Chapter 11
Lead by Thriving on Stress

Learn how to thrive on stress. Stress provides a tremendous incentive to perform well. Leaders should spend less time reading about it and going to stress-management seminars, which bombard you with information about stress's harmful effects, and more time making it an asset.

Stress is unquestionably a determining factor in success versus survival. It comes into play in everything you do every day, both professionally and personally.

On the one hand, leaders thrive on stress. I've never met a good leader who was not a stress seeker. Survivors, on the other hand expend enormous amounts of energy avoiding stressors. Consequently, they only survive at best.

Whether they're working in a sport or corporate environment or working through a chronic illness, the people I have worked with over the past 45 years realize that stress is always there. Initially, it is perceived as a negative by almost everyone. But we need to understand that stress levels do not make us sick or cause other negative things in our lives. Rather, it is how we perceive and react to stress that can have an unhealthy effect. This will be surprising to you if you've always been told that stress is a negative, even overwhelming influence in your life.

How much time do you spend every day trying to rid your life of stress? How much does stress cost industry every year? Billions of dollars are spent by corporations to deal with stress. Much of that cost takes the form of disability payments. Employees can retire from some professions after seven years with as much as 75 percent disability because of job-related stress.

It would seem that stress is a significantly negative factor in terms of productivity and health. However, probably more than 80 percent of stress factors are neither positive nor negative when they confront your system. They become negative primarily because of how people perceive them. We hear the word stress and immediately begin thinking of all the things that are wrong with our lives. We seldom think of the positive aspects that actually act as motivators to make positive changes that will benefit us. Stress management seminars are very popular ways to teach people how to relax and eliminate stress, but too often these seminars are nothing more than knee-jerk reactions to a traditional definition of stress. The truth is that your mindset causes most stressors to become more negative.

Of course, I'm referring mostly to those stressors that cause you mental anguish. There are physical stressors that are obviously extremely negative, at least initially, to those who suffer from disabilities, have had accidents, or have chronic illnesses. Even in those instances, there are enough assets present within your system so that, if you use the stressors as motivators to accomplish things, your life can continue to be very productive.

By definition, stress is the amount of wear and tear the body and mind experiences. It has a physiological impact on the body. For instance, stress when you walk puts pressure on the joints in your legs. When you throw, you put stress on your arms and shoulders. When you talk, there's stress on your vocal cords. Even when you breathe, there's stress on your respiratory system. Another physiological example is the fight-or-flight response that is triggered by major emotional stressors.

So there are physical stressors and responses everywhere every day in everyone's life. You need to accept that this is true and will probably always be. When you fail to accept these physical and psychological stressors as normal, they can develop into major issues.

There are many ways to deal with stress, but the first thing we have to realize is that stressors are not necessarily meant to shut your system down. In fact, most of the time, they are meant to be incentives to enable you to become better. Stressors make you what you are and drive you to where you need to be. They can bring you to the emotional edge and get you where you need to be in order to obtain that optimal level of performance. If they don't drive you to become better, stressors may make you worse through illness such as depression or burnout.

Success or failure depends on your perception of these stressors. The operative term is perception. Because of both personal and professional conditioning, people tend to panic when under great stress. They let stress control their lives. This is an issue for anyone at any age. I've known parents whose five-year-old kindergartners were in counseling due to stress in their environment. I've known people no older than 26 who have had heart attacks related to stress.

Stress really does not discriminate. In the workplace, stress-related problems cause widespread symptoms such as headaches, nervous tension, irritability, burnout, wasted time, and poor time management. All contribute in some respects to absenteeism, which has been a major issue in business, especially in the present economic environment.

To repeat, up to 80 percent of stress is neither positive nor negative. Traffic is an obvious example of a stressor that isn't inherently negative. Others common stressors are deadlines, shortages of financial resources, and other constraints that propose difficulty. But anything can be a stressor, including other people, children, and, of course, bills. Almost everything you can imagine that affects your life creates some degree of stress. All these stressors can be assets to your productivity if you see them as incentives to success; otherwise they can become detrimental. The key is how you deal with them. This is a serious and conscious choice that every person has to make. By choosing to perceive those stressors, if at all possible, as bringing potential positives to your life, you can harness their power and thrive.

At one point in my life, I was partially paralyzed. I was in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and was diagnosed with a stress-related condition for which I had to be hospitalized. Though I've never been sure if stress was really the problem, I nonetheless recovered and began to do about 10 times as much as I had done before. My productivity soared because I learned to take better care of myself. I exercised more and I ate better. I looked at things from a different perspective. Since then, I've never been happier personally or professionally, despite the many stressors I have encountered.

In 2004 I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). People with chronic illness understand that stress is a major issue for patients, and I was definitely under pressure. I had no idea what MS was, and I had no idea how devastating it could be. The only thing I knew was that it was not good.

