Using Pressure to Your Advantage

This podcast is brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.

When you're feeling under pressure, do you rise to the occasion or do you sink from the weight of it? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, and welcome to Actionable Intelligence. My guest today is Dane Jensen. Dane is the CEO of Third Factor, and he's also a highly rated speaker, a university instructor, a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, and the author of a great new book called "The Power of Pressure." In today's conversation, we discuss pressure. And what you're going to discover is pressure has patterns, and these patterns are somewhat counterintuitive. But once we learn to recognize them, we can turn pressure into a catalyst for peak performance. So let's get started with Dane Jensen. You have a new book out called "The Power of Pressure," and all of us are feeling under pressure at one point or another. And I always like to start with a definition just to make sure that we're all on the same page here. So how would you define pressure? And does pressure differ from other states like stress, fear, or grief?

The way that I approached kind of the topic of pressure was through asking the most interesting people I could find, and as many of them as I could find, one real question, which was, what's the most pressure you've ever been under? And I found that this question was almost like a magic portal because, you know, on the other side of this thing, it doesn't matter who you ask this question of, you get a really good story in response. But many times when I would ask people what's the most pressure they'd ever been under, they would come back at me and say, okay, well, you know, do you mean pressure or do you mean stress? And so I would say, well, okay, well, you tell me, like, what do you think the difference is? What's unique? To you about stress versus pressure. And, you know, as I started to kind of get, get smarter people than me to kind of define these two things, the way I kind of eventually synthesized it is, you know, using the metaphor of a basketball game. And I'll use my wife as an example. My wife is a huge Toronto Raptors fan. We're based in Toronto. And, you know, she's a fan to the point where if we're in the playoffs and it's a close game in the fourth quarter, she has to leave the room. And I give her updates on the game by text message because she just finds it so stressful to watch the game when it's close and it's important. And that for me is stress. Like, she is feeling stress in the moment, but it's not pressure, right? Pressure is reserved for the players on the court, right? The people that can actually influence the outcome. And so when I think about pressure and what distinguishes it from fear, grief, stress, you know, these are in some ways sort of passive states. Something happens and I feel a sense of grief. I feel a sense of stress. Pressure is I actually need to act. There is an imperative that I've got to do something in this situation that is going to influence the outcome.

That's a great distinction because I think it really puts it in perspective here. Now, as you think about that, and as you think about the research that you've done on pressure, you've developed what you call the pressure equation. So tell me, what is the pressure equation?

Yeah, you know, the pressure equation, which is really at the heart of kind of the book and how I think about, you know, getting at the energy under pressure, you know, it really tries to distill down a vast array of human experiences because, you know, honestly, Steve, when I started asking people this question, one of the first realizations I had was that what people describe as their highest pressure moments It spans life itself. Like you hear everything from, you know, standard situations like a big speech or a big presentation or a really important exam, all the way over to things like I experienced, or a gentleman who told me, you know what, for me, I was, you know, swimming in the ocean and I got so far out from shore that all of a sudden I realized the tide was going out and I didn't think I would make it back. All the way to people who are, you know, holding down high stress jobs while caring for dying parents. I mean, it really does. Run the gamut of human experience. And so the pressure equation was really my attempt to kind of take all of that and say, okay, as different as these situations are, what are the things that kind of they have in common? What are the hallmarks of high-pressure situations? And where I kind of got to was that at the heart of it, pressure actually really only requires two things. The first thing is importance. The pressure we feel in a situation is directly correlated to the importance that we have assigned to the outcome. We don't feel pressure when something doesn't matter to us. But importance alone isn't enough to create pressure. There has to be a second thing there, which is uncertainty. Because no matter how important something is, if I know exactly how it's going to turn out, it's not really going to create that much pressure. You know, as humans, we experience pressure at the intersection of, hey, this matters to me, there's a fair bit at stake here, and I don't know how it's going to turn out. These two have existed pretty much since the dawn of time, right? I think as human beings, we've always had to exist in important uncertain situations. I think it's the third part of the equation, the final variable, which is a little bit unique to the modern world, and that's volume, which is just the sheer volume of tasks, of decisions, of distractions that surround our important uncertain situations. You know, I think this has grown exponentially, you know, in the past 5 years, even 10 years, just to prepare for our podcast today, right? What do I have to do? I've got to close Slack. I've got to close WhatsApp. I've got to close iMessage. I've got to close Outlook. I've got to put my phone on do not disturb. I have to eliminate 7 different ways that people can reach me with their important urgent requests. So I think at the heart of it, yes, all high-pressure situations are unique, and they are all some combination of importance times uncertainty times volume. Now what's interesting, what I described, Steve, is what I would call a peak pressure moment. Peak pressure moments are really where we have these violent collisions of ultra-high importance with a lot of uncertainty. So these are sort of our acute high-pressure moments. There is another flavor of pressure, which is, you know, what I talk about as the long haul or the grind. And that's really more about a grinding sense of volume and uncertainty.. And I think, you know, many of us have become quite, you know, personally familiar with this for better or for worse over the past 20 months, right? So there are definitely different flavors within how those 3 variables combine.

