Blog for all health-conscious: [Indie Business Blog] Enjoy Your Life, Build Your Business, Have Your Way!

Monday, 2 January 2012

[Indie Business Blog] Enjoy Your Life, Build Your Business, Have Your Way!

Link to Donna Maria's Indie Business Blog

Podcast No. 270: How To Reduce Stress and Anxiety In Your Life and Business

Posted: 02 Jan 2012 11:24 AM PST

If you’re like me, you have a hard time distinguishing between different types of stress. In my life, pretty much everything involves some kind of stress. Even relaxing involves stress because I experience stress in order to plan the relaxing time. Lucky for me, most of the stress I experience serves as a motivator. Stress brought about by my work is particularly motivating.

Gina Rafkind and logo

My work sometimes actually anxiety and stress — because I enjoy it so much. Even so, unchecked anxiety and stress — even the good kind can produce unwanted consequences, and no one knows that more than my friend and IBN member Gina Rafkind. I call her my Anxiety Busting Guru, and on this episode of Indie Business Podcast, she shared some of her tips for reducing stress. She also shared a bit of her journey through the stressed out Indie valley.

To listen to my 30-minute interview with Gina, and to put her tips to work to reduce your stress level now, scroll to the bottom of this page and click the play arrow. If you don’t feel like listening right now, here is a high level summary of what Gina and I discussed, with time stamps in case you want to scroll forward.

Form your business around yourself (2:30)? A lot of you Indies will see yourselves here. Gina started out as a hair stylist, then opened her own salon, and added a cosmetics and aromatherapy product line. Ultimately, she was a people pleaser who sacrificed herself for her clients. “We don’t want to let our clients down, our customers down, our families down,” she says. But the more she let herself down by putting others first, the more she knew something had to give. Finally, Gina says, “I just trusted what I was feeling, but took the leap.”

Gina finally changed her business model so she could change her life. Have you considered whether you might need to do the same?
Listen when your body is talks to you (6:25). Gina says that when you feel stress or anxiety, you tend to want to push it away and not deal with it. But that stress may be your body trying to give you an important message. Pushing it away will only exacerbate your problems. But paying attention to it will allow you to use that stress to actually make it go away. (Love that!)

Beginning at 13:44, this section contains a short exercise to help you stop and notice what your body may be telling you.
Do the work (9:43). Learn what’s important to you and what your values are. For example, one of Gina’s values is freedom, and she did the work to recognized that her work as a hair stylist was not giving her the freedom that she valued so much. Gina says that she “sat with that” realization for a while. Then, rather than ignore the realization, she took action to address it. This was not an easy process, she says. It’s about making the decision to commit to yourself and do the work.

As you listen, be sure to catch the part beginning at 13:44, where Gina shares specific tips she uses herself that will help you use stress to relieve stress.

About Gina Rafkind

I like to call Gina the Anxiety-Busting Guru. She helps women establish new paths of “being” so they can enjoy their lives more. Through guided meditations, e-books, workshops, and transformational life coaching, Gina’s work helps women transform stress and anxiety into positive forces for good in their live, so they can have more fun and experience more success in business and in life. Follow Gina on Twitter here, and check out her website here. You can also find her on Indie Social.

How to Listen to the Show

This post contains my paraphrases of the information Adelaide shared. To hear it from the horse’s mouth yourself, listen to the entire 30-minute show using one of these options:

Download it on iTunes. (It usually takes a day or two for iTunes to feed the show there.)
Click on the arrow at the bottom of this post to listen now!
Because I have not had a chance to load all of my shows to this blog, you can listen to hundreds of interviews from 2005 to 2010, each one as relevant today as it was when I recorded it, at my Indie Business Radio site.

Question: What do you think of Gina’s tips and insights? Are you listening to your body’s signals? Do you need to make a business and/or lifestyle change?

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