The Anxious Achiever

Tim Shriver is a filmmaker, chairman of the Special Olympics, and host of the podcast Need a Lift. He’s also a member of the Kennedy clan, and has spent much of his life’s work helping to increase emotional awareness and improve the discourse around things like mental health, faith, disabilities, and more. He speaks with host Morra Aarons-Mele about the most important conversations we need to be h...

Yowei Shaw was the host of the NPR podcast Invisibilia before layoffs hit the organization. In the aftermath, she struggled with how her identity and sense of self shifted in unexpected ways. Now, she hosts the podcast Proxy with Yowei Shaw. We’ll talk about the process she went through following her layoff, how she’s recovered, and advice she’d share with others in the same situation.  Listen to...

Check out a new show we love: LinkedIn's Let's Talk Offline. Co-hosted by Gianna Prudente, LinkedIn's early career development editor, and Jamé Jackson, a LinkedIn community manager, this show seeks to answer unfiltered questions about work life, covering topics like: Setting workplace boundaries, building your personal brand, scoring your dream job, and navigating office friendships. The show aim...

Envy can drive us - but it can also drive us into a wall. It can motivate us at work, but it can make us - and the teams around us - miserable. And sometimes, envy is trying to tell us we might want a change in our own life. In this episode, we revisit a conversation with executive coach and president of PartnerExec, Nihar Chhaya, about how to recognize and reframe envy before it gets the best of...

 Laurie Ruettimann is a former human resources leader and current author and speaker on work place culture. She looks at how the overall system of capitalism is hurting us, what is broken about work, and what can be done. She shares her own journey through corporate America, despite her anti-establishment roots; how living a corporate lifestyle led to unhealthy habits and an impulsive and risky we...

A lot of us have a basic understanding of how attachment styles - secure, anxious and avoidant - affect human beings in their relationships. But we don’t often think about what they mean for work. In this episode Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Jack Hinman, who expands the definition and understanding of attachment styles and explains how they can be a superpower. Hinman is Founder and Executive Dir...

When it comes to managing our mental health as AI takes over the workplace, there’s a lot on our plate. But in a world that is also driven by systems, it’s important to think about what organizations can be, should be, and are doing to remember worker mental health in the coming years.  To wrap up our month long series on AI, mental health, and work, host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Susan Quain,...

When it comes to anxiety, the best thing we can do is figure out what is in our control and shift our energy away from the what ifs and the negative thinking. This applies when it comes to anxiety around GenAI taking our jobs as well.  In this episode, Morra Aarons-Mele speaks to two people sharing real tools to navigate today’s work landscape. We hear from author and disruptive leadership expert...

Sometimes, you have to look scary change in the eye and approach it with flexibility instead of fear. Dr. Diana Hill is a clinical psychologist and leadership coach who specializes in ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), and we speak to her this week as part of our month-long series on artificial intelligence and work.  GenAI and how it is impacting your job might be stirring up all kinds of e...

Host Morra Aarons-Mele recently spoke with Rufus Griscom on LinkedIn’s The Next Big Idea to talk about leadership. She speaks about how anxiety is an asset, resource and motivator - if you can learn to harness it the right way. And she offers up practical advice - with help from a pen, a banana, and science-baked research - on how exactly you can do that and take your leadership to the next level....

Like anxiety or depression, AI is now a constant companion for millions of people around the world. We might be benefitting from the use of AI at work, but also truly worried about what it means for our future. For the next few weeks, host Morra Aarons-Mele is exploring what AI means for our work and our mental health, from what tech giants are planning to tactics for managing uncertainty to how t...

There’s often a direct connection between how much you achieve at work, and how high you climb, and how much passion you have for your work. It’s a huge motivator, but it has a downside for those especially geared towards overachievement: burnout. Jon Jachimowicz is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and he shares what he’s learned from his study of passion, work, career longevity,...

