19. How to Handle Worry
I’ve spent much of my life worrying, catastrophizing, and generally being very anxious, thinking about all the things that could go wrong. I used to think that imagining all the possible worst-case scenarios that could play out in my life was helpful to me, and if this sounds familiar, I invite you to listen in today.
We’re all about enjoying our work and cultivating confidence in everything we do here on this show, so it’s crucial for us to unpack what’s really going on when you notice a worry come up. Our brains’ tendency to worry is hardwired into us, but with the tools I’m sharing today, you’ll be able to start creating new loops and habits that serve you better.
Tune in this week to discover how to handle worry better, and how you can extract useful content from your worries without feeling trapped in the fear that comes along with them. As always, I’m laying out some examples to show you exactly how you can utilize what I’m offering here so you can go forth and apply it to any situation in your life.
If you love the podcast and want to take this work deeper, I have great news! I have space for new one-to-one coaching clients starting this month, so click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If you want guidance in walking yourself through my deep dive strategy sessions, subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts! Make sure to follow the instructions here to receive an email from me with the PDF document!
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why I used to value worrying and why I was wrong about my reasons for it.
The difference between worrying and catastrophizing.
How to take what’s useful from a worry without inhabiting the fear that comes with it.
One thought that has been useful in giving me confidence in my personal and professional life.
A framework you can use to get out of the worry loop.
The choices that are available to you when you notice a worry come up.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
Leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts to receive an email from me with my deep-dive strategy session PDF document so you can walk yourself through it!
Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we are talking about how to handle a brain that spends all day worrying.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week, we are talking about worrying, which is a topic near and dear to my heart because I am a person who has spent enormous amounts of time worrying, catastrophizing, generally being anxious, and just spending a lot of time thinking about all the ways that things could go wrong.
Not a super fun pastime, but one that, like I said, I’ve experienced so much of and so many of my clients experience this as well. And I think it can be a hard habit to snap out of sometimes, so I really want to unpack what that’s about and what we can do when our brain is in that space to kind of pull ourselves out of the worry and get back to whatever it is we want to be doing, being super productive, enjoying our work, cultivating our confidence, whatever you want to be doing.
But before we get into that, I just want to take a moment and read a review for the podcast. So this review came in a few weeks ago and it’s called, “If you hate your job, listen up.” And the review says, “Love this podcast so much. I’m a long-time job hater and thought there was no way anyone could make me feel better about it. I was wrong. I just listened to How to Cultivate Killer Followthrough and I’m probably going to listen to it every day for a while. Can’t wait for more.”
Thank you so much for that review. I super appreciate it and you’re so welcome. I’m so glad that the podcast is useful. I spent so many years of my life really struggling with work and trying to figure out how to make work more enjoyable and trying to figure out how to get along better with people at work and how to end my workday without worrying.
I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what having a career was even about. Obviously, we have a career, we make money, but when I was younger, the whole idea of like, what do I want to spend my life doing for work was kind of this giant question for me.
And I really struggled with it a lot. I did all kinds of different things. Like I taught English in France, I was a bartender, I got a Master’s degree in poetry, I did freelance writing, I worked in coffee shops, I was a nanny. I worked at a boutique marketing agency, and then my last job before coaching was actually that I did corporate communications for the IT department of a big corporate tech company.
And even throughout all of these jobs, even when I was kind of more in the successful adult nine to five end of that, I was like, what is this whole having a job thing about? What is a career about? What do I want it to be about? Because obviously like I said, there’s money and there’s health insurance, but I was also like, there’s so much more to a job than that.
We’re spending most of us like, eight hours a day five days a week, right? Doing this thing, being with the group of people that we’re working with if we work with others, and I thought that jobs really had so much potential to be this amazing thing in people’s lives. And in so many of our lives, they’re not this amazing thing.
They’re this thing we fight with, they’re this thing we feel like we have to do. I know it’s not that way for everybody, I know some people really enjoy their work, and I was also super curious about that. And throughout all those jobs, there was something I loved about all of them.
Whether I was making lattes or hanging out with someone else’s kids or teaching English or bundling IT communications, there were always things I loved but I was always looking for it to be something more, which is ultimately why I quit all those jobs and why I launched my business because I really wanted a career that I could design and play with and have fun with.
But I also made this podcast because I know not everyone’s going to quit their job and build their own thing, and I just think that there’s so much more capacity for us to have delight, for us to have fun, for us to create meaning and value and find purpose and just kind of really have a great time while creating super cool shit for the world. I think there’s so much more room for that at work and I think so many people’s job are not full of all of that.
They’re full of like, I have to, and I don’t really get along with this person and like, this is all dumb. And just really so much struggle. So that’s what this podcast is all about is kind of helping people navigate the career world and make it something amazing just because we can. Just because why not, right?
So I’m glad when I hear that the podcast is useful because I know for a lot of people even if we’re not enjoying our work, we’re going to keep working. We want to pay out mortgage, we want to get a cat and feed it really nice cat food, or we want to pay off those student loans.
Whatever the thing is, we live in a world where money is a big part of how we make things happen, so most of us will keep working our jobs and if we’re going to do that, why not learn a better skill set and why not create a better experience in that arena?
So that’s my mini rant. Now let’s get into what we’re actually talking about, which is worry. So when I was younger, I used to worry a lot and I honestly still do spend some time worrying. This is an old habit that my brain has so my brain still brings it up from time to time. Those neural pathways are really strong.
