I remember when I started my first business, I was a young 19 year old kid with no extensive job or business experience. I dropped out of college to pursue starting my own business, and the fear of failure loomed over my mind every second I was awake. I had to learn how to do marketing, prospecting, sales, admin, customer service, and many other skills with no guidance or direction to tell me whether I was heading in the right direction or not.
During my first year, I saw zero results, zero revenue, piling credit card debt, and no signs of success. I had no ideawhether what I was doing was ever going to work.
What uncertainty led me to feel a constant level of extreme pressure and stress. There were many times where I strongly considered throwing in the towel and quitting.
Eventually, the thought and option of potentially giving up were so draining to me that I decided if I’m going to quit on anything, I’m going to quit on the idea of quitting.
Quitting was no longer an option. I also realized at the time that although I was doing my best, my best was not good enough. I had to continue to get better until I succeeded, and there was no other alternative.
Eventually, as my skills improved, that business started doing extremely well, and within a few years I became one of the top performers nationwide in that industry. I became significantly more capable as a person during that time period as I continued facing and solving problems that, at the time, caused a lot of pressure and stress.
Looking back, the most valuable thing I got from that experience, which was the reason for my success there, was the level of mental resilience I had built over time. I just learned to keep working through every situation and problem I was faced with, regardless of how much pressure and stress it caused me, and over time, problems continued to seem less significant as I adapted to dealing with bigger problems and became capable of achieving more in the process.
I eventually left that business, and later on I started Remote Leverage, where there were numerous times I faced extremely difficult situations. But having already built up a lot of resilience, I was able to handle those problems far more effectively and get through every difficult situation I faced.
If I was to put a younger version of myself to deal with the different things I have to do today, I would have completely crumbled and failed under pressure as I wouldn’t have had the mental resilience to handle what I could handle today.Which is why I decided to write this, to share with you one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past decade: Dealing With Pressure.
Pressure is simply the situation you are in, a demanding environment or high-stakes event.
Stress is the negative, physical, or emotional reaction that happens when you feel your resilience is inadequate to meet that pressure.
Resilience is the ability to adapt, recover, and grow stronger after facing adversity, difficulty, or significant change. It involves emotional and mental flexibility, persistence, and the capacity to “bounce back” from hardship. Think of this as your psychological stamina.
If you’re expected to complete a task you’ve done a thousand times before, you’d experience almost no pressure. You already know exactly what to do and what the outcome will be. You also wouldn’t need to draw on any resilience, because there’s nothing challenging about doing that same task for the 1,001st time.
On the other hand, if you’re handed a new problem to solve, or a new level of expectation on a task you already do, you’ll experience a heightened level of pressure. You now have to meet a demand you’re not used to meeting.
Whether you feel stressed with that new level of pressure or not depends entirely on your level of resilience.
If you have a high level of resilience, you’d have enough stamina mentally to take on increased levels of pressure without feeling additional stress.
Feeling stress is therefore simply an indicator that your current resilience level hasn’t caught up to your current challenges yet, and if you keep going, you’ll build more resilience and be able to face this same challenge (and equivalent challenges) with less stress in the future.
Someone with more resilience could face the same expectation you have and not be phased by it as they have more capacity to deal with that expectation.
