How to Stop All Panic Attacks

In our ever-upward striving to shape the culture of corporate America to closely resemble the Third Reich, we seem to have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the bondage of continuous improvement.

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!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.