Developing mental resilience is a practice. It requires challenges to struggle against, and, like athletic practice, it is helpful to rest between times of stress. Life doesn’t always offer us this rest. I have found it helpful to treat each challenge or issue as its own thing. When I was younger, I was lucky enough to have a pair of uncles who taught me that even small things can feel overwhelming if we bundle them together in our minds. I learned the lesson of breaking things into separate challenges to make them more manageable.

During his reign as emperor, Marcus Aurelius dealt with plague, treason, war and the loss of as many as 9 of his children. He struggled with poor health for most of his life before succumbing to an infection at the age of 58. His son and heir, Commodus, was clearly not the successor Marcus would have wished for (in fact, his solo reign may have led to the end of an era of peace and prosperity in the Roman Empire.) And yet, Marcus repeatedly admonished himself in his “Meditations” to focus just on the present moment and not be troubled by things outside of his control. He also reminded himself “Nothing that happens is unusual or unnatural, and there’s no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.” If life sometimes seems unfair and unrelenting, it is temporary and complaining will not improve the situation.

Bridgewater CEO and author of “Principles of Life and Work”, Ray Dalio, advises confronting our problems head-on. “The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.” He also advocates for identifying new challenges as examples of previously met ones – which can help reframe a setback or loss.

Marcus and other stoics remind us to note the things in our control and take action on them. By making progress in even one small area or addressing one issue out of many, we can regain some semblance of control when all seems to be conspiring against us.

Finally, it is worth remembering that our emotions are not facts, and we can control our emotions even at very difficult times. As Marcus put it, “When jarred unavoidably by circumstance, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony of you keep on going back to it.”

Next time it seems to you that life is handing you an unrelenting series of shit sandwiches, try to remember that the events (and life itself) are temporary. We will move out of the period of struggle, and will be better able to respond while in it if we remember to act on those things we can control. We can also remember that our emotions need not drive us – we can decide how we react to life’s challenges. Repeatedly practising intentional responses will make a calmer demeanour easier to maintain, even in very trying circumstances. While very few of us are ever likely to deal with the level of challenge that Marcus dealt with, we share a common humanity with those who went before us. We can leverage the lessons of our predecessors to make our present more palatable.

A few people have asked me recently, “When do I know it’s time to make a change?” In this post, I propose some criteria that I hope you will find relevant.

The context of the question above usually relates to role change. Typically, when someone asks me this question, it is because they have identified reasons to consider new roles and are trying to confirm or challenge their thought processes.

Several drivers show up in these discussions, which I like to frame as questions:

• Am I still learning and growing?
• Do I feel fulfilled by my work?
• Is my work considered valuable by key stakeholders?
• Do I think I’m being fairly compensated?
• Is there a next step or trajectory to this role?

Growth typically requires a level of challenge in the role – we learn most effectively when we are uncomfortable. The corollary to this is that staying in “the velvet rut” of the known and comfortable leads to stagnation and a lack of growth. A quote I like on the subject of change is attributed to John C. Maxwell: “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” We are going to be constantly subjected to change – environmental, organisational, personal – and it is up to us to determine whether we learn and develop from it.

One of the major reasons that people look to change roles (apart from having unsupportive or difficult managers) is reward and recognition. People can get hung up on monetary elements when it comes to compensation without considering other aspects. For example, am I being given new growth opportunities as a result of my delivery? Is my work getting publicised? Am I given the chance to be seen as a subject matter expert in my field?

We all have different criteria for what constitutes fair compensation. While the monetary aspect is key (very few of us turn up to work for the camraderie and challenge alone) it is not the only way to be rewarded for doing our jobs well.

I use a Pareto principle calculation to help people categorise the type of work in their current role. Am I spending 80% of my time on things that matter to me and others and that have value? If 20% of my time is spent on administrative work and noise, that’s probably okay. If the percentage grows closer to 50%, that probably indicates that a change (either within or outside the organisation) is required.

I have made a significant number of changes in my career and continue to do so, with an eye to continuing growth and challenge. Sometimes this works out, and the timing is right, personally and professionally, and sometimes it doesn’t. Each time I learn from the experience, and each time I refine and improve my criteria for when role change is necessary for me. One additional criterion that can be useful for you to consider is “What is my tolerance for risk at this stage of my life?” Younger people or those without attachments may have have higher risk tolerance because they don’t have dependents. For those of us with families to support and possibly aging parents as well, our risk appetite may be lower. Either way, it is important to consider if your current role is providing you the right answers to the questions above, and to other criteria that may be relevant to you.

