As we reach the final chapter of this book, you may be reflecting on the journey of exploring, reframing and consolidating the behavioural and psychological approaches to dealing with the tough stuff. If you want to make the changes needed to map a clearer path in the tough-stuff conversations, you will need to achieve a certain level of discipline and commitment to deliver the results you want.

Think about the times when you operate at your best at work — when you have 20 tasks on the go but you are on top of all of them, and nothing is too much of a challenge. Well-known professor of psychology and management Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this experience as ‘flow'. If someone took a picture of you in this state, what would that image look like?

Now take the time to think about when you're operating at your worst at work: even the little things feel like they are an effort and deplete you of energy, and nothing goes according to plan. It's about here that you lock your keys in the car or leave your wallet at the café as you try to rush back to your work. How does this photo of you compare with the other one?

Now consider how differently you are equipped to deal with the tough stuff at work in these two different states. Your ability to have the tough conversations — and to keep calm, rational and clearheaded — when you're working at your best far outweighs your attempts at the tough conversations when you're operating at your worst. How we turn up to these conversations has a significant impact on the outcome, its success and your ability to put into place the practical strategies outlined in this book.

Your ability to deal with tough situations and engage in key conversations when they're needed is directly related to how well you're able to cope with pressure. Part of this is looking after yourself and knowing yourself well enough to be able to say, ‘I've had enough. I need to revive, rejuvenate and restore to be able to tackle the next thing'. It's about knowing how to prioritise the things that matter in your life so that you have the energy to address the tough-stuff conversations successfully.

The mind is not always stronger than the body

Feeling driven to work harder and harder without giving ourselves a chance to rejuvenate is not sustainable, and at a certain point the body will step in and shut you down. We know that, as mere mortals, we need to acknowledge our emotional and physical limits. It's tough to admit to your humanity at times, but it's one of the most important things you can do to manage your energy levels and keep on top of your game. This takes a mindset shift.

In sport, for example, many athletes abide by the philosophy of more is better, but at some point the body will say that more is not better and will close up shop and send you messages of fatigue and low motivation to protect you from serious injury or illness. If you don't pay attention to your body's messages, you will harm your performance capacity and health for the long term. Sustainability is as much a concept for human beings as it is for the planet.

Perfectionists struggle with this one: ‘You mean I can't strive to do more of the perfect program, more of the perfect project refinement?'. It can take extraordinary courage to admit to limits and vulnerability, but it may be the best thing you can do to keep yourself healthy and on track to achieving your personal and professional goals.

How much stress is enough stress?

Stress has been given a bad rap over the years. It's seen as something to avoid, but the truth is that we need a certain amount of stress to get moving, to drive action and to get things done. There's nothing like a looming deadline to put the pressure on and force us into action. Challenges give us purpose at work. If we were not given challenges, and all goals were easily attainable, there would be no reason to push ourselves beyond our perceived limits, and we wouldn't realise that we're actually capable of much more than we think.

When it comes to how much stress is enough, there's a tipping point. The performance-arousal curve illustrated in figure 12.1 (overleaf) shows that we need arousal, energy and a certain amount of stress to reach our peak performance. Around the top of the curve we're operating in our flow, when the balance between pressure and our ability to cope is fairly equal. There's a tipping point when performance starts to decrease as stress increases beyond the level we need to perform at our best. We start to let small things slip; we're no longer on top of it all. Then, as the pressure continues to increase, performance steadily declines until we reach the point where we're snapping at others and forgetting even straightforward things. (Putting the milk away in the oven can be a sign you've reached this point.)

Knowing how much stress is enough stress is an individual thing. Some people have a higher stress threshold and it can seem like the greater the pressure, the more they excel. On the other hand, others may lose the plot at the pressure of having to attend a team meeting on time every week. The amount of stress we can take is also contextual — that is, it's related to what else is going on in our lives. Someone who can generally cope with a high level of stress but is dealing with caring for a sick parent while balancing the role of parenting and is perhaps also anxious about an impending restructure at work, for example, may have depleted resilience.

Knowing your tipping point is a crucial insight: know when you need to amplify the pressure and when you need to release the pressure. If you're working on the upside of the curve, the strategies to get into your area of peak performance will be different from those on the downside of the curve.

Insights about elite sport performance

Dr Sean Richardson has researched why elite athletes tip themselves past their peak performance point — past their limits — and end up in a heap on the way to achieving their biggest goals, regardless of the fact they have the knowledge to make better decisions about stressors and recovery.

One athlete, for example, was one of the best in the world in his sport: a three-time world champion, in the top three in the world for more than six years and a favourite to win gold at the next Olympics. Motivated by an intense desire to do more than ever before to ensure he sealed the gold at his home Olympics, he exceeded the limits, overtrained, got sick, was injured and finally missed out on competing in the Olympics altogether. The result was a long bout of depression and ultimate retirement from the sport. The costs of not acknowledging our limits can be enormous.

