Morra Aarons-Mele knows that taking your mental health seriously is a leadership strength. She launched and hosts The Anxious Achiever podcast for LinkedIn Presents, which was a 2020 Webby Awards Honoree, 2022 “Best Commute Podcast” Signal Award winner, and is frequently a top 10 management podcast and top 50 business podcast. She's passionate about helping people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their success. Morra speaks and consults frequently with Fortune 500 companies, startups, and U.S Government agencies. She is a 2022 LinkedIn "Top 10 Voice" in mental health.
In addition to her work in workplace mental health, Aarons-Mele founded the award-winning social impact agency Women Online and created its database of female influencers, the Mission List, which she sold in 2021. Morra was named 2020 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Iris Awards, created to recognize excellence among digital content creators. Before starting her own business, Morra founded the digital public affairs team at Edelman, where she worked with Fortune 50 clients, and previously worked in marketing for several internet startups. She has worked on 3 U.S Presidential Campaigns.
You just had a book come out. Can you tell us about the book?
The Anxious Achiever is a leadership toolkit for anyone who worries that anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges are preventing them from having the big career they want. There is much shame and stigma around discussing mental health at work, and anxiety is conflated with weakness. But actually the opposite is true: leaders who understand how their anxiety shows up at work are stronger, more self-aware, and much better to work for.
What drove you to write this book now?
I wrote this book because my own anxiety propels me forward but it’s painful and sometimes all-consuming. I’ve devoted four years to researching and interviewing hundreds of leading clinicians, researchers, and leaders to figure out how to build a career that isn’t ruled by my anxiety. There are many out there like me. I call us anxious achievers.
Anxious achievers are goal-oriented, future-oriented, and prized team members because we go the extra mile, and nothing less will do. We create extraordinary outcomes because we are driven to always excel and succeed at any challenge we set for ourselves.
But we pay a price. Anxiety takes a toll on our mental health, our relationships, and our joy.
Here’s the thing: Anxiety is an emotion. It is not an uncontrollable external threat but an internal state you can manage and learn from. You can even view your anxiety as a loyal partner in leadership. Anxiety isn’t an excuse. It’s an opportunity to become strong.
When you understand your anxiety and learn how to leverage it, you develop a leadership superpower. It may not feel like it now, but anxiety can enhance your leadership, ambition, creativity, empathy, communication, and vision. When you’re attuned to your emotions, you become a self-aware, conscious, and thoughtful leader.
What advice do you offer for leaders?
What if instead of habitually acting out your anxiety with a late night at work, endless scrolling on social media, or a Snickers bar, you took a moment and asked your anxiety, “What are you trying to tell me? Why does this person’s name in my inbox make me feel so much dread? Why does that upcoming meeting make me want a shot of vodka?” Reflection is where your anxiety can be an ally. It can provide key information that’s not available to you any other way. You can see anxiety in a new way—as neither good nor bad, but rather existing on a spectrum of unmanageable, manageable, and even helpful. But this might require discarding long-held beliefs of what strength, power, and success look like.
Most of us act out our anxieties mindlessly, with reactions that don’t serve us or the people around us. This isn’t anxiety’s fault. Anxiety, itself, is good data. It can push us to check in and change things, and it can even bring extra drive, energy, and focus. But we need to shift from mindlessly reacting to more thoughtfully responding.
This is really about taking power back from our automatic responses and learned behaviors, and then with full awareness, learning how to make the best decisions for ourselves and our organizations. The best leaders understand how anxiety drives their behavior, and develop the skills to manage their own reactions while understanding what motivates their team’s actions.
Can you talk about your path here? You sold a company, started an HBR podcast, and now….
Although I always wrote, blogged and podcasted on the side, I owned a small business for many years and sold it in May 2021. I knew it was time for me to try to make my living from the work that I loved so much: helping organizations and leaders create better workplace mental health. It’s been a really risky thing to do especially in my mid 40s with three kids. But I’ve given myself a year to prove the model. I think, as we get older, we can still take risks, we just need to plan for them a little bit better! I’m having the time of my life and I absolutely love this work.
Who are women you admire?
I greatly admire Susan David, PhD. she is a psychologist and leader and coach who helps people understand how their emotions are showing up. She is an incredibly positive person who isn’t afraid of the darker emotions all humans have!
What do you think are under-noticed trends impacting women in the C-suite?
Being a leader has gotten so much harder the past 3 years. Many leaders carry emotions for their teams..it’s very exhausting. We take on our teams’ anxieties and burdens, without protecting our own boundaries.
What’s the number one skill that contributed to your ability to ascend to a leadership position?
