The Anxious Achiever

By Morra Aarons-Mele

Business Careers

What's The Anxious Achiever about?

Host Morra Aarons-Mele is on a mission to reframe how we think about anxiety and mental health in the workplace. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S. We desperately need better models for leadership and a more holistic view of mental health. Our culture tells those of us who suffer from anxiety and depression that we can’t succeed, but we tell a different story — without sugarcoating the tough stuff. We feature stories from people who’ve been there and experts who can help you thrive.

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Here’s How to Plan for Diff...

02.01.2023

It might be a confrontation with a colleague who is constantly late to meetings. You might need to finally ask for that raise. Or it could be approaching a coworker to disclose a mental health issue you’ve been struggling with. ...

The Anxious Achiever episodes:

02.01.2023 Here’s How to Plan for Difficult Conversations It might be a confrontation with a colleague who is constantly late to meetings. You might need to finally ask for that raise. Or it could be approaching a coworker to disclose a mental health issue you’ve been struggling with. ...
01.25.2023 What Athletes Teach Us About Mental Health Most offices are rife with sports metaphors, from hitting the target to being a team player. There’s a lot we can learn from athletes and those who train them about performance and mental health. And high-profile athletes from Michael Phelps ...
01.18.2023 Facing Loss Amid the Tyranny of Positivity There are a lot of challenges in our lives that can help us achieve. And then there is the reality that there ARE going to be times that are traumatic, tragic, sad. We face depression, death, and grief - because ...
01.11.2023 What Mental Health Leave Taught One Google Executive People who end up in leadership positions at huge companies are usually overachievers: they’ve succeeded in school, internships, early career jobs, and as managers and leaders. But all that success can also hide a whole lot of feelings that we ...
01.04.2023 Shopify’s Harley Finkelstein is an Anxious Achiever Harley Finkelstein is president of Shopify, the e-commerce platform that has processed over 1 billion orders. For years, Harley’s anxiety troubled him but also gave him tremendous drive and energy. He realized that anxiety could actually be an advantage, and ...
12.21.2022 CVS Health’s Cara McNulty on Fighting Mental Health Stigma Much about mental health care in this country is pretty broken. In her role at President of Behavioral Health and Executive Vice President at CVS Health, Cara McNulty is working to help fix that broken system. At America’s fourth largest ...
12.14.2022 How to Channel Anxiety Into Positive Work Outcomes, According to Research Work can be stressful and downright anxiety-inducing; but we also know that bit of anxiety that comes from bumping up against a deadline or having to give a big presentation to the board can spark positive energy and creativity. Bonnie ...
12.07.2022 Managing With Intention Can Help Us Fight Toxic Work Environments, Burnout, and Anxiety Being intentional about how we spend our time and how we treat others is sometimes easier said than done. But it’s an essential piece of how we keep workers and workplaces mentally healthy in today’s increasingly chaotic and stressful environment. ...
11.30.2022 The Anxiety of Money, University, and Raising Mentally Healthy Kids It’s the time of year when so many young adults and their parents are thinking about a major achievement in young life - getting into college. It’s easy for overachieving parents to put that stress on their kids to go ...
11.23.2022 Finding the Right Work Fit When You’re Neurodivergent For all the negative stuff that social media and our online world can put out there - a lot of which we talk about in this show - there are also some pretty wonderful things. Being online can help us ...
11.16.2022 Digging Deeper on Perfectionism Many high performers go through their working lives struggling with perfectionism and not even realizing it - or not understanding why they have such a need to achieve. In this episode, we continue the conversation around the roots of perfectionism, ...
11.09.2022 Using Achievement - and Exercise - to Cope Emi Nietfeld is one of those people who looks great on paper. Raised in tumultuous circumstances and facing mental health challenges in her early teens, she went on to get into Harvard and work at Google. Now as an adult, ...
11.02.2022 Dealing with Grief While Dealing with Work Grief is something we’ll all experience in our adult lives, and we all experience it differently. But it’s not something the modern workplace is really built to deal with well. How do we move beyond our current system -- which ...
10.26.2022 Why Giving Up Control at Work Can Improve Your Emotional Health Aaron Dignan is founder of The Ready - an organizational transformation and coaching practice. He focuses on how to prioritize adaptivity and autonomy over efficiency and control - which you can pretty quickly extrapolate into upsides for mental health of ...
10.20.2022 Surgeon General Announces Framework on Mental Health and Work US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has never shied away from talking about emotions, and their impact on our health. On his own podcast he brings forth topics like loneliness, the pressure of achievement, meditation and stress reduction, facing crisis when ...
