Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (28 page)

COPING WITH STRESS

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” remarked Samuel Johnson, in a saying whose truth applies to the cases just presented. A major catastrophe that frustrates a central goal of life will either destroy the self, forcing a person to use all his psychic energy to erect a barrier around remaining goals, defending them against further onslaughts of fate; or it will provide a new, more clear, and more urgent goal: to overcome the challenges created by the defeat. If the second road is taken, the tragedy is not necessarily a detriment to the quality of life. Indeed, as in the cases of Lucio, Paolo, and innumerable others like them, what objectively seems a devastating event may come to enrich the victims’ lives in new and unexpected ways. Even the loss of one of the most basic human faculties, like that of sight, does not mean that a person’s consciousness need become impoverished; the opposite is often what happens. But what makes the difference? How does it come about that the same blow will destroy one person, while another will transform it into inner order?

Psychologists usually study the answers to such questions under the heading of
coping with stress
. It is obvious that certain events cause more psychological strain than others: for example, the death of a spouse is several orders of magnitude more stressful than taking out a mortgage on a house, which in turn causes more strain than being given a traffic ticket. But it is also clear that the same stressful event might make one person utterly miserable, while another will bite the bullet and make the best of it. This difference in how a person responds to stressful events has been called “coping ability” or “coping style.”

In trying to sort out what accounts for a person’s ability to cope with stress, it is useful to distinguish three different kinds of resources. The first is the external support available, and especially the network of social supports. A major illness, for instance, will be mitigated to a certain extent if one has good insurance and a loving family. The second bulwark against stress includes a person’s psychological resources, such as intelligence, education, and relevant personality factors. Moving to a new city and having to establish new friendships will be more stressful to an introvert than to an extrovert. And finally, the third type of resource refers to the coping strategies that a person uses to confront the stress.

Of these three factors, the third one is the most relevant to our purposes. External supports by themselves are not that effective in mitigating stress. They tend to help only those who can help themselves. And psychological resources are largely outside our control. It is difficult to become much smarter, or much more outgoing, than one was at birth. But how we cope is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress will have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control.

There are two main ways people respond to stress. The positive response is called a “mature defense” by George Vaillant, a psychiatrist who has studied the lives of successful and relatively unsuccessful Harvard graduates over a period of about thirty years; others call it “transformational coping.” The negative response to stress would be a “neurotic defense” or “regressive coping,” according to these models.

To illustrate the difference between them, let us take the example of Jim, a fictitious financial analyst who has just been fired from a comfortable job at age forty. Losing one’s job is reckoned to be about midpoint in the severity of life stresses; its impact varies, of course, with a person’s age and skills, the amount of his savings, and the conditions of the labor market. Confronted with this unpleasant event, Jim can take one of two opposite courses of action. He can withdraw into himself, sleep late, deny what has happened, and avoid thinking about it. He can also discharge his frustration by turning against his family and friends, or disguise it by starting to drink more than usual. All these would be examples of regressive coping, or immature defenses.

Or Jim can keep his cool by suppressing temporarily his feelings of anger and fear, analyzing the problem logically, and reassessing his priorities. Afterward he might redefine what the problem is, so that he can solve it more easily—for instance, by deciding to move to a place where his skills are more in demand, or by retraining himself and acquiring the skills for a new job. If he takes this course, he would be using mature defenses, or transformational coping.

Few people rely on only one or the other strategy exclusively. It is more likely that Jim would get drunk the first night; have a fight with his wife, who had been telling him for years that his job was lousy; and then the following morning, or the week after, he would simmer down and start figuring out what to do next. But people do differ in their abilities to use one or the other strategy. The paraplegic who became a champion archer, or the blind chess master, visited by misfortunes so intense that they are off the scale of stressful life events, are examples of individuals who have mastered transformational coping. Others, however, when confronted by much less intense levels of stress, might give up and respond by scaling down the complexity of their lives forever.

The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a very rare gift. Those who possess it are called “survivors,” and are said to have “resilience,” or “courage.” Whatever we call them, it is generally understood that they are exceptional people who have overcome great hardships, and have surmounted obstacles that would daunt most men and women. In fact, when average people are asked to name the individuals they admire the most, and to explain why these men and women are admired, courage and the ability to overcome hardship are the qualities most often mentioned as a reason for admiration. As Francis Bacon remarked, quoting from a speech by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, “The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.”

