Things go wrong. Project Managers are temperamentally suited to constant change and the ebb and flow of success and setback. But even the toughest of us can sometimes hit a stretch of adversity, bad luck, and pressure. This setback can leave us feeling out of control and stressed.
This is when you will need to call on all your reserves of strength and resilience, to continue to act objectively and make resourceful decisions.
What this Article Covers
In this article, I want to consider what options you have to remain resilient in the face of adversity and setbacks. It is rooted in the research I started to do, shortly after what I think of as my big ‘project fail’ – a short period where I lost perspective under pressure.
At that time, I had let most of my good habits slip. I was eating poorly, taking no exercise, and getting little sleep. I was blindsided by events and a long way from my usual support networks. So, what could I have done to help me avoid the clutches of despair, or to bounce back as quickly as possible?
Three Sections of Three
I have organized this article into three sections. Each one contains three elements. You’ll read about three:
Three Myths to Dispel
The first priority is to avoid the adversity building up to a full-blown stress situation. As soon as we start to feel ourselves beleaguered by stress, our perspective starts to slip. In these situations, you are prey to three easy patterns of faulty thinking:
- Personalization
- Pervasiveness
- Permanence
As soon as one or more of these takes hold, your task of building yourself back up will become far harder.
Personalization
Personalization is the sense that your adverse situation is all about you. It is your fault, or people are deliberately targeting you, to make your life difficult.
This is a particular risk for project professionals because of the extent to which we often take responsibility for our projects and start to identify ourselves with the project: ‘I am my project’. Consequently, you can start to take setbacks personally, and then you start to extend that thinking to the false belief that there is something wrong with you.
The Solution
Deliberately separate out your thinking about ‘the objective’ from ‘the personal’. Explicitly remind yourself that you are the manager of the project and that events are part of the natural ups and downs of project life. They would be there for any project manager. They are not an attack by others on you. Nor is it your fault.
Pervasiveness
It can then be easy to think you see a pattern of everything being against you. You start to interpret each event and circumstance as part of a pattern of first bad luck and then sustained and inevitable hardship.
In reality, what has probably triggered this is no more than two or three significant, unfortunate events or outcomes happening at around the same time. Much of your project life – and your life outside the project – is probably carrying on as normal, with its normal minor ups and downs.
The thing is, once you notice a couple of bad things happening, it can be all too easy to tune your senses to find more. And what we look for, we often find!
The Solution
Isolate the specific events that have felt like they knocked you back. Then, examine the background of each, to see how it is just as you would normally expect. Look for particular examples of minor successes and positive events, to put the setbacks in a new perspective. Better still, note down a list of everything that goes as planned – or better.
Permanence
The biggest danger is that you will start to see the pattern of setbacks as a permanent feature of your project life, from which you won’t be able to escape.
In reality, any tough times will pass. You will handle them well, or you won’t. But things usually return to their normal pattern fairly soon… as long as you don’t succumb to the permanence trap and start reading every minor glitch and problem as part of a long-term pattern from which you can’t escape.
The Solution
Tell yourself, ‘this too shall pass,’ and plan your way out. Look to the future, beyond the limited horizon that the setbacks are causing you to focus on. Also, look back at past successes and see how this run of bad fortune is exceptional, rather than part of a pattern. Other similar runs have come and gone.
One Final Tip
It can be hard to get feelings of personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence out of your head. Very often, just speaking to someone about these feelings can really help. It doesn’t have to be a counsellor, therapist, or other professional. A trusted colleague or a good friend is usually all it takes to give you the p-word that will help: Perspective.
How to Manage Stress
The second edition of my Best-selling Brilliant Stress Management is a complete guide to the levers for controlling your stress. It is based on my research following my own troubles with stress.
It covers controlling your stress in all contexts – particularly at work. But it also tells you how to help others who are feeling stressed.
Of all my books, this is the one that has sold the most copies. It is a standard guide for business professionals and is worth reading before you need it!
Three Attitudes to Adopt
Building on some of the advice above, there are three attitudes that research shows can best equip you to handle stress and adversity:
- Optimism
- Flexibility
- Gratitude.
Optimism
The confidence that you are competent and effective is the basis for your resilience. Optimism is not about a mindless ‘glass-half-full’ attitude: it is about a focus on spotting your opportunities to make positive change.
Keep a clear focus on what is most important. This will help you to spot ways to resolve issues.
- Start by taking stock of your goals and objectives and remind yourself what is most important.
- Second, inventory your resources:
- 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?
Then, as you start to break your problems down:
- Prioritize the components against what matters most, and
- Allocate resources to the parts
Now, you will start to feel in control.
Flexibility
Under pressure, we often find ourselves getting rigidly ‘stuck’ in fixed thinking patterns, making the same set of choices, and trying the same thing again and again.
But it is the people who are most flexible in how they adapt to the situation who are most likely to thrive. This means looking for more and more options. When you have failed time after time to achieve what you want:
‘If at first you don’t succeed…
…try, try something else.
The question to ask yourself – and your team – is:
‘How else?’
