Think back to the last time you felt stressed and overwhelmed because you had way too much to do, you were having a hard time managing your to-do list and setting priorities, and your boss and coworkers kept piling on the work.
Think about times when you were pushed to the max and on top of that, you were forced to interact with someone you found annoying, overbearing, or obnoxious; someone who took credit for your good thinking and hard work; or even a boss or direct report who seemed inept or unreasonable.
And with everything piling up on you, you were paralyzed by procrastination or self-doubt.
All feel truly awful. Right?
That’s psychological pain. It’s real. It’s how you feel emotionally.
It also shows up in how you feel physically.
We’ll bet you may have experienced at least one of these common physical symptoms: nausea, stomach ache, tight neck, cramping shoulders, back pain, and headache. And you may have struggled through sleepless nights, tossing and turning.
While all that feels horrible, the surprising thing is that it’s the easy way out.
We know it doesn’t feel that way at all.
But it’s the easy way because it takes no effort. What do we mean?
You see, all that anguish and pain is driven by your automatic, instinctual response to whatever stressors or challenges you’re experiencing.
We may not groom each other by picking off and swallowing nits we find on someone’s hair, like monkeys do, but we’re still part of the animal world. We have the same primal motivators as our animal “cousins” and our ancient ancestors. We seek pleasure instead of pain, conserve energy instead of expend it, pursue social acceptance and belonging rather than risk rejection.
The truth is, that as animals, we’re lazy and we act on instinct. We also are ever-alert for danger, which evolved into the negativity bias we’ve talked about in the last few days.
But that leads us to give ourselves over to procrastination--a lot easier and more fun to surf the web or do video gaming than work--and maybe even feeling sorry for ourselves.
Here’s another example of what we mean: Consider the difference between the energy you get when you feel pissed off and resentful when you’ve been wronged by someone and how hard it is to recognize your hurt, figure out how to have a respectful, honest conversation with the other person, and admit to the part you may have played.
Instinct is critical, but it works only sometimes. Not when you want to get ahead in your career.
That’s when you need something solid, dependable, and proven to work in all situations.
The antidote to the stress-procrastinate-conflict syndrome is self-leadership.
In the last several emails, we’ve talked about self-leadership, the downsides of taking a problem-solving vs solution-finding perspective, and how our hard-wired negativity bias can trip us up.
Self-leadership is hard because it takes effort and courage to sit with yourself and your raw emotion, come face-to-face with thoughts and beliefs that drive you, and be honest about the results of your actions, whether those results were success or failure.
But our SPRINGS approach makes it doable.
In our next email, we’ll explain our SPRINGS approach. You'll learn why it’s so revolutionary, and why it’s made such a difference in thousands of people’s lives.
Deborah & Glen
P.S. If you're just joining or want to catch up, we'll include links to all the previous emails we've sent in this launch email series at the bottom of each one: