and what their rituals are. But I hope that helped. It was just a quick snippet to help you understand in the moment how can you deal with this stress, what is really going on and what can you do for future stressors.

Speaker 1: 13:36

I want to make sure that I'm bringing you little snippets that are helpful. I would love your feedback. You know where I'm at. You can just message me on Instagram, on my email hello at emilyrollsdelaracom. You can also find me on TikTok sometimes not all the time I don't post as regularly there and obviously on LinkedIn, because that's my biggest channel. If you're a leader, you're probably on that all day every day, unfortunately and I will talk to you about why that is unfortunate In a later episode. It has helped me very much, but being on social media, being on screens too much, also dysregulates your nervous system. Anyway, it's been fantastic. I hope that you have a wonderful day. Thank you for popping in and I'll see you next time. First off for today on Bubbling Out, I hope you enjoyed the video I'm going to be DJing sometimes.