Anxiety is often treated as something to overcome. But what if it’s also one of the forces driving your success?

In this episode, JR speaks with Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and host of Harvard Business Review’s popular podcast of the same name, about the complex relationship between anxiety, achievement, leadership, and performance.

Morra argues that anxiety isn’t necessarily a weakness to be fixed. For many high performers, it fuels preparation, creativity, empathy, and ambition. The challenge isn’t eliminating anxiety—it’s learning how to understand it, manage it, and work with it rather than against it.

Their conversation covers:

• What separates anxious achievers from people who are simply stressed
• How anxiety can become both a leadership asset and a liability
• Why so many high performers are driven by fear, control, and hypervigilance
• The connection between childhood experiences and achievement-oriented behavior
• How mindfulness and self-awareness help people manage anxiety more effectively
• Why boundaries are especially difficult—and important—for anxious achievers
• What psychologically healthy teams and workplaces look like
• How managers can better support different working styles and needs
• Why today’s workplace often works against mental well-being
• How leaders can build resilience in an increasingly uncertain world

If you’ve ever felt driven by a constant inner voice pushing you to prepare more, do more, and achieve more, this conversation offers a thoughtful framework for understanding anxiety—not as a flaw, but as something that can be harnessed with greater awareness, intention, and self-compassion.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/morra-aarons-mele

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Anxious Achiever: Turning Anxiety Into A Leadership Advantage, With Morra Aarons-Mele

Unlocking The Potential Of The Anxious Achiever

Traditionally, we’ve all come to subscribe to a pretty simple story about success. That the best leaders are cool, calm, confident and collected. They can walk into any room with certainty, make the necessary decisions and sleep just fine at night. What if that story is just flat out wrong? It probably is. What if some of the most driven, high-performing successful people that you know, the ones running companies, leading teams, building careers, being famous are also badly with anxiety? Sometimes to crippling degrees.

Not only that. What if anxiety is part of their success engine because here’s what’s interesting. Anxiety doesn’t always look like panic. Sometimes, it looks like over preparation, hyper responsibility, relentless thinking, a voice that says, “This could go horribly wrong, so I better be ready.” Those aren’t necessarily bad things, particularly in a workplace. For a long time, we’ve treated these voices in our head as a flaw, something to manage or suppress or hide, especially when we’re at work.

Our guest argues something much more radical that anxiety, when understood and channeled, can become a leadership advantage. Morra Aarons-Mele is the Author of The Anxious Achiever and the host of a very popular Harvard Business Review show, The Anxious Achiever. She spent years exploring, including within herself what it looks like to succeed while anxious and how more leaders can stop fighting their minds and start working with them. This isn’t going to be a conversation about eliminating anxiety. It’s going to be about redefining it. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

—

Morra, thanks for joining me.

It’s great to be here.

Good to meet you. I was mentioning before we started that I enjoyed your book and I’m looking forward to talking about it. You write about anxiety and you challenge the idea that anxiety is something that should be fixed. What blood do you use to reframe it as something that people can use to their advantage or maybe even turn into something resembling a superpower?

I was just doing a session for a big global law firm and in a poll question, I said, “How many of you have felt anxious in the last 24 hours?” Eighty-four percent of them said they had felt anxious in the last 24 hours.

I would have thought it would be 100% in a law firm.

I know. I’m like, “Who’s that 16%?” There’s the fact that anxiety is part of the human condition and anxiety is a helpful and useful emotion and a necessary emotion. We’re going to feel it whether we like it or not. We might as well understand it and use it. There’s the fact that in my work, inter-veiling high achievers who manage mental health challenges, who are neurodivergent, who have faced traumas and other challenges that impact our brain and our psyche.

I couldn’t believe how many of them said to me, “Anxiety is my superpower.” They would say, “I’m not saying it’s comfortable and that I loved it and it makes me an unnecessarily happy person. It’s an essential key to who I am. It powers me. It drives me. It causes me to seek new things.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that even though as I always say it’s a double-edged sword.

What distinguishes people who you call anxious achievers from the everyday run-of-the-mill person who’s stressed out about something?

Anxious achievers are a special type of people. I would say that anxiety is like their oxygen. They have been powered by anxiety often since they were kids. It’s a way of being. It’s a little bit of a habit. Anxious achiever tends to be someone who is maybe an overthinker, who’s always four steps ahead, who’s never stopping and who just bust through milestones and keeps going in that relentless way. The ambition, the achievement can be powered by a lot of different drives, but the anxiety is used as a motivating fuel to keep going.

