Entrepreneurs face specific challenges compared to other professionals. They must constantly endure risks, uncertainty and the pressure to succeed. The reaction to these challenges is called anxiety, which is often treated as one of the worst enemies of workers in America.
But anxiety can also be a powerful ally. According to Harvard lecturer and co-founder of the coaching platform Optimal Work Kevin Majeres, MD, what prevents professionals from performing at their best is not the anxiety itself but how they welcome it.
“Many people in their work are continually in threat mode,” Majeres, who specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, told GREY Journal. “The deepest change to get out of threat mode is to start seeing challenges as capable of bringing out your best so that you look forward to challenges.”
In this Q&A, we talked about what anxiety really is, how to balance structure and flexibility, the importance of deadlines, the danger posed by perfectionism and how entrepreneurs can embrace risk and uncertainty to work better and achieve the results they want.
“In many corporate settings, political skills can be more important than the actual ability to work well,” Majeres said. “For entrepreneurs, that’s not the case.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
I feel like anxiety has become such an overused word. Can you talk about the difference between pathologic anxiety and having normal worries?
There’s a famous saying in cognitive behavioral therapy: all anxiety disorders come from seeing anxiety itself as a disorder. Anxiety is a perfectly natural reaction to a challenge — it’s when you are experiencing an urge to avoid this challenge. It’s best to define anxiety as the urge to avoid challenges, so that we don’t misidentify it with any one of its symptoms. Another way of defining anxiety is this: anxiety is adrenaline that is not being used to engage a present challenge. If you can find a way to take a challenge that right now might seem overwhelming, break it down into smaller steps, create a strategy for how you’re going to address it, now you’re utilizing the adrenaline to engage the challenge, and you will not experience it as anxiety. If a person is anxious about performing in a sport, that is adrenaline waiting to be utilized, and they can welcome it and use it to perform at their best. If they’re concerned about being anxious while giving a speech or taking a test, it’s the same story. When we learn to channel our adrenaline into the task at hand, we will experience its performance- boosting effects.
On the idea of flexibility versus structure. Can you talk about how the two extremes – the total lack of structure and the extreme fixation on structure – can be harmful to professionals?
The best use of a schedule or any device that gives you structure is to help your brain know what to expect. For instance, if you know you have a meeting at 10 a.m. with Barbara, then, when you see her, all your memories of her are ready. All the stuff you wanted to talk with her about is on the top of your mind. But if you were to unexpectedly run into Barbara at the clothing store, you wouldn’t have everything ready in your mind. Much of our brain’s effort, minute to minute, is spent trying to predict what happens next, to help you be ready for it. A schedule makes it more likely that your predictions will be correct and that you’ll be ready for what comes. Granted, none of us can have perfect control over our schedule; but they are still helpful to let our brains know what to expect. That gives our brains have less work to do and allows us to be more capable of giving our best in each hour of the day. But we don’t want to do that as a way of trying to mitigate anxiety, because that would be turning unexpected circumstances into threats, and that would only multiply our anxieties.
I had four major tasks today but have been able to do only two so far because certain things took me longer than I expected.
Stop times help us a great deal. Have you ever been in a meeting that had no stop time and no agenda? It’s just goes on and on. Having a stop time for a meeting is crucial because it allows everyone to make sure they get all the business done by the end of the of the time. So typically, when we give our brains a hard stop time, it helps us to finish things by that time. And that’s a good general practice. Always work when you sit down with a stop time in mind. Anything you didn’t finish is the seed of the next hour of work. Typically, when we work like that, we can start having our day feel like it’s a series of sprints and breaks. So we protect the intensity of our work by working with a stop time in mind, but then we also make it sustainable by having real breaks in between these sprints.
So even though we haven’t finished something yet, we take a break, reassess how we are performing this task and maybe reframe it. Why is it taking me so long, right?
