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.

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?

My guest Nancy Koehn, Harvard Business School professor and historian, speaks about great leaders-- leaders like Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Winston Churchill, and Rachel Carson-- and their mental health. Nancy goes deep into the lives of history’s greatest leaders to understand why and how they became great, especially during moments of crisis.

I think it’s fair to say that money makes most of us anxious. Money is often the first place we act out anxiety. The hardest lesson I had to learn as an entrepreneur was how to separate my emotions and my money. After 11 years, was I successful? Yes, and no.

If you’re like me right now, you might be sitting doing work when a news alert comes in, and then you’re flooded with uncontrollable worry, sadness, and helplessness. You may feel like you want to scream, or protest… this. very. Minute. But you have a deadline to meet. How do you process these feelings with the respect they need while still managing your work? I asked Carolyn Glass, LCSW, for advice.

Anxiety can cloud this process. My podcast guest this week, Carissa Gustafson Psy.D is an expert in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) a form of therapy that asks us to accept that our anxiety and distressing feelings are part of life. Instead, we can commit to changing how we respond. The linchpin in ACT is understanding your values, and having a way to come back to them when things get hard and your mind wants to stay stuck in anxiety.

Right now is an incredibly uncertain time, for a million reasons I don’t need to name here. And so when we show up at work, we are carrying all that uncertainty with us. And perhaps, things that 3 years ago wouldn’t have made us anxious, do now. I think we’re all a bit more fragile-- understandably so. And so whenever we can provide clarity to each other, our anxiety lessens and we feel better. And work better. Reduce anxiety through clarity.

I am so sick of hearing about Elon Musk. He is the epitome of entrepreneurship porn, of the myth of entrepreneurial genius who is a little unstable, unpredictable, and chaotic. This myth has persisted far too long and in truth, it lets a lot of people get away with a lot of bad behavior.

Ambient anxiety is like a free floating black cloud that likes to check in on us at inopportune times. For instance, what do you do when a tweet stops you dead in your tracks?