This article was originally from The Irish Times and is excerpted below. See the full article here.

People can function with anxiety but if it’s the dominant theme in their lives, they will not be at their best

There seems to be an unwritten rule that talking about one’s mental health is not the way to the top and Aarons-Mele, whose day job is “helping anxious leaders to thrive”, whether that’s in start-ups or Fortune 500 companies, puts this down to one thing: shame.

“They believe that exposing their anxiety will make them seem weak,” she says. “They worry that opening up about their mental health challenges will tank their company’s stock price. They think – correctly, based on my experience – that people consider anxiety and strong leadership incompatible.”

Aarons-Mele wants the corporate world to rethink its approach to mental health. And to help make it happen she hosts an Apple podcast that encourages people to ponder the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Time and again she could see that the connection between the two was strong and often problematic, yet she found it incredibly difficult to get senior managers to talk about experiencing anxiety.

“Anxiety is not a weakness, and learning how to manage it certainly isn’t,” says Aarons-Mele. Yet she has come across many leaders who will do anything to avoid letting their anxiety show. In short, they’re afraid of it whereas “when you understand your anxiety and learn to leverage it, you develop a leadership superpower”, she says.

“Being anxious all the time robs you of joy. And the capacity for joy is essential to your leadership (and your life) ... unmanaged anxiety keeps you stuck in imagining, and then reimagining, a scary future.”