It’s time to break the stigma that surrounds mental health. In today’s episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws interviews Adrian Gostick, co-author of Anxiety at Work. Together, they discuss the issues burdening employees and how to remove the weight of anxiety in the workplace.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Adrian Gostick is a best-selling author and thought leader on workplace leadership and strategy. With a Master’s Degree in Strategic Communication and Leadership from Seton Hall and years of experience in leadership, employee engagement and retention, and workplace culture, Adrian has a unique perspective into what drives business success.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE STIGMA
Adrian Gostick and Elton Chester began writing Anxiety at Work back in 2018. “We were seeing about one in five employees with full-blown anxiety disorder,” Adrian explained. “And yet we didn’t talk about that.” Managers just didn’t have any tools to deal with employee anxiety, and most don’t want to talk about this “touchy-feely” topic. But Adrian and Elton knew it was long past time to address anxiety. After all, “here’s an injury to the most important organ in our body — the brain.” Why wouldn’t we address something so pervasive?
The sudden emergence of COVID-19 only made matters worse. After the pandemic hit, anxiety levels spiked to a level that we could no longer ignore. And instead of buying into the mental health stigma and remaining silent, Adrian and co-author Elton Chester were ready to get conversations going and give managers some practical tools. They wanted managers and employees alike to know that they are not alone in dealing with the burden of anxiety.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Defining Terms
“Worry and anxiety are very different terms. When we worry, we’re focused on a specific event. ‘Gee, I’m going to fly tomorrow. Am I going to catch COVID?’ Stress is when we start worrying and worrying and it starts building up. Maybe my job is extremely worrisome and it builds into stress that starts affecting my body. We all know the signs of stress, right? They impact us all very differently, but it starts becoming biological anxiety. Anxiety, even when we remove a stressor, is still there. It can interfere with our work, our life. It is that intense and excessive and persistent worry and fear. As we were doing our interviews for anxiety work, I remember someone saying, ‘Anxiety makes me feel that the problems I face are insurmountable, and my ability to cope is insignificant.’”
Breaking the Cycle
“We can get ourselves into this situation where we start thinking, ‘I’m anxious about becoming anxious,’ and it becomes a process we have to break. If we do fall into that category where we start anticipating our anxiety, there’s a couple of things we have to focus on. The first is that you can only control what you can control. […] And the other part of dealing with anxiety about anxiety is having a network that really is supportive.
Find someone or a group of people and talk with them about your hell.”
Charting the Path
“A lot of times we’ll be brought in to help attract and retain employees. And one of the things we talk about is attracting people by letting them know you’re going to care about their career — that you’re actually going to have development plans in place — because most of the time when employees join an organization, they feel like they’re on their own. We’ve found, in fact, that in retail organizations and service organizations, they’re actually having career conversations every week because their turnover is so high.”
“And they’re finding this is one of the most powerful ways to cut turnover: they’re starting to have these monthly career or aspirational conversations. And it’s not about your projects. It’s not about interpersonal things. It’s just about your career. So you meet with your manager who takes the role of a coach, asks where you want to go, and commits to helping you get there.”
Striving for… Perfection?
“Back when I was in MBA school, we were told that if somebody asks you that interview question, ‘what’s your biggest weakness,’ we were supposed to say, ‘I’m a perfectionist.’ Terrible answer. Because we find perfectionists actually get less done than people who are diligent. Perfectionists are so afraid of making a mistake that they have a really hard time getting started. They put unrealistic expectations on themselves and others versus somebody who realizes they’re not going to be perfect but are just going to do the best they can. When it comes to perfectionism, the first thing you’ve got to do is clarify what good enough looks like.”
A Little Gratitude Goes a Long Way
“There is an incredibly high level of anxiety among high performers. In fact, high performers are almost twice as likely to burn out, […] but why? Well, they put a tremendous amount of pressure on themselves. But there’s also something called Imposter Syndrome, and it’s where my internal validation doesn’t match up with what I’m feeling or what I’m hearing externally. And so you’ve got to keep reinforcing it for me because I just don’t believe it.”
“I don’t know if you’ve read Bruce Springsteen’s beautiful autobiography called Born to Run. He talks about his lifelong anxiety attacks and depression. I mean, this is a guy who’s incredibly talented. And he says, ‘I will perform until I’m out there with a walker.’ He says, ‘The only place I feel like I’m myself is on stage.’ Why? Because he says I’m getting instant recognition, instant gratification, and gratitude from the people around me.”
LEARN MORE
Pick up Adrian Gostick’s new book, Anxiety at Work: Eight Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done, or send Adrian and his co-author a message at us@gostickandelton.com. They would love to connect with anyone who needs some solutions regarding building resilience in their workplaces.