stress, perfectionism, and how I'm working on it

A couple nights ago, something happened on my watch at work that effectively shut down our operations the next morning. An old and heavily-used hangar door broke while I was closing it - the reels of steel cable that raise and lower the door came completely unwound, and when I came in very early the next morning, the entire door popped out of one side of the frame and jammed inward on the other. None of this was legitimately my fault. The door was so fucked up from the beginning that it took a gentle nudge from an airport authority bulldozer to pop it back in to place. A faulty switch was allowed to cause a problem due to a faulty down-limit switch, and the door popped out due to missing pieces.

Have I lost you yet?

A problem that isn't your fault in any way really shouldn't elicit a fight-or-flight response. But it happens. In my haste to live up to an expectation of perfection, I took it upon myself to make sure everything was right. So, when I was pulling planes back into their correct spots after the door got fixed, I smashed one's rudder in the back of another plane's wing. It was hooked around and parked in a weird spot. Now I've created a problem that was completely my fault, because I was stressed about something that wasn't my fault.

Well, shit.

Stress and anxiety narrow the perceptual field. A healthy (small) dose of anxiety I think keeps me as a detail-oriented, conscientious person. This is, at least I think, the expectation that people have me in professional life, and to a lesser degree, in personal life. So when I'm stressed, I'm not entirely there: I'm forgetful, impulsive, and hyper-focused.

There is nothing worse than losing your head in a crisis. And I've been in shit like this before, but with different results. Last week I had to scramble to launch our corporate plane in twenty minutes. I planned and filed flight plans, cleaned the interior, pulled the plane out, got it gassed up, preflighted, stocked the food, serviced the engine, and then took off in an absurdly short of time. And I didn't miss a thing, because I wasn't stressed.

I'm not sure what was different about my mindset that day, but I'd like to know. By recognizing when I'm acutely stressed, I hope to cut down on the amount of dumb shit I'm capable of.