Join Alex for our first segment of Episode 02 to learn all about how to manage the everyday stress and pressures you face. In The Takeoff, Alex will outline key stress signs to keep an eye out for in yourself and your teammates, as well as how you pull back and look at the picture in these high-pressure situations.
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 first segment, The Takeoff, Alex will start off by outlining key stress signs to keep an eye out for in yourself and your teammates. Once identified, you can take the proper steps to address the stress directly. You will also be challenged to pull back and look at the bigger picture to gain control within high-pressure situations. And finally, you’ll find out how stress actually is developed, because it doesn’t just happen!
Hit play on our next segment, The Level, to hear about some of the eight areas of pressure management.
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] Alex: Hey, what's up guys? Alex Willis here, CEO of Leadership Surge, and I wanna personally welcome you to No Bullshit with Alex Willis, the go-to source for leadership development in the construction industry Today we have a phenomenal show for you. Listen to me, my friends, I put on my money green sweatshirt because today's show is money, right?
[00:00:26] Alex: So you wanna tune into this. Let's jump right into it. We're [00:00:30] gonna talk about working without stress in the construction industry. Is it possible? Can you work jobs that require a lot between teams, moving parts, all of this thing, and do it stress free? So today we're gonna talk about that. Let's jump right into the takeoff.
[00:00:45] Alex: I'll see you in the takeoff. Here we go. Hey guys, welcome to the takeoff. Jumping into this thing of working without stress right now, as I travel the country, we talk to construction teams and companies all over, and I ask one simple question, [00:01:00] is it possible to work without stress? And I tell you, Without a doubt, people give me a resounding hell no, you cannot do it.
[00:01:09] Alex: Now I wanna challenge you because we found that it is possible to work in the construction industry without stressed out. It is challenging. You have to practice. And so today we're gonna dive into how do you do it right? So hear me out. There's a book called Work Without Stress by a good friend of mine by the di, by the name of Dr.
[00:01:27] Alex: Derek Rogers. A lot of the things that we [00:01:30] talk about today has been studied in science and research, and Dr. Derek Rogers spent. Over 30 years, understanding pressure, understanding stress, to help us really begin to understand how do we control it, right? Uh, and not only control it, how do we dominate it? So in our industry, we can all agree that you have tight schedules, you have tempers flaring, you have different people all over the place.
[00:01:53] Alex: And so a lot of times those are things that we tend to think cause us stress in our lives. So as we [00:02:00] talk about this, the first thing I need you to understand is this. Is that you first have to understand what are your stress signs. So I want you to think about this for a second. When you get stressed out or when you feel stressed, what are your emotional signs?
[00:02:14] Alex: What are your behavioral signs and what are your physical signs? Right? Because as a leader, you have to know those three things so that you know those gauges. I like to call those warnings, right? Those are warnings that let you know, hey, Something's going on. I need you to slow down and take a [00:02:30] step back because something in your environment is causing you to act differently, right?
[00:02:36] Alex: Let me give you an example, my friends for Alex. When Alex feels stress, right, or when I feel pressure, what happens with me is number one, my left eye starts twitching, right? So, so my left eye started twitching for a long time. My wife, I thought I was having seizures. Now she's like, shit, he's okay. He's just stressed out.
[00:02:52] Alex: He'll be fine. Right? So, so one my left eye starts twitching from an emotional standpoint, I withdraw, right? So I get quiet, [00:03:00] I withdraw. I don't say much. I begin to look around and analyze. Others are talking. My eyes twitching. I withdraw and pull back. Now, from a behavioral standpoint, it just depends on what's going on, you know?
[00:03:11] Alex: Uh, I recently stopped drinking because under pressure and stress, uh, I realized that I would. Drink a little bit more excessive drinking, right? To try to ease the pain or ease the stress. Like now what I try to do, well, I try to find some type of physical activity, uh, maybe take a walk, go take a workout, those type of things [00:03:30] to, to manage stress.
[00:03:31] Alex: So first on the docket is understanding. How do you handle this thing called pressure and stress? What do you do when you feel stressed out? Now the second question that you need to answer my friends is this, for me, I get a chance to travel around, as I said, and asking a lot of our people in the construction industry.
