Resilience Unleashed: The Secret to Project Success Under Pressure

You know that Project Management is an exciting, challenging, and fulfilling role. But it can also put you under extreme pressure. Setbacks can be stressful, so you need to be able to handle the pressure. This long-term coping capacity is resilience. And that’s what we’ll study in this giant guide.

In this article…

We’ll be answering the following seven questions:

1. Where Does the Stress of Project Management Come from?
2. How Can You Prepare Yourself for Tough Times?
3. How Can You Build Personal Resilience to Adversity?
4. What is your Resilience Network?
5. What Can You Do to Anticipate Setbacks?
6. How Will You Respond to Tough Times? Handling Setbacks
7. What are My Top Three Tools to Help You Through Tough Times?

This is a long article, full of powerful information. You may want to bookmark it for the future.

Okay?

Let’s dive in!

Where Does the Stress of Project Management Come from?

In a way, novelty, uncertainty, and deadlines are baked into what a project is. And this all continues over a period. Sustained stress can damage your health and reduce your ability to think clearly.

When that happens, your responses are less resourceful and effective. You make mistakes, feel the pangs of despair, and things seem to get worse and worse. Without a plan to maintain and regenerate your personal and professional resilience, things go bad more easily – and stay bad for longer. You and your project can spiral out of control.

The origin of this article lies in a project that went wrong for me. Under pressure, I cracked. Just a little, maybe. And it could have been worse. But it was bad enough.

I quickly pulled myself together, but soon after, I had one thought:

‘Never again’.

So, I decided to learn about stress and resilience. Indeed, my best-selling book is not about Project Management. It is about Stress Management! (Available in our Project Management Bookshop.)

This article is a summary of ‘what I wish I’d known then.’ Those events changed me, and my priorities. So, in this article, I’ll share with you my favorite advice for unleashing your resilience and equipping yourself for the possibility of tough times on your project. And, if that’s not enough, we’ll also look at how you can respond when tough times hit you.

Building Resilience: How Can You Prepare Yourself for Tough Times?

The first thing to know is that we can build resilience, so that stress has less of an impact on you. You will maintain peak performance for longer and experience lesser degradation of performance. This is all about building good habits.

We’ll see that there are four areas where you can do this. Combining them all is the true path to success. In the next section, we will look at the first three, before going into a little more depth on the fourth, in the flowing section. We’ll be looking at the positive benefits of good:

1. Fuel – the food you eat and the way you eat it. This is important, because of its effects on…
2. Energy – the way you charge your body up to perform at its peak level. This is about building exercise into your routine, to maximize your physical reserves of strength. However, to be effective, you also need…
3. Rest – relaxation time is important. And even more important is good sleep. It’s how you recharge your reserves of physical energy and, more important still, of cognitive and emotional resourcefulness.
4. Relationships – in the section that follows, we’ll dive into the importance of positive support from the people in your life.

How Can You Build Personal Resilience to Adversity?

At the core of your resilience are your physical and mental health. So these are where you need to start. You need to build physiological, cognitive, and emotional reserves. And there are four keys to long-term physical and mental well-being.

I’ll discuss the first three in this section. And then I’ll expand on the fourth, Good Relationships, in the next.

Make each of these a habit when things are going well and you have plenty of time. This way, you won’t only build up reserves. You’ll also form resilience habits. These will help you with the discipline to maintain them in tough times. To make the best of your ‘easy-times’ investment, continue to set aside time for each of these.

Good Fuel

They say you are what you eat. And it’s true. Your body rebuilds itself constantly out of the nutrition you take in. I shan’t lecture you on what food you should eat, and what to avoid. There are plenty of better sources for that advice.

And anyway,  you probably know what’s good and what’s not. Do you dash down a portion of sugary junk food at your desk or on your journey home? Or do you choose good quality, nutritious fresh food, and take your time?

Choose a healthy diet and eat it with relish. Make it a social, and emotional pleasure. And if you don’t know what you should be eating; take Michael Pollan’s advice. He summarizes all the available research into good eating in 7 words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Here’s a link.

Good Energy

Next comes exercise. Make this a part of your routine, because it is vital for your long-term physical and mental health. And therefore, it’s also key to your resilience to stress.

Maybe sporting or traditional exercise activities come easily to you. But they don’t to me.

So, if not, find another activity that you enjoy. What about dance, swimming, or gardening? And remember: walking is one of the most effective forms of exercise. Replacing a part of your journey to work with walking can cut costs, increase fitness, and gain valuable thinking time with little impact on your schedule.

