1: Why Are You Stressed?

In this episode of "Stress Less for Greater Success," Coco Duan explores the nature of stress and its impact on your life. Discover the difference between good stress that motivates and bad stress that overwhelms, and learn why most of the stress you experience is internal. Coco shares personal insights, including her own struggles with overachieving and people-pleasing, and how she transformed these habits by uncovering and shifting limiting beliefs. Please tune in to understand what's fueling your stress and take the first step towards managing it effectively.

• Coco Duan helps Asian women leaders reduce unnecessary internal stress and achieve greater success on their own terms. 
• For VIP step-by-step support, apply for Coco's "Stress Less For Greater Success" VIP coaching program here. She'll be in touch to invite you to a discovery call.
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• Please feel free to email her at Coco@CocoDuanCoaching.com with any questions or feedback. 

Transcript

Hello, welcome to the first episode of Stress Less For Greater Success. I'm your host, Coco Duan. I'm a life and a leadership coach.

I'm here to empower you, Asian women leaders, to reduce unnecessary stress and achieve greater success on your own terms. Today, let's start by checking in with yourself. How stressed do you feel on a regular basis?

Take a moment and rate it from 1 to 10. 1 being the lowest, meaning you're feeling pretty relaxed. 10 being the highest, meaning you're feeling overwhelmed and maxed out.

Got your number? Great. Hold on to that as we dive into today's topic.

Stress. What is stress? Stress is the body's natural response to external or internal pressures that disrupt its equilibrium.

It happens when you perceive a situation or demand as threatening. Picture this. Our ancestors living in the wild, surrounded by dangers like tigers, lions, and snakes.

When a tiger appears, their bodies would immediately kick into gear, activate fight or flight response. The stress response makes their hearts raise and muscles tense, and give them the energy and focus to run as fast as they can. This search of stress is essential for survival, helping them escape predators and stay alive.

However, after the threat passes, their bodies have the time to recover and to recuperate and ready for the next challenge. Today, luckily, we don't face tigers anymore. But the same stress response kicks in when you encounter modern day challenges.

So stress isn't always negative, and it has a critical role to help you survive. However, there are good stress and bad stress. So good stress is short-term and manageable amount.

It can motivate you to take actions, solve problems, and achieve goals. So for example, deadlines. You may not like deadlines, but deadlines are necessary to push you to complete tasks or projects.

Working out and lifting heavy weight makes your body sore, but it builds muscle and make you stronger and healthier. Learning a new skill, it's uncomfortable. But it challenges you to grow.

But all those stress, it's good stress, because it is short-term and manageable amount. And also, you'll have the time to recover and recuperate. But when the stress is chronic, overwhelming, and persistent, then that's the problem.

It's like running away from tigers all the time. Imagine how exhausted you will be. So there's no downtime for your nervous system to rest and recover.

Like ongoing financial difficulty, or constant job dissatisfaction, or being stuck in a long-term unhappy marriage. This type of stress leads to serious health problems, like burnout, anxiety, and depression. In fact, research shows that chronic stress is a leading cause of cancer.

So what you need to really work on is to reduce the bad stress. But before you can reduce it, you need to know where does it come from? How much is external?

And how much is internal? Well, external factors like bad traffic, demanding work, difficult bosses, and family responsibilities, all of those matter. But really, most of the stress you experience is more internal than you think.

Take the same situation, might stress one person out, but does not affect another. Or it might stress you out before, but does not affect you now. Take public speaking as an example.

I used to panic at the thought of public speaking. It gave me so much stress and anxiety. But now, I enjoy doing it.

I don't see it as stressful anymore, because I have changed my internal response to it after mindset work and years of practice. So I want to give you an example to illustrate really how stress is caused by internal response. Now picture this.

I'm working in corporate America just two, three years ago. So work is demanding. However, the bigger problem is that I have what I call a helium arm.

I want you to use a little bit of imagination. My hand shoots up automatically, just like a balloon floats up. Whenever someone asks for a volunteer, whether it's for my boss, coworkers, or my team, we need someone to lead this new project.

Who wants to volunteer?

