The Hidden Power of Pressure: How to Turn Stress into Motivation

When people ask him, Jacob always says he chose the perfect career for himself. He loves his job in technology and enjoys coaching a young team. However, right now it has become too much. Currently, he is leading a transformational project that could be a career maker. At the same time, he is coaching team members on their work, helping them solve problems and providing feedback. Plus, there are the needs of his internal stakeholders, a lot of admin tasks that come with leading a team, a conference he is co-organizing, a regulatory issue he must help solve and endless meetings. There is enough to be stressed about, even without considering the restructuring that has been going on above him. Every day something new and urgent pops up that keeps him from doing what he had intended to do. He feels like his workday never ends and yet he still isn’t moving the needle on what matters most. Where he once had seemingly endless motivation, he now feels like there’s no energy left in the tank.

Sounds familiar? I hear this every day from people at all levels. It seems to be the new norm.

In previous installments of this motivation series, we reviewed how to motivate yourself intrinsically, how to create the conditions for your team to motivate themselves and how to set motivating goals (you can read the full series here). Now, let’s take a look at something that goes hand in hand with motivation: pressure.

Pressure: A Double-Edged Sword

Under the right conditions, pressure is an engine for motivation. It can produce the energy you need to keep going, to work just a little bit harder and to prove yourself in a high-stakes situation. Under the wrong circumstances, pressure can also make you anxious, overwhelmed, stressed and demotivated.

As Dane Jensen, author of The Power of Pressure. Why Pressure Isn't the Problem, It's The Solution says on my podcast: pressure becomes corrosive when you feel like you have no influence on your circumstances. So, how do you exert some degree of impact and keep pressure from killing motivation?

Three Sources of Pressure

Begin by understanding what is creating pressure. Dane Jensen identifies three things that accelerate pressure:

1. Importance of the outcome

2. Uncertainty about the outcome and

3. Volume of work to be tackled.

Frequently, you may experience a combination of these three. 

In our society, there is a rising tide of volume as workloads are pushing people to their limits. But there is also, as Dane Jensen says, “an arms race around importance inflation.” News outlets, social media apps, push notifications, messenger services and emails are constantly vying for your time by making you believe that everything is urgent, important and in desperate need of your attention. Needless to say, uncertainty seems to be at an all time high.

Each of these sources of pressure requires different tactics.

Managing the Pressure of Volume

You may feel an influx in volume on three fronts: tasks, decisions and distractions. Let’s start with the parts that you control.

• Distractions are everywhere. Focus on where you add the greatest value, not just on what you can do faster than anyone else. You can find strategies for eliminating low-impact things from your workday in this newsletter.

  
  

• Decisions play on our fears of getting it wrong. As Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer says: “Rather than being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right.” You will never have enough information to be sure that a decision is perfect. So, make a small decision now, assess and move on to the next piece.  

  
  

• Tasks expand based on what you volunteer to do, what you don’t delegate and how much you want to prove yourself. Be honest about what you can really accomplish in the time you have. Evaluate how many things you can really say “Yes” to (click here for a quick tip on saying “No”). Negotiate on timelines, degree of perfection, final version versus draft and who else contributes. Learn to delegate in a way that really works (click here for a video on delegating in a better way). Check out my podcast with Israa Nasir on Toxic Productivity to understand what drives you to take on too much.

When it comes to working with managers or other superiors who are delegating tasks to you, learn how to have productive conversations about prioritization. Be clear upfront about how long you estimate a task is going to take you, and what other projects you will have to be put on the backburner to complete it.

Oftentimes managers cannot really gauge how much time an ask will consume. If you tell them that it will take 50 hours of work to complete, they might direct you to do it a little differently or to focus on something else with higher impact. No good manager wants you to be so overwhelmed that you cannot get the most important things done. Here, negotiation needs to become your go-to tactic (see “Tasks” above).

Managing the Pressure of Importance and Uncertainty

If everything feels urgent, precarious and life-or-death, you need to work on ramping back the importance you ascribe to things. Everything may seem essential, but is it, really? What’s not at stake in your life right now? What doesn’t hinge on this project, this job, this assignment?

To help you zoom out, you may try negative visualization, a tactic popularized by the Stoic philosophers. If all your worst fears about the thing came true, what would happen? Play the scenario out until the very end. If you fail spectacularly in this meeting and cannot convince your stakeholders of your pitch, will your life be drastically different in five years? Or not?

If Jacob doesn’t complete the transformation project on his timeframe, his reputation isn’t doomed. He might not get a promotion this year, maybe he will get one next year. He might have a stakeholder who is disappointed, but that stakeholder is unlikely to fire him. Try to assess the true importance and recognize how you have contributed to importance inflation.

As Dane Jensen says: “Often, what creates the pressure around uncertainty are these incomplete thought loops. We have this general sense of “this is going to be terrible if I screw this up” but we don’t play the movie all the way out to the end and then decide what we want to do about it.”

To navigate the pressure of uncertainty, try focusing on what you know now and what small decisions you can make now with some degree of comfort. You might also try playing out three or four possible scenarios. Then, look across all of them for what’s in common. Often, the first few steps are the same regardless of which scenario turns out to be correct. Take those first steps. Assess next steps when you have more information.

A Way Forward

After Jacob starts thinking through his worries, he decides to talk to his wife: “If all fails, we might not be able to move to a new house this year or take the big vacation.” Together, they discuss options and decide that if not moving takes the pressure off, then it’s worth postponing that decision for a year.  Relieved and equipped with a sense of agency, he now finds it a little easier to concentrate on the most important work and make a real impact.