Using Anxiety as a Force for Good
Considering the state of the world, and the range of challenging scenarios that are being faced, it’s only natural that when I listen to people talk about feeling anxious it’s often portrayed as a negative experience. One that suppresses our capability and stops us fulfilling our potential. Holding this belief, that feeling anxious is a bad thing, however, is only one way to use the experience.
To explore this, let’s say we pause for a moment and turn the concept on its head. Instead of believing feeling anxious is a bad thing, I believe that we can recognise that anxiety and the energy it brings can be a force that helps us; it can help us focus on what matters most to us. To bring this to life, a recent client I was working with was experiencing an intense feeling of anxiety regarding a project they were working on. This was to the point that level of anxiousness they were feeling was almost paralysing. Not knowing where to turn, their feeling of anxiety and the prospect of the project failing was getting the better of them to the point of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy – i.e. the more they felt anxious about failing, the less effective they were becoming. Helping them to pause and face into the true source of what was driving their experience enabled us to take the anxious energy and direct it to making more effective decisions which helped the project get back on track.
How do we redirect anxious energy?
Firstly, we need to recognise where anxiety comes from, and my view is that anxiety is a product of two things:
- Uncertainty: we feel unsettled because there are things that we don’t know the answers to and/or we don’t know what’s going to happen.
- Vulnerability: as human creatures, no matter how much we hate to admit, we are mortal, vulnerable and magnificent creatures as human beings which means that we have this deep concern about our survival and our security.
It is the combination of these two things that not only causes us to experience anxiety, but it also causes us to experience anxiety as a limiting force rather than a force that can propel us to fulfil our potential.
How should we use these triggers of anxiety?
Digging deeper into each of these causes of anxiety, it’s important to understand how to shift our perspective toward uncertainty and vulnerability.
Uncertainty comes from the fact that we are living in a state of unknown where there are things that we just clearly don’t know enough about, or we don’t know the answers to. For instance, what’s going on in the world today are some of the biggest unknowns. When will the economy stabilise, what is going to happen with international trade, will the war escalate, who are our enemies, is global warming accelerating? Then, against any one of these topics, what are the time frames we are dealing with – months or years? None of us have the answers to these questions, and so it feels difficult to prepare to plan for anything. Despite this, to use the fear of uncertainty to help us focus requires us to take time to consider what ‘unknowns’ we are most concerned by, including what questions they raise for us. Doing this consciously helps us then employ the power of creating scenarios to ease the anxiety about an uncertain future. Returning to my client, due to the nature of their project they were facing a significant number of unknowns. To support them we worked through creating a list of questions that brought structure to the unknowns, against which we created scenarios that helped them feel more prepared. This simple act of scenario planning helped them dissolve the anxiety around the unknowns, thus enabling them to channel their anxious energy toward planning for the ‘what ifs’.
The second product of anxiety is around being a vulnerable human being. The sense of vulnerability comes from our exposure to threats; from our exposure to things that we perceive will threaten our security and our survival. Once again, if we do not take time to properly understand those things that we perceive will threaten us, including objectively assessing how real that threat actually is, it is easy for them to lurk between our conscious and unconscious, undermining our confidence and causing anxiety. Once we understand what we perceive the threats are, we can start to plan for them which builds our resilience. For instance, that same client feared that if the project failed, they would be fired. In not expressing this to anyone, this perceived threat floated in their mind, undermining their confidence. When we explored it, drawing the perceived threat into the light and properly assessing it, it became less worrying allowing them to take back control.
Using anxiety as a force for good
Although I fully appreciate that there is a difference between clinical anxiety and feeling anxious, for those who are experiencing feeling anxious as anxiety, rather than allow it to hold you back, I believe that it can be used as a source for good. So, if you’re experiencing anxiety, which is completely natural and very human, then I encourage you to think about scenarios and focus on building your resilience as a way of using that anxiety as a force for good. Use the experience to guide you to focus on what’s most important to you and start to take action in response.
To conclude, yes anxiety can be seen as a negative force that prevents us from fulfilling our potential but the mere presence of it gives us energy. We just need to use that energy in a positive way.
Want support? Contact Rob@purposefulleader.co