Leaders: Your stress is killing your team

If you're feeling  stressed out, overwhelmed and exhausted with work and feel like throwing the laptop against a wall right now...this is definitely the episode for you today!

In this ep, I wanted to talk to you all about the shadow work and healing I had to do to become a better leader.

These sneaky shadows of mine lay unnoticed for a long time. They manifested in many ways, and it wasn't until I started paying attention that I was able to make a big change.

A change that would transform my career and my future teams.

I get into:
-Alternate call weeks
-Signs of chronic stress
-The huge shadow I was confronted with
-What I did to build a motivated, stress-free team
-How you can improve your team dynamics and prevent stress seeping in 

If you're a leader who's always stressed, your team is always stressed and you honestly have no bloody clue what to do about it, then grab a pen, and let's get in to it.

📲Lower you stress in 30 days with the Stress Buster Starter Pack

06:17
Managing Stress and Reducing it in You and Your Team

21:53
Creating a Safe Space for the Team

29:00
Creating a Solid Inner Bubble

32:53
Noticing and Managing Stress

35:17
Controlling Reactions to Stress

36:16
Conclusion

🪩 don't forget to subscribe for a bi-weekly break and pick-me up from the chaos of leading a team.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

hey, hey, hey, welcome back to the bubbling out podcast. I am your host, emily rose delara. I hope that this week has been a good one for you. Um, I am very much chilling. It is my call weeks.

Speaker 1: 0:27

As you may or may not know, I speak about this quite often on social media. I have alternate call weeks and the purpose of this is to help me have focus time, because I have a brain that is easily distracted and I know how to manage it a lot better now than I used to. But if I have call after call after call, there's absolutely no work getting done. Like, I cannot code switch for the life of me, and I've learned that now. I've tried to train myself, I've tried to time block different things. It's not getting done. So now, during the week, when I know that I have calls in my call week, instead of trying to slot in big tasks, all I do is have really tiny things in there. So today, for example, is my call week and I have multiple calls, but I made myself have big gaps in between, so I had one hour gaps in between the calls and in those call gaps I worked on messaging, and this is something that I'm doing a lot of work on at the moment because I have really struggled not even struggled because I'm not allowed to use that word.

Speaker 1: 1:29

My coach does not allow the word struggle. I have found it challenging to really get my authentic personality across in the messaging. I found it quite challenging to express exactly who I help and how I help them, and I'm not going to lie, this has been a real difficult part of my business, and a conversation that I constantly have with my coach and with the people that I'm in a group coaching with is how do I productize myself, like how do I put me separate from the business? And that is something that a lot of other coaches really struggle with. So any business coaches here you need to hone in on this but, yes, really putting the finger or my finger on exactly how to express the problems, desires, wants and needs of the people who I could help the most. But we did make progress and, as you might have seen from my Instagrams and my LinkedIn posts and stuff, I have decided that and I knew this all along and it's kind of been reflected in who I'm coaching.

Speaker 1: 2:36

But I really just want to support new leaders. I love it. I love helping someone walk into their big new role. That's fucking terrifying, and helping them feel like they can figure this out. They've got someone by their side. They've got someone to ask questions to. They've got someone to help them point out what they might be doing wrong or what they might be doing right or maybe what they could change right. I love being that person who can stand by their side and help them see their blind spots, help them crack the code in the new job.

Speaker 1: 3:05

To give you an example, one of my clients went in and I've done this and I've talked about this in the podcast went in like a bull in a china shop in their new role because they wanted to prove themselves. They wanted to build trust, but they were doing everything to not build trust and not prove themselves. And so we work to help them slowly slow down on trying to get the quick wins and we work to slowly help them build trust relationships, set boundaries and really work on their communication, and they've walked into a new promotion. It's fucking amazing and I just I'm blown away by the amount of incredible things that can happen when you just start to develop your self-awareness and start putting things in place that serve you versus serving other people. Okay, and this is this is actually where, like, these two clients are actually where the leadership bubble of balance really um came out. They helped me to they don't know this, so, hi guys, but they really helped me to develop it like everything that this so hi guys, but they really helped me to develop it Like everything that they were going through resonated with what I was going through when I was a CMO and I was like, hmm, maybe if we did things this way, in this structured way, and coached ourselves through it, then we might be able to start seeing big results as new leaders. We might be able to really position new leaders as strategic decision makers, as people who are setting the standard for boundaries and team management and processes and all that kind of stuff. So that's what I'm getting really gritty on.

