How to increase your productivity and success rate in stressful situations
Most of us have been there. Apart from a few chosen ones who supposedly do not feel the weight of pressure, we have all experienced the negative mind rush that comes with stressful situations, potentially including time sensitive decision making, often charged with unexpected elements. It is not easy to keep composure in those moments, and even less to get optimal outcomes out of those.
Throughout the course of my life, I have been myself through personal and professional experiences which were highly time pressured and sensitive. To better succeed at managing them and develop healthy life habits, I have searched for a method that would combine the best of both worlds: the ability to embrace those crucial moments to get the best out of them, while living through them as peacefully as possible to be in position to handle repeated occurrences without losing emotional stability.
When looking for self-development tools, I tend to be very open-minded and more than happy to consider techniques coming from various application fields. This time, the answer came from US Navy Seal Command Master Chief and Medal Of Honor recipient Edward Byers. During an interview he gave on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, while describing the actions which led him to be awarded the US most prestigious personal military decoration, he shortly eluded to an approach of highly pressurized and tensed events which can translate efficiently in a lot of contexts. After assessing it further and structuring it to fit my mindset, I have even made it one of my favourite go-to techniques. So let’s break it down.
Step 1: planning by segmenting events, allocating criticalities and assessing dependencies
As Edward Byers phrases it when describing how his training allows him to handle a stressful event: “In your mind, it [the situation] is very segmented”. So that is where your mental journey should start: developing the ability to take an overall complex and tensed situation and segment it into a clean time series of sub-situations.
To do so, you should first build a high-level segmentation of the events, just like you would spread the numerous pieces of a puzzle on a table before digging into solving it. Next, you should allocate to each sub-situation in your time series some level of criticality, as well as assess dependencies between the sub-situations. By doing so, you will enrich and fine-tune your time series to ensure it is operationally consistent. Said differently, you will make sure that you got your priorities right. At this point you may still reshuffle the sub-situations to get a viable plan under which all the single tasks defined are properly sequenced to pop-up after all their own preliminary requirements are completed.
Step 2: getting into action, respecting the sequence planned
At this stage, the fun can begin. In the words of Edward Byers: “You take one situation, you handle that situation, and then move onto the next one”. If your enriched time series of sub-situations was built properly, you can now rationally operationally roll it out, tackling each of its component sequentially and in order. Doing so, you can focus on the moment and the task at hand, knowing that what is next does not matter as long as the previous step is not successfully completed. Why is that? Well, when you are a special warfare operator, the concept is that you do not need to worry about what is coming next if you do not handle the current sub-situation properly, as you will be dead if you do not. For the rest of us, the consequences are most likely less severe, but the principle still holds: you do not need to worry about something you will never have to handle if you do not complete the present task. Initially, this takes some mental effort, but if you make a habit, it is liberating as it helps freeing mental space to focus and perform.
To nail down further a point that is so angular to the whole approach, I will use a parallel most of us have been through during their professional career. I regularly get young executives coming to me for career advice, and a recurring set of questions I often get when they consider a new job opportunity is: “Is it worth me applying? I mean, are they likely to offer me a good package? Do you think I will be able to negotiate the salary?”. To that, I systematically reply: “If you intrinsically like the opportunity, apply. Then do not stress about an offer you do not have yet . Focus on the selection process and perform to the best of your abilities. Negotiating the best offer possible will be a nice to have problem if you get there…”.
Overall effect: slowing down time & and releasing pressure for an optimal performance
If you manage to consistently implement the above steps in stressful situations, you may start to relate with the benefits best described by Edward Byers: “It is kind of like time slows down”. In a nutshell, instead of potentially having your mind jumping around the different elements at stake without properly tackling any of them, you will repeatedly end up with a clear plan laid out for you to focus in a step by step fashion. Doing so, you will be able to free mental space to solve a problem before moving onto the next one, with the peace of mind that the current action is the only one you need to worry about.
Going the extra mile: the power of rehearsal
In conclusion, I appreciate that going through those steps in situation can sound overwhelming. Though, this can be tackled from two different angles. Firstly, as you persistently practice the method, your brain will become more agile with the framework and its operational implementation. Secondly, for all the subject matters to which you may be regularly exposed in situation, hone your craft, develop re-usable mechanisms and routines. Because as Edward Byers summarizes it: “We rehearse so much that it becomes very instinctual”.