Good Rest

This one is tough for project managers. With so much to do, you’ll soon find yourself working late and getting up early. For some, this is even a matter of pride. You’ll travel thousands of miles for one meeting. Or you’ll get up for a 6 am conference call… just a few hours after you finish writing a status report.

Time to rest and relax is crucial. And sleep is even more so. With a small reduction below ideal sleep levels, your brain function will drop. Its effect on your performance (and safety) is the same as illegal levels of blood alcohol. And a sustained sleep debt can trigger psychological disorders like neurosis and depression.

Late nights or early mornings?
Choose one.

What is your Resilience Network?

To go with good food, exercise, and rest, is the importance of good relationships.  

First, healthy relationships are essential for good mental and emotional health.

But they also create a network you can rely on for support in tough times. It’s like an investment. One day, you’ll need to draw from the bank of credit you have earned. So in the good times, ensure these relationships are strong and positive.

Your Faithful Supporters

We all have people who love us:  your partner, your family, and your close friends. These are the people you can call upon for unconditional support during tough times. They are loyal and committed. Their love and friendship are symbols that they have signed up to support you when you need help.

So, when it comes to a time when you need them, don’t be afraid to ask. They will be willing to be there for you. They will want to help.

But this does need to be a reciprocal arrangement. So invest in your relationship with small acts of kindness. Be generous with your time.

Your Inner Circle

You also have a second tier of supporters. These are your inner circle of trusted colleagues. Their advice, counsel, and support will help you put things back into perspective. When things get complicated, these colleagues will help you understand the subtleties, and make the decisions.

Build up this circle throughout your career. Maintain it carefully and meet people regularly.  You’ll need a sense of who to go to for different help. Who:

• listens well?
• can motivate and energize you?
• has judgment you value?
• offers the right level of challenge to your thinking?
• can boost your confidence?
• understands people?
• can read the politics?

You get the idea. Create a balanced group, and avoid the temptation to gather people who only agree with or compliment you. Your ideal is a group that is smarter and sharper than you are.

Your Wise Guide

Keep an eye out for one person who is special. At each stage of your career, try to find a wise guide. This is someone with the experience, insight, and gravitas, to transform your thinking. They will ask questions that challenge you and share the knowledge to take you to new places.

A wise guide can help you hone your skills and reflect on your experiences. They can both share their experiences and help you find the meaning of yours. This is a relationship that will help you grow as a professional. You may be a smart operator now. But don’t you aspire to a level of wisdom that others will seek out?

In tough times, your wise guide will be your source of advice and insight. They will also listen to you without criticism. Their questions will help you work out issues for yourself. Your partner may listen with sympathy. Your inner circle may have ideas, but also an agenda. But your wise guide will be objective. They will help you balance the conflicting pressures of tough times.

Your Fun Friends

Whether in the workplace or outside of it, it pays to have a group of friends with whom you feel comfortable hanging out and having fun. It may be a sport, a hobby, or just social meet-ups. Having fun with a group of friends is a great way to de-stress at the end of a working day.

What Can You Do to Anticipate Setbacks?

The third part of preparing for tough times is to anticipate them. Because they will come. What matters is how you handle them.

Things will go wrong; shift happens! And sometimes it will be big. Resilience is not about averting these problems; that’s part of the role of risk management. Resilience is being fit and strong, to handle them well.

Risk Readiness

But, another part of risk management is important to your resilience. This is the part that identifies points of failure and then reduces the likelihood and impact of damaging outcomes. This will reduce your emotional susceptibility to setbacks.

Scenarios and Contingencies

Another part of risk management is contingency planning. This will prepare your team for handling specific contingencies. Think through a range of scenarios. Then:

• Put in place plans for specific outcomes
• Build up the resources to handle the threats you can’t plan for in detail.

Knowing you have ways to respond to many scenarios will give you two things. It will reduce the stress of anticipation, making you more effective in focusing on the now. And it will also increase your speed of response when things do happen.

Looking around the Next Bend

Risk management and scenario planning are powerful processes. You will schedule activities throughout your project. But…

Take yourself out of your project for at least half an hour. Take nothing but a notebook and pen. This is your chance to take stock of where you are. Your brain is excellent at synthesizing ideas from a vast array of information. But without some quiet time for the ideas to emerge, you will miss out on its insights. This half-hour has always been one of the most valuable times in my working week. I can see trends, look forward, or spot things the whole team has missed.