Speaker 1: 4:34

If you're interested in this and hearing more and maybe helping me to pad this out, feel free to DM me or send me an email hello at emilyrosedalaracom, because this is where we're getting a really granular and as we move into this episode, which is not about this at all, I just want to remind you to hit subscribe, because in Spotify and on Apple podcasts, they really push your podcast towards more people when you have more subscribers. That's their metrics. The metrics are if anyone's listening and you've got a podcast. The metrics are new listeners during the day. So if you get this notification and you listen during the day, that's going to show it to more people. It's subscribers and it's downloads right. So if you feel like you want to download I mean I don't know how many people actually download, but that is the metric. So if you could help me in any way, just hit subscribe and you're golden and listen to the show. I would be very grateful. And whilst you're at it, if you want to sign up to my newsletter to get exclusive contact, tips, strategies to help you lead without stress, just head over to emilyrosedelaracom forward slash newsletter and you will get signed right up.

Speaker 1: 5:43

So let's pop in today's show. Today we're going to be talking about how to manage stress and how to reduce it in you and your team. To get started, I'm going to tell you a bit of a story about my experience with stress, because it wasn't obvious when I first started dealing with stress. Now I I wouldn't say back when I moved into my first leadership role. So I was head of global marketing for an exchange. When I first moved into this big role, I wouldn't have said I was a stressy person. I was anxious, I had a bit of anxiety, and that was always tied to money and scarcity mindset, which we've discussed before, but we can talk about all day. I would say I was pretty chilled.

Speaker 1: 6:24

I'd been hustling for a while. I had had my own business. During that time, I'd worked at bitcoincom, I'd worked on multiple different Web3 projects and I was in control of my own time, but I'd never worked in a really big company and this is pretty big. It was like the biggest company I'd worked in. I think it was 500 plus people and if you work in a corporate, that's nothing. But for me, who's a startup girl who loves building teams in small startups, this is quite big.

Speaker 1: 6:50

And when I got brought into the role, I was brought in under stealth mode and I had no idea. By the way, I was also in stealth myself and I got brought in to replace somebody else. I had no idea this was happening and so I got brought in and they're like oh, we've just fired the previous head of marketing, now here's your team, right? Can you imagine? How can you imagine the chaos. So I walked in, I adopted a team who were demotivated. They had been trying everything and getting tons of criticism. They were the team who were wrong, the team who were doing everything bad, the team who were causing problems, the team who were underperforming right. So this is them.

Speaker 1: 7:32

When I walked into the team and I thought Jesus Christ, I've got a lot of work to do here. However, on top of that, I also had this insane pressure on myself. I put it on myself and I also had founders that were if you've ever listened to my different kinds of personalities, of leadership personalities episode, go listen to that. They were in the hedge fund personality type. They were all men, all friends and all had a certain expectation of what success was and what a successful leader might look like. And that had because I was quite I wouldn't say inexperienced because I'd led teams before, but it was more like I'd been inexperienced in that kind of environment, like startup, like growing startup, bro hustle culture. That's what I walked into, and so the expectations were so different from day one. Like my expectation was I'm going to help build this team. We're going to get great, great success. La la la. Their expectation was high growth success. Now it wasn't going to work because the team was so low and demotivated.

Speaker 1: 8:32

We had to do a lot of work there first, so I put a lot of pressure on myself and I just thought I was working like normal. I was working quite a lot of hours, I was staying at the office late, because this is like in a physical office in Asia and I was responding to text messages all the time. As you know the story, I was on my burnout path, but there's things that I didn't pick up on, that I should have picked up on, and these are the things that I want you to look out for Now. I started getting bloated a lot. Right, I started getting tummy ache a lot and I thought, hmm, is this the food I'm eating? Is there like I lived in Vietnam? Me ache a lot and I thought, hmm, is this the food I'm eating? Is there like I lived in Vietnam, like it could be anything. So I started getting bloated a lot.