These people who think a bit as a superpower, what are some of the specific ways that they use it to their advantage?

There’s a lot of specific ways and some will surprise you and some won’t. An example is that anxious achievers always say that they are warriors. They are looking ahead for threats. Many of them are what psychologists would call Hyper-vigilant. They are scanning the environment for threats and preparing. When you think about it in many workplaces and in many professions, it’s something that is highly rewarded. I would imagine in your past careers. The ability to be four steps ahead and anticipate multiple scenarios, and how we might get out of them, is a key facet of an anxious achiever.

It’s extremely exhausting because your nervous system is always aroused in a threatening state. Again, double-edged sword. That person who’s always looking ahead who’s always thinking and very motivated by goals and tasks because goals and tasks feel very important to an anxious achiever just like a lot of my identity riding on it. Myself worth and my perfectionism riding on achieving tasks. We’re often very motivated by money, fear and scarcity. We will work very hard to provide money and make sure there’s financial security.

At the bottom of all of this behavior is the need for control that a lot of anxious achievers feel. We feel that if only we keep control over things and keep trying hard and harder, things will be okay. Some of the more surprising aspects are that I find that anxious achievers can be very empathetic. They are deeply attuned to other people.

Anxious Achiever: At the bottom of all of this behavior is the need for control that a lot of anxious achievers feel.

They are extremely creative because they’re seekers. I interviewed a script writer and she said, “I can go to Target and I’m attuned to everyone else’s behavior. I’ll have four ideas for different story lines and scripts just by noticing things and tuning in to the shoppers at Target.” We have a lot of radar going on. We could also have good social skills as well, because again, we’re very focused on the other person.

For leaders who see their anxiety as a liability, how do you help them shift their mindset?

From Self-Critic To Best Friend: Reprogramming Your Anxiety

I try to help them at a few different levels. I should say that I’m not a psychologist. I am not a therapist. I recommend that they are in therapy. The mindset shift is that a lot of anxious achievers and a lot of us in general are used to being our own worst enemies. There’s an incredible quote that I love from a sports psychologist that I know. He says, “At the highest level of performance, people are often their own worst enemies.” That’s true.

A lot of us use our inner critic. We almost bully ourselves. A lot of anxious achievers do this, too. We bully ourself into performance. The key is to stop being your own worst enemy and turn into your own best friend. Stop trying to change who you are. If your anxiety is getting in the way of your life, it needs to be treated. Many anxious achievers are on medication. They’ve been in therapy. They meditate and practice all the modalities that help and they still have that nature.

I joke that we vibrate at an 11. My point is, that’s a beautiful and essential part of who you are and like all things. All of our strengths, we have a shadow side. The key is learning to have a relationship with your anxiety. I use a lot of mindfulness techniques for that. It’s that it’s not in control of you, but you can’t control it. It’s a relationship and a dialogue that you will get more agency over, but the first thing is accepting it.

In the book you talk about how a lot of this goes back to childhood issues, childhood trauma, or childhood memories. How can somebody unpack that and use it to help in a practical way?

There’s a great saying, wherever you go, there you are. By the time you get to a certain age, hopefully, you’ve done enough reflection that you realize, “I didn’t come from a radish,” as my father used to say. The thing that’s so interesting about work is that workplaces are systems just like families are systems. When we grow up in families, we all play a role. There’s a big thing on the internet, the eldest daughter syndrome. I’ll use that one because I’m definitely the eldest daughter of a single mom.

There is the sense that as the eldest daughter of a single mom, you grow up hyper-competent. Many of my anxieties are the eldest child, especially single parents or parents who struggled. You fix things. You solve things. You are probably mature before your time. You learned that you are competent and that you have a role in making things better. Guess what happens when you show up to work? You’re that person, which could be extremely rewarding and extremely draining. Also, ultimately not great for your leadership.

At the end of the day, leadership is not about fixing things for other people. It’s about bringing people together so that they can create solutions and you can guide them. It’s interesting wherever you go, there you are. I met so many anxious people who come from alcoholic families, who come from families with significant trauma, who grew up themselves with a learning difference or ADHD. In which, they felt that they were constantly compensating or overcoming something with drive and with achievement, with getting the gold stars. Those patterns stay with us until we do the work to ask, “Are you serving me? Do I want to be like this anymore? Can I dial it back?”

Anxious Achiever: At the end of the day, leadership is not about fixing things for other people. It’s about bringing people together so that they can create solutions and you can guide them.

