How your mental health and work habits are linked

You are listening to College Success Habits with Jesse Mogel episode 171. Let's get to the show. Oh, this shows the best show ever. Best show ever! Welcome to the College Success Habits podcast. Do you want to try on through school and have a little fun along the way? Learn Habits to help you attain better productivity and hacks to help you slide through classes at NEA. Here's your host. College Circuit Speaker Jesse Mogel. Welcome back to College Success Habits. I am your host Jesse Mogel. As always, it's an honor and a privilege to have you here for the next 20-30 minutes or so. How is your winter closing up? It has been a winter here in North Alabama. That is for sure. Was not as prepared for all of the cold and rainy weather. I know for a lot of you you have been experiencing far more than that. I hope that you have hunkered down. You have maintained your grades. You maintain your mental health. I know there can be seasonal depression disorder. There can be a lot of things that start to come whenever you get super cold. Now you've got to go outside and bundle up and get yourself to class at an godly hour. Which to me is anything before 9 AM. So I have absolutely set my life up to be one where I am getting up at 830 and ready to rock and roll by 9. I hope that you have managed to create a schedule for yourself that works. According to your circadian rhythms, according to your clock, I think it's extremely important for you to understand your own body and your own mental health. As you mature from someone who was in high school sort of had to follow the curriculum, had to follow the scheduling of the school. Now you are creating your own. You are creating your own reality. And while a lot of people will ultimately go off into jobs and find themselves working in offices where they are told to be there at a certain time, we have certainly seen a mass migration of jobs going from where they previously were told you have to do this in an office to somewhere in some win that is a lot more fluid and flexible. Whether you are always at home, whether you are traveling, whether you are in the office, there are a lot more opportunities now than there were pre-pandemic for jobs to be outside of the traditional office space. And so you might actually find yourself very much in accordance with a job that allows you that kind of flexibility and freedom. While this may not necessarily have been what I thought I was going to talk about at the opening of the show, I think it is very important for you to know what jobs your major will be bringing forth to you. What career path will you be opening up for yourself? And if you are one of those people who prefers to have a more flexible morning and not necessarily having to get up at this particular time and do particular things, you might want to be thinking about that with your career. Do you want to have more flexibility when you do have children to be able to take them to school and pick them up from school and attend their sporting events when they get of age to do that. I know for those of you out there who are in that 18 to 25, let's go with 18 to 21. This might also be preposterous to be thinking about now, but as you start to get into your mid 20s, you are very much going to want to be thinking more along the lines of what will your future life look like with the job that you have been studying to get to attain. Will you have flexibility? Will you have time and location freedom? Or will you find yourself, you know, for lack of a, against the first thing that came to mind was chain to a desk. A lot of jobs don't necessarily find it as advantageous as they previously did to make people always be in the office. And then other ones, it's very much where being in that office environment is what allows the business to flourish. It's going to be your option in the future on which kind of job you choose. We have moved into a completely different marketplace. The technology age that began in the 80s really with the, you know, the advent of the, you know, let's just go with Nintendo for those of you who most of you are a twinkle in your parents eye until the late 90s. You don't even realize there was a time where, you know, having a Nintendo or a calico or an Atari in your house was just, there was a sign of having wealth. And now we have super computers in our pockets. So we've gone from the technology age to the information age and it's really opening up the entire world to a completely different way of thinking about the work and the office environment and how people are working. So I just want you to be thinking of that. Do you prefer to have a more fluid scheduled? Would you like to be more dynamic in the way that you present your work to your future employer? Do you plan on starting your own business? What kind of work environment are you planning on having for your employees? All of this comes into play when you start to think about what you're working toward while you're in school. And I really want to make sure that we focus on mental health as we go to get into spring in the warm weather in the flowers waking up in the trees, you know, beginning to blossom. It's going to very much elicit these feelings of a rebirth in us where we've made it through the doldrums of winter and we're now moving ourselves into spring. I know I have a substantial amount of listeners in the Southern hemisphere and you have been enjoying your spring and summer while we have over here been, you know, getting through our fall and our winners. And now we're switching like you are switching. So how have you prepared your mental health for what is coming up? Because when we don't think about our mental health, when we don't feel into what we're feeling, it can often be a surprise when it finally arrives. And your success is not a determiner of your mental health. You can be getting very good grades. You can be utilizing your growth mindset and not allowing setbacks or other people or your environment to dictate how you go about getting your schoolwork done and making sure you're on time to work and things of that nature, but it does not determine how you are mentally