Speaker 1: 9:11

I started to get really irritable with tiny things. So, because I was exerting a lot of effort and energy into helping my team to become motivated and inspired, I'm protecting them from the shit show that was happening above them. A lot of the time. I was just starting to become irritated with other things and I was starting to become less tolerant with people in my own life and in my professional life. So in slack, things in slack would piss me off so much and it would like throw my whole day off. I also started to see problems versus solutions, so things that I might be able to quickly solve.

Speaker 1: 9:45

I was getting stuck in for days and I was really struggling to stay on top of my notifications. I was getting notifications constantly, like I had Telegram, I had Slack, I had WhatsApp, I had all the social medias that I had to double check all the time because that was a thing, and so I was feeling anxious about checking my phone, but I wasn't able to put it down, because what if something happened? Because when something did happen and I didn't check my phone, I was reprimanded, right, reprimanded. Imagine, in a leadership role, being told off, putting me back into the little girl archetype, feeling like I was a child. That's a whole different story. I let that happen, of course, but I didn't realize that this was chronic stress. This is all the signs, the tiny signs of chronic stress adding up, and at the time. I just thought it was normal.

Speaker 1: 10:38

It was being in a big job, being in a fast-paced company. This is what it's like. I need to make the money now. I need to make sure that I've got it. I need to invest it. It was a lot of different goals. One of my goals was I need to save and I need to get a decent investment going. I needed a good strategy. I need to continue living my bougie lifestyle in Vietnam, all the things. So I accepted that this is how it was and I kind of accepted that I didn't really acknowledge that these physical things were because of the way I was working, the way I was behaving, but I kind of like started turning a blind eye to everything because I was so focused on succeeding and success was money and not failing and not losing the job. Okay, so bear that in mind when I tell you the next bit. So what I started to see on top of this was that my team was starting to behave weird, and so I'd got them to.

Speaker 1: 11:29

Before I reached this stress point. This is like seven months in. Before I reached this point, my team were doing really well. They were motivated, they were driven, they were excited about what we were doing. They felt again like they were doing something really well, and a few things happened. I think that stopped that from being the case. I got stressed because I had a lot of pressure on me. I had investor pressure, partner pressure and founder pressure, and I'd had a few altercations with the founding team whose values I didn't align with. That should have been a huge red flag and I should have had the courage to step away then, but I didn't. I didn't have the courage and I didn't have the financial backing to do so, and so I was leading without integrity.

Speaker 1: 12:16

I was doing things that I didn't think was right, and there was a few areas like pay rises. So I had quite a few team members come to me who had asked for pay rises very rightly, they really deserved it and they were getting rejected or nobody was getting back to them Right, and I was trying my hardest to get responses and I was getting nowhere. It was like speaking to brick walls. Sometimes I had team members who wanted holiday and they were getting rejected and I had no idea how to get this through because I was hitting brick walls, like the founding team were literally uncontactable. Sometimes I had team members who were late to calls, dropping the ball, not really caring, and I was like what is going on? Like, why is this happening? Why are my team behaving so weird? Like we were doing so well? And really it wasn't just one big catalyst, it was all these small things adding up and they started to feel the hit of my stress and my pressure too. I wasn't being able to create a bubble around that for myself and it was rippling out into them and, honestly, they just stopped caring, like.

Speaker 1: 13:24

I remember having conversations with the team members and they're like this is not worth it, like I'm not getting paid enough for this, like maybe if I got the pay rise, I would be putting up with this, but I'm not. And I also saw that they were getting quite passive, aggressive in meetings and in Slack and even with me, and I was like what the fuck is going on? Like, why is my team falling apart? Is this me? And so I remember sitting down with one of my team members who was they've been there like one of the longest team members, right, they've been through all the bullshit. If you're in crypto, they've been there like one of the longest team members, right, they've been through all the bullshit of if you're in crypto. They've been through all the token sale and all that kind of stuff and dealing with community and they've been through a lot.

