Dead People Rarely Succeed

Run time:  58:22

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

stress, damon, people, life, activity, thought, works, stress relief, stressed, absolutely, question, career, professor, mentally, happy, gratitude, mind, stage, pete, chat

SPEAKERS

Damon Pistulka, Brad Smith, Ira Bowman, Dr. Elia, Andrew Cross, Pete Alexander, Alon Zaibert

 

00:18

Getting everyone it

 

Damon Pistulka  00:22

right here ready to go. Well, welcome back. Thanks for thanks for joining us. This is your first time. My name is Damon. Welcome to the eggs your way Business Roundtable. We have this thing every Thursday. And just glad that glad to see you all here. If you’ve never been here before, this is an interactive event. Raise your hand, get the chat rolling, do all that kind of good stuff to meet the people around you. Good. I see the chats rolling like we want it to be

 

Andrew Cross  00:55

if you if you want to get on stage, say so we’ll pull you up and come on. I want to hear from you your hand.

 

Damon Pistulka  01:03

But I’m really excited today and I hope the the title for our event, you know, dead people rarely succeed. It kind of strikes and strikes a chord with some of us here. You know, we were lucky enough to have Professor Pete Alexander with us today. He is a stress relief coach. He’s an author podcaster business owner. I want to say one thing, he’s got 103 podcast episodes. I just saw the last one that he did, you released the day. I mean, that’s that’s a lot when you’re thinking about this a lot of time and not talking to people is really cool. But what we’re going to do today is we’re going to talk about stress. And there may be some of you that have never had real stress induced challenges, both mentally and physically. But those of us have had I can tell you, this is something new that we need to address we need to understand we need to deal with. And one of the things I know he does is he helps people do that very simple revolt results based ways. And I thought it’d be interesting for us to have him take us through basically his journey, and how he got to where he’s at today and helping people with stress. So he just a moment will will give the stage over to you. I want to start with with a little bit about my own personal stress challenge. We may or may not have have had a health challenge or stress

 

Andrew Cross  02:41

challenge. Yeah, I

 

Damon Pistulka  02:43

know mine started much younger than I was I was able to build and manage a manufacturing facility when I was 29. So I was fairly young. And this was a 24 seven facility that was producing stuff. for automotive companies we are supplying offshore mech in Mexico plants with with components. And I was 32 years old. I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought that someone was jumping on my chest. This was after about I don’t know how many weeks of this problem that problem I went into the emergency room. Luckily, I didn’t have a heart attack. But I did have to have some things taken care of they got my my body back, right and my mind back, right. It doesn’t matter how old you are. And especially with things that are COVID induced now and the other challenges that we have in life, we really need to think about this. I was lucky enough at that time that I made a switch because there’s there’s only so much you can do but when you do 100% of what you can do, and take care of yourself. You have to be able to simply say I I’ve given it everything I can and somehow come to terms with that if that’s your challenge. But I’m so happy to have Pete here. Pete, love to have you started down this journey and let’s see where it takes us.

 

Pete Alexander  04:16

Absolutely. Thank you so much for that opening Damon a great example of of the stress being something that’s just can be overwhelming. It’s a great intro there. I just want to make sure I got my slides here. So I’m going to share and only if you guys can see my screen.

 

Damon Pistulka  04:38

You can maximize this by hitting the hitting the arrows that’ll expand it on your screen to see it in fullscreen and

 

Pete Alexander  04:45

Okay, so you guys aren’t seeing it in full screen

 

Andrew Cross  04:48

mode. And lean users do that

 