inside yourself, how your health is going. Whether you are emotionally intelligent and monitoring your awareness and managing your feelings and having conversations with people who actually listen, who actually listen. This is why I'm a big proponent for going to the school counselors, going to the therapist that the school provides. Most of them provide some level of mental health. Qualified people to talk you through the things that you're experiencing while you're in school and I highly encourage you to take those assets on your campus and utilize them. There is a great deal of shifting and changing going on inside of you. And if you just leave it up to having a few beers with your friends or talking to one of your friends, you know, over coffee in the morning, a lot of them, they don't have the training. The expertise that those of us in the mental health field have to actively listen to what you're saying to hear the things that aren't being said to listen to the sentence structures that you're using that presuppose certain limitations you may have placed upon yourself that you're not even aware of. There is a very nuanced way we as humans will use our language to reveal how we actually feel inside of ourselves without coming out and just saying it. When you have someone who is trained to listen for the nuance to listen to the sentence structure in a way that they hear what's not being said. Now you're getting someone who actually will help you step into your vulnerability into the place that for many of us, we were taught to not experience. We're raised by parents who aren't as emotionally intelligent says they would prefer as we would all prefer. When I'm saying all this isn't a generalization that can sweep across all of you from many of you, you do have parents who know how to listen and give you unbiased advice or ask questions that allow you to come up with the answer that most suits your desires in the moment. Understanding that flexibility and openness towards new possibilities is something that we want to be mindful of. There are opportunities that come in front of us every single day, multiple times a day. Are we aware of what those opportunities are? Are you aware of what taking on one opportunity over another might actually cost you? What saying yes to this one thing means saying no to something else. We do not have an infinite amount of time in our days and our weeks and our months to take on everything that's presented to us. What's your lowest hanging fruit? We're coming up on spring break soon. If preparing yourself to be able to go off and go for a week and enjoy yourself is something that's important to you. How have you prepared your schoolwork so that when you come back, you're already ahead of the game and not somehow behind the eight ball. These are things to be mindful of. As in the future, you are going to be presented with opportunities to go on vacations or to take time away or having for bids you get sick and you're not unable to go to the office for a week or log in for a week. And now have you prepared yourself to be more advanced in your work rather than behind so when the unexpected good or bad desirable or undesirable arrive, you don't feel the stress of all of a sudden realizing wow by taking off this way. I'm even further behind versus now where I was is just me exactly where everybody else is. There's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna push things off and they're gonna procrastinate and they're gonna allow the instant gratification monkey to take over their minds. You want to be that rational decision maker who says, "Nope, this is what needs to be done today. This is my lowest hanging fruit. Let me get this off of my desk and then I can move on and go play some video games or go out and enjoy my friends." Not taking care of your work in lieu of instant gratification in the moment isn't going to take that work off of your desk. You're still gonna have to do it more than likely you have been thinking about how you should be doing it while you're goofing off and doing something else that isn't that work. So now you get that little voice in the back of your head that's sort of gilting you already rather than just sitting down and getting the work done while it's before it's due. And this is really interesting I've noticed in the workforce. There are people who will spend an inordinate amount of time acting like they're working or working to get out of their work rather than just doing the work. I'm not sure if you haven't experienced with this yet, but more than likely you've had to take on some kind of job in order to get to this stage of your life. And you know those people who will use wordplay and mental gymnastics to somehow you know shovel their work over to your desk or somebody else's desk. And they'll spend a majority of their time. They could have just been working on the project, working on that thing. They'll spend a lot more time trying to get out of working on that thing. And to me if an hour is going to pass either way, I'd rather just get it done and know that I did it and move on then spending an hour trying to come up with an excuse for why I didn't get it done or why it was somebody else's responsibility. Again, your mental health should be your utmost priority. And if you're pushing work off and you're procrastinating where you could be progressing instead, you're putting yourself in a state of anxiety and stress. Your cortisol levels are going up. You're wiring your brain to be in a state of survival mode and fight or flight mode way more than is necessary. But there are, I wouldn't even know if the word necessary way more than is useful, way more than is even that you should. There are things in life that will put you into fight or flight. Absolutely. There are going to be deadlines that come out of nowhere. There's going to be something you think you had done and then all of a sudden somebody else comes back and says, "This needs to be done in a different way and you've got two hours." Like there are going to be those times in your life where you're going to need that cortisol shot. You're going to need that dopamine to kick in that we're emotive