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May 3, 2024 17 mins

In our digital era, we find ourselves in the midst of heightened anxiety and stress, affecting both our personal and professional lives. The relentless pace of work and constant connectivity has left many of us with an on-going undercurrent of anxiety. Your first step to manage this challenge is to recognize it, and thereafter adopt effective methods to navigate it. 

In our introductory episode, we delve into the physical sensations of anxiety. De Hicks encourages you to notice when anxiety hits and name it. Becoming aware of your own physical signals is a crucial starting point to managing leadership anxiety. 

In this series of 5 Podcasts, Dr. De will show you how to transform your approach to leadership and work and overcome the ‘new normal’ of constant anxiety. 

 

Music Credits: Two Step Daisy Duke by Mr. Smith is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License from FMA

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Episode Transcript

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(00:00):
Leadership is hard. Some of the time, it's hard because we make it harder than it needs to be.
Right? The work itself is challenging, but it's our approach to the work that
magnifies the weight of the challenge.
Music.

(00:41):
Hi, I'm Dee Hicks, and welcome to the School of Leadership, Leveraged Lessons
from High-Impact Leaders.
For the past 35 years, I've researched the disciplines, habits,
mental models, and assumptions of the most effective leaders in dozens of vocations.
This podcast takes what I've learned from over 2,000 of these remarkable people

(01:03):
and distills it into practical tools and tips that you can use immediately.
Music.
So let's get started.

(01:25):
Almost every leader I know says that their work has gotten more difficult in the past few years.
Their teams are experiencing significant internal conflicts more so and in a
different way than in In the past, their enterprises or their organizations
are noticeably more stressed and anxious than at any time most of my friends can recall.
The ones that we've surveyed extensively also say that their challenges at work

(01:50):
are negatively impacting their own personal physical health as well as their family lives.
You know this, that leading an organization and leading teams is extremely complex.
Our connected society is overwhelming most people.
While connectivity is good, even great from a lot of perspectives,

(02:13):
it has created a dramatic reset.
Our levels of stress or our anxiety are higher. and here's the kicker.
This heightened reactivity has become the norm for many of us.
Our new baseline is go on all the time. Frenetic, hurried, anxious all the time. We're just used to it.

(02:39):
Anxiety hits us first neurobiologically, then it washes over us with physical
sensations, and then it hijacks our thoughts.
And finally, it alters our relationships, both in the moment and in the long
run. You've probably even felt it today.
People around you have likely felt it too.
If you're like most people that I get to be around, you always feel some low-level simmering anxiety.

(03:06):
And the only time you are unaware of it is when you're able to override that
feeling through all sorts of distractions available to you.
So do a little experiment with me. Turn off all the inputs. Sit in a quiet place.
Take a deep breath. Notice what you feel and think after three minutes.

(03:29):
What's your baseline? Are you twitchy and nervous and distracted and worried?
Are thoughts racing around like a Jack Russell Terrier on cocaine through your skull?
Almost everyone around you is experiencing the very same thing.
When we're hijacked by anxiety in all its forms, we are less effective.

(03:50):
Our memory doesn't work very well. our judgment is suspended,
our patience fades, our heart rate increases,
we feel chest pain and pressure, we get dizzy, we feel mentally foggy,
become irritable, and our sensations of pain increase.
Our humor becomes acerbic, if it's there at all, and we crave carbs.

(04:14):
Live like that for very long, and we set ourselves up for all kinds of disorders,
disorders digestive disorders disordered lives
heart disease obesity chronic fatigue and chronic pain
sounds like a nice future huh well
many of my friends like you in leadership and the
people that you lead are surfing the waves of anxiety like never before perhaps

(04:37):
you're experiencing this weird sense of doom and maybe headaches and irritability
and panic attacks even maybe it's a a low-grade depression that settled in like a weather front,
and it's been with you for, I don't know, as long as you can remember.
Extreme fatigue, maybe? A pounding heart for no apparent reason?
Shortness of breath? Increased blood pressure?

(04:59):
Muscle aches? Joint pain? Wow.
Most of my friends who experience this just think they're working hard,
and most of them have simply accepted that this is the new normal for leaders in this age.
My friend, it doesn't have to be the norm for you.
So we've learned a few things that'll help you manage your own leadership anxiety

(05:21):
and help those around you manage theirs.
And as we get started on this journey together, there are five podcasts that
will come together in a series, and this is the first of them.
And I want to right at the start give all kinds of credit to the late Edwin Friedman.
He's the guy who really helped crack open the way I think about systems and

(05:44):
how systems can create anxiety and the role of leaders within those systems.
He's a foundational thinker. A lot of his work was also done in tandem with
a gentleman named Murray Bowen,
the late Murray Bowen, who also was the guy who characterized and described
systems theory as it's applied to families, and then on to small groups.