As a final note, I came across a quote recently that made me smile – “You are not a tree. If you don’t like where you are, move.” It is important for all of us to remember that our constraints are often less restrictive than we think!

When I was young, stress was invariably considered a bad thing. It was thought that there was one stress category, which was all negative. Neuroscience and management thinking have moved forward in the intervening epochs, and there is a recognition that human beings need stress to be engaged and to grow.

Mihayli Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychologist, introduced the concept of Flow. We are in a flow state when deeply engaged with our work. Time passes without our noticing, and the work feels effortless and productive. Flow state is achieved when we can work without distraction and the work is sufficiently taxing to require our full attention.

Developers enter a flow state when coding without stopping for food, bathroom breaks or distractions. Writers constantly seek to enter a flow state to generate high-quality, volume output. We can enter a flow state when working on a new problem or while standing in a river fly fishing (literally being in the flow). To enter a flow state, we also have to be in a state of stress, in this case, called eustress.

Eustress is the state in which we grow and learn fastest. We may feel uncomfortable, like when starting a new job, but not to the point of damaging stress levels. I have learned the most when I’ve been in this state of “not-knowing” discomfort.

Too little stress can be damaging in its own way, particularly if we are used to operating at a certain level of everyday stress. If we have too little stress in our work lives, we may engage in damaging behaviours, spending time doom-scrolling social media or Internet sites. Our motivation suffers, and it can seem pointless to engage with anything. A continuation of this state can lead to a lack of a sense of purpose, which can be very bad for our mental health. Humans need focus and purpose, or we become anxious and perhaps even depressed.

One aspect I have noticed of moving from a high-stress to a low-stress condition over time is that I am more likely to get sick once cortisol levels drop. Several theories address why this may occur, but cortisol suppresses the immune system in persistent high-stress situations. When the stressors are removed, the body switches back to a higher immune response, which may cause pathogens that gained a foothold during the suppressed state to cause an immune reaction. This then leads us to feel sick. Research has shown that persistent, chronic stress can lead to hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, among other serious health issues.

Acute stress can also impact immune response. This tends to be temporary and does not always result in illness.

The key from the above is that maintaining a state of eustress is desirable, and we need to be aware of when we are either under-stressed or over-stressed. Persistent states of stress imbalance can have severe mental and physical health conditions associated with them. The only way to know what our eustress levels look like is to seek out the right challenges for us and know when to disengage from work (or leisure) and when to recharge or re-engage.

In short, go ahead, stress yourself!

What do procrastination and busyness have to do with each other? How can you procrastinate if you’re doing work? Marcus Aurelius put it this way in Meditations – “Ask yourself at every moment – is this necessary?”. I recently spoke with a coaching client who told me he sometimes loses entire mornings “researching” things for his business. He goes on ChatGPT binges or designs a logo using Dall-E. Later, he realises he hasn’t done the one crucial thing for the day. Tim Urban refers to this as the dark playground – doing things we enjoy but not being able to truly enjoy them because we’re not doing what we should be doing at that time.

It’s easy to become busy. In the corporate world, especially in middle management and above, we can become driven by our calendars, which are often not entirely in our control. A day spent in meetings will feel busy (and cognitively challenging) but is often not very productive.

If we follow our calendars blindly, we can lose entire weeks where all we do is attend meetings and not get any real work done. If we don’t understand our priority (yes, singular) for the day or the week, it will not be attended to. So we have to start with the priority for the day and do that work first. We have to avoid “the tyranny of the urgent.” Instead, mimicking Eisenhower’s matrix, we must understand the benefits of focusing our efforts on things that matter.

Doing the easier things first is a form of procrastination. Reading emails at the start of the day, instead of tackling the one big task that needs to be done, can give the impression of progress. In reality, it is just using time that could be better deployed on the more challenging problems. It invariably also impacts our ability to think clearly and focus. Email is generally just a collection of other people’s priorities delivered to us without prioritisation. Clearing out our mailbox will feel like we’re being productive, but it’s not moving our goals forward.

We must clearly understand our goals to avoid having our days consumed with other people’s priorities. This is the basis of coaching – helping people articulate what it is they want to achieve and then helping them get there. Once we’re clear on what we want to achieve, making those few items the focus of our time is much easier. We put the big rocks in the bottom of the jar before we try to add the pebbles and sand.

