Standard Commercial Roofing & Envelope Solutions

What Are Your Breaking Points?

Reaching a breaking point is when you feel you can't go any further than you already have. And even though you’re going to come up short of what you are trying to accomplish, you feel you’ve done the best you can, and you stop.

Everyone has breaking points. However, virtually all highly successful people have learned how to manage their breaking points so they never reach them. While there are some common breaking points shared by many human beings, breaking point triggers, or combinations of triggers, can be different for virtually everyone. You can ask others to understand what their breaking points and triggers are, but it is highly unlikely that theirs will be exactly the same as yours. However, if you pay close attention to yourself, and seek guidance and coaching from associates and others close to you, you can learn from experience to become aware of your breaking points and their triggers. When you learn to manage those triggers, you can successfully avoid reaching breaking points.

Fatigue is one of the most common triggers. When you need to push through to a deadline but sense that you are going to run out of steam, consider these scenarios:

1. If you have been at it since early AM to meet a 5:00 PM deadline and you begin to get drowsy early in the afternoon, take a 30-minute nap and be sure to wake 3 hours before your deadline.
2. If it’s very late in the evening after a long day, instead of trying to finish before you sleep, go to bed and get up 3 hours before you normally would and get back to it. Either way, you will be twice as productive in the last 3 hours after even a short amount of rest.

While very different than fatigue, stage fright of some kind is a very common trigger for virtually everyone, so it’s very important early in your adult life to understand how you will experience stage fright BEFORE you find yourself in an actual scenario. Consider these options to “practice” how you will experience stage fright and learn strategies to manage your triggers:

1. Attend a speech class at a local college to learn how stage fright manifests for you and strategies to manage it. Then you can seek opportunities to gain experience by volunteering with a civic organization to introduce your group’s guest speakers or with your church to speak on a topic.
2. Ask any associates who seem to be particularly good in front of groups for some coaching. Then request that they give you some opportunities to speak in front of groups where they are in the audience to provide affirmation and encouragement, and then ask them for honest feedback and be very open to their perspective.

Being overwhelmed is also another common trigger.

1. The most important strategy when managing daunting assignments is to break them down into small pieces and prioritize which task to get done first, second, etc. When you can see small, achievable tasks ahead of you, you can eat the proverbial elephant one bite at a time.
2. When someone unexpectedly shares a barrage of complaints or grievances, calmly listen and let them finish. If at all possible, get to a place where you can safely take notes. State that you want to make sure you have all of their concerns noted and have them repeat the first thing you heard. Then have them pause, write that grievance down, repeat it back so they know they heard you, and then repeat this process for each complaint. Keep in mind that people generally don’t want immediate answers, they usually just want to be heard and then to receive some sort of follow-up in the near future.

It is important to know that everyone has breaking points. You may not know what yours are yet because sometimes multiple triggers have to happen at the same time to bring you to one of your breaking points. While multiple triggers can be harder to diagnose, you can still get clues by paying close attention to your anxiety level when you’re in stressful situations. These are most often when trigger points begin to show themselves.

Keep in mind that one of the things that sets finishers apart is that they understand their triggers and are thus able to manage their breaking points whether it be delivering a comprehensive proposal, getting through a challenging meeting, dealing with a difficult employee, or making a tough phone call. When you maintain your discipline, you will consistently be able to avoid reaching your breaking point, and you will consistently get the job done.

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