[00:03:48] Alex: This question I. When you feel stressed, what is it usually about? Right? Pause for a second. Think about that. When you feel stressed, what is it usually about? And oftentimes we hear [00:04:00] similarities no matter where you are in the world. Here are some of the similarities, these buckets of pressure that we quite frequently hear in our industry.
[00:04:07] Alex: Number one, money. Money stresses the shit out of everyone. People are always like, dude, cash stresses me out. Or the lack thereof, right? Uh, we often hear family. Family stresses us out. We hear work, we hear deadlines, we hear fear of the unknown stresses. A lot of people out oftentimes hear health, right? Not knowing about my health or worrying about my health, that stresses [00:04:30] me out, right?
[00:04:30] Alex: Uh, people get even more specific and they say, Hey, kids stress me out, right? So if you're not careful, shit that can happen. Kids can stress you out, right? Depending on your coworkers, who you work with, the people on your job. Typically, no matter where we go, most of the pressure and stress that people have in their life, in our industry and construction falls into those categories, right?
[00:04:52] Alex: It's the schedule, uh, it's the lack of material, it's the fear of the unknown. It's the pressure to get the job done in the amount of time that they've given it to [00:05:00] us. All of those things, no matter who you are, where you are, falls into that category. And here's my one question. I wanna pause for a second and ask you all of those things that I just mentioned my friend.
[00:05:12] Alex: Think about this for a second. How many of those things can you directly control the outcome? Here's what I mean by that. You can guarantee the outcome no matter what you do. Think about it. If we're truly being honest, my friends, none of them. Now you [00:05:30] can try your best to put things in place, right, to hopefully have a favorable outcome.
[00:05:35] Alex: But truth be told, family, money, work deadlines. Hell, those are still things you cannot directly control. So the question that I like to ask is this, why do we still allow those to stress us out? There's only so much we can do and we can't control the direct outcome. So when I've done all that I can do, why not pull back and say, Hey, listen, I've done all that I can do.
[00:05:59] Alex: [00:06:00] There's no sense in me pacing the floor, no sense in me worrying myself to death, overthink that I cannot control. I have to now pull back and say, wait a minute. How do I move forward without being stressed? So in order to do that, we have to understand a couple things. Uh, number one is this, all of us handle pressure differently, right?
[00:06:20] Alex: In our last episode, we talked about the personality assessments and talked about those four colors. Understand this is my friends. Each of those four colors, depending on your lead color, handles it a [00:06:30] little differently. For example, those who are lead goal personalities who are structured, organized timely, they want control.
[00:06:38] Alex: They handle stress in, in a, in a way that, you know, they, they exaggerate at times. They get pissed off at times. They're, they're, they're the outbursts because they, they hate the, the lack of control, right? For that green personality, who lives in their head, who's thinking all the time, uh, for that person, they tend to think more, analyze things.
[00:06:57] Alex: They withdraw, they're gonna ask more [00:07:00] questions. Why is this, why is that? Go from there. My blue people who are team oriented, who are all about relationships and people, what do they do when they get stressed out? Well, oftentimes they withdraw, right? And not ask questions. Withdraw because they dislike.
[00:07:16] Alex: Confrontation. They dislike saying no. They would draw within themselves. They kind of pull back. And then last but not least, my oranges, those wild, crazy guys like Alex over here. How do we handle stress? Well, usually we do some, some [00:07:30] crazy shit that maybe, uh, uh, just out of the blue, just uh, just, just out of character, wild and crazy.
[00:07:36] Alex: Just escape the stress just for a second, right? So understanding your color type helps you understand how you handle stress, right? Automatically now. Typically, there's two ways that most people handle stress, and we like to call this the traditional pro approach to stress, the traditional approach to stress.
[00:07:53] Alex: Now, what's approach number one? Well, traditional approach, number one. Is what we call addressing the symptoms. [00:08:00] Most people do this. What, what, what do I mean by that? Well, you, you look at the symptoms and you say, oh, well, hey, you're tense or you're irritable. Hey, take a day off. Or, Hey, uh, go take a vacation or ho go get a massage.
