Thriving Under Pressure

Shaping Self-Talk to Meet Challenges

Walt Schafer

will be a regular column in

Walt Schafer, author and scholar in the area of the relationship between stress and health, has generously agreed to share his wealth of research information and experience.

To thrive under pressure is to stay well while staying challenged. To thrive under pressure is not to avoid adversity but to embrace it with a sense of challenge, confidence, commitment, and control. People strong in what I call the four C's are more likely to stay well—indeed to thrive during periods of adversity, turmoil, and change—than people with the opposite attitudes of threat, self-doubt, alienation, and helplessness.

In a current survey study of 225 California city managers, Dan Toy of the College of Business and I are finding that, despite the presumed stressfulness of this demanding profession, most respondents report enjoying their work; feeling relatively energetic, healthy and happy; and experiencing relatively few distress symptoms. Two-thirds would choose the same profession again. In short, most city managers we are studying seem to thrive under the pressures of their demanding work.

Still, we found enough variability in our sample to pursue this question: What qualities and habits distinguish "thrivers" from "non-thrivers?" Our findings are instructive. Thrivers (those with high scores on measures of job satisfaction, health, energy, and happiness and with low distress scores) display low Type A behavior and attitudes. (The Type A pattern includes being hard driving, competitive, perfectionistic, hurried and hassled, hostile, irritable, and easily angered.) More positively, thrivers display a high sense of commitment, a strong sense of control over their lives, high optimism, and a tendency to view adversity as challenge rather than a threat. They also report seldom feeling rushed or pressed for time. When dealing with stressful events, thrivers report staying engaged rather than denying or retreating. They tend to interpret stressful events in a positive way.

We also examined circumstances at work. Thrivers report more independent authority in their jobs, an important finding confirming a host of other studies. However, thrivers are no different from non-thrivers in such objective work-related factors as city size, number of employees supervised, or length of experience.

A thread through these findings is evident: Thriving under pressure results, at least in part, from positive habits related to perspective, attitude, and self-talk. Our habits of self-talk (repeated internal conversations about self, others, and events) may be passive or proactive, positive or negative, open or closed, helpful or harmful, caring or hostile. While developed over many years, these self-talk patterns are not set in stone. They are changeable, given sufficient motivation, mindfulness, insight, dedication, practice, and support.

Try this simple approach to shaping your own self-talk as you deal with difficult events. Select one of these self-talk statements:

• This is an opportunity, not a threat.

• I am calm and confident.

• Is this truly worth getting upset about?

Write the statement on an index card. Memorize it. Discuss it with someone close to you. Repeat it twenty to thirty times a day for two weeks. By then, the statement will have become part of your natural thinking. You are likely to find your emotional and physical responses changing accordingly, and most important, you will increase chances of thriving under pressure.}Walt Schafer