You talked earlier about needing to manage this relationship with anxiety and accepting the fact that you may never be able to fully control it, but needing to get more control over it. How do you work with people to develop the right self-awareness without falling into a pattern of obsessing about it so much that, that becomes a source of their anxiety?

What I do is helpful to anybody. I have a very basic technique that I start with people. It’s so simple, but it starts with helping them notice. I teach them what I call my two-step, which is basically to pause and then to ask. It’s a three-part process. It’s based on mindfulness and something called ACT therapy. The key is, whether we’re anxious achievers or we’re just going through a hard time. We carry stress and anxiety with us in our bodies. We have certain behaviors. It’s almost like your tell in poker. I don’t know what yours is. If you’re feeling stressed and anxious. What’s your warning signal?

Sleep is harder. I have a harder time falling asleep when I’m feeling that way. The second thing is I go into almost pulling the proverbial hoodie over my head and being blinded on head down and keep plowing through.

I would say that that’s a common reaction. For me, I get a twitch in my eye. It took me many years to understand that. I’ve had people say that they start tingling in their arms. You have to learn to tune in. A simple way to start to do it is literally during your work day, maybe once in the morning, once at lunch, once in the afternoon, once at the end of the day, or once before a meeting that you have frequently. Take a sec and close your eyes. Feel your body where you’re holding tension, where you feel stuck, or where you feel pain.

There’s often in our lives a meeting that makes us feel a certain way. I’ve worked with so many senior executives who said, “Every week before I have to have my one-on-one with my boss, I have a migraine or I feel like I’m going to throw up or I don’t sleep well.” These are all signals. The tuning in is the first step like when you start putting your head down. A lot of people will say, “When I start micromanaging people or when I need to know what everyone’s doing all the time.” These are signals.

The key is not to blame yourself. The key is to be like, “Ha. Okay.” When you notice that you’re feeling these feelings or you’re doing this behavior, pause for a minute. I like to teach people very simple grounding techniques so that they can calm their body, come into the present moment and then ask themselves. What do I need? What’s going on here?

That could be as simple as, “Maybe I’m hungry. Maybe I’m thirsty. Maybe I need to go outside and get some air. Maybe I need to put down the laptop for a little bit,” or it could be, “Why is this meeting making me feel like this is the end of the world? What’s going on?” It’s that deeper inquiry. That’s the process that starts building mindfulness that gives you that ability before you act out your anxiety, pause, interrogate a little bit and then choose a path forward.

Navigating Negative Self-Talk And Setting Professional Boundaries

There’s a related point around just the fiction sometimes. The negative self-talk that runs in our head that sometimes is truthful and sometimes is fictional. A lot of times, something may trigger us and trigger a feeling of anxiety, but we have to almost pull a thread to figure out like what’s driving that? It’s like, “Why am I upset about this situation? Why am I upset that somebody loaded the dishwasher wrong? Why am I upset that somebody’s a minute late to a meeting?” What’s the underlying reason when you’re working with your clients or giving talks on this? How do you suggest to people that they deal with the negative self-talk and the thought traps that they can fall into?

That is the work of therapy and inquiry because that stuff can run very deep. That stuff can be interlaced with trauma and hard things. My role as a coach is very much around the behavior and the grounding and the mindfulness. Those very deep questions are worth investing in yourself. I call it self-understanding.

The process of self-understanding is the greatest leadership gift we can give ourselves, which is understanding how we got where we are. The stories we tell ourselves are patterns. It’s understanding our personality. Am I an introvert? Am I an extrovert? Am I conscientious? Am I a little bit neurotic? It’s understanding our neurotype, which is something my next book is about. It’s putting that puzzle of us together so that we can create optimal situations. To me, that’s the biggest gift you can give yourself for other people as well.

You talked earlier about the fact that people who come into work and want to solve all the problems because that’s what they did are kids. That is often rewarded, but it’s also often exhausting, which brings us to the topic of boundaries. Which you talked about being a big issue for a lot of anxious achievers. How do you help people figure out how to set their boundaries?

Setting boundaries is hard. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but I used to talk about boundaries and talks. I found that I would start getting their eyes rolling at me. It’s like, “I don’t have the ability to set my boundaries. Stop promising. Stop teasing me because you don’t work here. You don’t know what it’s like.” I get it. We live in a world where boundaries are very challenging. It’s important to know your boundaries. It’s important to also understand.