How Will You Respond to Tough Times? Handling Setbacks

If you are like most project managers, you thrive on constant change. You love the ebb and flow of triumph and tribulation. But what happens when you hit a long patch of problems, setbacks, and mounting pressure? This can leave the toughest of us feeling stressed and out of control.

Now, more than ever, you’ll need to remain objective and continue making good decisions. So, you’ll need to call on all your reserves of strength and resilience.

In the face of these tough times, let’s see what options you have to remain resilient. So, I made it my own priority to learn about this after my ‘project fail’ which I mentioned above.

I had let my good habits slip. So, I ate poor food, in a hurry. I took no exercise. And I had too little sleep. Events blind-sided me and I was in a foreign country, a long way from my usual support networks.

So what could I have done, to help me bounce back to form, as fast as possible?

Three Myths to Dispel

Let’s start with some myth-busting. Because your first priority is to prevent set-backs from becoming full-blown stress. As soon as that happens, your perspective starts to slip. Now you are prey to three dangerous patterns of faulty thinking:

1. Personalization
2. Pervasiveness
3. Permanence

As soon as one of these takes hold, your task of building yourself back gets far harder.

Personalization

Personalization is that feeling that an adverse situation is all about you. It’s your fault. Or people are out to get you; they want to make your life difficult.

Project professionals can be at particular risk of this. You often feel a deep responsibility for your projects. From this, you may find you identify yourself with your project, too much. ‘I am my project’, you say. So, you start taking setbacks personally. That can lead to the false belief that there is something wrong with you.

Here’s what to do. Separate what’s happening from the yourself. You are nothing more than one of many players and influences on events. These events are nothing more than the natural ups and downs of project life. They would be there for any project manager. They are not an attack on you, and nor are they your fault.

Pervasiveness

If you don’t get a handle on permanence, it can get worse. You can think there is a pattern of everything being against you.

Now, you’ll interpret every event as part of a pattern of bad luck. And that can lead to feeling beleaguered by sustained and inevitable hardship.

See things for what they are. Probably, no more than two or three unfortunate events around the same time. Much of your life is probably carrying on as normal. There are the normal minor ups and downs. This one just represents a small cluster of bigger-than-normal ones. That’s bound to happen sometimes!

Look for the specific events that have knocked you back. Then examine the background to see what the causes really were. And also look for examples of successes and positive events. These will put the setbacks into their proper perspective.

Permanence

The biggest danger is starting to see the pattern of setbacks as a permanent part of project life for you. If you feel you won’t be able to escape, you will want to give up project management. That would be a shame.

In truth, tough times will pass. You may handle them well. Or maybe you won’t. But things will return to their normal pattern soon. As long, that is, as you don’t succumb to the permanence trap. You must not read every minor glitch and setback as part of a permanent pattern from which you can’t escape.

Tell yourself ‘This too shall pass’. Spend time with your faithful supporters, inner circle, and wise guide. And plan your way out. Look to the future, beyond the narrow horizon that today’s adversity draws your eyes to. Also, look back at past successes. See how this is a run of bad fortune. It is exceptional, rather than part of a pattern. Other runs have come and gone. More will come and go.

Three Attitudes to Adopt

How can you escape the traps of personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence? There are three attitudes that research shows can best equip you to handle stress and adversity:

1. Optimism
2. Flexibility
3. Gratitude

Optimism

Don’t think of optimism as a mindless ‘glass-half-full’ attitude. True optimism is an active search for opportunities to make positive change.

So you must focus on what is important. Tune your antennae to the issues, and you’ll be ready to spot ways to resolve them. One way to get a jump-start is to inventory your resources. Ask:

• What knowledge, skills, and experience do you have?
• What can your team members do individually and together?
• Who else can you call upon?
• What physical resources are available to you too?

Approach your problems in a structured way:

1. Break your problems down
2. Rank the components against what matters most
3. Allocate resources to the parts

This way, you will start to feel in control. The confidence that you are competent and effective is the basis for your resilience.

Flexibility

Under pressure, do you find yourself getting ‘stuck’ in a fixed way of thinking? This can lead you to the same set of choices, and to trying the same thing over and over again. But, if you do the same thing, you’re likely to get the same results.

That’s great if it works. But when it doesn’t, the repeated failure leads to despair. The people who are most flexible in how they adapt to a situation, are most likely to succeed. This means looking for more options:

If at first you don’t succeed…
…try, try something else.

Gratitude

Of these three attitudes, I’ve found gratitude is the most powerful. When things seem to be going bad, it can turn deep feelings of helplessness and depression around. It will restore a healthy perspective on events. So, if you do slip into a level of despondency, then gratitude is a powerful way out.