HU to get something done so that you can walk away from that project saying, "I did the best I could with the resources I had in that moment." Don't look for ways or unconsciously put yourself in the way of actually just getting things done, thus forcing yourself to become that fighter flight person. Who's like, "Well, got a paper due in three days. This was assigned three months ago. Awesome. What am I going to do for the next three days? Back to back to back all nighters. And you think that that's going to be good work? Just because you have gotten good grades in the past by shoveling in a ton of work at the end right before it's due. Does not mean that that method that modus Aparundi is going to work your whole life. There are things that you will have to begin to plan out for and you won't want to laying out the groundwork well in advance of the project being due. You are in control of your mind. Therefore, you are in control of your results. This isn't somebody else's job to get you in the headspace of getting something done before it's due. In enough time that allows you to work on the paper and put it aside for a couple days and then come back with fresh eyes and experience that entire paper a completely different way. When I wrote my college success habits book, which is still available and always will be, whether it be on Amazon or Walmart.com or any of those Barnes and Nobles. When I put that out there, I wrote the entire book in 30 hours over the course of a week after tons and tons of research and preparation. The writing of the book took 30 hours and I was able to reverse engineer how to do that in the way that I did it simply by writing that first chapter. No one set a deadline for that. I put the deadline on me to have the book coincide with the one year anniversary of the launch of the podcast. It did ultimately get delayed because of COVID and issues around that. But ultimately it's still out there. It was still done. It was still amazing. I bring this back up to remind you that I didn't just write the whole thing in 30 hours and then send it off to the editor. I wrote it over the course of a whole week, five days, six hours a day, in three hour blocks. Then I sat on it for a month, just let it be there on my computer and then I came back and did another 30 hours in a week, chopped it up, moved it around, really worked on the way that I laid it out so that it could be very easily digestible and put into simple action steps where you could go off and you could really follow these seven principles to excel in college and beyond. That was the point of the book. There was another 60 hours on the back end just with the editors and the cover and the publisher and all of that. But in order to get that book done, it was just very much me focused on how long will it take to write a chapter. I wrote the first chapter in three hours and said, okay, because I broke the book up in a why, what, how, what if format. I knew that each section of the chapter was roughly about 750 words. So there were about 40 hours, that's about four, that it is 45 minutes per. So 750 words in 45 minutes, that's pretty darn easy since I type somewhere between 80 and 120 words a minute. So there was a lot of time to think and bring the notes in and maneuver things around. And ultimately the book was done with great care and professionalism because I allotted myself a tremendous amount of time to get that done. So if you go back to that saying, you are in control of your mind, therefore you're in control of your results when you're looking at these big projects that schools bringing you, you can control your mind and thus your results by simply breaking that project down. So you know the 30 page thesis paper and you know the five main points you're looking to make, right, 30, let's say it's 30 pages, five main points, that's six pages per, per main point really maybe five main, five pages for per main point if you're going to be doing an intro and an outro, right, then you got to imagine that each page maybe is 250 words. So you're taking it up as we go along, but now five pages is only 1,250 words, you can write 1,250 words in three hours. If you've got your research, if you've got your organizational skills down to a science, and this is something that high school is teaching you, right, first it's, you know, those little five, seven page papers about a book you read, but it's been preparing you to continuously escalate your workflow and your work load. So that once you leave you have the capability to take on a project and get it done when the boss says get it done, whether they give you three hours, three days, three weeks or 30 months, right, you're going to get the work done generally in the amount of time, a lot of to you. The person who is forward thinking immediately starts working on it so that they can get it done at a pace that actually suits their desired outcome. Do you want to really harness that information, something that you can keep inside your mind and you'll be able to access in the future, probably best that you don't try to cram the whole paper into three days then. So you're capable of far more than you realize and we don't often know what we're capable of until we push ourselves just a little bit past the brink trying to smash down a 30 page paper in three days is pushing us way beyond our brink. And at some point we're just going to type it all up and say well it is whatever it is and then if we were to go back and read it after we turned it in we'd be like wow I see 10 things I would have done differently. You are capable of far more than you realize you also want to be giving yourself time to actualize that project to its highest fulfillment. When you just cram everything in your art necessarily taking any of the learning and being able to put that down on paper as much as you're in a state of franticness. You're emotional while you're in this you're in that complete fight mode cortisol and adrenaline or pumping through you and yeah you got it done. But was it done to the best of your capabilities is this something that you would feel proud you know showing your parents are showing a future employer. Would you be would