I was talking with Frances Frei and Anne Morriss and they said to me, “Nobody is going to protect your boundaries for you. No one cares about your boundaries if you don’t set your own.” That’s why I try to teach people to understand their limits. What are my limits? Limits are like the hard and fast lines that help us protect our boundaries. Maybe a limit for me is, I can’t do six Zooms a day because that fries my brain. Maybe a limit for me is around the amount of travel I do. Maybe it’s a time-based limit. The key is, how do I protect my limit without losing power and status?

That’s where the magic is. Even just understanding your personal boundaries and how they affect you gives you a little more agency over feeling less violated by them. For example, I have a funny boundary. Which is that if people start to tell me what to do in order to get around too much, I get very angry. I’ve done a lot of therapy and I know that this boundary is about my stepfather. I have an irrational response to it. Sometimes even inappropriate. That’s a boundary that I understand. Also, it’s a boundary that is hard to set limits around. I’m okay with that because now I know. I’m like, “Morra, this is your thing. This is not about the client. It’s about your past. Let this go.” Sometimes even understanding it is powerful.

Certainly, cognizant of the fact that you can’t always get people to honor your boundaries at work. If you don’t articulate them, then they’re never going to be honored. You have to at least try if it’s important to you. When you are hitting something that is like a hard limit in the way that you were describing it. You have to make sure that people understand that because that’s when things can go bad and off track. You don’t want that to happen for your sake or for your relationship with them.

That’s right. The other thing is, you can do it from a position of strength. My new book is for what I call a typical achiever. There’s a lot of people who would identify as neurodivergent. This is a big deal because, for example, if you cannot work under fluorescent lights. If they over touch your nervous system, that is a hard limit for you that is going to impact your performance. That has a very easy solution. Turn off the lights. Things like that, that are essential to performance and survival, you have to own in a position of strength. It’s like, “I need this to be the best I can be and I can be good.”

Those are hard situations if you work in an office that’s full of fluorescent lights. Essentially, it means they need to create a dedicated space for you. In some situations, the company is not going to be willing to do that then you get into a legal wrangle of whether they’re obligated to do that. I don’t know how those situations play out because there has to be some reasonable middle ground. When you are living with those circumstances, it does matter to you. It’s hard. I don’t think there’s an easy solution in those cases.

The solution can feel very stark for people. Under the ADA, you are entitled to reasonable accommodation if you say it is a disability. If your sight is a disability, they’ve got to fix it. On the other hand, many people won’t do that because they feel that they’ll be punished if they say that they have a disability. At the end of the day, maybe you can just turn off the fluorescent light above your cubicle. We, as teammates, as workers have to get much more comfortable with the fact that we all work differently and we need different things to thrive and that’s okay.

Building Mentally Healthy Teams And Organizational Culture

Let’s talk a little bit about the team in the organizational part of this. What’s a mentally healthy team or organization look like to you?

Mentally healthy team is a team that does have the ability to understand the conditions that they need to thrive and is able to ask for it without shame or fear of punishment. That’s important. There’s something called psychosocial safety factors at work. It’s important to understand that this isn’t someone being difficult. I’ll give you an example.

My daughter was having a lot of math anxiety. I met with her teacher and her teacher said, “I noticed that when she is seated among a lot of other kids and she sees other kids get up with their finished tests and go hand them into the teacher. She gets anxious and she freezes. What I decided to do is two things. 1) Nobody gets up when they’re test is done. They turn their paper over and read or sit quietly. 2) I seated your daughter in a corner so her line of sight is removed from other people finishing their work.”I thought that’s amazing. What a simple thing to do that helps everybody? We can all relate to that feeling of we’re still trying to finish the test and everyone’s getting up. It’s a terrible feeling.

Getting up early and walking out of the room is a bit of power play.

It’s a total flex, and it doesn’t mean you got a better grade on the test, by the way. That is also about psychological safety, the ability to be who I am, to ask for what I want, to push people and to question without fear of being punished. To me, that’s also based on an understanding that we are a group of individuals with different skills, different strengths, different quirks, and different needs who need to come together and work as a team. We have the ability to do that and figure it out like a grown up.

A lot of this is hard in a practical sense, and I’ve watched this play out. I’ve had situations where there’s been a lot of ask put into the group that on their own are very reasonable. That isn’t reflective of what people need to be at their best at work. When you pile them all together, it almost becomes too weighty for that team to even manage. Those are difficult situations to work through particularly when you’re the manager because you want to honor what everybody needs individually. When you look at it all collectively, you’re like, “There’s no way we’re going to be able to succeed.”

