In last week’s podcast with Bernie Harberts, I found myself repeating the words “De-pressure = Depression”. This connection first happened for me during the Journey On Podcast Summit in 2023, when Filipe Masetti Leiti spoke of his own depression after completing a very long ride from Canada to Brazil on horseback. He delivered one of the most inspiring speeches at that event, leaving us all in awe of the perseverance it took to ride through the pressures of 17,000 miles on horseback. Then he spoke of the depression he experienced when it was all over.
I wrote on my notepad: De-pressure = depression?
At the time, especially at that event, I was wrestling with the judgments floating around about pressure. Said directly or indirectly, the prevailing winds were blowing in the direction of Pressure = Bad. Why? Pressure puts our nervous system into Survival Mode – fight, flight or freeze - and then the assumption is that, at best, we can’t get anything done in that state and at worst, it’s abusive if someone or something puts you in that state.
Buying into the idea that pressure is a bad thing was easy for me to do. I had all kinds of self-judgment about myself back in the early 90’s when I learned via that lovely device called “360 feedback” that my methods for handling pressure were deeply ineffective.
At the time, I had a big role in a big bank. They invested heavily in leadership development, and I got the feedback through one of the fast-track leadership programs they offered. According to most of the people who filled out the feedback, being known as a hardass (ie someone who applies a lot of pressure) was costly me deeply. My coach in the program made the strong point that it was time for me to learn to listen. Walking around with a “whip in hand” clearly wasn’t bringing out the best in people.
After the program, I changed my tune. I became a doormat. I quit asking anything of people. I was so busy understanding them (and buying into their discomfort when they had to do something difficult) that I forgot that we were there to get things done for our clients.
When I needed something done, my tone went from “whip in hand” to “hat in hand.”
Begging is not a good leadership strategy.
While being a hardass had made life uncomfortable for my team, we also got a lot done. With my new make-no-one-uncomfortable- strategy, we were like a sailboat in the doldrums. We started going in circles and getting less done. My experience had begun to feel a little like depression. Taking no action seemed like the only answer to keep me safe – and them comfortable - and yet taking no action also was depressing.
I remember a significant moment when a senior executive looked at me in a meeting, asking if my team could take on a meaningful, high-pressure project and my reflexive answer was “no.” When he asked, my whole body felt the charge of electricity that happens when something big is afoot. My interpretation of that charge immediately went to: “if I bring this to my team, they will hate me and I will get more feedback that I’m a bitch.”
An outside consultant happened to be in the meeting, and at a break, pointed out what I had done. “Why did you not suggest that you would take it to your team and see if you could arrange your priorities and workflow to take this on? It will be a huge development opportunity for everyone, and help your team build new capabilities, not to mention the positive exposure it will give you.”
With that guidance, I did take it to my team, and we did take on the project. Yet I still struggled with the balancing act around pressure. Too much pressure and people go into survival mode and check out. Too little pressure and nothing gets done and it’s depressing. What’s a good leader to do?
As long as I teetered between those two extremes of the balancing act, my mental fitness either stayed stuck or deteriorated.
Several buried assumptions drove my actions. If I were to get out of the problem of overreacting and under reacting, my assumptions had to be considered. We rarely stress test our assumptions. They tend to operate in the background without conscious awareness. Here are a few assumptions worthy of consideration.
- Pressure is bad
- Discomfort (agitation) is bad
- Survival mode (fight, flight or freeze) renders you ineffective
- You either have mental fitness or you don’t
- There is a right answer to get in balance
I certainly did not see these assumptions at the time. To this day, I don’t see them unless I make a conscious choice to pay attention. They are so deep and so ingrained they are like the assumption that the other drivers will stay on their side of the road. We think they are true – until we examine them or until something happens to show it’s just an assumption.
Pressure is bad
Let’s start with pressure. Can we really change it? Is it even possible to get rid of pressure? What if pressure is the most natural thing in the world? How does that change the judgment that pressure is bad? One of my favorite books in a long time was written by podcast guest Sarah V. Barnes: She Who Rides Horses. The story involves early humans living on the ancient steppe 6000 years ago, focusing on Naya, who becomes the first person to ride a horse. Sarah wrote this historical fiction book from the perspective as a historian with Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University, so she deeply understands how early hunter gatherers lived. We can sum it up this way: they lived a life of pressure, because every day they had to find food and shelter. That’s a pressure I’m pretty sure no one reading this faces every day.