10.12.2022 Scary Mommy’s Founder on When Life Throws Curveballs We’re told again and again in the business world that the way to be successful is to follow your passion and to be authentic. Jill Smokler, the founder of the infamous mom blog Scary Mommy, achieved entrepreneurial success doing just ...
10.05.2022 Why Difference is a Superpower with Christopher Lochhead Many people who are neurodivergent have to figure out a way to succeed outside the rules and regulations of traditional institutions. Christopher Lochhead, startup advisor, podcast host, and author, is one such person. Growing up with dyslexia, he found his ...
09.28.2022 Burnout and Mental Health: Perspectives from Human Resources Every wonder what your manager or HR leader is really thinking? In this episode, host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Vice Media’s Chief People Officer Daisy Auger-Dominquez about mental health, the great resignation, burnout and more. We’ll hear what worries her ...
09.21.2022 Gretchen Rubin on Expectations, Pillars of Habits, and Understanding Why You React the Way You Do Before many others, podcast host and author Gretchen Rubin found a way to create her own brand, run a remote company, and think carefully about mental health and work. She shares a helpful framework for understanding how expectations shape your ...
09.14.2022 A CEO on Strengthening Leadership and Facing Childhood Trauma Adam Baruh is CEO and founder of the consulting agency SuiteCentric. But he’s also on a mission to talk with servant leaders and normalize conversations around mental health. That mission is partly inspired by his decision to face abuse and ...
09.07.2022 Your Questions, Answered: How to Get What You Need at Work We set out in every episode to share a story, reframe a perception, or even change your mind about mental health. But listeners are always writing in with questions. You asked, so we answered. In this episode kicking off the ...
08.24.2022 Questioning and Understanding Our Need to Achieve One of the core tenets of this show is about examining our motivations to achieve (and even overachieve), especially because those needs can contribute to mental health issues. As the school year starts and work pressure ramps up, we revisit ...
06.22.2022 The Hidden Mental Anguish of a Successful Tech Investor Andy Johns has had a nearly two decade career as an investor - working on companies like Facebook and Twitter when they were in their early stages. Today, he’s working as a mental health advocate. Andy is reflecting on how ...
06.15.2022 Lori Gottlieb on Writing as Therapy, the Mind-Body Connection, and What to Do When You Need Help Lori Gottlieb found her life’s work later in life, but she then built her career around therapy and writing - helping herself and countless others along the way. She wrote about her own journey through therapy in her bestselling book ...
06.10.2022 Changing Your Relationship With Email and Phones Sometimes you just need a little extra inspiration to remind you how to draw the right boundaries and make sure you relationship with work remains healthy. In this bonus episode, host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with speaker, entrepreneur, and digital communications ...
06.08.2022 Lessons in Mental Health and Leadership from History Mental health seems to be all the rage in the corporate world today. But the reality is that great leaders, great creatives, and great innovators throughout time have also been likely to suffer from bouts of mental strain and illness ...
06.01.2022 Why We Need to Understand Our Emotions Around Money Even if you don’t suffer from more generalized anxiety, money is something that causes almost everyone some stress and strain. Buffie Purselle, an entrepreneur and personal finance expert, says understanding our emotions around our finances is the first step to ...
05.25.2022 Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (And Work) A lot of us still think of mental struggles as something to push through. Or we think we need to “cure” ourselves from anxiety and that will be that. But licensed clinical psychologist and author Dr. Carissa Gustafson says there ...
05.18.2022 Why Managing Is the Hardest Job She’s Ever Had Building a positive, mentally healthy workplace isn’t a one-time feat. It requires work day in and day out - which makes managing an even harder job than it used to be. In this episode, journalist Priska Neely returns to talk ...
05.11.2022 Bonobos Cofounder on the Highs of Success and Lows of Mental Struggle Andy Dunn is the cofounder of Bonobos, a innovative retail company he helped start out of business school in 2007. And while the company reached incredible success, eventually being bought by Walmart, Dunn faced intense mental health struggles behind the ...
05.04.2022 Managing Anxiety When the World Feels like a Scary Place For many of us, anxiety is about the day to day - whether that’s from social interaction, managing all of our work, or a more serious disorder we might be struggling with. But what about what the problem is big ...
04.27.2022 Imposter Syndrome, Work, and Mental Health So many of us experience imposter syndrome - the idea that you feel like a fraud in your job; that you’re faking it until you make it and that any minute now, people will be able to see through it. ...