What I love about your book as I was reading it is you take this power of pressure model and like you just described, you've got the importance, uncertainty, and volume, and then you further distinguish it between these peak pressure moments and the long haul. And then for each of those, you identify what are some specific things that you can do if you're in the peak pressure moment. What do you do versus if this is more of the long haul, what do you do? So I'd love to explore that a little bit. So let's start with a, a peak pressure moment. What do we need to do if there's a peak pressure moment to make sure that we're not going to fold under the pressure here?

Perfect. Yeah. So, you know, I think the distinguishing characteristics between peak pressure and the long haul really come to the fore when we start to talk about the way that we relate to importance, uncertainty, and volume, because the way in which we want to intervene in each of those lanes, in many ways, it's almost diametrically opposite whether we're dealing with peak pressure or the long haul. You know, let's take my story, this violent collision of highly important, highly uncertain. And I'm going to start with uncertainty because I think in many ways, uncertainty is the part of the pressure equation that is, that is most uncomfortable for people. You know, as human beings, we really don't like uncertainty. We haven't evolved to handle uncertainty well. When we are in our peak pressure moments, the critical skill around uncertainty is action, is direct action., right, to as quickly as possible identify what can I control, redirect my attention there, and start to act. Because the second I start to act, I start to make progress. That's when the uncertainty starts to abate. One of the guys I interviewed for the book is a beach volleyball player. He went to the Rio Olympics as part of Team Canada, a guy named Martin Reader. And he had a wonderful metaphor for talking about this. He talked about how, you know, in, in beach volleyball there is a ton of stuff that is uncertain, that is out of your control. Opponents are out of your control. The officiating is out of your control. The crowd is out of your control. The weather is out of your control. You're literally standing on shifting sands. It's not just a metaphor. You are on shifting sands. Like, there's a lot that's out of your control. He said the one thing that you have complete control over is your serve. When you are standing behind the service line with the ball, you have control. And so he tells a story of qualifying for the 2016 Games. Him and his partner knew they were going to have to go into Mexico and beat the Mexican team. To qualify. And he said, we knew this was going to be really hard. The team was really good. The crowd was going to be very hostile, which sometimes leaks into the officiating. And so him and his partner spent 6 full months working on one particular serve. And he said, at a critical moment in game 3 in the Olympic qualifier, I moved to the complete other side of the service line. I served a ball this guy had no idea was coming for an ace. And that's what punched our ticket to Rio. And he said, when I find myself in high-pressure situations, I come back to that question, what is my serve? What is my serve in this situation? What is the one thing that I can control here? Because once we start to exert some control, that's when we start to feel the pressure from uncertainty begin to abate.

Along those lines, I want to read a couple of quotes here from your book that I think I want to get your comment on as it applies to what you're just talking about here. So one thing you wrote in the book is you said, There is one fundamental thing that applies to both the long-haul and peak pressure moments, the ability to put space between trigger and response. So that's the first quote. And then the second is, when everything else is uncertain, focus on your breathing. It's something you can always control. So how do we square the thought that we've got to take direct and quick action with the idea that we've got to put some space between trigger and response, We've got to take a breath. How do we reconcile those two?

Putting the space between stimulus and response actually makes us quicker. So, you know, the space really has to do with the fact that, you know, when we get put under pressure, we need to put ourselves in a position where we can engage our free will and choose a response that is appropriate to the situation. And that doesn't always happen naturally, right? There is a big difference between being angry and noticing that I'm angry. When I am angry, it's the anger that's driving, right? I'm not in control. The anger is in control. When I notice that I'm angry, when I step back and observe, now I am granted free will, right? It's almost like I've shifted the car to neutral. And from this position now, I can start to become conscious of what are the choices that I have to make here. And so I think, you know, to reconcile those two things, for me, this doesn't have to be like 10 minutes of planning, right? This is not an exercise where we get out the graph paper and we start to chart things out. This is taking the 5 seconds to go, wow, like my heart rate just shot up to 160. I'm thinking about all the ways this could go really bad and I'm starting to feel really anxious. What are the choices available to me and what do I want to do? That's the pause. So we don't just react. Now from that pause, I want to move quite quickly into action because the longer I delay, the more the uncertainty is going to start to build. And the more the pressure is going to start to impact me, impact my thoughts, my emotions, and my physiology.

