Welcome to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast! 

 

Episode seven, zero, only another 30 to do before we hit the ton. Only another that’s all, just what? 30 more. So within 30 weeks from now, we’ll be celebrating our hundredth episode. I’m getting excited already. 

 

Now, if you haven’t seen, heard, listened to, engaged, watched this podcast before basically the Builders Business Success Podcast is the construction business podcast. It’s for builders. We’re a builder’s coach, we’re a builder’s coach in Australia, but we’ve also got people that listen to us all over the globe it seems. 

 

We’ve got members in Builders Business Blackbelt all over the country, and we’ve got other members in New Zealand, but we seem to have people watching us all over the globe now, which is a bit exciting. So if you haven’t seen me before, my name’s Mick Hawes, I’m your business or your construction business coach. 

 

And the purpose of this podcast is to address all of the common problems, challenges that builders experience running their building business. So we don’t talk anything about building because what would I know? But as far as running the building business side of things, there is a lot to be learned from this podcast. Where do we get our information? We have a group of builders and it’s called Builders Business Blackbelt. 

 

They’re all over the place in major cities, in regional areas. And we talk every day about the common issues and we throw around a whole lot of ideas and those ideas get implemented. We get feedback as to whether it works and guess what? Not everything works at least not immediately. 

 

So we’re constantly talking every day about how we can improve it and make it work in the building game. 

 

So what is on the agenda for this particular episode? We’re going to be talking about stress. And I thought it’d be particularly relevant right now, because if you’re watching us live where on the beginning of November, that’s, if you have ever read a calendar, that’s the month before December. And in December, this thing called Christmas happens. And for whatever reason, whenever we get close to Christmas, people lose their mind. 

 

And they seem to think that everything needs to be done finished, completed by Christmas for whatever reason. But anyway, it’s real. And in particular, in the building industry, it creates a lot of stress. Now I’m gonna use the word distress because I think that there is a difference between stress being positive and stress being negative. And so I’ve got two different words. And we’ll talk about that as we get into the show. 

 

Question of the Week, or the Q and A, the question we’re gonna address in the Q and A is eliminating interruption. So we had a question, we had lots of questions, but this particular question is all about how to eliminate interruptions. You all get ’em. And sometimes interruptions cause stress. So this might all tie in beautifully together. Anyway, we’ll see. 

 

And of course we’ve got idea of the week simply so he can get a shot of our floating light bulb. No use having a floating light bulb, if you don’t get a shot of it. So we’ve got an idea of the week segment.

Stress, and as I mentioned, I tend to think of it two different ways. And I use the word distress in place of stress, because in my mind, I actually think that stress is good. Stress is like a challenge. Stress is like pressure. It’s like what you need to do to your muscles, when you go to the gym, you need to put stress on them. 

 

So they grow. So they improve. So they get stronger. And I think we need to put out selves in positions where we feel stress. But again, in my mind, stress is the good stuff. Distress is the bad stuff. And I think the only difference between the two is that distress, you have a sense that you’re out of control. Stress you are in control. It’s challenging you, it’s growing you. It’s changing you. 

 

Distress is putting pressure on you, but also it has a sense of being out of control. There’s nothing you can do with it. The circumstances have their way with you. So if you can keep that in mind as we go through here, you know, distress bad, stress good. It might change your thinking about it as well. But let’s talk about why we need stress or why do we need a better approach to stress? Is really the question. 

 

If you’re experiencing distress, it tends to drain your energy. Like if you have had a distressful day, some people called it a stressful day, I’m calling it a distressful day. At the end of it, you feel really, really drained, but you also don’t feel a sense of accomplishment. Whereas if your day was stressed, the way I seem to think about it, it’s challenging. 

 

You’ve learned something you’ve grown in some way, you’ve accomplished something. And you can feel a sense of fulfillment at the end of the day. And there’s a big difference between being pleasantly exhausted, because you’ve really challenged yourself, but you’ve accomplished something and you’ve got a sense of fulfillment versus you’ve just been dealing with all of these things and feeling like you’ve been out of control and you’re exhausted at the end of the day. And you just don’t want to know about anything. 

