CSQ ADVISOR
John Horton, MD
John Horton, MD, is a physician and stress specialist with a unique way of practicing medicine. He has lived and taught in Southern Africa, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Spain, and New Zealand. Along with Tim Gallwey, for fifteen years Drs. Horton and Hanzelik have been helping patients loosen stress’ grip on their lives with workshops similar to those Gallwey offers his corporate clients. Dr. Horton has been practicing medicine for 36 years, 17 of them in Westlake Village. He studied at Dartmouth, Columbia, and Duke School of Medicine. He lives in Westlake Village and is co-founder of World Travelers Healthcare in Westlake. He enjoys travel, golf, movies, hiking, cooking, eating, and practicing medicine.
Work / Life Balance is Not Enough
I’ve been practicing medicine for a long time. I used to start conversations about stress by building the case that stress is the culprit in many health problems. Nowadays people get it--stress opens the door to sickness. Still, while patients realize stress is a physical burden, most don’t think they have a choice in the matter. They believe external circumstances determine stress levels--that stress is inevitable in their situations. This is why we wrote The Inner Game of Stress: Outsmart Life’s Challenges and Fulfill Your Potential.
International business travelers and corporate managers are among the patients my medical partner and co-author Edd Hanzelik and I see daily. Much is said about work-life balance today. Patients are aware that spending time enjoying activities with family or friends is good for their health. I’d like to take that a step further: participating in enjoyable activities is critical to our health. However, the notion that we should spend our day in a grueling job balanced by time off doing things we enjoy isn’t working. We can’t make these sort of compromises without consequences. Here’s an analogy: what if we decided to work through the week without drinking any liquids, and drink them all on the weekend?
Work stress is described in medical literature as epidemic: 25 percent of employees name their job as their primary stressor; over 40 percent describe their careers as extremely stressful; the number of hours worked increased eight percent in one generation with twenty percent of the workforce working 49 hours a week. If not epidemic, it’s certainly becoming very expensive.
While it’s difficult to tell how much employee stress costs organizations yearly (an estimated 300 billion) the business sector is taking it seriously: health benefits cost an organization almost half of its after-tax profits, stress accounts for 60 to 90 percent of employee medical problems, causes conflict, errors in judgment, accidents, litigation, absenteeism and violence. A poll found 14 percent of respondents felt like striking a coworker in the past year, twenty-nine percent yelled at co-workers, and twelve percent called in sick due to job stress. Companies looking for ways to manage this are turning to a variety of solutions including corporate workshops like our Inner Game Seminars.
We need balance in our professional lives. Moreover, we need to create an atmosphere where employees enjoy what they do.
Two of my long-time patients, both named Mike, understand this. One is the retired CEO of a major division of a Fortune 100 Company. His story is in our book. When he first encountered our STOP Tool in a workshop he called it “procrastination”. After trying it, he became one of it’s biggest fans.
Most people tend to think the only thing that counts in their professional lives is performance. Our culture judges success by performance related results. Mike and other forward looking business people see a bigger picture. In the book and the workshops, we use a tool called the PLE Triangle, consisting of three equally important sides: Performance, the actual “doing” of a task; Learning, which is present in every activity; and Enjoyment, the quality of the experience while doing the task. Every activity has these aspects. If they are in balance, they support each other.
Tim Gallwey, our co-author, is a father of the executive coaching movement. The idea for the PLE Triangle grew from his answer to a question posed by a CEO in one of his Inner Game corporate workshops. “Three things actually happen simultaneously when the Inner Game is played well. Our performance is excellent, learning is occurring naturally, and we are enjoying ourselves.”
Leaving out the enjoyment factor evokes a stress response. It takes some understanding to see the relationship between performing, learning, and enjoying in our lives. This is our individual responsibility, but corporate managers can learn this and encourage others to do so.
I mentioned another patient named Mike; an engineer who helped build a local start-up into an international brand appearing on practically every movie released. Organizational changes caused the sale of his division and cutbacks, resulting in a severe cut to his income, while he has three kids in college. It’s stressful. However, for the first time in years he’s enjoying his job. It’s been good for his health and for the company’s bottom line because he’s energetically and happily helping bring a new product to market.
He explains: “I’m working on a product I feel proud of! My input is needed and valued, and they listen to me.” Regarding his previous experience he adds, “Paying people who don’t give a damn about what you make to come in every day and make it halfheartedly is really expensive.”
It’s also not sustainable.
In this economic climate, there’s a lot of talk about why businesses fail or succeed. If organizations make a few simple changes, they can not only minimize their exposure to loss due to stress, but sustain the health and livelihoods of employees -- which ultimately results in better performance, and a better bottom-line.
