Successful People Believe Stress is Good
Optimal amounts of stress is necessary for success, when embarking on your career.
Stress has a bad reputation…everything you read and hear about stress is about how bad it is for your health, how bad it is for your relationships, and especially how bad it is for your career and job. But stress is necessary to perform well, and successful people know this.
When you don’t have any stress, you are chilled out, barely breathing, barely have a pulse, muscles have no tone, and not a goal in mind- does this sound like a person who can achieve and be successful?
However, when the pressure and deadlines are on, and the competition is fierce, you experience an increase in energy, increase in your heart rate, faster breathing, muscle tension, tunnel vision, increased alertness, increased focus, and all around sharpened senses- does this sound more like a person who is primed to achieve and be successful?
Successful people know that stress is necessary to perform and achieve optimally. However, successful people also know that they can overdo it and have too much stress, which can lead to burnout and a significant decline in productivity.
So what successful people know is that it takes a moderate amount of stress to perform and achieve optimally. What they avoid are the extremes. They avoid having no stress, as having no stress is the equivalent of having no pulse and being comatose; so this state does not lead to anything productive and nothing gets done. Successful people also avoid having too much stress, as this can lead to a panic attack; so this state also does not lead to anything productive, and certainly nothing gets done while in the midst of a panic attack.
This relationship between stress and performance is illustrated by the following graph, an inverted-U curve:
So this inverted-U curve shows us that the extremes of stress on either end (comatose and panic attack) lead to poor performance, while moderate levels of stress lead to optimal performance.
But how do you control your stress level? There are numerous factors which lead to stress, including sleep and rest, diet, exercise, structure, work load, relationship status, financial status, passion, coping skills, and relaxation techniques, just to name a few.
So if you have too much stress, you might decrease it to moderate levels by sleeping and resting more, eating a healthy diet, exercise, instituting structure in your days, addressing relationship problems with your partner, balancing your personal budget, increasing your coping skills, and engaging in relaxation techniques.
If you have too little stress, then you might increase it moderate levels by sleeping and resting less, developing goals and deadlines, increasing your social and work connections, finding work that you are passionate about, reading inspiring books, listening to soul-moving music, and doing things that are out of your comfort zone (try new and scary things).
Successful people know how to tweak their stress level to moderate levels so that they can perform optimally. Moderate levels of stress are what successful people strive for to obtain peak performance.
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