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.