[00:08:10] Alex: Right? Or, or, Hey, listen, uh, may maybe after work you, you increase your drinking, right? So you try to mask over the stress by drinking. We call this masking over the symptoms, right? I like to say this is a big bandaid. Uh, be it the day off, be it a vacation, be it a massage, be it alcohol. What [00:08:30] happens is when we don't really address what's driving us, my friends, what we tend to do is you tend to cover it up only to wake up the next morning and the shit's still there.
[00:08:41] Alex: Right. You know, so I, I get off work. The, the team is stressing me out on the project. So we go to the bar, I throw 'em back. I wake up the next morning, I still have to jump right back into that shit again right now. Here's the challenge with that. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the pressure, the bigger the bandaid has to become, [00:09:00] right?
[00:09:00] Alex: So think about that. You start off with one or two drinks and shit before you know it, you shit faced, right? 15 shots of tequila having to wake up and, and work through that the next morning, right? So, so understand this traditional weight, number one, masking over it, dealing with the symptoms. It doesn't deal with the stress.
[00:09:16] Alex: You deal with everything else to cover it up, but not the stress itself, right? So what about traditional approach number two? Well, here's how traditional approach number two goes down, my friends, most people with traditional approach. Number two, if you've ever been to anger management or [00:09:30] stress management class, They tend to give you a list, right?
[00:09:33] Alex: They give you a list and, uh, we'll put the list in the show notes. But that list is a list of, uh, of activities, right? Activities that you, you experience in life. Things like, uh, a death in the family, a divorce, a change in jobs, buying a house, kids leaving the house, kids going to college. So they give you a shitload of things that's listed on this list, and they ask you one simple question, how many of these have you experienced in the last year?
[00:09:58] Alex: Right now, you go through [00:10:00] those in your circle, how many you've experienced in the last year, and depending on how many you've experienced, each of these have a score next to them, and it suggests how stressed you are, right? So the higher your score, the more stress you've experienced. Now, here's the problem with that approach.
[00:10:16] Alex: Approach number two, number one. If I'm telling you what I've been through, you was not there to help me get through the shit, right? So, so I was still stressing, you didn't help me. You're just, uh, uh, just analyzing what I've gone through in the past, right? Number [00:10:30] two, understand this. All of us experienced stress differently.
[00:10:33] Alex: Let me give you a real life example. I got two buddies, right? Two friends of mine, both going through a divorce right now, right? Uh, one of my buddies, he's struggling bad. So, so, so divorce should be a high stressful situation. He's struggling bad. He misses his family, he misses his kids. So we're checking on him quite frequently to make sure he's okay with the, with the pressure right.
[00:10:53] Alex: Now, on the flip side of that, I have another buddy going through a divorce as well, who lives in Miami on South Beach. He's going [00:11:00] to strip clubs every night, popping balls of champagne because in his mind, shit, he's gotten rid of his stress, right? So think about that. Two guys both going through a situation.
[00:11:09] Alex: Which is a divorce, which if we only just circle that, both of those guys are experiencing it differently. So here's what I need you to understand. All of us, my friends, we experience stress differently. We experience pressure differently. We experience events differently, right? So deadlines for one person may not [00:11:30] stress out another person, right?
[00:11:32] Alex: A lack of money for one person may not stress out another person. So understand events don't call you stress. I'm gonna challenge you to even think about this, and a lot of people call bullshit on me on this one, but people don't cause your stress, my friends. So I want you to think about that for a second.
[00:11:50] Alex: I'm telling you right now that as a leader in cons in the construction industry, in an industry that has a lot of pressure, a lot of deadlines, [00:12:00] a lot of moving parts with people moving together, the deadlines, the people, The, the, the schedule, the contractors, the general contractors, the subcontractors, all of those moving parts, that's not what causes you stress.
[00:12:14] Alex: So I want you to understand this. To understand this, you have to understand big rule number one. Big rule number one is this, my friends, is that pressure does not equal stress. They're two totally different things. Pressure does not equal stress. What do I mean by that? Well [00:12:30] hear me out on this if we're all being honest, my listeners today, you can really think about, The pressures that you have in your life.
[00:12:37] Alex: Most of us, Alex included, we have a shit load of pressures in our life, right? I mean, right now I have pressure to be a good dad, pressure to do a good damn show today. Pressure to show up and do good trainees, pressure to be a great husband, pressure to, to work out and, and look good, you know, and all those things.
