Overcoming Anxiety At Work with Chester Elton

The Mindful Marketer

When it comes to our careers and our customer relationships, the way we FEEL is everything.

Yet, there's a paradox happening in our workplaces.

On the one hand, we are witnessing declining unemployment (now 4.8%), soaring corporate and consumer spending, and a frenetic hiring pace for marketing and CX professionals.

On the other hand, drug overdoses in the USA have exceeded 100,000 this year. Mental health professionals are overbooked, Daycare and labor shortages impose stress for many families, and service workers are simply on edge.

Anxiety is casting a shadow over today's organizations.

Our job as marketing leaders is to keep our team's lights on, as well as our own.

That means we need ideas and strategies to minimize the long term harmful effects of anxiety, which is when we worry about the future, about things that have not happened.

Chester Elton, a fellow 100 Coaches colleague and co-author of Anxiety at Work, joins me in this special episode.

Named one of the top Global Gurus of Leadership and the Apostle of Appreciation, his four bestselling books have sold over 1.6 million copies.

Chester works with top leaders at American Express, AT&T, Avis Budget Group, the NHL, and Procter & Gamble

Together we unpack the sources of anxiety at work and ways you can mitigate them

Tune in this power-packed episode of The Mindful Marketer show —Overcoming Anxiety At Work with Chester Elton.

Watch the LinkedIn Replay.

Key points covered in this episode:

✔️ You can't have a healthy team and a productive culture if you're not addressing mental health and safety. When someone in a position of leadership has themselves been anxious, it requires transparency & sharing from their heart what they have been going through to help others be aware that what they are feeling isn't pathologic but is quite normal in this climate.

✔️ Understand the distinction that anxiety happens when you spend too much time worrying or obsessing about things that have not happened and may never happen in the future, while depression is when you overthink or obsess about something that happened in the past.

✔️ 90% of employees won't talk to their manager and supervisor about mental health or anxiety. It's time to normalize the conversation around mental health in the workplace. Chester Elton invites us to look at it in this context. "If you broke your arm and came to work with your arm in a sling, they say, 'Oh, geez, Lisa, you don't take care of yourself. Take some time off, you know? Have you seen all the right doctors? Have you taken care of everything you need to take care of?' And yet, when somebody comes to work with anxiety or mental health issues, we won't talk about that. We'll talk about a broken arm, but we won't talk about overload. We won't talk about anxiety."

✔️ We either psychologize or somaticize our anxiety. Dr. Anna Yusim, a clinical faculty at Yale who has been managing stress in the workplace with colleagues and patients for the last 15 years, explains how often these manifests in different ways in different people.

Listen to the replay on Stitcher.

✔️ Great leaders in this day and age are not the peak performers but those who possess empathy as the most crucial attribute. If you can't be empathetic with your people and create a safe place to talk about your individual team member's mental health issues, none of that other stuff matters.

✔️ Provide ample resources to help people deal with their anxiety. Lending them an ear and empathy and compassion as a manager and as a leader is hugely important. Giving resources, perhaps referring them to a therapist so that the anxiety does not get to a point where it becomes a diagnosable condition that further affects their workplace performance.

Watch the replay on YouTube.

✔️ Be careful about your list of employee to-dos. Watch out for giving lots of extra work to your most effective or busiest people because often, your top performers have the most anxiety. They're the ones that don't ever want to let anybody down and are defined by the work they can get done by the boxes they can check on their lists. Chester advises looking for changes in behavior because these top performers never say no, and they're good at hiding it.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Lisa Nirell of EnergizeGrowth™ LLC helps courageous marketers and CEOs accelerate growth and get promoted faster. Download your Mindful Marketer learning bonuses at themindfulmarketer.com. You will also join the “know ahead” list for our upcoming Life Streams.

Copyright 2021, Lisa Nirell. All rights reserved.