But I do have a really different relationship with worry now than I used to. When I was younger, I worried a lot more and had a lot less control over it, and I also kind of valued that worrying because to me it kind of felt like this kind of future vision. I could see lots of things that might go wrong, and that perspective could sometimes help me prepare for them. So I sort of valued it.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I do think I made myself worry even more than I already was because I put that value on it, and also because I didn’t understand that there was a difference between the worrying and that potential to imagine future scenarios.
So the way I think about this when I talk to my clients now is what’s the useful content. Inside of any worry that we have, any fear scenario, there’s some useful content about what we would like to have happen or what we wouldn’t like to have happen or the ways in which we could prepare for something.
And so when I was younger, I kind of thought those things went together. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized oh, if my brain has a worry, I can pull out the useful content and then think about do I want to do anything to prepare for this, do I want to put a plan in place, are there extra steps I could take to eliminate this possibility.
And I can do that without having to inhabit the worry and stay inside that fear. And that’s useful because while there is that content inside of worry that can be beneficial to look at, a lot of times when we’re worrying, we’re not looking at the beneficial content, we’re not thinking about how we can prepare for the future.
Instead, we’re spiraling and spiraling, and it doesn’t add any value. And what it does do is it depletes all our mental energy and makes us feel super worn out and overwhelmed. And when we go really far with this, it can get into catastrophizing.
So worry is one level, and I think catastrophizing is another layer up because catastrophizing isn’t just what if this one thing goes wrong. Usually the catastrophizing goes like, all the way out to worst-case scenarios in every direction.
And then even worse, what it does is it just stops there. Like all these terrible things could happen and then we’re basically - it’s almost like your brain is like, and then we die, even though you wouldn’t literally die. It’s almost like your brain takes it to that worse-case scenario versus when my clients catastrophize, I’m like, okay, then what would you do?
So we go to that worst-case scenario place, that catastrophe place, and we think about from there, how would you want to handle it. Because the thing about worry and the thing about catastrophizing is they never get to the place where then we make that plan or we think about how would I handle it, what would I do, who would I call, what capabilities or assets that I have would I tap into, how would I problem solve.
It just gets very caught up in the part where things are going badly and doesn’t get into the part where we handle it, we figure it out. And that brings me to a thought that has been so useful for me in my personal life and in my professional life, especially in building a business. And that thought is like, I’ll figure it out.
Because always in life there are going to be things we don’t know how to do, but when I have a belief in my capacity to figure things out, then it doesn’t matter if something comes up that I’ve never experienced before. For sure there are things my brain worries about that I hope won’t happen, but when I can trust in my own capacity to figure things out, then I have something to fall back on, even in all of those worst-case scenarios.
And it helps me feel more confident. Confidence is something we talked about last week, this thought, this belief in myself and my capacity to figure things out is really useful for feeling confident in the face of worry, in the face of a brain that wants to catastrophize.
But even beyond our capacity to figure it out, there’s something else I want to teach y’all about today and that is the idea of is your worry actionable. So when the brain wants to worry, it wants to think about something that could go badly and spin on it and then kind of not do anything. Don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that.
But when the brain wants to worry, it tends to be stuck in that worry loop, that imagining the worst-case scenario and just kind of circling on that. Or it’ll worry about one thing and then worry about something else and then worry about something else, versus thinking about is this worry actionable? Is there an action I could take right now to address the worry? And if there is an action I could take, am I interested in taking that action?
And this is kind of like what I was talking about before with the useful content. What’s the useful content inside of this worry, this concern, and do I want to do anything with that useful content? Sometimes there’s going to be worries that you want to do something about, sometimes there’s going to be worries where you could take an action and you’re just going to choose not to. But kind of having this framework is a helpful first step for just thinking about the worry and thinking about how you want to move forward with it, instead of letting your brain just spin and spin on it.
So let’s look at some examples. Let’s say that you are writing an email and you’re not sure it’s clear, or you’re not sure if it makes sense. And this is a pertinent example for me because like I said, I worked in corporate communications and IT. So when I was writing certain emails, they were going to go to 25,000 people.
So of course I had approval processes for that and stuff, so I was never sending one that someone hadn’t reviewed. But sometimes maybe I was writing one and I was maybe writing about something technical, an IT thing that I didn’t actually totally understand, and so maybe I would be unsure that the email made sense from a technical standpoint.
So that’s a situation where there’s the worry, what if this doesn’t make sense, and then there’s the useful content, which is like, I’d like to know if this makes sense technically. And when you pull that out from the fear of not being understood or the fear of looking dumb, there’s actually something you can move forward with there if you want to.
Like I was saying before, just because you can take an action about a worry doesn’t mean you’re obligated to. You always get to decide. But it’s a helpful framework for thinking about how you want to handle the worry. So in this case, if I was worried that an email maybe didn’t have the right technical content, the actionable activity is just to ask someone to review it.
The review would be an action I could take to address the worry. And I might have a colleague who has some genius insights that can help me revise the email, or the colleague might just say like, okay, it looks good, and I at least have that buy in like okay, this person who has the technical expertise says it’s great.
And whatever the colleague says, they’re just sharing their thoughts. But it’s a way to help me get feedback and to get information that can help me address the worry at its source. So often I see people just worry their worries, versus figuring out their worries.