In one of our studies the list of admired persons included an old lady who, despite her paralysis, was always cheerful and ready to listen to other people’s troubles; a teenage camp counselor who, when a swimmer was missing and everybody else panicked, kept his head and organized a successful rescue effort; a female executive who, despite ridicule and sexist pressures, prevailed in a difficult working environment; and Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who in the last century insisted that the lives of many mothers could be saved at childbirth if obstetricians would only wash their hands, even though the rest of the doctors ignored and mocked him. These and the many hundreds of others mentioned were respected for the same reasons: They stood firm for what they believed in, and didn’t let opposition daunt them. They had courage, or what in earlier time was known simply as “virtue”—a term derived from the Latin word
vir
, or man.

It makes sense, of course, that people should look up to this one quality more than to any other. Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. To admire this quality means that we pay attention to those who embody it, and we thereby have a chance to emulate them if the need arises. Therefore admiring courage is in itself a positive adaptive trait; those who do so may be better prepared to ward off the blows of misfortune.

But simply calling the ability to cheat chaos “transformational coping,” and people who are good at it “courageous,” falls short of explaining this remarkable gift. Like the character in Moliere who said that sleep was caused by “dormitive power,” we fail to illuminate matters if we say that effective coping is caused by the virtue of courage. What we need is not only names and descriptions, but an understanding of how the process works. Unfortunately our ignorance in this matter is still very great.

THE POWER OF DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES

One fact that does seem clear, however, is that the ability to make order out of chaos is not unique to psychological processes. In fact, according to some views of evolution, complex life forms depend for their existence on a capacity to extract energy out of entropy—to recycle waste into structured order. The Nobel prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine calls physical systems that harness energy which otherwise would be dispersed and lost in random motion “dissipative structures.” For example, the entire vegetable kingdom on our planet is a huge dissipative structure because it feeds on light, which normally would be a useless by-product of the sun’s combustion. Plants have found a way to transform this wasted energy into the building blocks out of which leaves, flowers, fruit, bark, and timber are fashioned. And because without plants there would be no animals, all life on earth is ultimately made possible by dissipative structures that capture chaos and shape it into a more complex order.

Human beings have also managed to utilize waste energy to serve their goals. The first major technological invention, that of fire, is a good example. In the beginning, fires started at random: volcanoes, lightning, and spontaneous combustion ignited fuel here and there, and the energy of the decomposing timber was dispersed without purpose. As they learned to take control over fire people used the dissipating energy to warm their caves, cook their food, and finally to smelt and forge objects made of metal. Engines run by steam, electricity, gasoline, and nuclear fusion are also based on the same principle: to take advantage of energy that otherwise would be lost, or opposed to our goals. Unless men learned various tricks for transforming the forces of disorder into something they could use, we would not have survived as successfully as we have.

The psyche, as we have seen, operates according to similar principles. The integrity of the self depends on the ability to take neutral or destructive events and turn them into positive ones. Getting fired could be a godsend, if one took the opportunity to find something else to do that was more in tune with one’s desires. In each person’s life, the chances of only good things happening are extremely slim. The likelihood that our desires will be always fulfilled is so minute as to be negligible. Sooner or later everyone will have to confront events that contradict his goals: disappointments, severe illness, financial reversal, and eventually the inevitability of one’s death. Each event of this kind is negative feedback that produces disorder in the mind. Each threatens the self and impairs its functioning. If the trauma is severe enough, a person may lose the capacity to concentrate on necessary goals. If that happens, the self is no longer in control. If the impairment is very severe, consciousness becomes random, and the person “loses his mind”—the various symptoms of mental disease take over. In less severe cases the threatened self survives, but stops growing; cowering under attack, it retreats behind massive defenses and vegetates in a state of continuous suspicion.

It is for this reason that courage, resilience, perseverance, mature defense, or transformational coping—the dissipative structures of the mind—are so essential. Without them we would be constantly suffering through the random bombardment of stray psychological meteorites. On the other hand, if we do develop such positive strategies, most negative events can be at least neutralized, and possibly even used as challenges that will help make the self stronger and more complex.

