Alex Carberry
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Making everything work better #006

Making everything work better #006

Feb 12, 2022

The issue for entrepreneurs isn’t stress. Stress is part of life. Prof. Hans Seyle the founder of our current theories of stress, defined stress as the wear and tear on an organism due to stressors. The problem comes when the wear is greater than our capacity to recover and regenerate. We build muscle by weight lifting by exposing our muscles to greater and greater load stress, then giving our muscles time to recover and regenerate. Because of our adaptive response to stressors we get stronger. Then if we are faced with a challenge requiring strength then our stressor adapted muscles and bodies are better able to respond to the challenge. The unpreparedness of someone who hasn’t trained for this is woefully evident. The recipe to adapting to stressors is regular cyclical managed exposure to stress and recovery/regeneration periods.

Save energy and stresses whilst doing everything

We choose the stressors train for and lessen those which we don’t have to unnecessarily endure. We choose where we will spend our energy. We just can’t expand in every direction or dimension all at the same time. So in the everyday rhythms of life we lessen the stresses or lighten the load giving our bodies a chance to regenerate and recuperate and we expose ourselves to the specific stresses that we choose and train for those. Which stressors do you need to train for?

If we choose to harmonise our everyday activities with the manner in which our bodies naturally work easily, we eliminate and get better at managing stresses in our everydayness. The Taoist call it harmonising with the way, and different wisdom traditions have different terminologies. As entrepreneurs we are able to bring harmony and integration with our natural biological functions to bear to lighten our everyday load. A key to this is adopting a habitual rhythm. Sleep, eating, work times, leisure times, etc. need to follow a natural rhythm which allows us to exert ourselves and regenerate, so that our wear and tear does not exceed our capacity to recover. If we consistently exceed our healthy biological limits then some sort of breakdown will occur. We must remember that we are NOT supermen! And even superman had his kryptonite! What is your daily rhythm and how do you lighten your everyday biological load?

There is a grace and wisdom in a sense of effortlessness. For this we invest in building habits.

We all need support, so get it

As entrepreneurs we must especially embrace our interdependence. We simply cannot do everything or master everything. On the entrepreneurial journey if we wish to complete the journey healthily and without burnout then we have to embrace a culture of interdependence and master how we master our interdependence. We are supported by all these life-forms and processes doing different things. And we are a life-form that has chosen to do what we have. We need support and learning how to build our support structure and processes. Adaptogens for example are part of this support structure and getting stronger at choosing appropriate support and learning how to integrate this into one’s life, is one of the essential skills.

Adaptiveness

Essentially we have to practice adaptiveness as a habit and this stuff really takes us out of our comfort zones.

Wow an entire episode and I haven’t even mentioned libido!

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