Now, there are a number of high-pressure situations that we can anticipate in advance, and I think having this model that you have, I think, gives us a good framework to think about these high-pressure situations that we might be able to anticipate. I'm going to give you just a very simple example here. I remember when I was playing Little League baseball, I'd play first base or second base or third base or pitching or whatever, And before every pitch was thrown, I'd say to myself, okay, if the ball comes to me, what am I going to do? Where am I going to— you know, if I got a runner on first base and the ball comes to me, am I going to try for a double play or what am I going to do? So I knew before every pitch, if it comes to me, boom, this is my immediate reaction and this is what I'm going to do. So again, very simple example, not necessarily high stakes. It's Little League baseball. But I've applied that same concept as I've gone out into the business world over these decades, is I'm always trying to anticipate what could happen here, what might be a worst-case scenario, and how would I react if such and such happened. So I tend to prepare a lot for things, as I think you've seen with the podcast here. Yeah, but I think that's, that's a key takeaway that I've learned over the years, is to try and anticipate these high-pressure situations. And the more that I prepare for them the less pressure the situation itself seems when I'm in it, because I've thought through how I'm going to react. Now, of course, there are other things that happen that you can't predict, but the best that we can do, I think, is to prepare and think through what the action might be so that in the moment we take the breath, we know what we're going to do, boom, we take action.

You've hit on something really critical here. You know, I think sometimes people feel like confidence comes from what I would call end-state imagery, which is, you know, I'm going to imagine myself hoisting the trophy, or I'm going to vividly imagine myself standing on the podium and everybody cheering. And like, you know, yeah, okay, so that's where some motivation can come from. You know, the imagery that actually builds deep-seated confidence— and of course, confidence is a tremendous boost when we're under pressure— is from, you know, having played through What are all the ways that this could go? And having vividly imagined, how am I going to handle those situations? So if you listen to Michael Phelps talk about the way that he uses visualization, the way that he uses imagery, he will talk about before every race, he is going to see the race going perfectly. And he said, I'll see it from my perspective in the water, and then I will see it from the perspective of somebody in the stands. Then he runs through the race What's going to happen if my suit rips? What's that going to be like? What's going to happen if my goggles fill up with water? What that, you know, what's that going to be like? What's going to happen if my bathing cap rips? What's that going to be like? And he wants to imagine all of those scenarios so that it's already programmed into his central nervous system. So when he hits the water, he goes, okay, I'm in this lane now, right? That's what this one's going to feel like. Okay, let's go with that. And so that ability to walk into a situation going, Yeah, I've actually got the film here for, you know, however this plays out. You know, this comes right back to our discussion on uncertainty. Like, that's a wonderful way to, you know, to build certainty, to start to load up the certainty bucket and drain the uncertainty bucket a bit. So I think that's just a terrific example that you're talking about there.

Yeah. And I love that example from Michael Phelps. And the one thing that I think he added that I hadn't really thought of is I get the visualization. I remember years ago before a state track race. I went to the stadium the night before and I sat in the stands and I visualized the starting line. I looked to my left and to my right, the people that were next to me that I'd been racing against all year. The starter's gun goes off, and then I literally visualize the whole race unfolding for 4 laps around the track and the specific spot on the track on the right lap when I was going to make my move and try and win the race. So I had this all programmed and visualized ahead of time, and it worked. I ended up winning the race. What I didn't do is what Phelps did, which is, okay, well, what happens if somebody bumps me or if I trip or something like that? How am I gonna regroup? Now, had that happened, I didn't have a film for that in my head. And so that's what I love about the Phelps story there is he's visualized these alternative scenarios.

Yes, and we talk about that as searching for a gap in the film. So take it out of the realm of sports and into, you know, I got a meeting with a big client and I've got a goal here. I realize that they've got assets with other providers, other FAs, you know, and I'm trying to move towards a world where I can help them see a picture of the benefits of consolidation, of, you know, bringing it all under one roof. I want to run through that meeting and anticipate what are all of the really difficult questions that could come up? What are all of the objections that could be raised? What are all of the ways that it could play out, where maybe, you know, the wife is really keen and the husband is not keen, and they start to have some sort of internal, you know, disagreement or difference of opinion on how this should play. And I want to search for gaps in the film, right? Where are the places where I can't imagine how I'm going to respond? I can't see myself handling that situation appropriately, because that's then my area of direct action, right? I got to figure out how do I close that gap in the film? What am I going to do? In that moment, in that situation. And once we've closed the gaps in the film, that's where you walk into a high-pressure situation going like, I, you know, I've got this. I have left no stone unturned here.

