What I've learned from 2 workplace anxiety attacks

I thought I was having a heart attack.

It was one of the scariest moments in my life, and it was all because of my startup. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you may have heard some of the story but today, I’m sharing it all.

There are a lot of lessons for founders and leaders alike in this tale. We all adjust to pressure differently, and it’s critical to remember that when managing a stressed team member. Today I am sharing lessons learned from managing employees who have anxiety attacks, and from having one myself.

“Mental health” gets tossed around in a lot of ways that I think are actually diminishing the narrative, such as the ongoing and flaming discussion of hybrid and remote work or the pursuit for politically correctness. I’m not going there today. Instead I’m sharing two personal stories about anxiety attacks, and what I’ve learned. This is especially important for founders and leaders.

First, we flash back to an early lesson in leadership.

My first days as a manager

When I was in college, I worked my way up to be the editor of the University of Kentucky’s newspaper. We had a 40 person staff and were one of the largest daily newspapers in the state. I think I was probably a decent editor, but I was not a leader, yet. It would be years before I would get my first shot at true leadership.

Years before I founded my company, I worked for an ad agency. I had been there a few years, and we were rapidly growing. The company operated far more similar to a startup than the first traditional agency to employ me. I loved the pace, and was wholly committed to becoming a leader within the company. As we started to win more and more business, I was given chances to lead accounts. Eventually I was promoted to an Associate Creative Director, partially to prop me up for clients. That was my role when I learned the lesson below.

One of my team members was incredibly dramatic. It made them fun at first, but it led to toxic behavior behind the scenes. When they left the company, I found out they had mocked my decisions, tried to turn my team against me, and questioned the decision to promote me over them. I had my suspicions, which combined with knowing this person’s propensity to exaggerate, created a dangerous bias for me.

One day this person told me their heart was racing and they thought they were having a panic attack. I was so inexperienced, and quite frankly just so stupid, that I thought they were making it up. “Oh, your typical flair for attention” I thought (I’m embarrassed by this now, of course). They left to drive themselves to urgent care. The entire time I thought it was all for attention. I didn’t even think a panic attack was a real thing (it totally is, by the way), just a sign of weakness. I should have driven this person to urgent care if that’s what they felt they needed, but instead, I let my distaste for someone personally muddy my perception of their own awareness for their health.

One more tale—disregard for my own health

Flash forward a few years. I was still full-time at that same ad agency and was wading through turbulent waters for my startup. It was a Saturday, and at 5 am I was getting ready at my house for my first trade show for GoWild. A nasty ice storm had settled in overnight.

GoWild had launched our beta version of the app in the iOS AppStore. We still didn’t have an Android app, but we had 10K members in our community after 90 days and I was proud. I woke up early on my day off to drive 2 hours to Indianapolis & try to land our first advertising deals.

As I got ready, a few things started to compound in my head:

• This was still a side hustle

• I had a great full-time job

• My wife was very pregnant with our 2nd child

• I had security for my family

And here I was, about to put my safety at risk, driving through an ice storm for hours to try and win a deal.

As I got ready to leave the house that morning, all of this hit me at once that I was officially about to put myself out there. Once we had actual clients paying for ads, this was going to be VERY real. There would be no going back.

Entrepreneurs walk in the dark when you're building a company, knowing a ledge is coming and that eventually, you're going to take a plunge called "all in." On this morning, I could feel it coming more than ever before.

My wife slept as I got dressed. I still remember looking out of the bathroom and seeing her sleeping in the dark as my heart rate revved. Suddenly I couldn't breathe. I started sweating, and I felt like crying.

It was absolutely terrifying. I thought I was having a heart attack.

I didn’t know what to do. Instead of sneaking out quietly, I laid down next to my wife and told her what was happening. We talked for a few minutes and she gave me a few words of encouragement. After 10 minutes or so, I pulled myself together.

It was years that I realized this was a mild anxiety attack. Instead of taking care of myself, I skidded my way along the interstate for hours on black ice.

That day really turned around, though. I met with 6 companies, and I got my first advertising deal for the company, a $10,000 vote of confidence in what we were building. That success helped the anxiety dissipate.

In fact, I resigned from the ad agency a few weeks later. I was all in.

What I’ve learned

I am truly embarrassed by how I handled the first situation with the dramatic employee. I hesitated to even share this tale, but I share despite my shame because I have seen it happen with too many other leaders. If you are leading a team, I hope you will take my story to heart and learn to separate personal perceptions from an employee’s wellbeing, should you ever find yourself in this scenario.

That is only the first factor here, though. As a leader, if your team is regularly running into this kind of stress, you have to reflect upon your leadership, and most importantly the team’s culture. In my personal story, there were outside forces causing the stress for this employee.

Leaders have to accept outside forces are at play, and accommodate. Everyone who works for you faces their own set of challenges. They go through divorces, losses of family members and pets, financial strain, conflicts with their children’s schools, and this list goes on for days. Great leaders give flexibility and support to team members in these times of need.

If the stress is coming from the company, it’s critical to manage the situation. Short term stress, in my experience, is healthy and creates growth. Moments of short term hard work and tight deadlines lead to great pride in the accomplishments or even failures that follow. These moments create impactful professional growth because adversity initiates creativity. However, continued never-ending stress within teams will rot the culture from the inside out. Great leaders will see these early signs and rectify the situation.

As for my personal tale of anxiety, I want to share some advice specifically for founders. About a year into founding GoWild, another startup founder told me how the role of founder is the loneliest in a company—you never have anyone to talk to about the stress. I wrestled with that for years, but have learned this is only as true as I let it be.

Instead of bottling up my stress, I have found healthy alternatives:

• Share concerns with the team so they can help solve them

• Confide in my cofounders

• Connect with other founders

Too many founders go it alone (many do it for equity, which is short sighted). Take care of yourself.

Last week marked my fifth time back at that trade show I mentioned. We had four of us on the floor, and with the support of this team, I’m feeling better than ever before. I never would have made it if I had given up that icy morning, but at the same time, had I not learned how to deal with stress, I am certain the wheels would have fallen off years ago.

3 ways to manage anxiety as a leader

1) Take care of yourself first

No, this doesn’t mean every man for himself. It means that if you don’t have yourself together, you can’t lead. The easiest course correction here is getting yourself mentally healthy before you tackle company or teamwide culture. Take time for family. Go for a run or walk. Work out. Eat healthy. All of this matters when it comes to wellbeing and it’s all only within your control.

2) Don’t let personal perception cloud your judgment

When a team member expresses concern for their mental or physical health, don’t question their motives. Act immediately, put work aside and just be a good human first.

3) No matter your role, find support

Find confidants (if you’re in leadership this should be someone of similar stature in the company—be careful with complaining down the chain). Find someone you can talk to when stress hits—it will be therapeutic, and often will help you find new ways to tackle the situation. I like meeting up with founders from other companies—we can let it rip when it comes to the woes of leadership and walk away, hands washed of the stress of fundraising, legal work, growth, etc.

Who I’m listening to: Erik Willis (a GoWild member—discovered his music on our app)

What I’m reading: “Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer”

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