As an expedition leader, nature is my habitat. Wind, rain, sun and silence settle me. Cold, sleep deprivation and hunger are familiar ground by now. At home, inside a business, it is different. There it is not the weather that turns but the market, the team or the timing. And yet the answer to both is the same.
What stress does to your decisions
Under acute stress your body switches to fight or flight. Adrenaline spikes, your heart rate rises, your muscles tighten and your attention narrows. Facing physical danger that saves lives. Facing a difficult conversation or a disappointing quarter it mostly gets in the way.
Neuroscientist Amy Arnsten (2009) described why: under stress the prefrontal cortex, the part you use for overview, planning and self control, temporarily loses ground to older and faster brain regions. You do not get less intelligent, you switch to a different operating system. You notice it in three ways.
Tunnel vision
You fixate on one problem and lose the wider picture. On a mountain that means staring at the summit and missing the cloud mass at your back. In a company it means bailing water without closing the tap.
Emotion over logic
You pick the comfortable option over the sensible one. Postponing the bad news conversation. Pushing on because turning back feels like failure.
A smaller working memory
You can hold less information at once. Exactly when more is coming at you, less fits. That is why checklists and fixed procedures earn their keep precisely then.
The three zones
A useful map for placing yourself comes from psychology: the comfort zone, the stretch zone and the panic zone.
- In the comfort zone everything is familiar. Little happens, including learning.
- In the stretch zone it is tense but manageable. This is where you perform and learn best.
- In the panic zone the stress response takes over. You function worse than at rest.
As early as 1908 Yerkes and Dodson described that relationship: performance rises with arousal up to an optimum and falls away after it. Leadership under pressure is therefore not about how much tension you can take, but about how quickly you notice you have overshot your optimum and how you come back.
Three techniques that work
Visualisation
Walk through the moment mentally before it arrives. See yourself responding calmly, speaking clearly, taking the decision. Your brain distinguishes only partly between vividly visualised and real experience. On expedition we do this before every risky section. Before an acquisition meeting it works just as well.
Breathing
Breathe in through the nose for four counts, out for six to eight. The lengthened exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system and lowers your heart rate within two minutes. This is the only dial on your stress response you can operate consciously.
Communication
Calm is contagious, so is panic. Speak more slowly, more quietly and more briefly than your instinct tells you. Give one concrete next task instead of an analysis. What you say matters less than how you say it.
Three mindsets that make the difference
Step by step
Focus on the next achievable action. On day six of a trek the question is never how you will cover the remaining eighty kilometres, but where you place the next foot. Running a business works the same way.
Deliberate optimism
Not pretending everything will be fine, but deliberately looking at what is working. In an exhausted group, the leader who names something positive first is often the one who saves the day.
Letting go of what you do not control
Rain, injuries, disagreements and delay are part of it. Spending energy on what you cannot change is the most expensive mistake on an expedition, and usually at the office too.
From the mountain to the meeting room
Expedition skills are not a metaphor. They are directly applicable. Someone who has learned to breathe first, then look, and only then decide, does the same when a client walks away.
That is exactly why we build our programmes with a lead in and a follow up around the expedition. The trek makes it visible, the guidance afterwards makes it usable. There is more on that under leadership development, or in the comparison which leadership training fits you.
Sources
- Arnsten, A.F.T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
- Yerkes, R.M. and Dodson, J.D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology.