The Anxious Achiever

 Sometimes you just need a little extra inspiration to remind you how to draw the right boundaries and make sure you relationship with work remains healthy. In this bonus episode, host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with speaker, entrepreneur, and digital communications expert Erica Dhawan about the mistakes she’s made along the way, and how she works everyday towards a mentally healthy career.

Mental health seems to be all the rage in the corporate world today. But the reality is that great leaders, great creatives, and great innovators throughout time have also been likely to suffer from bouts of mental strain and illness - even if it was called something else. Historian Nancy Koehn has long studied leaders from Abraham Lincoln to Oprah Winfrey, and she shares lessons from them on how to get through depressive or anxious times - lessons she’s even applied in her own life.

Even if you don’t suffer from more generalized anxiety, money is something that causes almost everyone some stress and strain. Buffie Purselle, an entrepreneur and personal finance expert, says understanding our emotions around our finances is the first step to achieving better financial health. She speaks with host Morra Aarons-Mele about some of the most common issues around money she sees, and offers up some tips on how to combat our financially-related trauma. Purselle is the author of the new book Crawl Before You Ball: Breaking the Cycle of Generational Poverty.

A lot of us still think of mental struggles as something to push through. Or we think we need to “cure” ourselves from anxiety and that will be that. But licensed clinical psychologist and author Dr. Carissa Gustafson says there are real steps you can take to “unhook” us from anxiety. The first step for many people is accepting that distressing feelings and thoughts are part of life, which is part of the basis for acceptance and commitment therapy - or ACT. In this episode, we speak to Gustafson about some tactical approaches to accepting the discomfort, and then taking action.

Building a positive, mentally healthy workplace isn’t a one-time feat. It requires work day in and day out - which makes managing an even harder job than it used to be. In this episode, journalist Priska Neely returns to talk about how her leadership role has been going, how she’s creating positive structures for her team, the real roadblocks she still faces, and how she takes care of herself while working to take care of others.

Andy Dunn is the cofounder of Bonobos, a innovative retail company he helped start out of business school in 2007. And while the company reached incredible success, eventually being bought by Walmart, Dunn faced intense mental health struggles behind the scenes. Struggles that came to a head when he woke up in a psychiatric emergency room in New York City. He’s the author of a new book, and shares his story with host Morra Aarons-Mele.

For many of us, anxiety is about the day to day - whether that’s from social interaction, managing all of our work, or a more serious disorder we might be struggling with. But what about what the problem is big - like, really big? In today’s episode, we speak to Kyle Empringham, co-founder of The Starfish Canada, about his own journey to his non-profit work, which celebrates and supports youth activists. And also about climate anxiety - the feeling that more and more individuals are struggling with when faced with existential threats.

So many of us experience imposter syndrome - the idea that you feel like a fraud in your job; that you’re faking it until you make it and that any minute now, people will be able to see through it. The problem can be especially hard for high achievers. In this episode, psychologist Lisa Orbe-Austin explains what her research has shown about what we can do to eradicate these kinds of feelings.

So many people struggle with mental health issues in part because, unlike many physical ailments, you can’t always know that someone is suffering, or just how badly. In this episode we dive in with reigning Miss America Emma Broyles, the first Korean-American and first Alaskan to win the crown. While many people assume winning the crown comes with a certain amount of perfection, Broyles is breaking down those barriers by speaking openly about her ADHD and a rare obsessive compulsive disorder she battles.

Today’s guest is someone who experienced the racism in the corporate world. After years of constantly being triggered at work, she had enough, and walked away. She discusses how to heal after work breaks your heart.Minda Harts is an author, an equity advocate, and the CEO of The Memo LLC, a career development platform for women of color. And she speaks to host Morra Aarons-Mele about the kind of experiences she had at work, and how she now spends her days helping others.