Learning How to Be Tough
When I began speaking to audiences in the business world several years ago, I made a fascinating discovery. The people I met were facing demands and stresses far greater than those faced by any would-class athlete I have ever known. If your life is anything like those of the thousands of people who have gone through my Toughness Training program, you are working longer hours, and getting less sleep than any athlete, making more difficult decisions under greater pressure, and facing more potentially serious consequences.
If a tennis player loses a crucial set there may still be a way to win the match. If a baseball player strikes out in the bottom of the ninth inning, the odds are high that his team will lose the game. Yes, that is stress, maybe even high stress; but in sports, the slate can be wiped clean. There is almost always another game tomorrow, a chance for the player to make amends.
When a surgeon makes a mistake, a patient may die on the operating table. When a law enforcement officer makes an error under pressure, the officer’s own life may be lost, or the error may cause the death of innocent people. For those of us who aren’t in life-and-death professions, a bad decision can still have a devastating effect on the company we own or work for, or on our career. Even apart from major stress moments—for example, the upcoming sales conference you’re chairing, which will make or break your company’s next six months financially—the competitive pressure of everyday life in corporate America today is more intense, demanding, and debilitating than ever before. It’s characterized by long hours, frequent travel, a constant need for high levels of concentration, endless competitive pressure, and the ever-present threat of downsizing.
We are all expected to accomplish more with less. Companies are being forced to streamline their operations and streamlining affects everyone involved. We must work longer hours and achieve higher productivity without burning out, abandoning hope, losing the corporate vision, or breaking down personally. We have to learn how to excel in a game that has constantly shifting rules. We are asked to find ways to perform at our absolute maximum in high-stress arenas and to summon whatever genius we have for accomplishing our goals—not only today or next week, but for years to come. In today’s corporate world, you either perform to the max or you don’t play. There’s always someone waiting in the wings to jump in and take your place.
FACING REALITY
I am standing in front of a roomful of 50 executives from a major insurance company. I ask them a series of rapid-fire questions:
How many of you are concerned that the level of stress in your lives is so great that it is seriously threatening your health?
How many of you have no time for yourselves?
How many of you are too exhausted to truly enjoy your families when you are with them?
How many of you are feeling frustration, fear, and even anger about your job—and your future?
Almost without exception, every person in the room raises his or her hand in response to each question I pose. Now, I get more specific:
How many of you sleep eight hours a night? (No hands.)
How many six hours? (Two hands.)
The majority of people raise their hands at five hours—they survive on at least two hours’ less sleep than experts say is necessary to be fully rested. Another considerable percentage volunteer that they sleep as few as four hours a night.
Based on my last few questions, this sleep shortage comes as no surprise. How many of you, I ask, feel that you are currently being pushed to your absolute limit? This time, every hand goes up. How many, I then ask, would have said the same thing a year ago today? Once again, all hands go up, accompanied by a ripple of laughter. How many of you, I finally ask, suspect you’ll feel the same way next year at this time? The laughter turns to a collective shudder.
During the past two years, this experience has repeated itself 300 times when I’ve posed the same questions to well over 30,000 people we’ve trained—financial consultants, attorneys, executives from the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries, law enforcement officers, and physicians. Their grim responses come as no surprise. Between 1987 and 1995, more than 50 percent of the companies in the Fortune 1000 downsized. According to the American Management Association, two-thirds of the companies that downsized are likely to do so again in the near future. A networking group called Execunet recently surveyed its currently employed members, who make up about half its clientele. They found that an astonishing 60 percent of those earning more than $100,000 annually believe they will be forced out of their jobs within a year. How can I make it any clearer that the pressures of corporate life have never been greater?
