Cynthia Lou.

As entrepreneurs, our most important work is to manage our selves. Our energy levels, our moods, our attitudes, in order that we can spread positive and creative growth through our work and our companies.

Finding my zen at the Tour de France this year made all the difference. Last year I was tired, stressed, and frazzled. This year I emerge with many great stories, leads and opportunities, as well as the mental strength to put them into motion. Recovery was much faster this year, as I was more efficient and calm in the middle of chaos and potentially stressful situations.

This year I brought with me a series of mental tools I’ve been fine-tuning and testing at home and put them to use in moments of acute stress at Le Tour. The stress and chaos of Le Tour gave me even more opportunity to refine my tools. Last year I got sad, scared, worried, and stressed, which leave me with few useful results in the end. This year, I was happier, more relaxed, more able to create good work, with fewer freak out incidents and fewer tears.

Here are a few of the Lessons I learned this year in the art of zen amidst chaos.

1. Own my niche and favor my strengths.

   Last year I knew I was covering the Tour as a blogger, but pretended to be a news reporter. What?? I tried to cover a bit of everything, and tried to cover all the same kind of ground other teams of reporters were covering. But, alas, they are NEWS, where my stories are features and first person. This year I fully owned the fact that I am a blogger, and not a hard-news reporter. This put me in a creative and not competitive place, and was much more my style and favored my strengths. Ironically, many of the news agency reporters were told to Tweet more, and to blog their experiences at the Tour. Great! I got to be ahead of the curve!

   Trying to fight against my the flow and be someone I’m not, report in manners that are not necessarily my niche, was a stressor last year. Going with the flow of what I’m good at and having a clear direction put me in the river zen.

2. Smarter energy management – taking micro and macro-level breaks.

   Not only do riders recover and conserve energy at every opportunity possible, so do writers, journalists, and bloggers.

   On a macro level, I stepped away from the Tour for 10 days, using the time to refresh myself and plan out the stories I wanted to cover (knowing my niche and strengths gave me ideas for a game plan). On a micro level, I worked in 45 minute blocks, taking five minutes off in between. This is a trick I learned in Eben Pagan’s “Wake Up Productive”, and is designed to optimize the mind’s ability to focus and be alert. (Check out this quick vid here about Wake Up Productive).

   Instead of being frazzled, desperate, exhausted, and plain overwhelmed,my first day back I was bounding in joy and refreshed energy. I startled (and maybe annoyed??) the first few journalists I encountered with my exuberance. They were tired, and recounted to me the story of how they put they couldn’t get off the Pyrenean mountain-top finish, how they didn’t move at all for quite some time in the massive traffic jam, how they finally got into civilization at 12:30am at which time they hangrily (hungry + angry) searched for food and then went to finish their work.

3. Not suppressing my enthusiasm.

   Last year I was too shy to be too excited. Trying to “blend in” and keep to myself, “be serious”, I didn’t want to stand out as that overly-excited newbie. But this year I’ve learned to dare to show emotion more, the good and the bad. When I encountered the exhausted journalists above, I didn’t care that I was happy. I dared to show my genuine emotion. I could see a few people annoyed, and a few people turned my direction because I was indeed a breath of fresh air in a world where something glorious like the Tour has become routine, boring, strenuous, and “just” a “job”.

   From an energy conservation standpoint, studies show that suppressing emotions dampens cognitive ability and drains energy.
   Psychologists did an experiment where they had two groups of people watch a very emotional movie. One group was told to suppress their emotions – whether they felt like laughing or crying, they had to suppress what they were feeling. The other group just watched the movie and expressed emotions normally.
   Afterwards, both groups were given a series of mental exercise to perform, exercises that required a lot of focus and concentration. The people who had to suppress their emotions did much worse than those who could express their emotions naturally. Those who suppressed their emotions burned their energy, willpower, and concentration on suppressing their emotions!

4. Pre-Organizing and Arranging Stories – preplanning and setting up times and dates

   This year I pre-set appointments for the stories I was covering, and I was able to plan ahead for someone to handle my car on the day I rode moto.

   I enjoyed a balance of pre-planned stories, and I also left enough time to capture the kinds of stories that happen only in the moment (see “Fights of the Tour de France”).

5. Using and TRUSTING my intuition more.

   1) to trust that stories would reveal themselves to me
   2) to find the best hotels when I thought I’d really messed up. I was certain it would be easy to find a place in Gap, but, when I got there everything was full! Until! I saw Japanese journalist Maki, and the first words out of our mouths to each other were, “I don’t have a place to stay tonight!” Through her contacts we were able to score a couple rooms in the convent in the middle of town, 2k from the start, and for just 25Euros that also included breakfast! SWEET!
   3) When the GPS got me lost, and the GPS will mess with you don’t you doubt it, I actually started to chill out, and use my gut to tell me which direction to go, even though many of the directions seemed counter to the directions in the road book, on the GPS, that the other team cars were headed…and I ended up beating the other team cars to the finish. Boo-yah!

