Episode 35 - Dealing with Stress is an Inside Job: How to Use Your Mind for a Change.

Transcript

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Robert Harrison: Hi everyone. Welcome to “Coaching by the Life Coach.” I am your host Robert Harrison. Today on the show we will be talking about the theme of health and wellness again. We have been focusing on this area for the last several sessions.

Steve Axtell: Stress is a real hot button. It has been for awhile. We talk about stress in our lives. We are hearing about it more and more now because of the so-called stress of the economic downturn and this thing is stressful and that thing is stressful. We live in a world of stress. And everyday we pick up the newspaper, there seems like there is an article about the impact that stress has on people’s health and how it undermines the well being that people have. It just brings people down, wears them out.

I like to look at the brain as being kind of a toy, a toy that we can just play with and do what makes us feel the best and do the things that causes us to be the most effective in our lives and so the brain is a fun, fun thing to be playing with.

Today we have the privilege of talking with Steve Axtell who is a certified energy coach and trainer. I’ve worked with him on some other projects before, health-related. And today Steve is going to be talking to us about stress and success. Steve, thanks for being on the show.

Steve Axtell: Hey, it’s my pleasure Robert.

Robert Harrison: Good. Now for those of you who don’t know Steve, Steve is known for helping people turn around their lives, getting past emotional mental blocks and known for making the process of change fun. I can personally vouch for that.

So Steve, tell us about stress and success, how you work with clients and what kind of issues do you see entrepreneurs, business owners and professionals struggling with right now as regards to stress.

Steve Axtell: Sure, Robert.   Stress is a real hot button. It has been for awhile. We talk about stress in our lives and we are hearing about it more and more now because of the so-called stress of the economic downturn and this thing is stressful and that thing is stressful. We live in a world of stress. And everyday we pick up the newspaper and it seems like there is an article about the impact that stress has on people’s health and how it undermines the well being that people have. It just grinds people down, wears them out and it’s exhausting. We’ve all experienced it, some much more than others. There are times in our life when we experience it more than we might at other times. Usually when we are kicking back on the beach in Cozumel or Cancun, we are not feeling tons of stress but we might have felt a lot of stress at the airport trying to get our luggage through security. So it’s something that comes and goes in different contexts and it impacts us. And it gets in the way because it sucks up energy. Stress is exhausting. I think everyone would agree with that. If you’ve been through a period of intense stress, it just wears you out and that’s energy that could be better used for other things.

Robert Harrison: Absolutely. 

Steve Axtell: And so, I guess probably a good question is what specifically is stress?  We talk about it but do we really define it and is it clear in our own minds. Does it have a physiological response that’s called The Stress Response or I’m sure you heard it referred to as the Flight or Fight Response.  Now this is something that worked great for our ancestors who lived in caves. They would get out of, crawl out of their cave in the morning and if there was a saber tooth tiger there, then they would have a physiological response that would empower them to either run like Hell and get away from the cat or do get out. And the thing is that however it came down, the decision would be made and the event would terminate. It would be over one way or another and then the body would cease having that stress response and again go into a relaxation response which should be the normal operating condition of the human body. We should normally be relaxed.

And so it has its place and has had its place throughout human history as a survival mechanism. However, what we find today in our society, in our culture is that we don’t run into a whole lot of saber tooth tigers. We don’t have very many instances where there is clear and imminent danger. What we have is sort of a steady trickle of stuff and we go into that stress response, that flight or fight response and we tend to stay there a great deal of time.

Now what happens when we go into a stress response? Well, maybe our heart rate begins to increase. Our respiration speeds up. The blood begins to leave the core of our body and our brains. The blood goes to our extremities and our digestion shuts down and so we have a whole cascade of pretty dramatic physiologic changes that happen instantly. Our bodies begin to produce adrenalin and insulin. Our livers dump sugar into the bloodstream as an energy source. And our bodies go through dramatic transformation.

