Very often, someone comes to me complaining that his/her job is particularly stressful. Lawyers complain about the pressure of having to meet deadlines. Nurses tell me about the stress of knowing patients’ lives depend on their doing their job properly. A secretary may describe a work situation where she has two bosses, each of whom expects her to do his work first. There are demanding bosses, dangerous jobs and jobs working for important people. All of these bring with them their own pressures. Some employees complain to me bitterly of the stresses of their particular job; yet, almost always, there is someone alongside them doing the same job without feeling stressed!
There is one situation , increasingly common, unfortunately, where everyone feels stress. If there is legitimate reason for a person to think he/she may be fired imminently, without recourse, without another job opportunity immediately at hand, and perhaps with no other source of income in the family, it would be unnatural and, frankly, undesirable for that person to feel comfortable. Someone in that position should be feeling urgently the pressure to write up a resume, call other potential employers and network as soon as possible. Stress, in that situation, serves its proper purpose–to motivate the individual to do whatever can be done to avoid a potential danger.
Very often, however, people know very well they are in no danger of being fired, yet feel stress on the job anyway, often on a daily basis. It turns out that for most of them there are two underlying fears not immediately apparent that make them susceptible to stress under ordinary circumstances and that would affect them no matter what kind of work they would do:
1. The fear of making a mistake.
2. The fear of being criticized, or yelled at.
They start off feeling some sense of inadequacy, usually for reasons having to do with the way they were treated growing up. This can be a subtle process and not just an outgrowth of parents telling them they were no good. On the job they are anxious not to make any mistakes which would make obvious that inadequacy. But everyone makes mistakes. Even if someone else’s life depends on it, everyone still makes mistakes from time to time. Since there is always an opportunity to make a mistake, these individuals are always under stress. Similarly, if someone has an irascible boss, perhaps out of a number of bosses, sooner or later that person will get scolded, for good reasons and bad reasons. Other people can shrug working under such a boss, if they have reason to think their job is secure, but these anxious people cannot.
The treatment of this problem involves developing techniques for comparing realistically one’s performance against others, and developing strategies for determining what a boss really feels. If he yells at everyone equally he is not likely to be registering any real dissatisfaction with the person he is currently scolding.