Okay, so for uncertainty, when we're in a peak-pressure moment, we need to take direct action. And as you've been describing here, we need to take a breath when that's appropriate, and we need to have a little space between trigger and response as appropriate. How about the importance piece? How do we think about importance in your model when it's a peak-pressure moment?

When it comes to importance, and I, I'll talk about peak pressure, I also want to just contrast it with the long haul here because I think importance is a really good jumping off point to talk about what's different in peak pressure versus over the long haul. Importance is a double agent, and this is one of the interesting things, frankly, that I found having these conversations is almost everything when it comes to pressure is a matter of dosage. Everything is a double-edged sword. Everything can be a positive or it can be a negative. Pressure itself is the ultimate double-edged sword, right? I mean, where do more world records get set than anywhere else in sport? They get set at the Olympics because there's pressure, right? Pressure is energy. It can absolutely elevate performance. And you'd have to be blind to not recognize, you know, the issues that pressure can cause, as we've seen over the past, you know, 18 months. And so importance is the same way. It really is this you know, this thing that can cut both directions. And so if we take the long haul as a starting point, and then I'll work my way up to peak pressure, you know, when we're going through the long haul, what's really necessary is we have to connect with importance. We need a really good answer to the question, why am I doing this? Why am I enduring this pressure? The tools over the long haul are all about clearing a line of sight to importance. Typically, what I've found in my conversations is there are really 3 paths to importance over the long haul. There is the growth path, which is I get to a really good answer to the question, how is this pressure helping me grow? Right? How am I getting stronger? What am I learning? The second path is about contribution. Right? So how is enduring this pressure benefiting others? Right? How is me sitting in this hot seat helping my clients preserve their wealth or, you know, build the kind of future that they want to build? That's the contribution path that importance. And then the final is connection. How is enduring this pressure helping me get closer to the people that I care about? And you don't have to be able to answer all three of those questions over the long haul, but you got to get at least one of them. You got to have a good answer to at least one of them. Otherwise, it just starts to feel hollow and relentless. It's like, why am I doing this? Why put myself through this?

[Speaker:BRAD_STONE] You make a very good point here. Let's think about a financial advisor as an example here. A lot of advisors are working with wealthy people. And having worked with advisors for several decades now, I've heard on more than one occasion, it's like, you know, I'm just making rich people richer. And so, they're trying to figure out, well, what's my purpose here? Does that give me a lot of juice to do that? And what I found a lot of advisors have done when they get to that point is, and I've got one in particular that I'm thinking of, is he said, I want to help people give away their money. I want to work with people who are philanthropic, who have made a boatload of money, and now they want to give back and contribute. And so he works with them to help them figure out what are the organizations that are important to them, and how can I help them facilitate giving that money away and putting it back out there. So that was one way that he was able to come to terms with his why and getting back to that importance and helping sustain him through that long haul of pressure that all financial advisors feel over time.

Yeah. And that's the contribution path, right? It's, it's, I get a clear line of sight to how what I'm doing is benefiting the community, benefiting society. And I think that's what has sustained frontline healthcare workers for the past 18 months, right? It's a sense of contribution that, you know, yes, the pressure is heavy. Yes, it's hard. And, you know, I'm benefiting others. I'm contributing. That's a really wonderful example that you just gave there. And so I think over the long haul, it really is about pulling importance close. It's like, I got to get importance to a place where I got a really clear line of sight from how what I'm doing ladders up to what matters to me. When we flip into peak pressure moments, importance actually is something that can become overwhelming. It's not about, oh, I can't see why this matters. It's like, no, I know exactly why this matters. All I can think about is how important this is, what's at stake. How critical this meeting is, that I need to land this because of the implications for my commission, for the business, for my trajectory as an FA, all this kind of stuff. And so when we move into our peak pressure moments, we actually need to do the opposite of what we do over the long haul, which is we have to try to see importance in perspective. We have to get some distance from importance. And I talk about using this one critical question, which is what's not at stake here? Because very naturally, as we approach peak pressure moments, whether this is, you know, a meeting with a really big prospect, it's the eve of an Olympic final, it's heading into a job interview, you know, whatever your peak pressure moment is, we have a tendency for our attention to fixate on what's at stake here. And so our ability to intervene and say, okay, yeah, I'm going to move my attention to what's not at stake here, right? What are the things that are important in my life that are going to be here win, lose, or draw on the other side of this thing. And you see, when we look at this duality of pulling importance close but seeing it in perspective, each of those has a role to play in a different phase of performance, right? When I'm in the preparatory phase, like let's say I have a big meeting coming up with a prospect, right? I actually do want to really think about in the lead-up to that meeting, what's at stake here? Why does this matter to me? Because that's what's going to give me the energy to put in the prep that I need to do. When I'm walking into the meeting, if I carry all that importance with me, it's going to be a disaster. I got to focus on the fact that, you know, win or lose, I'm going to go home at the end of the day. I'm going to have my family. I'm going to have a nice warm meal. I'm going to have a beer. And that's going to be the same one way or another, regardless of how this meeting goes, because that's what's going to free me up to perform in the meeting, that ability to connect with what's not at stake. It's an interesting kind of duality, Steve, of like how this kind of plays out over the continuum of performance.

