How to Turn Anxiety Into a Leadership Advantage, With Morra Aarons-Mele

Career Sessions - JR Lowry

This episode explores how anxiety can be a leadership advantage when reframed as a source of motivation, foresight, and empathy rather than a flaw. Morra Aarons-Mele shares insights from her book and podcast on embracing

Key takeaways

• Anxiety can fuel exceptional leadership through hyper-vigilance and over-preparation.

Transcript preview

Traditionally we've all come to subscribe to a pretty simple story about success that the best leaders are cool and calm and competent and collected they can walk into any room with certainty make the necessary decisions and sleep just fine at night but what if that story is just flat out wrong and it probably is what if some of the most driven high-performing successful people that you know the ones running companies leading teams building careers being famous are also battling with anxiety to crippling degrees. Not only that, what if anxiety is actually part of their success engine? Because here's what's interesting, anxiety doesn't always look like panic. Sometimes it looks like over preparation, hyper-responsibility, relentless thinking, a voice that says this could go horribly wrong, so I'd better be ready. Those aren't necessarily bad things, particularly in a workplace. For a long time we've treated these voices in our head as a flaw, something to manage or suppress or hide, especially, when we're at work, but today's guest argues something much more radical that anxiety when understood and channeled can actually become a leadership advantage. Moore Evans-Meely is the author of the anxious achiever and the host of a very popular Harvard Business Review Podcast, The Anxious Achiever. She spent years exploring, including within herself what it really looks like to succeed while anxious and how more leaders can stop fighting their minds and start working with them. This isn't going to be a conversation about a eliminating anxiety, it's going to be about redefining it. I'm J. R. Lawry. This is Career Sessions. Mora, thanks for joining me today. Hi, it's great to be here. Yeah, good to meet you. I was just mentioning before we started that I really enjoyed your book and I'm looking forward to talking about it. So you write about anxiety and you challenge the idea that anxiety is something that should be fixed. What led you to reframe it? What led you to reframe it's funny? I was just doing a law firm and I in a poll question said how many of you have felt anxious in the last 24 hours and 84% of them said they had felt anxious in the last 20% now I would have thought it would be a hundred percent in a law firm I know I'm like who's at 16% and so I think there's the fact that anxiety is part of the human condition and actually anxiety is a really helpful and useful emotion and a necessary emotion. we like it or not, so we might as well understand it and use it. And then there's the fact that in my work, interviewing high achievers who manage mental health challenges, who are neurodivergent, who have faced traumas and other challenges that sort of impact our brain and our psyche, I couldn't believe how many of them said to me, anxiety is my superpower. And they would say, I'm not saying it's comfortable, and that it makes me a necessarily happy person, but it's an essential key to who I am. It powers me, it drives me, it causes me to seek new things. And I think that there's a lot of truth to that, even though as I always say it's a double-edged sword. What is it that distinguishes people who you call anxious achievers from, I'll say the everyday run-of-the-mill person who's just stressed out about something? And I would say that almost anxiety is like their oxygen, right? They're powered by anxiety. Often since they were kids, it's a way of being and it's a little bit of a habit. An anxious achiever tends to be someone who is maybe an over-thinker, who's always four steps ahead, who's kind of never stopping, who just bust through milestones and keeps going in that sort of relentless way. And the ambition, the achievement can be powered by a lot of different drives, but the anxiety is used as a motivating fuel to keep going. So these people who think of it as a superpower, what are some of the specific ways that they use it to their advantage? There's a lot of specific ways and some will surprise you and some won't. So an example is that anxious achievers always say that they are warriors. There's a lot of specific ways and some will surprise you and some won't. So an example is that anxious achievers. for threats, many of them are what psychologists would call hyper-vigilant. They are scanning the environment for threats and preparing, which is actually, when you think about it, in many workplaces and in many professions, something that is highly rewarded. I would imagine in your past careers, the ability to be four steps ahead and anticipating multiple scenarios and how we might get out of them is a key facet of an anxious achiever, and it's extremely exhausting because your nervous system is extremely exhausting because your nervous system is. always aroused in the threat state. So again, double-edged sword, but it keeps you that person who's always looking ahead, who's always thinking. Very, very motivated by goals and tasks, because goals and tasks feel very, very weight to an anxious achiever. There's like a lot of my identity riding on it, my self-worth, my perfectionism riding on achieving tasks. We're often very motivated by money fear and scarcity. And so we will work very. very hard to provide money and make sure there's financial security. At the bottom of all of this behavior is the need for control that a lot of anxious achievers feel. We feel that if only we keep control over things and keep trying hard and hard and harder, things will be okay. But some of the more surprising aspects are that I find that anxious achievers can be very empathetic. They are deeply attuned to other people. They are extremely creative. because they're seekers. I interviewed a script writer and she said, you know, I can go to Target and I'm attuned to everyone else's behavior and I'll have four ideas for different storylines and scripts just by noticing things and tuning in to the shoppers at Target. And so we have a lot of radar going on. So we can also have really good social skills as well because again we're very focused on the other person. So for leaders who see their anxiety as a liability, how How do you help them shift their mindset? I try to help them at a few different levels. I should say that I'm not a psychologist. I am not a therapist. I really recommend that they are in therapy. I think the mindset shift is that a lot of anxious achievers and actually a lot of us in general are really used to being our own worst enemies. There's an incredible quote that I love from a sports psychologist that I know and he says at the highest level of performance people are often their own worst enemies. And I think that that that really true and I think that a lot of us use our inner critic we almost bully ourselves a lot of anxious achievers do this too we kind of bully ourselves into performance and the key is to stop being your own worst enemy and kind of turn into your own best friend and stop trying to change who you are obviously if your anxiety is getting in the way of your life it needs to be treated but many anxious achievers are on medication they've been in therapy they mediate they meditate they practice all modalities that help and they still have that nature. I joke that we kind of vibrate at an 11. And my point is that's a beautiful and essential part of who you are. And like all things, right? Like all of our strengths we have a shadow side. So the key is learning to have a relationship with your anxiety and I use a lot of mindfulness techniques for that and understanding that it's not in control of you, but you can't control it. That it's a relationship and a dialogue and a dialogue that it's a relationship and a dialogue and a you will get more agency over, but the first thing is accepting it. In the book you talk about how a lot of this goes back to childhood issues, childhood trauma, childhood memories, how can somebody unpack that and use it to help in a practical way? I mean there's a great saying, right? Wherever you go, there you are. And I think that by the time you get to a certain age, hopefully you've done enough reflection that you realize, gosh, I didn't come from a radish, as my father used to say. And the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing, and the thing that interesting about work is that workplaces are systems just like families are systems and when we grow up in families we