Pete Alexander  04:51

the viewers can Okay. Thank you. Alright, so guys, thank you so much for this time. It’s going to be very interactive. Got a lot of fun. For you, but as Damon says, I wanted to take you through a journey first and to get kind of set the stage for the activities. And the first thing I want to tell you is stress almost killed me. You heard what happened to Damon. For me. It started basically in 2008. It was a perfect storm of stressful activities going on in my life all at the same time. And the emotional and just physical problems that that was causing it, you know, it was just overwhelming. And what happened was, is that it culminated in my diagnosis was stress induced diabetes. However, I didn’t listen to my body about what stress was doing to it. Instead, I went ahead and burned the candle at both ends, like we all do for 10 more years, until I ended up in the emergency room and later into the ICU with a severe case of diabetic ketoacidosis. And for those of you Who don’t know what that is. My body was eating itself alive because of my stress. And I was one hour from being comatose. And my story is not unique. Let me tell you, my friend Ken, Ken and I met in high school, we were best friends there, we served as each other’s best man at our weddings. And we supported each other as proud fathers. He to 30 years later ends up in the emergency room. But in his case, it was with intestinal cancer. And the doctors had to remove over two thirds of his intestines and then he had to undergo chemotherapy. And in between his chemotherapy regimens where it would be three weeks on and one week off, we would either get together in person, or we talk on the phone, and every time he would tell me he was absolutely convinced that stress caused his cancer. So during the next several minutes, what I’m going to do is I’m going to talk about why we should care about stress. We’ll talk about how we manifest stress. I’ll introduce you to the lightened model for long term stress relief. And then we’re going to get into a lot of fun activities. And then I’ll just wrap up before taking any final questions. Right? Oh, why should we care about stress? Obviously, that the example that Damon gave, the examples I gave of my friend Ken and I, they indicate individual consequences of not dealing with your stress. But on a more global standpoint, the World Health Organization, call stress the number one health epidemic of the 21st century. Now I know COVID is getting all the attention right now. But think about it. What is COVID causing you worried about your health, you worried about going to the grocery store, you’re worried about your business, the effects of COVID on your business, maybe you’re worried about your job. Maybe you’re worried about your kids going to school in the fall with, you know, without, you know, any kind of restrictions or so all these things cause us stress. So guess what? who still says stress is the number one health epidemic of the 21st century because at some point we’re going to get through COVID. But guess what’s still going to be around? And how, how do we manifest stress? we manifest stress both mentally and physically. Mentally, it’s through as simple as lack of concentration. If you’ve ever felt like I’m having trouble thinking, or maybe you’re getting mood swings that you’ve never had before, where you go from happy to angry or sad at a moment’s notice, or you’re getting panic attacks that you never had before or you’re really anxious about something in the future. Or you’ve got prescription drug and or alcohol addiction. Any of these are indicated That you’re mentally stressed. and physically. It could be frequent colds. Instead of like one cold a winner, maybe you’re getting one cold a month or your stomach is just not right and no amount of Pepto bismol or any other medications will take care of it. Maybe you’re reaching for the excedrin bottle every day or every other day instead of occasionally, back and shoulder stiffness. This is one of the very first signs physically that you’re stressed because especially when we’re sitting at our desks guess what we do when we’re stressed we hunched over and that puts a lot of stress on our back and shoulders and weight fluctuations either gaining weight or losing weight. In fact, before I was diagnosed with stress induced diabetes, I lost 30 pounds in 30 days and At first, I thought it was fantastic. I mean, I was in my mid 40s I was eating junk food and not you know not doing any special Exercise was doing my regular activities and the pounds were coming off. And then when the 30th pound hit so quickly, I thought, Hmm, maybe I should check this out. And sure enough stress induced diabetes. Where does stress manifest itself from? So it probably doesn’t surprise you that most of our stress is mental. But what might surprise you is most of our stress is self induced. We do it to ourselves, somebody else doesn’t do it to us, we do it to ourselves. And during my research for my book, I found that there were seven areas that we create stress for ourselves. And those seven areas are your livelihood or your career, your imagination, our conscious mind, your genius, but I like to call your unconscious mind, your physical health, the time you have available, your environment and your network of relationships. So I just want to briefly touch on each one of these and then we’re going to get into To the activities. So, your livelihood, your career, all of us are likely to spend more time at work than doing just about anything else. And those of us with workaholic tendencies will work more hours than we sleep. So given the enormity of time that we’re spending on our careers, it is absolutely imperative that we have at least one or two things that we can do to give us some balance. our imagination, or our conscious mind is only 5% of our brain. But guess what, it’s where your inner critic lies. It’s where your control freak lies. And it’s also where your creativity is. And it’s absolutely imperative that we have some creativity when coming up with ideas for overcoming our stressful situations. Our genius is what I like to call our unconscious mind it’s the other 95% of our brain. It runs our bodies 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And if you don’t think that your unconscious has a role in your life, give you an example. Think about a time that you got behind the wheel of your car. And you drove from point A to point B, and had absolutely no recollection of that drive. That was your unconscious mind because that’s your autopilot. Your unconscious is where your memories are stored, your habits are formed, your perception of the world lies and it’s where real change happens. Your physical health is the inspiration for why I do what I do today. Without your health, nothing else matters. And if you don’t believe me, think about the last time you were really sick. Did you feel like doing anything else other than lying in bed? Probably not. I know I didn’t. So make sure that you make Your health. Time is another precious asset. With time, though, once it’s gone, you can’t get it back. And that means it is so important to take action today. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next month, don’t procrastinate. Take action today, even if it’s for just one or two minutes a day. Because if you do even a single practice regularly on a daily basis, the compound benefits over time will be enormous. But you got to start today. And your environment is highly important to your stress relief efforts. So, whether it’s at work at home at school, you do have to have a place that you can concentrate. Let’s say if you’re working on a project, maybe you need some silence you need a comfortable place to sit, no interruptions and understanding from The people around you. I think about when I was working on my PhD in the early 2000s, I was working 70 hours a week at my job. And I could do my research on the weekend from my home office. My kids were really small at that time. And they would just come into my home office and want to play with daddy. And I would oblige them almost every time. And I don’t regret that one bit because it was some of the happiest times of my life. But I can tell you that when I got back to my home office, after playing with the kids, I was overly stressed thinking about how am I going to catch up on all this research. So make sure that your environment is conducive to your stress relief efforts. And finally, your network of relationships. The people in your life matter. When you’re stressed, you’re less patient, you’re more irritable, you’re less able to listen and show interest in empathy to those others around you. Don’t Take your relationships for granted, make sure that they’re in alignment with the other aspects of the light model. So that is my introduction on stress. And now we’re going to get into what I wanted to do all along and the fun stuff here. But what I’m going to ask you guys, oh, sorry.

