by Robert
This week’s blog post is going to be a bit shorter because Stefanie is working on other projects, and I’m on vacation with my family. Still, I thought I’d take a moment to write about something that’s come to mind during this trip. Stress has far too negative a connotation. Sure, chronic stress is a problem. But we often find ourselves in situations where stress enables us to do or experience things that wouldn’t be possible without it.
Let me give you a current example from my vacation. No one wants to get up early, and getting all the kids ready under a time crunch is pure stress. But the result is fantastic. We’re in Barcelona right now, and the tourist hotspots are packed to the brim unless you get there really early. Some cool places even offer exclusive pre-opening sessions where you and 20 others can get an almost private tour—like, say, of a nearly empty Gaudí house. If you don’t put yourself through the morning stress of getting ready and leaving early, and instead you leisurely roll out around noon, sure, you’ve had a relaxed morning, but the crowds then create a whole other kind of negative stress—at least for me.
Stress in High-Pressure Situations
In the same way, I’ve always found stress before exams—this includes job interviews or conference talks—to be a good thing. That shot of adrenaline makes sure I stay calm and laser-focused in the moment. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, but for me, it always means that once I’m in the thick of it, I’m hyper-focused and able to perform better than what anyone might expect based on my generally poor preparation.
Stepping Out of Your Comfort Zone
Of course, there are countless other reasons why the right amount of stress can be seen as a good thing. For example, whenever we step out of our comfort zone, stress naturally comes with it. So, whenever we learn something new or make progress, we experience stress. How we perceive and handle it depends on how far out of that comfort zone we’re pushed. Let’s take a realistic scenario: Imagine getting lost in an unfamiliar wilderness in a country with a moderately lethal fauna (venomous spiders and snakes, wolves, coyotes), the night is falling, and you’ve got no phone reception, no food or water. You’re way beyond your comfort zone, and you’re definitely feeling the stress—at least, that’s how I felt in this exact situation I found myself in a couple of years ago.
When Stress Becomes Positive
However, I’ve realized when I find stress to be positive. It’s always when there’s a reward at the end. Whether it’s the intimate exploration of sights away from the crowds, hitting a project deadline, or solving a critical problem that has caused headaches before. Without that reward, stress feels negative to me.
In short: stress needs to lead to something positive, or it becomes negative. With this mindset, even my experience in the forest ended up being positive stress because I survived the situation, and now I have an epic story to tell, of which I’ve only shared a small piece here.
Managing Stress: Focus on the Reward
This also leads to a great strategy for managing stress: when you’re feeling stressed, picture what reward is waiting for you at the end. If something good is coming, you’ll find you can handle much more pressure.
Stress triggers another response in me: it makes me think about how I can avoid it. This often pushes me into a continuous improvement mode where I ask myself how I can make my life easier and avoid this stress next time.
Leadership: Creating Healthy Stress in Teams
This brings me to the leadership angle. Here’s how I see it: as leaders, we have a responsibility to create stress in our teams, but only the healthy, positive kind I’ve described above. We also have a responsibility to avoid negative, unhealthy stress, and that’s definitely a tricky task. Everyone handles pressure differently. Everyone responds differently to stress, and every good leader has to develop a sense of how much “challenge” is good for the team and how much is too much. We should be careful not to use ourselves as the standard. The longer you’ve been in academia—or any other field—the better you’ve learned to deal with stress and build resilience. But most of our teams consist of people who aren’t as “stress-trained.” Junior team members, especially, need to learn to see stress as something positive and figure out how to use it. Our job as leaders is to help train them. I want to emphasize again: we’re not responsible for shielding the team from all stress, and doing so can even be counterproductive. On the contrary, we need to stay mindful and share our strategies for stress management and avoidance, so that our team members can become as resilient as we are.
While I’m writing these lines, I just realized another thing: imposing positive stress is actually a leadership technique. It’s tricky, sure, but the payoff is huge if you learn to master it. It’s not about pushing people just for the sake of it, but about finding that sweet spot where they’re challenged enough to grow and reach their full potential, without feeling overwhelmed. You want to push your team members to be their best, but in a way that keeps things healthy. When you strike that balance, you’re helping them build resilience, confidence, and success, and that’s where the real progress happens.
– Robert
