Do you ever feel that success requires – demands! – anxiety? Anxiety is contagious within systems; when the anxious leader gets rewarded, teams copy their leader’s anxious behaviors. Guess what happens then? Everyone becomes anxious!

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy today released a new framework highlighting the critical role that workplaces play in promoting the mental health and well-being of workers and communities. This week’s podcast is our discussion about five evidence-based essentials that help organizations develop mentally healthy policies and practices.

While some stressed out leaders react to anxiety by agonizing over a decision and putting it off, others do just the opposite and make hasty decisions. It can be an enormous relief to move the needle on a project, get something off your plate, or feel like your stress is now someone else’s problem. But of course, the very definition of an impulsive act is one that’s carried out immediately, with no forethought and little or no regard for the consequences.

Lochhead is known as “one of the best minds in marketing” – and now I know why. Lochhead told me he felt like he just never fit. But he understands something essential: his neurodivergent brain is his greatest asset. Lochhead unlocked how to soar in big jobs and make his difference work for him. Talking to him unlocked a crucial puzzle for me as an entrepreneur.

It's Mental Illness Awareness Week, and the theme is "What I Wish I'd Known." I wanted to share what I wish I'd known about managing an anxiety disorder as a new parent.

Being a manager requires having conversations that feel intimate and discomfiting. The key is to remember you’re not alone. It’s not your job to be the office therapist and you don’t need to show up with solutions when a team member is struggling. Sometimes, you just need to show up.

It’s often impossible for us to meet the expectations we set for ourselves. It’s also impossible to meet the expectations we think others have set for us. We spend a lot of time racing against our own expectations and what we perceive to be other people's expectations. Anxiety happens when expectations are out of balance, ungrounded.

Adam Baruh is a CEO rewriting the rules of what a CEO talks about. He’s working with the mess of midlife- the legacy of a divorce on the kids, the extreme stress of providing for people, poor decisions along the way, and long repressed childhood trauma that caused him shame for decades.

How can I ask for the flexibility I need while maintaining my professional reputation? How can I protect my mental health and my boundaries? What do I actually want my work life to look like? Can I be myself and still succeed? These complex questions are at the heart of most of my listener mail. And they are at the heart of today’s season opener show, where I ask two experts your questions.

Our brains do not like uncertainty. Fear of the unknown triggers a flood of chemicals into our brain and body. The chemicals were designed to help us respond to physical threats. And so, we worry, says Runyan. Worry makes us feel like we are doing something about the uncertainty. It’s a way of meeting the discomfort that our body feels about uncertainty.

Boundaries are a big deal. Your physical boundaries control your safety by establishing your level of comfort with touching and interaction, and your emotional boundaries protect you from being crushed by difficult personalities or enmeshed by in dysfunctional systems. Your boundaries around work are equally important, and they encompass every other kind. As Darlene Lancer, MFT, put it, “Boundaries are your bottom line.”

Almost every leader I have ever interviewed has spoken about the importance of rest and rebalance. And yet rest feels more elusive than ever. Rest is more difficult to achieve than ever. Rest is hard.

Role switching can be one of the most stressful and unsettling parts of working from home. "Switching" is the process by which social actors move between different social contexts, i.e between family relationships to professional relationships. If constant role switching is a problem for you, here are a few things that you can do

These are anxious times, especially for leaders who need to support their teams while also driving business results. In my course I share proven techniques for managing anxiety as a leader and leveraging what anxiety tells us as a force for good to help you and your team thrive.

Some teams are anxious because things are really tough right now, everyone’s burned out, and the world is very uncertain. No matter why your team is anxious right now, you can take steps to lower the volume of anxiety and reduce reactivity. (PS: These are also fundamental, great leadership skills!)

Every headline is bad these days, but if you’re a professional, the financial headlines can be especially triggering. I asked business psychologist Camille Preston PhD, how to stay focused when headlines like this pop up in your feed in the middle of the day.

You may be grieving right now. You may feel deeply anxious, uncertain, and like things are not ok. And that may lead you to “forget” to do work assignments and avoid deadlines.

Like many of us, I grieve for my country, our people, and our planet. Grief is in the air. At the start of the pandemic David Kessler told HBR that all of us are feeling different kinds of grief for what we're experiencing both right now, and what we fear in the future.

For a lot of us, getting recognized for an achievement is a dopamine hit. It makes us feel good. And when you’ve been a high achiever your whole life, that dopamine hit feels essential.

Making big choices and changing are not something we’re taught how to do. I think it’s expected that we learn how… that’s what getting older is for. I don’t think getting older makes us better at accepting the loss and discomfort of change. In truth, most of us don’t know how to do change well because there’s no place in our development and schooling where we learn how to do it well.