 

Damon Pistulka  15:20

No, that’s great. That’s great. It’s good stuff. It’s good stuff. Our chats are all along nicely here. And you know, some of the, some of the stuff that it brings up is is really as you said, is the stress it causes irritability, it causes getting, you know, can’t sleep, I think in my life and how many times I use that Prop, where are you living on acids, or you wake up in the middle of night for the wrong reasons, you know, and and that’s, it just really can and you don’t understand it until you’re sitting there going in your 2530 pounds heavier. You don’t feel worth a damn and yet you’re still in that cycle of I can’t stop working. You know, because got to do it just got off.

 

Pete Alexander  16:02

Oh, yeah. And for me, I got I got hooked on NyQuil because that couldn’t get to sleep. Yeah. So I was just slamming that or you know, and Eunice on Sleep, sleep aids, things like that. And it’s just ridiculous. Because you know, my mind was just going wild. So it’s good. I’m glad that people can resonate with this. So before we get started with the fun interactive activities, I’m going to ask you guys to turn off your phones, turn off your email turn off if you have Slack, or any other thing that might, you know, LinkedIn messenger that might ping you just for a few minutes, because if you don’t turn off those, those notifications, you’re going to get distracted and you won’t get the benefit out of these activities. So just wanted to let you know that and our first activity together, get us started. What I’d like you to do is click Close your eyes and take a deep breath. And what I’d like you to do is go to a place in your mind that you like to relax. Maybe it’s your happy place. It could be the beach, it could be a park. It could be a lake. It could be your backyard. It could be a spa. Wherever it is. Go there now in your mind and start taking in all of your senses. What do you feel? Do you feel the sun on your face? Do you feel the grass or the sand under your feet? smell the smell the fresh air. Do you smell the a the lotion from the spa? What do you hear? Do you hear the wind blowing through the trees? Do you hear the water splashing on shore? What do you see? Do you see the blue sky? Maybe the green of the trees or the grass. Whatever it is. Take it all in and Take another deep breath and open your eyes as simple visualization exercise to calm you in one to two minutes.

 

Damon Pistulka  18:51

Very cool.

 

Pete Alexander  18:56

Any comments on that one Damon before we get to the next one

 

Damon Pistulka  19:00

No, no, it’s nice. All right, yep.

 

Pete Alexander  19:04

Good. And now you guys can see why not having getting pinged by any other, you know, messages and stuff. It’s so important when you’re practicing this. So our next activity is a quick last activity. And what this one if you’ve never

 

Damon Pistulka  19:26

Oh, sorry, people to stage two for this, so sorry, I didn’t mean

 

Pete Alexander  19:30

No, no worries, no worries. What I what I’d like to do is just kind of tell you about laughter yoga. It is being hit has been clinically proven to reduce stress and improve your health. And it’s a very simple activity. And I’m going to take you through one once. Once we have people on stage because it’s easier to do this when you can see others doing it.

 

Damon Pistulka  19:57

So Aaron, and Who else did I put on? I put Aaron and Kurt and Dr. Elia. If you can turn on your cam and Mike, I believe you will show up on stage now.

 

Andrew Cross  20:10

We were limited to six, so I’m going to

 

Damon Pistulka  20:12

limit it to six room. You know, I think we can do nine dude. I didn’t I didn’t mean to put you guys on the spot. I’m gonna actually add a couple more. I’m gonna put a line on the stage too. And who else do I have here that I’m actually gonna put con on the stage too. Yeah,

 

Pete Alexander  20:31

that’s awesome. Good

 

Dr. Elia  20:32

to see you professor.

 

Damon Pistulka  20:34

Hello. All right, you guys that I put on a lawn and con if you can turn on your mic and camera. Or, or not. If you can’t, you’re not in a place to do it. But we’re going to have some fun here. Oh, absolutely.

