Create Clarity - 10 Tips to Remain Calm and Get Clarity
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Benefits of Calm
Have you ever noticed the most productive and financially successful people are usually calm?
The skills to manage emotions and remain calm under pressure have a direct link to personal performance.
Research conducted with over 1 million people, has shown that 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress, that is they are able to remain calm, create clarity and stay in control.
Being calm has many benefits including:
- create clarity, and clarity leads to better productivity and higher quality output.
- helping you feel more in control of your emotions and your life
- increasing your breathing capacity
- enables you to notice your quitter thoughts
- helping you to have more insights due to having a quieter mind
- allowing you to access your creative flow
- helping your memory recall and memory retention
- allowing you to connect more deeply to those who you communicate with
- enables you to have deeper communications
- helps you to build influence
- have more positive impact on others
- you earn more as your influence and impact grows
Top 10 strategies to bring more calm into your day
To help you I’ve put together the top 10 strategies that the highest achievers use to bring more-calm into their day, create clarity, escape the craziness of today’s world and bring more productivity and excellence into their days
1. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude
Research has shown that regularly being grateful has the ability to greatly reduce stress and increase general feelings of joy and optimism.
One study conducted at the University of California found that by being grateful regularly reduces your stress cortisol levels by 23%.
2. Remaining positive by re-framing the situation
When things aren’t going so well try to reframe the situation into a more positive light.
Ask yourself where is there a potential benefit in this experience? What can I learn from this experience to get closer to my best?
3. Take time to disconnect
Balance is crucial in today’s busy world. Being accessible 24/7 to work is not healthy for your conscious or sub-conscious brain.
Draw a line in the sand and say I am not contactable after 7pm (for example).
By doing this you are sending a strong message to your subconscious that you are serious about protecting your downtime / sleep time and family time.
4. Limit caffeine intake
Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the “freeze-flight-or-fight” response.
This “away from threat” response is a survival adaptation which heralds from our ancestral times when we would need to escape the sabre tooth tiger.
However in today’s interconnected world it also overruns our emotional thinking capacity and hence behaviour.
Further to this the effects of caffeine can last for hours as it takes time for caffeine to work through the system.
5. Don’t cheat sleep
Sleep is the most important system we have to refresh and rejuvenate our bodies and minds.
Research shows that most people need between 6-9 hours of interrupted sleep to be at their best.
6. Label your emotions
By labelling your emotions you actually dampen down the amygdala activation (the away from threat response).
For example next time you are feeling flustered, identify that as being “flustered”, say it out loud.
This actually significantly reduces the stress response in the brain by shifting resources away from the amygdala and into the pre-frontal cortex (PFC).
7. Practice mindfulness
There is an abundance of research demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness practice for improving all aspects of mental, emotional and physical health.
One of my favourite practices is a 1-2 minute exercise I do when driving from one appointment to another or from the gym to home or home to work etc.
Its called the “Release-Tension-Set-Intention” exercise. Basically, you do some deep breathing for 1 minute and as you exhale you say “release” and visualise and feel the tension leaving.
Then for the next minute focus on what is the positive frame or intention you want to bring to your next meeting or appointment or activity.
8. Get on a healthy diet
Research has shown that having happy gut health can significantly reduce anxiety and build levels of calm.
9. Use your support system
When you need to reach out, do it! Identify those in your support system who you can trust for a D&M and reach out to them.
They are more than likely more than happy to help you through what ever is troubling you
10. Controlled breathing
Controlled breathing is one of the easiest, most accessible and most powerful tools at our disposal to achieve more calm in any given moment.
In fact, while you are doing any of the above activities you are always breathing, because the body needs oxygen!
So next time you catch yourself in a less than calm state you can simply do 5 deep breaths to bring more oxygen back into your system and calm yourself down.
Some of the other benefits of controlled breathing include:
- lowered blood pressure and heart rate
- reduced levels of stress hormones in the blood
- reduced lactic acid build-up in muscle tissue
- balanced levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood
When was the last time you let yourself relax and recharge?
Silence is not empty – it’s profound and full of answers.
Check out my post here to learn the 3 Daily Power Rituals to Prime yourself for Peak Performance.
"Silence is not empty, its full of the answers you seek"
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