So looking at what is actionable and then deciding on purpose if you want to take action, or if you want to choose to dismiss the worry is so useful. Let’s look at another example. Let’s say you have been on a project and you’re worried that you didn’t perform well.
This happens a lot. I talk to a lot of women who have done work and they’re worried that they didn’t do it well enough. And I think this is a good point to say that some of this is also because of the thing I’m always talking about, which is the social conditioning we receive as womxn.
And if you’re not a womxn but you have any marginalized identities, and especially if you have multiple marginalized identities, like if you’re a womxn and have other marginalized identities, or you’re not a womxn but you have multiple marginalized identities, we might have more of that tendency to worry about our performance because we’ve received a lot of social conditioning about our capacity and abilities.
So as an example, womxn receive social conditioning about not being as good at hard sciences. You might be a womxn, you might be fucking amazing at hard sciences and you might have even grown up in a family that told you you were really smart and really good in that area, but our culture in the larger context does not have that social conditioning about womxn and there’s a lot of sexism and there’s especially a lot of sexism in the fields of hard science.
So you might be amazing at your job and have performed on a project and you might have done stunningly well, but your brain might still be worried that you didn’t perform well and that’s not just about you being insecure because you did not choose this social conditioning and because it comes from such a big container of all the culture and when we were little kids, we just absorbed social conditioning. We don’t question it.
But now you’re an adult so you can for sure notice and question that social conditioning that’s a lot of what I work on with my clients when they come and get coaching with me is we discover their social conditioning and then we replace it with thoughts that are more helpful.
But if you’re not in coaching and this worry comes up, there is also an actionable step you can take here. The useful content here is that you would like maybe a third-party review of your work. And so you can ask for that. So if you have performed on a project and you want to know if that met expectations, you can ask to do a postmortem, you can discuss what happened with a manager or someone else who is in an area of expertise.
And especially if you’re in a field where there is sexism, you can go seek out someone who is more likely to give you neutral feedback about you. You probably wouldn’t want to pick someone that you think has a lot of sexist thoughts because then their thoughts would probably come through in the feedback.
So in this case, I would say worrying about your performance isn’t helpful. And actually it can cause us to perform badly if we get very caught up in our head worrying about did we perform well enough on the last project, like are we doing well enough on this project. But shifting that worry and taking out of that worry an actionable step and then following through that actionable step can be useful.
And we can get feedback that can help us either see that according to the expert we’ve asked, yes, we did a good job, or maybe we can get feedback that’s going to help us do an even better job because even for the most high-achieving individuals, there’s usually things we can improve on.
And creating space for that feedback can help you become even more of a high performer and can help you get something more useful to move forward with than just that worry that spins and spins about maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I didn’t do well enough.
Like I said, that worry is not helpful. It’s just going to kind of make you feel like shit and distract you from your ability to do a good job. Whereas thinking about okay, what is the useful content in the worry, like with a third-party review, or I would like to go hire a coach to help me weed out these internalized thoughts that aren’t helping me, either one.
Because in this scenario, there’s the work performance to look at, but if that kind of particular worry is coming up, especially if you’re a high achiever, then the useful content might actually be I need to go work on my thought patterns because I know I’m a high achiever, but I keep getting stuck in this thought loop, this error of worrying about my performance, even though 70,000 people have been telling me it’s amazing.
One thing to note here is just because someone shares their feedback with you does not mean you have to upload it to your brain. And this is where also you want to be thoughtful about who you choose to get feedback from. If you’re going to get feedback on the work that you’ve done, you want to be sure to choose someone whose thoughts you would be happy to upload to your brain, and then you still also want to look at those thoughts once you see them.
Because other people’s thoughts are just their thoughts. Sometimes they can be useful. We have an entire podcast episode about how to turn critical feedback into a blueprint to create the life you want. But just like we want to consider food we eat before we put it in our mouth to decide, is this food nourishing, is this food useful, we want to think about that with feedback as well.
And just as a little asterisk there, when I say is this food nourishing, I’m meaning more like, is this actually food - is this something that has gone bad. I am a firm believer in kind of a more intuitive eating approach, so I’m not saying is this food healthy. I’m just saying is this actual food or is this cheese that didn’t get refrigerated and is now bad, which isn’t a good example because some cheese doesn’t need to be refrigerated.
Now that we’ve done this large aside, let’s carry on. There might also be scenarios where your brain is worrying but you don’t want to take any action. And in that case, something that I like to return to is that idea of being able to figure it out.
So for instance, if you’re worrying about something that’s coming in two years and there’s no action you can take or that you would choose to take in the meantime, then when that worry comes up, it’s just kind of about reminding your brain it’s not helpful to worry about this, we’re going to figure it out when it arises, we don’t have to handle this ahead of time.
The brain doesn’t like to have open loops. It likes to close them. So if it’s worrying about something, it wants you to get to a resolution so it can close that loop. But because humans have this amazing capacity to imagine way far out into the future, we can kind of tap into all these potential things that could go wrong in sort of an unlimited fashion.
So at some point, you also have to learn the skill of saying I’m simply just not going to choose to indulge this worry. And that might be a really new idea for you that you can just not indulge a worry, but it’s just about noticing when your brain goes back to it and redirecting it somewhere else. Noticing your brain going back to it and saying okay, my brain only wants to go back to it because it wants to close that loop, but the reality is that loop’s actually not open. I’ll handle it when it arises, I’ll figure it out when it happens and for now, I’m going to shift my energy and attention back to the things I can control now.