Gratitude
For me, gratitude is the most powerful attitude of all. In times of adversity, it can turn around deep feelings of helplessness and depression. Use it to help you keep a healthy perspective on events. If you do find you have slid into some level of despondency, then gratitude is a powerful way out.
When you face tough times, set aside time every day to think about what is most important to you, for which you are grateful. It works best when you write it down and create a gratitude journal. Start a notebook that you can use to write down what you are grateful for each day. It can be something big and important, like the health of your family. Or something small and trivial-seeming, like enjoying a cup of coffee on your way to work.
This will help you to put your adversities in context. Too often, all that we can see in tough times are the setbacks that face us. By purposefully considering everything we have to be grateful for, we recover a sense of balance.
Three Tools to Help You
Shifting your attitudes can have a rapid and profound effect on your feelings of stress or even despair. But sometimes, things get bad quickly and flip you from a cheerful optimist to a miserable victim almost instantly. At these times, you may not have enough perspective to apply the ideas above.
As a project manager, you are probably comfortable putting a measure of trust in a tried and tested process. If you know it can work, and you know how to apply it (or can find it in a blog you have saved), then it is easy to put it to work and enjoy the outcomes.
So here are three simple processes that will work:
- The SCOPE Process
- Distinguish Overload from Overwhelm
- The ABC of Adversity
The SCOPE Process
The first of these is a quick way to respond to a setback or a situation with the potential to overwhelm or unsettle you. On the surface, it is worryingly simple. But it works.
It is the SCOPE Process:
- Stop
- Clarify
- Options
- Proceed
- Evaluate
The secret is in the first two steps:
Step 1: Stop
Your temptation, under pressure, is to respond as quickly as possible. Don’t.
Stop. Take a breath. Pause.
Sometimes this is no more than a deep breath; at others, you may need to step away from the situation for a few minutes.
The imposed pressure can trigger changes in your brain chemistry that activate the less thoughtful, considered, and objective parts of your brain into action: stress may follow immediately behind. By stopping, you allow time to reassert conscious, rational control.
Step 2: Clarify
Before doing anything else, gather some facts and think them through.
Make sure you really understand the situation for what it is, rather than making assumptions from the small snippet of data that triggered you to adopt the SCOPE process.
Step 3: Options
What are your potential responses?
Deliberately reviewing your options – mentally or with others – will dampen down your emotional response. Once you have looked at each one, evaluate them and make your decision. Determine what to do and in what order.
Step 4: Proceed
Once you have made your choice, act swiftly and deliberately.
Action takes away feelings of stress by giving us a sense of control. And it makes the situation better. Unless, of course, you missed something…
Step 5: Evaluate
The difference between wisdom and foolishness is simple.
Fools carry on regardless: ‘I have a plan: I’m following it.’
Wisdom means constantly observing the outcomes you are getting and evaluating whether your plan is working. If it is, continue.
If it’s not, and needs modification: Stop.
Then clarify what happened, review your options, proceed accordingly, and evaluate your outcome.
Distinguish Overload from Overwhelm
Overload is having more to do in a fixed time than your resources will allow. It an objective state and also one with which many project managers are familiar. We roll up our sleeves and plan our way out.
Overwhelm, on the other hand, is a subjective, emotional state. It is a stress response in which we feel that whatever faces us – whether it’s a little or a lot – is too much.
The set of tasks may be easy to handle, but you must first overcome the feeling of overwhelm. You can do this by focusing 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 this video:
The ABC of Adversity
In fact, there’s more: it’s ABCDE.
When you really feel that events are getting on top of you, this is one of the most powerful tools. It comes from the hugely successful therapeutic intervention, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But you can run the process for yourself.
ABCDE Stands for:
- Adversity
- Beliefs
- Consequences
- Disputation
- Energize
Adversity
Review the setbacks and events that have triggered the feelings of being under pressure and struggling to cope.
Ask: ‘What were the triggering events?’
Beliefs
Your feelings are triggered not by the external events themselves, but by the beliefs you attach to them.
Ask: ‘What are your beliefs about what has happened?’
Consequences
These beliefs have consequences for your reactions, behaviors and emotions.
Ask: ‘What consequences do those beliefs have in limiting what you could do?’
And: ‘How do they change your options and opportunities?’
Disputation
Challenge any beliefs that limit your options (‘limiting beliefs’).
Ask: ‘What evidence you really have to support those beliefs?’
And: ‘What alternative interpretations could you put on the events, which would give you more control over them?’
For 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.’
Energize
Now it’s time to plan your way out. That’s what you are great at!
Ask: ‘What are some practical steps that you can take, which will 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 allocate three groups to:
- stabilize the situation,
- look for a long-term solution, and
- communicate with our stakeholders.
Since stabilization is our top priority; that is where I will focus my attention at first.’
Isn’t that a whole lot better than feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and defeated by events?
How do You Handle Setbacks and Cope when Things Go Wrong?
I’d love to hear about your experiences, advice, or questions. As always, I respond to every comment I get.