Understanding that we decide how we prioritise our time, even if we don’t dictate our schedule or our deliverables, can give us a sense of freedom. Being focused on what matters and making progress on those things over time reduces the sense of overwhelm, of being constantly “busy”. And replacing the list of “priorities” with the priority – “what’s important now (WIN)” for each period in the day can give us clarity on how to proceed.

Don’t be busy. Be productive.

The British Queen, Elizabeth II, was a fixture in my life and that of many others until she died this week. I am not a monarchist – it would be strange if I were, given the nature of UK and Irish relations throughout my life. QE II was a neutral presence in my life and awareness, if not in the lives of many others. Fans of the monarchy and the royal family are undoubtedly grieving the loss of a monarch who outlasted 15 UK prime ministers, including Winston Churchill. Critics have, in some cases horribly, greeted the news of her demise differently.

What the Queen represented, not just in the minds of UK citizens, was a solid, stable, professional approach to leading her country. She was diplomatic and discreet and gave her entire life to the service of the UK. She continued to do so following the loss of her husband of 73 years – the kind of blow I can’t even imagine and a level of commitment that very few people in my experience can demonstrate.

While the notion of the monarchy seems archaic and bizarre to me, the level of leadership that Queen Elizabeth II demonstrated is much more relatable. She navigated challenging diplomatic situations with gravitas, aplomb and surety. There were no reports of her ever speaking ill of anyone, despite having plenty of ammunition in some cases. She was a solid, dependable, compassionate leader of her people. She was constant.

That kind of constancy is rare. I aspire to it in my personal and professional life. I try to be a good Dad, keeping my temper when it is sometimes challenging. I try to be a thoughtful partner and husband to my wife. I put enormous effort into being a good leader, manager and teammate at work.

I fail to achieve these things with consistency. I can get cranky with my kids when I’m tired and in pain. I have failed over the years to see where simply asking “what else can I do to help” would have taken a burden off my wife’s shoulders. I have made mistakes (and continue to) as a leader, manager and teammate, including not being as aware as I should be of the impact of my words.

Where I give myself a passing grade is that I always care. I always try. And I always care enough to try and learn from my mistakes and do better next time. That is the primary area of consistency in my life. I am a constant learner. And, like her or not, QE II represents a life lived in learning and lessons that I can take from a leader who faced challenges I can only imagine.

I am not a plumber, nor do I play one on the Internet. I do have a basic education in physics, though. When I moved the thermostat, I was operating under a bit of pressure. My wife asked if I had completed the job I had forgotten a couple of weekends in a row. I didn’t want to disappoint my wife, and I did the work. As a result, when I moved the thermostat, I felt I had accomplished something. Shortly after that, I started to question the advice we had received.

Hot water rises in a tank, so having the thermostat moved to where the plumber recommended didn’t make sense. When I mentioned it to my wife, she looked it up online and confirmed that the appropriate place for a thermostat on our tank type was the original position. I had cut holes in the moulded lagging on the tank for no reason. Ultimately, I moved the thermostat back to its original position and patched the damage as best I could.

This whole situation is an example of something I like to think of as expert bias. Someone who appears qualified gives us advice, and we assume they know what they’re talking about. Unfortunately, it happens a lot in the workplace. We hire consultants. They do extensive analysis, produce a bulky document, and we attempt to follow the advice within. Or we ignore it completely; the document sits on a virtual or physical shelf and gathers dust.

Either way, we’ve spent a sometimes considerable sum of money to get advice that we hope is well-informed. It may change the direction of a project or an entire organisation. It may solve the original problem described or not. In the case of the advice received from the plumber, the challenge was my teenage girls complaining about having cold showers. I have very short showers because I’m mostly bald. My daughters, by contrast, have showers that seem to last for days and apparently drain the equivalent of the Mariana Trench. I didn’t notice a problem with the amount of hot water available while they did.

The root problem we were trying to solve was the mechanism we used to heat the water. We were using the immersion to heat the water, whereas we should have used the central heating system. Unfortunately, the immersion didn’t reach far enough into the tank to fill it with hot water.

So what have I learned from this little expedition into the land of ill-informed DIY? First, while expert advice can be helpful, we cannot afford to outsource our thinking entirely. Once I thought about it, I knew that the advice I received didn’t make sense. When we are under pressure to make a decision, it is sometimes tempting to simply accept the advice of experts. For what it’s worth, I advise you to do your most critical thinking in those moments. Don’t succumb to real or perceived pressure just to make a decision. Take the time to think for yourself and avoid an unnecessary repair job.