Now when we have this going on all the time then we get nice things like high blood pressure, heart palpitations. We have the constant stream of insulin going on in our body that is a precursor to metabolic disorders and diabetes. The list goes on and on and on. It takes a tremendous toll upon us when we are in that steady state of stress, anxiety, worry, tension, fear and we are not designed for that. That’s not the original intent. The original intent was to help us get through an immediate crisis situation and then when that was done to return to a normal, relaxed state and enjoy our lives. So, I think it really

Robert Harrison: That’s so true too, Steve because I remember reading an article in The New York Times about the heavy cost of chronic stress and it compared the stress that we as humans generally feel versus the plight of the Pacific salmon. Now these are fish that leap, flop, struggle upstream, [xx] in their lives. Their level of cortisol serves huge, huge adrenal jumps all the time because they are designed to die. Their digestive systems wither away. Their immune systems break down and they are weak. But most of the stress that they feel is purposeful and it’s by evolutionary design and it carries on the life cycle just fine, however, most of our stress is self-imposed. It’s self-imposed, which is where I think the NLP part of this conversation is going to be very, very germane. It’s primarily psychological and a lot of it is social and self-perceived pressures of modern life.

Steve Axtell: That is so absolutely true, Robert. And the thing is we get our heads turned on backwards and we look at life events and situations that happen around us and we fall victim to those things and we blame the external stuff that is around us on how we feel internally and it’s all wrong because all of that stuff that is happening out there where we say “Oh my God it’s so stressful or it’s so fearsome or so anxiety producing” is all a figment of our imagination because no event in and of itself has any meaning until a consciousness comes along and gives that event some kind of meaning. Does that make sense?

Robert Harrison: That’s right. Yeah.

Steve Axtell:  And so you and I Robert could go to the amusement park and we could be standing next to the rollercoaster and I am looking at the rollercoaster and contemplating getting on it and saying, “Oh my God. That is the scariest thing I have ever imagined. I wouldn’t get on that thing for a million dollars” and I’m starting to sweat and shake and you are looking at it and you are starting to drool, you know, because you are saying “Man that is so much fun. What a blast. I can’t wait to get on.”

Robert Harrison: Yeah

Steve Axtell:   But it’s exactly the same experience and it is how we run it through our filters that determine how we relate to that event and then what the subsequent impact is.

Robert Harrison: Yeah, there was a very interesting study done on that based on the work of Hans Seyle who did the general adaptation syndrome and he talked about this concept of the you stress. So for example, the feelings of like running your car off the road in the near death accident are actually identical to the feelings of a rush that a person might get on a rollercoaster but two totally different meanings. One, they believe and they know and they have confidence they are going to be OK. So this turns into this euphoric type of stress that actually leaves the immune system boosted, leaves their energy levels up and they are healthier whereas this other instance that literally feels the same, has the same equilibrium off balance type situation going on, creates this very immune depressive weakening, completely different way of being and it really goes to show how important our perspective on life really is.

Steve Axtell: Yep, couldn’t agree more. Our perspective really is everything and when we are experiencing that you stress then our bodies are generating those wonderful endorphins, those natural opiates that our bodies are so fabulous at producing and then they just feel great and so it’s a matter of where our minds go in terms of what our bodies then produces. And if our minds go in one direction then we produce those kinds of chemicals and responses in our body that are destructive. If our minds go the different direction, then we have stress happening. It is really very empowering for us.

Let me give you a good example. I work a lot with people that have fears around public speaking or public performance generally and the feeling that I get when I am in front of an audience I label as excitement. For me, I am on cloud nine. I am jazzed. I am excited. I just have a ball, however, if I were to start talking about what is actually going on in my body and comparing that to what another person who is terrified of public speaking, what they are experiencing in their body, it would look a lot alike. But we are labeling it differently and we are having very different experiences. I am experiencing you stress whereas the other person is experiencing stress.