It stops us from going down rabbit holes. We’re all very prone to go down rabbit holes, and sometimes, when we feel anxious, we’re even more likely to go down a rabbit hole, because we have the satisfaction of progress. But we may have lost sight of what we really needed from this reading or how well we had to craft this email or this presentation? Perfectionism is an attempt to reduce anxiety by achieving extremely high standards. I’m all for people working at their best, but we have to see that when we’re becoming perfectionists, we’ve often lost sight of what most matters, and something that really only deserves 15 minutes of time can take two hours instead.
Sometimes, we have a break scheduled, but we feel so stuck that we just need to recline at our desk, take a deep breath, and walk around our room. Is it okay to take a break earlier? How much pain should we endure while performing a task?
Procrastination is when we put off doing something that could be better done right now. Not all “putting things off” is procrastination. Out of anxiety, people try to do things when they’re not ready to do them. Adam Grant calls this “pre-crastination.” If you were writing a piece that ordinarily would take you five hours to write, what would it look like to space that over time? The initial priming should feel a little bit painful, but then it’s best to let it go totally and come back the next day. You’ll find that many of the questions have been clarified in the meantime. This is because our attention is divided into two halves. One half is task attention, which deals with things in the here and now, and the other is our default mode network, which prepares the next things you’re to work on. There’s a benefit to delaying and to spreading things out over days. In the end, that doesn’t actually mean more time — it may mean much less time in total is spent. That’s often why the best ideas come in the morning in the shower.
To me, personally, it’s when I’m doing chores at home.
It’s good that we learn to use our own default attention as a resource, and that means respecting how it works. So one of the things we talk about in OptimalWork is called the deadline benefit. When there’s a deadline, it allows your default attention to make sure things are prepared by the deadline. The other is called the reentry benefit, which you experience when you come back to a task and notice that things have progressed in your absence. But both of those are related to getting your task attention and your default attention to work better together. Your default attention’s number one job is to predict what you will do next. The main thing you can do to make its job easier is this: when you sit down to work on something, lay out the steps in advance. That list of steps speaks directly to your default attention so that it knows where to pull you.
We have a deadline, and magic happens. We make it work. Sometimes it’s not going to be the best work, but it’s better than missing a deadline.
Deadlines have two different benefits. It helps us to overcome Parkinson’s Law, which says that work will expand to fill whatever time we give to it. The other is it helps us to overcome perfectionism, so that our standards go higher and higher until it fills whatever time we have available to give to it. People need to be able to ask themselves: do I really need to get an A+ on this? What would I settle for? How can I get there most quickly, and then how can I incrementally improve it from there? So there’s no perfect answer when we face deadlines, but in general, deadlines are always capable of bringing out our best. Sometimes, our best might entail speaking to a boss if there are unreasonable expectations being laid on us.
I’m now thinking about our audience. There are common components to entrepreneurship, like the willingness to succeed and the need to take risks. Can you talk about how anxiety can affect entrepreneurs and how they can overcome it?
Anxiety, again, helps us to perform at our best when we welcome it. If we try to control our anxiety levels, we turn it into a threat, and that will make us adverse to risk and uncertainty. But entrepreneurs don’t have the luxury of being free from risk and uncertainty. They need to develop the ability to prudently assess risks and to occasionally take an adventurous leap when an opportunity presents itself. No entrepreneur can guarantee that they will always succeed, so they also need to be prepared to learn from failures, so that they can lose their fear of making mistakes. They will make mistakes. They will inevitably let some people down. But as long as they are giving their best, trying to be prudent, they will end up being able to serve people in new ways and to do a great amount of good. They will see that the benefits outweigh the costs.
There is probably a learning curve, no?
There’s always a learning curve, and that means that there’s some difficulty that will get less and less with practice. So maybe the appetite for risk is one of those difficulties. Maybe they feel averse to risk, and that may be something that will have to habituate. Entrepreneurs also can experience in their own life how their own ability to do good work is the ultimate value in their endeavors. An entrepreneur’s ability to work at their best is what determines whether they, in the long run, succeed or fail.