 

Pete Alexander  20:48

So you tell me when to go.

 

Damon Pistulka  20:52

Alright, we’ll give them another a couple seconds. They might not be where they want to go. And, you know,

 

Dr. Elia  20:58

Professor Pete, one of the things I want Tell us, you know, besides the pandemic, as you know, we have this mental health crisis in the United States where depression, anxiety and all kinds of stress related symptoms is up an astounding 800%. As of the end of May, we don’t have the jus statistics yet, but it’s even higher. You know, the longer this goes, the greater the stress level. So this epidemic will definitely outlast the pandemic.

 

Pete Alexander  21:21

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It’s just the media is covering COVID. So, so much, and we forget that it’s, it’s the stress that it’s causing. That’s really the problem. Yeah,

 

Damon Pistulka  21:31

yeah. Well, I they didn’t want to turn the camera. So I put a couple more people up, but we’re gonna get started. They can turn on their camera and mic. I brought Andrew and who else was it I brought up. But let’s get let’s get rolling.

 

Pete Alexander  21:48

Okay, so here’s how we do the activity and those of you that are not on stage, just follow along because we’ve got people on stage because it’d be easier watching them do it too. So what I’d like you to do is imagine that you just received a bill that you were not expecting. And rather than getting pissed off about that bill, what I’d like you to do is pretend to hold it in your hand, either hand. And then what I’d like you to do with your other hand is point out it like so. And then for the next 15 to 20 seconds, I want you to force laugh at that bill like this. And notice how good that’s Feels, here is the crazy thing. Your body doesn’t know the difference between a real and a forced laugh. It only knows that you are laughing. And what it does is it secretes the positive endorphins to give you the benefit you need. So think about that. The next time that you get that unwanted text, that unwanted email that unwanted voicemail or you know that unwanted snail mail, consider laughing at it first, before taking action because chances are if you do that, you will be better mentally and physically to deal with that message. There we go. That’s cool.

 

Dr. Elia  23:48

That’s a cool thing to do. Right? I mean, it’s so simple and it has an immediate impact on you physiologically mentally and emotionally.

 

Pete Alexander  23:55

Absolutely. And believe it or not, I’m I’m a laughter yoga certified and struktur and we do this for an hour or at least, you know, I don’t do it online much anymore, but in person, we just laugh for activities for an hour and you pretty much you are physically exhausted, but in a good way at the end of the hour.

 

Damon Pistulka  24:16

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’ll get people back down and do that. Well, thanks a lot, everyone for doing the laughter on the stage. That was awesome. That was really good.

 

Pete Alexander  24:26

Let me know. Go to the

 

Damon Pistulka  24:28

next one. Dammit. You’re you’re ready to go. I’m gonna

 

Ira Bowman  24:32

be my one unshare your screen while we’re doing these exercises,

 

24:37

I think Oh, well.

 

Pete Alexander  24:38

You know what, because on the rest of the IRA, that’s the only one where we’re bringing people on stage. Okay.

 

Damon Pistulka  24:46

Cool, cool, doctor.

 

Pete Alexander  24:50

All right. All right. So the next one. Does anyone know what the acronym fear is? Fa R stands for FA are anyone put it into chat Damon?

 

Damon Pistulka  25:07

Yeah, let’s see if they got it in there. There’s a lot of chat rolling man it’s hit 11 just in this this someone says the watch it us laugh made it easier to laugh myself.

 

Pete Alexander  25:23

That’s why we brought you on stage.

 

Damon Pistulka  25:27

That’s funny. It’s good once I start I can’t stop that’s the worst part about that. Wow, not worse, but

 

Pete Alexander  25:33

that’s a good thing.

 

Damon Pistulka  25:35

Free everything Mark Lauren’s free everything about real reality.

 

Pete Alexander  25:41

That’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. It’s actually not not a bad one. Um, what I use is fictional evidence appearing real fictional evidence appearing real. And if you remember that most of our stress is self induced. Well That self induced stress is usually fear based. And so especially when it comes to when we’re afraid of trying something new, or maybe going for that next position, or maybe you’re thinking about in your business, going a different direction, and you’re fearful of it because you don’t know what’s going to happen. What I suggest is you ask yourself the following question. What would you do? If you knew you couldn’t fail? What would you do? If you knew you couldn’t fail? I like that. Yeah. about thinking. So how does that Damon how does that? You know that question, what does that make you think?

 

Damon Pistulka  26:53

Just boldly go forward.

