How to Effectively Handle Anxiety Part 1

Barbara often suffered with anxiety when managing projects. She found herself worrying about all the “what ifs” that might lead to disaster.  Although those things rarely happened, she couldn’t shake the anxiety that something could go wrong. Barbara lost sleep and felt on edge - and her efforts to control for possible trouble annoyed others around her.  This three-part blog will describe, step by step, how Barbara honored her feelings of anxiety and used them to become more effective in her project management role. In doing so, she fortified her commitment to resilience.

Adaptive Inquiry (AI) enables people to develop a strategy for successfully handling challenging emotions. Anxiety is the emotion that our subconscious sends up when we are at a loss to mitigate a risk.  Resilience is the capacity to adapt our behavior in harmony with our values in the face of adversity.  When we confront reality and acknowledge our dissatisfaction while maintaining our composure, we are more able to take decisive action. Anxiety usually reaches its height as we pretend everything is fine when it’s not.  Contrary to what we often hear, taking deep breaths and counting to 10 doesn't do the trick.  All relaxation does is change high arousal stress (panicking) to low-arousal stress (resignation, depression). Instead, it is most effective to work with your anxiety to understand your concerns about risks.

Let’s look at three steps that help define our anxiety using an adaptive interpretation, rather than a projective one.

Step 1: Look at the possible risks you are anticipating and ask yourself, “What risk am I at a loss to mitigate?”

Barbara’s situation involved a project that was not moving forward urgently enough. The team was letting other priorities interfere with their actions to move this one head. She asked herself, “Why do I feel anxious?” Barbara wrote in her journal that she didn’t feel effective in motivating her team members to care enough to make this project the top priority for them.

Step 2: Ask yourself, “ What is the 'what if’ scenario my subconscious is imagining?” For example: "What if I fail to deliver on time?" "What if a key employee resigns?" etc.

Barbara answered, “What if I fail to deliver this project on time?”

Step 3: Ask yourself, “What injury or loss would I be exposed to should this ‘what if’ occur?” For example, loss of status/respect/self-esteem/affiliation/belonging/trust, etc. We wouldn’t be anxious if we didn’t anticipate the potential of injury or loss (which would produce the emotion of fear).

Barbara answered, “I might lose credibility in the eyes of my boss if I were late. I might not be viewed as an effective project manager. I would also lose self-respect.”

By answering these questions, Barbara clarified the risks that were the basis for her anxieties. She noticed that her focus shifted from her team to her own effectiveness at mitigating the risks of potential loss of credibility and self-respect. With this analysis, Barbara set the foundation for examining her options for clarifying her beliefs, her options for practices, priorities, and place. We will look at these in my next blog posts. Stay tuned…

-Andrea Zintz, Career Coach