And these stresses at the office are not the only ones you’re struggling with. Everyone we consult with now either has children and a working spouse or, more challenging yet, is a single working parent. These challenges add immeasurably to the level of everyday stress. And the new communications technologies, far from making Ole easier and increasing our leisure time, have mostly extended (lie workday and workweek. Here is how Augie Nieto, president of Life Fitness, describes how increased competition and the new technologies have changed his life:
Ten years ago, your drive home was your personal time to relax. Now, the car phone is an extension of the office. When you’re competing in the marketplace, you have to use technology. That means you’re always on stage, always on call. Two years ago, when you were on a jet, all you could do was make a call—now, you can receive one. You’re always on at home now, too, because 18 percent of all homes have fax machines. In the Old days, you’d wait at least one day for FedEx, but now you get instant feedback and proposals. I call my voicemail at night from home, and I have six or seven messages. Answering them takes up more of my leisure time. My day starts at 6 A.M., talking to my office in Europe, and doesn’t end until 10 P.M. If I was the only one doing this and my competitors weren’t, I’d feel OK about it. But I don’t have a choice.
Does Augie’s situation sound familiar? What’s the answer for this kind of performance pressure and stress? How he deals with stress is going to determine how well he runs his business in the future.
The conventional wisdom when it comes to managing stress is very simple. Reduce it! Don’t work so hard, get home earlier, go on more vacations, just veg out. Many stress management experts offer the same advice on how to change the way you think: Just be more positive and upbeat and optimistic, and you’ll be happier and more successful. Others suggest relaxation techniques as the solution— deep breathing, meditation, yoga, or even dietary changes, such as omitting coffee, sugar, and high-fat foods. And of course, there’s the classic coach approach. Tough it out. Buck up, suck it up, push away your fears and vulnerabilities and get the job done, whatever it takes. Unfurl the “No Pain, No Gain” banner.
The fact is that each of these answers contains a piece of the truth. But because each focuses on a single sphere of life, they are all ultimately quick fixes that produce short-term results, at best. The solution is not to discard these ideas, but, instead, to begin to look at them as pieces of a larger, more balanced, and more comprehensive puzzle. Positive thinking is useful. Relaxation techniques do provide a mechanism for recovery. Diet does matter. Setting aside negative feelings can be useful. None is a solution by itself, but by putting them together you can develop an approach in which the sum is greater than the individual parts.
The pressures of life in corporate America are not about to go away. If anything, they show every sign of increasing. High pressure is now a fact of life and a way of life. The only way to survive—and thrive—in today’s workplace is not to get rid of stress but to deepen your capacity to handle stress. That can happen only by exposing yourself to new levels of stress, developing a new response to stress, and establishing a very special kind of mental, physical, and emotional balance, which will be discussed in later chapters.
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Here is what we have learned about stress during the past two decades.
1. Protection from stress will not make you tougher, stronger, smarter, healthier, happier, or a better Performer in any arena. Have you ever broken an arm or leg and had it casted? Do you remember the day you took the cast off? What was the capacity of those muscles to exert or resist force after just a few weeks of complete protection? What happens to muscles happens to us mentally and emotionally as well. Look at what happens to children who are overprotected. How happy, healthy, or stress-resistant are they when forced to enter the real world? And what happens to retirees when they buy into the “freedom from stress” myth? When stress shuts down, everything shuts down. The growth process comes to a screeching halt—mentally, physically, and emotionally. The six-month period following retirement is one of the potentially most lethal periods in an entire lifetime. Eventually, even going to the grocery store for food becomes too stressful emotionally. Tragically, sustained protection from stress simply leads to an erosion of functional capacity. It is the antithesis of Toughness Training.
2. Exposure to stress is the basis of all growth, mentally, Physically, and emotionally. World-class stress simply provides the foundation for world-class growth and world-class toughness. To be fully alive and fully functional in today’s often brutal business world, we’ve got to keep growing in strength and resiliency every year.
To maximize health, happiness, and productivity, corporate athletes must become seekers of stress for a lifetime. Researchers now confirm that the most powerful anti-aging agent we know of is— ironically—stress. Use it or lose it is a reality of life. If we want to retain functional capacity for a lifetime, we must seek stress for a lifetime. And the older we get, the more we must seek,
3. Tough times make us tougher. Take away all the storms of life and business, all the tough times, and what strength of character, fighting spirit, and belief in yourself would you have? Take away all the tough times in Dan Jansen’s life—all the struggling, the grinding, the failures, the gut-wrenching battles—and who would he be? How much growth in his character and belief in himself stern directly from the stress? And how meaningful would his triumph in the 1,000-meter race be if all the tough times had been removed?