Robert Harrison: Exactly

Steve Axtell: But they are very similar in a lot of ways.

Robert Harrison: Exactly. Now what I would like to do is, we need to take a quick break for our sponsors but when we come back, let’s get into how you in particular, I know you are a master at dealing with this, how you in particular deal with this, some strategies that you use with clients and some strategies that listeners can use and apply to their life right now.

So everyone, this is Robert Harrison with “Coaching by the Life Coach.” Today we are talking about stress and how to overcome it and how to take control of it in your life.   We are talking today with Steve Axtell, who is a certified NLP energy coach and trainer. We will be right back.   

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Robert Harrison: OK everyone, this is Robert Harrison with “Coaching by the Life” Coach. Remember if you haven’t gotten on the blog or sent an email to [email protected], it’s your chance to get some live coaching on the show and to get your questions answered. Also make sure that you support our sponsors like CardScan. And today we are talking with Steve Axtell. The subject is on health and wellness. We are talking about stress and how to prevent it, how to deal with it, what to do with it if you are experiencing it now. And Steve, just before the break we covered the different types of stress but how specifically in this segment do you handle it and what are some things that our listeners can do to take charge of their lives more?

Steve Axtell: Well Robert, of course we were talking about our perspective and our perception of the event. And that’s a great place to start right there to number 1 suspend all of the mental garbage that we bought into during our lifetime how specific situations are inherently stressful or fearsome or produce anxiety and stuff like that and move into  more of a neutral position. I will be talking more specifically about that in just a minute.

I would like to address something that is very, very common that creates and generates anxiety in people that most of us are not even aware of and is so easy to remedy or turn around and that is simply an imbalance that gets built up in our blood between the gasses of oxygen and carbon dioxide. All mammals have a very delicate balance in the ratio between carbon dioxide and oxygen in the blood. When either one of those factors gets out of balance we automatically begin to go into an anxiety response. We start to feel anxious.

This is why when drowning people who are suffering from a lack of oxygen have a massive buildup of carbon dioxide in their blood. This is why when people drown they panic. The anxiety builds to an intolerable level and they just probably lose their minds. We have all experienced that. If you simply hold you breath you find anxiety creep up as the carbon dioxide in the blood begins to rise and the oxygen drops.

Now, we tend to breathe in the top part of our chests in the upper lobes of our lungs and we don’t take nice deep breaths that flush out the lower lobes of our lung and consequently, the air down there becomes stagnant, becomes carbon dioxide latent and then gradually over time the carbon dioxide level in the blood begins to rise. We start to feel more and more anxious as that happens. And it doesn’t matter if everything around us is perfectly calm and there aren’t any events going on that would produce that at all. It’s strictly a physiological reaction and so, the antidote to that is to take a few nice deep breaths, flush out that stagnant air and get some fresh air in and then immediately the gas ratios in the blood begin to even out. And this is one of the easiest and quickest ways to just enjoy nice relaxation is to take a few nice deep breaths and then just go along a whole lot better. Isn’t that simple?

Robert Harrison: Yeah, that’s real simple. Most people [xx]

Steve Axtell: It’s just simply blood gas. Now let’s talk about things where there are situations that we perceive as being stressful or fearful or that cause anxiety for us and again, let’s focus in on that perspective and on perception. And what we can simply do when we are in the heat of battle and there is stuff going down is to mentally take a step back and get a little bit of space, a little bit of distance and doing this in our minds from the situation that we are in and again, take a couple of nice deep breaths and we begin to relax and then this is where the NLP part comes in because you see we can make these wonderful images and movies in our mind and as we manipulate these movies our experience of reality starts to change.

