Internal Stress

Internal stress is much more difficult to observe or quantify but is the most powerful. After all, everyone has external stressors of one type or another. In many cases we all live through the same or similar external stressors but we all react to them in a different way. Why are some people so much more driven to achieve certain things than other people? This question has plagued managers in business for centuries. Some people are classified as self-motivated and others seem not to be motivated by anything as much as we try.

We all hear about the masses that seem to live their lives slack jawed and doing the minimum that is required of them. Our best efforts to influence their productivity utilizing negative and positive reinforcement seem to go completely unnoticed by some. How do we motivate the folks that are not self motivated? Well the answer is clear; you cannot motivate anyone to do anything. Their internal stress is either driving or not driving their productivity and there is little a manager can do to prod these people along. Strangely enough, for the most part these folks seem to continue to meet the minimum standards to a level that allows them to keep their job.

So why are some people internally motivated while others are not? The answer lies in where their internal stressors kick in and kick off. You see, internal stress kicks on and off like a furnace kicks on and off to maintain a constant temperature in a building. As long as the temperature is acceptable the furnace (as long as it is in top working order) will do the minimum required to maintain the assigned temperature. For some people that temperature is set at a steady job that pays an acceptable amount and has benefits. For others their internal temperature means that they’re achieving success beyond their peers.

You can see this theory at work when you look at socio-economic classes in a place like the U.S. where people are free to change classes as they like. We are not bound to a caste system where our families determine our class for our entire life but something keeps us comfortably in our class. Most people do not move at all even though they are free to. The reason is that I believe that people get comfortable with the lifestyle that they grow up with. When they begin to fall a bit short on that lifestyle and their expectations of themselves, the internal stressors kick in. At the same time, they may not be comfortable in a more lofty lifestyle so when that may begin to happen, they back off, blow the money they’ve received, etc. These internal stressors have gone off because they are no longer comfortable so the actions they take bring them back to that comfort level regardless of whether it’s a better or worse lifestyle.

Stressed? Great!

Learn to Utilize Stress to Accomplish your Goals!

Did you know that with no stress in your life, your accomplishments would likely amount to absolutely nothing? You see, stress has gotten a bad rap because people are only aware of the negative impacts of too much stress. There is a constant effort in the U.S. to try to reduce stress. There are no efforts to help us become accustomed to or understand how stress can help us work and perform at a higher level than where we currently operate? This is the reason for my book. There is an inherent relationship between stress and productivity. The general relationship can be explained in general by the following diagram of the Bristol Stress Curve.

Of course, each person’s stress curve is going to be a little different. The bottom line is that stress drives us to be productive. We are all driven by both external and internal stressors. External stress is easier to identify because it’s easy to see and understand. Things like the stress due to the lack of food in the fridge mixed with the inevitable physiological stress hunger of will ultimately drive you go to the grocery store or restaurant for food. Similarly in our jobs, we must meet some clear objectives or we could face losing that job (i.e. getting to work on time, performing our duties at some minimally expected level, etc.). It is easy to see positive and negative reinforcement at work with external stressors in our lives. Lack of things that we want will lead to stress and the related performance or productivity and the introduction of negative reinforcement will also lead us to higher productivity if introduced right.

The down side here is that when too much stress enters our lives, our productivity can decrease down to little or no productivity. An example of this would be the end of a relationship with a significant other or other extreme stress circumstances.