Transcript: Workplace pressure — how to cope

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Workplace pressure — how to cope’

Chris Hunter
When I was a younger bomb disposal operator, there’d be adrenaline coursing through my veins. Nowadays, it’s a very different story. Yesterday I did eight improvised explosive devices with my team, and my pulse rate was actually lower than it would be normally. When I deal with a device now, I’m absolutely relaxed. I’m absolutely at peace because of that repetition, that learning, the experience, it’s all built up. That idea that knowledge dispels fear — it helps you to basically succeed again and again and again.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. All of us deal with pressure at work. Maybe you’ve got a sales target to hit. Maybe your career prospects are riding on a presentation you’re giving to management. Or maybe you’re putting pressure on yourself to do your work perfectly. Whatever the reason, pressure affects all of us. So how can we deal with it and even turn it to our advantage? Can pressure actually be good for us? I wanted to find out. So I spoke to Mark Wilson. He’s a professor of performance psychology based at the University of Exeter. Mark also works with elite sportspeople as a psychologist, so he knows a thing or two about how science can help us deal with pressure. We’ll hear from Mark later. But first, I’m going to speak to Chris Hunter, whose voice you heard at the top of the show. Here’s what he does in his own words.

Chris Hunter
I’m a bomb disposal operator. I was in the British Army for about 18 years. I retired and then I got back into bomb disposal about five or six years ago. I’ve worked against the Islamic State and Wagner mercenaries and all the sort of worst people in the world in Libya, Syria and currently in Iraq, where I’ve been for several years, clearing improvised explosive devices left behind by the Islamic State.

Isabel Berwick
So he defuses bombs for a living. That’s pretty stressful. But in Chris’s case, there’s the added pressure that a mistake could be fatal.

Chris Hunter
There’s absolutely zero margin for error. If you make a mistake, then it’s a very high likelihood that you’ll be killed. And it’s an even higher likelihood that other innocent people will be killed. And then, of course, there’s the actual keeping yourself safe so that you can continue again and again and again to deal with these devices. All of these things put a tremendous amount of pressure on you both physiologically and, you know, intellectually and psychologically as well so we’re very fortunate in that, you know, pressure can also be a companion for us and we get to explore all sorts of ways to overcome it.

Isabel Berwick
I mean, it sounds very trite not to talk about the physiological effects of stress for people in office jobs, but you must know a lot about what that kind of stress does to the body. You know, what does it do and how do you manage it?

Chris Hunter
I think the thing about stress, it doesn’t matter what occupation, the effects of it are exactly the same. Ultimately, it’s gonna damage the body, it’s gonna damage the mind. You know, for me, one of the biggest things with pressure is fear. That’s one of the areas where I see it resonate in every occupation and every sort of element of society. So fear is a really sort of interesting one, a really interesting part of pressure. And danger is real but fear is an emotion, and therefore it’s something that you can very, very easily overcome with sufficient practice and sufficient strategies. If you don’t do that, whether you’re walking up to a bomb or whether you’re failing to meet a target in the office, the effects can be exactly the same because, you know, you will basically be worried that people are gonna ridicule you. You’re basically worried you’re gonna fail and therefore potentially lose your job or lose your reputation. So it’s really, really important, I think, to find ways to overcome fear, first and foremost.

Isabel Berwick
I just want to ask about the pressure that people put on themselves, you know, rather than external pressure. And it’s often the result of perfectionism in the workplace, for example. Do you have any advice for dealing with that kind of internally generated pressure?

Chris Hunter
Yeah, I mean, that’s a really interesting one that, you know, with us as bomb disposal operators, even now, we still have to do four assessment tasks every year, every six months. And back in the military, we had to pass three assessment tasks out of the four. And they were basic, basic jobs. There was nothing in there that was designed to sort of trick you and catch you out, you know? It was just basic techniques, basic assessment. But the number of people who used to fail was phenomenal, and it was because of the self-induced pressure. And interestingly, you know, you do these planned assessments tasks and then when you do real bombs, there’s always sort of lots of variables and things you would never dream of seeing in a training task, you know, ’cause life is far more complicated, isn’t it? And yet it’s so much easier to do those real tasks because you’re not actually under assessment and most importantly, because you’re not putting yourself under this self-induced pressure.