This is the magic of NLP. And so we can mentally take this situation and begin to shrink it down and make it a little bit smaller in our mind. Now normally when we get into a stress response we are taking the image and we are making it bigger. We are bringing it closer. We are making it wider. Let’s turn that around. Let’s push it out a little bit. Let’s shrink it down. Allow some of the color to drain out so that it goes into black and white and shades of grey and mentally start to think of it as being maybe two dimensional and sort of flat and even imagine that perhaps of it being like a black and white photograph in a newspaper where it is grainy and a little fuzzy around the edges. And then you can look at that situation from a different perspective and say to it because what you say internally is very important. You can look at it and you can say not only to yourself but you can say in a loud, strong voice internally, “I am bigger than you are. I am smarter than you are. I am stronger than you are and I will figure this out.” And that will shift us right into a place of looking for creative solutions rather than into that place with overwhelm where we have blown the whole thing up and it is huge and it is gigantic and we are just overwhelmed by it. So that’s a real simple mental way of handling it just by how we change our perspective and our perception of what’s going on inside our head.

Robert Harrison: That’s great. I think most people don’t really recognize and I think one of the beauties of working with a qualified NLP practitioner is you start to recognize that what we are often responding to is not reality itself. It’s the map of reality in our heads. It’s the pictures that we are making in our heads about a particular situation.

I used to have a client that I would drive over the hill to Half Moon Bay everyday which is a very big, very steep little mountain range up here in northern California on the peninsula. And every day going over that hill she would have a panic attack. And I was learning NLP at the time. I was working for the NLP Institute of California. I remember asking her. I said, “Hey, how do you do that? You have this massive state change that happens almost instantly and if you put in the right data, that could be really, really useful.”

And one of the things we found out from that little experiment Steve was also how much the auditory or what you are saying to yourself impacts that image in your mind. In other words, there’s the image and that can especially with a very shocking event often the image is the lead but we have found that with anxiety a lot of times a lot of stress is a different form of anxiety is that auditory channel. It’s talking to yourself, not just what you are saying to yourself but talking to yourself loud and fast, loud and fast and repeating a certain phrase over and over and over again. We found that to be a definitive piece of the strategy of getting yourself anxious or even working yourself into a panic attack.

Steve Axtell: That’s true, yeah.

Robert Harrison: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit. What’s another NLP maneuver that we can do? Do you want to mention, before I throw stuff out there, what are your NLP thoughts on what else we can do besides change that image like, then we can talk about reframing.

Steve Axtell: Yeah, absolutely. We can certainly change the image and we can really work on changing that voice that you just mentioned. Now kind of the interesting thing is we go through our lives and it’s sort of like a fish is not especially aware of water because it’s the experience that it’s in. So we are constantly talking to ourselves. We are constantly making movies in our minds. We are constantly having the internal experiences. And we are often just not even aware of them because we are having it all the time. So it helps to start to become aware of what is it that I am really saying to myself to begin to listen to that internal voice, see what it is telling you and then you can begin to start to alter it and shift it. You can turn down the volume. You can push it so that it sounds like it is coming from a place that is more distant, farther away. You can maybe really play with it and turn it into a really sexy, seductive voice or you could turn it maybe into the voice of Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck.  We have greater editorial capabilities than Steven Spielberg has,

[Robert Harrison: laugh]

Steve Axtell: his creative skills committed [sp] by his media but we are not but we can do anything with our minds. We can take these different century representations and change them however we want to change them and we can play with it.

I like to look at the brain as being kind of a toy, a toy that we can just play with and do what makes us feel the best and do the things that cause us to be the most effective in our lives. So the brain is a fun, fun thing to be playing with. We can manipulate and change all of these things.  And play is wonderful because again, we look at a situation and we say that it’s a problem. How much better does it work if we look at the situation and say well it’s a challenge? This is an opportunity to be creative, that there are some goals in the shadows. There’s something of value to this experience that we can begin to leverage to our benefit and to the benefit of the other people that are involved.