Gratitude Journal

Here’s what to do. Set aside time each day to think about what you are grateful for. it will help you to put your adversities in context. This works best when you write it down and create a gratitude journal. 

It works because all you can see in tough times are the troubles facing you. But with a deliberate review of everything you have to be grateful for, you can regain your sense of balance.

What are My Top Three Tools to Help You Through Tough Times?

Let’s get practical. Shifting your attitudes can have a profound effect on your emotional state. But sometimes, things go bad quickly. They can flip you from a cheerful optimist to a miserable victim on a turn. You may not have enough time and perspective to use those ideas.

So, what you need is a tried and tested process. You want something you know will work. And it needs to be easy for you to apply it.

So here are three simple processes that will work.

Distinguish Overload from Overwhelm

Overload can trigger stress. But it won’t always. Let’s define terms.

Overload is having more to do in a fixed time than your resources will allow.

It is an objective state. And it’s one that project managers are familiar with. We roll up our sleeves and plan our way out.

Overwhelm is different. It is a subjective, emotional state.

Overwhelm is a stress response where you feel that whatever faces you – a little or a lot – is too much.

The tasks you face may be easy to handle. But first, you must overcome the feeling of overwhelm.

The way to do this is to focus  on the facts:

• List the tasks
• Remove any that are just not important enough
• Reschedule any that can wait
• Quickly knock off the small ones
• Then knuckle down to the first of the big ones.

You can find a more detailed process for overcoming overwhelm in our feature article: ‘Feeling Overwhelmed by Your Project? What to do‘.

The SCOPE Process

This is a quick way to respond to a situation that has the potential to overwhelm or unsettle you. It is the SCOPE Process:

Stop

Under pressure, we often try to respond as quickly as we can. Don’t.

Stop. Take a breath. Pause.

Sometimes all you need is a deep breath. At others, you may need to step away from the situation. Sudden pressure to respond can trigger changes in brain chemistry. These activate the less thoughtful, considered, and rational parts of your brain. You jump into action, and the stress response is part of this. The Stop gives you time to reassert conscious, reasoned control.

Clarify

You cannot respond wisely without facts.  So, make sure you understand the situation for what it is. Avoid making assumptions from the one moment that triggered your response. Find out more.

Options

Now think about your choices for possible responses. Review your options – mentally or with others – to dampen down your emotional response. Once you have found some options, assess them and make a decision.

Proceed

Once you have made your choice, act with speed and determination. Action gives you a sense of being in control. Since stress comes from feeling out of control, action reduces stress.

Evaluate

What’s the difference between wisdom and foolishness? I’ll tell you.  Fools carry on regardless:

‘I have a plan: I’m following it.’
… even when it does not succeed.

Wisdom is pragmatic. Check the outcomes and evaluate whether your plan is working. Or do you need to Stop, Clarify, and find a new Option?

ABCDE – Apply the principle of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Project Resilience

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a powerful therapeutic tool. It works well for people with long-term resilience problems. You can apply the principles to avoid long-term problems.

A for Adversity

What events triggered the feelings that you are struggling to cope?

B for Beliefs

The trigger to these feelings was not the external events themselves. It was one or more of the beliefs you attach to them. What are your beliefs about what happened?

C for Consequences

How do those beliefs your choices? How do they change your options and opportunities?

D for Dispute

Now challenge the beliefs that limit your options (‘limiting beliefs’). Test yourself to find evidence to support those beliefs. And look for contradictory evidence. What alternative interpretations can you put on the events? How do the new insights give you more control over your choices?

Here’s an example. Rather than:

‘This is another example of my bad luck…’
(Personalization and Permanence),

try:

‘These events are out of my control, but I do have control over how I respond.’

E for Energise
It’s time to get practical. What steps can you take, to give you control over your response to the events?

How about this:

‘These events are out of my control, but I do have control over how I respond. I will get my team together and create three groups to: 

• stabilize the situation, 
• look for a long-term solution, and 
• communicate with our stakeholders.

Stabilization is my top priority. So, that’s where I will focus my attention.’

Isn’t that a whole lot better than feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and defeated by events?

Over to You

What are your experiences? We’d love to hear your tips and advice for being more resilient, or on regaining your resilience.

When have you had problems like these on a project? What did you do, and what did you learn from your experience?

And do you have any questions for Mike and the community? We’d love to help you with them.

You May also Like…

• Our Project Management Resilience Podcast interview with Elise Stevens of Fix My Project Chaos
• Three Project Leadership Challenges for Tough Times [and what to do]