Speaker 1: 14:04

And I said to them like what's happening? And they said it's not the team, it's not you, we just find this company is too misaligned with our values and it's too stressful. Like I cannot justify working this way with the amount of stress that we've got and not feeling aligned with it. I was like okay, but when I did some introspective work, I realized that maybe if I had been able to manage my stress better, being able to stand up for my values, being able to have the courage to speak up and push back when I thought that the decisions were misaligned with the company's values, being able to have the courage to speak up and push back when I thought that the decisions were misaligned with the company's values, misaligned my own values and were not fair, maybe this wouldn't have happened right. And so that was a hard pill to swallow.

Speaker 1: 14:48

I had inevitably caused my team to lose interest because I wasn't standing up for them enough to lose interest. Because I wasn't standing up for them enough. They were stressed, I was stressed. Stress causes stress. Disinterest causes disinterest right, whatever you put into your team is what you're going to get out.

Speaker 1: 15:07

And I realized that if I'm leading with a certain frequency because energy is frequency, after all if I'm emitting a certain frequency, this frequency of stress, pressure, anxiety, lack of motivation, if all I'm working towards is money and I'll do anything for it, and I'm not protecting my team from the pressure of above, because I'm literally seeping all of this energy into them anyway, like I can't be the umbrella if my umbrella's got fucking holes in it, right, and so it's no wonder my team were feeling exactly like me. It's similar to mirroring. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but it's when someone's mirroring your energy, because if they're in your energy field, then they will also experience what you're experiencing. That's what was happening. That's what was happening. This stress, energy, this unfulfillment was turning into a physical reality and I was doing things that reflected that.

Speaker 1: 16:03

Right, and so the things that were causing my team to feel a bit meh, to feel stressed, to feel all over the place, were things like me being stressed, setting last minute campaigns, because if I set this last minute campaign, maybe we're going to get results, maybe the founder is not going to fire me. I always had this thing about I'm going to get fired. I was setting tight deadlines because I had pressure to set tight deadlines for my birth and wasn't courageous enough to push back. I was saying yes to too many things. I was saying yes to partners who made absolutely no sense whatsoever, to the campaigns or the business model right. I could have said no, but because I was saying yes, I was also misaligned with my team's values, who were like why the fuck are we saying yes to this? This makes no sense. And I was arguing with members of the team in meetings when my team were there too.

Speaker 1: 16:52

So all of this energy was just counterproductive. It wasn't helping anybody. We weren't leading the team to success. We weren't getting the results we wanted. We were deflating each other. At the end of the day, we were all irritable with each other. We're all feeling like shit. I wasn't creating a supportive or safe environment and it was really a job run by fear. That fear and thoughts then showed up as stress in my body, which then poured into my team, and it had to stop. I couldn't carry on like this. It wasn't working, and if you've been listening a while, you'll remember that it did stop abruptly. I burnt out fully.

Speaker 1: 17:33

Like I remember being on a call with my HR director and we were friends and I just said to him this is bullshit. Like I cannot deal with this absolute ridiculous expectations. And I can't deal with being shut down in meetings and not feeling like I have a voice and I can't deal with being told that I'm ridiculous and to stop talking like I have a voice and I can't deal with being told that I'm ridiculous and to stop talking and like, honestly, it's no wonder I was not standing up for myself because I was being shut down and shut down, and shut down and it was really hard. Emily now wouldn't have stood for it for one minute, right. I would be like out of there in two seconds. In fact, I would never have even talked to these kind of people in the first place, right, no matter what money you give me.

Speaker 1: 18:12

But I reached that stage and I remember being sat at my kitchen table in Vietnam with my little puppy on my knee and I was on the phone to my director, my HR director, and just said I'm out, I'm out. And I remember starting crying on the phone but feeling that those tears were like relief. And then I took a break and, as you know, I took a bit of a break. I did a lot of soul searching. We even moved to a different part of Vietnam to live by the beach for a bit. I did a full 360 of my life. I did a lot of healing in terms of health. I worked with a functional practitioner. I really turned my life around. I was like fuck this, I'm not staying where I am right now. We need to get out of this.