I’ve written in other blog posts about how our biases shape our worldview and responses. This area has been beautifully explained in Danny Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and many other equally relevant behavioural psychology and behavioural economics works. We use our experience and our mental shortcuts to make quick determinations so that we don’t have to waste valuable resources on a problem we already know the answer to.

Often this works well. For example, typically, we take the most efficient route from home to work without thinking about it every day. We know that traffic will be heavier on certain streets, and we avoid them at certain times of the day. We don’t sit into the car every morning and make a conscious decision to follow our usual route – we’re often halfway to work before we think about driving.

In the medical arena, when a patient presents with an inflamed, irritated, or debilitated knee, a knee surgeon will focus on that joint. They will order x-rays and perhaps MRIs and determine whether more direct surgical intervention is required. The patient may or may not get relief over time from the symptoms, but the surgeon will have treated the immediate crisis. This commentary is not a criticism of the medical profession but an observation – patients are often treated as a presentation of symptoms and not a holistic system. But people are not symptoms, and symptoms are not the root cause of an issue. In the case of knee pain, the problem might be due to poor footwear, an opposite side hip dysplasia, or a gait issue caused by lower back misalignment. Over time, biomechanically incorrect use of the knee joint will cause wear and tear, which leads to the symptoms. Again, what presents is the symptom, not the root cause.

In other areas of work and life, the same is often true. For example, in the technology arena, production outages of a system are often attributed to human error. An operator makes a change, and the system breaks. The operator may have failed to check inputs or follow documentation adequately. The prescription is often “more training” or “four-eyes checking” to address the issue. My contention, however, is that in this case, the problem may not be the operator – human error is a symptom. Instead, the problem may be with the complexity of the system design, that the operator has been working 12-hour shifts, or that there is insufficient automation to assist them.

We are often presented with symptoms rather than root causes in our personal lives. If my teenage daughters suddenly start behaving in a more challenging way than expected, it can be easy for me to dismiss it as them “just being rude”. My reaction to that diagnosis is unlikely to be favourable. I need to continuously bear in mind that a teenage brain is an incredibly complex system attached to other highly complex systems that are in an enormous state of flux all the time.

It is hard to look for and find the real root cause of an issue. It takes real effort, diverse inputs and critical thinking. It requires us to look past the surface and ask next order questions. Instead of just asking the typical “why” question, it can also be helpful to ask, “what might I be assuming that is preventing me from seeing what is going on?”. Or “who can I bring in to help me understand this problem?”. We have to take the time to make an accurate diagnosis of important problems. The next time you are presented with something genuinely impactful, it may be helpful to ask yourself, “am I looking at the problem or just a symptom?”. That question alone may help us make better decisions.

We see things, and people, all the time. For those of us with sight, it’s an automatic activity. And yet, a lot of what we see is filtered by our brains. As a result, we make inaccurate witnesses to events we are present for because we have so many cognitive filters on the world. For example, because of the automatic nature of what we do when experienced drivers, we often recall little to nothing of the cars we see on our journey to work. Our brain filters out a lot of the visual stimuli – how many red cars did you pass on the way to the office the last time you drove in? You probably have no idea.

We also filter people without meaning to do so. I don’t mean that we edit people out of our worldview, but we don’t always notice people the way we should. I think this can happen when we’re very familiar with someone – we don’t always take time to observe them. So, for example, my wife will not notice if I trim my beard (although she may notice if I don’t, oddly). Likewise, I won’t always see that she has coloured her hair.

Sometimes this lack of observation can feel like a lack of caring. At other times it can be seen for what it is – attentional deficit due to overload or brain filters kicking in for different reasons.

These examples are trivial, by and large. What matters more is when we miss seeing someone for who they are. Conversely, it matters enormously to people when we see them as they see themselves and as they behave.

At the closing event of a leadership development program I co-lead, my co-chair took the time to recognise me publically for the work I do in this area and others. She used thoughtful, insightful language to describe my impact on the program and on the people I interact with and support. She closed the event by saying to me, “We see you, and we recognise you”, in front of over one hundred people. I was genuinely moved by this – not because of the “recognition” in corporate-speak, but because she sees me. No one has ever so clearly articulated this to me in twenty-eight years of a career.

Apart from being awed by the skills that my colleague displayed (and being emotionally ambushed, in a lovely way) I was struck by how much it means to be seen. For our impact on the world to be noted and played back to us. It reinforces the message that what we do matters. It provides the best kind of incentive to continue doing what we do. But, more importantly, it recognises our humanity; to be seen is to be valued, and to be valued is to be human.

