Pressure - Test of Character or Test of Stupidity?

There seems to be two sides of Challenge. One is Opportunity and other is Pressure. While in the corporate world they provide steroids to make people immune to pressure and give them prisms which convert the challenges into rosy opportunities, I see something else also.

What is this pressure? How does it generate? What does it mean " Not wilting under pressure"?

When you set a goal. The first thing we do is to set a road map for implementation, set check points, participating in the processes which gives periodic feedback, using these feedback again to correct things.

So far this all is objective, no pressure at all. Then where does pressure come from. While preparing for a challenge, there is a parallel mental game which we subject ourselves to. While we are engaged in the preparation we start developing the fear of failure syndrome. We then start thinking about the expectations other have from us, we have from ourselves and suddenly we feel there is a lot at stake. Resultantly, this cloud gets thicker and directly fritters away the focus which should be totally upon the preparation.

In other words we start worrying about the result before the act is over. We also feed this fear back to us, thus starts the story of pressure.

There is another kind of pressure. Sometime we stretch ourselves, and consciously or unconsciously set the benchmark for us. Since life always do not let us operate in perfect conditions, but in general the expectations do not take into account all these factors. Thus we continuously engage into stretching ourselves. Since stretching in one direction makes our life severely disbalanced, thus we feel the heat on the other fronts in life. Now, the natural reaction is not to eliminate the original stretching, but we start stretching ourselves more. Example we set a benchmark at work place. But consistently performing at your personal high level costs you your personal space happiness. Your family is at the stake. The first reaction is to somehow manage this all. This we get into the loop of managing things rather then living the life.

There is third kind also esp for the corporate environments. While management is more interested into getting things done rather than taking care of you. Since the psychology of pressure also operates on groups as it works in individuals. Thus the some characters in the hierarchy in group, who are supposed to take decisions, starts building the fear failure mania and starts feeding this back to the whole group. Since the worker threads in the group in general believe in not to wilt under the pressure, but they fail to distinguish the real objectives to be achieved vs chasing the false and foolish targets set by some stupids who are weak in handling pressure.

This is more dangerous preposition. Since the precious energy of the system is being sucked up by the stupids in getting lots of useless things done.

So, in the end my formula.

1. Do not worry about the result or end date or target, while working on something. Only thing to be kept in mind is the focus and priority. Clarify about this before starting.

2. Don't leave a path without concluding it, as situations created by the fickle minded jokers will ask to to dig hundred 10 inch holes to see if there is water underground, instead of letting you consolidate in one direction till logically you see a hope there.

3.Question or reason before starting to work on something, instead of knowing at the end of the month the whole lot of effort has been junk and useless.

4. put forth your best and don't think about the results too much, because come what may you cannot better your best. Thus you have already contributed for the worst case scenario.