In many ways, the storms of life nourish us and provide a foundation of personal strength for future battles. They also bring us face to-face with our weaknesses and literally force us to get moving.
For just a moment, stop and reflect on your own toughness, your own capacity for handling stress. Each of us has a breaking point where we simply can’t take it anymore. An inner voice starts screaming, “That’s it! I’m cooked, fried, toasted! I’m out of here! I quit!” How would you rate your capacity? High, medium, or low? And whatever your capacity, how did you get it? Where did it come from? Was it principally from the good times, the joyous times, the wonderful sunsets, the intense pleasures, the happy moments? Or did it come more directly from the great struggles of your life, from the crises that pushed you, from the gut-wrenching stresses over which you somehow triumphed? Which of these two influences have most powerfully formed your character, fighting spirit, and belief in yourself? When you look closely at your life, you’ll see that from your greatest trials generally came your greatest growth.
I recently was conducting one of our public seminars. Just after I had completed an explanation of how stress toughens, a participant raised his hand and stated he was also in the toughening business. He was in the business of toughening plants! His explanation was fascinating:
Every spring before we sell our plants, we take them out of the greenhouse and put them in cold frames. There they are subjected to extreme temperatures—not enough to freeze them but just enough to toughen them up. We also deprive them of water so they get thicker stems and thereby the plant becomes tougher. Sometimes we even deprive them of nutrients for a period of time, and through the process of depriving them of heat, water, and, to some extent, nutrients, they become stronger. Then when the homeowner plants them in the garden, the frost doesn’t kill them. The plant goes through the same process that human beings do when exposed to stress. As a result of the crisis, plants get bigger and stronger and the root structure deepens and expands. If you don’t do the toughening, the chance that the plant will fulfill its complete potential when it’s put out in the real world is diminished considerably.
The Apollo 13 performance of Gerry Griffin and his team of flight controllers ranks among the greatest moments in all of aviation history. Thanks to Gerry and his team, what began as NASA’s worst hour became one of shining brilliance.
In my interview with Director Griffin, now 61, I asked him to comment on how he learned to perform so precisely and to remain so focused and relaxed under such extreme life-and-death pressure. At the time of the Apollo 13 mission, he was 34 years old. Here’s his response:
The thing that helped me the most was being exposed to intense pressure and stress in my training. The things that pushed me the most were the things that helped me the most. NASA’s Simulator Supervisors played a major role. We called them Sim Supers. They would nearly drive us crazy. Their job was the create problems for us. They were like DIS [drill instructors] in our lives. They were constantly throwing catastrophic failure situations at us, which forced us to think under pressure and cope with the impossible. How many times we thought, “This is so stupid. This is never going to happen. Why do you do this to us?” The crisis Of Apollo 13 was as bizarre as any Sim Super’s nightmare . . . . And my physiology would respond in the simulator as if the events were actually happening. We were constantly practicing under great pressure so when the real thing came along, it was nothing new. The most intense pressure in the simulator was peer pressure—not to screw up in front of your peers. When I walked into the control room, I would have 100 percent total focus. Fear of dying was not nearly as intense as fear of making mistakes in front of my peers. The other thing that helped me deal with stress was my very first year at Texas A&M’s School of Aeronautical Engineering. I was in the service and the hazing in that first year was unbelievable. We were called “fishes,” To put it mildly, this was intense high stress. It really toughened me. All the discipline and harassment taught me how to keep my cool, and not panic. When I finally started learning the lessons, that first year actually started to become fun for me.
4. Stress is biochemistry. DuPont’s motto, “Better life through better chemistry,” is right on target. Getting control of our personal chemistry, getting control of emotion, and getting control of stress are all one and the same. The hand that’s dealt to you daily at the office, and the number and kind of stressors that flow in and out of your corporate life are not the determinants of your stress level. Plain and simple, your body’s internal response dictates everything. Your unique biochemical response to the stressors you face day in and day out at the office will ultimately dictate the way in which stress will impact your happiness, health, and productivity.
