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Breaking up with worry

Breaking up with Worry

In the spirit of writing with more brevity, (and so I hope frequency) in some of what I write and share here, I’m mulling over a new reframe to me that feels somehow liberating, enlightening and if we can integrate it, might alleviate from us a degree of our suffering, inner conflict and self-doubt as we pursue goals and new, novel experiences in work.

Just how much our tendency - perhaps as the Type A, Insecure Overachiever personalities we are - automatically feel some safety in worry. Is this now a mis-attribution for our future success and potential?

I can’t help but question now, how necessary this is as we progress in life and a careers, and if not worry, then a perpetual, joyless high expectation:

It is not more noble to treat your pursuits so sternly that the only positive element is the end result and absolutely none of the experience.

Chris Williamson on dispensing with worry to allow for enjoyment

Even as we gain skills, encounter types of people, and generally collect experiences, while our worry might diminish, we’re not permitted to derive some joy from what we are doing instead.

The ‘joy’ is always to be had later. That’s the prize. But at some point, the worry must stop for us to actually experience the fruits of our experience, assured in our ability to handle situations even if they go wrong for us, and not let this diminish the fun we take in our work and lives.

Fear and worry may have once aided our performance. Once.

But we grew. Achieved escape velocity, and we no longer need to revert to worrying when encountering or pursuing something new as it may now be undermining our performance or at least our ability to enjoy the process which is - I was told - the point!

In any case, anything that could go wrong, we can match to a similar threat pattern from our repertoire of past experience, such that we are armed with the bravery and self-assuredness necessary to try this new thing, and not worry about the outcome…

Because we have the tools as conditioned professionals - indeed humans - to respond sensibly and without self-destructing, just as we always did, which earned our place at the seat of being able to work on these second-order life-puzzles.

We already beat the boss levels; now we’re iterating, guided by habit, skills and experience.

Worry may have served its purpose as the spectre; the imagined enforcer looming over us earlier in our career as we explored the lay of the land for threats and what kind of person we even are.

But for me, I must acknowledge this habitual worrying, the self-doubt is a hinderance.

Something going wrong is annoying, but it’s not enough to unseat me from myself; to undermine my resolve or ability to respond and course-correct as I always have, and we all must do if we are to pursue anything that enriches our life.

Worry now feels less a prerequisite for anything going well; it does not need to be the cause of our trajectory over the decades, and has become a tax we put on ourselves if we had the audacity to pursue anything meaningful to us.

So, that said, I guess I’m trying to realise my own agency and ability to respond, instead of this all-consuming feeling that one ought to worry about things, or cement its failure.

As someone who cares deeply about things, expects a lot from myself - and others - and so feels debilitated and often fraught with worry, I can learn to liberate myself from the habit and take action using the operating modes that have served us in the past: habit, humility, skills, jugement.

But importantly, allow ourselves to enjoy it.