04.20.2022 Miss America on the Suffering We Can’t Always See So many people struggle with mental health issues in part because, unlike many physical ailments, you can’t always know that someone is suffering, or just how badly. In this episode we dive in with reigning Miss America Emma Broyles, the ...
04.13.2022 Racial Trauma and Work: “I Hear From Broken-Hearted Women Several Times a Day” Today’s guest is someone who experienced the racism in the corporate world. After years of constantly being triggered at work, she had enough, and walked away. She discusses how to heal after work breaks your heart. Minda Harts is an ...
04.06.2022 Understanding “Good” Anxiety Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a neuroscientist at NYU who studies neuroplasticity. She’s the author of “Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion,” and she talks with host Morra Aarons-Mele about why anxiety can actually be a good ...
03.30.2022 Does Negotiation Give You Anxiety? Here’s How To Approach It. Preparing for and managing a negotiation can be hard for anyone, but for people who suffer from anxiety and tend toward rumination, it can feel near impossible. In this episode, Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with negotiation expert Christoper Voss about how ...
03.23.2022 Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms On Mental Health In And Out of Office A career in the public eye is not for the faint of heart. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms didn’t start out knowing she would enter a career in politics, but she followed a drive deep inside of her to serve the ...
03.16.2022 Learning Compassion for Your High-Achieving Self What if we all were a little nicer to ourselves? In this episode, we hear from lawyer Mark Goldstein about his own journey with depression, OCD, and breaking down stigmas. He's an example of someone who learned to practice self-compassion, ...
03.11.2022 A Mini Meditation When You Need It Hear mindfulness leader Sharon Salzberg walk you through a short meditation you can use at work or any time you feel anxious.
03.09.2022 A Career in Mindfulness, Mindfulness for Your Career Meditation and mindfulness have become household concepts, especially in the wake of the global pandemic. But it wasn’t always that way. In this episode, we speak to meditation and mindfulness leader Sharon Salzberg about how she began her journey, how ...
03.02.2022 Why Ambition Can Make You a “Terror” - And How to Fix It When we get jobs that seem impressive to the outside world - and get sucked into a corporate, competitive culture - we don’t always end up displaying the best leadership traits. Danny Bernstein spent nearly a decade at Google, but ...
02.23.2022 On Being CEO - and Living with Bipolar Disorder Many leaders succeed and thrive not just in spite of anxiety, depression, or other mental health struggles - but because of them. They make leaders more aware of themselves, and more empathetic to those around them. Gillian Stein is one ...
12.20.2021 Psychological Safety in Theory and In Practice What does psychological safety at work mean for people with anxiety and other mental health challenges? Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, who has long studied psychological safety, and Christopher Yates, Ford Motor Company’s ...
12.13.2021 Why the Workplace is Actually a Good Place to Heal Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Susan Schmitt, co-author of Healing at Work: A Guide to Using Career Conflicts to Overcome Your Past and Build the Future You Deserve, about how we can face childhood trauma, understand how it impacts our ...
12.06.2021 Anxiety Is a Habit Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Dr. Judson Brewer, author of “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind,” about how we can experiment with different behavior patterns. Then, she speaks ...
11.24.2021 Huma Abedin on Private Pain and Public Struggle As a political staffer for Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin was under immense pressure to achieve, while staying out of the public eye. That all changed when her husband Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress, following a sex scandal. Host Morra Aarons-Mele ...
11.22.2021 Neurodiversity at Work Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Danny Lakes, a Procter & Gamble employee who is on the autism spectrum, as well as Todd Ballish, a neurotypical manager at P&G, about why having a program for neurodiverse workers is a strength for ...
11.15.2021 What You Want Matters Anxious achievers are often hyper-attuned to other people and how to please them. New York Times bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims argues that many of us need to learn how to tune out that noise and focus on ourselves, our dreams, ...
11.08.2021 How Family Dynamics Play Out at Work Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Kathleen Smith, an associate faculty member at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, about how family systems theory can help us better understand leadership and relationships with coworkers.
11.01.2021 Even Public Figures Have Social Anxiety Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with New York Times bestselling author Lindsey Pollak about how she maintains a public speaking career while dealing with anxiety, and why she’s finally opening up about it.

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