- This is an English version of the article in Russian published here on the 11th of October, 2021
A good friend of mine who runs his own business for more than 20 years once said: “My anxiety stimulates me, I always do something for development of my business because of it”. I asked him, how does his anxiety show up. He replied, “Usual worries: not to miss revenue, not to lose a client, etc.”. Then I asked him: “What do you think, how much of your life energy you spent to oppose those worries? Every time you proved to yourself that all is good, nothing to worry about, etc.”. He thought for a while and then said that though it was a significant spend of energy, it was justified because otherwise he would worry about the fact that nothing worries him and that would burn even more energy of his.
Well, this is his choice that he made according to his personality and his success in business states that he gets the desired.
And now let’s look at the subject in general, without anyone’s personal specifics.
Anxiety is a powerful stimulator that creates so called ‘motivation from’ which stimulates a person not to get a bad result, not to end up in an undesired situation and so on. Thus, relevant efforts will be invested into avoidance of undesired developments.
Yes, you will avoid undesired developments. What about achieving of desired developments? Will anxiety help here? I am confident that it will not. It will not obstruct too, however it may happen that you invest so much energy into struggle for avoidance of undesired developments that you simply run out of it.
“But I need to defend myself!”, you will say.
Certainly, defense is needed. But if the defense blocks the development, is it what you want? I don’t think so. You want to build your career, set up a successful business, earn tons of money… It will be at least difficult to fulfil such plans staying in deep defence.
So, what to do?
I prefer to focus on development and achievement to shape ‘motivation to’:
1. Understand what you should do to ‘get where you want to’.
2. Then identify associated risks and figure out how to prevent or mitigate them.
This will allow you to solve the defense task and you will not need anxiety as a stimulator anymore.
Of course, people are different, and our natural level of anxiety varies in a wide range. And of course, anxiety will keep visiting us, no matter how well our plans for achievement/development and risk management tools are developed. But it will just visit but not control us.
This is much better, don’t you think?
#anxiety #risk #motivation #success #development #risk management