Yeah, and I think that's the hard part because let's again use the example of a financial advisor. Let's say we're meeting with a prospect who just sold their business and they're sitting on $20 million of cash that they want to do something with, and they're talking to you about it. So, on the one hand, you could put a lot of pressure on yourself. Oh my gosh, I got to do a great presentation here. I've got to have all my ducks in a row. I've got to fire on all cylinders because this is $20 million. We're talking serious money here. But on the other hand, it's like, this is not life or death. This is not going to make or break my career, most likely. And hopefully, my family is still going to love me if I go home tonight and I didn't, you know, get this new relationship here. So, how do we distinguish between putting this pressure on ourselves, like this is a big deal, to give us the energy to perform, while at the same time, having that other side, which is it's not the end of the world if I don't get this. And I think that's this tension that you're talking about here. Is it artificial? Do we just talk ourselves into it? How should we think about creating the right tension here to give us the energy to perform at our highest level, but not be so depressed if we don't get the account that we're depressed there?

Yeah, this is the tension inherent in importance, right? I have to be able to see what I do is important. Without being overwhelmed by what's at stake. And I do think that is a tension that starts with awareness. You gotta check in and, you know, this is this that we talked about, putting the space between stimulus and response, right? There is a moment where we can check in with ourselves and go, okay, where am I at on that tension? I've got this big meeting coming up in 4 weeks. Am I scared enough? Have I really connected with what's truly at stake here? And am I doing the prep I need to be to be Or is the reality that I, you know, I haven't slept in 3 days because of this meeting, because I'm— all I can think about is how important it is. And depending on where I am in that continuum, I'm going to want, you know, a slightly different intervention. In one case, it's going to be like, okay, let's get really conscious about what's at stake here and why this really matters to me. On the other hand, it might be about really focusing more on what's not at stake. You know, I'll still have my existing business, I'll have my job, I'll have, you know, all of that stuff. The story that really kind of landed this one for me in the book is that chat I had with a guy named Johan Koss, who's a 4-time Olympic gold medalist. He's a long track speed skater from Norway. When I asked him about his highest pressure moment, he went to the period leading into the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994. Johan, coming into those games, he was under what, for my money, is probably the most pressure you can be under in sport, which is he was a gold medal favorite. He was actually favored to win 3 gold medals. At an Olympics in his home country. So he's got 4.5 million— Norway's small, but it's still 4.5 million people in an individual sport. It's just you out there on the ice. That is a tremendous layer cake of pressure. And he talks about how 10 days before the games, he broke down. He couldn't handle the pressure. He felt overwhelmed. And he ended up actually crying under a staircase in his hotel. And he said that at that moment, He felt like the fear of failure was so strong that failure at the Olympics would mean failure for the rest of his life. That's the way he characterized how he felt, you know, 10 days out. And the way that he resolved this is his sports psych found him and joined him under the staircase. And she knew that he wanted to be a doctor after sport, right? You know, sport career, you're going to retire from sport in your kind of late 20s, maybe early 30s if you're Tom Brady, or maybe mid-30s, who knows. So she said to him, you know, will failing at the Olympics make you a worse doctor? You want to be a doctor after your sport career is over, you know, will failure make you a worse doctor? And he said, well, all right, you know, maybe not. Actually, if I fail, maybe I'll have more empathy for people who have been through tough times. Okay, right, that's one brick of importance off the scale. This is not about, you know, your life itself. And then she said, okay, do you think the Norwegian people at the end of the day, do you think those 4.5 million people care whether Johan Koss wins the gold medal or another Norwegian? Wins the gold medal? And this is a tough one because this is the ego question, right? But eventually he goes, ah, they probably don't care, one or the other. She said, okay, well, is a Norwegian going to win? He said, oh yeah, we got the deepest team in the world. She said, all right, another brick of importance comes off the scale. You're not responsible for 4.5 million people. And so brick by brick, they started to go through a process of disassembling the stakes. Now, this is not to say the Olympics is not important, right? Of course the Olympics is important. He's been training for this his entire life. And He needed to get to a place where he could see it in perspective, right? What was really at stake and what was not truly at stake here? And so I do think that balance exists for all of us as we kind of approach our peak pressure moments.