 

Pete Alexander  26:55

Exactly. It opens up the world of possibilities because when we’re fearful stuck. If you ask yourself that question, all of a sudden it’s like, okay, now I can start being creative and think about what I really want to do. And it works. You know, if you’re any of you that are parents, it works for your kids. I’ve tried it on my kids, and it works magically with them. It’s worked with my elderly mom. It’s worked with all my clients. It’s just it’s, it’s a really powerful question. And if you think about it, when you’re going towards something new in your life, that you’ve never gone before, that’s uncharted waters, and inevitably, you’re going to run into a speed bump, you’re going to hit a wall, something’s going to happen because it’s all Uncharted. But instead of thinking, Oh, God, I failed at this. Think about it as feedback on your way to success. You’re just figuring out you’re navigating. That’s all you’re doing. You’re getting feedback to move in a different direction. So Just remember that question, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? All right. The next one is a little bit on the writing standpoint. And it’s an incredibly powerful tool. It has to do with your personal values. And your personal values are what’s important to you, how you spend your time, and how you evaluate the use of your time. And so in this activity, we’re going to professionally elicit your personal values as it relates to your career. So if you can have a pen and paper handy, or if you want to just type it on your phone, or on your computer, that’s perfectly fine. Just make sure that you have a way that you can scribe some words. And I’ll give it maybe 30 seconds if people have to grab a piece of paper. So that and then we’ll start activity. Okay. Now what I’d like you to do before you’re going to write or type is I want you to close your eyes. And I’m going to ask you to think about three scenarios. The first scenario as it relates to your career. I want you to think about a time in your life when you were most happy, most happy. Who were you with? What were you doing? What was the occasion? The second one, as it relates to your career is think about a time in your life. When you were most proud Who are you with? What were you doing? What was the event? And finally, the last one, think about a time in your life as it relates to your career. When you were most fulfilled, most fulfilled su l f fi LL. Ed. Who were you with? What were you doing? What was the event? And now that you have those three, go ahead and open up your eyes and on a piece of paper or typing it out. What I’d like you to do is write or type as many one and two word answers to the following question. What’s important to you about your career? What’s important to you about your career as many one and two word answers as you can come up with What else is important to you about your career and what else is important to you about your career Once you have at least five, what I’d like you to do is rank them by just putting a number next to each one ranking most important, to least important. So obviously your most important is number one. Your least important is whatever number is the last number on your list. Go ahead and rank them. And if you have trouble ranking one value versus another, you could ask yourself if you could have value a, but you couldn’t have value be, would that be okay to you? And now what I’d like you to do is take your top five values and write rewrite them as a separate list in sequential order as value one, value to value three, value four and value five Okay, and now that you have this list, what I want you to do is make sure to keep that list handy, either in your wallet, in your purse, take a picture of it with your phone, whatever you need to do to make sure you can get to it for the next time, but you have a major decision as it relates to your career. Because if you make that decision and it’s not in alignment with your top five values I absolutely guarantee you are going to add on necessary stress to your life

 

Damon Pistulka  36:09

that’s a that’s a great that’s a great thing and when you put put it in perspective like that, it really and I bet anything on the more comprehensive list to it also adds stress as well. But these five are key, these five are key because it’s all about what is most important to you. After 5678, etc, become nets. It’s the top five

 

Pete Alexander  36:32

that are the important ones. Yeah, very good. So keep that list handy guys. It is, you know, whether it’s you know, making a big decision for your business, taking a new job. Make sure you take a look and make sure that it’s not going against any of your top five because guaranteed you will get stressed if not.

 

Damon Pistulka  36:54

Yeah, yeah, real good. Well, I think that what we can Do now. So you got Andrew here. I’m gonna I’m gonna, I think, are we do we have some more

 

Pete Alexander  37:06

free quick ones?

 

Damon Pistulka  37:08

All right. So I’m going to bring up Alon Zaibert we’re going to let the let him kind of give us weigh in on where he’s at with this and then maybe a couple other ones and we want to do a little bit of that and then we’ll roll back into this. Okay, so yeah, I think if anyone else wants to come up and just for a couple seconds, go ahead and give your input so far it’d be awesome.

 

Alon Zaibert  37:34

Hi, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. First of all, thank you, Professor Pete. I think it’s a great tool. For me. It’s It was a great reminder. You know, I assumed people I’ve started doing it late in my career, but you know, kind of reflecting right? Going through my why And what I want to do my career and so this is a good reminder and a good cheat sheet. Like you said, little Northstar, write a good reminders Northstar. So I think it’s great. The one thing I would say is, you know, I’m literally going to put myself a reminder or monthly reminder to actually go open it up once a month, regardless to if I open it up before or after, and go and see. Maybe I need to update it. Maybe not relevant anymore. So yeah, I really appreciate it very much.

