The wolf will show up on your doorstep. Are you ready for him? If there’s one thing I know to be true it’s that no matter who you are, how successful you are or are not, how happy you are or are not, nothing will keep the ‘bad times’ from showing up in your life. It’s inevitable, something will happen and your job is simple – be prepared. As prepared as you possibly can be. Build up what I call Stress Immunity.
A friend of mine, McKeel Hagerty, says ‘Stress is not a feeling’ it’s the result of a feeling. Something bad happens, you feel sad, and then you allow the stress to creep in but it’s not a feeling and you can build the immunity to it. Think about this for a second. Think about a time in your own life when you experienced something really difficult. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve been around awhile you may recall the first time you ever received some sort of legal notice on your desk (yea, this happens and it happens all the time). But the first time it happened, if you are like me, you freaked out. You let the stress creep in and you stopped everything, made a huge deal out of it and spun out of control addressing it right away. Now, compare that to how you respond now, maybe 10 years into your entrepreneurial journey. That same letter that sent you into a tailspin a decade ago gets set aside until you have time to review it and address, it’s just not that important now. The wolf showed up, you learned from the experience of dealing with the wolf and now when he shows up again it’s not as scary or maybe not scary at all.
Stress Immunity is built the same way. Putting yourself, often on purpose, into stress inducing situations (physically and mentally) builds your tolerance to it. Over time, after doing hard things over and over, you’ll have a level of immunity that simply doesn’t allow the wolf to create stress for you. You decide.
