The Bend Like Bamboo Podcast: How a flexible mindset can help you to overcome stress, uncertainty, and change Ep 32.
Bending Like Bamboo is believing that flexibility builds resilience. Amanda specialises in helping leader’s CEO’s and executives to master resilience with flexibility. When we can adapt to change, we can transform obstacles into opportunities. We are more creative and innovative. We are happier, healthier, and engaged.
When you can believe in what can be possible for your mind, body, and life you feel like you can overcome anything. Resilience is about leaning into uncertainty and discovering what you are made of.
Get ready to be inspired by their stories, golden nuggets, and actionable tools that can help you to elevate your mindset, to be bigger than your setbacks. Within every adversity is an equal or greater opportunity. No matter what you are going through, you can overcome it, and discover what you are made of.
It is important to feel motivated and hopeful about the future. When we are positive, we can be more creative, and innovative. Seeing our obstacles as opportunities, rising above the turbulence we can feel more ready to rebuild our minds, bodies, and lives.
Overcome stress and change
Welcome to the Bend Like Bamboo resilience podcast, where on the show I get to interview special guests, from men, women, people in business celebrities and I get to ask them all What does resilience mean to you? On the podcast I have had the pleasure of interviewing wonderful special guests and now in the podcast, I would like to do some solo work with you where I'm going to deliver topics that I want to break down intersections.
Today, I want to explore the topic of resilience and how to manage change. In the world and within ourselves, we are all experiencing a lot of change right now. How can we find that deep anchor and resilience within ourselves to feel happy and healthy as we navigate change?
It's not an easy task, but we all must go through this, so we might as well have fun along the way. In this podcast, we will explore resilience, stress, and how to manage change with the power of flexibility. Along with tools that will help you to destress, manage change and see your situation with fresh eyes.
From rigid to flexible
Bend Like Bamboo is a program designed to maximise resilience and wellbeing. I believe that flexibility builds resilience, and when we are stressed, we tend to be more rigid, close minded, more, we're not as happy, we're not as well and we can be very reactive. You know how it feels when you're focused on what you don't want and worst-case scenarios usually when you're in that stress response.
As opposed to being calmer and more present, connected within yourself. We're more adaptable, we're more creative, we're more innovative. We're more solution focused, and we tend to focus on what we want. In our ever-changing world where we are experiencing change all of the time, doesn't it make sense to master change and to welcome change as a positive thing? But this is difficult to do when we are super stressed and kept from suppressing how we're really feeling about things in life.
And we've been stressed for a long period of time, all of us, and this gets backed up in our like clogged pipes in our nervous system. So today we're going to look at how to de stress. We're going to look at what stresses us out maybe it may not be what you think. And I'm going to take you through a podcast that will help you to realise that all that you're searching for is within and when we can anchor within just like a bamboo tree anchors deep into the soil. We can find more flexibility to change our minds about what we're thinking, how we're feeling and what we're believing. Because how we feel about things is in our control how we're perceiving our circumstances, and what and all the change that we're all going on. In our lives. We can control this. And when we change how we feel about things.
The way that we see the world changes as well and things tend to shift and move around us. When we can feel more positive about our situation. Suddenly it feels like we're getting in receiving more help. It's no accident. After all the research I've done and in my own experience as well and working with clients every day in the clinic, where we can shift how we feel about our lives and our circumstances and our futures ahead, not only can we create happier and healthier lives, but this can also shift our nervous system which helps us to be healthier as well.
What stresses you out?
I want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine a situation I want you to think of a situation that's troubling you right now. And I want you to feel in your body where you feel this stress. Is it in your head? Is it in your gut? Is it in your heart and chest?
Now I want you to imagine a tall building, Carolyn Myss taught me this analogy and I want to share it with you. When we are stressed. We tend to see things from the ground floor of a building where all you can see is what's in front of you. You have a limited perspective and point of view here. We can be very reactive when we just see things from the ground floor. But as we grow and we push ourselves out of our comfort zone as we become braver to embrace change, we elevate, and we escalate to the first floor and then the second floor and then the third floor of the building.
And if you can remember a time in your life where you have elevated and progressed and you know you've shifted to a whole new level of your life. And life as you knew it before was never going to be the same again, because maybe you pushed yourself. Maybe you left a relationship that was no longer serving you. Maybe you were brave enough to go for the job you really wanted or a lover, whatever it was that pushed you out of your comfort zone that helped you to grow and elevate. When we elevate, we progress to the third floor, fifth, sixth, until we get to the penthouse. And when we can see our life from the penthouse, we can see all the streets we can connect all the dots, we have a greater and higher understanding of our situation and our lives. We can make better decisions from here we can feel calmer, we feel wiser.
Seeing from this more elevated mindset and perspective can dramatically change our life and how we manage stress and change. Today's podcast is going to be all about how to see your life from the penthouse instead of the ground floor. I want you to imagine you're on the penthouse. However, you are probably seeing your situation from the ground floor right now. So let's meet where you're at, at the ground floor for now. Okay, and just feel in your body, how stressful that feels. You don't have any creative solutions about how to navigate your way out just yet.
Today I want to show you just how adaptable you really are. Benjamin Franklin has a wonderful quote on change, and he is a statesman, scientist, and diplomat in the 1700s. He said “Change is the only constant in life and one's ability to adapt to those changes will determine our success in life.”
What is resilience?
