Stretched Too Thin? What a Bartender in Madrid Taught Me About Stress
Most of us know what we're like when we're stretched too thin. The team is short-handed, the calendar is full, and every person who stops by with a question feels like one more thing to get through. I've been that leader more times than I'd like to admit, which is probably why a bartender in Madrid made such an impression on me. He was running a packed wine bar by himself, with people waiting at the door, and he still gave us his full attention like we were the only ones there. I've been trying to understand what he knew that I didn't.
We had stopped by Mercado de San Fernando in Lavapiés one early evening, before dinner, which in Spain doesn't start until nine or ten. It's a neighborhood market from the 1940s that's now as much about eating and drinking as shopping. We ended up at a little wine bar called Bendito, a narrow space framed in red with one whole wall of natural wines in hand-drawn labels. It was packed, with people standing two deep at the entrance.
There was one guy working. The rest of the staff were out, so he poured, took orders, put together plates of tapas, washed glasses, and rang people up on his own. When we asked what he'd recommend, he went to that wall, came back with six bottles, and lined them up in front of us. He told us who made each one and where, what the grape was, how it had been made, and why he liked it. You could hear how much he loved this, not just the wine but the small producers behind each bottle and the work that went into it.
Then he poured us a taste, then the next, until we had each tried all six. I settled on one, changed my mind and went with another, and we each ended up with a different favorite. Somewhere in the middle of all that, he also made us a plate of cheese and cured meats, some of the best I've ever had. In between, he'd step away to take care of someone else, and when he came back, he picked up exactly where he had left off. He never sighed or glanced over his shoulder at the people waiting, and it never seemed like we were taking up too much of his time, even though he had a full bar and no help.
Why it would have felt so different to me
I know what I would have looked like in his place, because I've been there. When I was running my company through the 2008 financial crisis, I spent most of that year not knowing whether we would still be around in six months. I remember how it felt in my body, my shoulders up near my ears, a tightness in my chest every time my phone buzzed, and a short fuse with anyone who wanted five minutes of my time. I probably didn't have more on my plate than he did that evening, but I was carrying a lot more fear about whether I could get through it.
I see the same thing with the leaders I work with. When they're under that kind of pressure, their teams stop bringing problems up early because they can see there's no room for it, clients pick up on the rush, and decisions get made faster and worse. I kept wondering why the same evening that seemed easy for him would have felt so heavy to me.
Richard Lazarus, a psychologist at UC Berkeley who spent decades studying stress, argued that it has less to do with the situation than with how we size it up. The same busy evening can feel like a threat, where all we can see is what might go wrong, or like a challenge, where there's something in it we actually want. In my experience, that second way of seeing it comes much more easily when we love what we're doing and are enjoying ourselves, because a busy night just means more of the thing we like.
Amy Arnsten, a neuroscientist at Yale, has shown what a threat does to us. Stress chemicals take the prefrontal cortex partly offline, and that's the part of the brain we rely on for focus and judgment. So the fear that we can't handle something makes us less able to handle it. We forget things, snap at people, and make mistakes, and then we take all of that as proof we were right to be afraid.
That's what I saw in the guy at Bendito. He loved wine, the stories behind each bottle and the people who made them, and he seemed happiest when he shared it, so a full bar never seemed like something to get through. He was doing the best he could and trusting that the rest would get done, and as far as I could tell, nobody waited very long and the bar ran fine with one person behind it.
The place felt the way he did
What I took away from that market is that he made the environment he was working in. It was crowded and loud, the kind of evening that would have had me rattled, but because he was relaxed, the place was too, and so were we.
I've gotten a lot better at this since 2008. I notice the tightness in my shoulders much sooner now, and when I do, I ask myself the same question I ask clients: what am I telling myself I can't handle right now? Most of the time, the honest answer is that I can handle it, and I'm reacting to a story about what will happen if I can't. Other times, the better question is what I actually enjoy about the work in front of me, and whether I've lost sight of it.
With clients, I can stay focused even on a packed day. On those same days, home is harder, and I still catch myself giving my family half my attention while my mind is on the next three things. But I keep coming back to that evening in Madrid, and to a guy with six open bottles lined up on that little wooden counter, in no hurry at all, pouring us one more taste before we decided.
Reflection prompts
Where are you bracing for something you can actually handle, at work or at home?
What would change for the people around you if you stopped bracing?
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