(06:05):
More recently, though, I've run across a gentleman named Steve Cuss, C-U-S-S.
You can find his work on Instagram and on Twitter and on In Your Facebook and
all those places. He's written a couple of wonderful books as well.
One of them, the most recent one that I have been chewing on is called The Expectation Gap.
I think his Instagram post, Instagram feed is called Cuss Words, which I get a kick out of.

(06:30):
He's got some great thoughts as well. And he boils a lot of this stuff down.
So those three thinkers and then a bunch of others that I just don't have time
to list here have really helped formed my thinking around these thoughts that
I'm going to share with you, probably forming these for the last five or six years.
So I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for their work.
Go ahead and look them up.

(06:50):
So as I said, it doesn't have to be this way for you.
So in this podcast, I'm going to give you a few tips that will help you,
first of all, notice your anxiety and notice that what it is,
that it is anxiety, and then maybe even notice it in other people.
Then in the podcast that follows that, I'm going to help you name it.
It comes from somewhere.

(07:11):
As leaders, our anxiety comes from something that we are believing to be true,
especially something we believe we need.
And if we think we really need that, and then something is in theory going to
threaten that need, it will create anxiety.
In the third podcast in this series, I'm going to show you what to do about

(07:31):
this stuff right on the spot and then move from that into how to help others.
And then we'll go on to podcast four and five and wrap it all up with some other
thoughts and some other stories that hopefully will be very helpful for you.
So let's dive right on. First of all, anxiety is the word that we use to describe a really fast,

(07:54):
complex response to real perceived or even imagined threats,
threats, especially if that threat doesn't have a specific source.
It's worry about what may happen in the future. It's probably not about what's
happening at this very moment in most cases.
It's also by some of the thinkers of the past called reactivity.

(08:16):
We react to a mental construct of what may happen. Let that settle in for a moment.
We react to an imagined threat, to a need that we have learned along the way.
Perhaps a need we really think we need, but perhaps we don't.
I think I need something to, air quotes, survive, unquote.

(08:41):
I imagine something as a threat to that need, and then I react to it in seconds.
So deal with your own leadership anxiety, first off, by noticing it physically.
Because it happens pretty quickly. Talk to yourself.
Oh, oh, I get that. That's anxiety, or whatever word you want to use. Worry, fear, stress.

(09:03):
Anxiety is the one we're going to use here. and that response is very natural.
We're designed to have that response.
It's always been that way. But we now live in a world of our own making that
perpetually exposes us almost non-stop to inputs that scare us.
We live in a fear industrial complex.

(09:25):
But my friends, this is not normal. It is not good.
It is not healthy to be anxious even at a low level all the time.
So what does it feel like physically for you when you begin to get anxious,
even if you haven't used the word anxiety yet? What does it feel like for you?
For me, I noticed a tightness in my chest right away. It's just a subtle tightness in my chest.

(09:49):
I might notice right after that, within a second or two, a little bit of a lightheadedness
or a queasiness in my stomach. I might notice that my humor begins to fade away.
I might notice that I get into what we call cognitive tunneling,
which is just thinking about that one thing.
Even my hearing changes. Although my ears are still working,

(10:10):
my focus is gone. I can't really hear what people are saying.
They might talk for two minutes and then I have to back up and reconstruct what they said.
So think about it for a second. What does it feel like for you?
You felt it today. What did it feel like?
Most of us are, you know, really engaged. We are busy people, right?
So we just blow past those indicators that something is going on.

(10:33):
Or we might explain it away.
I didn't sleep very well last night, or that person was irritating to me,
or I have a lot to do, or I'm in a new situation.
We talk about our thoughts about it, but we don't notice that that feeling means
that my body is telling me, I'm afraid, this is anxious.
So right out of the gate, let me challenge you to say to yourself,

(10:55):
oh, oh, I know what that is. That's anxiety.
Just observe it. Notice the detail of what you're feeling physically.
Just notice it. It won't make you feel it more. It won't make it grow.
It will certainly stop in its growth. It might even shrink just a little bit, but just notice it.

