There are a lot of people in the world who do not enjoy what they have been doing due to external expectations on them. These expectations usually come from those people being naturally more proficient than others more quickly. Sure, pressure does have its benefits. For example, deadlines, as a tool of progression, are used to motivate people who seemed bored or unmotivated. However, for a lot of people, especially during hard times like the economic recession, excessive amount of pressure are exerted on employees by upper management. Many of these employees are too afraid to speak out in the threat of losing their jobs, albeit being in a fear-based environment either for providing for their families or for paying off loan payments. For those of you who can leave everything behind and either start at a new company (different employer or even your own company) or profession altogether (if everyone who hires the same type of professionals evidently takes advantage of you like your previous employer), you are in luck. This post talks about the problems with excessive stress/incentives on performance. In addition, it also discusses about the benefit of being free from external expectations when having a completely clean slate, and how this benefit relates to the science of motivation.
Problem of Excessive Stress or Incentives on Performance
In 1979, a researcher named P. Nixon charted out the stress-performance curve to explain how stress affects performance.
The graph is relatively self-explanatory. The comfort zone is where one can produce the best performance as the stress level increases. However, when the stress continues uncontrolled and a fatigue point is reached, any further stress arousal would not only hinder performance, but create all kinds of problems, ranging from exhaustion, illness, and even breakdown in the end. Negative thoughts can crowd minds when being uncomfortably stressed, distracted, and anxious.
As you may also notice from the graph, stress management, if applied daily and regularly before the fatigue point is reached, can straighten the stress performance curve up dramatically.
Benefit of External Expectations being Absent
Using threats of employment termination or rewards in the form of bonuses and pay rises (i.e. using the carrot and the stick approach) helps increase pressure to perform. Such pressure or stress causes body to release endorphins, which are nature’s pain-killer for potentially life-threatening (or any kind of potentially threatening) situations. If you are being attacked by a predator and are injured, you don’t want to be focusing your attention on how much you hurt.
However, the tradeoff of releasing endorphins when feeling fearful is dulling the ability to think and to feel, both of which are required for effective decision-making and interpersonal skills. If you’re cautious about the workplace environments (hey, let’s admit it, there’s a lot of places operating on the atmosphere of fear, threats, and/or insecurity), you should be able to witness the consequences in the blank faces of clerks, the lack of enthusiasm by front line workers, and in the remarkably insensitive ways managers and employees treat each other.
The consequences of being exposed to such stress ultimately lead to the loss of creativity (i.e. right brain power) for the organization, if breakdown has not occurred. Divergent thinking is suppressed, as the brain is dumbed down to deal with the threat with greater focus. This effect is amplified in jobs where the stress level is high and the level of control is low (i.e. feeling helpless and disempowered). The sad fact is that although experiments demonstrating these findings have been repeated for over 40 years (hence one of the most repeated studies in psychology), this correlation is also ignored the most often by varying levels of management, as pointed out by Daniel Pink in his TED talk, which I am going to include for your viewing pleasure.
For those of you who are dissatisfied with your current situation of not being able to garner improvements despite exerting endless amount of effort and hard work, I do feel sympathetic for you. However, because of the fearfully competitive environment, many people are afraid of making unorthodox decisions such as throwing a certain unsatisfying job or even career away to start over with a completely clean slate (i.e. they think they have too much to lose). Older generations often succumb to external expectations on how they should live their lives, namely going to school in a major they do not necessarily enjoy, getting a supposedly good job that they have difficulties tolerating, and “hopefully” living happily ever after with a family and children to repeat this ridiculous cycle. For those of you who do have the guts to make such a move, congratulations on being free from excessive external expectations (let’s face it, they build up because they are dependent on you to cash in their own bonuses).
When you’re free from the expectations, the stress levels would obviously be lower, which frees you to be more creative as required to solve your own candle problems (not candle problems for dummies). Furthermore, the Results-Only-Work-Environment and the 20% freedom work time liberate employees further to think more creatively when working on their passions. They also eliminate a lot of inefficiencies in the traditional system to satisfy the needs of the immediate manager rather than of the overall survival of the company.
Conclusions
If achieving a goal with minimal external expectation is so good, why aren’t more people doing it? Humans are often afraid of changes, especially those which lead to uncertainty. I would suggest having a blanket of security before taking a certain risk if doing so comforts you, although this is another topic as planning rather than anticipating for failure usually implies failure. In addition, if these ideas are proposed to upper management (without having you to lose your job or important client), they are usually rejected if not presented properly, as they are resistant to change. I will leave Daniel Pink’s TED video for your viewing pleasure to further validate my arguments.
Here is the funny version:
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