We’ve talked before about how to stay calm under pressure and be resilient, and about succeeding when things get really ugly. This time we’re going further. We’re not just going to stay calm and survive as best we can when we’re stressed or feel under pressure; we’re going to look at how we can actually thrive under pressure, because you can count on finding yourself in that situation at some point, both professionally and personally.
Above all in business, sales and investing, which tend to be the three areas where you find out what a person is made of once the pressure is on.
Tips for thriving under pressure
1. Don’t focus on the results
If you have a business or run a company, it’s very common to focus on the numbers more than anything else, especially when the numbers don’t add up and the results you want aren’t coming.
When someone focuses only on results, they’re focusing only on a very near future that’s just around the corner and that they’re going to reach without the numbers they wanted. This causes stress, and some authors call this mistake an “absence of presence”. In some professions, this absence of presence can even be dangerous.
In sales, I’ve always taught people not to focus on sales but on visits. Let me explain.
Every sales sector has its own sales “P/E ratio”, which is basically the ratio of visits to sales. In some sectors the average is one closed sale for every four visits. Some of the best salespeople have a better ratio, while others are still somewhat below it.
If we start from the fact that the average for all the salespeople in a company is one sale for every four visits, we can teach a salesperson to focus on making those four or eight visits as well as they possibly can. That will be their job, and if they do it properly, the sale will come.
Imagine for a moment what would happen if a surgeon focused only on the result. They would be constantly afraid of something going wrong, because they could lose a patient, be sued for negligence, lose their job and even lose their professional reputation. Every operation would be torture for them.
Fortunately, surgeons focus only on their work and on applying everything they’ve learned and have been doing for years. For them, even though they’re “playing” with a human life, it’s simply an almost automatic system of applying knowledge. Focusing on their experience rather than on the result has, luckily for us, proven to be a better deal for our lives.
So if the surgeon does it, as a business owner, an executive or a salesperson you can and should do it too: focus on your work and your experience and do it as well as you can. That way, the results end up coming, and they’re positive.
See also: Entrepreneurs: the 7 deadly sins of business and finance
2. Start getting comfortable with discomfort
Among the five personal growth books we recommended, we included Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which talks about the two kinds of mindset we have: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.
Obviously, a growth mindset will take you further than a fixed mindset, but it’s very rare for someone with a growth mindset to feel very comfortable, because to grow you have to feel discomfort, since you’re very often stepping into unknown territory.
If you refuse to feel uncomfortable, you’re literally limiting your capacity to grow. Many people embrace comfort and hate what they call chaos. The person with a growth mindset turns chaos into their comfort zone.
Remember that most cases of depression don’t come from thriving every day and learning new things, even when you feel the stress of being busy. Most depressive states come from boredom, monotony and losing a sense of meaning in life, which is the opposite of thriving.
When you learn to embrace discomfort, you’ll learn to see every obstacle as an opportunity to grow. I know this sounds like self-help, but over time you realise it’s exactly like that.
3. Get rid of the fear of making mistakes
The only person who never makes a mistake is the one who isn’t doing anything. There’s nothing worse than a team where mistakes are punished or where the boss is afraid of making mistakes.
People who work focused only on not making mistakes are very likely to end up making more of them. It’s easy to explain: “Don’t think of a pink cow on top of a black car.” What did you just think of? On the other hand, when we focus on avoiding mistakes, we completely limit our creativity, because being creative means accepting that we might get things wrong.
When you make a mistake, you should see it as part of your growth process. Don’t hide it. If you’re an executive, tell your staff about it openly, and draw on resilience. Learn from that mistake and help the people who report to you avoid making it.
Remember that the best way to protect yourself from mistakes in business is to know the mistakes others have already made. We’ll all make mistakes and we’ll probably all have failures, but as long as you learn from them, it’s called learning.
However, if you make a mistake and blame others, you’ll have made two mistakes: the failure itself and the failure to learn from it.
4. Wire your mind to thrive, not to survive
By default, our brain has a kind of defence mechanism that can see threats where there are none, in many cases as if people’s lives depended on the results, and we end up piling up a series of unnecessary fears that only drain our energy.
Most fears aren’t real, and once you learn to let go of them, you’ll leave survival mode behind and switch into thriving mode.
5. A sense of humour
One of the most powerful weapons for fighting life’s problems, or the situations that seem determined to make our lives miserable, is precisely a sense of humour, especially if you’re part of a group.
Energy is contagious, whether it’s positive or negative, and we do a group no favours if we worry them more than necessary or start pulling long faces.
I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you: you get up full of energy, arrive at work or somewhere else, and find long faces or an atmosphere that quickly ruins your day.
A sense of humour gives you a different outlook on a problem
I remember a friend who was having one of the worst weeks of his life. He caught his partner with another man, he had a car accident, and the company he worked for had cut part of its workforce, and he was one of them.
I’ve seen people start saying they’re jinxed, that someone has put the evil eye on them, and so on. When this man arrived at our table and we asked him, “So, how are you doing?”, he answered in a jokey, sarcastic way:
“Damn, when I saw this morning that I’d woken up alive, and then I went to the bathroom and the tap hadn’t broken, I was blown away. I can feel luck surrounding me on all sides.”
We all burst out laughing, and any outside observer watching our table would have thought we were celebrating, not consoling a friend. Within a month this man found a better-paid job with more responsibility, and three weeks after that he met the woman he’s married to today. That string of misfortunes showed us what our friend was made of.
People who face problems with a certain philosophy and a sense of humour tend to end up with fewer problems in life and get better results overall.
See also: The 3 goals you need to achieve in life. There are no others
Featured image: Navy Medicine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
