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I remember when I started my first business, I was a young 19 year old kid with no extensive job or business experience. I dropped out of college to pursue starting my own business, and the fear of failure loomed over my mind every second I was awake. I had to learn how to do marketing, prospecting, sales, admin, customer service, and many other skills with no guidance or direction to tell me whether I was heading in the right direction or not.
During my first year, I saw zero results, zero revenue, piling credit card debt, and no signs of success. I had no ideawhether what I was doing was ever going to work.
What uncertainty led me to feel a constant level of extreme pressure and stress. There were many times where I strongly considered throwing in the towel and quitting.
Eventually, the thought and option of potentially giving up were so draining to me that I decided if I’m going to quit on anything, I’m going to quit on the idea of quitting.
Quitting was no longer an option. I also realized at the time that although I was doing my best, my best was not good enough. I had to continue to get better until I succeeded, and there was no other alternative.
Eventually, as my skills improved, that business started doing extremely well, and within a few years I became one of the top performers nationwide in that industry. I became significantly more capable as a person during that time period as I continued facing and solving problems that, at the time, caused a lot of pressure and stress.
Looking back, the most valuable thing I got from that experience, which was the reason for my success there, was the level of mental resilience I had built over time. I just learned to keep working through every situation and problem I was faced with, regardless of how much pressure and stress it caused me, and over time, problems continued to seem less significant as I adapted to dealing with bigger problems and became capable of achieving more in the process.
I eventually left that business, and later on I started Remote Leverage, where there were numerous times I faced extremely difficult situations. But having already built up a lot of resilience, I was able to handle those problems far more effectively and get through every difficult situation I faced.
If I was to put a younger version of myself to deal with the different things I have to do today, I would have completely crumbled and failed under pressure as I wouldn’t have had the mental resilience to handle what I could handle today.Which is why I decided to write this, to share with you one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past decade: Dealing With Pressure.
Pressure is simply the situation you are in, a demanding environment or high-stakes event.
Stress is the negative, physical, or emotional reaction that happens when you feel your resilience is inadequate to meet that pressure.
Resilience is the ability to adapt, recover, and grow stronger after facing adversity, difficulty, or significant change. It involves emotional and mental flexibility, persistence, and the capacity to “bounce back” from hardship. Think of this as your psychological stamina.
If you’re expected to complete a task you’ve done a thousand times before, you’d experience almost no pressure. You already know exactly what to do and what the outcome will be. You also wouldn’t need to draw on any resilience, because there’s nothing challenging about doing that same task for the 1,001st time.
On the other hand, if you’re handed a new problem to solve, or a new level of expectation on a task you already do, you’ll experience a heightened level of pressure. You now have to meet a demand you’re not used to meeting.
Whether you feel stressed with that new level of pressure or not depends entirely on your level of resilience.
If you have a high level of resilience, you’d have enough stamina mentally to take on increased levels of pressure without feeling additional stress.
Feeling stress is therefore simply an indicator that your current resilience level hasn’t caught up to your current challenges yet, and if you keep going, you’ll build more resilience and be able to face this same challenge (and equivalent challenges) with less stress in the future.
Someone with more resilience could face the same expectation you have and not be phased by it as they have more capacity to deal with that expectation.
When you hit a challenge that exceeds your current resilience, you generally have two options.
1. Retreat and cap your growth
One option is to acknowledge that you’re not yet equipped to handle this level of pressure and retreat from whatever is causing you stress. This protects you from the discomfort of dealing with stress in the short term.The tradeoff is that it also caps how far you grow as a person. If you avoid taking on more challenging situations, your resilience never has a reason to expand, and the ceiling on what you’re capable of as a person stays exactly where it is today.
In my opinion, this is one of the closest things to death that we could experience while staying alive as we practically stagnate and wither away over time until we cease to physically exist. I personally would rather die than accept that as my reality.
2. Lean into the discomfort, and become a better version of yourself
The other option is to stay with the challenge even though it’s uncomfortable, letting the stress be a signal that you’re growing, not a signal to retreat.
Accept that the reason that you feel stress is that you’re not mentally conditioned to deal with that new level of expectation, and instead of retreating back to a comfortable spot, take action and adapt to become a better version of yourself so that you could take on the challenge that is currently causing you stress and overcoming it.
Identify the gap between where you are vs. where you need to be, and work through it until you succeed.
You’ll be uncomfortable, but the discomfort of overcoming a challenging situation will help you build more resilience.As you build more resilience, you’ll grow to the point where what stresses you today will feel insignificant in the future. As you take on problems of similar levels of pressure in the future, you will have conditioned your mind to be able to handle challenges more effectively.
Becoming someone who can handle challenging situations, and adapting to overcome these challenges, makes you significantly more valuable at work. Personally, I also find that skillset to be extremely useful for me in my personal life as I’ve dealt with situations where I had to solve problems to help out close friends and family.
We shouldn’t hope for situations with less pressure. Pressure is just part of doing meaningful work.
Instead, the goal is to build more resilience to handle pressure well: to keep leaning into uncomfortable situations and continually becoming better versions of ourselves.
