Welcome to the Anxious Achiever!

If I told you your anxiety was a gift, would you laugh in my face?

I believe anxiety can be a gift. I believe it’s a leadership superpower. Now I don’t want to sugarcoat anything. Living with anxiety is hard; I know. Clinical anxiety can stop you in your tracks. I’m talking about the daily anxiety so many of us feel: the rush of stress, adrenaline, racing hard, tensing muscles. The “Oh sh**, this is going to happen and I can’t handle that” feeling. If you learn to understand and manage your anxiety you’ll decipher what it’s trying to tell you, manage how you respond to anxious feelings, and channel anxiety’s creative energy and drive.

And then you may just be one of those leaders who credits their anxiety for helping them get where they are, even though it’s been a bumpy path. You might be like many of the guests on my podcast, The Anxious Achiever. I want you to meet one of them.  I want you to meet one of them. He may not be a household name, but the 2,000,000 web stores his software company supports drive over $3 billion of global e-commerce revenue.

Meet Harley Finkelstein

Harley Finkelstein is president of Shopify, one of the biggest and most profitable e-commerce companies in the world. Harley is an anxious achiever from way back: He’s had anxiety and a gift for entrepreneurship since childhood. Harley was an early entrepreneur- but it came from a complicated place. 

“That was not driven by passion,” Harley said on my podcast. “That was not driven by interests. That was not driven by some incredible ambition. That was driven by anxiety. That was driven by this need to survive.” Harley’s anxiety had him jumping out of bed at six every morning, raring to go. That was when it first clicked for him that anxiety could be an advantage. “This thing that I have,” he said, “could actually be incredibly effective in terms of achieving some sort of entrepreneurial goal or some sort of business objective.” 

Still, anxiety was uncomfortable, and sometimes negatively impacted Harley’s quality of life. He fought with the people in his life, and he fought his own anxiety. He tried to rid himself of it. But, Harley says, “It was only towards my late twenties that I realized I can't get rid of this thing. This is part of me. What I can do, however, is I can manage it better and I can make sure that this superpower gets honed.”

These days, Harley manages his anxiety through therapy, daily meditation, exercise, breathwork, and careful scheduling that builds in time for work and protects his time with family. His deep self-awareness has enabled him to identify the tools he needs to be an amazingly effective achiever and to keep his anxiety in check when it begins to escalate, and on the other hand, to lean on it as a superpower when the situation calls for it. 

For example, if he’s nervous ahead of a big public speaking event, he does a deep breathing exercise that activates the parasympathetic nervous system (also known as our “rest and digest” system). It’s “a three-minute practice that immediately reduces my anxiety, immediately makes me more focused, and makes me less nervous,” Harley said. But when he needs to remain high energy, he welcomes the presence of anxiety. “When I'm preparing for something that's really important—the IPO, for example, or an earnings call, or negotiating a very important business deal—I actually don't need to activate the parasympathetic nervous system,” he explained. “I actually want to use some of that anxiety to anticipate all the things that could go wrong…. It provides me with this incredible checklist of things that most people would never think of.” The anxious achiever’s ability to anticipate problems and double-check everything, he said, allows him to put in particular guardrails ahead of time so potential problems simply won’t happen. I call this looking around corners.

Your Anxiety Toolkit: Dropping Anchor

If you have anxiety, you need a toolkit to manage through. We will develop the toolkit in this newsletter, week by week.

Today, I want to start with a quick exercise to do when your anxiety hits, and you want to channel your anxiety into effective action, not spiraling into negative thinking. The key here is to use your energy and put it to immediate work while not letting your brain cast into the future. Stay in the moment, focused on the task at hand. This is the difference between feeling anxious and working through it and going into catastrophic thinking and freezing. 

Say you’re facing some uncertain news and it’s making you very anxious. You’re in the middle of your workday, though you can feel the racing heart, sweaty palms, adrenaline rush, and racing thoughts of anxiety.

Psychotherapist Carolyn Glass suggests something called “dropping anchor.” It takes about a minute (here’s an audio version if you’d like to listen. You don’t have to stand).

Pause what you’re doing. And tell yourself: I’m anxious. I’m really feeling anxious. This is hard. And take a breath. Give yourself a moment to settle.

We can get anxious about feeling anxious and that makes things worse. Try not to blame yourself for feeling anxious, or worry about your anxiety. You’re anxious. It’s ok.

Plant your feet into the floor. Notice where your body is tense. Breathe into it, and feel the gravity flowing from your head and into your feet on the floor.

Look around and notice: what can I hear? What can I see? 

Are there people around me? Can I hear them? 

The goal is to “contact the present moment,” as Dr. Russ Harris says.

Do this for as long as you need to come back into your body, into the moment. Breathe.

And then ask yourself: What do I need to do right now? What is the task at hand? 

Define a concrete task, for example the next hour of work you need to do or a clear output like writing 3 pages of a report or a section or a presentation or forecast. Use your adrenaline to think through the task, anticipating challenges and outcomes. Put that deep brain to use! For example, if an issue around money makes you anxious, and you’re diving into a financial projection, ask yourself what set of figures you can run through that might quell your anxiety.

As you work, try to stay in the moment. Stay focused on the task. If your brain goes into overdrive and starts thinking ten steps ahead, tell yourself to come back into the moment and stay focused on what your immediate task is. As your task absorbs you, your anxiety will lessen.

Finish when you’ve done what you set out to do and give yourself a reward!

Check out the entire Anxious Achiever episode library here.