We live in an age of anxiety, and it is contagious. One of the most common self-defeating patterns I see in the leaders I coach is a failure to distinguish anxiety from legitimate urgency. You may be asking yourself: What’s the difference? Here’s how I define the two:
Anxiety is an emotional state — often future-focused and tied to uncertainty, worry, or fear. It can be contagious, escalating, and without clear action steps.
Legitimate Urgency is situational — grounded in the present reality. It requires timely, focused action based on facts.
It’s natural to experience anxiety when faced with legitimately urgent challenges. The problem is that all too often anxiety, in the absence of a legitimately urgent issue, hijacks our attention and spreads like wildfire.
When leaders fail to distinguish between legitimate urgency and personal/collective anxiety there are predictable consequences – individually and organizationally. Here are some of the most common outcomes:
- Chronic Stress & Burnout: Constantly reacting to perceived crises depletes mental and physical energy, leading to exhaustion.
- Poor Decision-Making: Anxiety-driven decisions tend to be impulsive, short-term fixes rather than strategic, long-term solutions. Anxiety can also lead to decision paralysis.
- Loss of Credibility: When leaders treat every issue as a fire drill, people stop taking their urgency seriously and question whether they have a clear sense of priorities.
- Reactive, Crisis-Driven Culture: Leaders who operate from a place of anxiety unintentionally spread it to others, creating a culture of fear and reactivity.
- Wasted Time & Resources: Anxiety-fueled urgency leads to misallocated attention, focusing on the wrong problems while critical issues go unaddressed.
Here are four strategies that can help if you are caught in the trap of failing to distinguish between anxiety and real urgency:
- Ask the Right Questions. There is power in simply pausing to assess what’s really going on. Stop and ask yourself the following questions.
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- What is happening right now (facts, not feelings)?
- What are the real consequences if this situation is not addressed immediately?
- Who is impacted, and what do they actually need?
- Recognize Physical and Emotional Cues. Anxiety-driven leadership is most often fueled by rumination about hypothetical scenarios, reactive decision-making to reduce uncertainty, and over-functioning (trying to control everything). In contrast, urgency-driven leadership is rooted in acceptance and clarity regarding the “realities on the ground,” focus, and the ability to prioritize and make decisions effectively. Urgency-driven leaders may feel – even acknowledge – anxiety but it does not fuel their actions.
- Learn to Regulate Before Responding. As you learn to recognize yourself in “threat” or anxiety mode , there are some simple techniques you can use to access greater calm and focus. These include taking a few deep breaths, wiggling your toes, naming your emotions to a trusted colleague, and writing down your concerns. Many more techniques can be found in my book, Standing in the Fire.
- Model Non-Anxious Presence. In his book, A Failure of Nerve, author Edwin Friedman argued that the most effective leaders are those who maintain their composure, clarity, and steadiness when others are anxious or reactive. Leaders who model a non-anxious presence are commonly seen doing the following:
- Self-regulating anxiety as described above.
- Slowing the conversation down, listening without reacting, and making space for thoughtful responses.
- Asking What happens if we don’t act right now?
- Modulating by saying This moment is tough. We will find a way through, instead of saying: This is a disaster!
- Holding healthy boundaries and resisting the impulse to make someone else’s anxiety your urgency.
As a leader, remember that calm is as contagious as anxiety. In a world that is increasingly uncertain, fast-moving, and anxiety-provoking, embracing these strategies can become your leadership superpower.
Photo Credit: John Cameron on Unsplash