you be happy if they said explain to me your workflow and you said yeah just dicked around the whole semester and then shoved it all into three days instead. You might think well wow doesn't that show my ability to really get a lot done in a short amount of time again we are capable far more than we realize when push comes to shove we can get a ton of things done in a 24 hour day will it be our best work more than likely not. You have all the resources you need inside of you in order to succeed in college in your relationships with your personal growth and development. You have shown yourself ways that you are disciplined where you can take the determination and turn it into this tenacity and resiliency so each and every day you're showing up as the best version of yourself. Bye-bye. whenever some adversity slides in there, you have the ability to bounce back from it. The key is that ability to get up, to have self-love for yourself, that whenever you don't get the grade that you desired, that you can then take apart your workflow and say, "Okay, well, here are some ways that I could do it more desirably next time." Except who you were the time you turned it in and got the C realizing that in the future, if you do it differently, you'll get a different outcome. Will it be better or worse than a C? That's up to you. It's up to your ability to continuously work on something, knowing that there's always another step forward. There's always, you think you've created this boundary, well, this is as good as I can be. That's a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset will tell you, "This is as good as I can be. This is as good as it's going to get." A growth mindset alerts you to the fact that there's always room to grow. There's always room to push something a little bit further. You can forgive yourself for your past indiscretions, your past inability to step up and work as hard as you know you could have worked, be vulnerable with yourself and say, "Okay, you know what? This is why I didn't work on it the way I could have." Fear, success, and fear failure, they operate very similarly inside the brain. There might be a part of you that thinks, "Wow, what if I put 100% of myself forward on this project, and then I don't get an A? What's that say about me?" So I'll have acid. So when I do get the inevitable B or C, I can say, "Well, I got the B or C because I have acid. If I had tried 100% of me and poured myself into this, then I would have gotten an A." A lot of people live in a world where they would rather justify not working as hard on something and only getting a B, rather than just working as hard as they can on something and then getting the B and then accepting that that was where their work is at now and that there's still room to grow. I have done this in the past. I remember the way I went through college. Hell, I remember the way I went through most of my 20s and 30s. I'd prepared just enough to know that I was prepared, but not as prepared that had I not succeeded that I wouldn't have been able to say, "Well, I had a little more left in the tank. I don't want to be someone who says that I left something in the tank. I want to say that I spent it all, that I burned it all, all the fuel. I laid it all on the line and I did exactly as good as I could in that moment knowing that there's room for growth in the future. I just got back from teaching at a leadership conference that me and one of my business, me and another coach trainer, have a business together while we also have our own separate businesses and we teach people in LP and becoming life and business coaches and how to become leadership trainers and leaders in their own communities. We do this through neuro-linguistic programming, which is something I've been peppering throughout this show since the moment it started. We go out there and we're training these future leaders. They're current leaders. We're just training them to be even more desirable leaders. I put it all on the line. I mean, there was some times after I was done teaching my brain was mush. I was spent. I was cached. I was going into my bedroom at like 10 o'clock at night and putting on a little bit of television just unwind and falling asleep while it was played. There was nothing left in the tank. I was completely spent. And I loved that about myself. Did I do 100%? Did I knock it out of the park every single time? I see room for growth. I absolutely see room for growth. Even if I would have walked away from that thinking I had done it 100%. That's to me not possible. There's always a little bit more. Always a little bit more left in the tank. Maybe Michael Phelps can walk away from Beijing and say, I put, there was no more left in the tank. Seven goals and seven events. I think he knocked it out. Maybe he got a bronze in one of them, but that may have been a team one. Not important. What's important is just focusing on the fact that the guy crushed it. Maybe he can walk away from that saying, you know what, I put it all out there. But even one of the races, he only won by like one one thousandth of a second. He could easily say, you know what? Should have won that by 10 one 10 10 10 10th of the second. Even he walked away from that more than likely saying he could have done a little bit more. This goggles came off at one point for one of the races. He could say I could put my goggles on better. There's always room for a continued growth forward. If we're willing to just release this inner desire to do things perfectly. Perfection doesn't exist. What one person thinks is perfect will be another person's, yeah, that's okay. When Mona Lisa was first painted, people thought it was just dull. When Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address, the media back then said that it was a water down and it was just a boring old speech. All right. Now the Mona Lisa is held at the highest of levels of art from that era as well as that the Gettysburg address has seen as one of the most powerful speeches that a president's ever given. But in the moment, it was just sort of seen as, yeah, that's okay. Meanwhile, we're over here looking at those things as if they were perfection. And back