I am really anxious to move away from abstract discussions on the nature of stress we experience every day and start showcasing stressful incidents and frustrating professional issues near and dear to every CFO, Controller, etc. However, before I do that I feel we need to address one more theoretical subject – correlation of Frustration and Anxiety.
As I already mentioned several times, frustration is a normal reaction (whether extra- on introverted) to situations in which we face obstacles to our achieving goals or actions that contradict our standards, etc. Every person experiences it from the moment he or she is born. In this blog, with examples from daily war of survival, I argue that my peers, CFOs, Controllers, and other financial execs in entrepreneurial environment, operate in a state of chronic frustration.
Anxiety, on the other hand, no matter how many scientific definitions are out there, boils down to sense and fear of danger, whether real or non-existent. The symptoms and sensations are the same if you are genetically predisposed ("wired") for anxiety or forced into it through the lifetime of conditioning.
Because it is far more fascinating to try to explain why some people feel anxiety and panic attacks for no tangible reasons at all, cognitive science is primarily preoccupied with the types of anxiety that are caused by chemical imbalance, hereditary factors, etc. If you are interested to learn more about the latest research advancement in this area, I particularly recommend an almost a year old, but still very accurate and exhaustive, New York Times Magazine article Understanding the Anxious Mind.
And, of course, most of us belong to the army of Americans (tens of millions of people, actually) who are worried about the economy, their job security, the money they lost in various market shakeups, the environment, the future of their children, etc. etc. Economic and environmental issues are big reasons why so many people seem to be on the verge of a breakdown.
That said, in the context of this blog I am primarily interested in the undeniable fact that chronic frustration with your job leads to stress and acute anxiety. Just like Pavlov's dogs we are conditioned by frustration to fear those situations that cause the unpleasant experience.
We try to accomplish a particular task, meet our regular obstacles (bosses interventions, subordinates incompetence, time constraints), fail to achieve our goal, get frustrated – and (surprise-surprise), now we feel anxious every time we start that task, because subconsciously we anticipate frustration and fear the pain. The anxieties accumulate into stress, and now we feel trapped. If the situation is not managed, we can spin out of control.
And that is why it is so important to find methods of releasing frustration out of your system (please see my post One CFO's Personal Tools for Frustration Relief) and, just equally important, find resolutions for your professional problems by elevating your managerial, organizational, behavioral and technical skills – issues I hope to discuss in the future based on the incidents from your professional life.
The Frustrated CFO 