[00:00:38] Vesna: Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vena. Today I am gonna talk about the CEO's secret weapon, which is mental bandwidth. So if you are a business owner. Or a founder, or you're running a team or anything in a leadership position, you will understand, particularly in business,
[00:01:00] You may sign up for freedom and more income, but you still come to realize that they come at a cost and that cost is the roller coaster, right? That is the nature of. Business. It's very normal for it to be a rollercoaster. I don't know anyone who has just continuous ups and no downs. Right? And But I think if you're established in business, you already know that, right? You've already experienced enough of that to know that it's pretty normal for it to go up and down. It's how you manage the down times, right?
Because this is where we can get in a complete. Tailspin, we lose our mental bandwidth, which I'm gonna talk about. We lose our mental clarity and it seems like. It would be very normal to be stressed at that time, right? Look at everything I've got going on. It's normal to be stressed, right? Some months are great, some months are not so great. When you have a quiet few months, you start to panic, right? Or maybe you've got issues with growing your team. Maybe you don't have the right team. Maybe you don't have enough team, though there's growing pain issues.
[00:02:00] Maybe the economy takes a turn and they're forecasting doom and gloom, and you're wondering, right, how am I gonna get through this phase? Right? And so, again, a lot of these things happen in business. It's a normal part of business, but the outside factors don't have to completely rattle us. And it's important to. You know, keep high bandwidth, and our high bandwidth is not impacted by what is happening with our team, with our income, with the economy.
Or whatever the problem is, right? So let me talk about what bandwidth is. I did talk about this in a previous episode, but I wanna go into it more because I can see a lot of people when I speak to them, they're like, yeah, but I've got this going on and I've got that going on. Of course, I'm stressed and I'm not gonna deny that business has challenges, which I've already mentioned, but the stress of it is an inside job.
It's not created by outside factors. And we can argue this point, but I wanna share some examples of what, how low bandwidth increases our stress. Right. So high stress is an indication of low bandwidth. Okay?
[00:03:00] It's not an indication of what's happening in your business. It's an indication of where your mental and emotional bandwidth is. When we have high bandwidth, we just operate differently. So on the days that we have low bandwidth, it looks like. Everything is urgent. you're driving through traffic and you're so frustrated because you've got no time for this. You know, everything seems to take so much longer that day.
You are. Got a mental to-do list, which is going off in your head. Like, I've gotta go, I've gotta pick up the chicken on the way home. I've gotta go fill out that report. I've gotta respond to that email that I haven't responded to, I've gotta have that team meeting, or I've gotta pay the bills of whatever it is, right?
There's a continuous mental to-do list going off in the head, and it just feels like you, you don't have enough time. You're running around and you just don't have enough time to get anything done. So that's a low bandwidth day, which I know that you will recognize, but a high bandwidth day looks like.
[00:04:00] Time has slowed down. Everything feels chilled, feels easy to do. It's like even though you're courting traffic, you're like, that's okay. I've got time. I'll get everything done that I need to get done. It doesn't feel so rushed. It doesn't feel so urgent. It feels a lot calmer and things don't bother you the way that they bother you on the other days.
Right. And you'll find on these days that you just get a lot more done. on these high bandwidth days, we are really productive. So the difference between these two days is our level of bandwidth our mental and emotional, emotional bandwidth, not what is happening in our life.
Why is this important? Because I didn't really understand bandwidth. In the beginning, in my early days of business, and that's this business, like I didn't really understand it before at all. coming into this business, it was a lot harder for me to get the online business going, and I stayed stuck for quite a number of years.
And I was very stressed because, you know, I was running outta money and my mind went through all these worst case scenarios and I was very, very stressed, but it seemed pretty normal to be stressed if I wasn't stressed. I'd be crazy, right? Because I should be worried about these things because I need to provide for myself, right?
[00:05:00] I need to have an income. And I didn't realize then, what I realize now is that level of stress that I dialed up, the mental stress, right, was blocking my bandwidth. And what that meant was the way that I see this scenario is that it kept me stuck in my business and where I was at in my business.
