Angst

 Photo: El Caminito del Rey (BBC)

I'm a pretty anxious person.  Like many other paid up members of the "insecure overachievers" club, I spend a lot of time worrying: will the client criticise my report? Will I get poor feedback on my training?  Will my team members lose respect for me?  Will my coachee think it is all a waste of time? In fact, I sometimes wonder what I might be able to achieve if my over-fertile imagination were able to spend less time conceiving future catastrophes and more time addressing the job at hand.

This kind of anxiety is, of course, generally a bad thing - it spoils our enjoyment of our work, and it can actually make us worse at our job.  I've spent much of my career figuring out how to deal with this, and I have had some success over the years.  It's also a theme that many of my coaching clients like to talk about - particularly in the context of not feeling confident at work.

However, anxiety need not always be bad.  The existentialists were very interested in what they called "angst" (you have probably heard the phrase "existential angst").  This is not the same as the worries we face about particular problems we face in our day-to-day existence, but rather the troubling experience of being human (as I have said before, these guys are not exactly "laugh a minute"). They felt that, for example, freedom can induce fear - Sartre likens it to a kind of vertigo, where you are afraid not so much that you will fall from a cliff, but rather that you will choose to jump.  Kierkegaard too talks of the "dizziness" induced by contemplating the appalling decisions we could make.

This kind of fear, this "angst", is not particularly pleasant - and we can be very good at running away from it.  But sometimes it needs to be faced - we need to accept that we are free, and although some of the choices we could make are scary, there are others that, although risky, might shake things up and set us off in a new, exciting direction.  Coaching can help with this - but so can just spotting this kind of angst, and allowing yourself to be OK with it, at least from time to time.  As the world inevitably changes around us, embracing the terrifying yet exhilarating fact of our incredible freedom can give us energy, inspiration and creativity.