As we have learned, stress is simply the body’s response to a demand of some kind. And although the stress response always involves some form of energy expenditure, not all stress responses are the same. Each has its own highly specific biochemical component, which mobilizes the body to respond to the demand in a particular way. We can be mobilized in challenge, or we may cower in fear and impotency. The good news is that the stress response is highly modifiable.
5. Perception dictates chemistry. Change perception and the chemistry changes. Change your perception of your DI, boss, or coworker from a maddening psycho to a positive toughening force, and the distress goes away. Change your perception of traffic to positive time alone, and the distress of traffic goes away. Change your perception of your job so that your IPS flows, and your job distress vanishes like magic. Remember, IPS is a nondistressful response. The perception of threat, real or imagined, immediately triggers the release of the toxic chemicals of distress. When the amygdala places a negative valence on an experience and is presented with few or no response options, what you see is what you get. As we learned earlier in this book, rituals, acting skills, and mental preparation can be effectively used to change perception and emotional response.
The following example of how a trained perceptual shift completely alters a stress response was sent to me by a fast-lane, highly driven financial adviser:
It’s amazing, but New York has truly become much more enjoyable for me. Things that used to drive me crazy don’t anymore. Friday evening was a good example. A business associate and I were being driven by taxi from New York to Greenwich after a late dinner. The dinner was a big disappointment; it was supposed to be a superb event. Normally I would have been irritable as hell after such a big letdown. Both of us dozed off on the ride back and when we awoke we realized that the driver had either gotten lost or completely misunderstood our instructions. In any event, the guy with me, who is generally very calm and mellow, really lit into the driver and completely lost it. I surprisingly found myself relaxing and soothing him—what a switch. Normally, I would have gone ballistic. I just relaxed and rolled with the punches, even after being let out several blocks from my destination and having to carry two very heavy bags! I don’t feel any loss of my intensity, desire, or fighting spirit, however. I just feel calmer and more in control. And the level of stress in my life has completely changed.
6. Once you’ve exceeded your capacity for stress, perception turns negative. Even if you’re armed with world-class performance skills, once your tolerance for stress has been exceeded, your warrior spirit and IPS control start coming apart. If your business life demands that you sustain a metaphorical 7-minute-mile pace and, on your best day, all you can do is an 8-minute-mile pace, no matter how good your rituals, acting skills, and mental preparation are, you’re going to be consumed in negative stress and emotion. You’re going to start whining and complaining about everything. “Why do we have to do this? This is a joke! We never had to do this before. I hate this place. This is making me sick. Who in the hell do they think they are, making demands on me like this!”
But how different would your voice be if you had the capacity to maintain a 6:30-minute-mile pace with ease? What would you likely be saying? “No problem. This is OK. Let’s get it done.” Remember, all the same obstacles are present in both cases—same hills, same humidity, same opponents, and so on—but your response to them is completely different. Your perception of what’s fair, right, and doable has dramatically shifted.
How did you increase your capacity from an 8-minute-mile pace to a 6:30-minute-mile pace? Not by protecting yourself or reducing stress in your life. The only way you got there was to expose yourself to progressively greater episodes of stress, followed by full recovery. The message is straightforward—world-class toughness demands world-class capacity, which demands world-class stress exposure. No hiding. No looking for cover. No retirement from life.
7. Feelings of discomfort typically accompany stress that expands capacity. If you didn’t experience any discomfort today, chances are that you didn’t grow any, Teaching athletes to know the difference between the discomfort associated with growth and the pain associated with overtraining is critical to the toughening process. Real pain is a physiological signal that you have dangerously exceeded your limits. Please hear this—once and for all, loud and clear— PAIN IS A SIGNAL TO STOP! Most of us understand what pain means physically, but how about pain emotionally? How are we to recognize pain in this area? An alarm should sound when intense feelings of sadness, depression, anger, fearfulness, moodiness, helplessness, insecurity, and doubt break through. Not unlike pushing beyond the red line on a high-performance race car, pushing yourself beyond discomfort and into pain runs a high risk of completely undermining the toughening process and causing real damage. Feelings of discomfort signal that your normal mind—body limits have been exceeded, but the damage is still reparable with normal rest and recovery cycles. Whatever damage has been done can be repaired. This process, called adaptation, is, in fact, how growth occurs. The critical learning for corporate athletes is to be able to distinguish pain from discomfort. Teaching athletes to recognize and to properly interpret the body’s stress signals has been the only successful way we’ve found to lower the risk of serious breakdown or injury. Expanding functional capacity carries a real risk. Emotion and feelings are the internal eyes and ears of the body. Negative feelings exist for a purpose: they are one of the only ways your body has of getting your attention. Negative feelings signal imbalance, and intensive negative feelings signal EMERGENCY!