Robert Harrison: Absolutely. I think that is a skill that I really believe that all effective people have whether they are conscious of it or not. They have the ability to see things from a different perspective and what’s interesting is, when you do that enough, not just talking about it but I think for a lot of people when they are first learning NLP or they are going to a practitioner-in-training, one of the byproducts of learning this stuff, seeing things from a different point of view or changing the way you see it or the way you hear it so ultimately you change the meaning or you change the way it feels in your body is you can’t not begin to develop a sense that all meaning really truly is subjective.

Steve Axtell: Yep

Robert Harrison: And that is so liberating because then next time you find yourself in a stuck situation or a stressful situation and it feels where in the past you would have looked at and said, “Oh, well this is now my lot in life or I’m going to be stuck here forever,” you realize that where all meaning is subjective then how I am feeling right now can be changed.

Steve Axtell: Well, there is tremendous power in that freedom,

Robert Harrison: Yeah

Steve Axtell:  tremendous power for change to realize that no, we are not locked down. And even though we’ve had a lifetime of programming by our parents and our peers and the culture that we are in and the media and so many, many different things that have programmed us to respond in various ways, some of which are good and positive and work for us and others that don’t. But there’s a lot of plasticity in there. We can change  those things. The things that are not working for us, we can change. We can alter. It doesn’t have to be all that hard. The old model of mental health was you go to a psychoanalyst for five years, three times a week and you get to experience some relief of your anxiety or whatever your problem is but that is just an old model. We can change so quickly now and it’s exciting.

Robert Harrison: That’s so true. I think a great example of that, too, is for those you who don’t know out there, Steve and I worked together with one of the biggest trading companies to teach therapists to help their clients quit smoking and hilariously enough, one of the biggest challenges to helping a person quit smoking is really believing and accepting and stepping into the idea that it doesn’t have to be difficult. It doesn’t have to be this like blood curdling, painful, bed of nails type experience. It actually doesn’t have to be that big of a deal.

Steve Axtell: That is so true.

Robert Harrison: [laughter] You hit that, you find out things like 70% of all women who smoke and discover they are pregnant go “I’m done” and they quit, no cravings, no withdrawals, huge number of people.

Steve Axtell: Yeah

Robert Harrison. What does that tell you about that? Does that make it more possible for you to believe that you can get through it? And I will tell you something. If you also look at the biggest challenges of our life, oftentimes they are the most impactful. They are oftentimes the most meaningful and there have been thousands of examples in our lives of things that we initially upon first glance thought there was no way I can get through this and here we are to tell about it and look back on the other side. I think all these things help us to keep this in perspective, Steve any other kind of wizardry you have on stress reduction in particular or tidbits before we wrap up here that our people can go out and use right now or keep their NLP muscles built a little stronger?

Steve Axtell: Again, in terms of physiology one of the things you really want to watch is your blood sugar level. If you tend to drift in the direction of hypoglycemia and the blood sugar levels start to drop, anxiety feelings start to build up with that condition, as well. So you pay attention to your nutrition. Pay attention to your breathing. Get adequate rest and then do the head work, do the head piece and look at things from different perspectives and then begin to play around with some of those energies. It’s tons and tons of fun to start to manipulate the movies and the voices and the feelings and the experiences that we have going on within us all the time. It’s a great thing to do when you otherwise might be bored. Once you learn how to play with your brain you will never ever be bored again

Robert Harrison: That’s true. Now let me ask you a little bit more about the hypoglycemia. I think for a lot of people out there listening they are going “OK, wow, that’s a really interesting point.” And I think it’s always important to consider everything  is synergistic. It’s important to consider the chemistry as well as the psychology and they both obviously affect one another.

Steve Axtell: Right

Robert Harrison:   They are totally interconnected and they are interdependent. But what are some of the signs, Steve, that you would teach a client to become more self aware  
of when they maybe are becoming a little bit hypoglycemic or their blood sugar is off. What are some of the things they might look for that would indicate “Oh maybe I need to take a look of my nutrition a little bit more closely?”

