When the Pressure's On, The Secret to Winning When You Can't Afford to Lose, by Louis S. Csoka, Ph.D., amacom 2016
It's true that few of us have the wherewithal to completely eliminate stress, to walk away from our jobs or blow off the minute-by minute stressors that make us crazy. And the relief brought by great escapes like my dream vacation in Costa Rica or Canyon Ranch only lasts a day or two past re-entry. But we know that stress boosts productivity while unrelieved stress damages the body. What's a high-powered professional to do?
Well, Dr Csoka offers encouragement - go gettem! - and insight about neuroscience that helps us think through new approaches that satisfy both the need to succeed and win, and the challenge of staying alive and healthy.
The author's strategy for building mental strength keys on five areas:
1. goal setting - understand how to lay out clear objectives with a purpose along with attainable benchmarks for achieving them
2. adaptive thinking - cultivate a positive, deliberate, and adaptive thought process to handle sudden transitions and turmoil with confidence and self-assurance
3. stress/energy management/attention control - build an increased capacity for situational awareness, mental agility, learned instinct, and calm and self-control under extreme conditions
4. develop a razor-sharp focus and sustain concentration amidst relentless distractions
5. imagery - visualize success and then make it happen.
To baseline the point at which we're starting, the author offers on page 27 a good self-assessment, "Peak Performance Skills Level" that looks at goal setting, adaptive thinking, stress management, attention control, visualization and imagery. A low score of 5 - 9 indicates "not taking control of your performance... allows the performance situation to control you.... ok when things are going well... probably hurts when you need it most....Work at it and take back control."
1. Goal setting
2. Adaptive thinking -
Raising the performance score takes work along each of the author's five key levers. But here a couple key points elucidate the power of the brain to control outcomes:
"We become what we think about most. People carry around images of themselves - of who they are and how they perform. These "pictures" begin at birth and continue throughout life capturing all of our experiences. Given the basic negativism surrounding our lives, being positive and having trust and confidence in our abilities is really hard work... Our brains do not help here, either..." The conflict between our primitive brain stem and the limbic system, seat of emotions, ranked against our logical, thinking brains is the challenge. The author believes that we have to work hard to stifle negative emotions, negative self-talk which, under stress, will continue to pour from our more primitive brain sectors.
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3. Stress and energy management - Stress wears down and for some organizations, highlights the performers who appear to work better under stress. But Csoka makes the point that continued unrelenting stress damages individuals, hurts organizations' productivity, and leads to increased healthcare costs. The answer he offers is to combine "the idea of being energized and excited and impassioned and always very much in control," as the antidote for PTSD and other stress-related disorders.
Chapter 6, Stress and Energy Management, in the Holmes-Rahe Social Readjustment Rating Scale, show up the various life stressors scored; personal injury or illness, for instance, counts 53 points, business adjustment is 39, etc. A total score of 300+ predicts "a high or very high risk of becoming ill in the near future"! The scale offers a longggg list, including mortgage outstanding over $300k!
4. Attention control - "If you think about it, today's business world seems to call for the type of attention required on a battlefield..!." Have our distractions become so powerful that they are intruding on clear thought processes?
5. Imagery - The author covers how we can use positive imagery to reinforce our goals and steadily move toward success. Specifically, he wants us to use all five senses to imagine, to "see" the goal already accomplished. Chapter 7 offers hints on the methodology he recommends to improve attention control, including establishing (like Rafa Nadal does each time he serves), a set routine.
When the Pressure's On is a very useful book, a guide to evaluating performance pressures and what it takes to win in tough business or life situations. My only criticism of the book is that it could use even more detail, more specifics, especially contrasting examples, illustrating the good and bad ways of dealing with each of the five challenges to successful performance.