I think that the human brain likes to worry because it’s trying to keep us safe. It’s trying to keep us alive and the human brain as we talk about all the time wants to scan for threats and things that could potentially harm us. But sometimes it does that to our detriment because if we’re spending all our time worrying, then we’re spending zero percent of our time in our actual life where we can actually solve things now in this moment.
So when your brain wants to do that and wants to loop back to the worry and back to the worry and back to the worry, I think it’s helpful to be like, you’re trying to do that to keep me safe but actually, the only place that can keep me safe is in this current moment, so I need to bring my energy and attention back to this moment. This is where all problems get solved, it’s where everything gets handled, it’s in the now.
And it’s not useful or beneficial to me to imagine 78,000 things that could go wrong and then try to plan for all of them because then that’s all I’ll ever do with my whole life. And even if something you worried about happens and you aren’t able to prevent it, like maybe you even took some actionable steps and the thing happens anyway, that’s okay too.
Let’s just think it through. Let’s go back to that email example. This didn’t exactly happen to me but actually other things very similar to this did happen to me where I didn’t ever send an email, I don’t think that had the wrong technical details, like our previous example, but I definitely sent some emails that didn’t have all the necessary information, especially when I was brand new in that role.
So I sent an email to 25,000 people and it didn’t go the way it was supposed to, and it turned out to be okay and that actually helped me figure out how to do my job even better. And it gave me experience handling an email snafu. Was it my super favorite thing I ever did in that job? Of course not. But it didn’t kill me. It didn’t ruin everything, and I was able to learn so much from it and I became so much better in that role and I got such a better understanding because of that experience.
And these kinds of things happen to people, right? Because humans are humans, we’re not perfection machines. So things are going to go wrong and not go according to plan sometimes. And then it just comes down to like, how do we want to respond to that? How do we want to show up to that? And what can we learn from it? How can we make it something that’s beneficial for us instead of a problem and a reason to worry more in the future?
Let’s go back and think about the example of working on the project. Let’s say you’re amazing in your field but maybe you did underperform according to the person whose feedback you asked, and you respect them and you want to take that feedback and turn it into a blueprint. It’s okay that you underperformed.
You’re going to figure out what went wrong, you’re going to figure out how to do better next time, and you’re going to figure out what went right too. So even if someone gives you that critical feedback, even if they do say you underperformed, there’s always something you did right if you look hard enough for it, and finding out what didn’t go well is what’s going to give you that blueprint to help you get closer to the kind of performance you want to have.
And even if this happens to you, it could be the best thing that ever happens. Maybe you’re going to become the office’s go-to person on transformative growth and development and you’re going to have an emotional resilience for feedback that no one else has.
And guess what happens when you have an emotional resilience for feedback that no one else has? You grow a lot faster and a lot more than everyone else because you’re willing to not just hear feedback, you’re willing to seek it out and you’re willing to have it happen and still believe you’re a high achiever and keep going.
Versus people who can only think they’re a high achiever until they get negative feedback are kind of fucked, right? Because then they can only be as good at the level that they’re at, they can only do projects at the level they’re already at, and then let’s just say something gets messed up at that level, then they have to think something terrible about themselves, but that’s totally not necessary.
If we’re willing to believe we’re doing awesome, even when someone says we underperformed, then we have the capacity to do better because we have enough confidence in ourselves that we can even hear this critical feedback and take it and use it for our growth, rather than letting it slow us down or stop us.
Alright, so let’s review. Brains like to worry. Not all brains. Some people have brains that don’t worry at all and I’m fascinated by those people, but I have a brain that loves to worry and if you listen to this podcast, I’m guessing your brain loves to worry too and maybe even spends some time catastrophizing and playing things out into very complicated and advanced worst-case scenarios.
And if that happens, that’s okay. You can still do amazing work. You can still enjoy your job. You can still have a really fun time. But what you want to be able to do is notice the worry and separate it out from the actions you can take and the useful content that you might want to consider that’s inside of the worry.
And then you want to go from there. And then no matter what happens, you want to begin to cultivate the belief that you’re going to handle it no matter what comes up. Because here’s the real truth; everything that’s ever happened in your life so far, you’ve handled it.
Now, maybe you didn’t handle it the way you would handle it now, but you became the person you are now by handling it as best you could before. So I love to think about this. My capacity to handle whatever arises is the best it’s ever been today and every day it gets better because every day, whatever happens, I learn from it and my capacity to handle the unexpected or to handle something that I’ve worried about which actually comes to pass is bigger and better and every mistake I’ve ever made in the past, everything I’ve ever fucked up, every time I’ve ever fallen on my face, literally and metaphorically, all of that has given me more strength and more skills and more resilience to handle anything in the future.
And here’s the thing; I plan on continuing to improve. So it’s possible something could happen this week and I’ll handle it as best I can, and then maybe in 10 years, future Kori will be like, wow, I have a way better way to handle that. But I become future Kori by being the Kori I am now. You become future you by being the you you are now. And I trust in your capacity to handle things and figure them out with all the tools you have now, even if you want to become an even better version of yourself who handles them in even cooler ways.
