"Grit your teeth"

"Game time"

"Get on with it"

"Keep calm and carry on"

These affirmations and others appear on mugs, office walls and posters the world over.

They are at the same time well intentioned advice and barely-disguised put downs at work, at home and in our own minds.

In one sense, I like them. I like the well-intentioned sentiment behind them. They are a short-hand for "things aren't great right now, but if you're proactive and take ownership, they can improve".

In another sense, I hate them. They imply that how we are experiencing things is unimportant. That we are being weak. That we should just 'be better'.

Most of us say these things to our friends, family or colleagues as a way to encouragement. Or perhaps out of exasperation. But from a performance improvement standpoint - they are just unhelpful.

It's all connected

Here's why. We tend to forget that we are dealing with people, not titles.

We have a meeting booked with someone - perhaps a client, perhaps a prospective client, perhaps a direct report. We have an agenda to discuss, that helps us get something done that we need to do. (At the time of writing), they will appear on a screen at a certain time, and disappear at a certain time.

But that person does not appear and disappear. They are living their own stories. They may show up as 'team-mate', but they may also be spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend.

And all these sides to them are connected.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there existed a myth in business.

Want to know what it is?

It's a big one.

It was that personal and professional lives where separate.

We used to believe that our work-self stayed in the office, and our home-self stayed at home. We used to believe that the two stayed blissfully apart.

They didn't.

Suggesting that personal and professional lives are separate is like saying that a hangover from a big night out with friends will stay at home when you go to work the next day.

It doesn't. (Sadly).

All of our 'selves' are connected. If there is stress in your personal life, it showed up in your professional life - whether or not you were conscious of it. Perhaps you were a bit short with a colleague or you found if difficult to concentrate on that report.

So if this is true for you, it is true for the person you're about to meet. As the saying goes;

"Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about"

But I have a business to run!

So here's why telling people to "Man up and get on with it" is unhelpful from a performance standpoint. It ignores the very problem stopping that person from getting on with it.

It is akin to telling someone to keep running with a splinter in their heal. Whilst there are many problems that we can't help the other person with, a lot of them we can - often just by listening.

Acknowledging their problem is simply allowing them to pull out the splinter. It can only be a good thing.
And to those business leaders who insist that the work is for work, and to leave personal problems at the door - your approach is short-sighted. Sooner or later, that splinter will get infected, and the person who was running before soon won't be able to walk.

Now you have a much bigger performance problem.

To be clear, I'm not talking about spending all our time dwelling on someone's personal issue. I'm not talking about crying alongside them.

I'm talking about acknowledging the problem, and helping the person to keep going with their burden, rather than suggesting they try and move forward by ignoring their burden.

I'm talking about having empathy, not sympathy. (To find out the difference in less than three minutes, click here).

It's a two way street

But there is more to this.

It is not up to others to deploy more empathy for us. A key to long term, high performance is deploying empathy for ourselves.

In our culture, there is a tendency to think 'coping' is 'dealing with'. We don't allow ourselves the opportunity to feel how we feel because if we stop, we are weak.

Nelson Mandela said:

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."

I tend to think that resilience is the same.

A resilient person does not notice the pain, but acknowledges it and keeps going in spite of it.

One of the first lessons taught in jiujitsu and other grappling sports is tapping out. Tapping out is tapping your opponent on the arm/leg/back to signal that you want them to stop. (It also taught me a lot about energy management - click here if you want to find out how).

Tapping out is seen by beginners as a sign of weakness. But tapping out is just part of training. It is how you don't suffer a serious injury, so that you can keep going.

It doesn't mean "I can't go on".

It means "I can't go on right now".

It means "I'm stopping now so that I can go on".