Author: Angelos

How to reduce anxiety in your team as a manager👇🏻

Our autonomic nervous system needs 3 things to feel safe:

1 – Connection

2 – Context

3 – Choice

1 – To strengthen CONNECTION, directly address moments of disconnection and have an honest conversation.

For example, “Adam, I feel we are a bit disconnected this week. Would you be open to having a chat to explore this?”

Or if you want to address this with humour first, “Adam, are we getting on each other’s nerves this week? Do we need to have a little bit of a chat?”

Humour is good especially if you’re doing this for the first time and you want Adam to feel at his ease.

2 – Make sure your people have enough CONTEXT to do their job and perform certain tasks. Context is information—what, why, how, when.

Explain why something is important.

Encourage them to ask if they miss important information. Who can they reach out to for help?

Do you remember the occasional maths problem at school that you couldn’t solve because you were missing necessary data? Can you remember your frustration and confusion?

That’s why context is important. Make sure you give your team the radius before you ask them to work out the area of the circle.

3 – Give your people a CHOICE when you can.

Our autonomic nervous system senses danger and activates a survival response when there is no choice.

For example, “I have these three available times for our Zoom meeting next week. Which one works best for you?”

“I have three projects which I think would be a fit for you. Shall we have a chat to see which one sounds more interesting to you?”

During the pandemic, connection, context and choice have become more limited so it’s important to have these at the back of our mind.

Can you do something today on any of these three areas for your team?

Loving you, Angelos

If you google “executive stress” you’ll find all sorts of studies.

Executives attribute their stress to:
– competitors
– reaching targets
– satisfying stakeholders
– volume of communication

Some say ‘What stress?” (I’m really suspicious of those)

What do all the above have in common?

They are all external stressors!

“It’s not me! High expectations are put on me!”

This is all true to a certain extent.

But what about inner stressors?

It’s not easy to for a leader admit to those, is it?

Perfectionism, impostor syndrome, low self-esteem masked with super-confidence.

We can go deeper!

The deeper reasons go way back into an executive’s upbringing and the expectations set by their parents.

An executive may have been neglected as a child and as a result, they had to strive to guarantee the love of their parents.

Or they were given too much attention because of their talents (yes, they’re charismatic).

And when they entered the real world, they had to go to extreme lengths to get the same attention.

When executives become aware of these deep-seated issues, they can forgive themselves and their caregivers.

They become more self-aware, productive, and emotionally intelligent.

And guess what?

The stress levels go down too.

Loving you, Angelos

Do you know the worst type of anxiety?

The most counterintuitive?

The most disguised?

The happiness anxiety!

Is there such anxiety?

Oh yes!

Here’s how it works:

When you suffer from low self-esteem and something good happens in your life… you may feel happy but also confused…

“Hold on… that’s not how things usually are for me!”

“That’s really cool but round the corner it’s going to be really awful!”

Joy creates conflict with your deepest views of yourself.

And this triggers anxiety!

So, how do you overcome this anxiety?

By sabotaging yourself and reducing joy.

And you end up back in control.

“I knew it was too good to be true”.

Homeostasis. Equilibrium. Business as usual.

This behaviour is rational. When you die by your own hand, at least you’re still in control.

You spare yourself the anxiety of waiting for destruction by somebody else.

How to Overcome the Happiness Anxiety

Now that you know how it works—go back to your life and carefully observe.

It’s hard to spot, so pay close attention.

See if you can get through today without undermining your good feelings.

First of all, now that you know how the happiness anxiety works, you can catch it on its game.

Next time you experience anxiety when things are going “unreasonably well”, first welcome the anxiety—don’t fight it!

There is an unconscious part of you that wants to protect you, to make sure you’re safe and well.

Observe the thoughts with non-judgmental curiosity.

Your unconscious communicates with you through feelings and sensations in the body.

Focus all your attention on those feelings and sensations.

You may catch yourself try to rationalise or compare yourself to others or escape these thoughts—”I shouldn’t feeling like that, look at you things are going well and you’re not grateful, etc.”

Welcome all those thoughts too.

And then go back to those feelings and bodily sensations:

“Mmm… I’m feeling x, y, z…. oh here’s some tension….”

Scan all your body for any type of sensations; you’ll find a lot there.

Practice this every day. You’ll get better with practice.

The point is to get familiar with those feelings and sensations that anxiety produces without having to reduce the joy. 

And a tip from neuroscience: When you feel anxious your cognitive abilities are compromised BUT the part of your brain that helps you sense bodily sensations is not—irrespective of the level of the stress arousal. So, you always have a channel accessible for communicating with your unconscious.

Loving you, Angelos