How To Become Completely Unflappable
We talk a lot about resilience. These days, just mustering up the capacity to cope with the pressures of everyday life is getting harder.
For leaders though, the challenge is even tougher. You need to manage your own physical and mental state – sure – but you also have to model self-mastery for your team.
When the pressure is at its greatest, your people need to see a leader who is relaxed, confident, and capable of leading them through any crisis, no matter how extreme.
This requires Grace Under Pressure.
Virtually everyone who reaches the senior levels of an organization has built some resilience. But this doesn’t mean they have P/G.
Most often, it just means they’ve learned to mask their emotions enough that they appear calm-ish on the outside.
But you can always pick up on a mismatch between what someone’s consciously projecting, and what’s really going on for them on the inside… something just feels off.
People who have P/G are completely calm on the inside, and the team experiences that in a completely different way.
How do you move from just being able to put your game face on, to achieving P/G – the ability to remain calm, rational, and in control regardless of what’s going on?
I want to give you two really useful hacks to set you on the right path. The rest is up to you, as you work to hone this ability over a period of years.
The first hack is to bring the perspective process forward.
The natural reaction to a major problem or crisis is to catastrophize. This makes the problem seem a lot worse than it actually is.
As time goes on, the event fades into perspective with the rest of your experiences.
I’m sure you’ve been in plenty of situations where, in the heat of the moment, it felt as though the sky was falling… but within a matter of days or weeks, you’d completely forgotten about it.
What if you could bring that perspective forward, without having to wait for a week for things to settle down?
When you’re facing a crisis, just get into the habit of asking yourself a simple question, “How big a deal is this, really? How important will it be in a week’s time?”
There are about 100 sub-questions you can ask to test this… like “What’s the maximum financial or reputational damage this event can have?” That monster is never as big as it seems at the time.
The second hack is harder to pull off, but equally valuable… don’t be too attached to your job!
Even though it might seem a little irrational when I say it, the immediate fear you feel in any crisis is the threat that it poses to your job security.
But what if you weren’t overly concerned about losing your job? What if you were able to just focus on the issue at hand, without worrying about the personal implications?
Early on in my career, I managed to create a deep belief within myself, that if for any reason my company no longer wanted me, it was only so I could be free to take up the next opportunity…
… an opportunity that was undoubtedly much better than this one.
I figured that, if my current employer didn’t value and respect the effort and expertise I brought to the role, for whatever reason, then it clearly wasn’t the right place for me.
Because I was never too worried about holding onto any particular job, I was able to be completely calm, even in the most stressful situations.
And, paradoxically, that helped me to become such a valuable performer, that my employer would never want to lose me.