And I’m using better here but you’re never going to be better than you are now because you’re already wonderful and amazing and your worth as a human is inherent. But yeah, you can become more skilled in certain ways. You can become more practiced in certain things and you can learn ways of handling things you might not have now. And that’s amazing, but you’re also already amazing.
So think about something you’ve been worrying about and ask yourself like, what’s the useful content here and what’s actionable here? Do I want to take action on it, or do I want to dismiss it? And then go forth from there and show those worries what’s up.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving womxn who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. This week, we are talking about worrying, which is a topic near and dear to my heart because I am a person who has spent enormous amounts of time worrying, catastrophizing, generally being anxious, and just spending a lot of time thinking about all the ways that things could go wrong.
Not a super fun pastime, but one that, like I said, I’ve experienced so much of and so many of my clients experience this as well. And I think it can be a hard habit to snap out of sometimes, so I really want to unpack what that’s about and what we can do when our brain is in that space to kind of pull ourselves out of the worry and get back to whatever it is we want to be doing, being super productive, enjoying our work, cultivating our confidence, whatever you want to be doing.
But before we get into that, I just want to take a moment and read a review for the podcast. So this review came in a few weeks ago and it’s called, “If you hate your job, listen up.” And the review says, “Love this podcast so much. I’m a long-time job hater and thought there was no way anyone could make me feel better about it. I was wrong. I just listened to How to Cultivate Killer Followthrough and I’m probably going to listen to it every day for a while. Can’t wait for more.”
Thank you so much for that review. I super appreciate it and you’re so welcome. I’m so glad that the podcast is useful. I spent so many years of my life really struggling with work and trying to figure out how to make work more enjoyable and trying to figure out how to get along better with people at work and how to end my workday without worrying.
I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out what having a career was even about. Obviously, we have a career, we make money, but when I was younger, the whole idea of like, what do I want to spend my life doing for work was kind of this giant question for me.
And I really struggled with it a lot. I did all kinds of different things. Like I taught English in France, I was a bartender, I got a Master’s degree in poetry, I did freelance writing, I worked in coffee shops, I was a nanny. I worked at a boutique marketing agency, and then my last job before coaching was actually that I did corporate communications for the IT department of a big corporate tech company.
And even throughout all of these jobs, even when I was kind of more in the successful adult nine to five end of that, I was like, what is this whole having a job thing about? What is a career about? What do I want it to be about? Because obviously like I said, there’s money and there’s health insurance, but I was also like, there’s so much more to a job than that.
We’re spending most of us like, eight hours a day five days a week, right? Doing this thing, being with the group of people that we’re working with if we work with others, and I thought that jobs really had so much potential to be this amazing thing in people’s lives. And in so many of our lives, they’re not this amazing thing.
They’re this thing we fight with, they’re this thing we feel like we have to do. I know it’s not that way for everybody, I know some people really enjoy their work, and I was also super curious about that. And throughout all those jobs, there was something I loved about all of them.
Whether I was making lattes or hanging out with someone else’s kids or teaching English or bundling IT communications, there were always things I loved but I was always looking for it to be something more, which is ultimately why I quit all those jobs and why I launched my business because I really wanted a career that I could design and play with and have fun with.
But I also made this podcast because I know not everyone’s going to quit their job and build their own thing, and I just think that there’s so much more capacity for us to have delight, for us to have fun, for us to create meaning and value and find purpose and just kind of really have a great time while creating super cool shit for the world. I think there’s so much more room for that at work and I think so many people’s job are not full of all of that.
They’re full of like, I have to, and I don’t really get along with this person and like, this is all dumb. And just really so much struggle. So that’s what this podcast is all about is kind of helping people navigate the career world and make it something amazing just because we can. Just because why not, right?
So I’m glad when I hear that the podcast is useful because I know for a lot of people even if we’re not enjoying our work, we’re going to keep working. We want to pay out mortgage, we want to get a cat and feed it really nice cat food, or we want to pay off those student loans.
Whatever the thing is, we live in a world where money is a big part of how we make things happen, so most of us will keep working our jobs and if we’re going to do that, why not learn a better skill set and why not create a better experience in that arena?
So that’s my mini rant. Now let’s get into what we’re actually talking about, which is worry. So when I was younger, I used to worry a lot and I honestly still do spend some time worrying. This is an old habit that my brain has so my brain still brings it up from time to time. Those neural pathways are really strong.
But I do have a really different relationship with worry now than I used to. When I was younger, I worried a lot more and had a lot less control over it, and I also kind of valued that worrying because to me it kind of felt like this kind of future vision. I could see lots of things that might go wrong, and that perspective could sometimes help me prepare for them. So I sort of valued it.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I do think I made myself worry even more than I already was because I put that value on it, and also because I didn’t understand that there was a difference between the worrying and that potential to imagine future scenarios.
So the way I think about this when I talk to my clients now is what’s the useful content. Inside of any worry that we have, any fear scenario, there’s some useful content about what we would like to have happen or what we wouldn’t like to have happen or the ways in which we could prepare for something.
And so when I was younger, I kind of thought those things went together. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized oh, if my brain has a worry, I can pull out the useful content and then think about do I want to do anything to prepare for this, do I want to put a plan in place, are there extra steps I could take to eliminate this possibility.