My willingness to bounce back from rejection!
What is one way anxious leaders can re-think networking?
Religiously Follow the “Ten touches” Rule.
My husband, an experienced entrepreneur, taught me this one. Every week, reach out and connect with ten people in your network: past clients, colleagues, friends, mentors. It can be virtual, it can be a phone call, a lunch, a coffee, even a Facebook message. Just do it.
Keep a chart and make your “ten list” every Sunday night or Monday morning. If you finish it by Wednesday, give yourself a treat (I let myself watch a show on Netflix….during the work day).
If it feels challenging to come up with the ten touches each week, then you need to do some work upfront on developing your Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM.
My husband Nicco Mele is my coach for thinking strategically about biz dev tactics. I interviewed him and his mentor, Michael Ansara, to learn more about a philosophy of business development very much in keeping with my hermit mindset but also one that is generous and expansive and above all, not about selling.
Nicco has owned a small business for over 12 years. As the company grew, the team considered how much to invest in sales and marketing: maybe hire a PR firm or develop sales collateral or host events. Before they made a decision he tried to figure out what made the business come in and go out.
“And it was pretty clear, after a certain extent of analysis that my relationships with people and the amount of relational activity I had in a week had a direct impact on how much business came in. So I formulated a rough rule that I had to reach out to ten people a week. Not replies, not current clients… but to check-on with ten people a week. Maybe the exchange is an email, maybe it’s a phone call, maybe it’s lunch or dinner or coffee- maybe it’s sending them a book or an interesting article, but ten kind-of picks at random from my rolodex. And it very rarely leads directly to business. But, you know, I’ll call someone, say I’ll call you, Morra and say “Hey I was thinking about you and I noticed on Facebook it was this, that, the other, your cat’s birthday.” And you hang up and you think, oh that was a great talk with Nicco. And the next day you’re having lunch with someone and that person says, “I really am looking for someone to help me with x, y, or z.” And I’m top of mind.
And I think that selling business in a world that’s kind-of chalk full of sales marketing messages, you know there are different strategies, but mine certainly is always relational. It’s about relationship. It’s also about being kind-of being top of mind and frequency and recent-cy of contact.
I asked Nicco, ‘how do you come up with the ten people every week? That sounds stressful.’
“Honestly, what I used to do is I just used to go through my LinkedIn. Or two ways: One is I would go through my LinkedIn and say, “Oh I haven’t talked to so-and-so in a while”. Or I just pay attention to Facebook and to email and to LinkedIn and look for people doing something interesting or something I want to talk about or learn more about. Maybe somebody just changed jobs. Maybe somebody is about to leave a job. It used to be easier to do in some ways than it is now-although you can do a lot of it on LinkedIn. Because you know, whatever industry you’re in, the industry association would have a publication, which would print notices of job changes, promotions, etc. Now you kind-of have to use LinkedIn to do that and it’s really dependent on people updating their LinkedIn.
Here’s the thing: Nicco is naturally an extrovert and he is a super connector. He loves nothing better than a good cocktail party. It’s actually amazing we’re still married because I never go out and he would love to be out every night.
Part of it is just playing toward my natural strengths. I like talking to people… I like relationships, and I get excited by talking to people- lots of people. So, reaching out to a lot of different people was playing to my strengths. And if I could formalize it- not formalize it in a rigid sense, but formalize it in a practice or discipline sense, I could make it a formal habit of mine. I could see that it would be good for my business.
This method doesn't just work for small business owners. Silicon Valley entrepreneur and power saleswoman Joanna Bloor noted a Senior Vice President at a tech company in San Francisco whose sales team had a target of over $200 million per year. This leader worked four days a week. She had figured out that if she made the requisite number of contacts and dates Monday-Thursday, she’d meet her sales goals and be able to take Fridays off.
Your network of past clients is an incredible relationship network, and you must tend it like a garden. Relationships from past jobs, past schooling, industry events and even kindred spirits is the garden from which your business will grow. Instead of looking ahead, look back and think about those customers who you did a really great job with. Same for past bosses or colleagues.
Review those contacts, consolidate them and develop a CRM. Message them with love, respect, and great stuff (share great examples of how various entrepreneurs do this). Still, this might only generate a certain amount of revenue. You need to make sure your network is broad enough. To do this in the hermit fashion, it’s crucial to develop great online networks.
One of my favorite hermit networking disciplines is to offer people jobs. If I see a really good job come through on one of my networks, I’ll think of five people who I could say, “Oh wow this sounds great, are you looking for anyone?” and send it around. It feels great, is great, and helps keep you top of mind.
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