Leadership Resilience
I’ve never seen as much stress as I am seeing right now in the work place.
Most people are putting on a good front but when you scratch the surface you find an ocean of suffering right below the surface.
There are a lot of people offering solutions but most (according to the research) start with exactly the wrong premise – how to get rid of all those stressful events. That doesn’t work. Below I’m going to share what I’ve learned about stress and resilience and how I learned it. (Nick is a Cantabrian and the following story played out in the CDHB.) At the age of 25 while playing professional rugby in Japan I got stomach cancer. The surgeons found and removed three large tumors from my abdomen. My response to the situation was not shock, but denial. I went back to Japan picked up my life again and pretended nothing had happened. One year later after my MRI scan my doctor told me that the tumors had returned, this time in my liver. Now there was no denial. My mind started to go crazy, “Why did this happen to me?”, “What if I only have 6 months to live?”, “Why didn’t I make better use of my life?”
During this period I read a newspaper article about a British academic (and former Banks Peninsula resident), Dr. Derek Roger, who was visiting my hometown. He had dedicated his life to studying why it was that some people go through difficult situations and are overwhelmed, while others go through the same event and cope. I wanted to meet him and find out what he knew so I wrote to him. He agreed to meet and over coffee he taught me a lesson that has stuck with me ever since:
What causes stress is not the event, but the rumination about the event.
Cancer for me was the event and it was unavoidable. But what was optional was the endless rumination about ‘what ifs’ and ‘if onlys’. Over the next several years I started to apply the steps that Derek taught me to reduce my rumination. At first it was hard, my situation had a lot of uncertainty and the stakes were high. But over time, bit by bit, my rumination decreased and my ability to handle my situation increased.
When I originally took the resilience survey I scored 10/10 on rumination (the highest level of stress). When I take the survey now I score 0/10. What is most interesting about this for me is that my situation hasn’t actually changed. The difference now is that I never spend a minute of my day ruminating about them or most anything else. I have come to see that stress and rumination are a complete waste of time.
Derek became a mentor of mine after our meeting and I started to teach the methods I learned from him to others who needed these tools. I’ve now taught the tools to 1,000’s of leaders in workplaces around the world and the response is nearly always the same:
I wish someone had taught me these at the start of my career.
I wish my direct reports, wife/ husband, children could learn about these tools.
In a nutshell, these are the methods and the reasoning behind them:
There is a difference between pressure and stress
Pressure is an external demand – you can face pressure and not be stressed
Stress is caused by ‘rumination’ – thinking about events in the past or future and attaching negative emotion
Ruminators have suppressed immune function and more heart attacks
To be less stressed and more resilient practice four steps:
Wake up: connect with your 5 senses and come back into the present
Refocus your attention: ask what can I control right now?
Put things in perspective: use humour and re-framing questions
Let go: peace comes to those who accept quickly and move on.
About the Author:
Nick Petrie is a Senior Faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership, USA. Before this he took time out to do a Masters at Harvard University where he spent his days learning about the latest research on leadership, teams and psychology. For ten years he has worked around the world helping organizations develop their leaders. http://www.nicholaspetrie.com/