We humans need hope! A lack of hope contributes to much to mental health struggles across the board, and that’s why it’s important to learn more about the science behind hope and how it impacts us. Hope is a skill we can all learn. In this episode, Kathryn Goetzke, founder and chairman at The Shine Hope Company, explains what she’s learned about negative thought patterns, control, depression and m...

We’ve come a long way in the last five years, but there’s so much still to be done when it comes to our working lives and our mental health. In this episode, host Morra Aarons-Mele revisits our very first episode, where she speaks with Scott Stossel. He’s a National Editor of the Atlantic magazine and author of the New York Times Best seller “My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search fo...

What if all your assumptions about people with neurodivergent conditions… were all wrong? In this episode, host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks to two people living very different lives, but who have a Tourette Syndrome diagnosis in common. First, TV presenter Aidy Smith shares how he became the only person to host a show in the UK who has Tourette Syndrome, and how he overcame obstacles to get there. Th...

The news is overwhelming, and thinking about the upcoming election makes many of us anxious. Political veterans know how to get things done in a never-ending 24 hour news cycle, and somehow stay on course when the world is spinning too fast - but it isn’t always easy.  In this episode, host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Shaniqua McClendon, Vice President of Politics for the media company Crooked....

In 2012, Michael DiSanto graduated from a prestigious university. But instead of following the path of his peers, he set out to achieve a lofty goal: make the 2016 Olympic rowing team. It was a tough decision and even tougher training process; at times he was bored, at times he wanted to give up. di Santo used anxiety and anger as powerful motivators to drive his performance as an Olympic rower. H...

Dr. Ned Hallowell has ADHD himself, and is a well-respected doctor who focuses on counseling people of all ages with similar disorders. But he’s quick to point out that the phrase deficit disorder isn’t quite right. Dr. Hallowell’s life’s work is freeing people from the stigma associated with these kinds of conditions. He explains how he thinks about this kind of neurodiversity differently (a Ferr...

Dan Ariely is a famed behavioral economist who looks at the irrational, upside-down ways that humans think and act. His recent interests include resilience - something he’s had to build up in his own life after a serious burn accident in his teens. Ariely is a professor at Duke University and the author of bestselling books like “The Upside of Irrationality.” Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks to him a...

If you fall into certain people-pleasing behaviors at work, we have news: it’s not just an individual problem. Kathleen Smith, therapist and author of the new book True to You, explains how relationships, family ghosts, and systems inform our behavior in all kinds of ways, both inside and outside of the workplace. She explains how family systems theory is a helpful frame in this context, and how p...

Just as working mothers increasingly feel pressure from all sides to achieve and be the best family members possible, expectations for fathers have shifted in recent years. But professor Brad Harrington and former TV anchor Liam Martin argue that the ecosystem of support for working fathers hasn’t been formed in the same it has for women. Brad’s research shows that working fathers increasingly fee...

Clayton Lord breaks the mold of what you might expect someone’s career to look like if they are on the autism spectrum. He’s Director of Programs at the SHRM Foundation and channels his strengths to create insight and order out of complex and messy problems. He also balances that with the fact that he isn’t always first to notice interpersonal issues at work. But he’s developed a tool kit - which...

Shirley Leung is a columnist at the Boston Globe and host of the podcast Say More, and in 2020, she hit “rock bottom.”Being stretched on all sides for years finally took its toll and she realized her work life balance needed a change. Four years later, Shirley went on a quest to better understand how to deal with and prevent burnout at work. In this episode, she talks with host Morra Aarons-Mele a...

Craig Robinson, brother of former First Lady Michelle Obama, is a basketball legend, former NBA executive, coach, and Executive Director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches. But he wasn’t always on that path: after playing basketball at Princeton, he ended up spending much of his career in finance before following his true passion. Robinson shares lessons he learned from his family,...

Starting June 5th, the Anxious Achiever is back to celebrate its tenth season. We’ll be diving into the topics and challenges you’ve asked about most: How to manage anxiety around AI and your job What is is like crafting a career while living with Tourette’s syndrome How to identify if you are a people pleaser (and how to change) Why your boss is or isn’t toxic Manage emotions through difficult si...