The Mindset Mentor - Ep 91 - How to Handle Stress

Episode Date: March 18, 2016

Stress is inevitable. It is going to happen to us throughout our lives no matter what we think of it. In this episode I talk about how to learn from stressful situations because most of the time stressful times are our biggest periods of grow and the times when we learn the most about ourselves. Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

On holiday, there's nothing like doing nothing. As an Expedia member, you can save up to 30% when you add a hotel to your flight, so you can go out there with great ambition to do absolutely nothing for less. Expedia, made to travel. Before we dive into today's episode, if you would like a free copy of our motivational ebook called Hack Your Goals, The Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success, go to mwfmotivation.com and download it. It's already been downloaded over a thousand times, so go ahead and get your copy now. All right, I'll get you the podcast right now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, which I am proud to say has been rated the number one

podcast in iTunes new and noteworthy in six different categories, including self-help and business, and is a podcast designed to help you grow into the best version of yourself in 10 to 20 minutes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we'll take a life topic, break it down, discuss it, and leave you with thoughts to impact your life and mind. My name is Rob Dial and the podcast starts now. Welcome to today's episode. I am super excited to bring this one to you. But before we dive in, if you have not yet done so, please subscribe to us however you listen to us. Also, follow us on Facebook, facebook.com slash MWF motivation. Officially today had my first video go viral, which is kind of crazy. It got 1.1 million views in the past couple days. So that's pretty insane

if you want to go on there. It's pretty cool to see. And also, I know that some people were asking about my Snapchat because I mentioned it. If you want to follow. And also, I know that some people were asking about my Snapchat because I mentioned it. If you want to follow me on Snapchat, I did a bunch of crazy stuff for South by the past couple days. I saw John Legend at a private party. Also, there was Aluna George, Galant, a bunch of really incredible artists. And you can follow me on Snapchat if you want. My handle is at Rob Dial, R-O-B-D-I-A-L. But besides that, today what we're going to talk about, it's going to be a short episode and I'm going to talk about how to deal with stress, how to handle stress. And I saw this video not too long ago with a rabbi and he talks about

stress and he talks about lobsters. And you might not think that the two of those would make any sense to talk about in the same sentence. But a lot of people think that stress is a bad thing. They think that stress is something that really just messes up their whole day. But stress, they don't realize stress can actually be a tool for growth. And then he talks about lobsters and says, do you know how lobsters grow? So if you don't know how lobsters grow, lobsters are actually a soft animal that lives inside of a hard shell that doesn't expand. So the shell itself does not expand. It grows the shell. And then what happens is after a while, once it grows too large for the shell, it'll be uncomfortable. It'd be really hard for

it to move around. And the lobster is still growing inside of the shell, but it's not. So it starts to get to a point where it's, there's too much stress and it's, it has to get out of the shell. And so what does the lobster do? It goes into the rocks to protect itself and it grows a new shell. And that shell, it grows into it and it's, you know, it's a larger shell. So the soft animal can move around for a little while. But then after a while, that shell becomes too confining and it becomes so confining that it has to do the exact same process again. It has to go back into the rocks and it has to break the shell and get out of the shell and regrow another one. And on average, an average lobster, I did my research within its first five to seven years of life, will go through this process of breaking out of its shell, being under immense stress and

actually literally breaking these shells 25 times on average in the first five to seven years. And what you have to realize as a human, the same thing happens to us as well. And also, just so you know, the same thing happens to a hermit crab as well. If you don't know about a hermit crab, it's just a little tiny crab that it grows continually and it has to go into a shell. And once they grow out of their shell and they get too large for it, they have to find another shell. They have to move out of that shell and go into it because the other one, it's too stressful. It's too confining and it becomes uncomfortable. So the stimulus for a lobster to grow is actually stress and being uncomfortable. So what can you take from this story of stress and a lobster's growth?