And I can do that without having to inhabit the worry and stay inside that fear. And that’s useful because while there is that content inside of worry that can be beneficial to look at, a lot of times when we’re worrying, we’re not looking at the beneficial content, we’re not thinking about how we can prepare for the future.
Instead, we’re spiraling and spiraling, and it doesn’t add any value. And what it does do is it depletes all our mental energy and makes us feel super worn out and overwhelmed. And when we go really far with this, it can get into catastrophizing.
So worry is one level, and I think catastrophizing is another layer up because catastrophizing isn’t just what if this one thing goes wrong. Usually the catastrophizing goes like, all the way out to worst-case scenarios in every direction.
And then even worse, what it does is it just stops there. Like all these terrible things could happen and then we’re basically - it’s almost like your brain is like, and then we die, even though you wouldn’t literally die. It’s almost like your brain takes it to that worse-case scenario versus when my clients catastrophize, I’m like, okay, then what would you do?
So we go to that worst-case scenario place, that catastrophe place, and we think about from there, how would you want to handle it. Because the thing about worry and the thing about catastrophizing is they never get to the place where then we make that plan or we think about how would I handle it, what would I do, who would I call, what capabilities or assets that I have would I tap into, how would I problem solve.
It just gets very caught up in the part where things are going badly and doesn’t get into the part where we handle it, we figure it out. And that brings me to a thought that has been so useful for me in my personal life and in my professional life, especially in building a business. And that thought is like, I’ll figure it out.
Because always in life there are going to be things we don’t know how to do, but when I have a belief in my capacity to figure things out, then it doesn’t matter if something comes up that I’ve never experienced before. For sure there are things my brain worries about that I hope won’t happen, but when I can trust in my own capacity to figure things out, then I have something to fall back on, even in all of those worst-case scenarios.
And it helps me feel more confident. Confidence is something we talked about last week, this thought, this belief in myself and my capacity to figure things out is really useful for feeling confident in the face of worry, in the face of a brain that wants to catastrophize.
But even beyond our capacity to figure it out, there’s something else I want to teach y’all about today and that is the idea of is your worry actionable. So when the brain wants to worry, it wants to think about something that could go badly and spin on it and then kind of not do anything. Don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that.
But when the brain wants to worry, it tends to be stuck in that worry loop, that imagining the worst-case scenario and just kind of circling on that. Or it’ll worry about one thing and then worry about something else and then worry about something else, versus thinking about is this worry actionable? Is there an action I could take right now to address the worry? And if there is an action I could take, am I interested in taking that action?
And this is kind of like what I was talking about before with the useful content. What’s the useful content inside of this worry, this concern, and do I want to do anything with that useful content? Sometimes there’s going to be worries that you want to do something about, sometimes there’s going to be worries where you could take an action and you’re just going to choose not to. But kind of having this framework is a helpful first step for just thinking about the worry and thinking about how you want to move forward with it, instead of letting your brain just spin and spin on it.
So let’s look at some examples. Let’s say that you are writing an email and you’re not sure it’s clear, or you’re not sure if it makes sense. And this is a pertinent example for me because like I said, I worked in corporate communications and IT. So when I was writing certain emails, they were going to go to 25,000 people.
So of course I had approval processes for that and stuff, so I was never sending one that someone hadn’t reviewed. But sometimes maybe I was writing one and I was maybe writing about something technical, an IT thing that I didn’t actually totally understand, and so maybe I would be unsure that the email made sense from a technical standpoint.
So that’s a situation where there’s the worry, what if this doesn’t make sense, and then there’s the useful content, which is like, I’d like to know if this makes sense technically. And when you pull that out from the fear of not being understood or the fear of looking dumb, there’s actually something you can move forward with there if you want to.
Like I was saying before, just because you can take an action about a worry doesn’t mean you’re obligated to. You always get to decide. But it’s a helpful framework for thinking about how you want to handle the worry. So in this case, if I was worried that an email maybe didn’t have the right technical content, the actionable activity is just to ask someone to review it.
The review would be an action I could take to address the worry. And I might have a colleague who has some genius insights that can help me revise the email, or the colleague might just say like, okay, it looks good, and I at least have that buy in like okay, this person who has the technical expertise says it’s great.
And whatever the colleague says, they’re just sharing their thoughts. But it’s a way to help me get feedback and to get information that can help me address the worry at its source. So often I see people just worry their worries, versus figuring out their worries.
So looking at what is actionable and then deciding on purpose if you want to take action, or if you want to choose to dismiss the worry is so useful. Let’s look at another example. Let’s say you have been on a project and you’re worried that you didn’t perform well.
This happens a lot. I talk to a lot of women who have done work and they’re worried that they didn’t do it well enough. And I think this is a good point to say that some of this is also because of the thing I’m always talking about, which is the social conditioning we receive as womxn.
And if you’re not a womxn but you have any marginalized identities, and especially if you have multiple marginalized identities, like if you’re a womxn and have other marginalized identities, or you’re not a womxn but you have multiple marginalized identities, we might have more of that tendency to worry about our performance because we’ve received a lot of social conditioning about our capacity and abilities.
So as an example, womxn receive social conditioning about not being as good at hard sciences. You might be a womxn, you might be fucking amazing at hard sciences and you might have even grown up in a family that told you you were really smart and really good in that area, but our culture in the larger context does not have that social conditioning about womxn and there’s a lot of sexism and there’s especially a lot of sexism in the fields of hard science.