Speaker 1: 18:52

And then I was given a really great opportunity to do things differently, and within those three months I'd had out, I'd done a lot of mindset work, I'd been working on my stress reduction. I'd really done a deep dive on what had gone wrong, like why didn't this work? Why didn't I stand up for myself? Why did I let people talk over me in meetings? Why did I feel so angry and frustrated that I was nearly crying in meetings? Because my voice just wasn't being heard, which meant that my eye was stressed, which meant that my team was stressed and it meant that nobody was happy.

Speaker 1: 19:25

I learned how to do it differently, and so the next role that I went into, I was really determined to support myself and my team fully. So what changed? I walked into a big new role where it was a bigger company actually, but I was put into a really interesting role. It was a really nice role head of product marketing and operations for the global side of the exchange, and I was given a lot of space and a lot of wiggle room. I would say I wasn't put in a box in any way and no expectations were put on me. I was able to create my own KPIs, my own team. I was able to build out people who complemented my skills. So that was one thing that really worked.

Speaker 1: 20:08

But what I did for myself, before even going into this role, I created a solid inner bubble. No joke, like I literally worked with my functional practitioner on this one as well, and you've met her, isla Hi Isla, but I remember just talking to her about all these things and she's like I think it's really good that you're taking this break. Now make sure that you use it. And so I did things like creating routines and rituals like the ones I put into my Stress Buster starter pack. If you haven't got it, I'll put it in the show notes. Go get it, because it's got really. It's got 30 days of rituals and routines you can try to help manage your stress right now. It's also got breathwork and that's something that I really honed in on and back then I was like breathwork, I love my yoga, I'll do my meditation, but my breathwork I'll take it, I breathwork, I love my yoga, I'll do my meditation, but my breathwork I'll take it, I'll leave it. But honestly, it's a game changer. You don't realize how much it reduces stress in your body and it helps to clear out trauma and emotions and it's really worth training yourself in it. So I tried breathwork.

Speaker 1: 21:06

I prioritized fun and play, and so this is before COVID, so we could actually have a life. But I remember going to do fun things like with my friend's kids, like trampolining in the trampoline park and playing with my dogs and going to the beach and just being silly and slacklining and trying to DJ. That was back before I could actually DJ. I mean, alex knows he's listening now I can't fully DJ yet, but we'll get back to that later. Anyway, I played, I set boundaries and I was very clear about them from day one in this new job and I communicated them and I implemented them consistently.

Speaker 1: 21:44

I also chose when to interact with work. Now, instead of having my work all on one phone, I had a work phone and a normal phone, and so the work phone stopped. I think it was like 6pm, because in Asia like nobody works after 6pm. Well, at that time anyway, don't know if everyone does this, but in my company no one was really working after that, and so I put my phone away and that was it. Done, work Finished, it's out of my zone.

Speaker 1: 22:15

I also used to time block. So many people say to me I can't time block, I can't prioritize my own focus time, and I'm like yes, you can, you absolutely can. You communicate it? You tell people that that's when you're doing the focus work and you explain why that's important. So that's what I did. I also reduced meeting times because in the previous role all I was doing was in bloody meetings constantly and I wasn't getting anything done. All I was doing was going back and forth, because most of these meetings, the people who were running them and the agendas were just backwards and forwards and upside down. We never got anywhere. So in this new role I walked in with all of these things ready to roll and then in my outer bubble, which is me communicating and working with other people. I created a really safe space for the people I was working with for my team. I think I had maybe 12 people that I adopted. So I walked in as a new role I adopted and we shift and change people's roles around to complement each other but I created a very safe space for them.

Speaker 1: 23:08

I helped from day one. I helped them set clear expectations and KPIs that kept them moving, that kept them prioritizing their stuff, that helped them working towards something versus just floundering. I discussed my boundaries with them and I allowed them to be transparent and implement theirs. I really encouraged that. I'm not going to reply to you after 6pm. When are you going to be stopping work? When can I expect replies from you? I don't want you to reply. When you don't want to reply, right, tell me when is to be expected a reply. Tell me when you focus the most. When do you want me to send you this kind of work? So I help them to.

