Don’t Let Your Eyeball Pop Out
The higher you go, the more pressure there is to perform. Always ascending and never stabilizing eventually causes burnout. Leaders must practice the art of balancing the stress of success and the renewal of rest.
I’ll never forget my very first time flying in an airplane. I was a young teenager going to meet up with my parents in Arizona, where they were vacationing. I was a little nervous since I didn’t know what to expect. The thought of being…who knows how high up in the air, strapped into a chair with only a few inches of metal surrounding me, seemed a bit nerve-racking to say the least. But I was courageous enough to take on the challenge. A friend dropped me off at the airport, and trying to keep my cool, I waved and thanked him for the ride.
At first, things went smoothly. I made it through all of the airport checkpoints without a hitch, and it was no time before I was at my gate. Not long after I arrived, I heard the gate clerk’s signal telling me it was time for my row to board. This flying thing was a piece of cake so far. What was I so worked up about? It was when I entered the plane that things began to change. I quickly noticed how cramped the cabin was. Shouldn’t there be more room inside such a huge jet? Still, I was doing O.K. I located my seat and was able to get my luggage stored properly, my seat in the upright position, my safety belt snuggly fastened, and all exits located and stored in my memory banks. The engines began to roar as the jet backed away from the airport terminal and headed for the runway. No big deal.
Then we came to a complete stop, and what I thought was a roar just moments ago sounded like a purr compared to the sound blasting out of the jet now. The whole cabin started to shake and suddenly we picked up speed. I felt myself being pushed against the back of my seat as we began to takeoff and ascend into the air. We hit some turbulence on the way up. The feeling of my stomach dropping as we bounced up and down was extremely unsettling to me. I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be happening. I tried to look normal but I couldn’t help but think that a wing was going to rip off of the plane at any moment or maybe an engine was going to fly off into the great blue yonder.
At this point, the real trouble began. Something terrible that I couldn’t explain began to happen to me. It scared me to death…literally. I had no doubt in my mind that I was about to die! As we continued our ascension, my right ear started to clog up and a pressure like I had never felt before started to build up in my head. I had felt a similar sensation before while driving in the mountains. But this? This was something massively worse.
I remembered my parents telling me to yawn in order to release the tension on our drives in the mountains, and not knowing what else to do, I, as calmly as I could, began to try to make myself yawn. Not wanting to draw attention to myself and let the whole world see my panic, I began to nonchalantly yawn and open my mouth wide, but nothing was changing. In fact, the pressure just kept building and building. My nervousness really started to get the best of me at this point, especially when the right side of my head started twitching uncontrollably from the pain. My whole head began to shake and I felt like my eyeball was going to pop out of its socket and go sailing to the front of the plane. As this vision passed through my mind, I began to frantically pray that it wouldn’t come true. I had now reached the point of not caring about my coolness factor. I didn’t care who saw my panic. I needed to fix this problem fast or I was going to have to invest in an eye-patch and start calling people mayte.
I began yawning with my mouth as wide as it would go. I was twisting, tugging, and pulling on my ears, as I grabbed my head in pain. To make matters worse, my neck started to tighten up from all the pressure, which caused me to tilt my head over into my neighbor’s “personal space.” My neck completely stiffened up and I couldn’t move it back to its normal position. My neighbor looked as scared as I did. I am not sure he knew how to handle my frantic display of fear. I thought I had met my end, not because the plane was going down from the frightening turbulence, or because one of the engines was going to detach from the plane, but because my head was going to explode all over the place.
Luckily, at just about the point when I was going to burst, my ear popped and the pressure was released. I think it blew my neighbor’s hair out of place when it blasted out the side of my head. It was one of the craziest feelings I have ever felt. I let out an extremely loud sigh of relief and then noticed everyone looking at me with horror and worry. It was just like a scene from a movie; however, I definitely was not the hero.
I learned a valuable lesson that day; the higher you go the more pressure you’ll face. For every new level, there is a new devil you have to fight. In fact, the more successful you become, the greater the pressure to perform will be as you battle the forces of imbalance. Leaders are driven to move forward and ascend, but they must learn how to decompress from time to time. You can’t always be in overdrive or your emotional engine will overheat and stall from destabilization. As you climb the ladder of growth, you have to master the art of recovery, or you’ll internally combust under the pressure. I once served under a very fast-paced, high-energy leader that only knew one speed…Mach3! He became very frustrated at anyone who didn’t move at his pace. One day my leader’s mentor came to visit our team to do some training. After the meeting, I made a quick lighthearted comment to him about how intense it was serving under my boss/his protégé.
He then looked at me and said, “Yeah, he’ll learn one day. You can’t live life as a full-on sprint all the time. You have to pace yourself for the long haul.” His truth became a fulfilling prophecy when years later my leader had to step out of his role because his life had unraveled under the pressure he put on himself.
Life has to be lived as a marathon, not a short dash. There is a huge difference between working hard and harmfully working. Leaders must set a realistic pace in order to set themselves up for longevity. There is a temptation to exert so much energy into what we do that it consumes our life. In fact, the greater the cause we are working toward, the more temptation there is to lose ourselves in it. But great leaders know how to work hard in bursts, then replenish their energy with rest.
In The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz explained how they spent years training and developing Olympic athletes in performance management. This led them to the corporate world to train world-class leaders in productivity with the same principles they taught athletes. They made a significant impact on the productivity of many organizations by enhancing employee performance. They wrote this about the importance of balance:
“In a corporate environment that is changing at warp speed, performing consistently at high levels is more difficult and more necessary than ever. Narrow interventions simply aren’t sufficient anymore. Companies can’t afford to address their employees’ cognitive capacities while ignoring their physical, emotional, and spiritual well being. On the playing field or in the boardroom, high performance depends as much on how people renew and recover energy as on how they expend it, on how they manage their lives as much as on how they manage their work. When people feel strong and resilient—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—they perform better, with more passion, for longer. They win, their families win, and the corporations that employ them win.”
According to their research and real life applications, the whole key to performance rests on the ability to renew and recover from stress. The rhythm of productivity hinges not just on what you do, but also on what you don’t do.
Taking time to refresh enhances the times when you are working.
* Taken from my book Leadology: 12 Ideas To Level Up Your Leadership available on Amazon Prime here.