Steve Axtell:  Yeah, great question Robert. Thank you.  It helps to understand that the main source of fuel for the brain is glucose. The brain does not operate on anything else. It only runs on glucose which is a form of sugar and when it becomes deprived of that glucose and it requires a lot of it. It requires a consistent steady stream of it. When the brain is deprived of that it stops working as efficiently as it could and ultimately will go into coma and death. So our bodies are very, very sensitive and we have a very refined regulatory mechanism within us to balance out that blood sugar.

So when the blood sugar gets out of whack, when it tends to drop off, we immediately start to feel some physiological things going on in our body. For me and for a lot of people, I think it begins with problems concentrating. Our thinking becomes a little bit fuzzy. It’s hard to focus. We start to get a little bit shaky. Your hands begin to tremor a little bit. Feelings of anxiety start to skyrocket.  You become very short-tempered and irritable. You can’t remember things and those I think are the primary feelings that first begin to manifest and then it gets worst. And typically, people are pretty sensitive to that and as soon as they start to feel those feelings they’ve learned that they need to go find food. I think we’ve all had that kind of experience. Some people are a lot more sensitive to it than others. Some people’s regulatory mechanisms are not as effective as others and they have to be a little more careful.

Robert Harrison: Sometimes they may need, would you say, sometimes they need to add sugar to their diet and sometimes that is a result of too much sugar.

Steve Axtell: Yeah. And you want to be careful about sugar. I always say don’t eat refined sugar or refined carbohydrates. You want a piece of fruit is a good way to bring your blood sugar up more quickly or a complex carbohydrate like whole grains along with some protein and that will bring it up and keep it more stable. You want to avoid giving yourself sugar shots where you are taking in a lot of sugar and then the body responds with a flood of insulin. This happens and the sugar throws you back down to hypoglycemia and then you are off on that merry-go-round of spike and crash. It’s so horrible.

Robert Harrison: I know a big vegetarian trick for regulating blood sugar especially when you are consuming fruit is to also mix those with leafy green vegetables.

Steve Axtell: Yeah

Robert Harrison: And what that will do, that will help regulate that sugar absorption rate in the body because you are literally adding more fiber that does not have extra sugar to it. So it helps balance it out. There are different ways to check that and I think that one of the important pieces of that is to really listen to your body and one of the things that it seems that you are indicating right now is to increase that level of awareness. What’s going on in your body? What’s going on in your mind?  What are you feeding your body? What are you feeding your mind? The statement “We are what we eat” really is true and it is true on a physical level and I think on a psychological and an intellectual level, as well.

Studies have been showing now if you watch boring, depressing movies you get boring and depressed. You watch exciting movies that leave you feeling thrilled and energized and excited it actually affects your immune system in a positive way. A good example of this, the other day I was driving home. I think I was listening to NPR and it was about this new women’s group that had been developed for minorities dealing with depression and it is very needed. It’s a great cause but as I am listening to this interview, I am listening to this radio broadcaster interviewing this person who has suffered from depression most of her life, is now running this group that helps other women deal with depression and just listening to her talk about what she was doing and who she was and how she showed up was depressing. It was like literally, this whole, because what you place your attention on a lot of times ends up manifesting itself in your life. So that balance is really, really important and so, there are positive benefits and there are also some side effects sometimes to what you pay attention to. I really believe what you feed your mind and what your feed your body, critically important, critically important to success.

Steve Axtell: So important and the body needs exercise. You know the body requires exercise. Did you know there are over 200 studies out now that all say the same thing, studies on the effect of exercise on depression. You probably have seen those headlines that 45 minutes of vigorous physical activity was as or more effective in alleviating depression than any of the medications. And so when we who do not have depression engage in physical activity then we come out of it and we feel absolutely buoyant and more effective so it’s a wonderful thing. We have got to take care of the body and we have got to take care of the mind. And we have got to get rid of the old excuse, I don’t have time.       