In Chapter 13 of my book Dancing the Tightrope, I wrote:
“I was chasing the option to live. To be fully alive while I was alive.
The Tools are as natural as the air we breathe. Curiosity, feel, timing, patience, discipline, observation, listening, hearing. I can imagine one of my ancestors, living in the pre-modern age. Perhaps he knew how to set a trap to catch dinner or gather fur for a coat. Living off the land, he didn’t have Google to tell him where to find the animals. He watched. He waited. He discovered. He learned. He felt.
When his Negative Pole went up, it might have been because he realized the trap had failed. Or he had chosen the wrong place. Or he was being watched. He followed his instincts with a well-developed sense of the subtle cues of nature. He knew how to play the game of Warmer-Colder until he got it right. The same was true for those growing and gathering food. Where did the plants grow the best? When was the right time to plant? What kind of soil was needed? Knowledge of the land and the seasons was passed from one generation to the next and that knowledge was amplified in each generation until dawn of the modern age.”
Discomfort (agitation) is bad
This passage begins to challenge the second assumption: Discomfort and agitation are bad. (It’s possible that we’ve built an entire “mental health” industry on this assumption.) What if discomfort is the most natural thing in the world? What if agitation is required for us to learn and grow? What if agitation is the way we discover what it happening outside of us – and inside of us? I know for myself, much of my early adult years, and almost all of my corporate life, I bought into the notion that “feelings are bad, thoughts are good.” Following that “guidance” took me into burnout and away from my internal guidance system, aka instincts.
Weather may be the best way for us in the modern era to grasp the idea that pressure just IS. Have you heard the saying “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just wrong clothes.”? On the heels of Hurricane Helene and so many tornadoes this Spring, it’s difficult to argue the bad weather statement. I’m not sure what kind of clothes I could have worn on September 27 or in any tornado that would protect me from the effects of that much pressure – the weather was undoubtedly bad. But that misses the point. Nothing I could have worn or done would have changed those acts of weather. Humans have always faced “bad” weather; the question leads to the next assumption.
Survival mode (fight, flight or freeze) renders you ineffective
We cannot escape survival mode any more than we can escape weather (or pressure in general.) It’s hard wired into our nervous system. However, if you look at human performance, it’s clear that there is a HUGE range of possibilities for how to handle survival mode. On one end, we have the fearful person who barely leaves their house or takes few chances in order to remain comfortably safe. On the other end, we have the Navy Seals, daredevils, athletes and entrepreneurs who seem to defy risk and embrace discomfort as a necessary side effect of living the life they choose. In my book Dancing the Tightrope, I called the former “existing” and the latter the art of living.
Survival Mode puts us in a state I call the “Froth”, which feels like the electrical charge I experienced in the story about the aspirational project above. It seems the difference comes down to what we do with the Froth. Do we escape it, using whatever behavior or medication we can get our hands on, or do we ride the wave of it, allowing it to elevate us?
What if the agitation we are avoiding creates the exact conditions required for growth? How would we see pressure if it became a good thing, not a bad thing? If we can’t get rid of pressure, can we change our assumptions about it?
To be continued…
In the next blog, I’m going to tackle these questions, the remaining assumptions and some new assumptions that sit under the excavation of the first assumptions.
In the meantime, if you haven’t listened yet to my conversation with Bernie Harberts, it’s worth your time. He beautifully addresses many of the questions I’m raising here, including the daily challenge of wondering, “where am I going to sleep tonight, with my two mules?”
If you would like to learn a little more about Filipe Masetti Leiti, Bernie actually interviewed him in 2023, and you can hear that (or read the transcript) here.
And coming up later in June, I have two awesome guests related to these topics on my podcast. On June 13, Julia Carpenter, founder of the Two Step Way (and Bernie’s wife) shares her insights, and two weeks after that, Hannah Betts, who fits squarely in the art of living category as an award-winning Hollywood stuntwomen who faces huge fear every day will be on.