Well, she is one very smart sports psychologist to have that conversation with him and really lay it out like that and get it to the point where he could really understand it and completely turn the situation around for him. It reminds me of Eric Heiden, speaking of speed skating. I think, what did he win, like 6 or 7 gold medals? Oh yeah, he was up there. Yeah, and then I read a story a while ago where his gold medals were like sitting in a shoebox in the closet. He's a doctor now. Maybe he's retired, a retired doctor at this point, but maybe he was also thinking about this idea of, you know, the importance. It's like, yeah, I wanna win some gold medals, but at the end of the day, I want to be a doctor. And he was a doctor, and the medals ended up in the closet. And not a lot of people are probably talking about him except for me on the podcast here today.

Well, there's a wonderful scout in hockey who did a lot of work for the Ottawa Senators, and he always talked about— he said, you know, if you're nothing without a gold medal, you'll be nothing with a gold medal, right? At the end of the day, you know, it's— you're right, most of the athletes we work with, you talk to them 10 years later, I mean, the medals are in a drawer somewhere, they're in a box somewhere, and it's So it is getting to that place. And I think that's true for most careers, right? You know, we get these big trophies and at the end of the day, they're satisfying for a little while. And then we move on to the next thing and the next phase. And so, yeah, that ability to see things in perspective, I think is vital.

And then the third part of your formula here is the volume. So talk to me about how volume impacts us, whether it's the peak pressure moment or the long haul.

I started by saying that volume is, you know, this unique kind of force multiplier in the modern world. You know, we are dealing with a volume of inputs that I think would be baffling to people even 10, 20 years ago. And I think the thing with volume that's a little bit interesting is when volume is the dominant source of pressure, as it is for so many of us on a day-to-day basis, it kind of feels sensible or natural to turn to time management as a solution. It's like, okay, there's a lot of stuff I have to do. There's a lot of things maybe distracting me or pulling me away from my key— I got to get more efficient so I can accommodate all these things. And the challenge is that, you know, time management is a trap. It's a trap. You know, if you look at people who get really good at time management, what happens? Do they get more volume or less volume? More. They get more volume, right? They get more volume. You know, it's like, okay, I managed to free up an hour on my calendar through some magic of efficiency and time, man, you know, and immediately it's like boom, Calendar invite, like, thanks very much. I see you got an hour free. Like, why don't you join this kickoff or this team meeting? I always come back on this one. One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons of all time, Catbert the consultant comes in and he's talking to the manager and he says, you know, how do you guys reward your high performers around here? And the manager says to him, you know, we load them up with work until they become average performers. And that to me is, you know, time management in a nutshell. Time management is a great efficiency strategy. It's a great way to accomplish more, to be more productive. It's not a solution to pressure, right? Because it simply results in more volume. In particular, as we are heading into our peak pressure moments, we need to be just ruthless in attacking the root causes of volume, which are the volume of tasks, the volume of decisions, and the volume of distractions, right? Not just trying to accommodate all of them, but being ruthless at eliminating tasks, decisions, and distractions that are going to move us away from what's at the center of our peak pressure moment. And I actually think, just to use a really topical example because we've been talking a lot about sport, this was the path that Naomi Osaka chose, which was like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm coming into a critical peak pressure moment for me. This is a Grand Slam tournament. There is a whole bunch of volume surrounding this that distracts me from what I'm here to do, which is to win a tennis tournament. Instead of trying to accommodate all of it, I'm going to just eliminate it. And I mean, we saw how that played out, right? Roland Garros kind of totally mishandled it and came back. But I think from my perspective, that's exactly what we should be doing heading into our peak pressure moments. Be ruthless about eliminating this stuff that distracts us from performance. I think that's one where we have this tremendous bias in the modern world towards accommodation, towards efficiency, towards time management, And I think we've lost a little bit of the art of just eliminate, right? Make sure that we're simplifying as much as possible.

Another thing that you talked about in your book is a situation when you said something like, when all we control is how we look at a situation. And in the book you said it helps to have a few go-to questions that can help you reorient from a perspective of threat and uncertainty to one that is balanced and progress-oriented. And you came up with 3 questions. So I'm going to mention these 3 questions here. I'd love for you to comment on them. The first one that you said is that when you're in a peak pressure moment, here are 3 questions to ask yourself. One is, what am I learning right now? The second is, what is the easiest thing I can do right now to make progress? And the third is, what would XX do? So I'd love for you to comment on those 3 questions and set some context for them.

