How to Stop Worrying at Work

Everybody does it, even though it’s totally unproductive and gets you in your own way. Worrying about work. But how can you stop worrying at work?

At some point, most people face anxiety at work, or stress at work, or just worry about work in general. There can be a million reasons for worrying - and if you’re me you like to take your personal anxiety to work with you because it’s so helpful - but no matter the reason there are four steps you can take today to stop worrying about work.

Step three is something most people don’t think of so pay careful attention to that one.

Step 1 | What are you really worried about?

Begin with figuring out what you’re really worried about.

In order to process your worry, you need to know the actual source of your anxiety. For example - you’re worried about making a mistake that is going to be a multi-million dollar err because it causes downtime or a lost client. You’re worried your not going to the promotion you’ve been working so hard for. Or maybe you’re worried your boss doesn’t like you.

And sometimes it’s the obvious worry, but often you need to dig deeper.

Step 2 | What is the WORST thing that can happen

You’ve probably skipped ahead to start here…that’s the point of worrying afterall. But I want you to deliberately thing about what the worst thing that can happen is in the context of the long term effect.

Let’s look at the example of not getting a promotion.

Whats the worst outcome of not getting the promotion? Does it doom you to be stagnant for the rest of your life? Will your family still love you? Is it your one and only chance for the rest of your life?

here is no long term impact.

Let’s look at one of the scariest worries people have: losing their jobs. This is the worst case scenario to a lot of common workplace worries, so I love talking about this one...

What happens if you lose your job?

You’re totally unemployable and you have to move back in with your parents and live alone in their basement as a spinster until one day the isolation finally drives you mad?

That’s probably not going to happen. Definitely less than a 25% chance.

In reality, people lose jobs all the time. In fact, I’ve lost more than one job due to lay-offs due to lack of funding, companies shutdowns, and restructures. When you lose your job - you simply go and get a new one. Right now we have a super hot economy, especially if you’re in tech. And even if it turns, if you’re the ace I think you are, you’ll have no problem finding something else.

Unless you’re a rocket scientist or a medical practioner, mistakes at work are not life and death and most setbacks we encounter are just that - tiny bumps in the road that have no long term impact.

Step 3 | Is worrying helping or hurting?

This is one that most people honestly don’t consider, but is worrying actually a bad thing? For instance, if you’re always worried about messing up a system that would cost your company millions of dollars if there was an outage… I’d say that’s well founded.

As long as you function through that worry, it’s probably making you way more attentive and mindful than you would be if you weren’t really concerned.

However, if the worry is getting the way - if its keeping you stuck or impacting your ability to do your job or make decisions it’s something you need to resolve.

Step 4 | Take control

Over almost everything you can worry about there is some level of control. Maybe you can’t control the actual situation, but you are always fully in control of you.

That means, even when s&*^ hits that fan you control your reaction to it… and that in turn impacts other people’s reaction to it.

It’s like when a toddler falls down and looks at you to react - if you panic they're going to cry. But if you’re like no dude you're fine, they react accordingly.

With a lot of career stuff, the biggest mistake people make is they don’t take control.

They want to be leaders but wait for the title. They want a promotion but sit don’t do anything differently to get it. They want to be acknowledged but don’t do anything that will get acknowledged...

And that’s why I created my free masterclass, where I share the five strategies that help ambitious professionals rewrite the rules and take control of their careers.

If you’re looking to get the position, promotions, pay and praise you deserve, check it out at here.