Transformational skills usually develop by late adolescence. Young children and early teens still depend to a large extent on a supportive social network to buffer them against things that go wrong. When a blow falls on a young teenager—even something as trivial as a bad grade, a pimple erupting on the chin, or a friend ignoring him at school—it seems to him as if the world is about to end, and there is no longer any purpose in life. Positive feedback from other people usually picks his mood up in a matter of minutes; a smile, a phone call, a good song captures his attention, distracting him from worries and restoring order in the mind. We have learned from the Experience Sampling Method studies that a healthy adolescent stays depressed on the average for only half an hour. (An adult takes, on the average, twice as long to recover from bad moods.)

In a few years, however—by the time they are seventeen or eighteen—teenagers are generally able to place negative events in perspective, and they are no longer destroyed by things that don’t work out as desired. It is at this age that for most people the ability to control consciousness begins. Partly this ability is a product of the mere passage of time: having been disappointed before, and having survived the disappointment, the older teen knows that a situation is not as bad as it may seem at the moment. Partly it is knowing that other people also have been going through the same problems, and have been able to resolve them. The knowledge that one’s sufferings are shared adds an important perspective to the egocentrism of youth.

The peak in the development of coping skills is reached when a young man or woman has achieved a strong enough sense of self, based on personally selected goals, that no external disappointment can entirely undermine who he or she is. For some people the strength derives from a goal that involves identification with the family, with the country, or with a religion or an ideology. For others, it depends on mastery of a harmonious system of symbols, such as art, music, or physics. Srinivasa Ramanujan, the young mathematical genius from India, had so much of his psychic energy invested in number theory that poverty, sickness, pain, and even rapidly approaching death, although tiresome, had no chance of distracting his mind from calculations—in fact, they just spurred him on to greater creativity. On his deathbed he kept on marveling at the beauty of the equations he was discovering, and the serenity of his mind reflected the order of the symbols he used.

Why are some people weakened by stress, while others gain strength from it? Basically the answer is simple: those who know how to transform a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled will be able to enjoy themselves, and emerge stronger from the ordeal. There are three main steps that seem to be involved in such transformations:

1.
Unselfconscious self-assurance
. As Richard Logan found in his study of individuals who survived severe physical ordeals—polar explorers wandering alone in the Arctic, concentration camp inmates—one common attitude shared by such people was the implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands. They did not doubt their own resources would be sufficient to allow them to determine their fate. In that sense one would call them self-assured, yet at the same time, their egos seem curiously absent: they are not self-centered; their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously.

This attitude occurs when a person no longer sees himself in opposition to the environment, as an individual who insists that
his
goals,
his
intentions take precedence over everything else. Instead, he feels a part of whatever goes on around him, and tries to do his best within the system in which he must operate. Paradoxically, this sense of humility—the recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer—is a hallmark of strong people.

To take a trivial but common example, suppose that one cold morning, when you are in a hurry to get to the office, the car engine won’t start when you try the ignition. In such circumstances many people become so increasingly obsessed with their goal—getting to the office—that they cannot formulate any other plans. They may curse the car, turn the ignition key more frantically, slam the dashboard in exasperation—usually to no avail. Their ego involvement prevents them from coping effectively with frustration and from realizing their goal. A more sensible approach would be to recognize that it makes no difference to the car that you have to be downtown in a hurry. The car follows its own laws, and the only way to get it moving is by taking them into account. If you have no idea what may be wrong with the starter, it makes more sense to call a cab or form an alternative goal: cancel the appointment and find something useful to do at home instead.

Basically, to arrive at this level of self-assurance one must trust oneself, one’s environment, and one’s place in it. A good pilot knows her skills, has confidence in the machine she is flying, and is aware of what actions are required in case of a hurricane, or in case the wings ice over. Therefore she is confident in her ability to cope with whatever weather conditions may arise—not because she will force the plane to obey her will, but because she will be the instrument for matching the properties of the plane to the conditions of the air. As such she is an indispensable link for the safety of the plane, but it is only as a link—as a catalyst, as a component of the air-plane-person system, obeying the rules of that system—that she can achieve her goal.