 

And you’re terrified about the next day in case that happens again. Matt is watching us live. He’s put in the #live. He listens well, he’s followed the direction, the instruction, and he’s done it, well done. I think also when we start to unpack what most people call stress, a lot of it is unnecessary. It’s emotionally painful, mentally painful. And I believe it’s for the most part, unnecessary. 

 

Stephen Covey, the author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, he has a saying in the book and when he’s talking about stress and so forth and he talks about paradigms. So the way that we see situations, I’ll come back to that in a tick, but he says the way we see the problem is the problem. If you can take that away from this podcast, remember that the way we see the problem is the problem. 

 

So what can we do about it? And I think understanding what stress really is, it can go a long way to being able to help it. And we’ve talked about this before, potentially, but if you didn’t, if you weren’t on that particular episode, I’m gonna repeat it. I believe that stress really is the tension between how we see or how we perceive things are and how we perceive things should be. Mike Church is with us, he’s the legendary plumber from Kettering. He’s also joined us with a #live. Morning, Mike. 

 

So that to me, that’s what stress is. 

 

It’s the tension in between how we think things should be and how we think things are. And I’m putting extra emphasis on think there because there’s so much wiggle room that can be changed that contributes to our emotion, our feeling of distress. Because if distress is simply the tension in between how we think things should be and how we think things are, we can change a lot of things. 

 

So how do we think it should be? So if we’re setting realistic or unrealistic expectations and have unrealistic beliefs that is creating unnecessary stress or distress. A classic one is at some level, people think that everything that they’ve got on their list today should be done today. And the trouble is that the method that people use to set up their prioritized daily action list, and most people don’t have a prioritized daily action list. So in fact, most people don’t even have a list. 

 

They just got in their head and in their mind, they think that all of that stuff needs to be done should be done. And you’re putting an unrealistic expectation on yourself. If you unpacked everything that you had on your list with things to do today written on top of it, you’d probably have 36 hours worth of stuff. And your expectation is that you’re going to get it done today. So your expectation, the way that you think things should be is fundamentally flawed. 

 

So it’s going to create tension because there’s no way you can get all that stuff done in a day. But if that subconscious belief remains there and you don’t address it consciously, and you don’t have a proper process to manage this, you will experience distress because there’s no way you can get all of that stuff done, but you think that you should. So there is that tension. 

 

So we can change our expectations. We can change our processes. And then there is also an interpretation. So there’s wiggle room with how we think things are. And if we are constantly focusing on things and only seeing the negative side of things. When we’re having conversation with a few Blackbelt members just over the last day or so about that it’s one of the way that us humans tend to operate is that we only tend to focus on what hasn’t been done, what we haven’t got, lack, scarcity, all of that sort of stuff. 

 

And we never look back and see where we’ve come from, see what we’ve accomplished, see what we’ve achieved, see how we’ve changed and give ourselves some kudos, some appreciation for what we have done to balance this out. We tend to just look at the negative side of things. 

 

So that skews, how we think things are. And so if we change our expectations of how we think things should be, and we change our view on how things are and all of that’s up for debate, and it’s all under your control as to how you determine how you decide to interpret things, you can at least at very least reduce the level or intensity of distress that you experienced. 

 

And if you keep going and you practice and rehearse and drill these ideas, you could potentially eliminate distress. And it is a skill. I had a funny, my church will laugh at this, probably. I was at our boat last weekend and we bought one of those horseshoe life rings. And we were looking as to where to put it, you know, and I was holding it up different places. And a chap friend of ours jumped on the boat. 

 

And I said, “What do you think? Should it go here? Or should it go there?” And I walked out to the end of the swim platform at the end of the boat and held it up. Should it go there? And he didn’t like where it was, but as I moved it away, the brand new stainless steel bracket that we only purchased moments prior, slipped off the horseshoe and into the drink. And he was a bit shocked. 

 

And I just sort of walked back into the boat and sat down and we started talking and he had to interrupt and say like, “Didn’t that piss you off?” And it hit the water. And I went, “Ugh” like that. But I guess, because I’ve practiced this so often that hit the water, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m not gonna jump in after. The water was cold and dark and deep and all of that, and I’m not gonna get in there. They still make ’em I’ll go and get another one. And it just wasn’t an issue and I got on with it. 

 

And I guess that’s a silly little example, but if you can do that with the little things, you can start to do it with the bigger things. If you start to practice on the little things, you can start to do it on the bigger things. And how you interpret things can make a big difference. Basically, we get better at what we repeat. 

