View Stress as Helpful to Performance (and Live Longer)
This blog post is inspired by Semih Yağcıoğlu. Semih develops software in Ankara, Turkey. Semih caught my attention after he followed me on Twitter. As I perused Semih’s stream of tweets, I came across his tweet referencing Psychologist Kelly McGonigal’s TedTalk: How to make stress your friend. This talk took place in Edinburgh, Scotland in June of 2013.
How you think about stress matters:
Viewing stress as helpful improves your performance and health.
The TedTalk tickler:
Stress makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.
Listening to Kelly changes how you view stress: http://www.youtube.com/embed/RcGyVTAoXEU?feature=oembed
In Kelly’s words,
Chasing meaning is more important for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. That’s the best way to make decisions. Go after what creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.
Here’s my five “Kelly talk” takeaways:
- The harmful effects of stress are not inevitable.
- Your belief about stress makes a difference in your life expectancy.
- How you think and how you act transforms your experience of stress.
- When under stress create resilience by choosing to connect (being social) with others.
- View stress as helpful to perform better. That also creates the biology of courage and joy.
How do you experience stress? Does stress handle you or do you handle stress? Are you using stress to enhance your performance? Please have a conversation with me and comment.
Related post: Applying the Right Shade of Pressure (is key to unleashing top performance)
About my social media workflow (because some of you are asking):
Twitter exposes me to a vast network of weaker social ties or people who know things that I don’t know. This is my “go to” social channel for listening and learning. Blogs are also a key tool for me. I usually discover the best bloggers via tweets or retweets. Twitter exposed me to Kelly’s inspiring talk. Thank you, Semih. Please share your workflow with me. I’m prepping a future blog post about “workflow” best practices.