In last weeks’ Careers Briefing session we explored career anxiety, why it’s important, healthy, and even welcome (yes), and how to harness it as a force for good. We also made sure we could recognise the signs of anxiety when it start becoming unhelpful (in ourselves and others), and sources of support for coping with unhealthy anxiety. A few highlights from the session:
- First we defined anxiety for our purposes: a worry, concern, or fear of an unknown future
- We explored the physical sensations – recognising that these are different for everyone, and even for us depending on what we’re anxious about, and what else might be happening in our lives
- Career anxiety affects almost all of us at some point – we all have different triggers and thresholds, so it’s important to remember to be compassionate to others who may get anxious about their careers more easily than we do
- Underlying all of this is that anxiety – like all other human emotions – is a natural and important part of being human. We’ve evolved anxiety to keep us alert, remind us to take in information, be prepared, and to protect ourselves by taking appropriate action.
How can we harness anxiety to help our careers?
As an example we looked at how interviews might make us anxious. Our anxiety is telling us we need to do some work, and to tackle the fear of the unknown that interviews cause, we can:
- Prepare for the interview – increase our self-awareness, research the role and job in more detail, do practice interviews
What is the effect of this on career anxiety? Whilst we don’t know exactly what will happen at interview, by imagining what could happen and preparing for it, we’re less likely to be cause on the back foot. Enhancing our self-awareness through reflection means that we can handle unexpected questions because we have up to date knowledge of ourselves. We will have an awareness of our reactions and feelings so excitement, discomfort, confusion, enthusiasm, etc. won’t be new things that we experience and have to deal with on the spot. Being prepared helps reduce the information gaps that give rise to career anxiety and help you feel more confident with the situation.
Anxiety is an important source of information, but too often the advice is to get rid of it. If we can, we should try to embrace our anxiety to see what we can learn from it – career anxiety is normally telling us we are missing information about ourselves or about the external world.
Having said that, it IS important to recognise when anxiety is not helping us. Some signs to look for:
- When it’s chronic – we are feeling fearful and anxious on a near continuous basis
- We find we can’t control or manage it on our own
- It’s impeding our ability to make decisions or engage in normal day-to-day activities
- It’s affecting our physical health
These pages explains University and wider support you can access if you need help with your anxiety or want to be able to support peers.
The metaphor we used to help us tackle career anxiety is to think of it like standing on the bank of a river and needing to get to the other side. Trying to cross the river in one giant leap or even wade is fraught with danger. What we really need is a bridge. But even trying to build a bridge on our own is daunting. So we read, we plan, we enlist the help of others, we assemble tools, and materials, and slowly make a bridge across the river. Career anxiety is similar – when we identify what’s making us anxious, we plan, we prepare, we involved the wisdom and support of others – it become easier to bridge the gaps in information, and in this our career anxiety becomes a motivating force that keeps us going.
Bibliography
Klemanski, D.H. and Curtiss, J.E (2016) Don’t Let Anxiety Run your Life: Using the Science of Emotion Regulation & Mindfulness to Overcome Fear & Worry. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