   Trusting my gut and not freaking out saved me time and energy. In order to hear the intuition, I had to be calm cool and collected mentally. My quick exercise for this is to simply “STOP”, get quiet, and tune into what the gut is saying rather than the incessant rambling of my panicked mind.

6. Generating luck.

   Trusting my intuition, floating down that zen river, the results I got seemed like magical luck.
   Opportunities opened up for me, hotel rooms in the most interesting of areas (a room in a convent 2k from the start? Cool!), and stories that would have otherwise been missed.

   Last year I had a general overlay of worry that squeezed out my ability to see these opportunities.

   It’s like looking at my feet and getting stressed out wondering where the ocean is, when all I had to do was look up and see the ocean all around me.

7. Choosing my battles.

   Fight the French police, or concede?
   Cover the Galibier AND Alpe d’Huez?

   I’ve learned that karma’s a bitch, and fighting with police was not a battle I wanted to engage in. In the end, it seemed they ended up being quite gracious (see this post, “Observations from Riding Moto on a Mountain Stage”).
   I covered the Galibier with gusto and enthusiasm, and at the end of the day was extremely drained but happy with the awesome story I recorded. However, I was stuck in a traffic jam on the way down, the GPS sent me down many blocked roads, many narrow, super steep and windy roads with zero light, and I didn’t find my hotel until 1:30am. Yikes!

   It turned out to be lucky that I book my rooms daily, because the next day I chose to go straight to a cute town right outside of Grenoble and watch the mountain Alpe d’Huez finish from the comfort of a cafe, eating a croque monsieur, sipping a chardonnay, and processing pics from the day before.

   Turned out to be quite a fantastic choice!
   1) I heard horror stories of journalists stuck on the mountain, not arriving at their hotels until 2-2:30am.
   2) As a solo traveler, I did not have anyone to share the physical load (driving, carrying stuff) with, nor did I have anyone to share the mental load with (sometimes you just want a buddy who is going to tell you it’s going to be okay).
   3) I was fresh, rested, clear, and alert for the time trial stage.

8. Unlimited miles for the rental car.

   This alone saved me hundreds of dollars, and lots of stress. Last year I had a car with limited miles. Oops.
   It will kill your zen to always be wondering, “How much MORE over miles am I now? HOW far is the next stage? HOW far is my hotel??”

9. A hair dryer in every hotel room this year.

   This is indeed a victory! Not in the sense that I’ve lowered my standards enough that a simple hair dryer is victory, but, that I am thankful for and grateful for all the things that I want. This year I decided I required to stay at a level of hotel that was conducive to good rest (better rest = better results).

   And from experience, “Premiere Classe” is not, in fact a class of hotel that is premiere in class.

10. Making decisions from zen clarity, rather than out of fear and panic.

    Last year, in panic, I booked a few hotels in advance. However, many times I was too exhausted to make the extra 2hr drive to get there and booked something else close by, or I miscalculated that 12k takes 3hrs to in the mountains.

    This year, I pre-booked when it made sense and when I was making my decision from a clear and calm place. There were a few bookings left to “last minute”. My panicked mind screamed, “Book things NOW!!! You need certainty! Clarity! A path! Or you’ll diiiiieeeeeeeee!!!”, but my gut quietly said, “Why don’t you just wait and see?”

    It all worked out in the end. One example is above, where I stayed in the convent. Another example this worked in my favor was the day I rode on moto through the Alps, and hadn’t accounted for how exhausted I’d be afterwards. My initial plan was to drive 2.5 hours to the finish of the next stage, but instead I booked a hotel close to the finish so I could sleep earlier, and made the drive refreshed in the morning.

11. Stay away from people who are a negative energy drain, surround yourself with quality to upgrade your own quality.

    I’ve known the importance of the company one keeps and the environment one is surrounded by, but it was so distinctly laid out for me this Tour. Before, I’d accepted people who were negative or energy drains, thinking that I could simply steer my attention and energy away from them. But that energy I use steering away from negativity could be much better used in creation!

    This was my biggest – and unpredicted – lesson from this Tour.

    This “ah-ha” comes as a cumulation of:
    1) trusting my gut for who I do and don’t jive with,
    2) having a positive, creative focus (my niche and story ideas),
    3) demanding better energy management

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These are some of the practical examples of this at work during my Tour de France experiences.
How do you keep your cool in stressful situations?