 

Pete Alexander  38:38

And, yeah, yeah, it’s a good point along because things happen in our lives. Most of the time, you won’t have a complete clean slate of five. But what will happen is if something significant happens in your life from month to month, most likely one of those values would potentially change and be replaced with something else. Yeah,

 

Andrew Cross  39:02

I think you kind of have to revisit them and challenge you. Because maybe they not they’re not what you think they were.

 

Pete Alexander  39:12

Exactly.

 

Damon Pistulka  39:13

Are we? We’ve got Brad Smith up here as well. He raised his hand so great to senior this morning Brad, what do you what do you have for us what nugget of wisdom?

 

Brad Smith  39:22

I got shoved into this the hard way at 18 when I got an ulcerate colon doctor said to me, you know, it’s like, oh, yeah, stress, right. The doctor said to me, You have a psychosomatic disease. Your emotions affect the severity of your symptoms, right? Yep. So what I learned from that was, if I don’t have a daily practice, not weekly, daily, where I look at, you know, right here, on my wall, there’s, there’s my values, right? And the one that’s the most important, other is meaning. Worth, meaning I’m creating and what’s my integrity with myself, because it shows up in every part of my life. So think of it this way. Think of yourself as a projector, and everything that you have in your life or happy, all the all the negative, all the stress, that’s all coming up out of your subconscious. And what we’re here to learn is to learn to manage consciously what’s in our subconscious, and what we projected out into our life. So if you have money issues, if you have relationship issues, if you have health issues, any of those if you have political issues, right. All of those are in your subconscious and you’re agreeing to have them there in your life until you wake up and realize that you’re the Creator, you’re the projector screen, and have a daily practice. write it all down. These are the things I hate about my life and go back in your history and say When did I choose? Worked out there? And how am I going to get rid of it? Yep,

 

Pete Alexander  41:03

yep. And it’s a good point too, that you, you know, this activity, which at the end, I’ll give you links to where if you didn’t write down how to do this, I’ll have a place where you can go to just practices. This goes for any aspect of your life. So as Brad said, your health, your relationships, etc. It’s the same process and the only, you know, for me, my physical health, physical and mental health is my number one value and that goes across all of my my areas of life. But everything else varies. And so

 

Alon Zaibert  41:44

one thing that, Professor Pete, can we just call your Pete? Sure,

 

Pete Alexander  41:48

yeah. I just Professor p because Pete Alexander is just so so common name a lot of Professor I’ll

 

41:55

just go one thing that professor said, and I’ve gone through a seminar a few years ago. by a guy who invented a game, like, kind of Monopoly style game that actually takes your mind through entrepreneurial, you know, way of thinking, etc. And he said it as well, Professor, and I want to reiterate it for everybody because this was a game changer for me. physiologically, our minds cannot tell the difference if it’s a game or if it’s made up. So the exercise we did with laughing, right, I studied facial kinesics in school many, many years ago, there’s a guy who did a experiment he took a pencil and held it like this for like an hour or so he realized he wanted to see how the physical elements of the face the same nerves that we use when we smile, right he wanted to see the impact of the physical on the mental and vice versa. Right and then he held the the pen like this Which are the same physical as when we’re upset, right? But it’s proven physiologically scientifically, that it works. And it’s the same thing here. So this goes to what Brad was saying, if you practice, if you practice, it’s hard, don’t get me wrong, it’s hard. Maybe leafing through practice

 

Alon Zaibert  43:21

is an impact.

 

Pete Alexander  43:22

So it’s really very rewarding. It absolutely

 

Damon Pistulka  43:25

was. You know, one thing personally for me is when when I started, I used to think, you know, the gratitude. I honestly, thought was bullshit. I’m just gonna say it right there. You know, but when you when you reflect it, and you go, and, and you many of you guys see me, you know, early, early in the morning, when I started getting up in the morning, and when I when I realized I was breathing. That’s a very first thing that you’re thankful for. I’m breathing today, I have the opportunity to do the best I can today to do whatever I can awesome today just that little thing from the beginning of my day is incredible. How much that helps my stress it helps everything so I think we haven’t talked about gratitude all but man, I tell you that we all have so much in my my personality is I can focus on the negative, like son of a gun, you know, I will. But the gratitude part of it. You know, when you look at your family, your kids, we’ve got foodie, you know, this kind of stuff, the rest of it kind of melts away, and it really helps me personally reduce stress. I think gratitude.

 

Pete Alexander  44:37

Well, David, David, actually one of the three left that we’ve got is very similar. So if we, if we can get those last three in. There’s, it’s not called gratitude, but you know, you’ll know it’s gratitude we do.