Burying negative feelings is analogous to putting masking tape over the instrument panel of a race car. No Formula I driver would ever be so foolish. By removing the masking tape and opening up to the messages sent via feelings and emotions, the language of stress will eventually become understandable. Only then can the distinction be made between the discomfort of toughening and the pain of overtraining.
8. Levels of personal health, happiness, and productivity provide great insight into stress tolerance levels. One of the best ways to determine whether you have enough capacity for stress is to take a hard and close look at how the stresses of life have impacted your health, your happiness, and your ability to perform to your full potential. If your stress capacity is insufficient, you are undertrained (the sport term). When you are undertrained, the forces you must face consistently exceed what you can handle, and you are therefore always in a state of overtraining. Injuries, sickness, and negative emotions of all kinds—intense anger, choking, resentment, insecurity, and poor performance—start showing up everywhere. If you don’t have the capacity, the signs and signals will be there. A former client described it this way:
Every day was the same. I would wake up exhausted and go to bed exhausted. It would take six hits on the snooze alarm and four to five cups of coffee before I even knew what day it was. And the more I would come to life, the more my bad attitude would take hold. I was critical of and angry with everything and everyone. I was miserable, and I made everyone around me at the office miserable. At the time, I thought my emotional state was completely normal. I really believed that the people around me deserved what they got from me. I wasn’t interested in stress management or help of any kind. If I hadn’t gotten sick—very sick—and then been taken forcibly by my wife to your center, you wouldn’t have got to me in a thousand years. Now, people at work can’t believe I’m the same guy. It’s like I’m on some mind-altering drug. My health, happiness, and work performance are off the chart. I wake feeling rested and don’t even need an alarm anymore!
9. Increasing your capacity for tolerating Physical stress deepens your capacity for tolerating all stress. Exercise is really stress practice. Remember that stress is energy expenditure. Anything that causes energy to be expended mentally, physically, or emotionally becomes a stressful event. And every time a stress response is triggered and energy is expended, a powerful biochemical and physiological set of events occurs with it. One’s capacity for stress is inexorably linked to the chemistry involved in energy expenditure. We become cowards and wimps when our energy resources are depleted and deep fatigue sets in. If you quickly experience physical fatigue, you’ll quickly tire mentally and emotionally as well. Your warrior spirit will melt like an ice cream cone in the sun.
10. The best way to DEEPEN capacity is to expose yourself intermittently. Researcher J. M. Weiss discovered that low levels of a brain hormone called norepinephrine are associated with helplessness and a low tolerance for stress.3 Depletion of this brain neurotransmitter clearly impacts helplessness and what might be called nontough behavior. According to Weiss, the real culprit in depleting norepinephrine is not ordinary stress but chronic and persistent stress that permits little or no recovery for rebuilding lost reserves. Weiss found that cycles of intermittent stress exposure that allowed ample time for restoration actually led to an increased tolerance for stress and resistance to norepinephrine depletion.
What does this mean to you as a corporate athlete? Two things:
I. Actively seeking exposure to stress through exercise can deepen your stress capacity and help reduce feelings of helplessness during periods of high stress (active toughening).
Exposure to physical stress is inversely related to all causes of mortality in both men and women—the greater the exposure, the lower the mortality rates from all causes. Increasing evidence points to a dose—response relationship—the fitter you are and the more vigorous and intense the exercise exposure, the greater the protection.’
2. The storms of life and business can be converted into opportunities for expanding stress capacity, as long as you build in adequate periods of recovery and restoration. For example, grieve in waves, never continuously; worry and then cease to worry; push, charge forward, and then completely shut down.
From “Stress for Success” by James E. Loehr 1997.
Managing IA's 