4 Ways to Cope with Meeting Anxiety
It's hard to feel your own feelings in a tricky meeting. But it may be even harder to know what to do with other people's hopes and fears.
Welcome to a biweekly post about small, good shifts to help you and your coworkers thrive. Let’s talk about dealing with meetings you dread.
I’d been fearing the meeting for months. To make bad matters worse, as I pushed my bike out into traffic, the skies opened, and a heavy rain fell. Most days, I like being a cycling commuter. But on this day, as I pedaled through the downpour, I was thinking about the fiercely air-conditioned conference room where my socks would be squishy and my coworker’s feelings would be intense.
Whether you’re the kind of person who shakes your fist at the sky or the kind of person who just ducks your head down, you’ll find that, in a tough meeting, other people’s emotions can be just as hard to cope with as your own.
It’s hard to keep your soul intact when you’re sloshing through the world with lots of worried humans.
Photo by Matt Mutlu on Unsplash
Regular readers of this newsletter know my goal is to suss out behavior shifts to help you and your coworkers thrive in the workplace. So if you’re dreading an upcoming meeting, I have good news: canny professionals like you can activate a mode/switch worth making.
Here are four practices to get you there:
Practice 1: Brace for Affect
Isn’t that like what the airplane pilots say in movies like Sully? “Brace for impact!” But the impact you’ll face in meetings is affect. It’s important, as you walk into a tricky meeting, simply to prepare yourself for a lot of energy and pressure in the room.
You notice, I’m not yet talking about bracing for emotions—like dread or anxiety or resignation. I’m talking about bracing for affect. What’s the difference?
Emotions are sensations you can tag. I feel afraid. I feel mad. I feel disappointed in my supposedly rainproof pants.
Affect is an indeterminate force, an unnamed energy in the room. It feels like humidity. Or static electricity. Or barometric pressure. It makes you feel restless, like yesterday’s caffeine did this morning at 2:45.
I recommend you brace for affect, because it’s likely to be overwhelming. You may find yourself thinking, “I just wanna get out of here!”
The good news is that because it’s affect and not yet emotion, it’s remarkably changeable. You can redirect it in a way that’s good for you and for the team.
What’s that like? You know when you feel nervous about a public presentation and you tell yourself that all the surplus energy you feel isn’t stage fright; it’s excitement. You really want to give this speech! When you say things like that to yourself, you’re redirecting affect. You can do that sort of magic in a meeting, too.
So, brace for affect, and let your heart take courage. The affect is re-directable.
Practice 2: Speak What You Feel
In the meeting I was dreading, I think I was hoping that nobody noticed me so that I and my non-wicking shirt could dry in peace. But then, a colleague came up and sat down next to me. It was a good thing she did, because as we talked, I found the gumption to tell her I was feeling anxious and avoidant. I followed Edgar’s advice in King Lear: “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” And it helped.
Usually, I go into Stoic Mode: keep the chin up and the upper lip stiff. Pretend to be apart from everything and above everything. You may go into Soldier Mode instead: fear provokes you to tighten your fists and glare.
I don’t think it matters whether we’re avoidant or aggressive. What matters, in a tricky meeting, is that you tell the truth to yourself and to others about what you’re feeling. It can take some grace, let me tell you.
Why does being emotionally articulate matter in a difficult meeting? It’s worth paying attention to your feelings, because they clarify your values. As Martha Nussbaum points out in Upheavals in Thought, emotions are often judgments about what matters.
If it weren’t for your big feelings, you might not notice just how much you care about this policy or those processes or that person.
Practice 3: Wade the Room
The usual advice is “read the room,” right? But wading the room might be just as vital.
A few minutes into this meeting, as my sogginess had started to dissipate, another colleague came and sat next to me, this time on my left. As the meeting got underway, I noticed my coworker’s agitation, his constant shifting, his heavy sighs.
It suddenly occurred to me that he’d been involved in the decision-making that led to this meeting. And here he was, seeing the consequences working out in real time. It’s not fun to have to say, when the stakes are high, “Well, we’ll just see how this goes.”
But there’s a certain consolation in recognizing that you are, like everybody else, standing up to your waist in this meeting, like someone in waders. You’re looking for footing in the mud. You’re watching out for snapping turtles. You’re in the middle of a dynamic ecology that’s doing all sorts of things around you and to you. You have a part in it. But you’re not in charge. You’re one living thing in relation to many others.
Wading is hard. It’s much easier to stand on the dock and look around abstractly. Recognizing your clumsy, awkward, but invested place in the thick ecology of a meeting takes humility and receptivity.