(11:17):
Oh, that's anxiety.
Huh. Perhaps you could ask others you lead and work with what they feel physically
when they are anxious and ask them with you to begin to notice their own physical
sensations when they're anxious.
I don't know. You may not have a team of people of a core of people that you
can talk with like that, but if you do, give it a try.

(11:39):
We are designed to feel anxious when we are threatened. threatened, that's okay.
There's nothing wrong with that if we're actually threatened.
Then you may want to try this. Compare what you experience physically when you
are anxious to what you feel physically when you're in another state.
Ask yourself the question, over the last few days or weeks, when have I felt the most alive?

(12:07):
What did that feel like physically? What was I thinking? When do you feel the most alive?
And then notice the comparison. The most alive state is a normal state.
Brief moments of anxiety, rarely or occasionally, now that's normal too.
But to reset your state to be constantly at a low to medium grade anxiety and

(12:31):
rarely feel fully alive means things are upside down for you.
So over the next few days, just notice the anxiety and call it that.
Call it anxiety. anxiety or my favorite word is
reactivity i'm reacting to something partly internal
and partly external oh i'm kind
of reactive right here you might say to yourself huh and just

(12:52):
observe it don't judge it don't try to chase it away with a stick don't worry
about it oh no i'm gonna die right now now that no just notice it oh at this
moment i'm feeling very reactive and it's got got physical symptoms that go
with it, and then move on.
Maybe you want to help a couple of people with whom you live and work to do the very same thing.

(13:15):
Everyone feels it from time to time, and it's normal, and we'll make it harder
than it needs to be when we either wallow in it,
or we just skip over the top of it and accept it as the new norm for somebody
who is doing the kind of work that you are doing.
And then we'll just justify it away and in fact, even ignore it.

(13:36):
So next time, next time your leadership anxiety begins to well up in you, pause and recognize it.
Just notice it. I guarantee you it will not make it worse and it will not tip
you into a deep morass of depression.
You'll be able to notice it. All right.
So in the next podcast, when we get When this one drops in a little while,

(13:58):
we're going to talk about where our leadership anxiety comes from.
Some great work that I've learned from other people much smarter than me suggests
that it comes from our assumptions or what I like to call our flawed mental models.
I really believe something is true. That's a mental model. And I act like it's
true and respond like it's true. But what if it's not?

(14:19):
But it's not true at all. You had many of those occasions in life where something
occurred externally to you that caused you to sift that thing through a mental
model, a belief system, a set of assumptions,
and you thought it was going to be something horrific or challenging or painful.
And so you spun yourself up and then reality dawned upon you a day,

(14:39):
a week, a month later, and you realized that the thing that was causing so much
fear was really nothing at all.
And you can look back on that and think, wow, if I had known that,
maybe I wouldn't have gotten so fearful and anxious.
Well, that's the kind of thing we're going to be doing. It's possible for us
to change how we think about those stressors in our lives.

(15:02):
And it's possible for us to look at different beliefs that you and I have got
as leaders that set us up to have a full-blown forest fire of anxiety raging through our brains.
So I look forward to the next one. I hope your day is going really, really well.
Mine is. It just so happens to be out here on the Olympic Peninsula at the recording of this podcast.

(15:29):
And stunningly beautiful day. It's about 66 or 67 degrees.
There's not a cloud in the sky. I'm looking out of the studio window up onto
a ridge right now, and I could look out another window and look right down at
the water of the Puget Sound.
This is one of those days where people think, I'm going to move there.

(15:49):
And then they make all of their arrangements to move here and they move in the
beginning of winter and wonder what on earth were they thinking?
That's the Puget Sound for you. Anyway, but it's an absolutely beautiful, beautiful day.
And I wish you were here. You'd be able to enjoy it with me and we'd have some
fun conversation and we'd probably crack open a bourbon and share that.

(16:10):
I'm not going to do that right now because it's a bit early in the day for that.
So I'll save that for another time and give you a review around it.
So you got important work to do. Keep it up.
Take care.
Music.

(16:32):
Thanks for joining me in today's School of Leadership.
I know your time is valuable and I appreciate the opportunity to spend a little bit of it with you.
If this podcast has been helpful, perhaps you could consider sharing it with a friend.
And maybe you want to check out the dozens of videos that we've created for
you on our YouTube channel, just look for HILT Academy, H-I-L-T Academy.

(16:57):
And HILT stands for High Impact Leadership Training.
And if you want to check out our in-depth leadership management and supervisory
courses, head on over to HILT Academy at thinkific.com and see what we have to offer there.
Once again, thanks for taking a little bit of time and spend it with me.

(17:20):
Music.
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