You need to consider the ABCs of human behaviour (see chapter 2) when it comes to managing your most valuable resource: you. Look at which antecedents to a behaviour might motivate you to make poor decisions about your health and wellbeing, particularly when the pressure is on to deliver on big targets.

At work we also need a mindset shift about the role of recovery in achieving peak performance, just as we would for peak performance in sport. This involves allowing ourselves time out and recognising mental, social, emotional and physical rejuvenation as being no less important for our work than the time and effort we put into getting our work done. The stress-recovery balance (the yin and yang of high performance) can't be ignored if we want to be able to perform at our peak when we need to.

Managing emotional overload

The problem is that we get reinforcement for overdoing it, and exhaustion has become a status symbol. There's a sense that we're not really having a go unless we're up to our eyes in work and burning the candle at both ends. The problem with societal approval of being overworked is twofold:

• Tiredness is detrimental to problem solving and innovation.
• People get caught up in being active instead of being productive.

Long-term, sustainable performance requires a balanced approach. We need to top up our energy stores on a weekly, if not daily, basis. For leaders, it's critical to courageously model the behaviour that says, ‘I have a limit', or ‘I'm not able to do that right now', or simply ‘I don't know, so I won't push it'.

The research reminds us that no-one is immune to significant personal setbacks. Recent studies suggest that 20 per cent of people in the Western world will face significant depression or anxiety, and that's probably an underestimate! Think about the people around you at work. More than two out of every 10 people will be touched by a major personal, emotional crisis: are you prepared to deal with that? How do you have a conversation about sensitive topics with people at your workplace? How can you be supportive without becoming someone's therapist? How do you manage your own emotional overload?

Ramp up and bounce back

There are times when we need to stretch ourselves to break free from complacency, and times when we need to focus on recharging. Do one more than the other for too long and your performance will suffer. In order to keep within your area of peak performance you need to know when you need to ramp up your energy levels and when you need to relieve the pressure.

Ramping up the pressure

Sometimes sitting in a comfort zone actually reduces productivity, and in order to become more productive, more efficient and more effective you need to find strategies to ramp up the pressure and move into your area of optimal performance. When this is the case, you're best served by bringing some discipline to challenging yourself.

• Regularly seek discomfort. If you've been in a comfort zone for more than a week, it's time to stretch yourself a bit. (Revisit the vulnerability section in chapter 1 for some extra tips.)
• Set your own challenge. (If the boss wants a job done in five days, get it to them earlier than expected.)
• Create friendly competition with someone and be accountable to each other.
• Take on additional projects or roles.
• Develop new systems or new ways of doing the work.

Consider other things that could work for you as challenges and support in ramping up your energy to get things done.

Getting smart about relieving pressure and bouncing back

There are other times when too much pressure actually means we're operating in a state that's beyond our optimal performance and we would benefit from being able to relieve the pressure.

The latest research in human physiology tells us that sleep and good nutrition often aren't enough to replenish your energy, particularly if you have multiple stressors in your life — mental, physical, emotional, social and situational. You need to match your recovery activities (anything that puts energy back in) with the type of stressor (anything that takes energy away) you're experiencing. Here are some examples.

• If the main source of stress is physical (caused by, for instance, lack of sleep or lots of travel), match it with an appropriate physical recovery. Try getting more sleep, eat more nutritiously, try massage or physical therapies to help the body recover, or do some light exercise such as a walking or bike riding.
• If the source of stress is emotional (such as anxiety caused by work or issues in your personal life), match it with appropriate emotional recovery. Consider meditation, talking to supportive friends or colleagues, or getting some counselling or psychotherapy sessions.
• If the source of stress is social (caused by things such as tough interactions with people at work or in your personal life, difficult relationships or general lack of fun), match it with appropriate social recovery. Think about attending social nights out — minus any heavy drinking — such as movies, dinners, relaxing and fun conversation, or light, enjoyable physical activity.
• If the source of stress is mental or cognitive (caused, for instance, by working intensely on a project that demands high-pressure decision making), match it with the appropriate mental recovery. Meditation, time out, giving yourself permission to let go of worries for a specified period, and enjoyable mental activities such as relaxed book-reading and mentally relaxing light physical exercise could work.

Tune into what's going on for you at a particular time, physically, emotionally and socially, and then match your strategy accordingly. Ask yourself what you need more of and what you need less of to help you to operate at your personal best.

It's important to recognise where you're sitting on the performance arousal curve at any given time so that you can match your activities accordingly. Do this more often and you'll be better equipped to deal and cope with the tough stuff when it arises.

