Shawna Samuel
You're listening to episode 39 of the Mental Offload Podcast.

Intro
Welcome to the Mental Offload podcast where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism and coaching tools so you can tackle it all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host Ivy League MBA certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

Shawna Samuel
Anxiety seems like something we should want to get rid of. But what if it's not always a bad thing? What if it's maybe even a strength? Today, we'll explore the hidden benefits of anxiety and how you can learn to harness your own anxiety and the anxieties of your team so you can be a more effective leader at work and at home. Hello Offloaders. This is Shawna Samuel. I'm the host of this podcast, and I'm also an executive leadership coach. I want to talk to you today about anxiety because most of the women that I get on the phone with are racked with anxiety. It's a request that I hear over and over again, like, can I just get rid of this anxiety? And I can truly sympathize with this because I struggled quite a bit with anxiety over the years, mostly around work. I used to joke to my team that I dreamed in PowerPoint because I would wake up anxious at 3:00 AM and I would start mapping out slides for big presentations. So I had to laugh the other day as one of my clients was like, but you seem so mellow and calm. I just thought you were always like that. I no longer wake up at 3:00 AM with anxiety working on PowerPoint decks, but I'm.

I'm still an anxious person. Most mornings before I get out of bed, there's like this predictable wave of anxiety that will just greet me as I'm waking up and I've come to expect it. So I haven't eliminated all the anxiety from my life, but getting coached over the years has really equipped me with ways to manage that anxiety really well so that I can function without over functioning. And let's be clear, there is a lot to be anxious about in the world and sometimes in our daily lives. But I've been reading this great book by Maura Erin's Mealy. Some of you may know her as a podcast host. She's got a book called The Anxious Achiever. Turn your biggest fears into your leader superpower. And I think her perspective is so interesting both in the book and in the podcast has really changed the way that I think about anxiety. And so I want to share some of that thinking with you today. And this is going to be helpful if you are a person who struggles with anxiety either at work or at home. But it's also, I think, going to be really impactful if you yourself do not struggle with anxiety.

Because as you'll see, as we talk today, the reality is that most of the people that we work with and sometimes the people that we live with, statistically speaking, you are more likely than not dealing with other people who have anxiety. And so understanding a little bit more about how it works and where the benefits are can help you be a better leader. So let's dive into it. If you're used to thinking about anxiety as something to be eliminated, avoided, tamped down, then I think it's really interesting to start thinking about the advantages of anxiety. I'm going to go through 5 hidden benefits of anxiety. Some of these are based on Maura Aronsmili's work. Some of it I've built on with my own observations. So the first one is forward planning. Anxious people are really good at forward planning. If you're an anxious person, you know, you probably have that decision tree going on in your brain of like all the potential scenarios of what might happen, what could happen, and really working through how to respond to different possibilities of what could happen. All of that is really forward planning, and that makes anxious people as leaders really good at looking forward, evaluating different scenarios and how organization or your people might best respond. Now, whether you're leading people in a big organization or leading people in your household, you want a forward planner on the team, right? That ability to look forward to evaluate different possibilities and create action plans and contingency plans. This is a true leadership skill.

And you want that whether you're in the workplace or whether you're just thinking about how we would manage to get out of our building if there were a fire, right? These forward planning skills are critical leadership skills and desirable leadership skills. The second benefit of anxiety that's often hidden is an ability to read the room. Anxious people are often scanning the room to be like, how is this going? What are people thinking? Do I have people with me or not? And that attentiveness is actually a leadership strength. We want to know how others are feeling or interpreting messages as a leader so that we can help respond to that and prepare them. And that brings me to the third hidden benefit of anxiety, which is really preparation. I hear this regularly from women who would say that they struggle with imposter syndrome. Like, I have to be really prepared. I have to know my stuff going into meetings. I don't want to be caught out. And often times if you struggle with anxiety, one of the benefits of it is that you're really motivated by a goal. You want to be prepared. You don't want to be caught out in a meeting or even at home when it comes to doing, for example, home renovations. And I think it's related to that skill of forward planning, but it's also a little bit different. Often just it's about doing research, knowing your stuff, wanting to look at things from several angles and make sure that you have a lot of input. This can lead to anxious people being very well prepared in a number of different scenarios and that is a leadership strength. Anxious people tend to have done their research, so you know and you've already thought about how you're going to respond to certain questions or what are the most relevant facts for a given issue. Anxious people also are prepared for things to go badly. So for example, when I used to do a lot of travel to client meetings in my corporate job, I would come armed with a laptop with the presentation with Ausb, stick with a copy of the presentation in case something happened to the laptop. Oh, and a hard copy just in case all the tech went down. And because anxious people are so prepared, it tends to make you stronger in terms of getting to your goal and getting to a goal quickly and effectively. Anxious people tend to map out, all right, what do we need to do? What's our project plan, and what are the dates that we need to hit?