Speaker 1: 23:49

I helped them by leading with example, basically, and I talked to them about the importance of listening, because in my previous role, we had lots of talking over each other and women. Well, I was like the only woman in the team so it didn't really count. But women got talked over very often and it was so difficult to get a word in. So I explained to them how important active listening is and repeating back what someone was saying and in compassion, and how compassion was so important for the team. Okay, and helping the team. And I also told them that nothing, absolutely nothing, is so urgent that they need to be working after 8 pm. Nothing is like, honestly, who works after 8 pm? It's not. You don't need to be sat in your community until then. You don't have to be sat on Slack and pinging partners. Your partner shouldn't be working at 8pm. Like, come on, unless it's been specifically communicated that they are your working hours. I don't need to reply to me after that.

Speaker 1: 24:49

And I also gave them tips and tactics, like when you're having a Slack conversation and it starts to get heated, take it offline. And I used to remember jumping in to Slack and really supporting my team and saying this has no room in Slack for discussion. Let's take it offline and let's talk about it in a way that is non-violent and I don't know if I ever actually said non-violent, but we were using non-violent communication. Here we take it off in a way that's respectful, compassionate, and that we help to find a solution. Um, yeah, and, and I also used to remove defensive language. So it wasn't they've done this and they've pissed me off and la la, it was always let's try and use, I feel, or this is how I've experienced this, or this is what's happened and this is how I would like to see it not happen. We always used to remove defensiveness from conversations.

Speaker 1: 25:38

We used to practice breathwork before big meetings, especially If we were doing pitches to partners or at the time it was token listings, trying to get people to come and list a token for a high fee. It was quite difficult to get people to say yes to the fee and we used to practice breathwork. And it was quite difficult to get people to say yes to the fee. And we used to practice breath work and it was just very simple just four, four, four, four. If you've ever tried that before, it's simply four in, hold four, four out, hold four, and it just regulates your nervous system and calms your whole body down, and that helped us to get in the zone and focused before events, before big pitches, we used to also set intentions each week as well, and this is something I've carried into my coaching. I get all my clients to set intentions versus okay, we've got these KPI. To me, it's yes, we've got KPIs and objectives, but what's the intention, how are we going to show up and how we're going to do it?

Speaker 1: 26:25

So, honestly, it was like the polar opposite of my previous experience and I was so proud of myself for being able to create this and being able to have such self-awareness and determination and consistency to turn it around. And that's why I love working with new leaders, because all these mistakes that I made in my previous roles and there was more before this role, the one where I burnt out loads of different examples that I should bring to the podcast I love being able to fast track success of leaders and help them to notice when they're doing things, because I don't want you not to make mistakes right, I don't want to use that kind of language. Like you will make mistakes, it's inevitable. I'm not there to like be on top of you saying don't do this, don't do this. I want you to make mistakes, but I want you to recover from them faster and I want you to not make those mistakes again. That's our approach.

Speaker 1: 27:18

And, of course, I tripped up in things. When I was trying to do this full turnaround. I did trip up, like there was things that I said that I was like no, I don't want to say it that way and I would go back on it and I would apologize or I'd say something more compassionately or whatever. There's things I would say yes to that were not within my boundaries and I would have to correct myself and explain why. And some days I didn't do the rituals, some days I didn't meditate, like all these things. But the most important thing was that I was on an upward trajectory and so nine times out of 10, I would have done the thing, and that's all I ever want is small, consistent action.

Speaker 1: 27:51

And when it came to my team, actually one thing I keep jumping around a bit, but one thing that really helped was that they knew that I had their back and that I was there to help reduce their stress and not add to it. They knew that I was the one who was going to diffuse the situation. I was somebody who was going to try and take things off their plate and shuffle it around and help them do things that they were really good at. That's exactly what I wanted and that's what I was able to create. I basically created this team and I loved them.