So I think some of the ways that, you know, we overcome that, I think the first and foremost is the idea of positive thinking. And I think knowledge is a really, really important one as well. When I was a younger bomb disposal operator, if I went and dealt with a number of improvised explosive devices or even one, I would usually be absolutely buzzing afterwards. There’d be adrenaline coursing through my veins. You know, I’d be literally buzzing and, you know, bouncing around. And nowadays it’s a very different story. We’ve done, my team and I, well over 1,000 improvised explosive devices in the last few years here. Yesterday, I did eight improvised explosive devices with my team. And it was on top of a mountain and I came down and my pulse rate was actually lower than it would be normally. And when I deal with the device now, it’s truly elemental. I’m absolutely relaxed and absolutely at peace. Not complacent. Still know exactly what’s going on. Still very cognisant of the risks and the procedures that need to be adhered to. But because of the acquisition of knowledge, because of that repetition, that learning, the experience, it’s all built up. That idea that knowledge dispels fear — it helps you to basically succeed again and again and again.

Isabel Berwick
That’s a brilliant example, Chris. You’re in a flow state essentially, aren’t you, when you’re doing this work?

Chris Hunter
Yeah, it is. I mean, obviously not to start with, you know, you question everything to start with, but exactly that. It becomes very much a flow state. Yeah.

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Isabel Berwick
Chances are that your job isn’t that much like Chris’s, but he introduced some ideas there that even those of us who work in safe office environments can relate to. I wanted to learn a bit more about what stress actually does to our minds and our bodies. I was also curious whether, as Chris implied, a certain amount of pressure can actually help us. And I wondered what we could do aside from preparing to fight its negative effects. To find out, I spoke to Professor Mark Wilson. Here’s a little reminder of who he is.

Mark Wilson
I’m a professor of performance psychology based at the University of Exeter. Most of my research is actually looking at the acute effect of pressure on performance across areas where stress might be an issue, like sport, the military, surgery, aviation. I’m also a practitioning consultant psychologist, so I also work in elite sport, trying to support athletes and teams to perform at their best when it matters most.

Isabel Berwick
It’s fair to say that Mark’s well qualified to talk about pressure, and I wanted to run some of Chris’s ideas by him. I started by asking him about what pressure actually is and how it manifests itself.

Mark Wilson
The interesting thing is that pressure is a perception. So it’s viewed as anything that provides potential consequences and negative consequences. And it’s the effect of those negative consequences that causes that unease and that uncertainty and that apprehension. So it has a range of effects in that it can affect our attention, which is one of the major issues. So it makes it hard to think. It makes us hyper-distractible. It can affect us physiologically. It can affect a whole host of hormonal effects that can influence everything from how blood will flow to muscles, to the brain, fine motor skills, decision-making, how it can impact our emotional health. And over a lot of time, it can also have an effect on more chronic measures as well. So wellbeing, anxiety, depression, perhaps some cardiac issues as well.

Isabel Berwick
So I know you do research into sort of what we might call hidden cognitive states. And one of them is called the challenge mindset. What is that and what can it tell us about handling pressure at work?

Mark Wilson
You know, the challenge mindset, really, it comes out that we have got a response to any stressful situation. So when we’re in a stressful situation, we’re going to evaluate the demands of that situation. And then we’re going to evaluate whether we have the resources to cope. So a challenge mindset really happens when you perceive that you have those sufficient resources to cope with any demands. And that challenge mindset is important because it’s been shown to be correlated with better performance across lots of performance environments actually, and also better mental health states over time.

Isabel Berwick
You work with people in elite sport and in the military. And I spoke previously to Chris Hunter, who was in the military for a long time, and he mentioned the importance of preparation. So should we be fighting pressure kind of in advance by preparing harder?

Mark Wilson
That’s exactly the right question to ask, and that’s one of the things that sport do well. They don’t take performance to happen by chance. When we look at confidence and metrics like that, they are highly linked to performance. Good preparation is one of the most positive ways that you can increase confidence going into something. The other, probably the most often and most powerful sense of confidence comes from having done something similar before. So if you’ve done a big speech previously and you kind of know, well, look, it is gonna be, it’s very demanding. You know, I’m up there, I’m putting myself out. But if I look at my resources, yeah, I’m the kind of person that can cope with this. That’s OK. I’m gonna put in the preparation. I will probably do a practice run in front of X, Y, and Z people. So exactly that idea of if we’re thinking about what are the demands and what is it gonna feel like, what are the difficulties of the scenario? OK, well, what can I do about that? To shrink those demands slightly and increase my sense that I can cope with it.