What does resilience mean to you? I want you to think about that. For me. It is about the courage, having the courage to dig down deep. When life gets tough when the odds are stacked against us, those moments where we want to give in. I believe that resilience is our ability to manage stress and change our ability to adapt and innovate as we navigate change. I believe resilience is about our ability to lean into uncertainty with the courage to discover what we're capable of, particularly in times of adversity. And this is connected to how successful healthy and happy we can be.
How does resilience feel internally in your body when you feel resilient? What happens externally in your life in your environment within your relationships, when you are feeling more resilient? Maybe you can think of an experience that you've just had, where you had to be resilient. How you grew, what you've learned.
Resilience affects our lives personally
Let's look at some of the problems that we face when we are stressed. This affects our lives. Our ability to be resilient affects our lives personally, and our mental health, whether we experience pain or inflammation or disease in the body. When we are stressed, we tend to overthink we get stuck in our heads. You know how that feels. When you're overthinking obsessive thoughts, you've go over and over things in your mind often stuck in the past or overthinking the future. This impacts our self-esteem, how we feel about ourselves, and our confidence levels. Our ability to be resilient affects our lives personally within our relationships, our ability to connect in them, and how we connect within ourselves. Our ability to be resilient personally affects our well-being, our ability to repair our minds and bodies, how successful we can be, and how fulfilled we can feel.
Our ability to be resilient affects our lives professionally. The health of our culture, how we are communicating within our teams, how productive we can be in our day, and of course, how happy we can be at work, and we might as well be happy at work because we're there half of our lives, but also there is evidence to show that that feeling happier at work can increase our bottom line.
Have a think about what stresses you out, and it's not always what you will think. Have you ever noticed how having a goal is not enough? Having a goal is not enough to make things happen. What we really believe about ourselves and whether we can make this happen in the world, is also what matters, and for many of us, our goals are not aligning with what we believe about ourselves and what can be possible for us.
That is what I call an inner resistance or an inner conflict. You know when you want something that you've just got this narrative or a story in your head, and it creates a conflict and a sabotage loop. But when we can be more flexible in our mindset, we can change our minds about the story, our goals can then align with what we believe about ourselves and what can be possible for us.
To achieve this, we must go through a process of flexibility and letting go. When we are stressed, of course, this can happen from obvious things like trauma or an accident, think back to the caveman days when was all about running from a predator. And the stress response fires adrenaline, and cortisol, so we can fight or flight or freeze and get out of danger. In our modern-day of living. We can also exacerbate this stress response or express it when we are experiencing change within our relationships, our finances, death, or divorce which are bigger changes in our lives. Poor lifestyle and drinking too much coffee can also add to our stress response, an inner conflict, and unresolved issues, can all express a stress response. So have a think about what's going on in your life. You may have not thought about how this impacts your health.
Back in the caveman days, we would have a stress response and it is important to have a survival program it keeps us alive. But we had a balance of fight or flight and we would go back into nature after we ran from danger. Our autonomic nervous system would balance, we'd have our sympathetic nervous system and then our parasympathetic nervous system would balance, and we would switch off again, wired and on and then off.
Do you have rituals in your day that help you to balance out the nervous system?
I want you to think about what are you believing about yourself now? What are you believing about your business? Are you aware of what is blocking you from achieving your health goals? Your relationship goals your finance goals? And is this story that you've been telling yourself even true? Can you bring in flexibility to change your mind about the story? When did you even learn this story? Take a moment and maybe note down a few answers to those questions.
Let’s talk about the power of flexibility and how this can help us to de-stress so that we can nourish a better mindset to see things from the penthouse, a more elevated state, rather than from the ground floor. And this is all about the art of bending like bamboo. When we bend like bamboo, we are anchored just like a bamboo tree.
When we discover our inner anchor, this allows us to be more flexible and resilient, we can adapt to change, and we can get out of our comfort zone, where we can be at our best.
To bend like bamboo is to elevate and see things from a higher perspective to reimagine what can be possible in our minds, in our bodies, and in our lives. It is our ability to be adaptable in times of change, to see our situation with fresh eyes, and to see our obstacles as an opportunity to grow. To lean into uncertainty with confidence and to get out of our comfort zone.
Seeing setbacks as gifts.
When we access elevated emotions, think of love joy, compassion, forgiveness, kindness, and resilience. When we're seeing things from the ground floor, we access lower denser emotions of anger, worry, shame, and guilt. Imagine that tall building. Imagine you can see things from the penthouse and from here we can see that our setbacks are really changes that happen in life that are designed to set us on a new path, what we go through in adversity is teaching us valuable skills and lessons of who we need to become to have what it is that we're wanting next in our lives. But if we are not open to change, and feel rigid from stress, we cannot see these moments that I believe are truly miracles that are placed in front of us that can change our lives for the better. When we are seeing things from the penthouse, we have a higher perspective accessing those elevated emotions of joy, love, compassion, and self-belief, letting go of lower denser emotions when we're stressed with anger, worry, shame, guilt fear.
Imagine your stress again:
I want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine your situation you thought of at the start, a situation that's troubling you right now. Can you see it from the penthouse instead of the ground floor?
I hope you enjoyed my first solo podcast about how a flexible mindset can help you to overcome stress, uncertainty, and change.
Pls subscribe and rate the Bend Like Bamboo podcast and remember, that no matter what you are going through, you can overcome it and discover what you are made of.
You can also listen to the interview on the Bend Like Bamboo Resilience podcast
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