HOW GIANT ARE YOU? Are you good at handling pressure?

Question

Regardless of the giants we face – whether they’ve chosen us or we’ve chosen them – how are you when they don't bend to your will on your schedule?

Stress – the feeling of not being in control – can often bring with it an armada of strong feelings & emotions.

So now, not only are we facing pressures without, we're also facing pressure from within; feelings we can barely wait to make go away.

This emotional & mental duress distracts us from the priorities we’re facing, diverting our energies & attention to medicating our discomfort, instead of tackling the issues.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there's a kicker: like any material when placed under pressure, the greater the fractures, fissures & flaws in our psyche, the greater the fail rate.

An aeroplane hull with a stress fracture invisible to the naked eye can taxi along a runway just fine. But at 30,000 feet, the results can be devastating.

We know this instinctively. So we never stray too far from the edges of our comfort zone, just in case our carefully curated self-image cracks under pressure.

For the same reason, this reticence also leaves us wary of our weaknesses & tempted to accentuate our strengths.

Strengths in our minds are good, weaknesses are bad.

Positive. Negative. Welcome. Unwelcome.

There’s just one problem with this paradigm:

It’s not entirely true.

Strengths & weaknesses aren’t merely good & bad, they just are.

This binary thinking – that weakness is the opposite of strength – isn’t nuanced enough.

For some, weak tea is nicer than strong tea.

A metal’s strength may be its pliability, not its tensile strength.

Strengths misused, misapplied or mismanaged are no longer strengths – they’re weaknesses.

Remember that old maxim, “to the man with a hammer, everything’s a nail”:

A hammer is an incredibly strong, useful tool. But misapplied, it’s incredibly dangerous.

Which begs the question, when you’re under pressure, do your strengths become weaknesses?

But back to this post's titular question: the answer is, yes, we’re all evidently good (resilient) at handling pressure to some degree. If you’re reading this in a global pandemic, that’s clearly true of you, too.

But what would it be like for you to be better still?

With the world as it is, what’s needed now more than ever is for us to stop taxiing around on runways & remember we were made for higher heights.

And for that, we need to get even better at resisting pressure from our giants.

A little less vincible, a little more GIANT.

If you’d like that to be you, then join my weekly Clubhouse this Thursday 8pm BST/3pm EST (https://www.clubhouse.com/event/m712RdaR).

I’ll explain how you can complete your GIANT resilience mission – should you choose to accept it – to get better at protecting yourself just enough to find the optimal level of stimulus that helps you to function more comfortably, especially under pressure.

Looking forward to seeing you there…