Everything is set up and prepared. A fourth benefit is being detail oriented. That same part of your brain that is scanning for things that might go wrong also means that you probably tend to proofread your documents, make sure that i's are dotted and T's are crossed, and also tend to look out for things that don't quite match up. At home. It probably means that you do an amazing job of making sure that the diaper bag is always fully packed with everything that you need, that you know if you're traveling, you've got the right number of snacks and toys and changes of clothes to make sure that everyone gets to their destination feeling good and content. 1/5 benefit of anxiety is building structure and process. Many people with anxiety prefer situations that are predictable and repeatable. And So what that means from a leadership perspective is that if you put an anxious person into an ambiguous situation or an ambiguous culture, more often than not, they are a person who will try to figure out how to create, structure and process and build it out for an organization. That is a hugely useful skill in all kinds of domains, everything from scaling a start up to creating decision making processes in large organizations to fixing process problems in manufacturing. And it's a skill that we can often take into our home life as well. Like when kids come along, you might think, OK, well, if my goal is to get healthy meals onto the table six nights out of seven, then I'm going to need to build a process for that. And that includes meal prepping in this way and going out to the store on this particular day and doing the cooking during specific times. Like we figure out a process for things and we're very good at structuring. Now I want to add 2 caveats here because obviously anxiety is not one-size-fits-all and there's no one universal experience of anxiety. So some of these 5 hidden benefits, you might think, oh, this is totally me, that absolutely applies. And others based on your experience or the experience of people that you know with anxiety might not apply at all. And that's OK. But for the purposes of this episode, I'm speaking a little bit in generalities. The other thing I just want to add here for completeness is that there are different levels of severity of anxiety.

Now, there are some levels of anxiety that are a serious disorder that can leave someone not functioning. And my goal here is absolutely not to make light of serious anxiety disorders, the kind that have a serious detrimental effect on someone's ability to function. That said, I know my offloader audience and you all are smart and you get nuanced, so I am not worried about you all misinterpreting this as some message to like, go out and celebrate and embrace unmanaged, out of control anxiety, right? What I do want you to consider, though, is that if we did manage to eliminate all of our anxiety, we would lose potentially some important benefits as leaders and as humans. Like, Can you imagine if you were just to show up in life and at work like Jeff Spicoli, that surfer character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, you know, who just didn't seem to care about much at all? Or like Jordan Catalano, you know, super mellow, can't really be bothered types. You know, imagine if you were showing up like that. You'd be like preparation. Who cares? Structure. Let's just go with the flow planning. Well, surely it'll all work out. That does not sound good. It's definitely not how a leader shows up at work, right? And it's interesting because some data suggest that people in management and C level

roles are about 80% more likely to have a mental health condition versus individual contributors. And while they don't break out anxiety specifically, they tend to lump anxiety and depression in most studies. We know that anxiety and depression usually top the list when it comes to mental health conditions. Now let's be clear, correlation is not causation. We don't really know. Do people get to sea level rolls because their anxiety fuels them in a way that it doesn't for others, or is it that they end up with anxiety as a reaction to some of the stresses of these types of roles? We don't really know the answer to that, but I just want you to know that it's more common at the leadership level to feel some anxieties. And maybe some of that maybe is because of the benefits that anxiety confers when it comes to leadership. And the same is true as a parent. Like imagine if you were to show up super mellow and really not caring as a parent, like eek you, you want to be prepared, you want to be on your toes, you want to be engaged in building solutions.

So eliminating anxiety probably isn't a desirable goal. I think the real goal is not to be able to turn anxiety off, it's to have control of that volume knob to be able to dial it down. I was just booking my chimney sweep to come to the house because no one wants to burn the house down right? Uncontrolled fire. This is a bad thing. But a well managed fire in the fireplace, it's divine. It's warm, it's pretty, it's safely contained. Beats the hell out of freezing, right? And it's the same with anxiety. Instead of working to eliminate it all together, I want to offer you that you don't need to let it rage. But anxiety, when it's well managed, when it's well contained, is a leadership strength that can help lead to better performance. So how do you start to get control of that volume knob? I'm going to give you a couple things to consider here in this episode. And the first thing, though, is to really start by understanding just a little bit of the neuroscience. The most primitive part of our brain is really wired to seek out threats. It's a part of the brain that's called the amygdala, and its main function is to seek out threats. Researcher Zoe Chance calls it our Gator brain. You know, like that sort of Gator on prowl in a swamp, eyes just above the water looking for threats or in the Gator world looking for food. But this drive of the brain to seek out threats and react to them, this was a strategic advantage to early humans. A brain that can scan for threats and quickly react to them was more likely to keep you safe, keep you alive. I experienced this first hand when I was mushroom hunting down in the Pyrenees, and as we were walking through this forest path, we heard some noise that sounded like a wild boar coming out of its home. And it's not completely out of the realm of possibility. We know that there are wild boars that live in this area. And so you know, if you're anxious like me, you pick up your kid and you turn and you run. And The thing is, you might be wrong about it being a wild boar. 9 times out of ten. Maybe it was just like a large squirrel or something, but that one time that it actually is a bore that's getting ready to charge from the bushes, well then you just saved yourself and your kids.