2.
Focusing attention on the world
. It is difficult to notice the environment as long as attention is mainly focused inward, as long as most of one’s psychic energy is absorbed by the concerns and desires of the ego. People who know how to transform stress into enjoyable challenge spend very little time thinking about themselves. They are not expending all their energy trying to satisfy what they believe to be their needs, or worrying about socially conditioned desires. Instead their attention is alert, constantly processing information from their surroundings. The focus is still set by the person’s goal, but it is open enough to notice and adapt to external events even if they are not directly relevant to what he wants to accomplish.

An open stance makes it possible for a person to be objective, to be aware of alternative possibilities, to feel a part of the surrounding world. This total involvement with the environment is well expressed by the rock climber Yvon Chouinard, describing one of his ascents on the fearsome El Capitan in Yosemite: “Each individual crystal in the granite stood out in bold relief. The varied shapes of the clouds never ceased to attract our attention. For the first time, we noticed tiny bugs that were all over the walls, so tiny that they were barely noticeable. I stared at one for fifteen minutes, watching him move and admiring his brilliant red color.

“How could one ever be bored with so many good things to see and feel! This unity with our joyous surroundings, this ultra-penetrating perception, gave us a feeling that we had not had for years.”

Achieving this unity with one’s surroundings is not only an important component of enjoyable flow experiences but is also a central mechanism by which adversity is conquered. In the first place, when attention is focused away from the self, frustrations of one’s desires have less of a chance to disrupt consciousness. To experience psychic entropy one must concentrate on the internal disorder; but by paying attention to what is happening around oneself instead, the destructive effects of stress are lessened. Second, the person whose attention is immersed in the environment becomes part of it—she participates in the system by linking herself to it through psychic energy. This, in turn, makes it possible for her to understand the properties of the system, so that she can find a better way to adapt to a problematic situation.

Returning again to the example of the car that wouldn’t start: if your attention is completely absorbed by the goal of making it to the office in time, your mind might be full of images about what will happen if you are late, and of hostile thoughts about your uncooperative vehicle. Then you are less likely to notice what the car is trying to tell you: that the engine is flooded or that the battery is dead. Similarly the pilot who spends too much energy contemplating what she wants the plane to do might miss the information that will enable her to navigate safely. A sense of complete openness to the environment is well described by Charles Lindbergh, who experienced it during his epoch-making solo crossing of the Atlantic:

My cockpit is small, and its walls are thin: but inside this cocoon I feel secure, despite the speculations of my mind…. I become minutely conscious of details in my cockpit—of the instruments, the levers, the angles of construction. Each item takes on a new value. I study weld marks on the tubing (frozen ripples of steel through which pass invisible hundredweights of strain), a dot of radiolite paint on the altimeter’s face…the battery of fuel valves…—all such things, which I never considered much before, are now obvious and important…. I may be flying a complicated airplane, rushing through space, but in this cabin I’m surrounded by simplicity and thoughts set free of time.

A former colleague of mine, G., used to tell a gruesome story from his air force years that illustrates how dangerous excessive concern with safety can be, when it demands so much attention that it makes us oblivious to the rest of reality. During the Korean War, G.’s unit was involved in routine parachute training. One day, as the group was preparing for a drop, it was discovered that there were not enough regular parachutes to go around, and one of the right-handed men was forced to take a left-handed chute. “It is the same as the others,” the ordnance sergeant assured him, “but the rip cord hangs on the left side of the harness. You can release the chute with either hand, but it is easier to do it with the left.” The team boarded the plane, went up to eight thousand feet, and over the target area one after the other they jumped out. Everything went well, except for one of the men: his parachute never opened, and he fell straight to his death on the desert below.

G. was part of the investigating team sent to determine why the chute didn’t open. The dead soldier was the one who had been given the left-handed release latch. The uniform on the right side of his chest, where the rip cord for a regular parachute would have been, had been completely torn off; even the flesh of his chest had been gouged out in long gashes by his bloody right hand. A few inches to the left was the actual rip cord, apparently untouched. There had been nothing wrong with the parachute. The problem had been that, while falling through that awful eternity, the man had become fixated on the idea that to open the chute he had to find the release in the accustomed place. His fear was so intense that it blinded him to the fact that safety was literally at his fingertips.