After spending many days and nights wondering and worrying about what was going to happen and feeling sorry for myself, I came to realize that there was a purpose to all of this. I acknowledged that MS was indeed a stressor, but I could use it to become a better person. I had probably gotten complacent in my profession. I believe my programs were still good, but I'm not sure that I appreciated them as much as I should have. I began to work harder. I found I had more control over my time and became, I think, more productive than before I was diagnosed. I certainly learned to appreciate every day of my life more than I had before.

With that in mind, I made a conscious choice to turn the stress of my MS diagnosis into a positive incentive in my life, and I never looked back. Obviously not everyone is able to do that, but at least we all have the emotional capability to take control of our lives under stress and salvage more good things to make ourselves better and to be happy.

As a leader in a corporate setting, it's critical that you understand that stress is a part of any environment. It's your responsibility as a leader to help your team members evaluate the stress, categorize it, analyze it, and use it as an incentive. If people don't react to stress in a positive way, then the end result is exhaustion of the system, and obviously no one wants that. But it's your first responsibility, not only as a leader but also as a corporate person, to demonstrate how you deal with stress in a positive way so that your team can pick up on it.

There are many typical reactions to stress and we will discuss four or five of those. There are just as many ways to recognize stress and deal with it in a positive way, and we will also discuss doing that. The important note here is that when you have many things on your mind that you're thinking about, worrying about, or trying to attend to, you're going to have undue stress in your life. You may try to give everything equal consideration and time, and hope for positive results, but that's not going to help you succeed. You have to begin to prioritize. You can't be happy as a multitasker. As I like to describe it, multitasking puts mud in the water. It clouds your judgment and your ability to dedicate your full efforts to the most important tasks at hand. You have to be able to prioritize several stressors before you can make them incentives, so you must be able to focus on two or three things instead of trying to tackle everything at once. We've talked about this in several chapters. You need to be able to sit down and list all the things that are on your mind, prioritize, and eliminate. You'll need to give your emotional attention to those items that are most important at this particular time.

Consider for a moment a person who is physically disabled. She is still the same person she has always been, but she has a new stressor and will have to figure out new ways to do the same things she has always done. It is possible. It is a choice that is critical to make.

If you have a chronic illness or memory issues, as in my case, you may have to write more things down. Despite these change, you have to learn to enjoy every single day. Instead of setting an extensive, long-term goal, set smaller daily or hourly goals. That will help you deal with stress. Go back and review Chapter 4 and you'll find that setting goals in the suggested manner will indeed be an asset to you.

If you have something specific that you're trying to do, as opposed to letting the stress in your life cause you to put things off or to procrastinate, set goals to help you get the job done. You'll feel better having accomplished some things on your list, even if they are small. As I've said before, it's easy to feel bad and hard to feel good, but once you do the things that are necessary to feel good, like using stress as an incentive, it's amazing how much more productive you can be.

There are a lot of stress reactions. They are generally categorized into five different areas. I don't think any of these five are particularly helpful to you, but they're typical ways that people deal with stress, and you need to know about them. The first is withdrawal. In other words people remove themselves from a stressful environment. Sometimes I think strategic withdrawal is okay if you need to get your ideas together and think about things before you confront the stressor. But just withdrawing in order to avoid emotional exposure to stress can be detrimental to your system because, when you come back to the environment, most likely the stress will still be there and it will probably be even more significant than before. It's very important for leaders to notice when people withdraw and understand why it happens. Then they can take advantage of a teachable moment to help people confront their stressors head on.

The second response to stress is helplessness. I think everyone at some point has experienced this feeling, especially when you're sitting in traffic, having a bad day, or feeling ill and medication doesn't seem to be helping. A feeling of helplessness can creep into your system very quickly. It inhibits recovery and can shut your system down, so you need to do whatever you can to avoid it. If you begin to feel helpless in a stressful environment, then try to think of some situations you've been in that caused similar feelings and think about what you did to recover. Doing so will give you a springboard for recovery.

Internalizing is the third way many people attempt to cope with stress. A person who internalizes stress does not talk about it, deal with it, or let other people on the team step in and help. I think this may be the most harmful to your body and the most hazardous to your health because the more you hold stress in, the more apt you are to have problems with headaches, ulcers, rashes, and other kinds of physical manifestations of internalized stress. Internalizing is a very scary way to deal with stress. A difficult situation doesn't get any better by holding it inside.

The fourth approach to dealing with stress is overcontrol. This is of particular importance to people who want to be leaders. Many times when things seem to be out of control and going in a negative direction, tightening your grip seems to be the most logical step to take. This is often not true. Many people in stressful environments attempt to over-control what's happening around them. In a corporate environment, these people tend to become micromanagers, and subsequently they have a negative impact on the office environment and lose a lot of good employees.

