PAPERmaking! g FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY Volume 3, Number 2, 2017
More than 15 years ago, Nick Petrie walked off a rugby field in Japan feeling more exhausted than he ever had in his life. The 6-foot-6 professional athlete, just in his late twenties, was used to being in peak physical condition. But when he arrived back home in New Zealand for a visit, his mother didn’t mince words. “You don’t look well,” s he told him. She was right. Testing and surgery revealed a nightmare diagnosis — stomach cancer. An operation removed the cancer. A year later, it came back in Petrie’s liver. Another surgery followed. Then 5 years ago, the cancer came back again. Here’s one surprising piece of this story: Petrie, who still harbours cancer in his liver, is thriving as a senior faculty member at the Center for Creative Leadership. And here’s another twist you might not expect: He’s not stressed at all. Petrie and Derek Roger co-authored the new book Work Without Stress: Building a Resilient Mindset for Lasting Success . He credits Roger, a British researcher, with transforming his approach to stress and making it possible to live fully in the face of a terrifying illness. This duo’s insights have important implications for us not only as individuals but also as leaders who are charged with unleashing the full potential of the people we are privileged to serve. Petrie and Roger reject the conventional notion that stress is caused by external circumstances beyond our control, such as our job or our boss or family members. Instead, their work is grounded in 2 fundamental assumptions. First, there’s a critical difference between pressure and stress. Pressure is the need to perform, and it’s something we all feel at one time or another as we compete in athletics, build a career, or raise a family. Stress, however, is what happens when we let pressure overwhelm us. Second, we let pressure overwhelm us because of our tendency to ruminate — that is, to continuously churn over emotional upsets. To paraphrase Petrie, rumination is what you do when you wake up at 3 a.m. and can’t get back to sleep because you are thinking about all the things you have to do or haven’t done or should have done. It’s an invitation for worry and permits negative thoughts to take over our minds, and we all let it happen. Some of us even spend most of our lives in this state. Certainly, it’s where Petrie found himself, ruminating endlessly and unders tandably over his cancer diagnosis, when he met Roger more than a decade ago. He was able to break the cycle of rumination by following Roger’s advice, and sharing that guidance with others has become one of Petrie’s main missions. Just a couple weeks ago, in fact, he led a workshop for more than 100 pilots at a major airline in the morning and then flew straight to CCL’s headquarters to lead a similar session that afternoon with our board — all the while looking remarkably relaxed!
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Article 11 – Stress Management
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