Need to perform at your best under sustained pressure? It Starts By creating conditions to thrive®
Every worker–– executives to entry level–– needs to be capable of performing at their best “under pressure.” That’s obvious to most at this point. But how to pull it off?
The answers can seem vague, incomplete, or overwhelming, depending on several factors, including the type of pressure we’re talking about. Because not all pressure is the same, and pressure is more than just being stressed, exhausted, or busy.
Here’s how I break it down for my clients. This is a high-level overview of my 3Ps+T™ framework with a few prompts to help you get started.
3Ps+T™
The three Ps are personality, past, and present.
Understanding who you are and why is fundamental to self-awareness. Self-awareness is the most important leadership skill.
As John C. Maxwell said, you cannot lead others until you first lead yourself.” Or put another way by Frances Hesslebin, "Practice self-awareness, self-evaluation, and self-improvement... leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do".
Personality includes both how you see yourself and how others see you or experience you. There is a large gap between your intention and others’ perception. This gap is the source of much discontent and worse. Through self-awareness, you can close that gap, improve trust and buy-in, safeguard your reputation, and thereby enhance the performance of yourself, your colleagues/staff, and your organization.
The first assessment I do with my clients is the Hogan Assessment. It gives us quick insights into your intention-experience gap and how to close it. As well as insights into your strengths, which for all of us can devolve into liabilities when you are under pressure.
The assessment also reveals your core values, which serve as important motivators but can also blind you during decision-making. The assessment saves us significant coaching time and money.
Prompts to explore your personality:
Here's the challenge: the most important insights about how you show up under pressure are precisely the ones you can't see in yourself. That's why I start with the Hogan Assessment rather than self-reflection exercises.
But here are some questions to get you thinking:
"What's my go-to move when things get difficult?" (Do you take charge? Withdraw? Get more detailed? Push harder?)
"If I'm being really honest, what feedback have I dismissed or explained away in the past year?" (This won't tell you if the feedback was right, but it reveals where your blind spots might be)
"What would my team say is 'just how I am' about me—for better or worse?" (You may not know the answer, but asking the question reveals how much you know about your reputation)
If you can't confidently answer these, that’s not surprising. Improving self-awareness requires the guidance of others.
Core values are a bit easier to self-identify, though. Here’s an exercise that will help you identify your core values.
How self-awareness helps performance under pressure
There are two types of pressure in the workplace. Planned pressure is what you can see coming—a board presentation, product launch, quarterly review, or entry into your peak season, such as tax or political campaigning. Unplanned pressure hits without warning—a crisis, conflict, a client revelation, or a key employee quitting.
Self-awareness helps you handle both. When you know your patterns and values, you can put guardrails in place to prevent tipping—whether the pressure is planned or unplanned. You'll recognize when your strengths become liabilities and course-correct before the damage is done. Self-awareness doesn't eliminate pressure. It gives you the capacity to lead through it.
That’s personality. What about past and present?
Your past shaped who you are and how your personality is expressed. I think of it in the same way as genes. We are born with our genes, but our lifestyle and experiences determine which genes “turn on/off” and to what degree. Similarly, our personality, at least as scientists understand it now, is influenced by both innate traits and our experiences–– especially early ones. It’s a hot topic as to whether we can change our personalities. I think it’s important to mention that, but delving in is another can of worms.
One question you can ask yourself is, what was the most difficult part of childhood? Then ask yourself why. Then ask yourself, how is that showing up in me today?
For example:
Youngest child, because I always felt left out and didn’t get to be the helper. Today, I struggle with boundary-setting because I will go out of my way, losing sleep, for example, to help anyone who needs it.
Bullied in school because I was poor. Today, I spend more than my partner would like on designer things to show my success.
Parents divorcing when I was young and then having lots of half-siblings that I had to help parent. Today, I like to control as much as possible because I don’t remember not being a caretaker.
This is just one angle on the past to explore, but it should get you started. The bottom line is, which early experiences, childhood through young adulthood, helped shape who I am today? How I lead? How I define what a leader even is or what success is? Those core values? How well I communicate, take feedback, tolerate risk and uncertainty, or deal with conflict.
Your present
Your present includes both your daily routines and your environment. Daily routines include your hygiene, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and mindfulness practices, or absence thereof. It includes your home and work environment: are they supportive or contentious? Even the lighting, air quality, furniture arrangement…everything in our environment influences our thoughts and behavior, and thus our performance.
For example, if your office or cubicle is set up so that your back faces the door or entryway, your baseline anxiety goes up because your mind is essentially guarding against a sneak attack.
Exploring your present includes your relationships and whether you feel lonely or isolated, whether you feel a sense of belonging.
I often use the Wheel of Life (sometimes called the Wellness Wheel) to help clients gain a holistic view of where they are, the interconnectedness of their life's different aspects, and where they might need to focus first on strengthening.
Here’s one version of the wheel that will get you started.
Your triggers
In a nutshell, these are what trigger or cue or prompt your thoughts and behavior. Whether it’s imposter thinking or your morning run. Exploring our “triggers” helps us break habits we want to break, like eating too many donuts each morning, becoming more present, reducing our catastrophizing, or better managing planned and unplanned pressure points.
All of this, as you can guess, ties back to self-awareness.
creating conditions to thrive®
If you want to show up at your best day after day, building to a planned pressure point, and you want to be able to pivot quickly when blindsided, you need a solid foundation. The Human Performance Institute has a pyramid that aligns nicely with the well-being framework on which I wrote my dissertation.
Essentially, are you creating conditions to thrive®? It’s the mind, the body (including sleep, exercise, nutrition, and mobility), healthy relationships, and routines that promote efficiency and effectiveness. And it’s staying in alignment with those core values, which help you stay grounded in what matters to you rather than automatically conforming to external pressures or societal expectations.
Without this foundation, performance under either type of pressure is hard. But under unplanned pressure, it’s damn near impossible. If helpful, instead of a foundation, you can think of it as your reserve tank, your back-up engine. When shit hits the fan, you need it. When you are exhausted at the end of tax season or campaign season or a trial or even a long week, and it’s 6 pm on Friday, and you are about to walk out the door to meet your family for dinner, and your boss shows up and says, “bad news…”…your reserve is what gets you through.
If you are constantly running on empty, you have nothing to tap into. You have to create an environment and lifestyle that helps you keep your reserve as full as possible, and to know what fills it, you have to know yourself–– the strengths and the weaknesses.
This is the owner’s manual I help my clients write for themselves.
BS On Burnout®
Burnout costs thousands of dollars per employee. Your own burnout, that will cost you more. If you aren’t keeping your reserve tank full, and your work environment does not support you doing so, you are on the burnout path.
Depending on your level in the organization, you will have varying degrees of control over the workplace drivers of burnout. But no matter what, you will always have some things in your control.
When you review the areas we focused on above and your answers to the prompts and worksheets referenced above, what do you have no control over, some control over, and the most or full control over? This is essentially Stephen Covey’s Circles of Influence exercise.
What one small adjustment to your routine or environment would most help you keep your reserve tank full (or at least fuller than usual)?
Now, what’s going to cue you to do it?
If you’d rather not go through this alone, you can schedule a complimentary consultation here.