In our third segment of Episode 02, The Foundation, Alex will describe the final three areas of pressure management: Detached coping, sensitivity, and flexibility. Just like in The Level, try to keep your tallies for each area as you go!
In the construction industry, you face tight schedules, flaring tempers, and an endless list of other pressures. So stress must be an unavoidable part of the job, right?
Wrong. It is possible to work without stress! On today’s episode of No Bullshit, Alex will teach you exactly how to balance the everyday life pressures both on the job site and off the clock. It’s important to remember that life is a marathon, and your emotional well-being is critical to staying healthy and living it to the fullest.
Building on our last episode, you’ll hear how each color personality naturally responds to stress, so if you haven’t found out which category you fall into, click the link below to take the 4 Lenses Assessment before we get started.
What to look for in today’s episode:
In our third segment, The Foundation, Alex will describe the final three areas of pressure management: Detached coping, sensitivity, and flexibility. Unlike in The Level, you want to achieve high scores in all three of these areas to successfully mitigate stress.
Tune in to the final segment, The Frame Out, to hear about how critical it is to live in the present and frame your challenges through neutral thinking.
Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts as well as the YouTube channel to watch full video episodes and be notified as soon as the next episode is live.
Helpful Links
Work without Stress by Derek Roger
Life Change Index Scale (Stress List Score)
[00:00:00]
[00:00:00] Alex: Hey, welcome to the foundation, my friends. So we've talked about the first five areas that manage pressure from tilting over the stress and how you want lower scores in those areas. Now, in this segment, we wanna really dive into those last three. So what's the first one? Well, the first one is detach coping, right?
[00:00:27] Alex: Detach coping. Now, difficult [00:00:30] concept to think about, but I really want you to think about it. Detached coping really measures your ability to keep things in perspective, right? Think about that. This means not turning molehills into mountains, not making every, everything a catastrophe, right? If we're being honest, we all know that one person who shows up to the job site, At 6:00 AM and says, man, today's going to be shit.
[00:00:54] Alex: And you're like, damn, dude. Today just started, bro. How can you say today's gonna be shit already, right? [00:01:00] Because of one thing, maybe traffic or whatever happened in their life that morning. They made everything a catastrophe and they kind of put that, that negative shadow on the entire day. So this detached coping, what does this mean?
[00:01:12] Alex: Well, this means you're able to ship your attention and focus your mindset on the positive things that are going on in your life. Think about that for a second. My friends, most of us, Alex included, we allow our daily job to weigh in heavily on our entire [00:01:30] life, right? So think about this. You have a great family, you have a great, great relationships around you, great kids.
[00:01:37] Alex: You have great health, you live in a great neighborhood, but one project that may be going downhill or going south on your job, Overshadows all of that shit, and you don't think about any of it right now. Detached coping allows me to kind of pull back for a second and say, wait a minute, this one thing is a challenge in my life.
[00:01:57] Alex: But man, look over here. I have a, a, a, [00:02:00] a bunch of amazing things happening in my life, right? To help you with this, I wanna challenge you to incorporate what I like to call a daily gratitude practice. This helps us manage pressure in a way. So here's what that looks like. Every morning, Alex, myself, I get up and the first thing that I do is I journal and I write down three amazing things that happened to me the previous day.
[00:02:24] Alex: And most times these things are not work related. These things like, hey, me and my 13 [00:02:30] year old daughter had a phenomenal talk. She just wanted to come talk to me and sit on my lap and share her day with me. Or, hey, I remember Sabrina just coming and just kissing me on the forehead and just tell me how much she loved miss.
[00:02:39] Alex: Right? So, so those kind of things helps us get our attention and our focus. Against some of the challenges that are going on. Detach coping, right? Detach coping. So that's number two. The higher your score in detach coping, your ability to be able to detach, the better you can be with managing pressure. The next one is this sensitivity, and this is a tough one in the construction [00:03:00] industry.
