What is everyone else doing?

Words = 104 Reading Time = 0 minutes 21 seconds

If you spend your time looking over the fence at your neighbour's garden do not be surprised if your own is full of weeds.

That is not the same as saying that your neighbour’s garden should be ignored. By all means take a look, see what lessons are to be learned and perhaps pick up new methods or fresh ideas.

However, if you spend all your time worrying about what the neighbours are up to, if you stand open-mouthed in awe at their goings-on, then your own backyard will – perforce – be ignored and your flowers, fruit and vegetables will wither for want of attention.

Learning from our mistakes

Words: 78 Reading time: 16 seconds

We spend needless time worrying about mistakes, mainly because we have been programmed during our formative years to concentrate on correcting our errors, rather than maximising our successes. What we have rarely been taught – but what we must quickly learn for ourselves in business – is that mistakes are the inevitable corollary of success. Unless we are making mistakes we are missing opportunities; we are not trying hard enough and we are forgoing huge, valuable and irreplaceable learning.

Who cares if you're stressed?

Words: 708 Reading time: 2 minutes 22 seconds

The Health & Safety Executive have published figures showing that 6.7 million working days are lost each year due to the effects of stress. The cost to society is estimated to be in the region of £3.8 billion.

Stress is believed to be responsible for up to 40 per cent of all absences from work and can reduce employee performance by up to 70 per cent.

Now we have more labour-saving devices than at any time since the world began, why is it that?

When I ask ‘What is stress?’ I get different answers.

One set of answers is a list of symptoms, some of which are emotional, such as feeling irritable, frustration at having to wait for something, barely suppressed anger, generally feeling upset, lack of sense of humour, etc.

Other symptoms listed are physical, such as muscle tension, neck or shoulder pain, stomach upsets, 'pounding' or 'racing' heart, sweaty palms, 'butterflies', insomnia or excessive sleep, shortness of breath, etc.

Another set of answers list what people see as possible causes, such as job insecurity, heavy workload, infrequent rest breaks, poor communication in the organization, crowding, noise, insufficient leisure time, etc.

A third set of answers merely uses synonyms for stress, such as anxiety, hassle, pressure, strain, tension, worry.

But none of these actually tells me what stress is.

Aching joints and a runny nose might tell me I have influenza, but it is not influenza itself. Getting soaked in a downpour might make me susceptible to influenza, but it does not cause influenza. As we all now know, the true cause is viral.

So, what single root cause covers all of the above factors and manifestations of stress? What is the equivalent of the viral or bacterial agent where stress is concerned?

My suggestion is that stress only occurs when the situation, as we perceive it, demands more resources than we believe we have available at present to resolve it

Situation > Resources

As far as I can see that definition covers all cases and it helps by providing four different avenues of escape:

The situation can be avoid, vacated or mitigated.

Our perception of the situation can be revised, or reframed.

The resources required can be augmented, assembled, bought or borrowed.

Our beliefs about our resources can be challenged, replaced or adapted.

The other important point about this definition is that underlines the part played by perceptions and beliefs in the whole subject of stress. That is not to dismiss or denigrate the trauma reported by those experiencing stress, it merely points up the fact that we cannot isolate this stuff called stress and hold it in our hands. We cannot isolate it from the person directly concerned and measure it separately.

Because stress is not an objective reality, it is not equally experienced. Two individuals can be seated side by side in the same work environment, doing the same tasks and with the same demands place on them, in the same way, yet one individual will experience greater stress than the other.

This tells us that one other precondition is needed for someone to experience stress – the person concerned must actually care about the outcome. This is crucial, because unless you really care there will be no anxiety on your part about what may or may not transpire.

At the end of the football season, as various teams face demotion from one league to another, some fans become genuinely anguished. However, for those who do not follow football in general, or that team in particular, there is no concern one way or the other. Indeed, the whole organizational structure surrounding the sport could collapse and non-fans would be totally unaffected.

Stress is an internal phenomenon. We manufacture it ourselves. Sometimes we manufacture it inappropriately by caring about inconsequentials, or by caring too much about the wrong things. So when we are stress it is extremely useful to ask ourselves what is it that we care about so much, and is that sensible.

Who cares if you’re stressed?

You do!

As a parting thought, is it therefore nonsensical to blame employers for causing stress? And if stress arises because people care, how wise is it to work on increasing employee engagement? Isn’t this ultimately self-defeating?

Where’s Your Trumpet?

Words: 569 Reading time: 1 minute 54 seconds

I recently came across an aphorism of John Maxwell's (Attitude 101 from Nelson Business) who said “life is about 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react.”

One obvious implication is that if we choose to react less we will create more room for those things that happen to us. By choosing the events we want to notice we can respond in a considered manner with an outcome in mind, rather than being pulled hither and thither by our emotions in an uncontrolled way affected by random occurrences.

So far so good, but we also need to recognize that our life is often taken up with more than what happens. How much of life is worrying about things that will never happen? John Maxwell seems to have left that out of his reckoning.

Bob Proctor offers the following as an educated guess about the things that worry people:

Things that never happen – 40%;
Things past that can’t be changed by all the worry in the world – 30%;
Needless worries about our health – 12%;
Petty miscellaneous worries – 10%;
Real, legitimate worries – 8%.

And Sir Winston Churchill reminded us of the old man who said on his deathbed that he’d had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.

Evolution has favoured those people that accentuate the negative. Individuals who vividly recall their previous unhappy experience – or more likely someone else’s – with poisonous toadstools, or an angry grizzly bear is more likely to survive and reproduce successfully.

Consequently, ask anyone to recall the events of the day and they will more easily and more frequently recall the bad happenings than the good. The traffic jam, the delayed train, the stressful meeting, the missed lunch, the extra workload, the broken promises will all figure more prominently and with greater precedence than the safe arrival, the word of appreciation, the delicious dinner and the expectations fulfilled.

Similarly, when asked to list their notable traits most people will denigrate themselves rather than risk blowing their own trumpet. We have been trained to focus much more on our shortcomings than on our virtues.

Evolution is not the only culprit. Home and, in particular, schooling has played a large part. We will probably all recall (there it goes again) the “must try harder” on our report card, what subject it was and who taught that class.

I believe schools could learn much from the adult world, if only they would let themselves learn.

When Andy Murray is practising he is not directed to another sport where his talents are less evident. Steve Gerard is not asked to “try harder” with his goal-keeping. Vanessa-Mae is not admonished to brush up her trombone playing.

When working with my clients we both seek ways to capitalize on their manifest abilities and morph that success into equally promising areas. We do not seek to change a tap washer if the boat is holed below the waterline.

In cataloguing our own qualities it would pay greater dividends, more often, by investing where the returns are already shown to be good, than in wasting time, effort and money reinforcing failure.

We all have different talents and different levels of talent. Maximize your personal returns and give others the scope to maximize theirs by delegating what you are not so good at, or do not enjoy as much.

In international trade it’s known as comparative advantage.