How It Used To Be

Gone are the days when a manager or boss might start a business meeting with the words, “Good job! We’re doing great. Just keep doing what you are doing right now!” That never happens anymore. What we do now in our jobs and professions is never good enough. And, we are not only expected to improve our performance, we are expected to continuously improve it. From a business math perspective, that means improvement must take place over the smallest time increment possible. If you performed at an 89 one second ago, your performance had better be a 90 in the current second and 91 in the next second. That is no way to live. This corporate mindset is killing us with stress and unreasonable expectations. Let’s look a little deeper.

Why Continuous Improvement?

Words are important. In fact, words are containers. They can hold love, hope, encouragement, and many other intangibles that are necessary for living a fulfilling life. But words can also constrain, demoralize, and enslave the hearers. The phrase “continuous improvement” is interesting on one hand because it is not possible. Continuous improvement is impossible because–hello!–we are not machines! We are incapable of performing the same way or in ever increasing levels of performance. We are people! We have good days and bad days. We hit it good at 9:00 but not so good at 10:30. The overall effect may be great on Tuesday and merely good on Wednesday. However, like machine, if we are subjected to relentless stress we break down. Live with it corporate American–it’s what it means to be human. (Of course, everyone knows that management and administration cannot continuously improve either–they just have the power to tell us they do.)

Now since no one is capable of continuous improvement, why use that label? Why create an entire culture around continuous improvement instead of one of meeting or exceeding a high standard and going home to a nice pot roast? I suggest that the choice of words is oppressive and is a tool of domination to expect impossible levels of performance at all times and to provide a justification for punishment when expectations are not met. And, for the most part, it looks like we’ve bought into it.

Good Enough Is Good Enough

Taboo words or concepts within a culture are very interesting. When discovered the give us insights into what is really happening behind the Ozian curtain. Malcolm Gladwell had the courage to not only speak words that are taboo in today’s business culture (and I include education, health care, and all other bureaucratic institutions) but to back up his claim with some convincing observations. He wrote in Outliers: The Story of Success that good enough is often sufficient to accomplish what we need to get done. In fact, someone who completes a task to the level of “good enough” may have enough humanity left over to bring other dimensions to the task at hand and contribute to an overall success that is greater than a narrow focus on continuous improvement. Maybe “good enough” leaves a little room for asking about how the four-year-old did at T-ball practice or offering help to someone who is swamped.

A Natural Stress Reducer

Isn’t it amazing the number of health problems that link back to stress as a primary cause? High blood pressure, cancer, overeating, depression, panic attacks, and anxiety attacks feed off of stress–the kind of stress produced by a culture of continuous improvement.

So my suggestion to you, gentle reader, is to let it go. Don’t buy into the system pressurizing expectation of continuous improvement. Aim at good enough. For most of us, good enough will be quite good and will achieve all of the expected results and even more. Good enough is, well, good enough.

But you may also require some resetting of your system to escape the habit of continuous stress. If so, know that panic attacks, anxiety attacks, OCD, and other stress-related problems can be cured. Don’t settle for managing stress, discover the cure. Get real solutions with a 96% success rate. Learn how to stop panic attacks and return to the humane land of good enough!

We all know it: stress is a killer. But long before it gets that bad, it’s still bad!

Stress reduces our ability to think creatively and often contributes to hasty decisions that we pay for later. At the most elemental level, stress is a thief that can, if allowed, rob us of enjoying life moment by moment.

So . . . like so many other things that come our way daily, stress must be managed. We need to figure out how to stop panic attacks and the ill health that anxiety brings.

Okay . . . This Works!

I’d like to use this posting to share a strategy that I’ve found to be very effective in taming the lion of stress–bearding it, as it were.

I learned to apply this technique when I was in the middle of that desert of lost hope called a doctoral dissertation. I had chosen a research methodology called “grounded theory.” This method could best be likened to pulling in everything you can find out about your research topic and then plowing through all of it hoping to find the pony. If something doesn’t come up out of the muck—and your continued appointment as a professor depends upon it—you’re out on the streets. I had to face the lion of fear and hopelessness or stay curled up in the mental fetal position I often found myself in and be out on the streets shortly.

Enough verbiage! Here is the Technique.

I talked to the fear that kept knocking on the door of my mind as if it were a living creature. It sure felt as if it was real because it kept talking to me saying things like, “You’re a loser; you’re never going to get this done” and “You’re going to lose your job.” Although it was very difficult to ignore such convincing and oh so helpful encouragements that echoed through my mind, I fought back.

When I would hear the knock at the door of my mind with the temptation to be paralyzed with fear, I would speak to it the following statements:

1. I will not give you a minute’s attention.

2. I will not open the door.

3. I will not invite you in.

4. I will certainly not sit down with you on the sofa and carry on a conversation with you.

5. I WILL ignore you and turn my attention to things that make progress.

Whew! I could not believe how hard this was to do the first few times I DISCIPLINED myself to manage this stress and keep the lion away! I would close my eyes and hear the pounding at the door. In my mind’s eye I would see the savage lion pacing and jumping up on the door, trying to get in. (visualization and imagination are very important to make this work).

Difficult–It Goes Against Our Learned Tendencies to Accept Worry

Every bit of our nature wants to dwell on the negative–to have a relationship with failure–but we have to deny that very strong pull! We’re not in the middle of a soap opera here. This is life and the stakes are very high. The lion of worry and fear has real power but it can only damage us if it can get in and take over our world.
And remember, the lion outside sometimes sounds like a little lamb that just needs some attention. But if you open the door, if you invite it in, if you let it commune with you on the sofa, it will take over and devour your thought life and energy. Negative is negative, whether it is in the body of a lion or a lamb.
We won’t let that happen, will we?

An Ongoing Strategy

Since then, long after my dissertation was completed and successfully defended, I’ve had to manage stress and resist the temptation to carry on a warm relationship with fear, doubt, and insecurities many times by using this same technique.

Try it the next time something is threatening to overwhelm you. It works best if you speak out loud but, of course, you also have to manage the possible perception on the part of your co-workers that you might be stark, raving mad.

Take care and take care of yourself! Check out this great step-by-step course–click here!

I want to start out by saying I ain’t no doctor or anything. I’m just someone who experienced heavy duty stress at work and watched my brother-in-law in and out of emergency rooms with what he thought were heart attacks. They were panic attacks instead.

It was important to me to find a solution that did not mean taking prescription drugs and paying for doctors visits the rest of my life. I was so happy when I found a product that worked for me.

Check it out here …

When people ask me how I got cured of panic attacks, they also ask me what the symptoms are.

I found the symptoms of panic attacks to be these:

• Dizzy spells that end up in panic
• Tightness in throat and chest- shortness of breath, especially hard to exhale normally
• Racing heart with tingly feelings
• Hot flushes followed by waves of anxiety, maybe a lot of sweating
• Worries and unwanted thoughts you can’t control
• Not feeling connected to what is going on around you, kind of spacey feeling
• Overwhelming fear that the anxiety will make you totally lose control of yourself

That list kind of sums up what I felt but it may be different for you. I know my brother-in-law had really bad chest pains that made him think he was having a heart attack. That’s pretty extreme!

Hop on their web site and listen or look through their testimoniels and you’ll see what other people have experienced with panic attacks and how to stop panic attacks.

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Best to you …

-Bill