Thriving Under Pressure

People who Thrive and Adapt fully accept and face the circumstances they are in. They recognise what they can control and what they can’t. They don’t waste energy on things they can’t change. Thrivers recognise the flow of what is happening around them and use it to their advantage. They take action, solve problems and take responsibility for the outcomes.

Thrivers create calm and opportunity for themselves and others. They are highly effective in any circumstances they face. They are constantly seeing, shifting and doing - hunting for the most effective way forward.

Feeling the pressure…

Capt. Richard De Crespigny was the pilot in charge of Qantas Flight QF32 out of Singapore bound for Sydney when the Number 2 engine blew up. The damage was extensive and rendered the plane barely flyable. The workload in the cockpit was immense. De Crespigny was literally flying for his life and those of the other 364 passengers and crew aboard. It was definitely a survival situation. De Crespigny’s clear, cool-headed leadership helped the crew sort through an unprecedented situation and cockpit workload. He focused on what was working and what they could control, thereby avoiding the distraction of the many potential disasters beyond their ability to fix. They pulled off an almost miraculous landing with no loss of life.

It’s a great example of an Adaptor at work! DeCrespigny’s book “QF 32” is well worth a read and has many lessons for dealing with pressure and leadership under pressure.

You can download a summary here.

How do you adapt to pressure?

What can you control in your current circumstances?

A Daily Lesson in Survival

Every day I see someone pick up their phone while driving. The instant they do, they enter a survival situation.

Research by Professor Dingus in Virginia quantified this. He says, “Taking your eyes off the road to dial a cell phone or look up an address and send a text increases the risk of crashing by 600 to 2,300 per cent.

If people were genuinely aware of this risk, they would never pick up the phone on the road. It is a genuine, life-at-risk survival situation. To take the risk, there’s got to be a lack of acknowledgement of the circumstances they are in. Either a sense that, ‘I’m so bloody good at driving, this risk doesn’t apply to me’ or ‘The traffic is cruisey, I’ve got heaps of space and time’. There are only three possible outcomes.

1. A near miss - this is the best possible outcome. It might shake the driver out of their complacent denial.

2. A sudden, violent reminder that Phone + Driving = Accident. This is, at the very least destructive, always traumatic and in the worst-case scenario, fatal. Definitely a bad outcome.

3. The driver gets away with it, reinforcing their delusion - this significantly increases the future potential for 1 or 2 to occur. The fact the driver got away with it increases their sense that they are not in a survival situation. They are more likely to do it again, in increasingly busy traffic conditions, and for longer periods of time.

All survival states are like this. The risk may not be directly to life or limb. It might be measured in financial or relationship terms, but lack of decisive and timely action will inevitably lead to a confrontation with the risk. What critical situations do you face but chose to ignore? Where might your blindspots be?

Reference. Dingus, T, Hanowski, R and Klauer, S “Estimating Crash Risk: Accident data must be considered in the context of real-world driving if they are to lead to realistic preventive behavior”. Human factors and Ergonomics Society, 2011