Old Brain…New Tricks

Due to the ongoing attempt to move all my technology into the cloud and integrate it fully with my various social media activities, I have been quite stressed over the last couple of weeks. This is happening at the same time as work proceeds on getting my soon to be video channel read to launch. More stress. Much of what the various people working on these activities are doing is well beyond my area of competence…or even understanding. Yet more stress. For reasons beyond me, I agreed to get all this moving a few weeks before I will spend a week in Tokyo for the United Nations – hopefully with email and access to various documents and such working so I can keep all my activities going and my clients happy. Need I say, immense stress?

All this stress has me thinking about old brains learning new tricks and the impact it is having on me.

I have the great good fortune to have an exceptional person helping me drive all this forward: Laura Walton, Founder of Talk Show Connections. She combines exceptional technical knowledge and ability with amazing expertise in ensuring executives with no video experience star in great videos for marketing and other purposes. And she figured out that treating me like a three year old in the process is exactly right.

In spite of Laura’s support and the extensive time she and the others have put into my project, with so many moving parts – as you certainly expect – it is taking awhile to get everything updated and integrated while various video and channel creation activities are going on and I am continuing to think, create, and re-design in the midst of it all so am causing changes and delays. Thus my stress.

I’ve realized that the stress comes from several different places. One is what I think of as the normal business stress created by working to get a complex system performing perfectly. I’ve been dealing with this as I normally do so it doesn’t worry me much. Another stress comes from participating in a business activity where I know little about how it works and have to totally depend on the experts. Again, this is what most of my consulting with senior executives entails so I have learned to ignore the stress created by not knowing and trust those who know for the technical details.

Then there’s that other stress, the one that comes from realizing that I have to learn a collection of new skills that fall far outside the kind of things that lie in my comfort zone. I am not very technological both by background and by inclination. Now I find myself being coached and educated about all kinds of nitty gritty details about my systems and social media that often make no sense to me. Me, Mr Big Picture now turned into Mr Tiny Detail.

It is stressful.

As part of my personal therapy to overcome my stress, I decided to write about this instead of the usual leadership or management issues you usually see here. Thank you for helping with this. Perhaps you’ll read a few words helpful to you in decreasing your stress.

The mere activity of thinking it through and turning it into a reasoned (hopefully) overview of what is going on has the amazing ability to defuse the stress significantly. Not totally, as knowing leads to lessening but not erasure.

Lessening leads to the ability to more calmly consider the situation and focus on the end result and how absolutely wonderful it is going to be instead of focusing on the aggravation of the journey. The mind needs to retreat from the focus on the difficulty and the fear of the unknown that the stress feeds on so it can rationally consider the situation and evaluate the value…which is immense in this case.

Once able to think more clearly and understand the underpinnings of the stress and irrationality of giving in to it, the physical discomfort it causes jumps out. The mind and the body feed each other. It’s either a destructive loop or a virtuous loop. The choice is yours.

So mind moved towards calmness and body tenseness identified, I took a very, very long walk through the woods, up and down the hills, around the countryside of Birchrunville. A clarity break. The mind soars, the body relaxes, the stress dissapates.

I return energized and enthusiastic about what is to come. It’s hard to remember what created all the angst that led to this story.

Rejuvention is a wonderful thing. A better future awaits.