Before I get to the specific questions, I want to go back to how you started your question, which is when all this is out of our control, All we control is how we look at the situation. This is ground floor bedrock stuff for handling pressure. If you think about Martin Reeder's question of what's my serve right now, I think sometimes we find ourselves in situations and we go, I have no serve. Everything is out of my control here. COVID is a great— it's like, I don't get to decide on how this is going to progress. I don't get to decide on the government's response. I don't get to decide. There's just so much out of our control.. And I think we sometimes lose sight of the fact that we can always influence how we look at these situations, you know, even if the situations are out of our control. If you want to go back to the true master on this stuff, you know, Viktor Frankl, when he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, which documented his experience in the Nazi concentration camps in World War II, he realized that the Nazis could take almost everything. They could take food, they could take clothing, they could take shelter. He said, at the end of the day, there was only one thing that they couldn't take from me, and that was my ability to choose to see what I was going through as a meaningful experience. And he called that the last human freedom, my ability to choose to see what I'm going through as meaningful. Once we can genuinely understand that and get to a place where we go, you know what, there is always at least one thing within my control, which is my perspective, that unlocks so many helpful tools under pressure. If we forfeit that power, if we go, I know, like, this is the truth, this is just the way the situation is, and we give the circumstances control over our perspective, we have abdicated just a vast amount of personal power when we let the situation control how we look at it. And so those questions that you listed, and I love good questions because they are little attentional anchors that allow us to connect with that personal power that we have to shift how we are looking at our situations. And so what am I learning right now? That's a great way to get us back to growth, right? I talked about how growth is a source of meaning under pressure. If I can go, hey, you know what, this is really uncomfortable, it's not enjoyable, but man, is it ever making me a better X. Like it's making me more collaborative, more resilient, more creative. It's really forcing me to be a slightly better version of myself. That's a wonderful way to start to imbue what you're going through with a sense of meaning, right? To, to see it as a meaningful experience. So I do think those questions are just great little ways to start to shift that perspective.

And the second question you had is, what is the easiest thing I can do right now to make progress?

Yeah. In many ways, progress is sort of the antidote to pressure. When I feel like I'm moving forward, that's when pressure starts to abate a little bit. There's a wonderful book out of Harvard called The Progress Principle.. And, you know, Theresa Amabile and Stephen Kramer, they interviewed hundreds of people in, you know, dozens of industries over a period of 4 months. They sent them a little survey after every day that they were in the office. And the survey basically said, I want you to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how you're feeling about work, your emotional state at work, your level of motivation today. And then the fourth question was just briefly describe an event that stands out to you from your day. That was it. They gave no other context. And when they crunched all of these little diary entries that they had received, and they had more than 12,000 at the end of this study, and they started to synthesize it down, what they found was that the single biggest driver of how people were thinking at work, feeling about work, and how motivated they were was did they make progress on something meaningful that day. On days where people had made progress on meaningful work, their satisfaction and motivation went up. On days where people felt they had flatlined or even moved backwards, their satisfaction and motivation went down. And so when we are able to consciously connect ourselves with progress, right, what's the easiest thing I can be doing to make progress? It is a really powerful driver of, of motivation under pressure.

And sometimes it might just be taking a deep breath.

Absolutely right. Progress can come from I get myself under control and in a space where I can make better decisions. 100%.

And then your third question was, what would XX do?

So we talk about this in performance psychology as scenario performing, which is, you know, maybe there's something that I can't see myself doing, but if I go internally, I can see somebody who I think is an expert at this handling it really well. And because imagination is a, is a form of knowledge, you know, once I can envision somebody else handling this situation I start to actually gain some of that expertise because I can go, okay, so, you know, I can see how Steve would handle that question or handle this circumstance. Okay, so if I was being Steve, what would I do in this situation? And so one of the exercises that I do all the time with, with leaders, with execs, is helping them build out an internal advisory board. So I'll have people think about, okay, what are the 3 to 4 skills or qualities that you think you're really going to need? Over the next 3 months that maybe you don't particularly have strength in. So that could be, you know, being an inspiring leader. That could be having direct conversations. That could be about being inspiring. That could be empathetic, or, you know, whatever your list is of what are the qualities or skills. And then I want people to pick, okay, who is going to fill the seat on your internal advisory board for each of those skills? So when you're walking into a situation where you need to be an inspiring leader, Who is the person that you are going to imagine handling this situation so that you can kind of, you know, learn from them or borrow from them? And I use this personally. I'll tell you, you know, I speak for a living, Steve, and there's a reason for that. You know, I'm not a very good listener, so I got into a role where I get to speak a lot. When I'm going into a situation where I need to be a good listener, I do one thing and one thing only. I literally close my eyes and I go, how would my mother handle this situation? She is a phenomenal listener. And the second I do that, I go, you know what? Okay. So she would close her computer. She would close the door. She would bring her chair around to the same side of the table as this other person. She would definitely have a piece of paper and a pen. When they're talking, you know what? She would be nodding, but also looking down and writing notes. You know, the second I start to imagine her in this situation, I get all of this information. On what does it mean to be a good listener that cognitively I might not have even realized I had access to. So I think it's just a wonderful source of knowledge when we start to imagine, you know, other people handling situations.