So this function of the amygdala, it does have a really important function for us as human beings to keep us safe. And when you're dealing with a potential wild boar, that ability of the brain to activate sort of fight, flight or freeze mode and you know, decide without much logical thinking, OK, it's time to run, that is a really good thing. But when we are looking at the modern world, whether it's in our workplace or at home with our kids, one of the skills that we need to develop is the ability to stop and get our strategic brain back online, to really watch our own anxiety and let that more strategic part of our brain

make the call. Like, is this something that I really need to run from? Or do I want to put my anxious reaction in control in this situation? Or do I want to take another tack? So learning to be the watcher of our own thoughts, even in the face of some anxieties that can feel very immediate and very real, this is an amazing skill to have. And this is a learned skill. This is something that in coaching, we actually slow things down and teach you how to become the watcher of your own thoughts and how you can bring that strategic brain back online. But a great question that you can ask if you want to start to practice this at home is in the moment you can just ask yourself, what is it that I'm thinking about this situation that's causing me to feel anxious right now? That is the start of a practice of just watching your own mind at work. A second thing that I really encourage you to do is to reframe how you talk about yourself. Even in this episode, I sometimes refer to people as anxious people. And what I really want to encourage you to do is to move away from that language, Reframe being an anxious person, which when we phrase it that way, it's like it is part of who we are. It puts our anxiety in charge of how we react and how we show up in the world instead of referring to ourselves as anxious people. You can call yourself a person with anxious thoughts.

When you talk about yourself as a person with anxious thoughts, it takes the power away from the anxious thought. It takes that control away. It puts your strategic brain in charge. You are a person, a human being who happens to have some anxious thoughts and sometimes acts on them. We do this really naturally, often with our own toddlers. I've almost never heard a parent say about their three-year old. Oh, she's impulsive. We're like, she's a kid who's still learning impulse control, right? Calling a child impulsive, we don't tend to do that because we know that's not who they really are. They're not an impulsive person if you're a person who struggles with impulse control, right? And just that little reframe, the different way of talking about it makes a huge difference in terms of how we see ourselves and how we see other people. Another thing that you can do in sessions with clients, I often work to build out like a personal tool kit of tactics that we can use to help turn the volume down on anxiety so that clients can operate and execute at their very best. But you can start to do this at home because everyone's tool kit is going to be a little bit different. So one of the things that you can start to do is pay attention to the coping strategies that help you just lower the volume on anxiety in your own life. Or if you're managing a team with some people with anxious thoughts, as we're going to reframe it with some people with anxious thoughts on your team, you can do these same things. Look for the strategies and mechanisms that allow the people on your team to feel less anxiety. Having that tool kit at the ready is super impactful and allows us to feel more equipped to show up in the way that we want to at work and at home. So if you spent time in your life trying to figure out how to tamp your own anxiety down, I want you to reconsider where there might be some hidden benefits that anxiety allows you, both in the way that you lead at work and at home. And even if you aren't personally struggling with anxiety, chances are you work or live with people who do, so understanding anxiety is crucial so that you can get the best out of the people around you. And if you take nothing else away from this episode, I hope that you've come to think that you don't need to turn off anxiety to be successful. Perhaps it's enough to just turn down the volume so that you can access the benefits of anxiety in a way that helps you be the best leader you can be.

Are you ready to step into a life for success at work and success at home go hand in hand? Then it's time for the Mental Offloads Shut down ritual. It's a proven practical method to help you log off and leave work behind and on your evenings and be present with the people you love. And the shutdown ritual makes it easy gain the power to truly walk away from work and be present with the people who matter most to you. It's just what you need if you want to achieve big things in the world without losing your mind. Ready to reclaim your time and your Peace of Mind? Go to WWW dot the Mental offload.com/shutdown and get your free download of the shutdown ritual that's www.thementaloffload.com/shutdown and join me next week for the next episode of the Mental Offload Podcast.