Celebrate your progress

It's easy to jump from one project to the next, from one change to the next, from one tough conversation to the next, without taking the time to stop and recognise the progress we've made. The word ‘celebrate' comes from the Latin word celebrare, which means ‘assemble to honour'. In our projects at work or at home, we often overlook the milestones. Taking the time to honour progress doesn't require a fanfare. Simply sitting back and seeing how far you've come and what you've achieved can be enough. Gathering your team and the people around you who have contributed to the progress and saying thank you is incredibly important.

You are the company you keep

We all have a choice about the people we share our day and valuable time with. Generally, there are two sorts of people in our lives: those who put out our fire and those who ignite our fire. The fire-fighters are quick to put out your flame: they're cynical about the possibility of success. But the fire-lighters in your life inspire. You know the ones: the people you walk away from simply buzzing; the people you can't wait to catch up with again. The first group will deplete you of resources, but the other will refuel you with energy and possibility. Life is too short to be living by other people's self-limiting beliefs.

Just as physical exercise can build our fitness, consistent mental exercise will build our inspiration and creative muscle. You can exercise your brain and keep company with some of the leading experts from around the world by:

• reading the top 10 business books and articles
• connecting with other forward-thinkers
• watching one of the many speakers who showcase online at TED Talks offering ideas worth spreading. Ken Robinson's talk on creativity and Benjamin Zander's talk about sparkly eyes are good places to start
• turning off the television and getting engrossed in a stimulating conversation with one of your fire-lighters.

Make smart choices about the company you keep and you'll see how ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things. Being able to approach key conversations from this place of inspiration and enquiry is a powerful tool in dealing with the tough stuff as it provides perspective and new ways of considering a given situation.

Develop the skill of courage

We all have times in our working lives when we become frustrated by a certain aspect of our job, and there are times when this one aspect changes our whole outlook on the job. But there's a clear difference between the people who get stuck at this point, dreading going to work each day in a job they hate, and those who use this experience to their advantage. Invariably, the difference between getting stuck or moving forward is courage.

Courage is the catalyst that moves us from inaction to action.

From a simply economic viewpoint, few businesses, organisations or teams have singled themselves out from their competitors without the presence of courageous decision making. The leaders in almost every field of endeavour have rarely taken the path of least resistance. While doubt, anxiety, worry and hesitation provide valuable checks for measuring our potential course of action, they should not provide the reason for inactivity.

Courage in the workplace is seldom a response to an emergency event and, when used well, is planned, well timed and logical. Engaging in a courageous act at work is mostly a deliberate decision that requires planning and good timing. Consider where you may be able to use and develop courage at work through deliberate action. Maybe it's through the courage to:

• deal with difficult behaviour
• deal with conflict
• own your mistakes
• address your point of view with a manager
• make a decision
• deal with poor performance
• treat others better than they have treated you.

Before thinking about planned courage as a time-consuming or effort-filled process, remember this: a lifetime of change can often be brought about by just a few seconds of courage.

Do the stuff you're great at and outsource the rest

The Gallup organisation, which researches human nature and behaviour around the world, conducted a study in various countries and interviewed successful leaders with the aim of identifying the common qualities that great leaders possessed. What the organisation found was that there was only one common factor among the vast array of successful leaders they interviewed: these leaders worked within their strengths; they did the things that they were brilliant at, and they outsourced the rest.

This sounds straightforward but, on closer inspection, the ability of a leader to be open and transparent about the things they are not great at — to admit that there are areas of the job that would be much better left to someone else — takes a massive amount of courage. There's a common perception that our leaders should be great at everything, but the humble and the authentic freely admit that they're not, and then set up strategies and teams around them to bridge the gaps.

To become a better leader, play to your strengths. Get clear about the things you excel at and find ways of doing these things more often. This is not to say that there won't be stuff that you have to do that's not among your strengths, but aim for imbalance: aim to be playing to your strengths more often than not.

Create great habits

Today's habits are tomorrow's achievements. The decisions and actions you take today shape your future. For example, if you set yourself the goal of running a marathon, you need to develop the habit of running. Whatever you do consistently and repetitively will be your outcome.

What are today's habits predicting about your tomorrow? Are you equipping yourself to be in a better position to tackle the tough stuff when it arises? Are you practising the strategies from this book? If you stumble or get slightly off track, reaffirm what the next step is and take it rather than giving up. If you miss a week of training in the lead-up to the marathon, rather than throw out the goal, commit to making your next week of training truly count. Strengthen your great habits through the following:

• Make choices around why.
• Be clear on the method — how am I going to do it?
• Get moving into action — what can I do today?

These three practices create habits that predict tomorrow's successes.

Conclusion

Inspiration and motivation are terrific things to have on your side, but without a process that allows them to work, they soon wane. In order to take our suggestions forward and put them into practice, remember that things built to last are assembled one step at a time, with purpose and deliberate action.

As you move forward and prioritise your attention, make sure you have the capacity to know when enough is enough.