Know What You Don’t Know, What You Need to Know, and Who You Need to Meet Next

Know What You Don’t Know, What You Need to Know, and Who You Need to Meet Next

In Podcasts by Cate Stillman

In order to achieve any goal you need to find a clear path to “how”, but if you want to get there faster, you will also need a “who”. Whether you are looking to uplevel your professional career or your personal life, you need to set long-term goals. Painful ones. The kind that will intimidate you enough to open yourself to failure.

Not all stress is negative. Positive stress will keep your mind and body sharp and will keep you young and vivacious. But how do you create positive stress instead of negative stress? By developing the right habits and surrounding yourself with the right people.

In this episode, Cate talks to Andy Stillman about leveraging your skills and the ones of people around you to achieve peak performance and personal success.

How to know what you need to know next

What type of stress are you under? Stress is often perceived as a negative emotion, associated with an array of illnesses. But that is not the case. There are both negative and positive stressors, and though the first might be detrimental to your health and general wellbeing, the latter plays a huge role in self-fulfillment.

Positive stress – or eustress – is a necessary part of growth and evolution. In modern western society, we are raised based on performance, instead of experience. This may lead people to develop a fixed mindset, where they pursue only what they are good at, and neglect new experiences. Doing what you are good at may seem like a no-brainer, but in the long run, it will leave you feeling unfulfilled. Humans have a mental pain barrier they need to get through.

If you are a peak performer, you are probably aware the biggest impediment to growth and success is the fear of failure. But the openness to make mistakes can be shut down, not only by culture but also by your body. Your physical body affects your emotional ability to deal with stress, even the positive kind. This is particularly true when your body is struggling with toxicity. That is why, when trying to uplevel all aspects of your life, detoxing is a smart first step. By having toxicity in your body, you are kept in a fight or flight state, and in order to be able to connect with your purpose, and better deal with the painful road growth entails, you need to be in a rest and digest state.

Success and leveraging other people’s skills

The path to the next version of yourself is never easy, but it shouldn’t be a lonely one. If most of your limiting beliefs are a product of the culture you grew up with, then the fastest way to grow is to immerse yourself in the right culture. After figuring out where you want to go, you should start connecting with the people who are already there. When you are surrounded by the right people, your growth is accelerated because you are being pushed and pulled at the same time.

You are the average of the people around you. That is the power of masterminds and the reason why, at Yogahealer, all courses are dynamic group-oriented. When you surround yourself with people who are focused on growing and creating positive stressors in their lives, you will experience exponential growth. The hyper-connectivity created will help you go further faster.

In order to grow, you will need to develop new habits. And the fastest way to get them is to hang with people who have been living these habits.

Success and leveraging your own skills

Desire is the beginning. If you are confused about what it is you want to achieve next, or what your long-term goals are, tap into desire. Because if you are going through life without a long-term goal, you are going through life without direction. In order to have a meaningful life, you need to set big goals and align your habits in order to achieve them.

Short-term goals, and easy choices, may feel good momentarily, but over time, they will create distress. No matter what you do in life, you have a bigger purpose, and a desire to achieve your highest potential. There is depth to living your life aligned to a bigger purpose.
If you are wondering if you could improve your life’s balance while achieving your goals, take our peak performance quiz.

What you’ll get out of tuning in:

How positive stress creates growth and evolution
What being around the right people can do
How to connect with long-term desire

Links Mentioned in Episode:

Show Highlights:

Eustress creates new neural pathways
Utilizing SWOT in business and life
You are the average of the people around you

Timestamps:

1:29 Creating positive stress in order to grow
6:04 The importance of investing time and energy in new things
10:32 The ability to understand your long-term desires
20:55 Who do you need to guide you where you want to go

Guest Bio:

Andy has over 30 years of experience successfully helping businesses improve by developing and executing meaningful strategies focused on the long-term success of the business. Andy has held senior roles in a number of large multinational corporations including E*Trade, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Societe Generale, and Coopers & Lybrand (PWC) – often as a Chief Operating Officer or an in-house consultant.

As he was recently looking to pivot away from large companies and become more entrepreneurial, he has now partnered with his cousin, Cate Stillman, to help grow Yogahealer – leveraging his skills and experience. He is motivated by helping others and finds intrinsic value in solving complex issues large and small – putting the business in a better place and better positioned to grow.

He enjoys working across multiple levels of the organization. He approaches problems with no preconceived notions and relies on a data-driven approach. His orientation is towards simplification, transparency, holistic pragmatism, leveraging tools, and managing risk effectively.