I love what you just said there. A couple of things that I want to pull out. One is you said imagination is a form of knowledge. Help me understand that a little more.

I love that. So this is kind of a bit of a bastardization of an Einstein quote. Einstein actually said imagination is more important than knowledge. When we think about imagination, you know, knowledge traditionally is kind of thought of as, you know, a sense of sort of an understanding of why things are the way they are. Like, I, you know, I have knowledge about gravity and about photosynthesis and calculus. You know, like, I understand why things are the way they are. Imagination is more of a knowledge about the future, you know, because imagination tells us what's possible, right? What might happen, what we could envision. And if you just look at, you know, great human accomplishments, right? You know, we wouldn't have a democracy today if somebody in Athens, you know, in 580 BC hadn't started to imagine, like, okay, well, how could this work? Like, you know, what would it mean if we had people, you know, put little pellets in canisters to vote on things? You can't land a rocket on— or a probe on a comet without a physicist or an engineer first imagining, like, okay, well, what's the flight path that this thing is going to take? How might this play out? And so, yeah, you know, I think imagination is a really powerful form of knowledge because it's unique in that it's knowledge about the possible, it's knowledge about the future.

And then the second idea that you mentioned here was this internal board of directors. I think that's a fantastic idea as well. And I've done, I guess, a version of that. So I run a company and oftentimes I find myself asking myself as a CEO, what would a CEO do here? Is this what a CEO would say? Is this the kind of article that a CEO would write? And so I want to make sure that I'm communicating and that I'm functioning in the role of a CEO by trying to ask myself, well, is this what a CEO would do? And yes, I can tell you there are many times where it's changed, like what I've written, or changed what I did, because it's like, no, this is not what a CEO would do. So that is maybe my little version of the internal board of directors. But I like the idea of having like a series of them, and maybe you're almost having a conversation with yourself. But I think that's a great exercise.

I love that. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, what you just described is a perfect example of how it can be helpful and how to bring it into play.

That's bang on. Great. All right, Dean. Well, as we get ready to wrap up here, just two things. So one, is there anything else that you want to mention here that we haven't talked about yet?

You know, the only thing I might say by way of just wrapping up is, you know, the subtitle of the book is Why Pressure Isn't the Problem, It's the Solution. And I think, you know, that's kind of the overall message I'm hoping people will take away from our conversation, from the book, is, you know, yes, pressure can be profoundly uncomfortable. And if left unmanaged, absolutely pressure can be a problem. And at the same time, pressure is energy. And when I talk to people about their highest pressure situations, unequivocally what I heard was actually the energy under pressure that gave me the capacity to handle this situation. Without the pressure, I couldn't have accessed what I needed to thrive here. And so I think a big part when we talk about the last human freedom is your perspective. You get to decide whether you're going to look at pressure as something that I need to resist and push away, or something that I want to get under the hood of and start to figure out how to channel. And I think if we can shift our perspective on pressure and start to see it as maybe a bit of an uncomfortable ally, but an ally nonetheless, I think it opens up just a world of performance. Excellent.

And so all of you listening, I certainly encourage you to pick up a copy of the book. You can get it at all your favorite bookstores. And then also the last thing here, Dane, what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

I'm most active on LinkedIn. You can just search for my name, Dane Jensen. I'm also on Twitter @DaneJensen. Uh, and those are the two best ways to, to find out a little bit more about me.

Great. All right, Dane, appreciate you being on the show today. Thanks so much, Steve. My key takeaway from my conversation with Dane Jensen is to reframe how we think about pressure. Instead of thinking of pressure as something we dread, we can use Dane's Power of Pressure model to put pressure in perspective and use the energy that pressure can generate to power us to thrive and perform at our best. All right, that's all for for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

Take care and be safe. This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions, with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow.

Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.