Anxiety is the state of having your brain, mind and behavior
– and as you get older your values –
be out of alignment with the task in front of you

Consider someone in their early forties or older who has a, b and c skills that have earned them a living. Skills that they do masterfully and nearly automatically and ones they now need to replace with something altogether new.

A few years ago I worked with the controllers of a large international bank that was beginning to outsource many of their functions overseas. Many of these people were CPA’s and MBA’s who hadn’t thought strategically in decades and now had to think that way, because all the auditing and actuarial functions they had been doing could be done less expensively abroad. Their brains, minds and behaviors as auditors were completely out of alignment with thinking strategically.

And then there was the case of a large insurance company whose independently owned franchisees had been selling auto, home, property and casualty coverage (i.e. protection from risk) that had been told to sell (risky and complicated) financial instruments.

In both cases, the push back was enormous. The list of explanations and excuses from the bank and the insurance company was long and extensive. The bank controllers claimed that services coming from India would upset clients and the small insurance office owners claimed that selling financially risky products would turn everything they did for their customers upside down.

Every counter explanation of the need to move forward to the new platforms and new offerings was met with, “Yes, but.” And every “Yes, but” was clearly fueled by anxiety.

The only thing that eliminated that anxiety was listening. When managers were trained on how to listen without an agenda and instead keep asking out of genuine concern “what’s really going on?” the resistant controllers at the bank and mom and pop insurance franchise owners opened up and revealed it.

In the cases of the controllers and insurance office owners, both were embarrassed to admit that they had become so comfortable doing what they did — that was no longer sufficient to be competitive — that they hadn’t learned anything of this scale in decades. The controllers hadn’t thought strategically in many years and the insurance agents had never sold financially risky products. Both groups were scared that they couldn’t learn new things and felt too embarrassed to admit that they felt too stupid to do so.

However, once they both owned up to this, they exhaled and breathed a huge sign of relief and were able to get this humiliating weight off their chest. An interesting thing occurs after people are able to talk from what they’re really scared, ashamed or frightened about and feel not just understood, but — as I write about in my new book, “Just Listen” — “feel felt.” At that moment not only do they physically relax, but it is as if their brain relaxes and as if the three parts of their brain (the “fight or flight” lower reptile, the emotional middle mammalian, the rational upper human brain) relax the way they are bonded/neurologically welded together and can realign with each other in a way more aligned with the present situation. Nearly every break though that most people have had with another person is preceded by their stopping talking over or at each other, beginning to truly listen and hear the other person and then begin talking with each other. It’s only after that point that they realize they had misunderstood (i.e. their brains, minds and behaviors had been misaligned) each other.

After that it was easy to point out to them that they had each learned many new thinks with regard to technology, with regard to new rules and regulations and with regard to new sales approaches and that learning these larger items — which they could do in a step by step fashion — would utilize the skills and abilities to learn that they already had.

The second thing that eliminated their anxiety was their learning to listen more deeply to their clients and customers and find out what was really on their minds, much as their managers had just listened to them. That enabled them to stop being so self-absorbed and do the thing that makes any service or sales person more successful, which is to stop selling and instead listen to what is truly on your client or customer’s mind and help them with that.

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Catch Mark on October 7, 5 PM PDT on “This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis”

Sign up to see Mark speak live, October 7, 5:30-8:30 PM at the Professional Mentors and Coaches Association in Santa Monica, CA

If the above speaks to you and you were listening and would like to pick up some tips on how to do that better and more effectively, please visit the Just Listen website and sign up for the exclusive FREE RESOURCES..

Also if you’re a working mom and anxious and would like to find out how to become less anxious and even happier, you’ll want to check out my good friend, Cathy Greenberg‘s great new book, What Happy Working Mothers Know. I was pleased to have contributed to the large body of research Cathy used to write this cutting edge book.

When you can’t say, “Yes,”
because you don’t have anything left to give;

When you can’t ask for help,
because you can’t hear someone give another excuse for why they can’t
and because you wouldn’t know what to ask for anyway;

When you deal with the above by withdrawing
and becoming sullen and irritable with your family;

AND when the cycle repeats itself daily
and every day is Groundhog Day;

YOU are depressed.

If this speaks to you, what do you do? If’s it’s about someone you care about, how have you helped them?

Read More at: Are You Anxious or Depressed?

Depression and Suicide see: “I’m going to kill myself”

Don’t isolate, reach out and share your hurt and what you’re doing about it at: Are You Depressed

Resources for Depression:

NIMH
WebMD
NAMI
Mayo Clinic
Wikipedia

Nervous breakdowns come in twos. A first trauma causes the first one and leads you to feel utterly defenseless. When as sure as you thought you were is as wrong as you turn out to be, it can cause you to doubt all your past decisions and any upcoming ones, at which point you are frozen in limbo.

When you’re in such a state of feeling exposed and at risk, you live with the constant fear of being re-traumatized. You think that if the first trauma caused a severe crack in the porcelain of your well-being (that you turn away from your public face, lest others see), a second one will shatter you completely and you will never recover.

This is what PTSD victims, many concentration camp survivors, rape victims, financial collapse, and prolonged unemployment have in common. All of these traumas introduce you to an extreme vulnerability that on bad days you can barely live with. The world may think you got over those traumas, but the secret you keep inside is that you never did; you merely got past them.

All subsequent behaviors following such traumas — from social withdrawal to excessive alcohol/drug/prescription abuse to moodiness and irritability (when pushed to do something you don’t want to do) to rage (when cornered or provoked) to suicide — can be viewed as an effort to avoid re-traumatization at all costs.

Treatments from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (re-evaluating your thinking and perceptions in light of reality) to interpersonal therapy (helping you stay involved in relationships and more effective in them) to biological (from anti-anxiety, to anti-depressant to anti-psychotic meds) and other modalities are an effort to intervene with people living in this psychological abyss and help them manage their emotion and land back on the track back to a functional life.

Sometimes one step in the right direction is to talk and walk a traumatized person back from the edge, as for example recently happened when I spoke with a financially ruined person teetering on the brink of psychologically falling apart (and something you might try with a traumatized person you know

Dr G: How big a trauma has losing all this money been?

Client: Big.

Dr. G: How big?

Client (now beginning to cry with upset and relief): I can’t even think about it.

Dr. G: What does it make you want to do?

Client: I don’t know. I guess, just hide. (He then continues to speak about this for several minutes).

Dr. G: How well do you think you could handle another trauma with your wife, children, parents, health?

Client (looking at me incredulously): Are you nuts? I couldn’t.

Dr. G: What do you think you’d do?

Client: I couldn’t even imagine. (He continues to speak about this for several minutes).

Dr. G: So, you’re as scared as you’ve ever been.

Client: More than I’ve ever been.

Dr. G: Tell me about another time in your life that you never thought you’d get through, but that you did.

Client: I remember when my dad abused everyone and he got so angry I thought he was going to kill someone… (He continues to speak about this for several minutes)

Dr. G: Yes that. Tell me about that incident, how you never thought you’d make it through and how you did.

Client (continuing to talk at length)

As the client began to talk and answer these questions and tell the story (of another trauma he made it through) he visibly calmed and realized he’d survived bad times in his life before. As he continued to relax, he became more open to talk about his options in his current crisis.

For more information check out my book, PTSD for Dummies.