The key to growth and success lies in looking at the big picture, and colouring it in with smaller goals
Whether you’ve been promoted or demoted, you’ll find yourself experiencing stress, fear and anxiety, with the same levels either way. On the surface, this makes no sense. How can good news possibly be as stressful as bad news?
Pioneering psychologists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe understood that it can be, when they compiled their landmark Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale.
They assigned a ‘score’ to 43 stressful life events that could contribute to illness, with a total score of between 150 and 300 indicating a 50% chance that you’ll suffer a major health breakdown in the next two years.
Unsurprisingly, dreadful events like Death of a Spouse (100) and Divorce (73) carry high scores on the scale – but then so, too, do happy events like Marriage (50 points).
Taking a Vacation (13 points) carries a higher score than a Minor Violation of the Law (11 points), which suggests that it’s more stressful to go on holiday than to get a traffic fine.
As if to ram the point home, a Major Change In Responsibility At Work carries 29 points, but the score is the same for a promotion or a demotion.
The stress paradox
So what’s going on? Kelly McGonigal, author of The Upside of Stress, points to a 2005/06 Gallup World Poll, which asked more than 125 000 people from 121 countries the simple question: Did you feel a great deal of stress yesterday?
To the researchers’ surprise, the higher a country scored in terms of stress, the higher its levels of wellbeing.
“When it came to overall wellbeing, the happiest people in the poll weren’t the ones without stress,” McGonigal wrote.
“Instead, they were the people who were highly stressed but not depressed. These individuals were the most likely to view their lives as close to ideal.”
In contrast, the researchers reported that among individuals who appeared to be the most unhappy, experiencing high levels of shame and anger and low levels of joy, there was a notable lack of stress.
McGonigal calls this the ‘stress paradox’. High levels of stress are associated with both distress and wellbeing, she explains.
Importantly, happy lives are not stress-free, nor does a stress-free life guarantee happiness.
“Even though most people view stress as harmful, higher levels of stress seem to go along with things we want. Love, health, and satisfaction with our lives.”
Silencing the voices
On the face of it, it makes perfect sense that bad news, like a demotion at work, will cause you stress and anxiety.
“You’ve failed,” the voices in your head will tell you. How will you recover? What will you tell your family? What will your co-workers think?
But then, when you get good news, like a promotion at work,,the same voices come to visit. How will you live up to this? Can you really do this? What if you fail?
Johannesburg-based career coach Jennifer Kilian says she’s seen both sides of the coin with her clients.
“It’s definitely stress-related, and it’s usually because of an insecurity within themselves, which they’ve developed over a period of years through a conditioning process,” she says.
It makes a huge difference when you listen to what those internal voices are saying through the filter of fear and insecurity.
After all, the human brain’s fear circuit kicks in very quickly, and it doesn’t always stop to differentiate between good anxiety and bad anxiety.
The bigger-than-self goal
To ease your anxiety,whether you’ve been promoted or demoted,,it helps to step back and assess what McGonigal calls ‘bigger-than-self goals’.
A bigger-than-self goal is not an objective goal, like getting a promotion, or a reward, like being praised by your boss.
“It is more about how you see your role within your community – what you want to contribute, and the change you want to create.”
That clarity of purpose will give you the big picture. As as you colour it in, you’ll find the smaller goals take care of themselves.
As McGonigal puts it, “When you strive from this mindset, you increase your chance of reaching both your professional and bigger-than-self goals. You also experience more joy and meaning along the way.”
Kilian, through her work at Clearsight Coaching, takes a similar approach.
“I’ve developed a career development programme to see whether my clients need to make changes, what their challenges are, and to help them develop a clarity of purpose for their lives,” she says.
“Our objective is to find that clarity of purpose, taking them through a series of coaching processes to see whether they should be starting their own business, moving into another job, or taking a sidestep in their career.”
Each of those actions will be stressful in their own way. And whether you succeed or fail you are likely to experience anxiety.
The key is to understand that it’s based in insecurity and self-doubt, and to keep your mind focused on the bigger picture.
As the saying goes, whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are probably right.
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