It’s hard. That’s why there has to be compromise on both sides. They call it work for a reason. We all have to be reasonable, but that’s why I encourage people to figure out their non-negotiables. What’s nice to have and what’s a must have. I have this framework that I call Mentally Healthy Leadership. That isn’t team-based, but it creates healthy teams. The first pillar is self-understanding, which is showing up understanding my past, my personality, my nature, or my neurotype like what makes me, me, what makes me thrive and what makes me struggle.

The second piece is emotional flexibility, and this is what you’re getting at. Emotional flexibility is the ability to name an emotion, to identify it, and to manage it appropriately in the moment. Sometimes, that is saying, “I’m going to take one for the team. It’s okay. This triggers me. This makes me upset. It’s hard for me, but I’m here for the team.” That’s an important skill. The hard thing is that most of us, if we’re not taught that, we act out our emotions. That makes situations like you’re describing way harder. All of a sudden, they become fraught. Emotional flexibility is so key.

Anxious Achiever: Emotional flexibility is the ability to name an emotion, identify it, and manage it appropriately in the moment.

The third pillar is stress literacy. It’s understanding what stress is, what your body feels like when it’s under stress, and how to identify good stress versus harmful stress. It’s understanding the nervous system. Again, if teams understood that, we would remove so much complexity. The fourth is mindfulness. It’s being able to come into the present moment, to focus on what’s at hand, to be present and pay attention. In my perfect world, we’d all have those skills and all of the things we’re talking about would be easier.

Those are some of the things that are at the team level, at the broader organizational level. What are some of the things that you would like to see or some of the things that you advise your corporate clients to do to help better position anxious achievers to be at their best, but also create a mentally healthy construct in the organization?,

It’s hard because the incentives are so misaligned with mental health in every way in most workplaces. Would you agree with that?

We took some steps forward in COVID time and then we took some such right back.

I would agree. What’s sad for me to say is that as much as I want companies to create the infrastructure, have access to therapy, pay people well, and have benefits. All of those things companies need to do. The incentive structure that companies create is almost antithetical to well-being for many people. Not less the threat of AI.

Every time I read about a company who’s threatening layoffs because of AI or having people teach AI how to do their jobs. It is extremely hard to have any well-being in an environment like that. That is literally placing you under threat. I find myself coaching individuals to survive. Versus, how do we create systems and organizations that allow people to thrive? Companies want to do that, but the market forces against them are so hard. I don’t have a good answer for that. Maybe you do.

I’ve certainly had more conversations with people who are feeling the same sense of unease about the direction of travel in the corporate world. Part of it AI related and part of it more general. In the sense that, below the top level of the company, life gets hard quickly. You’re constantly under threat of losing your job. We want to hollow out the middle management layers.

I was talking to somebody yesterday about age in the workplace. There’s a lot of things that work against healthy workplaces. They may be financially healthy, but they’re not emotionally healthy or societally healthy. That is one of the big tensions in the corporate world. We’re indexing hard on one dimension and it feels like it’s been in the other dimensions. If you’re an individual in those situations, even if you are an emotionally healthy individual, it’s hard. If you are an emotionally challenged person, anxious or in whatever other form, it’s really hard.

The best work you could do is to get comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s such a cliché. but focusing on your locus of control, trying not to catastrophize and investing in that. I will say that there’s a lot of companies doing a lot of things. Much magic can happen at the team level. If I were a company and I’m obviously not, I would think about helping managers because managers are very overloaded. They don’t have enough resources, but smart companies understand that the magic happens at the team level. How do I empower managers to create great teams? That’s the answer.

You’re on a level of a small company, you are going to have some level of middle management. I know we’ve got this dream and there are a few small examples of it where one or two people can run these gigantic companies. They’re doing it all with third parties and automation. That’s a bit of the tech nirvana. You’ve got other companies where the senior person may have 20 or 30 people reporting to them and it’s a very flat structure, but there is a limit to that.

Once you hit that limit, then you need layers in between. Once you’ve got those layers in between, you’ve got an obligation to make sure that they have the conditions that they need to succeed. I feel like what happens a lot of times is, as soon as we’ve got that layer, we start complaining about them. At the end of the day, it’s not helpful because what’s the alternative? You can upgrade your talent in that layer. You can train them and try to develop them. Pointing fingers and blaming them for all of the ills of the organization seems to be what a lot of executive level people have a tendency to do. That doesn’t solve any problems for anybody.