I can recall at least one situation in sports where the general manager was an incredibly overcontrolling person. Because of that, the team was not permitted to do their job without answering to him first. My feeling has always been that if you hire well, it's best to let your people work. In sports, the manager's job is to have good players, put them on the field, and let them play. Overmanaging is worse than not managing at all.

If you have good people on your team, an environment with less control is better than one where the manager is domineering. No one can improve without the opportunity to take ownership over their work. Overcontrol, especially for the long term, is not a viable way to deal with stress. In rare case, brief periods of overmanaging may be beneficial to get people back on track, but once they are there it's your responsibility as a leader to help them understand that they have a job to do, a good environment in which to work, and a leader who is going to let them play the game.

Emotional outbursts are the fifth way people unsuccessfully cope with stress. This is my favorite because it is the most interesting. Many people who seem to be pretty mild mannered, quiet people can all of a sudden become overwhelmed by stress that they have been internalizing. When it gets to be too much for their system, they have an emotional outburst. Everyone has probably experienced this at one time or another, either in front of other people or when alone. But an emotional outburst of 30 seconds may cost you years of loyalty and respect from the people around you. It may even have cost you friendships.

I've always thought that getting mad is not an issue, in sports or in the corporate environment. My perception is that if you don't get mad, you don't care. The reality is that anger enables us to have a catharsis for our emotions, but it's critical that you get past those feelings very quickly. When I talk about speed of recovery from adversity, I mean that it's okay to get upset, but you need to get over it in a reasonable amount of time. You see it in sports and in the corporate environment.

If your emotional outburst causes you to lose the respect of your people, you're basically lost as a leader. The only way you can regain respect is to go to a new environment because most of the people who witnessed your outburst are going to be suspicious of your motives for being nice to them. So once you lose respect, you're done.

If you look at these five ways of dealing with stress, I think you would be hard pressed to convince me that any of them is desirable. You need to give a lot of thought to how you want to react to stress, at least emotionally.

If you look at how people typically try to relieve stress, one good example is running. Many people consider running to be a good way to relieve emotional stress, but it puts tremendous physical stress on your knees, hips, and joints. Running is not always a relief to stress, and many times it causes more stress. Other people will play golf or play tennis for stress relief, but if you've ever played, you understand very quickly that the sport environment often causes more stress than it relieves. So unless you play for the right reasons, then you probably shouldn't consider it a way to relieve stress.

Going beyond those five negative ways of dealing with stress, I would like to put forth a positive method: look forward to and thrive on stress. Stress will either make you great or end your life; it's your choice to make. If you ask 100 people who are recovering from heart attacks brought on by stress how they feel, an overwhelming number will tell you they feel better than they've felt in 20 years and they're more productive. My question to you is very simple: Do you have to have a heart attack before you get healthy?

After dealing with professional athletes, corporations, and many folks with chronic illness, I've developed a few keys for thriving on stress. These keys may at least give you an idea of how to pursue positive outcomes. Remember that all the stressors can be either potential assets or liabilities. It's your choice to make. In fact, the most dangerous stressors seem to be the small, nagging things that come up every day, not necessarily major life events.

I think a lot of people who have gone through catastrophic injuries and life-altering situations have gotten through them and are stronger than they were, at least emotionally. It's the little things that pop up every day that you probably need to learn how to react to. It's the responsibility of leaders to help their teammates deal with these niggling little stressors on a daily basis.

The first key to thriving in stressful situations is to separate the stressors from the symptoms. We often react with pretty significant emotion to symptoms, but we never get to the sources. If you recall our discussion of assets and liabilities (Chapter 2), I said that on a list of 10 liabilities, you will find that there may be 2 or 3 true liabilities and the other 7 or 8 items are really just symptoms of those. The same thing happens when you examine your stressors. If you write down all the things that cause stress in your life—there could be 10 or 20 or 50 things—when you review them, you will likely find that you are dealing with only 4 or 5 real stressors. The rest of the things are symptoms of those basic issues. Realizing this will enable you to get off to a much more positive start in dealing with stress.

Another thing that is critical to managing stress is the ability to drain your emotions from negative situations. The better you can neutralize emotions during conflicts, the better off you're going to be. One way to do that is to list the elements of a particular stressor and then, when emotions begin to run higher than is comfortable, look back at what you wrote to regain your balance. If you're going to have a meeting or other situation that you expect to be stressful, beforehand list the things that you want to address. Then, if the conversation becomes emotional, you can always review what you wrote. This prevents an emotional discussion of stressors, which makes stress worse.

I had a corporate client recently who was dealing with a very tough situation, and he was basically intimidated by the person he was dealing with. I suggested that before the next meeting he list the topics that he wanted to discuss, keeping it as objective as possible. Then, when he started to feel emotional during the meeting, he could go use the list to stay focused and neutralize his feelings. That conversation went well, the outcome was good, and now the two have a decent working relationship.