My hand would go up. Me. We need someone to train you hires.

Who wants to volunteer? My hand goes up. Me.

We need someone to organize a team dinner. Who wants to volunteer? Me.

Again, me. Me, me, me. Say yes to everything.

Without what happens, the work just piles up. So I work 60 hours a week, I work after hours on the weekend and on vacation. I have just not been able to disconnect.

Just constant work. And what does it do to me? Stress.

So have you ever experienced that? Just always raise your hand and volunteer and get stressed. But stress doesn't stop here.

When I go above and beyond, I just give my 120 percent. Then I look around, and I see my coworkers are not, some of them, are not even giving 80 percent. Guess how I feel?

I feel frustrated with those slackers. I'm thinking to myself, this is unfair, I do so much more, and we're getting paid the same. Can't be like this, I can't stand those free writers.

Can you relate? Have you ever felt that way? And with that thought, it creates more stress in my life.

But the stress doesn't stop there. All those volunteering, I have motive. It's not all selfless.

Secretly, I want acknowledgement and recognition. When I'm not getting the recognition I think I deserve from my boss, guess how I feel? I feel resentful.

I'm thinking, they don't see how much work I put in. They don't value me. They don't appreciate me.

Why am I doing this? Have you ever experienced that? So with that, cause is more stress.

But guess what? Stress doesn't stop here. With all the overwork, frustration, and resentment, I feel more stress.

So stress, stress, stress. I turn into this massive stress ball, but I don't see that's my problem. In my mind, I think the problem is everyone else.

My boss, my coworkers, and my partners, everyone else around me is to be blamed. So I was stuck in that vicious cycle for years until I couldn't take it anymore. So I started to work with a coach and really helped me to figure this out.

And that's when I learned the truth. You have to face the truth before you can fix it. Face it to fix it.

So really, the problem, the biggest problem is me. It starts with this tendency to say yes to everything. It's automatic and it's compulsive.

My coach helped me to dig a little bit deeper, to really uncover the underlying reason of that tendency. Why? Why I have the need to say yes to everything?

That is really driven by a deep desire, the deep desire to feel that I'm important, I'm capable, and I'm indispensable. Really, I want to feel that I am valuable. It's really driven by this subconscious belief that I am not valuable enough.

So, I need to prove that I am valuable enough by overdoing, overachieving, and over giving. This is called Gremlin, a fundamental limiting belief that I have of myself, coming from my childhood and my upbringing. So, this is really deep stuff.

Maybe it's hard for you to wrap your head around at this moment, but don't worry, we'll unpack this in the future episodes. But once I uncover that deep subconscious belief of I'm not valuable enough, and I've learned to shift that belief is a really limiting belief to something more empowering, which is I am valuable. We are all valuable, and I am valuable for being who I am, and intrinsic valuable for being a human being.

So once I internalize this new belief of I am valuable, that my people-pleasing, overachieving, and over-giving tendency is reduced significantly. And now I feel very comfortable with saying no, setting healthy boundaries. And I no longer have that helium arm anymore.

Use the stress scale that we had at the beginning of the show. My stress level before was at 8 or 9 on a regular basis. And now I'm at 2 or 3.

What a transformation. Right, so it's truly, truly incredible. But this is just a very quick overview of the process for reducing the internal stress.

In future episodes, I'll break it down and teach you the tools to identify your stressor. More importantly, it is to uncover the underlying cause, that fundamental core limiting beliefs that you have, and then help you to shift those limiting beliefs to empowering ones. So it's going to be very, very powerful work that we'll be doing together.

But today, let's recap really quickly. We talked about what stress is, the difference between the good and bad stress, and how most of the stress you experience is internal. That is great news, because it means that now you can feel more empowered to reduce and manage it once you learn the right tools and skills.

In our next episode, we will dive deeper into how Asian parental, societal, and cultural expectations have impacted Asian women leaders, and have caused you bad internal stress. So it will be really eye-opening. Thank you for tuning in to Stress Less For Greater Success.

If you found this episode helpful, please subscribe and share it with others who might benefit from it. Until next time, be kind to yourself.