Balancing and Dealing with Unavoidable Stress
17m
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Realiteen Talks
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We’ve all been stressed out. Whether you’re a teenager with a big project due, a big game tonight or a big college application or an adult worrying over work, bills and other stressors, stress is a natural human emotion and an unavoidable part of life.
However, that doesn’t mean you can allow it to dictate its own terms and control your life.
On this episode of FranklinCovey Education’s Realiteen Talks, host and High School Practice Leader Gary McGuey was joined by a pair of teenagers intimately familiar with stress – particularly in a year that’s been more difficult than just about any that’s come before it.
McGuey and the two panelists explored how they recognize stress, keep it at bay, and use it to fuel a more productive approach to the challenges and opportunities in their lives.
“I feel like there’s also a good side to stress, where we feel motivated by it,” one panelist said. “Things like, perhaps, classes – when we want to do well in a class and we know that, if we do well, it will be good for our futures. …
“There’s definitely a point where we have to figure out, ‘OK, where is this tipping point?’”
To keep stress from becoming a “dark cloud,” it’s important to work to understand your own unique signals of being overly stressed and to pay close attention to when stress in one particular area bleeds into other, unrelated aspects of your life.
The episode Balancing and Dealing with Unavoidable Stress from the podcast Realiteen Talks has a duration of
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The Relationship between Courage and Growth in Tackling Unconscious Bias
In the first two Realiteen Talks conversations about unconscious bias, FranklinCovey Education High School Practice Leader Gary McGuey and a panel of teenage guests have tackled how to identify your own biases – after all, if you have a brain you have bias – and how to be open enough to be willing to overcome them.
In this third installment, the answer to true growth was revealed – courage.
In order to confront bias and experience genuine growth, you have to have the courage to be uncomfortable. No one likes to look in the mirror and see things they wish they could change, but the irony is that those things can’t be changed unless you’re brave enough to take them on.
Some would argue that confronting bias just leads to more conflict. While that misconception can appear true, especially in the early stages of such a confrontation, it’s certainly not true over the long run.
“If you are confronting bias with respect to the people you’re talking to, with tact, with the correct information and with different viewpoints, it can be effective,” one panelist said. “It can create a good response. It can create a safe space for everyone to feel like they’re represented [and that] their viewpoint is being heard.”
Watch the full episode for more thoughts on how to meet this final battle with unconscious bias head on.
How Can You Move Past Unconscious Bias and Cultivate Connections?
As we discussed in the first episode of Realiteen Talks’ series on unconscious bias, every human being on the planet experiences it – and coming to terms with that fact is key to identifying your own unconscious biases.
Now, though, more questions remain. Once you’ve identified an unconscious bias in yourself or others, how can you work through it and begin to cultivate connections with genuine openness?
That was the subject of this episode, where host and FranklinCovey High School Practice Leader Gary McGuey was once again joined by a panel of teenage guests ready to deliver their firsthand insight.
It all begins, one panelist said, with a commitment to exploring outside your comfort zone. The process, by its very nature, will therefore be uncomfortable, but it’s that discomfort that lets you know you’re being exposed to things that will help you grow.
“Explore maybe those things you don’t really see as big biases,” she said. “Just exploring outside of yourself [is key].”
It’s also critical to work alongside one another to grow together, as unconscious biases are created and reinforced by your own ways of thinking. Without new information and an openness to others’ opinions, particularly those that contradict your own, you can only change your own thinking to a certain extent.