So you might be amazing at your job and have performed on a project and you might have done stunningly well, but your brain might still be worried that you didn’t perform well and that’s not just about you being insecure because you did not choose this social conditioning and because it comes from such a big container of all the culture and when we were little kids, we just absorbed social conditioning. We don’t question it.
But now you’re an adult so you can for sure notice and question that social conditioning that’s a lot of what I work on with my clients when they come and get coaching with me is we discover their social conditioning and then we replace it with thoughts that are more helpful.
But if you’re not in coaching and this worry comes up, there is also an actionable step you can take here. The useful content here is that you would like maybe a third-party review of your work. And so you can ask for that. So if you have performed on a project and you want to know if that met expectations, you can ask to do a postmortem, you can discuss what happened with a manager or someone else who is in an area of expertise.
And especially if you’re in a field where there is sexism, you can go seek out someone who is more likely to give you neutral feedback about you. You probably wouldn’t want to pick someone that you think has a lot of sexist thoughts because then their thoughts would probably come through in the feedback.
So in this case, I would say worrying about your performance isn’t helpful. And actually it can cause us to perform badly if we get very caught up in our head worrying about did we perform well enough on the last project, like are we doing well enough on this project. But shifting that worry and taking out of that worry an actionable step and then following through that actionable step can be useful.
And we can get feedback that can help us either see that according to the expert we’ve asked, yes, we did a good job, or maybe we can get feedback that’s going to help us do an even better job because even for the most high-achieving individuals, there’s usually things we can improve on.
And creating space for that feedback can help you become even more of a high performer and can help you get something more useful to move forward with than just that worry that spins and spins about maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I didn’t do well enough.
Like I said, that worry is not helpful. It’s just going to kind of make you feel like shit and distract you from your ability to do a good job. Whereas thinking about okay, what is the useful content in the worry, like with a third-party review, or I would like to go hire a coach to help me weed out these internalized thoughts that aren’t helping me, either one.
Because in this scenario, there’s the work performance to look at, but if that kind of particular worry is coming up, especially if you’re a high achiever, then the useful content might actually be I need to go work on my thought patterns because I know I’m a high achiever, but I keep getting stuck in this thought loop, this error of worrying about my performance, even though 70,000 people have been telling me it’s amazing.
One thing to note here is just because someone shares their feedback with you does not mean you have to upload it to your brain. And this is where also you want to be thoughtful about who you choose to get feedback from. If you’re going to get feedback on the work that you’ve done, you want to be sure to choose someone whose thoughts you would be happy to upload to your brain, and then you still also want to look at those thoughts once you see them.
Because other people’s thoughts are just their thoughts. Sometimes they can be useful. We have an entire podcast episode about how to turn critical feedback into a blueprint to create the life you want. But just like we want to consider food we eat before we put it in our mouth to decide, is this food nourishing, is this food useful, we want to think about that with feedback as well.
And just as a little asterisk there, when I say is this food nourishing, I’m meaning more like, is this actually food - is this something that has gone bad. I am a firm believer in kind of a more intuitive eating approach, so I’m not saying is this food healthy. I’m just saying is this actual food or is this cheese that didn’t get refrigerated and is now bad, which isn’t a good example because some cheese doesn’t need to be refrigerated.
Now that we’ve done this large aside, let’s carry on. There might also be scenarios where your brain is worrying but you don’t want to take any action. And in that case, something that I like to return to is that idea of being able to figure it out.
So for instance, if you’re worrying about something that’s coming in two years and there’s no action you can take or that you would choose to take in the meantime, then when that worry comes up, it’s just kind of about reminding your brain it’s not helpful to worry about this, we’re going to figure it out when it arises, we don’t have to handle this ahead of time.
The brain doesn’t like to have open loops. It likes to close them. So if it’s worrying about something, it wants you to get to a resolution so it can close that loop. But because humans have this amazing capacity to imagine way far out into the future, we can kind of tap into all these potential things that could go wrong in sort of an unlimited fashion.
So at some point, you also have to learn the skill of saying I’m simply just not going to choose to indulge this worry. And that might be a really new idea for you that you can just not indulge a worry, but it’s just about noticing when your brain goes back to it and redirecting it somewhere else. Noticing your brain going back to it and saying okay, my brain only wants to go back to it because it wants to close that loop, but the reality is that loop’s actually not open. I’ll handle it when it arises, I’ll figure it out when it happens and for now, I’m going to shift my energy and attention back to the things I can control now.
I think that the human brain likes to worry because it’s trying to keep us safe. It’s trying to keep us alive and the human brain as we talk about all the time wants to scan for threats and things that could potentially harm us. But sometimes it does that to our detriment because if we’re spending all our time worrying, then we’re spending zero percent of our time in our actual life where we can actually solve things now in this moment.
So when your brain wants to do that and wants to loop back to the worry and back to the worry and back to the worry, I think it’s helpful to be like, you’re trying to do that to keep me safe but actually, the only place that can keep me safe is in this current moment, so I need to bring my energy and attention back to this moment. This is where all problems get solved, it’s where everything gets handled, it’s in the now.
And it’s not useful or beneficial to me to imagine 78,000 things that could go wrong and then try to plan for all of them because then that’s all I’ll ever do with my whole life. And even if something you worried about happens and you aren’t able to prevent it, like maybe you even took some actionable steps and the thing happens anyway, that’s okay too.
