The Secret to Stress Reduction According to Burger King

As a leader, one of your many responsibilities is keeping things in perspective.  I’ve got some suggestions for how you do that through an excerpt from One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership (you can get your copy here).

Many of us take the events in our lives way too seriously. Anything and everything ends up being viewed as serious and important. Little things become larger than they really are and can seem more critical than truly important things. When you take things too seriously, you lose perspective. Losing perspective creates stress. Stress makes you fat, bald, gray and dead earlier than you should be.

When the human body is stressed, all attention is pulled in and focused on the stressor. Vision becomes tunneled and “extraneous” information is blocked to enable focus on the perceived threat. It is biology at work. Going back to the days before time, when a caveman saw a saber tooth tiger emerge from the woods, he ignored anything not related to getting away from that threat.

Those same instincts have remained with us for thousands of years. When we perceive a threat we focus on it to the exclusion of everything else around us. That reaction is a defense mechanism that prevents distractions from taking our attention away from the survival task at hand. The problem is this physiological reaction causes us to lose perspective. This focusing instinct does not serve us as well as it did the caveman because there are not too many saber tooth tigers running around the cubicles of the office.

If you examine how this instinctive reaction to a stressor manifests itself in the modern world you will see how dysfunctional it can be. Imagine you are the brand manager responsible for your company’s website. When you see a formatting error on your website (which remember, you are responsible for) you realize millions of consumers might notice it and they will think less of your brand which means your sales will drop which will crater your stock price which will destroy your 401k OH MY GOD YOU’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO RETIRE! See how quickly that happens?

When you are stressed you will focus on the perceived threat in front of you, whether that threat is a tiger or a formatting error on your company’s website. Your adrenaline will surge and your thoughts will race. Typically those thoughts will run toward the worst possible scenario imaginable. To avoid the stress associated with allowing little things to seem big, you need to take a step back and regain your perspective. Maxims are a helpful tool for doing just that. They serve as touchstones to re-ground you during stressful moments when you are losing your composure over trivial events and bring you back to reality.

There have been times in my career when I was in high-stress roles. Being a type-A personality in those situations made me susceptible to losing perspective quite easily. Fortunately I have used several maxims at different points in my career to keep me grounded and to bring me back to center when I am knocked off balance. I have also used those maxims to bring members of my team and coworkers back to a centered state when they get carried away by an issue and lose focus.

The first maxim on my list is “Burger King is hiring.” I had a great boss at one point who always kept himself centered and grounded. He was the quintessential unflappable guy. One particular day I went into his office to bemoan some typical corporate problem causing me a significant amount of stress. My boss let me complain for a while and once I had expended all my energy he looked me dead in the eye and said “Burger King is hiring.” I blinked a few times as I tried to process his comment. When I was unable to extract meaning from the statement, he offered an explanation. “From the sounds of it you are frustrated with the way things are going. I don’t blame you. I would be frustrated too. If you hate it here, you should find another job. If you’re interested in finding that next job I thought you should know Burger King is hiring. I’m sure you would have a lot less frustration to deal with if your role consisted of flipping burgers all day long. Now that you know they’re hiring, does this problem seem like one worth quitting your job over?”

With my new-found perspective the issue I was complaining about no longer seemed as important as I was making it out to be. It certainly was not bad enough to quit my job over. Once I had regained my perspective I was able to approach solving the problem more rationally and logically. Since this incident I have used “Burger King is hiring” many times both to re-center myself and to help members of my team regain perspective.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

– If you want to create your own set of triggers to help you put things back in perspective when you get stressed out, grab a copy of my book One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership or download the audiobook version at Audible.com. It will help you remember your role as a leader requires you to be the calm in the proverbial storm.