Robert Harrison: [laugh] True. I’m so glad you mentioned the whole exercise thing. We actually almost skipped that. [laughter] It’s so obviously critically important and I love the studies that say that exercise is almost as effective, if not more effective, than medication. The reality of it is that no matter how wonderful the medication is and there are some wonderful medications out there, there are some stuff that doctors do that just blows my mind how they can cut open your chest and pull your heart out, clean it out and put it back in. But I don’t ever, as I heard Stone Powell Farrow [sp] talk about, I don’t ever want that product.  I don’t want that to happen. I don’t ever want to have to rely on blood pressure medication to have normal blood pressure because every medicine is going to have a side effect.

Steve Axtell: Yeah

Robert Harrison: It cannot. That’s how it is designed to be and yet you look at something like exercise and not only does it burn calories, not only does it reduce stress. If you do things like Yoga it stimulates your lymphatic system. It keeps the body cleansed, working properly. Backbends have been scientifically proven to help aid in depression. It gets oxygen to your body and, of course, oxidation, lack of hydration to the body is what accelerates the aging process and increase cortisol levels.

Steve Axtell: So this physical health is a do-it-yourself project and good mental health is a do-it-yourself project and we have got to be constantly working on those things if we want to have effective lives, if we want to be happy and fulfilled.

Robert Harrison: Especially. This is a perfect time to interject this because you are talking about it being a do-it-yourself process but the reality of it is, there are a lot of busy professionals out there, busy entrepreneurs, etc. that don’t have the time or the luxury that someone like yourself has because this is your profession. Maybe their specialty is finance so they study financial charts all day whereas you study the effects of stress and neurology and chemistry and biology on the body all day long. So for those type of people that want to leverage the experience of a mentor like you or a coach like you that can help walk them through that process, save them the hours and the time and the trouble of figuring it out on their own, what different program would you look like and how would they get a hold of someone like you to pursue something like that?

Steve Axtell: Right. And when I say it’s a do-it-yourself project. I am a do-it-yourselfer and I enjoy doing that but I like to be coached. I don’t want to just be out there all by myself trying to figure it out and reinvent the wheel. So it is really helpful to have those experts that you can go to for support. So I do work over the telephone. We can do e-mail kinds of support. The telephone works very, very powerfully and we can do a lot of NLP and altered state of consciousness kinds of work, cognitive behavioral kinds of things over the telephone. It is very, very effective. And you can simply give me a telephone call or shoot me an email and I would be happy to answer any questions you might have, give you some pointers. Take it wherever you want to take it. And you can reach me at 303-523-0874 or my email is [email protected].

Robert Harrison: Wonderful. Steve, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show.  I appreciate it. I look forward to interviewing you more in the future on some other NLP specialties and I will just leave that to everyone’s imagination right now but I know that there are a few more I want to tap into with you.
And today we have been talking about how to reduce your stress, how to be more successful, stay healthy, especially right now. I know people are worrying about the economy, a lot of people are worrying about their job and I think it is time to kick back, party, celebrate the year, enjoy the holidays. So Steve, thanks for being on the show. Any final comments to our listeners as you say goodbye?

Steve Axtell:  You know it has been a blast. I’ve enjoyed it and I just second what you just said Robert. Let’s kick back and enjoy ourselves a little bit more. Life is short enough. Let’s get the juice out of it and let’s have fun.

Robert Harrison:  Sounds great. Alright everyone. This is Robert Harrison with Coaching by the Life Coach. Make sure that you subscribe to the podcast, that you send emails to [email protected] if you want to be on the show, if you want to be a guest, if you have got some information that you want to share with us, questions you want me to answer. I am going to be posting some live coaching sessions that I have been doing with some clients recently with some of the most germane and up-to-date topics that are going on in the career marketplace [music] particularly now in the 21st Century and I want to thank everyone for being on the show today. Thank you and have a great week. Bye Bye.

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