Hi, friends, Ron here and I'm delighted to introduce you to our very first session. In our first module in dealing with six steps to overcoming stress. It's going to be an exciting, dynamic time, and I'm looking forward to the process. Now, what we're going to do during this module, the introductory module is, of course, we've given you an overview of the course. But we're going to walk through specifically the whole area of stress. What I want you to be able to get out of this time is the ability to understand what stress is.

Be able to clearly define how stress impacts you, and how you respond to it. mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually relationally always And then I want you to understand especially the distinction between stress and distress. Because whenever you have stress in your life, you can respond, you stressfully or distress fully. And stress is one element of that. But then you stress and distress is how we respond to it. That's going to be incredibly important.

Important, especially in light of the discussion we're going to have in this particular session, and then I want you to grasp the meaning of the importance of your mind and your perspective. You're going to find that the key organ and dealing with stress is not your stomach, it's not your heart that will flex the fast pace when you feel stressed. It's in fact, your thoughts, your brain, the thoughts that are up there, and that's why I often say if you have to go 18 inches to find Your solution for stress, there's a problem because it has to do with your head and your heart. And that's the revolutionary part of this, that's going to make this an exciting adventure, I think for you not just now, but in the days to come as you learn to overcome stress. So in this particular session, all I want to do is get you to think about stress.

Now, let me give you a very simple definition of stress. Stress is simply pressure, see my hands, I'm pushing them together, pushing my hands together, that's stress. So when you have a stress on a building means you have pressure on a building. When you have stress in your heart, it means you have extreme pressure on your heart. When you have problems in a relationship. It means you have pressure in the relationship.

When you have a deadline. You have the pressure of meeting that deadline when you're sick, your body experiences that pressure, those stresses. And the thing to know about stress is it's neither good nor bad. It's just A reality of life. And what I want you to understand further about stress is my twofold assumption is this. Number one.

Stress isn't good or bad. It's just a reality of life, you're always gonna have it. And the more successful you become as an individual, the more you're achieving what I call authentic success, the more you're winning and making a life and making a living, winning in all vital areas of your life, the more stress you're bound to experience doesn't that fun. I'm going to unpack that further in the days to come but you will have more stress because you're trying to run, run your life as a race to when you're trying to when you're trying to balance your life or have harmony in your life and your fitness in your family and your friends and your finances, your faith all vital areas of life. You're trying to have work life integration or harmony, as I like to call it, you're gonna have more stress. Furthermore, because whenever you begin to achieve more and more and become more authentically successful, you're contributing more to the culture, you're giving more back, you're providing more leadership.

And that results in its own type of stress. There's all sorts of external pressures that come after people who are in positions of leadership or who are entrepreneurial who are making a difference who are changemakers. And I want you to be a change maker. So that means you're going to have more stress. So the issue isn't so much stress that we want to look at that in this particular module. The key is how do I respond to stress?

So my second point, or assumption is this. The more you follow right principles of perspective, the lesser amounts of stress you're bound to experience. Now again, I'm going to unpack that in the days to come I'm going to show you why that's true. I'm going to give you six areas where you need to have the right perspective. And that's going to be our six core internal modules besides our introductory module, this one with multiple sessions, and then our conclusion, which will basically, sandwich wrap the six sessions. In our conclusion, we'll talk about where to go from here.

But in the six core content sessions, each one will deal with one of these perspectives that I'm going to show you how to develop the right perspective in six areas of life, which I'll unpack going further even in this module. So, what I want you to know about today's session is this. I want you to understand that stress is pressure. It's not bad. It's just a reality of life. So one of the things I want you to do in this session, not during the video time, but in the PDF that we're providing for you is to evaluate what what what's called your life change units, that is life.

It's called a life change index scale. It's a very simple tool that you'll be able to work through, you'll be able to score yourself. And you'll see these elements that people often will use to help people determine the stress in their life dealing with the changes in their life. And it can range from the death of a spouse, which is worth 100 points all the way down to, to Christmas, which, which has still numbers in the double digits. The point is, you're going to evaluate that and see where you and you'll add up your score. And you'll be able to get a sense of the amount of stress in your life and as a result of that, they maintain the kinds of sickness or weakness or ailments you can have mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, again, holistically.

Now, by the way, I take some issue with this you The days to come. But I want you to take the life change unit strategy. So you can find out where you are and how you can determine the kind of stresses you have in your life right now this will be a great start. Then secondly, I want you to work through another a sheet or a tool that we have PDF tool, which is basically from Web MD that provides a lot of tremendous resources. And it'll allow you to go through and look at what's called the typical type of approach to dealing with stress or approaches to dealing with stress, they recommend they they show some good ones and they show some ones that aren't so good. And what what you'll do after you go through that and read that is you will fill out one other piece that we have here another PDF that you can download, where it's going to be basically a T bar across the top.

I want you to list the biggest stress in your life. And then on the left side, I want you to respond, how you deal with it positively if you do. And on the other side, I want you to deal with how you deal with it in a weak way or negatively, in appropriately ways that aren't health healthy in light of what you read. This will give you a sense of the stressors in your life and how you deal with them. This is important as we start this journey, because I want you I know you feel the need to deal with stress, otherwise, you wouldn't be going through this course. But I want you to understand the stresses in your life.

So So do you have this number one, you're going to go through and write up a count up, add up your life change units based on your own self analysis on the tool that we provide the life change index, scale. And then secondly, you're going to look at this piece from when Web MD on on positive and negative ways to deal with stress and you're going to Do the T bar where you evaluate how you respond well to a stress and how you respond weakly or not so well or poorly or inappropriately. And I want you to be brutally honest about this. Now, again, across the top of the T bar, you're going to see a space where we say, major stress in my life. And I want you to write down what you consider the major stress in your life. And maybe a relationship and maybe financial and maybe physical, it could be mental or emotional, could be spiritual, could be relational conflicts, could be marriage, kids, family, parents, any of those things, but identify the major stress in your life right now or perhaps this year.

And then when you evaluate your, how you respond positively and negatively, do your own self assessment. Now, here's the last thing I want to say here is, I hope you're in our private Facebook page. Now that's for our premium members. You pay a little more for that, but not too Very much as you know, we have, we have valued this, we value this course very highly. But we're charging very little because this is a first run on this course. And we want to create crowdsourcing, we want people to have group wisdom.

So we're going to be interacting and talking and processing and and I'll be doing some online coaching and live Facebook's, and we're going to be providing lots of tools and resources in our private Facebook page. So I hope you're in that group. If you're not, it's not too late to sign up. You can you can see how to do that in the notes in in the courseware, particularly under Resources. But in that you're going to be able to share your concerns, share your questions, asked me and our team and others who are in the group, how they're dealing with these issues. And we want this to be a tool where you can actually build habits in your life and actually processes.

Work it through. You'll hear a lot more about that in the days to come. But the Facebook group in my mind is where the action is because there's accountability there support, there's encouragement, well, you've got the picture. This is where we're going friends, this is the first session in Module One, they're going to be multiple sessions and everyone, and there'll be videos and then there'll be tools like the ones we're providing from the get go here. So you can actually understand this and put it to work. Are you with me?

Okay, so a little virtual high five. And let's see if we can make this an adventure. don't deal with don't handle this as a burden. Don't think of this just as a course. Think of this as an adventure. That's gonna help you now in the days to come, overcome and ultimately even conquer stress in your life.

Won't that be fun? It's got to be Look forward to it.