Stress to Success

Appeared in Mortgage Professional Magazine
November 2003
By Andrew Bryant

It’s 9:35 pm, you’re exhausted as you lock the office and head for your car. All you can think of is getting home to your family and a chance to relax. It’s been a hell of a day you’ve spent hours on the phone to some moron of a salaried officer at the lending institution who had ‘lost’ the application for your client. You reach home feeling more than a little frustrated. You put your key in the front door. Instead of the peaceful haven you have been yearning for you are greated by the sound of the kids screaming and a look on your partners face that could turn milk sour. Plan B, you pour yourself a large measure from the drinks cabinet and try in vain to chill out in front of the TV.

Next day you finally get to the office after the traffic works has sent you on the not-so-scenic route and there is a fax in the machine telling you the deal you had been working on for three days has just fallen through. As your voice reaches 147 decibels yelling down the phone at the lender, a thought pops into your head - “maybe the stress is getting to me?”

How we handle stress can mean the difference between success and failure. In this article we will explore the components of stress and how you can use stress to propel you to success.

The opening story may or may not have any similarities to your life because we all handle stress differently. Typical behaviour indicators of the stress response are, frustration, constant fatigue, a feeling of being out of control, irritablilty or anger at people making demands of you, cynisism or negativity and a very short fuse. Physical symptoms include, headache, muscle tension, stomach pains, insomnia and skin disorders. The physiolgical effect of a prolonged stress response is a reduced immune system that can lead to colds, viral infections and cancer or coronary heart disease.

Being a mortgage broker can be exciting and rewarding with the opportunity to be your own boss and determine your own success, it is imperative therefore that you understand stress and how to harness it if you want to avoid the catastrophic results of the stress response.

A stressor is something that causes you to experience a stress response. The stressor is the cause and the stress response is the effect. The stressor that triggers your stress response can be anything from a ringing phone to a client who forgets to tell you their credit rating is worse than some West African countries. The stressor may not even be something ‘out there’; it can just be a thought inside your own head.

You might start to think “If I don’t get a new client soon, there won’t be any food on the table and my mortgage won’t get paid.” As you start to play this thought over and over in your head you might feel the knot in your stomach and the stress response has occurred.

The stess response occurs whenever we cue our neurology in one of two ways. Either when we send a message to our brain of “Danger!” Or we send a message of “Enough! Overload!”

Either of these two messages cues the brain send the body into the Fight/Flight response otherwise known asThe General Arousal Syndrome.

When this happens: blood is withdrawn from the brain and stomach and sent to the larger muscle groups, adrenalin is released into the blood, heart and lungs beat faster, eyes dilate, skin sweats, fats, cholesterol and sugar in your blood stream increase, stomach secretes more acid, immune system slows down, thinking shifts to a more black-and-white, survivalist mode.

In today’s business world we can neither fight nor run, we therefore need to manage our thinking and behaviours.

The first step in stress management is awareness - awareness of the stressors in your work and home life and your usual stress response. Only through awarenes can we gain control and direct the energy to success. A strong word of caution, denial can be lethal both fnancially and physically, so take a moment now and think about what pushes your buttons?

Some examples are:

• Not enough time
• Not enough clients
• Being kept on hold
• Paperwork
• People lying to me
• Delays
• Interuptions
• Incompetance

Are any of these, stressors for you? And what else?

What about internal stressors such as the following thoughts?

• “I’m not good enough”
• “I don’t know enough”
• “I don’t have the right connections”
• “I’m not smart enough”
• “I need to be perfect”

Do you have any of these thoughts or others like them?

When your buttons are pushed, either from and external or internal stressor, what is your response?

• Breathe holding
• Muscle tension
• Anger, Frustration
• Shouting
• Depression

So next time your client has rang you five times in the same day to enquire about the progress of their loan, or you have been sitting on hold for twenty minutes on the broker support hotline and then been cut-off or you get told by a potential client that they don’t want to deal with a broker because the industry has a bad name – “STOP” and become aware of your stress response.

You can interupt the stressor to stress response and break the cause-effect chain. You can manage your mind-body and emotions because it is this ability that determines the difference between success and mediocrity in any endeavor including business and sport.

Consider Tiger Woods as he steadies himself to take a long put at championship point, with thousands of people watching intently. Watching to see him win or lose. Could you handle the pressure? Well probably not, not without the practice and training that Tiger has had. You can however practice and train yourself to handle the pressure in your chosen endeavour.

Sporting greats such as Tiger Woods have a strategy for handling stress; let me share with you a strategy to propel you to success in your business.

Step 1. Know why you are doing what you are doing. We can withstand any what if we have a big enough why. Your ‘whys’ are you values, what’s important to you.

You got into mortgage broking for a set of reasons, by getting back in touch with these you can use them to navigate to success.

Examples of values are: Making a difference, independence, profit, caring for family, being in control, balance, health, happiness. So what’s important to you?

Step 2. Keep a note in your diary of when you become stressed and what caused it; this will increase your awareness of how you run your mind-body-emotional states.

Step 3. Interupt the stressor to stress response. There are many stress interupt patterns and the best is still breathing. When we start to go into a stressful state we tend to breath hold and tense our muscles, by consciously taking a deep breathe and slowly breathing out fully, you break the cycle. Practicing relaxation techniques is also useful to achieve this.

Step 4. Take the sting out of the stressor - burst its bubble.

When you identify a stressor, ask yourself this question “in terms of what I value, is it useful to get stressed about this?”

Comparing the stressor against your values shrinks it down to size. With the stressor now at a manageable proportion you can ask yourself, “What is a more useful behaviour for me to engage in?” For example if your stressor was not enough new clients, rather than engage in stressful worrying, a more useful behaviour would be to engage in marketing activities to secure new clients.

Step 5. See each stressful situation as an opportunity to increase your skills. Successful people have the ‘frame of mind’ that with every challenge is a chance to improve, they don’t beat themselves up, they focus on what learnings they can take out of a situation.

By using this strategy you will take control of you mind-body state and so start to take control of your results. You may not be aware that all communication is dependant apon the state you are in. Have you ever tried to say, “I love you” when you are angry? The words are changed by the emotional state. We are all very sensitive to non-verbal signals and your emotional state is broadcasting to everyone you are communicating with. So if you are frustrated, angry or stressed this will be transmitted along with whatever you say. Since the quality of our communication has a direct correlation to our results it is important to manage your state of mind for success.

Between 1991 and 1992 Richard Branson was under attack. His Virgin record company was making money but his vision for Virgin Airways was being blocked by underhanded tactics from British Airways and a lack of support from his own bankers. When Branson blew the whistle on BA, the smear campaign saw the British papers with headlines calling him a liar. Branson could have cut his losses and consolidated his business to the profitable record company. His wife, friends and advisors all suggested that course of action but Branson is an optimist and refused to let the stress get to him. Dr Martin Seligman has discovered that the pessimist is at the mercy of reality, whereas the optimist has a massive defense against reality that maintains good cheer in the face of a relentlessly indiferent universe. It is my observation that the optimist by refusing to accept reality creates their own and therefore determins their results. Branson beat BA and went on to become a billionaire.

Will you back yourself and take charge of your success? Will you use your stressors as the fuel to improve your skills and move to the front of your field? Will you practice the skills daily and move from Stess to Success?

Andrew Bryant is available for keynote presentations - click here for details.

Talk to one of our coaches about stress - click here.