 

So if you repeat getting pissed off, distressed, upset, frustrated when things don’t go the way you think that they should, you’re going to get really, really good at it. If you repeat that activity, you will develop an incredibly refined skill at being able to get pissed off upset, frustrated with any little thing, if you keep repeating it. 

 

And of course, if you repeat the opposite, if you repeat letting it go and thinking about it in a way that will serve you better in the future, you’re going to benefit from that. Because you’re going to have an automatic, better approach, an emotional response or reaction to it. You can start to train your reactions to those sorts of things. 

 

So you react or respond in a much more valuable way that doesn’t take away the value of the rest of your day. You know, some people can be driving to work and somebody pulls out in front of them in the traffic and they go “You bastard!” and they honk the horn and start screaming and yelling and that. 

 

That dude pulls off and goes in a different direction. And you go this way. And that person probably still doesn’t know you exist. They didn’t know you were there because they pulled out in front of you. ‘Cause they didn’t see you, and they’ve taken off and they are now controlling your day because you’re driving around and now you got a red light, and that’s pissed you off and it starts to snowball. 

 

So if you can start to work on these smaller things, these little things. Be a little bit more philosophical about it and understand that your current thought process about what’s going on right now in front of your face is input. 

 

And it goes into your mind into your subconscious and your input determines your output. And if you want things to be different in your life, you need to change what goes in. And this is just one thing that you can do. 

 

You can stay in guard at the entrance of your mind and start to change what goes in, because then it determines it changes. It influences what comes out and what can come out are your reactions, your responses, your emotions. And you can change that by changing what goes in. 

 

So, as I said before, what I think you need to do is change your focus, start to appreciate what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished, what you have instead of constantly focusing on what you haven’t. And the lack and the scarcity and all of the stuff that still hasn’t been done and has to be done. 

 

And all of that, because that’s not putting you in a great emotional space to be effective. Being certain and proud and appreciative, are better emotional spaces to become a lot more effective and enjoy your day and enjoy your life. And I’ll finish off with the, I’m not sure who said it, it might’ve been a Jim Rohn-ism or something like that, but maybe it wasn’t because he doesn’t, he wouldn’t say shit. But I think the analogy is, you know, stop looking at the fly shit on the window and start looking at the beautiful view through the glass. 

 

Cause if you can start to do that, you’ll look at things very, very differently. You won’t be stressed out. You won’t be upset. You will perform a lot better. You’ll enjoy your day a lot better. No, that mouse was up there. Somebody should have told me to take that mouse off earlier. 

 

So I hope that makes sense. And I’d love to talk to you about this because we have a part of for instance, our Blueprint Program addresses a simple step-by-step process that if you do it every day, you become significantly more effective, but you will enjoy your day significantly more. 

 

Because of how you will learn to interpret everything through your day. It’s got the Personal Success Ritual it’s in, it’s part of our Blueprint Program. And so if stress or distress as I call it is an issue for you. Particularly at this time of year, I’d love to have a conversation with you. We’d love to talk to you and share with you how that can be a thing of the past really, really quickly. And there isn’t a better time than right now because here’s one thing that I learned from years ago, teaching time management. 

 

‘Cause that was my gig many, many years ago, I used to fly around the country, just teaching time management. And the thing that I learnt from the many years of doing that, were noticing that the people, the small number of people who showed up to that training, who really had a lot on and really felt like that they just didn’t have time to be there, but they showed up anyway. 

 

Always, always, always got so much more out of it than the people that turned up when they didn’t, or like when the dust had settled, like there were so many people who would cancel and I’m too busy to turn up and all that sort of stuff. And it’s a quieter time at that month in the year. So we’ll book in for then. Those people didn’t get anywhere near as much out of it as the people who were really, really under the pump and showed up anyway. And that’s what I’m suggesting to you now. 

 

You might be thinking, you know, I haven’t got time to be listening to this or doing this or participating in a program or anything like that. You know, I’ve got X amount of weeks till Christmas. I don’t have the time for it. Bad, bad, bad decision. The time, there couldn’t be a better time. If you’re under the pump, there couldn’t be a better time to learn this stuff. 

