LibraryPatternsGetting PromotedAnxiety about work performance leading to avoidance o…
Problem
Toward Leadership

Anxiety about work performance leading to avoidance or paralysis

Part of the pattern: Getting Promoted
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The path forward
  1. 1Name the anxiety directly
  2. 2Take one small action despite it
  3. 3Build tolerance gradually
One thing to try this week
Identify what you are most afraid will happen if you fail at work
Related problems
A large part of how I see myself comes from the name of where I work — its prestige is borrowed into my own identity. It means I cling to a job partly for the badge, and the thought of leaving the name frightens me more than leaving the work.After being inside, I don't know who I am on the outside or whether I get a real second chance.After time away from work, I feel like I've lost my edge and everyone's passed me by.After time out — for children, illness, or a pause — I have come back to work without the identity I left with. The world moved on, my old confidence is gone, and I am not sure who I am professionally anymore now that I am returning.As I have become more successful, the people around me treat me differently — more deference, more distance, more assumptions about who I now am. I have what I worked for, and I feel oddly more alone inside it than I expected.As younger, fresher people rise around me, I feel myself quietly becoming obsolete — their tools, their references, their ease all reminders that the field is moving past the version of me that mastered it. My identity was built on being current, and I no longer am.

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