I mentioned last week that I intended to write about the fiscal cliff, and with the inauguration past us, I am certain we’ll be hearing more now. As an entrepreneur I feel like I’m always facing another ‘cliff’ or crisis with my start-up—and there’s no end to them. It comes with the territory: new opportunities mean new risks and new pressures. And they require me (and you) to come up with new models for handling them.
I function best when things are a little crazy, when I’m experiencing just enough pressure to hit my sweet spot of productivity. I’d say that’s just me, but I know it isn’t, because I know far, far too many other people who feel the same way. But when we routinely live and work in a stressful deadline-driven state we can become inured to it, and frankly the stress stops working for us.
Stress: Not All Bad
Contrary to what you hear, stress is not all bad. Calm sounds great for a vacation or even a day, but a life of eternal calm—no pressure, no urgency, no nothing—is hardly where entrepreneurs thrive. Stress is a daily part of a normal life. The trick is harnessing it without letting it control you. Like so many students, I pulled all-nighters to get papers written, and have more than once relied on a cup of high-octane java to fuel me through an impossible stretch. But just as a cup coffee can make me alert and focused, too much causes a state of high wire anxiety. We seem productive but perhaps but we aren’t. The same is true of stress.
The Solution is a System
So what’s the best way to handle stress? Create a system for it, as you do everything else, from how to handle your expenses to tracking your inventory. My point is this: systems beat resolutions every time. Creating a structure gives you a way to function, steady ground to return to when the tide of stress swells and recedes and swells again.
The Yerkes Dodson curve (shown above), developed by two psychologists in the early 20th century, demonstrates the relationship between stress, or chronic arousal, and performance. Performance increases with stress but only to a certain point, before it begins to decrease.
Here’s a suggestion for the first tenet of your system: Reinterpret stress as thrill, and allow it to rise but then also abate. Neither you nor your team can expect to go full-throttle day in, day out, without hitting a wall. While it’s often hard to control the highs, or chronic high pressure we are sometimes subject to, we can improve our response to these by scheduling in regular recharge time. The ability to take that hill, to power through that deal or creative assignment requires constant recalibration and awareness of what’s going on—in your thinking, your reactions, and your approach to achievement, and it must include a degree of self-care.
When you can see the stressful times, the highs, as a thrill, and harness that power to fuel your other efforts, then you’re using stress, instead of letting it use you. I suggest you make 2013 the year you look at stress and lay the ground rules for living with it, instead of trying to eliminate it (which is impossible, by the way).