[00:03:00] Alex: I know You're like, bullshit, Alice. There's no sensitivity in construction. I get it. I get it. But hear me out, my friends hear me out when I talk about sensitivity. What do I mean by sensitivity? Well, Sensitivity is your ability to measure the emotions and feelings of other people around you, right? Can you walk into a room and can you realize how stressed your team is, how under pressure they are, and measure that and operate in a way that's empathetic and compassionate in [00:03:30] that moment.
[00:03:30] Alex: Now, as a leader, that's important because understand, not only can you manage your own emotions in that moment, But if you really do a phenomenal job of being understanding of other people's emotional feelings, you can also cut down their pressure and their levels of pressure and stress in that moment.
[00:03:48] Alex: Also because of your behavior and how you respond, right? So, so if I have a high level of sensitivity of other's emotional feelings, I can be a sensitive leader and have high levels [00:04:00] of emotional intelligence and come in and do a great job. Now, ultimately what you wanna do is this. You really wanna be able to pair those two together, right?
[00:04:08] Alex: You wanna be able to have detached coping skills in a sensitive way, right? Lemme tell you the best I've ever seen with this, my friends was, uh, my former coach at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Tony Dungy, uh, he was a master of detaching, also doing it in a sensitive way. I remember I got that dreadful call one day.
[00:04:29] Alex: Hey, [00:04:30] Alex, bring your playbook. Coach Dudgeon wants to see you. Trust me, my friends, when you hear that right there, that means your ass is getting fired, guaranteed. So brought my playbook, went into Coach Dungeon's office and I sat there on the couch with Coach Dungy and for the first, you know, five or 10 minutes, we begin to talk.
[00:04:47] Alex: And I remember he said this to me, he looked me in the eyes and said, Alex, you are going to do phenomenal things in life. Not here with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, though he was very clear. We are detaching from your [00:05:00] ass right now. But he did it in a sensitive way. And I remember us having a great talk and so much so that after that I went and I was standing in front of the stadium waiting for a cap to pick me up, right, uh, to take me to the airport.
[00:05:14] Alex: And I remember my first thought was, man, that coach Tony Dge is a phenomenal guy. And then the second thought was, but damn, he just fired my ass. Right? So, so understand you can give tough news in a sensitive way that still doesn't cause people, [00:05:30] Stress. Right? And as a leader, that's important for you to understand that.
[00:05:32] Alex: Now, the last one, what's the last one? The last one is flexibility. How flexible are you my friends? It's important for you to understand that flexibility dictates how we manage this thing called pressure. The higher your score and the more flexible you are, the less pressure and stress you will experience.
[00:05:50] Alex: Right now, most people, they don't like change. And so therefore, when we have changed schedules, uh, on, on, on, on the project, when constantly the general [00:06:00] contractor and the schedules changing left and right, people get pissed off and they cause these people high levels of stress versus saying, Hey, wait a minute.
[00:06:07] Alex: Let's just go with the flow. Let me shift my mind. Let me detach from what I was thinking and planning, go a different direction and it will allow me to do a phenomenal job. Working without pressure being a better teammate because I'm flexible to go with it, right? So I want you to think about that. So, uh, understand this there, these eight key areas.
[00:06:29] Alex: If you can [00:06:30] begin to dictate how you view them and understand how you manage them, you can begin to manage your pressure and not tilt over the stress, my friends. So here's what I need you thinking about as we talk about the foundation. Where do you need to focus of the eight? Where do you struggle? Where do you struggle?
[00:06:48] Alex: Where do you struggle? Right? So, so here's the deal. You can go to the challenge of change, uh, dot uk.co, and you can begin to check out and actually take the test to see where you struggle, my friends, [00:07:00] right? So by taking the test, you can actually get your scores and see where you are with these things.
[00:07:05] Alex: And and understand where you may need to make some adjustments, right? So in our last segment, we're gonna really dive in and say, how do you make the adjustments though? It's one thing to know what I am, know where I am, know what my scores are, and understand that. But what do I need to do to really begin to implement this in a way that's effective for me, that's effective for my family, effective for my team?
[00:07:27] Alex: And in our last segment, we're gonna really frame [00:07:30] it out for you and show you how to implement this in your life so that you can begin to live life. With pressure without having stress.