Let’s just think it through. Let’s go back to that email example. This didn’t exactly happen to me but actually other things very similar to this did happen to me where I didn’t ever send an email, I don’t think that had the wrong technical details, like our previous example, but I definitely sent some emails that didn’t have all the necessary information, especially when I was brand new in that role.
So I sent an email to 25,000 people and it didn’t go the way it was supposed to, and it turned out to be okay and that actually helped me figure out how to do my job even better. And it gave me experience handling an email snafu. Was it my super favorite thing I ever did in that job? Of course not. But it didn’t kill me. It didn’t ruin everything, and I was able to learn so much from it and I became so much better in that role and I got such a better understanding because of that experience.
And these kinds of things happen to people, right? Because humans are humans, we’re not perfection machines. So things are going to go wrong and not go according to plan sometimes. And then it just comes down to like, how do we want to respond to that? How do we want to show up to that? And what can we learn from it? How can we make it something that’s beneficial for us instead of a problem and a reason to worry more in the future?
Let’s go back and think about the example of working on the project. Let’s say you’re amazing in your field but maybe you did underperform according to the person whose feedback you asked, and you respect them and you want to take that feedback and turn it into a blueprint. It’s okay that you underperformed.
You’re going to figure out what went wrong, you’re going to figure out how to do better next time, and you’re going to figure out what went right too. So even if someone gives you that critical feedback, even if they do say you underperformed, there’s always something you did right if you look hard enough for it, and finding out what didn’t go well is what’s going to give you that blueprint to help you get closer to the kind of performance you want to have.
And even if this happens to you, it could be the best thing that ever happens. Maybe you’re going to become the office’s go-to person on transformative growth and development and you’re going to have an emotional resilience for feedback that no one else has.
And guess what happens when you have an emotional resilience for feedback that no one else has? You grow a lot faster and a lot more than everyone else because you’re willing to not just hear feedback, you’re willing to seek it out and you’re willing to have it happen and still believe you’re a high achiever and keep going.
Versus people who can only think they’re a high achiever until they get negative feedback are kind of fucked, right? Because then they can only be as good at the level that they’re at, they can only do projects at the level they’re already at, and then let’s just say something gets messed up at that level, then they have to think something terrible about themselves, but that’s totally not necessary.
If we’re willing to believe we’re doing awesome, even when someone says we underperformed, then we have the capacity to do better because we have enough confidence in ourselves that we can even hear this critical feedback and take it and use it for our growth, rather than letting it slow us down or stop us.
Alright, so let’s review. Brains like to worry. Not all brains. Some people have brains that don’t worry at all and I’m fascinated by those people, but I have a brain that loves to worry and if you listen to this podcast, I’m guessing your brain loves to worry too and maybe even spends some time catastrophizing and playing things out into very complicated and advanced worst-case scenarios.
And if that happens, that’s okay. You can still do amazing work. You can still enjoy your job. You can still have a really fun time. But what you want to be able to do is notice the worry and separate it out from the actions you can take and the useful content that you might want to consider that’s inside of the worry.
And then you want to go from there. And then no matter what happens, you want to begin to cultivate the belief that you’re going to handle it no matter what comes up. Because here’s the real truth; everything that’s ever happened in your life so far, you’ve handled it.
Now, maybe you didn’t handle it the way you would handle it now, but you became the person you are now by handling it as best you could before. So I love to think about this. My capacity to handle whatever arises is the best it’s ever been today and every day it gets better because every day, whatever happens, I learn from it and my capacity to handle the unexpected or to handle something that I’ve worried about which actually comes to pass is bigger and better and every mistake I’ve ever made in the past, everything I’ve ever fucked up, every time I’ve ever fallen on my face, literally and metaphorically, all of that has given me more strength and more skills and more resilience to handle anything in the future.
And here’s the thing; I plan on continuing to improve. So it’s possible something could happen this week and I’ll handle it as best I can, and then maybe in 10 years, future Kori will be like, wow, I have a way better way to handle that. But I become future Kori by being the Kori I am now. You become future you by being the you you are now. And I trust in your capacity to handle things and figure them out with all the tools you have now, even if you want to become an even better version of yourself who handles them in even cooler ways.
And I’m using better here but you’re never going to be better than you are now because you’re already wonderful and amazing and your worth as a human is inherent. But yeah, you can become more skilled in certain ways. You can become more practiced in certain things and you can learn ways of handling things you might not have now. And that’s amazing, but you’re also already amazing.
So think about something you’ve been worrying about and ask yourself like, what’s the useful content here and what’s actionable here? Do I want to take action on it, or do I want to dismiss it? And then go forth from there and show those worries what’s up.
And if you love what I teach and you want some help taking things a little bit deeper and figuring out how this all applies to your own life, I’ve got good news for you.
I’ve got space for a few new one-on-one coaching clients starting this month, so let’s hop on a call. I’ll give you some coaching right away to help you get going and if it seems like a good fit, I will share with you how we can work together. Just head on over to my website and click on the Work With Me button and get started there.
Also bonus, my coaching offering is totally virtual so as to better serve my global audience, and yes, I do work with people who are not native English speakers and we’ve had great success doing that.
There’s even a testimonial on my website with someone in that category so you can check that out on the testimonials page. Alright y’all, have a lovely week and I will talk to you next time. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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