Which is nowhere. It kept me stuck for a very long time, right? But I didn't understand bandwidth. I didn't understand that all that mental stress that I was going through was actually blocking my ability to solve the problem in my business and get it to grow and get it to scale. So even when I have a problem now, when something goes wrong, I can see that if I catastrophize that problem, then it just like eliminates my bandwidth.
can you see this as I'm talking about it, right? Because I know that you would've experienced our, our mental stress and the noise and the worry and the concern has this ability to just shut down our bandwidth or minimize our bandwidth so much. And then the problem becomes so big and we dunno how to find our way out of it.
[00:06:00] And we can get stuck in this mental loop all day long or week long. And it's not until we regain our bandwidth that we'll know what to do. our mental clarity in our bandwidth will give us solutions that we need. The other example The other example that I use is, um, you know, the show Master Chef in Master Chef, you know, everyone gets like the same list of ingredients and they're told to make whatever they need to make right, or to make something out of it. And so there's like six ingredients. Everyone gets it and they're like, some people are they just go to pieces, right? They are just freaking out. They're looking at the list. Their mind is just like, you know, million barrels an hour. They look like headless chickens running around.
They're losing control. They don't have it together. Right? And then other people have the exact same list in under the same pressure. Got the same scenario going on in the same environment yet they look at the list and you can see that they're looking at it quite calculated. They're like, Hmm, hmm, yes, I can do this.
[00:07:00] We can do this. And you could see their mind processing it right in a very different way. They don't look that stressed. They don't look like they're out of control now. That task is exactly the same. The pressure of that environment is exactly the same, yet the outcome between different people was different, and that comes down to bandwidth.
Now, as you can imagine in your business, that would be really important to not have those times when we lose bandwidth, when our mind just spins so outta control that we can't put a proper thought together to think about what to do next. Like we get stressed immediately, and maybe you don't catastrophize, but you get stressed.
And you can't find a solution, right? It just stuck, stuck on a loop. And you could find it that, you know, you come home, you talk to your partner about it and you know you need a glass of wine or something, and your partner's not really that concerned and you're like, stuck in this loop and you're talking about it, whatever it is, like, however that looks for you, but you're not able to switch off from it.
[00:08:00] Do you know, I remember, um, having a client once who said. At night when I'm in bed is the only time that I can really think about what I need to do and resolve the issues in my work. I was like, wow, what a crazy time to, to do that, right? You need to get sleep. And, until she could see that she wasn't actually resolving anything, she was just keeping herself up at night.
but that was also robbing her of her bandwidth the next day. And so our bandwidth is. elevated or decreased through different things, right? So we need to take care of ourselves. We need to take care of our energy, our mental wellbeing, our physical wi wellbeing, all of that. So nutrition plays a key part.
Sleep also has a massive impact, you know, um, supplementation and all that kind of stuff. But the biggest interference to our bandwidth is our worry. Is our overthinking, is our negative thinking is our catastrophizing. So all that mental noise lowers our bandwidth. And when our bandwidth drops, we're in no place to resolve the issue that we have.
[00:09:00] We're in no place to grow our business or scale our business. We're in no place to figure out what our team needs or how to resolve an issue in the business. We don't have that capacity anymore. It's completely diminished. And the irony is, is that we worry. Because we think that we're going to find a solution, but it does the opposite. Okay? So the more that we spin in our mind, the less ability we have to find the solution.
So what I'd love for you to take away from this podcast is that bandwidth is a game changer in our business. And we can have access to more bandwidth, which is our natural state when we let go. A lot of that noise that we carry around in our head, if you can just see that the days that you have higher mental bandwidth, that you get a lot more done compared to the days that you don't and the days that you don't like.
You just gotta kind of say like, I just don't have it today. Right? There's no point trying to overthink stuff to try and create bandwidth that does the opposite.
[00:10:00] But if you can see that you're gonna value the high bandwidth days, you're not gonna spend so much time replaying and getting yourself stuck in a loop of negative thinking and worry. So let me know in the comments below. If you see the comments, let me know. Have you experienced those days of high and low mental bandwidth and what have you seen as a difference in your business on the high bandwidth days? Do you get more done? Do you, you know, have time for a laugh with your team? And do you feel like it just changes the energy in your business?
Like what have you noticed in the high bandwidth days and do you notice on the low bandwidth days that there is a lot of mental noise going on? Any one of those, I know I've given you a few comments there to respond to, but let me know in the comments below.
