The Most Helpful Thing You’ll Read Today
This is about work, but it applies to every life situation. It’s about not taking on other people’s anxiety. Ever. Their anxiety gets to be their anxiety, and your anxiety gets to stay your anxiety. He writes,
Anxiety is conductive. It wants to travel from one person to another person. And once it sees itself in another person, it feels justified in being in that first person. … To put it another way: once a client becomes anxious, their primary goal becomes to make you anxious because that justifies their own anxiety.
Don’t worry; he also explains how to contain the anxiety to the other person. Stay calm, listen, reassure that you will look into the problem, and report when you know something. (And he doesn’t mention one thing: communicate, communicate, communicate.)
I really love this idea of diffusing anxiety by not fomenting fear.
2 comments
Agreed–this will be the most helpful thing I will read today! I’m about to start a big study session, which will involve a lot of reading, and this will still be the most important thing I’ll read.
Anxiety can be contagious. We all have our own; we don’t need anyone else’s!!
Oooh – this has the opposite effect in my house. I’d be frantically looking for something, and when everyone else in my house was unconcerned, I would become irate. Obviously, I’m irritated. I have asked for help. And all I would get is “it’ll turn up.” And same with my husband – I would assure him I would take care of whatever was driving him nuts, but if I wasn’t doing it on what he considered an appropriate timeline, he would ramp up his anxiety to an unmanageable level.