[00:12:52] Alex: But hear me out, not every pressure in my life causes me stress. And if I'm being totally honest, and if you're being [00:13:00] honest with yourself, not every pressure in your life causes you stress. It's only a few of them. So, so hear me clearly on this. If pressure does not equal stress, right, because pressure's just pressure and if events and people don't cause you stress that that's just pressure.
[00:13:15] Alex: But for some reason, my friends, when you take pressure and you add something to it, you get stress. So think about it. If I had to do a math equation, right, a math equation, you have pressure plus something equals [00:13:30] stress. What's that something? And damn it is not people in events. So most times when I ask those questions, people in our trainings, they're throwing everything out there.
[00:13:38] Alex: Hey man, it, it's, it's, it's mindset. Hey, it's time. Some people still swear up and down that it's the people. But here's the deal. Dr. Derek Rogers did 30 years of research and he found this one word that this one word, when you married this one word to pressure, you get stressed. So, what's the one word? The one word, my friend?
[00:13:59] Alex: The one [00:14:00] word is, Rumination. Rumination, right? Rumination. Now, I'm gonna be honest, when Dr. Darren Rogers said, Hey, Alex, when you take pressure plus rumination in equal stress, I'm like, doc, hear me out, man. I'm a former football player hitting the head a couple times. Man, what the hell is rumination? Right?
[00:14:15] Alex: So he told me quite frequently, Alex Rumination is this. Rumination is thinking about events in the past and in the future in a negative mindset, and thinking about those events over and over and over and over, and [00:14:30] again. But in a negative mindset. So I'm thinking about the past, I'm thinking about the future, and I'm thinking negatively about that.
[00:14:36] Alex: And it causes simple pressure to turn to stress for me. Here's how I want to end this piece of the takeoff. I got a story to share with you to think about this. So in one of the biggest games of my life in college football, we were playing a number two, number verse number four, matchup, uh, at the University of Tennessee.
[00:14:53] Alex: They knew that, hey, if they won this game, they, they, they, they win the s e c championship, right? So here's the deal. We're there. [00:15:00] It's the fourth corner. We're down by six points. And as we're there fourth and three, we needed the first down. Coach Spurrier calls a time out, he says, Willis, we're throwing you the ball.
[00:15:11] Alex: Right? So think about that. Only a few few minutes left on the clock. We're down six points. We're on, on an away, uh, a game. The fans are going crazy. The coach calls the timeout and says, Willis, we're throwing you the ball. We need the first down, fourth and three. Hear me out, my friends, as I broke the huddle.
[00:15:28] Alex: I was pressure. I [00:15:30] wasn't stressed. Wasn't stressed. So, so, so why not? Why not? Well, here's why, because as I broke the huddle, when I went to line up, I just thought about what I need to do. I wasn't thinking about the past, wasn't thinking about the future. So what, what do I need to do in that moment? Right?
[00:15:46] Alex: Here's what rumination looks like in that situation. If when I lined up, I was thinking to myself, oh my God, if I drop this pass, ESPN's going to play this shit all night long. All of a sudden with simple pressure, I'm getting [00:16:00] stressed out. My friends, if when I lined up before we call the police, I'm thinking, Hey, if I dropped this pass, I'm gonna embarrass my parents.
[00:16:06] Alex: Everyone in my neighborhood. Holy shit. I have to catch this pass. All of a sudden, what simple pressure turns to stress? And that's when we, that's when we don't perform our very best when we are under those conditions. Right? So the first thing that we have to understand as leaders, we have to stop rumination my friends, right?
[00:16:24] Alex: You have to slow down those negative thoughts with situations in those moments, because that's what lead us [00:16:30] to be on our worst behavior. So in this segment, we really begin to explore this thing called stress, really understanding that it's a mindset. This thing called rumination dictates how much pressure we can handle and how we keep pressure, pressure and keep it from tilting over the stress.
[00:16:48] Alex: In this next segment, we're really gonna dive into the eight key areas that as a leader, if you can control them with yourself and your team. You can really begin to manage pressure well. So I'm [00:17:00] looking forward to kind of diving into those, and we'll do those in the next segment and the level. Let's jump into the.