Up Your Game By Reframing Stress
The Long Arc of Stress
When I was young, I didn’t think of the word stress. I can’t remember a time when I labelled a situation as stressful. School tests made me nervous, not stressed. Girls made me stupid. Bullies made me small.?
Stress is a word that seems to come with adulthood. Work sometimes frustrated me with decisions made by my superiors that I didn’t understand. But it wasn’t until I had a health-related incident, involving stroke-level blood pressure and an inability to talk, in my early thirties that I started to focus on stress itself. Because, as we all know, stress is bad for us, right? If I wanted to control my hypertension, I needed to eliminate stress.
I tried self-care: better diet, meditation, exercise. Work-life balance came naturally; I wasn’t one to burn the midnight oil—though I recall 4 AM office visits for quiet productivity. Wednesdays became self-care days: barefoot office walks and fasting with a maple syrup-cayenne-lemon-water concoction. (No promises to shield you from my quirks.)
The stress got more challenging for me as I took on more responsibility. This despite my health-related scare coming in the middle of one stressful occasion. I was chosen to lead a multi-group effort to bring in an already half-year feature delaying a product release. But I embraced and even enjoyed the added responsibility. It brought me closer to my goals.
At that point, I thought of stress mostly through a health lens, not through a career lens of something that could hold me back. Or drive me to my goals!
Stress, particularly inter-personal stress, grew as I moved up the corporate ladder and into executive positions. And I did not handle this stress well.
Energy Leadership
It wasn’t until last year I started to think about stress more systemically. About how my reactions to it held me back from what I wanted in my life. How did I want to respond in the face of uncomfortable challenges from my CEO? Why did my reaction to those challenges seem to paralyze me, or at least prevent me from doing my best work?
I started to get answers at iPEC, where I did my coaching training. At iPEC I became a Master Practitioner of the Energy Leadership Index (ELI).
The ELI is an attitudinal assessment tool that captures how you currently perceive and approach work and life. It’s not about your strengths, weaknesses or personality traits. It uncovers how you show up to the world—under normal circumstances and when you’re under stress. Read more about it at https://www.craigblitzcoaching.com/blog/the-energy-level-index-assessment-may-be-right-for-you.
The levels of energy can be thought of as increasing in energy through seven levels, from victimhood, up through antagonism and toward “higher” energy levels that can be thought of as collaborator, connector, and creator,?
The lowest levels are catabolic energy in iPEC parlance. Catabolic energy is destructive and generally correlates to a scarcity mindset. The higher levels are? increasing amounts of anabolic energy, or constructive energy. They correspond to a growth or abundance mindset.
This is where I was living when confronted by my CEO or executive colleagues, I retreated to being small, like I reacted to childhood bullies.? Although I knew what I needed to do or say, I was too easily intimidated.I avoided conflict, I was full of fear. I was losing.
In one example, I was asked to create a training program (and team) in a very short amount of time. Projects were at risk because customers were unable to utilize our product correctly. I knew how hard it was going to be to deliver something of quality so quickly, but failed to communicate it well. The result was frustration all around. Although we did pull off a rather miraculous training effort, the damage to my reputation was done.
That reaction to colleagues’ pressure is very common. One thing that is immediately noticeable, having conducted a number of these assessments, is that people spend much more time in the scarcity mindset, catabolic levels when under stress. That is, they view situations through either a “I win” or “I lose” perspective. At the executive level, there are plenty of “I win” people. Good luck if you are stuck with some “I lose” energy, as I was.
Such a reaction to stress is rooted in our Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS), responsible for our fight-or-flight threat response so useful to our ancestors facing constant real life or death circumstances.?
Mismatch Theory explains that the threat response was not intended for most modern day stress. Our Parasympathetic Nervous System, responsible for rest and digest, helps us react to stress more calmly and productively via a Challenge Response. Few modern circumstances require true Threat Responses, but that is where we are frequently stuck.
One of my early takeaways from looking at stress reaction charts vs normal charts was that it would suit us to reduce the amount of stress in our lives, or the length of time we spend feeling stressed, and move to our everyday, good mood energy levels.
I no longer think that way. I now think it is important we live with our stress, and make conscious choices about how we react to that stress.?
The Upside of Stress
Kelly McGonigal’s “The Upside of Stress” makes a strong case that your attitude determines whether stress is working for you or against you. She starts by reexamining the received wisdom that stress is detrimental to your health. By looking at older research and conducting her own, she argues that stress is only bad for you if you believe it to be so. Let me repeat that because it is so counter to what we believe.?
Most stress is bad for you only if you believe it to be so.
Notice the caveat “Most”.? We are talking about beneficial stress, or e?stress. Distress, such as a long-term illness, homelessness, etc, is a different matter. A toxic boss or work environment is distress; a challenging new assignment or reaction to a developmental goal is eustress, especially when it aligns with one of your goals.
Let’s start with a useful definition of stress from McGonigal:
Stress is what arises when something you care about is at stake.
For example, a stranger’s sidewalk criticism fades quickly, but a boss’s late-night Slack critique lingers—because you care.
Let's take a more typical example that frequently arises. Consider a public speaking opportunity. You’re afraid, stuck with your insecurities, but recognize the chance for personal and professional growth. You can:
The key to the Challenge Response is a mindset shift that takes the focus away from threat (people are going to judge me) to challenge/excitement (this is a great opportunity for me and I want to do it well).
Reframing helps embrace the stress. The public speaking opportunity initially seems like something that will reveal how uninteresting you are, your weak voice, or just be too much work that you are not interested in. By reframing it, you can see it as a way to develop a new skillset, boost confidence, and advocate for your work.
One of the most astounding conclusions is how mindset shifts alone changes the body’s biochemistry. This is the heart of something even stronger than a placebo effect: as our mindset towards stress shifts, we produce hormones associated with a healthier response to stress. When we say “this is so stressful” we produce different hormones than when we say “this is a great opportunity”, even though nothing has changed externally. But unlike a placebo effect which has a short-term, specific impact on an outcome, a mindset effect tends to snowball, increasing in impact over time.
How can we shift our mindset around stress? Start by reflecting on your experiences with stress, including times when stress has been helpful. When you feel stress, practice these three steps suggested by McGonigal:
Practice this process daily until it becomes habit.
The ELI assessment helps you understand how you respond to stress. When you do a debrief with an ELI Master Practitioner, you learn how you respond to stress, and when, how, and why you would like to shift those reactions.
The Upside of Stress also recommends a Tend and Befriend response as a way to transform stress by connecting to others. When helping others experiencing the same stressful situation “it triggers the biology of courage and creates hope.” In one study she cites, Wharton researchers looked at how to relieve time pressure at work. They gave one group of people an unexpected windfall of time. With another group, they only suggested people help other people. Surprisingly, it is that latter group of helpers who later reported feeling less time pressure; this group reported feeling more capable, competent and useful. This in turn changed how they felt about their ability to handle the time pressure and boosted their self-confidence.
My mission is “Helping Good People Win.” It is not when we are at our best we need such help. We are all capable of great work when we are doing something we love and pursuing it in a stress free environment. Stress is that friction between our goals and vision that messes with our confidence and screws with our best selves. Learning how to shift our mindset to stress is the key to moving quickly beyond these friction points to make them work for you and grow from the challenges.
P.S. I’ve continued a meditation and mindfulness practice on and off for the three decades since my health scare. And although walking barefoot in your office may not be something you’re comfortable with, I highly recommend any practice that can remind you to keep it all in perspective.?