Entrepreneurship and anxiety go hand in hand. You can’t separate them. Though I tried.
I spent the majority of my early adult life trying to run from anxiety. I was scared about feeling scared.
My first job was putting cheese on shelves in a big supermarket. It felt perfect at the time, because it was almost impossible to fuck up. And I was horrifically anxious about fucking up.
Throughout my professional life, I used my considerable intelligence to avoid things that scared me. I turned down promotions, I dodged taking on more responsibility, and I tried to stick to stuff I knew I could do.
Anxiety was something I felt but didn’t want.
It was also something I considered a dysfunction.
“People who are successful, and have their shit together, and are talented don’t get anxious. Anxiety is for people who get burn out or panic attacks.”
And then I started getting panic attacks.
It started right around the time I quit my last corporate job, nearly four years ago now. It scared the shit out of me the first time it happened – an intense pain across my diaphragm and solar plexus. 30 minutes where I struggled to breathe and keep my head above the panic.
There was nothing in particular that would seem to trigger them. One would just erupt, and I’d try and ride it out. When I started getting woken up by them in the middle of the night, I got really scared.
Something had to shift.
I got interested in anxiety
Even as an entrepreneur, I’ve spent considerable time and energy avoiding things I felt anxious about.
It’s why I liked being the marketing guy. I could hide behind the scenes, and construct powerful strategies and funnels, without having to actually face people.
My anxiety hit new levels during a hugely challenging, yet ultimately transformational period where I started asking the most powerful question I know.
My relationship had fallen apart, my work was a mess, and I was living back in England with my parents at the age of 32.
Things were not going well.
I felt stuck in a loop. Desperately wanting to quit the start-up I’d co-founded, but having no idea how on earth I could earn money without it. I’d churn it round and round in my mind, day after day.
The anxiety levels in my body were so high that I started meditating every day, simply to allow myself to function. I’d go on long daily walks in the woods or fields, caressing myself through panic and hopelessness.
It was during this period that I started to actually get interested in anxiety.
Anxiety comes in two (very different) varieties
It was last year that I got interested in work of the amazingly pioneering, yet frighteningly under-celebrated business philosopher Peter Koestenbaulm.
His work is quite unlike anything else I’ve read, and was a huge inspiration to me while I teased out my early ideas for The Realized Entrepreneur.
In a freakishly synchronous moment, I discovered that one of my clients had been a student of Dr. K (as she called him). During a work week with her in Colorado, I found myself thumbing through an old out of print book by Dr. K that she’d lent me.
I came across a distinction that has utterly fascinated me ever since. He said there are two kinds of anxiety.
One is dysfunctional. One is not.
One is inevitable. One is not.
Neurotic Anxiety
“Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.” – Seth Godin
Neurotic anxiety is simply a poor use of the human mind.
As human beings we have a quite remarkable gift. We can imagine the future. We can imagine possibility. Neurotic anxiety is taking that gift, and using it to envision futures that we really don’t want.
“But if I publish this thing, what happens if no-one at all likes it? What if it doesn’t work? And I discover I’m actually talentless, and a fraud, and I have to go back to stacking cheese on shelves for the rest of my life, and die, miserable and alone…?”
Neurotic anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.
The failure hasn’t even happened yet. Yet you’re already imagining it, and visualizing it, and expecting it.
But your nervous system can’t tell the difference between your neurotic dragon, or a real tiger in front of you. The sensations in your body are the same.
It’s an insidious habit. It’s a destructive habit. It’s a useless habit. It’s a warped and kinked experience of the true nature of anxiety.
Existential Anxiety
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” – Soren Kierkegaard
Or to put it another way. Anxiety is the feeling of the unknown. Anxiety is what you experience when you step into something you don’t know.
The feeling in my nervous system is exactly the same, whether the anxiety is neurotic or existential. In other words, my body is hard wired to feel anxiety when faced with something I can’t predict, and something important is on the line.
Anxiety is not an emotion. It’s a condition. It is the natural condition of a human being
It’s the condition of aliveness, and being faced with a level of freedom that no other being we know about has access to. It’s the condition of having our feet on earth, our head in heaven, and the consciousness to notice.
Are you scared of your own freedom?
You are. It’s hardwired. When faced with the possibility of greater freedom, wider awareness, larger wealth, we’re built to pull back. Is it safe? We get dizzy, like vertigo.
Anxiety is just the feeling of unexpressed creative potential. Anxiety is the jittery pulsing of a manifesting force, yet to be uncovered. Anxiety is the consequence of not daring to grasp the latent power we carry.
Anxiety is the material from which the road of growth is made. Anxiety is the excess energy that you haven’t yet learned to conduct. Anxiety is the inevitable consequence of creating something that didn’t exist before.
It’s not something to be avoided.
It’s not even something to be tolerated.
Anxiety is something to be sought out, like the bread crumbs of God, leading us deeper into the magnificence that we are.