Saturday, January 14, 2012

Job Stress and the Lost Art of Keeping Your Word

In a recent multi-week road trip, I talked to a lot of people – a lot of people – who complained about being overworked.  The demands of their lives are crashing over them like a wave, and they can’t figure out how to come up to the surface for air.  But the issue at work here is not that they are overworked.  That’s just the symptom.  The issue is they are overcommitted.

Here’s the difference.  We’ve all had days or weeks where we’ve felt we’ve given it all.  Left it all on the field, as the saying goes.  And we feel satisfied, productive and content.  Think back to one of those days – you probably worked harder on one of those days than you even thought was possible, but it was truly a great experience.  You were in the zone. 

Now contrast that with the feeling that your life is a series of looming deadlines that you think you’re going to miss.  You won’t be working any harder, but the experience will be a pressure-cooker that may be more than you can bear.  Because it’s the potential of a broken promise – not the workload – that creates the stress that burns people out.

Death by Promisesimage

Much of the workload you and I carry is based on agreements with others to provide them with some kind of result that they requested.  We made a promise.  And that chronic feeling of being overworked is really, at its core, the hopeless feeling that we’ve promised to do more things than we could possibly deliver.  We can’t keep all our promises, and we know that this will create conflict, disappointment and could even damage important relationships or our careers.

Of course, the tough part to digest about this difficult truth is our role in creating our own burden.  We’ve either done it to ourselves or allowed it to happen. “But wait a second!,” you say, “I have people breathing down my neck every day – whether I agree to it or not!”  Probably true – the people who are demanding so much of you may have made promises they can’t keep, and they are passing their problem along.  But for the chronically overcommitted, there is usually some percent of their soon-to-be-unkept-promises – and I’d posit that it’s a significant percent - that they never questioned or pushed back on for one reason or another.

A question of integrity

Why do these unkept promises create so much stress?  Because they compromise our integrity, and that goes against our basic wiring. By compromised integrity, I don’t mean cheating on your taxes or stealing copy paper from the office supply room (although those are both integrity issues).  Integrity is your ability to keep your word – so what you say and what you do line up.  Even in these somewhat graceless times, we each have a deep desire to keep our word.  When what we say and what we do are out of sync, we carry that disconnect as a burden. 

Each person tolerates this disconnect a little differently.  For some of us, holding one small or insignificant area where we can’t keep our word (e.g., promising myself I’ll pick up my dry cleaning on a certain day even though I’m booked solid) isn’t such a big deal.  Others have trouble carrying even the smallest unkept promises.  But what stresses everyone is carrying around a large number of disconnects or a really big disconnect.  Or carrying disconnects that aren’t even defined well enough to know how bad things are.

Blaming others for our lack of integrity

The human mind has a clever way of keeping us sane while carrying the burden of broken promises.  Unfortunately, it’s a relationship killer.  Sadly, our primary coping mechanism for our compromised integrity is to blame the person to whom we’ve given our word.  They’re unreasonable, they’re too demanding, they don’t understand the pressure I’m under, etc., etc.  Our mind will force the conflict outside of ourselves so it makes rational sense without making us feel terrible about ourselves.  The result is a victim mindset, where everyone around us is unreasonable and we are not in control of our world anymore.  leadership-and-self-deception

In their parable-style book, Leadership and Self-Deception, the authors from the Arbinger Institute refer to this blame-shifting approach as “self-betrayal,” which they define as “an act contrary to what I feel I should do for another.”  They describe the dynamic this way – “When I betray myself, I begin to see the world in a way that justifies my self-betrayal.  When I see a self-justifying world, my view of reality becomes distorted.”  One illustration from the book that hit home with me was a baby crying in the middle of the night. The two parents are lying in bed, each knowing they should get up to take care of the baby, but each pretends to be asleep in the hope that the other will do it. As the baby continues to cry, and nobody moves, the mother and father don’t begin to feel guilty for being a lousy parent – instead, they begin to feel angry that their spouse is lazy and selfish for not taking care of the problem while letting them sleep.  And deceptive, too, for pretending to be asleep (just like they are…). 

As our broken promises pile up, so does the anger and stress of self-betrayal, just like the two tired and angry parents above.  As we move into victim mode, it’s not our workload that upsets us, it’s our distorted view of our situation and the people around us – a self-created burden that can immobilize us.

Five steps to get you unburied from the promises you can’t keep

If you find yourself carrying this burden on a regular basis, here are five ways to begin the process of digging out from over-commitment, and to prevent yourself from agreeing to things you don’t believe you can actually accomplish:

  • Get clear on what you’ve committed to already: Whether it’s your objectives at work, your kid’s birthday party, or serving on a board of a local comedy club, write down exactly what you’ve promised to others.  Everything, and be specific (exact outcome, date you’ve committed to, etc.).  If you don’t have the details, get them.  Every new commitment needs to be added to your list. Just getting it out on the table makes the problem tangible so you can begin to work on it.
  • Identify role integrity situations you need to resolve.  Some commitments, like visiting family, owning broad areas of responsibility at work, or even responding to emails in a timely way, are role expectations that can be assumed by others or poorly defined.  Many of these expectations create a unique kind of chronic stress – that gnawing sense of unease - because they are subjective and can change or grow based on emotion or circumstances.  While you probably don’t need to nail down every single one of these, it’s a great idea to identify the key role expectations that are weighing on you so you can get them out on the table and get real about what you can and cannot do. 
  • Renegotiate the impossible.  Go back to those whose expectations will not be met, and negotiate an arrangement that reflects reality.  While this step is a tough one, remember that you already know you’re going to be having a tough discussion with this person when you eventually don’t deliver on your promise.  By having the talk now, you create options to address the situation before the deadline hits.
  • Start using the words “I promise..” when making a commitment.  It’s one thing to say, “I can get that to you by Monday.”  It’s an entirely different thing to tell someone, “I promise to have this to you by Monday at noon.”  Try this for just one week.  Every time you agree to do something for someone, really give them your word that it will be done when you say it will.  If you can’t bring yourself to say those words, then that’s a healthy beginning to negotiate a more realistic commitment.
  • Keep your word.  Remember that the whole point is to lower your stress level by keeping your promises.  So place a value on delivering against your promises – every time. 

Yes, you’ll work hard, but you’re doing that already, right?  The difference is that by keeping your promises, your stress level will drop, your reputation will get a boost, and people who have to rely on you will really be able to rely on you.

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