 

Not only that, but how to become more effective. So I’d love to talk to you about it. All you need to do is hit a link. There’s a link in the comments. If you’re watching on YouTube, there’s a link in the description, hit that and book a time for a real quick chat. So we can find out if this is gonna be appropriate for you and show you the pathway for it, because it will make a big difference. 

 

And I can tell you from experience there isn’t a better time of year to get stuck into this, particularly when there is a little bit of a break for you coming up in the next five or six weeks or so. So hit the link. We’d love to talk to you. Just a reminder. If you are watching live, hit the, put a #live in the comments. If you’re gonna watch the replay, when you’re watching the replay put #replay in there.

Okay. Q and A time. And the question was asked, how do you deal with interruptions? Well, there’s a couple of things. You can’t always eliminate the interruption, but you can certainly change how you respond to it. And this is very sort of parallel to what we’ve just been talking about with the whole stress thing. 

 

Many distractions, however, are avoidable because of how we set up our environment. You know, if we’re talking about when you’re in the office and all that sort of thing, how you set up your environment can avoid a ton of distractions. Getting things out of your peripheral vision and only having the thing that you’re currently working on is a great way to avoid distractions and interruptions. 

 

‘Cause many of the interruptions, believe it or not folks are of our own doing. We distract ourselves. We interrupt ourselves because there are things in our peripheral vision that, you know, go bing and light up or whatever, and they distract us from what we’re doing. And we can get rid of those things. 

 

We can turn those notifications off. We can change our environment. The other thing about interruptions and distractions is if we don’t have a plan that is full of activity, that is really, really important to us, not urgent, but important to us. If we don’t have a plan, it’s easy to be distracted. 

 

And I use my tired old example all the time. If you’re on your way to the airport, which we’re allowed to do apparently now, particularly if you’re in Sydney, you can go over overseas. It’s pretty exciting. If you’re on the way to the airport to jump in a plane and somebody asks you to drop in and feed their cat on the way there, you’ll probably say no. 

 

If you’ve only got just enough time to get to the airport, because you’ve got something super important in front of you, you need to do. If you can do that every day, make sure you’ve got super important, not urgent stuff, but super important stuff on your list. And you’re doing one thing at a time. 

 

Focusing on that, you will find that there are much less distractions, interruptions that you will create and many less interruptions and distractions that you will allow. That’s the secret to it. We allow them because we don’t have this plan in front of us that we’ve mapped out. 

 

We’ve only got just enough time to do it. And we create that sense of urgency for ourselves to stay focused on our plan. And we don’t allow those interruptions. If you don’t do that every day, you’re going to have a ton of interruptions. I can’t tell you how many trades people I’ve spoken to. 

 

And you know, “Oh, I’m so busy, I’m flat out like one legged man in an ass kicking competition” and all this, you know, just, “I haven’t got time for this” Kind of scratched myself. And they’ve just wasted two minutes telling you that instead of getting to it and they’ll talk and talk and talk and tell you how busy and how terrible things are and all that sort of stuff. And they waste so much time. No wonder they’re under the pump. 

 

Now let’s get focused. Let’s get to the point. Let’s have a plan. Let’s put categories together. Let’s prioritize. So you remain focused. And as I said before, you may not be able to stop the interruption itself, but you can change how you respond to it. And if you give these interruptions energy, they will grow. They will take your time. They will steal your time. 

 

So as I say, leave no room for them. Make sure you have a plan of hyper important activity that you set up every single day. Hope that helps. If you’ve got questions about it, you know what to do, just jump on a call and we can chat about any of those questions. You can jump into the Facebook group. 

 

We’ve got a free Facebook group. It’s called Builder’s Business Success forum. Find that in on Facebook you can jump in there. You can ask all sorts of questions, anything you like, and we’re monitoring that all the time, we can answer.

Idea of the week is specifically there, just so I can get a shot of the light bulb. That’s its only reason for existence. Well, we do try and make it useful as well. And the idea of the week, this week is all about a thing called ActiveCampaign. 

 

It’s a CRM, it’s a Customer Relationship Management software. And the reason I’m a big fan of it is we used to use a thing called Infusionsoft, which was really good. And it still is really, really good. 

 

It’s just about 10 times the cost and for the basic things that we do ActiveCampaign is really terrific. And if you haven’t got some sort of a CRM in your business, I suggest that you find one. And the one that we recommend simply is ActiveCampaign purely because we use it ourselves. 

