Understanding Psychological Stress: The Three Ways Humans Experience Loss and Fear in the Workplace

Explore the full episode here

Transcript:

(AI Generated)

Human beings experience psychological stress in one of three ways, sometimes all three at the same time. Number one, a net loss of resources. So let's think about this, give practical examples with regards to the early days of Covid. I was working at a marketing communications firm and during the first few weeks of Covid, we were pulled into these emergency meetings and we were discussing what the future of the company might look like.

And I saw this psychological stress play out in a big way. So, number one net loss of resources. What happened immediately is that some of our clients got cold feet and said, we need to pause advertising and we're gonna cancel our contracts. So right away, our monthly billable decreased, and I could see around the table, the owners, the leaders, myself included, were like, oh, shoot, this is really happening.

Like, we're losing money. Number two is, Threat of a loss of resources, so possibility of losing resources in the future. So we started to behave more defensively. We're like, okay, we need to call all of our clients right now and make sure that they are on board with us and nobody else is gonna cancel their contracts because if they do, we're totally screwed.

That was it. And the number three is the most interesting one to me. It's insufficient reward following an investment of resources. So we hired all of these people that we thought were gonna produce X, Y, and Z results, but they're not working out exactly as we thought. So all three of these things are pointing to the same thing that human beings are inherently afraid of.

Loss, loss of resources. And if you would take that to its nth degree, I think it's loss of life. We're actually afraid of death, but that's another conversation for another time. But in the context of work, we're afraid of losing the resources that we equate with success.