What you can take from it is that in our times of stress, if you're going through a whole bunch of crap right now, that's actually our biggest time for the most growth that we have as humans. If you think about it, whenever someone has something super stressful go on, if you think about how stressful times you've had in your life, times that might not be great, it's usually not good when you're going through it. It usually sucks when you're going through it. But then when you look back six months or a year down the road, 10 years down the road, that's usually our biggest growth period in life is those stressful moments, the uncomfortable moments, the moments that we either have to push ourselves out of our

comfort zones, or it's just really stressful. That's our biggest growth period. And we usually learn the most in that time, which translates into the biggest growth in our lives. So know that your most stressful moments end up being some of the biggest blessings in your life and end up being your biggest breakthroughs that you'll have in our biggest learning periods as well. So here's the thing that I want you to think about. Once that lobster, once it moves into a new shell and then it moves into a new shell and it moves into a new shell, once it does, it can never fit back inside of the old one because it has grown too much. The same goes for us. Once we've been through a lot, once we've been through a lot of stress, once we've put ourselves out of our

comfort zones and we've learned a lot, we'll never be the same person again. We're a completely different person. We've grown so much more. It's just like the plastic bag analogy that I told you about in the last episode. So once we're expanded, we can never be exactly the same again. We've only become better. We've only become, we've learned more. We've grown more through all of these things. And so if you think about it with the last episode where I talk about how to create a breakthrough, sometimes your breakthrough comes when there's a lot of stress and that's something that you can't really deal with.

It's just stress comes up. You can't not have stress be around. It just happens sometimes. So for some of you though, you might have a very easy, comfortable life. Things are going well. And maybe you've been in your shell for too long. How long have you been staying in the exact same shell? And is it time for you to put yourself into an uncomfortable situation and force yourself to grow, force yourself to grow and to become better and maybe get some type of breakthrough through that. See, most people, they find whatever feels

comfortable and they stay there as long as they possibly can. And some just stay there forever and they never grow themselves and they never quote unquote, get a new shell, just like the lobster would. So some people say, why is, you know, my life is so boring. There's nothing that's really fun that happens. Nothing changes. Everything stays the same. And they get the same thing every single week and every year and every single day is the exact same thing. And the reason why is because they're not pushing themselves. They're not going through any stress. They're not making themselves uncomfortable. They're not pushing themselves outside of their comfort zone to force growth.

So sometimes, even if stressful things aren't happening, like I said in the last episode with creating breakthroughs, sometimes we have to force ourselves into uncomfortable situations in order to force ourselves to grow. So what I want to leave you with is I want you to think about this. Is this something that you have to deal with if you're going through stress right now? Maybe you can look at it and say, you know what? What am I learning right now? What am I actually getting from this stress that's going to make me a better person five or 10 years down the road? And if you're not going through stress, but maybe you feel stuck and maybe you feel like life is the

same and it's just the same thing every single day, maybe you should take yourself out of your comfort zone and force yourself to grow and make yourself uncomfortable just like the lobster would when he has to grow as well. So with that, I want you guys to think about that. And I want to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission today to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you. I hope this episode helps. If you have any questions, reach out to me, Rob at MWF Motivation. I realize I've gotten a lot of emails lately and I haven't been able to necessarily respond to all of them because I have been traveling all over,

but I will get to them if I have not responded to you yet. But other than that, I hope that you have a great day. I hope that you have a great weekend as well. Well, that's it for today's podcast. If you want the show notes for this episode, they can be found at mwfmotivation.com. Also, if you liked this episode, please spread the love and share it with a friend because it's our mission to help as many people as we can. And to keep in touch, you can follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

Both handles are at MWF motivation with no spaces. Now you know what time it is. So go out and make your dreams a reality. On holiday, there's nothing like doing nothing. As an Expedia member, you can save up to 30% when you add a hotel to your flight. So you can go out there with great ambition to do absolutely nothing for less. Expedia. Made to travel.