Isabel Berwick
Yes, that resonates with me because I would get very nervous presenting events when I first started and now I don’t. Does that bring its own issue because you’re so used to it that you’re in a kind of automatic pilot?

Mark Wilson
So that’s one of the advantages of pressure, is that it definitely focuses the mind if you give yourself time to prepare rather than when pressure occurs in event. If you haven’t got that preparation in the background, if you don’t believe you have those resources, it’s very easy for the demands to sort of swell and for a sense of lack of control to kick in. And that’s when the negative influences of pressure can occur.

Isabel Berwick
Are there people who are just ill-suited to pressure, you know, and should avoid high pressure?

Mark Wilson
As someone who believes in sort of positive psychology and the fact that we can move people along the dial through training and through understanding, my view would be not necessarily. However, you know, clearly one of the interesting things that happens in any industry is self-selection. So, you know, if you’re not the type of person that can handle those environments, you’re unlikely to be taking on additional challenge. You’re unlikely to be putting yourself out there where your work and your efforts can be judged. But a lot of my job and the job of psychologists and good coaches and good managers is to help people feel more comfortable feeling uncomfortable, as it were.

Isabel Berwick
And I wanted to ask finally about flow, which is something I’m really interested in. You know, what happens in our brains when we’re in a flow state? Can you explain it? Because it’s a fascinating phenomenon.

Mark Wilson
It’s such an interesting phenomenon because it’s so fleeting. And, you know, again, if we could understand it better and try and push ourselves into it more often, create the conditions for flow, would not be brilliant, but it’s proving very difficult because it does seem to be this fleeting state. Sometimes time changes, sometimes it feels like time’s going slowly. Sometimes it feels like time might be going, speeding up. It feels like everything you do is effortless. And there’s definitely that sort of sense of things happening almost of their own accord. Sometimes people almost perceive themselves being outside of themself. And it’s interesting that flow happens a lot easier when you’re not being judged because the conditions for flow mean that the judgment part would make it difficult.

Isabel Berwick
If only we could all be in flow all the time.

Mark Wilson
Well, if you and I can come up with that, then we wouldn’t have to work. (Isabel laughs) So that’s the thing about these euphoric or hyper-positive states — that the creation of them seems to be difficult. Generally, when we’re working, we’re gonna be in flow such a small percentage of the time and hopefully we’re gonna be in outright distress very small parts of the time. Most of the time we’re gonna be in the sort of normal distribution of normal work. And what we’re trying to do is create the conditions whereby we’re more likely to experience flow than the other thing. So that’s what most of what my work would be when I’m working in those high-performance environments is to make sure we’re creating the conditions for that type of ideal performance state. So it doesn’t mean it will happen, but it’s more likely to happen.

Isabel Berwick
Mark, it’s not very often we can talk about euphoria at work, so it’s been exciting to talk to you. Thank you.

Mark Wilson
Thank you for having me, Isabel. I hope some of it was useful.

Isabel Berwick
I’ve been in the flow. (Laughter)

Mark Wilson
Yeah, well done.

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Isabel Berwick
In a sense, that advice from Mark and from Chris earlier is dead simple. If you want to perform under duress, there’s no substitute for preparing thoroughly beforehand. And if you still find yourself under pressure, focus on the little things step by step until they add up. Think calmly about what’s at stake. Most of us won’t kill anyone or lose out on an Olympic medal if we screw up. Thanks to Chris Hunter and Mark Wilson for this episode.

Next week on Working It, we’re bringing you something slightly different. My colleague Jonathan Black and I will be solving a raft of your workplace dilemmas. It’s something we’ll be doing regularly. So if you do have a problem at work or a debate you want settled, do send it in. There’s a link in the show notes to our online voicemail and you can always email me in confidence at isabel.berwick@ft.com.

This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Jake Fielding. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.