Make Your Email Less Anxiety Provoking

When people ask me to give them an example of how anxiety shows up at work, I always start with email.

Email (or Slack, or Instant Messaging, or even texting) brings up so many anxious feelings for us. Imagine: you get an email from a client with whom you don't feel 100% comfortable. The client asks to talk tomorrow at 10. Where does your mind go? What anxious thoughts do you immediately have? That she's mad at you? That you're getting fired? Do you lose time in between receiving the email and the actual meeting to anxiety and worry? I sure do.

And imagine, now, if you could stop the anxious cycle of responsiveness around your digital work life! Listen here to learn.

My guest Erica Dhawan wrote the bestselling book Digital Body Language, but she herself is working to reframe her own anxious relationship with digital communication. She answered client emails right after delivering a child!

After all, digital communication is about relationships. Important ones. There's always someone at the other end of the email, and we want that person to feel satisfied with us. But as Erica points out, this means we need to understand what actions are conscious, and what are unconscious and driven by anxiety. We need to measure the need for urgency or complexity of response for each kind of digital communication. And she has an awesome triaging system for determining what's worth responding right away to, and what's just not.

This episode is so helpful! And I'd love to know: how are you managing your digital communication boundaries these days?