On the scale of potential loss, a phone is a pretty minor thing. By contrast, Thomas Edison was dealt a substantial blow when, in 1914, his lab complex burned to the ground. Ryan Holiday tells the story really well in his book “The Obstacle is the Way”. By comparison to my teenage daughter, and most of us, I suspect, Edison accepted the loss of the buildings with both curiosity and stoicism. His main concern was that there be no loss of life, despite the incalculable loss of many patents and inventions. Rather than mourn the buildings and their contents he told his son to gather his friends to witness the spectacle of flames shooting 100 feet into the air.

In “Mindset”, Carole Dweck writes about a lawyer who spent seven years fighting a case against the biggest bank in his state on behalf of customers of the bank. He lost. His response to being questioned about how he felt was centred on the validity of the effort, not the loss. While I’m sure his clients would have liked to see a positive court case result, the outcomes were broader for the lawyer.

Outcomes aren’t necessarily binary things. We won, or we lost; we got to the top of the mountain, or we turned back. These seem like binary statements. If we view the consequences of our decisions as purely binary, then we’re in danger of missing important opportunities in our lives. Foremost amongst those is the chance to learn from the journey we take to get to the goal.

I suppose what I’m saying is that the goal might be different from the outcomes. And the outcome might not be “good” or “bad”, or even a binary position.

Failing during a worthwhile endeavour isn’t necessarily an unwelcome outcome. The goal isn’t to fail, clearly – it’s to get to the finish line. But the activity, and the lessons learned from the activity and the failure, can be transformational. Unfortunately, that is something we often disregard (particularly if we’re in a fixed mindset).

I’m not saying we should set failure as a goal – particularly systemic failure. That said, I do think micro-failures are helpful to us, especially in new disciplines. “I tried this, it didn’t work, I’ll try differently next time.” The failure is an outcome, not a definition of who we are.

In Edison’s case, the loss of the factory was not the goal, but the result was a massive increase in profit and a raft of new inventions. “We got rid of a load of rubbish”, was one of his comments to his son.

In my daughter’s case, the outcome was a new number and a more powerful phone. Not her goal when she set out that day, but I’ve not heard her complain about it since. She has also had a timely reminder of the need to maintain backups for all of her data, something that all of us can bear in mind.

Economists may tell you that all that matters is the outcome. Let’s make sure that we understand that the outcome is not necessarily the goal and that a failure or loss can have beneficial results. Being kinder to ourselves when we fail can bring new learning. In addition, succeeding doesn’t necessarily mean achieving our goals. And with that, back to the learning journey!

We all get stuck sometimes in our lives. Sometimes it’s in a role that doesn’t allow us to develop. We can become stagnant in our education – either formal or self-driven. Relationships that don’t provide us with what we need can be veritable tar-pits of stickiness. And a loss of direction or support can cause a sense of aimlessness.

I’m happy to say that I’m in a good place from a relationship point of view – my wife and I have been married for 19 years, and we are good for each other. My marriage has very rarely felt like a cause of that stuck feeling – quite the contrary a lot of the time. My wife supports me in my ambitions, helps me with my doubts, and I do the same for her.

I discovered, after a little thought, that the cause of the stress in the past couple of weeks was something I’ve fallen prey to before. I had way too much that I wanted to get done, and hadn’t spent the time to prioritise. My job is particularly busy at the moment – I’m working on a strategic project which is full of challenge and learning. While I’m getting a kick out of it, my days are getting longer and longer. My writing has fallen by the wayside, even though I enjoy it when I write. I’ve gone from writing one post every couple of weeks to maybe one post a month.

I’ve been thinking about writing another book, and I haven’t even begun to plan it. And my Amazon Web Services certifications are up for renewal this year, and I’ve not started studying.

All of these things have been floating around in my head, sometimes waking me at night. The work is first and foremost, because it allows all the other stuff. Even there, I needed to focus more on ordering what needs to be done and by when.

I needed to get unstuck, mentally. So I sat down and spent just 30 minutes taking things in my to-do list and prioritising them. I created a priority list for that day and then did the same the following day. And to take some of the pressure off the work week, I started to carve out a bit of time at the weekend to catch up on things that were falling behind.

I’m not out of the woods by any means, but I no longer feel stuck. I know (and reminded myself) that I am in control of what I do and when. So if you’re feeling a bit bogged down, try a bit of prioritisation. It might not be the full answer, but it never hurts, even if you’re not feeling stuck like I was.