Anxiety & Your Career

Who are the wounded by-standers?

• Is anxiety interfering with your ability to work effectively?
• Do staff below you get promoted above you?
• Has your career ground to a halt because the boss things you can't cope?

Too much anxiety kills performance.  Yet anxiety is often ignored in the workplace, considered a sign of weakness, and people either ignore it and hope it goes away or they try to sweep it under the carpet, but seldom is it dealt with.  If you manage someone with anxiety, what can you do about it?  Managers need to understand what they can do to create an environment to improve performances?

Anxiety is typically occurs when people are worried about the future.  Perhaps they feel they're about to become victims, or perhaps they feel the situation they are in is out of their control.  When you look at it in this light, the workplace is an obviously place for fears of the future to accumulate - fear of loosing your job, fear of the company closing, fear of job / performance reviews, fear of criticism from someone with more power, fear that no matter what you do to try to improve things, it makes no different to "them".  

What bosses, and you, need to know...  

When people are anxious, they have trouble understanding and following instructions.  No matter how carefully you explain what you want them to do, they get distracted and don't finish the job, or they can't seem to get it right.  Anxiety interferes with cognition and directly interferes with the ability of workers to do their jobs.  Managers are more likely to look for incompetence, and miss heightening anxiety levels which are causing the problems.

If people are displaying strong emotional reactions such as loosing their temper, being constantly irritated or  magnifying problems, it's possibly these symptoms may be signs of anxiety.   

So how can you overcome anxiety in the workplace? 

One of the best ways (and the quickest) to reduce workplace anxiety is to identify the underlying fears that drive it. The first things to look at are:

• Is the company going through a number of changes?
• Is the financial environment impacting on sales? 
• Do the employees find new policies or procedures threatening?
• Are you as manager, doing something that raising the anxiety levels?  (perhaps your presence is enough) 
• Are you a "seagull manager" one who flies in, squarks alot and shits on everything or are you a "one-minute manager" who goes around trying to catch people doing something right? 

If you're the boss, your employees will benefit if you can spot and reduce anxiety.  if you're an employee, your managers will benefit if you become more confident, assertive and responsible for your own actions.  Either way, hypnotherapy can help.

But your career might not be the only section of your life suffering from your anxiety...   your relationship and your general well being might be suffering too...