then, people were looking at them like, there's a lot of room for improvement. So realize that that perfection is all about perception. And that's all subjective to each individual. What is your subjective perspective on the work you're doing? As you flow into spring break and come out of this really, you know, in the final countdown to the end of this term, are you putting it all on the line? Are you giving yourself room to grow? Are you noticing where you can start projects earlier or start studying earlier? And this makes you more readily available for the knowledge that is being introduced to you. Your mental health is extremely important. And if you're waiting to the last minute to get projects done and then not getting the best of grades and then that sends you down a depression spiral, right? There's a lot of reasons why people can start to get sad and ultimately depressed in their lives. And you want to be mindful of the ones that you have direct control of. Getting your work done ahead of time, staying up to date on all the study materials, meeting with your tutors or meeting with your guidance counselor, meeting with your mental health counselor, staying up on these things. It's like we don't want to be waiting for the next paycheck in order to pay a bill that came in today. We want to have a bank account. We want to have some savings in there so that when we need it, it's available. This works well with your time, your energy, your mental health. Do you have some time banked in case something unexpected shows up and you've got to leave campus to go take care of your family or be involved in something else? Are you caught up? And maybe even a little bit ahead so that if you miss a few days, it just gets you right back to where you would have been. Had you not been caught up? Had you not been ahead of the game? What is your savings account look like? Not just in your money, but in your time in your mental health. How are you finding joy in the little things in life? We're not looking for this surround myself with things that bring me joy, kind of mentality as much as we're seeking to find joy in the things that surround us in the difficulties. When we pull that little bit of extra discipline and determination out and say this is the greatest place to spin this on. This is exactly where I need to be in this moment right now. All of these things are inside of you already. You have shown tenacity, resiliency, self-acceptance and the ability to forgive yourself. You've done it in so many areas of your life. Are you making sure you're accessing those resources throughout your college experience? When you start to feel down on yourself, are you able to say, you know what? I get that today wasn't the best day, but you know what? Three days ago, I crushed it. Let's go back and let's see what we did to crush that day and let's bring some of those resources, some of that time creation into the present so that we can redefine what it means to have a quote-unquote bad day. Not all my days are great. They're not. But I have the ability to self-explore, to increase my awareness around what makes a quote-unquote good versus bad day for myself and find those, again, quote-unquote good days, more desirable days and say, oh, this is why I had everything scheduled out and I got up a little bit early and I stayed on top of my game and I also got a little exercise and I did a little bit of working out. Like, what is it that creates a great day for you and what about the days that are not so great? Bring that formula from the great days and seek to replicate it every single day and again, life is 50/50. Some days are good, some days are bad, some interactions are good, some are bad. It's just life. Putting all the weight on one behavior, all the weight on one moment, it's blocking us from the creative control we actually have over the experiences that we are living through each and every day. You are in control of your mind, therefore you are in control of your results. If you keep spiraling on the negative, then your results are inevitably going to start to show negative. If you focus your mind on the positive, not in a toxic way, we're not looking for toxic positivity here. It's okay to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, you know what? You could have done better today. And so tomorrow, let's strive to do that. One step forward each and every day is going to put you a hell of a lot further along the path, then if you're just standing back waiting to take these broad jumps. Sometimes we don't jump. Each and every day a step forward compared to just trying to launch myself, you know, forward by 30 feet, I would rather be taking one step forward each and every day. Because in that broad jump over those 30 feet, then I land somewhere and I'm, is that even where I wanted to go? But if I was taking small steps each and every day, I can be flexible. I can see opportunities to shift my perspective, take on something new, learn something that will encourage growth within me. If I'm just looking for those huge blasts forward, I cram in a paper into three days, I'm not learning a lot of valuable life skills that come from planning, putting things together, strategizing and taking action. You have all of these inside of you and as we move forward into spring, I want to encourage you to pay attention to your mental health. How are your behaviors each and every day helping you along the path toward a desirable mental health versus how is your actions each and every day leading you towards an undesirable mental health? This is extremely important to have this kind of self awareness, to be able to look inside yourself and judge yourself, not with anger and bitterness and hatred, but to simply evaluate where did I do good, where can I grow and what was really great. It's that kind of acceptance and self love that will increase your mental health and emotional intelligence is a much, much bigger determiner of your success in life than your IQ ever will be. All right, my friends, go out there and keep being awesome as always, inclusivity over exclusivity, the power of positive energy, release and flow. See you next week. Bye-bye. [Music]