Resilience
Where does mental toughness come from?
Worried about being able to survive your hectic life as a senior executive? Apparently, you are not alone. A Google Scholar search returns over four million books and articles on the subject. There’s a lot of stress out there.
How should you cope with the day-to-day pressures that come with senior roles? I had the opportunity to work with a brilliant colleague, Nick Petrie, whose book with Dr. Derek Rogers, Work Without Stress, offers terrific advice which I’ll summarize here.
Nick, a cancer survivor, found himself consumed by worry about his disease as rounds of treatment, remission and reappearance of the cancer repeated themselves. Despite his brilliance, Nick found that most of his attention was diverted to worrying about when his cancer would return, whether it would be treatable, and what would become of his family if it could not be cured. Then, he met Dr. Rogers, who helped him think about things differently. In essence, what Dr. Rogers helped Nick learn was this.
Pressure is everywhere but people react to it differently. Those who are felled by pressure ruminate on it; they can’t let it go, and it is always present in their thinking. A simple golf analogy will help you know whether you are one of those people who will fall victim to pressure or thrive on it (if you aren’t a golfer, you’ll have to think about a similar analogy in your own life).
You step up to the tee of a par three; the green is surrounded by water and sand traps. There’s only one place your ball can land and be safe, and that’s on the green. As you get ready to swing, are you nervous about hitting the shot or thrilled to be taking on the challenge? You hit the shot. It lands in the water. Are you upset with yourself, mad at the course designer, or blaming the wind? Or are you smiling knowing that you did your best and the challenge was everything you hoped it would be? Ruminators don’t let things go. They keep going over and over things in their mind. In the case of the failed golf shot, after the round they are still thinking about what might have happened if they hit a different club, took another practice swing, or waited for the wind to die down. Past mistakes or future fears consume them whereas non-ruminators quickly let things go and move on. Tomorrow is another day.
Related tendencies are emotional inhibition; toxic achieving; avoidance coping; and perfectionism. Emotional inhibition is attempting to bury your negative emotions rather than acknowledging them. Sadness, fear and anger are natural reactions to events and signals to our brain that we need to stop to deal with something that’s bothering us rather than just pretending we’re fine. Pretending we’re fine only makes things worse because we can’t fool ourselves. When we bury emotions, we know we are burying emotions and we only feel worse rather than better as a result. We achieve emotional release when we give our emotions their due, allow enough time and attention to process them, and enable ourselves to understand how we will move forward despite what occurred.
Toxic achieving is a relentless compulsion to achieve success in the eyes of others. We can never be good enough until everyone in our lives appreciates everything we do; even winning the Nobel prize isn’t enough; toxic achievers just set new goals for themselves, like winning two or three.
Avoidance coping is dealing with stress by avoiding it at all costs. Procrastination, avoidance of responsibility, or denial of reality can bring short-term stress release but increase stress in the long run.
Perfectionism, in contrast to toxic achieving, is the feeling that a task should have been performed better, even if success was achieved. We won the game, but we missed a lot of shots; there’s still room for improvement and we continue to be more critical than happy with our performance.
When we ruminate about any of these causes of stress, we amplify their impact rather than reduce it. We feel sorry for ourselves, or angry with ourselves, or upset with others for letting us down or demanding too much.
To build resilience, we need to end our rumination. To do this, Petrie and Rogers recommend “waking up” by which they mean living in the present rather than in the past or fearing the future. We bring ourselves back to the present by being aware of our senses and what is happening in the moment, since that is what we can control. We need to be clear about the things we can influence and the things we can’t and apply our energy to those things that will lead to more positive outcomes going forward. Resilient leaders learn to learn from the past to understand what they might do differently and then do it, not just wish they had. They don’t avoid taking risks just because they have failed previously. They take smarter risks but keep moving forward. They let go of the things they can’t change and focus their energy on the things they can. Petrie quotes Nelson Mandela, who when asked if he was angry about the time he spent in prison, replied, “If I thought it would be useful, I would be.” In every way, non-ruminators keep trying and by virtue of focusing their energy on the next shot rather than thinking about the ball that went in the water, their optimism grows. They move on. Imagine if all Mandela did for the rest of his life was to complain about the injustice of his incarceration.
“Getting back on the horse,” really is good advice as it turns out. We need that advice most when we welcome it the least, which is at the low point in our rumination. But don’t offer it to someone unless you first help the person understand that rumination may feel like the right thing to do but is actually a poisonous addiction.
Then, instead of waiting until the person is ready to talk, which may or may not ever happen, bring them back to the present. Help them awaken fully to the moment they are in. Tell them what you need from them in the here and now. Connect with them, work with them, and take the first steps with them because it’s taking the steps that will make the difference, not making a plan. Help them step up to the next tee and shake it off.
When it’s you who should stop ruminating, don’t make it hard for those who are trying to help. Awake to the moment, ask what you can do that might start things moving in a more positive direction, and invite others to move with you so that you aren’t in it alone. There’s always a chance that the next shot you hit could be a good one.