Two leaders, same busy, but very different weeks

By this point in the year, most leaders are carrying a great deal. Deadlines pulled forward, a planning cycle stacked on top of delivery, a run of end-of-year commitments, and a team that is just as tired as you are. If you are reading this feeling worn thin, that is not a failure of mindset. It is what a long, hard year does to a person who has shown up consistently, for all of it.

So this is not a piece about thinking your way out of a heavy load. Some of the weight you're carrying is the year, and the year you've had is real.

But alongside it, quietly, most of us carry a second thing: the running commentary about being 'so busy' and what the pressure is doing to us.

"I'm not coping." "I'm behind." "This is damaging my health."

As true as it all might feel, that commentary adds weight of its own.

This stretch of the year is busier than most. On top of the work, there are the end-of-year functions, the family commitments, the holiday logistics, the school prizegivings and the social calendar that fills itself. It is busier, and it's important to acknowledge that.

It is also, in a way, beside the point. It is always busy. Most leaders can't name a quiet month from the last two years. If busyness alone explained the commentary, it would be running at full volume all year round, and for most of us it isn't. Something else turns it up.

That something is a question the mind keeps quietly running under load: can I handle this? Or perhaps even a commentary you've been practising for a while now: I can't handle this, it's too much.

When the demands feel larger than the resources you have to meet them, the answer comes back as a threat, and the commentary follows. When your resources feel equal to the task, the same demands read as a challenge, something to rise to. Nothing about the diary may have changed. Your resources to cope with it may have. And at the end of a long year, when energy is lower and the list is longer, the reading tilts towards threat more easily than at any other time. That is not weakness. It's just how a tired mind reads a full page.

Two findings show why the commentary deserves attention.

The first comes from a large American health survey. Keller and colleagues followed 28,753 adults from 1998 through to 2006. People who reported high stress and also believed that stress was strongly affecting their health had a 43 per cent higher risk of premature death over that period. People who reported just as much stress, but did not hold that belief, did not show the same increase. The stress was the same. The belief about it was the difference that tracked with the outcome.

The second shows the belief can move. Alia Crum, Peter Salovey and Shawn Achor measured people's “stress mindset”, whether they see stress as mainly enhancing or mainly debilitating, and found it could be shifted simply by watching short films presenting factual information about stress from one angle or the other. People holding a stress-is-enhancing mindset also showed a more moderate hormonal response under pressure, along with a greater appetite for feedback.

Pete Bristow's Self-Leadership for the Silly Season session inside Stones last week opened with a two-page pre-work, and its questions do this sorting better than anything we could add. Try them here.

First, the story. In the lead-up to Christmas, how often have you caught yourself thinking each of these, from never to very often?

Then the year, and what’s yours inside it. Rate each from 1 - 5, honestly.

The thought you rated highest is your story. The statement you rated lowest is the shift to make.

And Pete’s phrase for the thought that tempts most of us, “I’ve just got to get through”: a new date cannot close open tabs. January arrives with the demands still waiting, so the shift is one you make inside the year, not after it.

The full session summary and recording will be available shortly.

This is not an invitation to talk yourself out of a load that is genuinely too heavy. Some demands need to come off the list, and the honest move there is the conversation that removes them. If the pressure is showing up in your health, that is a conversation for your GP, not a rewrite.

What it is: an honest look at the story, so that the demands you can’t change aren’t made heavier by a commentary that doesn’t fit the facts.