 

A lot of our Builders Business Blackbelt members use it. And if you’re using it and you know other people as our Blackbelt members do, they can create automations in the active campaign, which are little things where you’ll just apply a tag to a contact in your, in your contact records. So your list of prospects and clients, and it will get an automation going, which could be a series of emails. It could be reminders, it could be all sorts of things. 

 

But it is a fantastic use of technology to keep communication high and high quality with your customers, with your team, internal reminders, all sorts of things. It’s super, super powerful. I would just jump on to the interwebs and look at ActiveCampaign. There’s a ton of training videos there. It’s incredibly inexpensive for what it can do for you. So just go have a look at it. 

 

I think it can take a lot of things off your plate. It can increase your customer’s experience, the quality of your customer’s experience. It can ensure that you don’t forget things because you can set them all up. 

 

So they happen automatically and you don’t even have to worry about it. A little bit of work in getting it set up. But again, if you’ve got other people that you know are using it, you can share automations and all sorts of things inside the CRM.

The takeaway. The takeaway seems to be a bit of a recurring theme. You know, when I think about what we’ve prepared for the podcast, but the theme or the takeaway again, is I think that we just have a whole lot more control than we think. 

 

If you think about what we talked about with distress, if you think about, what we talked about with the Q and A and interruptions and things like that, and even the idea of the week, ActiveCampaign, there are so many things that we can do and get control over that we don’t. And we just need to start to understand that most of the problems that we we experienced in our businesses are of our own doing. 

 

And there are a ton of solutions to eliminate them. The other thing that that I think, in relation to the takeaway is I would encourage you to learn and refine the skill of knowing what you can control and what you can’t. 

 

That skill of being able to identify what you can control and what you can’t. And then having the appropriate response. Because I see so many people get confused with this. Like they get upset because they’re trying to control something that they can’t control. You know, you might as well try and bump your ass on the moon. That’s the same thing. You know, you can’t do it. 

 

So accept it and use it to the best of your ability, but don’t waste your energy trying to control things that you can’t control. And in the other side of the coin, there are so many things that don’t get controlled that we have at least the potential to control. And we don’t use that control, which creates another set of problems, unnecessary problems for us. So I hope this was useful. 

 

I hope it inspired you to start to think about things differently. As I said, I’d love to have a conversation with you either personally, you can do that by hitting a link in the comment section or in the description, if you’re watching on YouTube. If you’re watching on the blog, there’s a button underneath. If you’re just listening to the audio version, you can just go to buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au. 

 

There’s a schedule a call button there. And you just click that, fill out a form. Tell us a little bit about yourself. And we jump on a call. And as I said, don’t make the mistake that because I’m so busy at the moment, I’ll leave that till our new year or whatever. I’m telling you, this is the best time right now. Because you’re about to go into a holidays in the next, you know, four or five, six weeks. And there isn’t a better time to create new habits and learn new things and implement new things in your businesses when you’re not there. 

 

When you’re away camping, when you’re out of your rhythm, when you’re out of your normal routine. It’s a brilliant opportunity, please don’t let it go begging. The last thing I’d ask you to do is there is a link there and it is the YouTube link. 

 

So it’s BBSP-YouTube there’s a link there. I’d really encourage you to share any of your trades. Sub-trades if you’re a builder. 

 

Any business owners that that are in the building game that would get value from watching or listening to this podcast, I’d love for you to send them that link and just recommend that they start listening or watching to the podcast. 

 

We just want to get as much of this information out to as many builders and as many sub-trades as possible, and we need your help to do it. So please grab that link right now and share it out to your sub-trades and so on and so forth. 

 

If you guys are talking about this stuff on site, it can only help. And it can cause you to ask questions. You can bring questions to these lives. You can bring questions to the Facebook group, Builders Business Success forum, and you can ask them in there. And we’re here to help. 

 

So get busy, start asking the questions. You can disagree with me if you want. I’m more than happy to jump into a conversation with you and help you if at all possible, by clearing things up, giving you a bit of extra information. 

 

I’m not gonna take it personally. So that is it for this episode, 70 of Builders Business Success Podcast. I’m Mick Hawes from Builders Business Blackbelt. That is it for this episode. See you again next week. Bye for now.