Feeling the heat
Unless our executive board room has the thermostat set to a cool 65 degrees, for some reason it often feels like a sauna in there. Whether that’s due to vast amounts of hot air making its way around the room, smoke steaming out the ears of some of our colleagues, or just the body heat we generate because our heart is beating so fast, it doesn’t take long for us to feel those first beads of perspiration. So, when the meeting ends and we walk back to our office does it drop 5-10 degrees? Unfortunately, the elevated temperature too often continues to surround us like our own personal climate.
When we find ourselves in the midst of our executive heat wave, we’re often told “don’t sweat the small stuff”. We welcome the advice, because it gives us much needed psychological relief and gives us permission to actually take some things off our plate. But what is the small stuff? It’s often defined as the things that don’t really matter. Yet, what doesn’t seem important to us may be pretty darn important to someone else. So do we simply ignore what matters to others to decrease our own stress and continue sweating what we see as the big stuff? Maybe not.
Turning Up the Air
You may be nodding your head as you read, filling your mind’s eye with memories of meetings, conversations, and multiple full days where you were feeling the heat. In fact, you may be thinking that living in the tropics is just part of the executive lifestyle. Success requires speed, speed generates friction, and that means lots of heat, right? If that’s the case, then how are we supposed to turn up the air enough to cool off without also freezing progress? Maybe the answer lies in figuring out where all this heat is coming from and why we’re sweating in the first place.
Perhaps we’re biting off more than we can chew, or we’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t need the sleep, nutrition, and mental rest that’s required by every other human being. Or maybe it’s that we feel everything is our responsibility, that we’ve somehow failed ourselves and others in our organization if we haven’t taken on every task that’s even remotely related to the work we do and provided every ounce of possible support to those around us. I’m guessing that as you read this you may already be feeling that first drop of sweat trickling down your forehead. So what can we do about it?
Lions, Tigers, and Teamwork
The process of sweating involves sacrificing fluids so we can reduce our body temperature. Sort of like the way we sacrifice time with family, time with friends, and too often time sleeping so that we can reduce the burden of that executive heat wave. Of course, we’re really fooling ourselves. Giving up all those essentials simply shifts the heat from our work life to our personal life. Not really that helpful.
Perspiration, you see, is part of the same primitive process that prepared our ancestors to fight a tiger or to run for the hills. Since the modern tiger looks more like a computer screen full of emails and deadlines, we can’t combat it by reaching for a spear and probably wouldn’t fare well if we ran out of our office screaming. But maybe there’s still a lesson here. The tribal structure kept our ancestors safe, so seems like that should work for us too. If we open the door to our office and look around, we might just realize that it’s a lot cooler out there and that there are lots of people who can help us avoid getting bitten.
You see, sharing our burdens with others, delegating a task here and there, and asking help from colleagues allows us to broaden our personal climate and thereby dissipate the heat. Now, that does require a shift in mindset from “what can I do” to “what can we do,” a realization that there really is strength in numbers, and seeing that reaching out doesn’t mean we’re weak. It simply means we’re human.
Getting back to the small stuff
So, maybe we don’t have to sweat at all. Rather than making all those personal sacrifices, perhaps we can best weather the corporate storms if we do so together. Whether that’s in the boardroom or in the trenches. That might just allow us to find time to include ourselves in that list of those we support. Then maybe we could take all that mental and physical energy we used to spend running from tigers and redirect it to engaging in the “small” stuff. Those behaviors that show gratitude, understanding, and empathy that may not at first glance seem important but might just make someone’s day or even someone’s year. Because, in the end, sometimes the small stuff makes the biggest difference.