Speaker 1: 28:19

They were so amazing that when I left and moved countries, two of them came with me. I mean, they didn't move with me, but two of them moved to a different company with me and I helped them to get salaries that were way above what they were earning before, and that was amazing because I was able to give them a working salary that was hugely above their economical salary, if that makes sense, because they were worth it. The stuff that they were delivering was on par with what you would pay someone in the US for the same level of work, and so I won't get started on regional salaries, but I was very passionate about everyone being paid for the value of their outputs and it was magical and I fucking love this. And I fucking love leading teams, and it's also why I love Thrive Circle and working with startup teams so much, because I get to recreate that. I get to recreate this safe space for people where they can be themselves, they can lead in a way that feels right, that is within their values, that gets them results, that helps them stay within their boundaries. That helps them reduce their stress and stay in a place where they can focus and be productive, and it also helps them achieve their financial goals because they're able to feel like they can ask for more money, that they have clarity and time to start thinking about how they want to invest their money. Right, it's a ripple effect in all aspects and the greatest thing is you can all do it yourselves, too. Right? For all leaders who are listening to this you might be new leaders, you might be experienced leaders.

Speaker 1: 29:44

The first step is to notice where you are at and notice. Is stress creeping into my stratosphere, into my bubble? Is it creeping into my team? Am I letting anxiety or fear lead me? Once you've noticed this, what are you going to do about it? Right, that's step one is noticing what is going on with you, and if it is stress that's coming up, go and download my Stress Buster Startup Pack. It's a full 30-day challenge and checklist and I've included tons of stuff Like. The first thing is notice your triggers, notice what is going on right now, and that's a very difficult exercise to do. That's day one. We have breath work, we have meditation, we have playfulness, we have groundedness. We have similar to CBT work, but for coaching. We have rewire your brain stuff Loads of different things that you could try to manage your stress right now.

Speaker 1: 30:36

I've got two great breathing exercises that I recorded for you, and I've also got an EMDR tapping exercise, which is amazing when you are feeling a bit anxious and stressed in a meeting especially, and you can just tap, tap in a really nice way. It's really cozy, really cozy exercise to do and and it just slows down your heart rate and it calms your nervous system. And so I've given you things to deal with stress right now. And then there's another product that I think you'll love, called the Stress Buster Bundle, which is like the big brother of this. It's got way more stuff in and that has got loads of stuff in to help you with long-term stress. But first of all, I want you to just get started with the Stress Buster Starter Pack. It's emilyrosedallaracom stress-starter-buster-pack. I'll put that link in the show notes because it's a lot easier, yeah, so go and grab that, work out what is going on with you right now and start to see what you can slowly change.

Speaker 1: 31:34

Maybe it's something like you are interrupting people or not letting people speak in meetings and that's stressing you out in meetings, because you're being told to like you're talking over people, other people are talking over you and you don't feel like you're getting your point across. And then you leave the meeting and you feel stressed and you're like I haven't got anywhere. Maybe it's stuff like that, maybe these things are triggering your stress. Okay, so what do you need to do? Maybe you need to ground yourself before the meeting. Maybe you need to do a bit of breath work, maybe you need to pause when you talk, maybe you need to focus on listening, right, all these things? All these things help you to manage stress.

Speaker 1: 32:10

So, if you have learned anything today from this great big story because we go off on one a lot I do this all the time. It's just how my brain works. I want you to remember that when it comes to stress and it comes to you, and it comes to managing you and your team and trying to protect them from what you're feeling, I want you to remember that you can't always remove stresses, but you can control how you react to them. That's it. The only person you can control fully is you, and I want you to think about that and I want you to use the Stress Buster Starter Pack to help you reflect on how you can control your reactions and your emotions so you can have a more fulfilling and more successful leadership career.

Speaker 1: 32:57

Thanks for popping in. I'll see you next time. That's all for today on Bubbling Out. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a five-star review. Your reviews and subscriptions help more people, more leaders, more entrepreneurs like you access the Bubbling Out podcast. Also, if you're on Instagram or TikTok, go and follow me. Emily Rose Dallara, coach for behind the scenes, dog vids, somatics exercises and me DJing sometimes. See you next time in the bubble. Bye.