Handling Stressful Situations with Grace & Success

Professor Pete Alexander has had a thirty-five year career that spans Sales and Marketing, being a college professor of Marketing, and running a small interior landscaping business called Office Plants by Everything Grows, where he’s still a majority owner. Professor Pete is also an expert in something that impacts all of our lives: stress.

Today, Pete joins the show to share tips and best practices for coping with stress, the role of eustress, and the importance of gratitude and visualization.

📺 Watch on YouTube

https://youtu.be/Ex_I_ZfC9N4

Key Takeaways

00:55 – Jonathan introduces today’s guest, Pete Alexander, who joins the show to talk about how financial insecurity growing up instilled a fear-based money mindset

09:14 – The inspiration to write a book about stress

17:31 – Gratitude, visualization, and personal values

25:40 – Staggering statistics on stress and its effect on the body

30:10 – Understanding the LIGHTEN acronym

31:49 – Good stress vs. bad stress and the two flavors of stress

35:14 – One thing that a person under severe stress can do to reduce their stress levels and one thing to avoid doing

41:09 – One thing people don’t know about Pete that he would like them to know

43:10 – Jonathan thanks Pete for joining the show and lets listeners know where to connect with him

Tweetable Quotes

“What I learned was that, when you don’t manage your money properly, that has a very strong effect on your kids.” (02:45) (Pete)

“For me, my feeling is that I don’t want to be a burden for my kids. And so part of my strategy of ‘saving, saving, saving,’ is that I wouldn’t feel like I had to go ask them, down the road, if something happened to me.” (08:29) (Pete)

“I sat there and I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m trading my health for my career.’ And that is a very bad trade because, if you think about it, the reality is when you think about a time when you were really sick, did you feel like doing anything other than lying in bed? Probably not. And when you’re in that state, you’re no good to your career, to your business, or to the people you love, because you have no energy.” (15:30) (Pete)

“Health became and remains the number one priority for me because, in my opinion, without your health, nothing else matters.” (23:32) (Pete)

“One thing that stood out to me when I started doing my research was that the World Health Organization (WHO) called stress the number one health epidemic of the 21st Century.” (26:46) (Pete)

“There actually is good stress, called eustress. That is stress where if you’re working on something that you are passionate or excited about, it’s the kind of stress that helps us get things done.” (31:52) (Pete)

“The energy that we project out there in the universe, we’re gonna attract that same polarity back. And so when we project out negative energy, we are retracting back like energy. But if we send out positive energy – guess what – we’re gonna attract back that positive energy.” (34:37) (Pete)