 

Dr. Elia  44:49

I read

 

Ira Bowman  44:50

that it’s funny because so I think y’all know I have eight kids, right? So one of the books that we read the kids that are smaller typing like you know, 567 that that a range. It’s called Count your blessings. It’s a bear thieves book. And, you know, they’re grumpy. They’re having a couple things they want the dog being spoiled or whatever. And the mom’s advice to them is, hey, go around and count the things that you can be thankful for. And by the end of the book, their attitude changed, know, their circumstances didn’t change, just their attitude. And all of a sudden, they were thankful for all the things now, I have been using that stupid child lesson for the past 20 years. And I will tell you that I’m so much happier with I mean, I drive a car that’s from 2013. You know, I mean, my house is from 2004. I shop at Walmart, not, you know, at the expensive places, but I’m happy and I’m happy not because of the things I have, because I take the time to appreciate what I have. If I focus on what you don’t have, then you’re going to be miserable. I don’t care what it is, there can always be better. There can always be something more. It’s I’m not saying you shouldn’t have goals, I chase goals all the time, but be content with the things that we have like Damon said I’ve never woken up and been thankful that I’m breathing. But now you say it seems so obvious like I should. Because

 

Alon Zaibert  46:07

I can I can I very professor, very quick story.

 

Pete Alexander  46:10

Um, well, I tell you I’ve got I’d like to get the last couple in logo. Yeah, because I know. We’re tight on time. So, Damon, is it? Okay, I’ll go ahead. Yeah. Okay. Since we’re talking about the gratitude, I like to call it remember the lottery. And here’s a way to, you know, when we when we think about, we’ve had those days where we wake up, and we think, ah, it’s another day and you don’t want to get out of bed. The reality is that there’s approximately 7 billion people on earth alive today. And there’s been approximately 100 and 15 billion people who’ve ever lived on earth in the history of the world. That means 100 and 8 billion, or approximately 14 out of 15. People who have ever lived on earth are dead. As Damon said that you wake up breathing guess what the fact that we’re here together means we’ve already won the lottery. Yeah, this also goes for finances. The average world income world, not us. Average world income is $5,000 per year. If you make $5,001 per year, you are in the top 50% of the world’s income earners. And if you’re lucky enough to make over $50,000 per year, you’re in the top point 5% of the world’s income earners. You already have more than almost everybody else on the planet. You’ve already won the lottery and if he’s Still are stuck. Ask yourself this question and truly answer it. Honestly. Is there anyone else in the world having it worse than me right now? And take that to heart because you’ve already won the lottery have gratitude. Yeah.

 

Damon Pistulka  48:29

Hundred percent. We see it around us all the time. Now, you know,

 

48:35

people in Project help you grow that that can’t, they can’t understand that they’re like, I’m not blessed. I’m like, What do you mean? Because you don’t have a job? Like, let’s think about the statistics that you just said, because I talk to people all the time. Their average income is $1. Day $3 a day because they’re in third world countries like you’re not thousand dollars a day for me odd or wherever. It’s like, come on, man.

 

Pete Alexander  48:57

Exactly. That’s it’s a powerful Question. It is a powerful question to ask yourself.

 

Damon Pistulka  49:04

Brad, you said something in the chat. That’s really cool. He said the analytical mind is subtraction engine aligned with negative emotions. The End, intuitive, intuitive mind is a synthesis engine aligned with positive emotion. Hmm, yeah. Thankful and positive gives us a great reminder, the rest

 

Ira Bowman  49:22

is pretty smart.

 

Pete Alexander  49:24

Yeah, and it is if you stay positive, you send out positive energy. If you stay negative, you send out negative energy and energy tracks energy. So if you are sending out positive, you’re gonna get back positive. If you send out negative you’re going to get back negative. So it’s the attraction thing. All right, let me do the last one, and then I’ll wrap up for you guys since we’ve read 852. So this last one is a simple meditation that you can do if you are stressed out because you’re afraid To go into, let’s say, a difficult conversation, maybe you’re worried about a presentation you have to give. And it’s called Hawk allow, and it comes from the Hawaiian culture. And the way you do it is this, you pick a spot on the wall, preferably above eye level, not on the screen, but above eye level. That’s a stationary spot, and you start focusing on that spot. And as you stare at that spot, let your mind go loose, and focus all of your attention on that spot. Notice that within a matter of moments, your vision begins to spread out. And you see more in the peripheral than you do in the central part of your vision. Now pay attention to that peripheral and instead Pay more attention to the peripheral than the central part of your vision. And you just stay in this state for as long as you feel comfortable. Notice how it feels. Close your eyes to the workshop here and notice that you’re probably more calm and more aware of your surroundings. And if you do this before a stressful situation, you will be much more calm mentally and physically to take on that situation. Very cool

 

51:59

AP donut Good question, right? Sure. When I’m staring at that, there’s a little mark on my wall, which it’s driving me nuts. But that’s what I was trying to stare at what he said, let go of your thought, you know what I mean? Like, I have trouble not focusing, like, Oh, you

 

Pete Alexander  52:15

just you’re doing the best that you can IRA because it’s uh, you know, I have the same thing. You just focus on it and just look at it. If you’ve got your mind is going to have its thoughts. So just focus on it and just let whatever happens for you. Because did let me ask you this. Did you feel a little bit better after doing it?

