Does Pressure Help You Work?
Does pressure help you or hurt you? Like a lot of people I've been spending time on Google plus over the past week and a half and yesterday Chris Bailey shared the Nike commercial featuring the US Women's soccer team. The video is below. The video made me think about pressure that we impose on ourselves to try and make ourselves better.
Pressure as a motivation
As a writer, blogger and speaker in the marketing world I have a lot of peers, and like most people I measure myself against them. Some I feel are in a different league to me all together, with others I feel I am further advanced than they are.
When the people I respect and admire like Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, Brian Solis, David Armano produce great content I feel the pressure mounting. Not because I want to be better than they are, but because they are elevating the game, raising the bar for audience expectations. If you have ever seen any of these guys speak you will know what I mean. They can command a room because they know their subject extremely well, they relax and become friends with the audience.
In that way pressure becomes a motivator. I recognize that the audiences I will speak in front of, the audiences that will read my posts want more and so I impose pressure on myself based on what I have seen others deliver.
No Pressure - No Achievement
But, what if, like the video asks, there was no pressure? Would you still succeed? Would you still give it your all? I know, speaking for myself that I doubt I would. Without others raising the bar, I wouldn't elevate my own standards. Not because I'm lazy, but simply because maintaining the status quo is what we are good at. Of course I'm not talking about the type of stressed out, boss screaming at you, not enough money in the bank, kids home from school type of pressure - that is a whole other thing.
This pressure is the type that comes from within, the pressure you put on yourself to get better at what you do and to continue developing yourself as a professional. I am constantly surprised by the complacency I encounter, especially in the corporate world where I speak to marketers who haven't picked up a new business book since they graduated ten years ago but consider themselves to be professional.
Pressure As A Negative Influence
Of course pressure can be a negative influence, you can end up convincing yourself that you will never raise your game to the level of others. That other people have some kind of "secret sauce" that they are using that makes them better at what you do than you are. In reality that isn't true, the truth is that those other people are also measuring themselves against a benchmark individual or group of individuals and applying that same pressure to their game, to drive themselves to achieve more.
So does pressure help you work?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=E851cINimc0
image used under CC by gfoots