The third key to using stress to your advantage is to take some time to make a comprehensive list of all your personal and professional stressors. Don't worry about presenting them in any particular order; just write each one down as you think of it. After that, you will be able to identify a lot of things that you can turn into incentives. For example, there are a lot of stressors in relationships that we need to deal with in order to make them stronger. As we mentioned before, withdrawing can make a situation worse, and it can get to the point where there's no recovery. If you block communication in a relationship for long, then the reestablishment of communication becomes very awkward and uncomfortable. If you are aware of your stressors and share this knowledge with others, you will be able to manage your emotions and build stronger relationships.

Once you have your list of stressors, decide which can be changed to become assets. The key to channeling stress so it helps you thrive is tying it to an action. Ask yourself: What am I going to do to make this a productive element in my life? Just like you did with your goals in Chapter 4, make each action specific and attainable, and put a time line on it. If you need help changing that stressor into an asset or an incentive, then call on those folks who are on your team. Surround yourself with people who will be honest with you and ask you tough questions to help you deal with the stress.

As you begin changing stressors into incentives, select a simple one to start with. Choose a stressor that will give you a feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment once you've dealt with it. Then, you can move on to more complicated and more cumbersome stressors. Eventually, you will be able to deal with challenges in a quick and efficient manner.

The last suggestion I have to help you deal with stress is to put your progress into words. I'm sure you've heard some of the benefits of talking to yourself, and I don't think that's a bad idea. Verbalize to yourself that you're better after dealing with a stressor than you were before it started. Adversity is not a bad thing in life. I've often said that you never learn to fly around trees until you fly into them. You need to encourage yourself, especially if there are not others around to give you a sense of accomplishment.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you set out to accomplish something every day, which you should, then you must thrive on stress. This idea always makes me thing of John Smoltz, a pitcher with the Atlanta Braves who still may be the best big-game pitcher in baseball. He always thrived on the challenge and the stress of high-stakes games. For many years, he held the record for playoff game victories. Why? Because those were the games where there was the most stress and, consequently, they were the games he most looked forward to.

Once again positive expectations are the foundation for achievement and quick recovery from adversity. You need to know what you expect of yourself and others in stressful environments, and let others know what you expect of them. It's a major step toward reducing stress in the environment. Not fully knowing what's expected in the workplace creates a very stressful environment, and it causes people to leave jobs every day. Frustration, doubt, and confusion may fuel a stressful situation by activating people's fight-or-flight responses. Clear expectations can prevent this.

We touched on this earlier, but I also recommend that people try to exercise as much as possible, whenever they can. The value of non-competitive exercise in dealing with stress is far too vast to discuss in this chapter. It gives you, in most cases, time alone to think without the clutter that's usually present in personal and professional environments.

Try to keep it fun. Stress can do a number of things to us but it can also do a number of things for us if we channel it in appropriate ways. You can find the fun side of anything if you take time to do it. I've been in some interesting situations recently that could have caused me to either be very frustrated or to laugh it off and have fun. Balance is a big issue for people with MS, and I recently fell while walking in a city square. I tumbled out into the street, breaking a couple ribs, and I couldn't get up. While I was lying in the street, trying to flag someone down to help me, people were just passing me by and waving back.

I called my son to come and get me, and he and I sat on the sidewalk afterward laughing about what had happened. I told him that so many people were waving at me as they passed.

He pointed out that my long hair gave me a certain look that prevented people from rushing to offer assistance. “Dad, they thought you were homeless and sleeping on the sidewalk.”

My response was, “If they had stopped, I would have asked them for money because I knew some of those people.”

It was a situation that could have been very frustrating and it could have led to a lot of stress. Instead, I was able to perceive the situation as being somewhat funny. It took me a few weeks to get over the physical problems, but I had recovered from the emotional shock by the time I got up and sat on the curb.

You have to accept the fact that stress is a part of your life, and in many ways stressors can put some levity into your daily life. When it's all said and done, every day should be an exciting day for you.

And I've always thought laughter is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get through stress. To be able to laugh at yourself is, I think, a tremendous asset. Some people are so wrapped up in the corporate structure, numbers, and black-and-white issues in the environment, there's no gray area in their lives, and they find it hard to enjoy every single day, even though, as I've said many, many times, stress is a part of every day; and if it's going to be there, then why not use it to your advantage.

img Make Stress Work for You

A. List your top ten stressors.

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B. Which of those stressors can and should be aids to your productivity?

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C. Indicate the action necessary to convert each stressor on List B to an asset.

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D. Of the remaining List A stressors, choose those which can and should be eliminated.

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E. Indicate the action necessary to eliminate each stressor in List D. Keep the following guidelines in mind:

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