 

52:33

So honestly, I stopped halfway through because I was trying to monitor the chat,

 

Pete Alexander  52:37

but Oh, okay. Yeah. So you were distracted

 

Ira Bowman  52:39

record? I will. I will do this later.

 

Pete Alexander  52:41

Yeah. And like I said at the end here, I’ve just got a couple more slides. I’ll be giving you guys links to all of these things. So

 

Damon Pistulka  52:50

what does that exercise called? Again, it’s called

 

Pete Alexander  52:52

Hawk allow h AK, a LA au and I’ll give you a link to it. You guys can learn more can do it on your own. Yeah. Okay, cool. So let me let me wrap up the two stories I started with at the beginning. So if you recall, my friend can who ended up in the emergency room with intestinal cancer, and he had to have two thirds of his intestines removed and then he had to undergo chemotherapy. And as I mentioned, he told me almost every time we talked that he was absolutely convinced that stress causes cancer. Two weeks before his 49th birthday, and not very long after this picture was taken, Ken passed away because of his disease. Stress got the best of them. As for me, when I was lying in the hospital bed, I had an epiphany moment I thought to myself, I better change, or else. I’m not going to be around much longer. And so what I started doing was several different stress relief techniques, including all the ones that we’ve done today. And I noticed that not only did my stress start going down, my glucose numbers as a diabetic started going down, my weight went down, my energy went way, way up. It was literally like I had discovered the fountain of youth. And my former co workers, my friends, everybody said, you got to get the message out about this. And so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m educating other professionals like yourselves on how to tackle stress head on, because I believe you can reach your full potential if you can get a handle on your stress. And that’s, that’s Yeah.

 

Damon Pistulka  54:58

Yeah, well Pete, thanks so much. I mean, learn, learned a lot in this and yeah, you know, stress will kill us it is well, your friends is a great example of it. We’ve all got examples of it in our own lives. And there’s a lot of stuff we talked about today and, and even more stuff I think we should talk about in future. future events like this, because, you know, one of the things we do have to worry about and we should be concerned about and take time for is in a group setting like this talk about real talk about because you know, we are all out grind and trying to do this, trying to do that. And we have to take this time as people say, self care, whatever you want to call it, to do take the opportunity to really think about how your mind is doing. And actually, as someone said on here as COVID is, has been really causing us up ever. Oh, yeah, in the butt. So. So great stuff. Thank you for coming. We’ll we’ll We have this be open for a while and I’m gonna let Andrew take it away here because I’m kind of fumbling with my word. But it was awesome. That’s all I’m gonna say.

 

Andrew Cross  56:10

Vegas Ray. Thank you, Pete. Thanks, Professor Pete. Now, this was tremendous. And I think, you know, you know, we’re all in business too. And we’re right in the epicenter of where stress happens. And this is really enlightening, I think. Not, you know, not only for that on a personal level, but you know, for it’s really, it’s a matter of perspective. It is really great to see your experience and thanks for sharing. Hey, so we’ll still be going on after back on the table. if folks want to stick around and chat, that’d be great. And next week, we’ll

 

Damon Pistulka  56:55

we have content generation, we got a couple people that are writing. We got some of that writes for? Well, it’s one of the financial writers for pitch book, they they do have an email list that goes out to over 100,000 150,000 people or something like that a day. And they have to write articles every single business day, we’re going to go through the process of creating content. And then we’ve got another person that’s, that is actually a marketing manager for that kind of company. And she’s going to show us you know, what it really takes to you know, lead a team that’s going to generate that kind of content consistently, it’s going to be pretty interesting, kind of sit back and look of what it takes to do this kind of stuff. And on a on a big, big scale like that. But they if you haven’t seen pitchbook before, they’re a data analytics company and they collect all kinds of data on the banking and business and, and their data resource and maybe a wonderful, wonderful daily.

 

Andrew Cross  57:53

Show the art, the art of contact, content and how to get through the noise. Hey, it’s 10 o’clock. Mountain Time. Anyways, top of the hour. So great. Um, thanks, guys. Well, you’re on the table

 

Damon Pistulka  58:16

we’ll be back down. Thank you.