The Leaflet #133: allaying anxiety; communication as hydration; demos > memos
Anxious? Connect or create. (or recreate)
When I’m not in the throes of anxiety and I can try to unpack what was happening in body and mind during those throes, I’m struck by how confident my anxiety is. Or maybe it’s how confident I am in my anxiety. Instead of open, curious, contemplative me, I’m hyper-focused, certain … distraught me. When I’m anxious, I have a pre- and post-verbal belief in what the future holds. Maybe not the events or circumstances, but at least the threats and feelings. I’m at the mercy of some version of, “1) I don’t know how, but 2) this is going to hurt and 3) I won’t bear it.”
Really? Is it? Will it hurt that bad?
Anxiety offers an unwinnable game. It makes bold assertions and gives everyone else the burden of proof. It’s often invincible to probabilities, common sense, even the other selves of you who cluck their tongues at anxious you.
To get out of it, or even pause it for a bit, I’ve gotten good advice to play a different game than the one anxiety offers. Get out of the actuarial business. Don’t predict. Connect or create. Talk to a real person you care about. Make a first draft of something and send it to someone else to look at and critique. If you can swing it, walk or jog for 20 minutes.
In each of these escapes from anxiety’s clutches, there’s a moving forward, an escape-to. Instead of mapping the future in an overconfident panic, you participate in a tiny piece of that future, ideally with someone else.
-eric
Proactive communication is like hydration
Here are a few ways this is so:
The signal you get that you need more of it is a lagging signal. When you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated. Of course you should drink that glass of water but that probably won’t even get you back to baseline.
Doing this well doesn’t necessarily make you feel better than you remember feeling before. This makes it tempting to let it slide.
Yes, you can overdo it. But overdoing doesn’t happen casually or even with serious effort. It happens in truly extreme circumstances.
Yes, you can accomplish this with muddled, alternative inputs. There’s water in coffee and lots of food. This can fool you into thinking you’re doing enough of it without effort or dedicated systems or rituals. There’s a good chance the defaults don’t cut it.
People invent, then sell, tools of varying cost and complexity to smooth or assist your practice of this. Like all other practices, this one is susceptible to fixation-on-tools and displacement-by-tools. Your Stanley cup might be the thing that gets you to drink all the water you’re supposed to drink. Or, it might be the thing that makes you think only certain water in certain vessels of certain style works for you, when the Elkay water fountain at the local airport, eg, does the job just fine. All to say, don’t wait for a sophisticated tool to begin your practice. Get it in.
Doing this poorly has symptoms and knock-on effects you don’t intuitively associate with doing this poorly. You feel bad, things feel bad, and perhaps you have a theory why. Before chasing that theory, double check this. Do some of this.
-eric
Reality can be persuasive (or, ditch memos for demos)
So much of the work within a team, especially a leadership team, is translation and persuasion. You have to make your idea intelligible to others across your differences of dialect and identity; you want to convince them it’s useful and good.
This feels stupidly obvious to me as I type it, because I’m thinking back on all the stupidly painful times I failed to practice it: reality can be far more persuasive than theory.
Let’s say there’s a continuum from Description to Depiction to Demonstration. As you move across that continuum, things get more real and you get more persuasive. A verbal definition of a shovel < a picture of a shovel < an actual shovel moving actual dirt.
If you’re feeling unheard or stymied in your attempts to translate and persuade, consider ditching your memo for a demo. In your context, how can you stop talking about a shovel and actually move some dirt?
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Songwriter John Darnielle on risk:
The canary in the mine saves you from what killed the canary when you released it into the mine, but you also don’t get to see the inside of the mine. That’s the trade-off.
Journalist Gary Sernovitz on units of currency:
For [Citadel CEO Ken Griffin], half a billion dollars is a basic unit of currency. He spent that much for twenty-seven acres in Palm Beach; for the joint purchase of a Jackson Pollock and a Willem de Kooning; in gifts to Harvard; and in political contributions, mostly to conservative candidates. He dropped a mere forty-five million on a stegosaurus skeleton, called Apex, which is now on loan to the American Museum of Natural History (though “the dream,” Griffin told me, “is one day she’ll be in Miami”).
Birder Stan Tekiela on the Brown Thrasher:
A prodigious songster. The male Brown Thrasher has the largest documented repertoire of all North American songbirds, with more than 1,100 types of songs.