Practice 4: Don’t Just Say Sh#t
I mean that literally. I have to admit that the first word I actually said in this meeting was an under-the-breath obscenity. I’m pretty sure my coworkers to my right and left both heard me hiss it.
The problem wasn’t that I said a bad word. On the Mode/Switch Pod, we’ve discussed the complex role that swearing plays at work. (You can listen to that episode here.) Sometimes swearing helps you notice how you’re really feeling about something. But in this case, it was, I think, not the communicative choice that would best help me cope with the anxiety. I think I had some other choices:
Keeping curious. Try this curiosity script: “Can you help me understand the goal that’s motivating this course of action?
Disbelieving faces. So many times, I assume I know, on the basis of a facial expression, what another person is thinking. And so often, I’m wrong.
Sharing stories. “Here’s the story my mind’s feeding me right now. Help me understand why my mind is wrong.”
Taking notes. Sometimes the simple act of scribbling on a notepad helps you engage a difficult subject and keep a needed distance.
When you’re dealing with an emotionally intense meeting, look for ways to engage the situation with effective and artful language. If you begin to spiral into loneliness, if you begin to feel a bitter sense that no one notices you or cares about your opinion, find a way to speak that.
As David Whyte says, “Your great mistake is to act the drama / as if you were alone.”
A Mode/Switch Worth Making
Surviving your next difficult meeting isn’t a matter of hiding from the emotions in the room—nor a project in using those emotions to bludgeon others. The trick is to acknowledge the presence of the feelings without exaggerating their import. (Explore this insight in a Mode/Switch Pod conversation with Geoff & Cyd Holsclaw.)
So, what’s this week’s mode/switch?
Coping with all the feelings in the meeting room invites a move from absorption to differentiation. Absorption is what I did in the rainstorm on my bike ride to the meeting: my clothes and I just slurped up everything into the sozzled mess of my body. But differentiation, as Edwin Friedman puts it, is a matter of being “a non-anxious presence, a challenging presence, a well-defined presence, and a paradoxical presence” (Failure of Nerve 230).
A non-anxious presence: you’re not surprised by all the emotions in the room. You’ve braced for affect.
A challenging presence: you’re not fusing with the emotions in the room. You speak what you feel.
A well-defined presence: you know your values; you’re committed to living them. You wade the room without becoming the room.
A paradoxical presence: your confidence might make others think you’re self-centered, but you’re actually self-differentiated. You don’t just helplessly say sh#t.
A final thought… Don’t underestimate the importance of talking with friends outside the dreaded meeting. Before I pushed my bike out and headed for my meeting that morning, I texted four of my closest friends. And they gave me advice—the very advice I’m drawing on for this week’s newsletter. Sometimes just knowing there are people outside the reach of all the room’s anxiety can help you keep your wits about you.
I’d love it if you and I and all the other Mode/Switchers could be something like that for each other. Would you be willing to share what’s gotten you through a meeting you dreaded? Put your ideas in the comments—or hit reply to this email.
Once at a party, my friend David Smith told some friends about a time he got caught in the rain walking home. His story made me laugh and led my friend Jane Zwart to write the following, which I quote, with her permission, from ONLY POEMS.
This world is made for joy
No one is denying that of this world
we have made a million joyless
things: landfills, bumpstocks,
caste. In roe, plastic gristle;
in children, lead. In case,
the suicide note.
How is it,
then, that we tarry on this side
of the ultimatum, unready
to depart this cruel world
made for joy?
Well, there’s this:
sometimes when we say in case,
what we mean is that we are bluffing
on the strength of the bees
who stuff their leg warmers
with gold dust, and sometimes
when we say hope, we mean small fry,
herring just hatched, an effervescing
pond. My claim on joy is this:
once a pediatrician asked my son
if it was his middle name.
So when I say this world
I mean wonders and I mean
signs taken for wonders, all of it.
I mean the grocer who wagged
a wet pompom of cilantro at us
like it was hyssop. You can’t tell me
that water wasn’t holy, as the water
is holy when a man not unused
to rain gets caught, biking home,
not just in rain but in more
than a downpour, when his mild
epithets turn to whooping
on his tongue. Even later, he will
not be able to tell it without
laughter, without incredulity; he will
not say cloudburst or torrent;
he will say, The heavens opened.
Sometimes they do. Sometimes
a child at three writes a note
in unproven runes and tapes
it to the sling where her infant sister
bucks. When I say hope, I mean
that when their mother asks,
the toddler reads the runes:
Cordelia, this world is made for joy.
- Jane Zwart