Are You Using Your Anxiety as a Force for Good?

Morra Aarons-Mele was 17 years old. She was a high school junior and impulsively decided to run for student body president.?

As the elections were the next day, she didn’t have time to prepare her speech. So she improvised.?

She won.

Fast forward to senior year, and now she is the student body president. But she doesn’t have a plan. Every Thursday, the student council meets during lunch, and Morra sits there, unsure how to lead the group forward.?

She doesn’t know what to do. Her anxiety rises, and she has panic attacks.

Each Tuesday and Wednesday, she gets more and more anxious about the Thursday meeting.

Morra was anxious.?

What’s worse, Morra’s anxiety around meetings followed her into the future. Even once she was in the corporate world, she would get incredibly anxious when she had to lead a meeting.?

So Morra, now the host of the award-winning Anxious Achiever podcast for LinkedIn Presents,? would cede her authority—she would let others lead meetings, often to the detriment of her career.

It became a barrier in her life.

Then, with the help of her therapist, Morra decided to leverage her anxiety instead of letting it control her.

Now, as a leadership expert and self-proclaimed anxious achiever, Morra argues anxiety is built into the very nature of leadership. It can—and should—be harnessed into a force for good.?

When Morra joined me on the Disrupt Yourself podcast, we discussed her experience with anxiety and mental health challenges and how she has learned to turn stress and worries into a source of strength for herself, her career, and the people she leads. She captures these concepts in her book, The Anxious Achiever.?

Morra shared that disrupting our anxiety starts by recognizing that anxiety is just data and it exists on a spectrum. At work, some habits like micromanaging, overworking, and even, potentially, mansplaining are actually people responding differently to anxiety. These behaviors are typically indicators of people seeking to control what they can.

The behavioral responses to anxiety may be personally or professionally detrimental, but the anxiety—the biological data such as an increased heart rate—itself is not necessarily bad.*?

Our response to anxiety is what often inhibits our success.

Morra suggests we should work to understand the stimulus for anxiety and our correlating response to it. Why do we respond to anxiety the way we do?

Frequently, we start to feel anxious because we are afraid of feeling shame. In fact, as a society, we do many things to avoid feeling shame.

It’s why, Examine Expectations, one of the Seven Accelerants of Growth that I outline to help you speed up your journey along your S Curve? focuses on ditching shame, the anxiety trigger.?

But even if we focus on reframing shame or other anxiety triggers, we will get triggered and become anxious eventually. We cannot change that.?

We can change how we respond when we receive that data.?

We can start to understand the anxiety and appreciate the good parts—the warning signals—but change our response.?

Because if not, anxiety has the potential to keep us from doing the things we want to do and being the people we want to be.?

At the end of my time with Morra, she shared an important lesson she has learned while talking to people about anxiety—it has almost always been a question that has caused people to change their responses to anxiety. Not a comment. Not a directive.?

A question.

It left me wondering how we can be better listeners to ourselves and others so that we can ask the questions that inspire change—that lead to personal disruption.

What is your body’s data—your anxiety—trying to tell you?

What is your typical response to anxiety at work? Do you micromanage, work long hours or over-explain? How can you change your response?

How can you listen better and ask the questions that will inspire change?

*There are many levels of anxiety, and if you are experiencing levels that are causing harm to yourself or others, please seek help from licensed medical professionals. Neither Morra nor Disruption Advisors are licensed medical professionals.