Finding Your Superpower in Anxiety
This article was originally posted in the Lexington Observer newspaper and is excerpted below. See the full article here.
A conversation with Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever
Because you’re a self-acknowledged “anxious achiever,” I have to ask: do you get anxious in interviews or public speaking engagements?
I don’t get anxious in interviews. It’s funny. And public speaking — I love it. I think that everybody has their own particular vulnerable spots. They’re different for all of us. In fact, anxiety before you speak can be a great tool.
Anxiety has obviously been around forever. Some would say it’s just part of “the human condition.” Do you think anxiety is over diagnosed these days?
I feel like that’s above my pay grade because I’m not a doctor. I will say, I think people have always been anxious. But increasingly we have better mental health literacy. In the past 30 or maybe 40 years, psychology has entered the popular culture, so we have more words to express it. Whenever we’re going through times of really transformative, scary change, people are probably more anxious. And we’re definitely in one of those now.
What is the difference between the anxiety you talk about on the podcast and describe in the book, and what we might have traditionally called “performance anxiety?”
Performance anxiety is just a piece of what I talk about. Anxiety at work hits us on many different levels — around what we think of as our ability to show up and do good work, the stories we tell ourselves about whether we’re good enough, whether we are going to work hard enough and whether we’re worthy. It can also tap into our individual fears. Do we have anxiety about money? Does it feel scarce to us? Do we have anxiety about making our mark in the world? Again, it’s a very personal thing and so no one’s anxiety is going to look like another person.
Many people act out anxiety, too, you know, like a lot of the bad behaviors, toxic management, micromanagement, controlling behavior, bosses who don’t delegate, perfectionistic bosses, people who are afraid to be wrong. All of that stems from anxiety. I think that what’s good about what’s happening now is that leaders are encouraged to look within and look at their habits and patterns instead of being given free rein to just be.
Since the workplace is ultimately all about achievement, how do people keep from simply getting more anxious the more they achieve and thinking, oh my God, I’ve raised the bar, now I’ve got to keep raising it?
That’s the trap that a lot of anxious achievers get caught in, including myself! We never stop because the goal posts keep getting higher. We’ve been conditioned to achieve out of a sense of self-worth or out of a sense of that if we just keep going, things are going to be okay, and we won’t face loss. It’s a real challenge that I talk about a lot in the book. We need to stop and take stock and proceed more mindfully rather than just push, push, push. Frankly, most of us push and then we burn out or we have a crisis, and we can’t function anymore.