There’s not much compassion for basic human empathy, and that’s unfortunate. There’s an amazing concept called Spaciousness that I love very much. It’s Dr. Megan Reitz. One of her big points is that when humans have no space at work, it’s hard to do our best work. It’s hard to be kind to each other. It’s hard to be thoughtful, make good decisions, and take care of ourselves. The mere idea of injecting some space into your day is profound. Often, if we just cut back a little and gave people back a little more space. What would happen?

The Future of Leadership: Thriving With Anxiety

Bringing this back to an individual level. What thoughts would you want to leave somebody with who cares all of this and identifies as a person who has a level of anxiousness? Whether they call it anxiety or not. It feels like they are an achiever. What advice would you want to leave them with in terms of how to manage a suspect they can and make the most of it?

I would say the key is not to try to cure yourself and not to try to change yourself. To simply sit with it and ask, is this serving me? Is this how I want to live? Is there a piece of me that feels like I might want to do something different? If that’s the answer, there are ways, but you don’t have to give up that essential hard, thinking, overthinking, achieving-driven piece of yourself. You don’t, but you could do it with a little bit more ease. It doesn’t have to be as expensive.

Thank you. Thank you for writing your book. I’m sure that it’s something that resonates with a lot of people. I know you talked about this topic on your own show as your theme. There’s clearly a massive audience of people who are resonating with it, who can relate to the work that you’re doing in the things that you bring to bear in your book, your show and your speaking engagement. Thank you for all of that. I appreciate it.

Thank you, J.R.

—

An interesting conversation Morra and something that a lot of you can probably relate to, because a lot of us struggle with anxiety. At least at some level and feel like it’s something that is an advantage, but is also something that probably gets in our way at times as well. One thing to take away is that anxiety isn’t the enemy. Misunderstanding is. If you try to eliminate anxiety, you’re going to lose the parts of you that you care deeply about. The things that allow you to think ahead, push for excellence and bring detail and focus to things.

The goal isn’t to get rid of those things. It’s about how to learn, how to make it work for you instead of against you. The second thing is just this idea of self-awareness. Self-awareness is opposed to self-control. If we’re so controlling in the way that we behave, whether at work or outside of work. It’s exhausting trying to power through anxiety. It is exhausting. The real shift needs to be in understanding your patterns, your triggers, and your thought loops. Sometimes the fiction that your mind is telling you so that you can respond intentionally and intelligently as opposed to reacting automatically with that amygdala part of your brain.

Third is that your coping strategies might be a constraint like overworking, perfectionism, people pleasing, or micromanagement. These things might feel like strengths. Although micromanagement probably wouldn’t, they’re often anxiety in disguise. At some point, what can help you can also start holding you back.

Finally, coming back to this idea of teams and organizations. The most effective teams, leaders and organizations model honesty, authenticity and imperfection. Not perfection. You can’t build strong teams by pretending to be fearless and pretending that nobody’s got things going on in their lives or nobody has worries. You build them by creating environments in which people can be human. They feel logically safe.

They can manage their emotions and they can still perform at a high level. The goal isn’t to become less anxious. The goal is to become a better leader with anxiety if you have anxiety. I invite you to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and subscribe to our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Morra Aarons-Mele
• Morra Aarons-Mele on LinkedIn
• Morra Aarons-Mele on Instagram
• The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower
• The Anxious Achiever
• Frances Frei on LinkedIn
• Anne Morriss on LinkedIn
• Americans with Disabilities Act
• Spaciousness – Megan Reitz
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok
• PathWise on Twitter

About Morra Aarons-Mele

Morra Aarons-Mele helps leaders build strength by tuning into their inner lives.

An anxious achiever herself, Morra knows that taking your mental and emotional health seriously is a leadership strength. Her ongoing work has been recognized by Mental Health America with their Media Award (2023). Morra is a LinkedIn “Top 10 Voice” in mental health and was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 2023 Distinguished Achievement in Leadership Award.

Morra’s consulting clients include Fortune 500 companies, startups, and U.S government agencies. She teaches Executive Education at the Harvard Kennedy School. In her decades-long career as a political, public health, and issue advocacy strategist and advisor to four U.S. Presidential campaigns she has helped the world’s largest organizations change minds and behaviors. Her speaking audiences range from executives to frontline workers, and startups to associations. Learn more about Morra’s keynotes and workshops here. Her media coverage is extensive.

Alongside speaking, coaching, and consulting, Morra hosts a Top 10 Management podcast, “The Anxious Achiever,” for LinkedIn Presents. Guests range from CEOs to leading psychologists and leadership colleagues. This popular podcast is a Webby Awards Honoree and a “Best Commute” Signal Award winner.