When I’m working with individuals on helping them overcome their mental health challenges, I often tell them that it’s okay if doing something healthy makes them feel anxious, to just do it anyway. And that’s also something that successful businesses learn as well, especially entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter whether you like doing something or don’t like doing something, if it’s one of the actions that’s going to make your company healthy, you have to do it.

It’s difficult to see what those healthy actions are when you’re stuck in your own head. It’s always so easy to think up reasons why you shouldn’t do the things that make you nervous. So get outside of your head and let your customer show you what you have to do.

Doing a series of customer-centered business design exercises can show you what your business has to do to connect with your customer. The Customer Portrait exercise is one of my favourites because it consistently provides so many useful insights to organizations by making their customers real. The moment your customer becomes a real person, it’s very difficult to convince yourself that they’ll behave in the way you want them to. As a business, you have to behave the way your customer wants you to. When you’re an entrepreneur, that can be frightening sometimes because, as an individual, you’ll have to change your behaviors for the sake of your company. Whether it’s calling up a 1000 people and getting rejected by 999 of them, giving up some control of your company so you can get the funds you need to reach your market, admitting your customer doesn’t like your favorite idea, or whatever your fears might be–creating a healthy business is going to require you to throw yourself into your fears.

What’s great about doing the Customer Portrait exercise is that it can give you the confidence to make personal changes to tackle your fears. Personal change takes a lot of energy but if you know you need to make some changes in yourself to meet your customers’ needs, and you’re committed to making your business succeed, those changes are going to be easier to stick bring into reality.

Here’s how you do the Customer Portrait exercise:

1. Get 20 photographs of people’s faces. Make sure it’s a diverse group. Spread them out on a table.
2. Each participant selects one picture out of the pile and tells a story about why he/she is NOT your customer. Repeat this step at least once.
3. Each participant selects one picture out of the pile and tells a story about why he/she IS your customer.
4. Each participant takes the photograph they selected and tapes it to a large sheet of white paper.
5. On the white sheet of paper, list characteristics of your customer. The characteristics you should focus on will vary depending on what your product/service is. For instance, if you’re building a website, list their favourite websites. If you’re creating a product, list their favourite products. Adapt the exercise to your business and remember to keep things as specific as possible. No adjectives! Here are some things you might want to include:
   • Name, age, location, income, education, etc.
   • What websites do they use every day?
   • What specific tasks do they enjoy doing?
   • What specific tasks do they hate doing?
   • What are their interests/hobbies?
   • If they had 30 minutes free, what would they do?
   • What are they good at?
   • What are they bad at?
   • What kind of news article would interest them?
   • What are their favourite things?
   • What would they spend $20 on?
   • What motivates them?
   • What are their values?
6. Each participant presents their Customer Portraits. Look for commonalities and discuss new insights that emerge. What assumptions are you going to have to discard? How can you make your branding reflect the aesthetic style that your customer likes? Where are you going to be able to engage your customer? If you have somebody facilitating the session, they can help the group synthesize a Customer Portrait and drill down to specifics. Place that Customer Portrait wherever you do your work and let that customer guide your decision making. When you build anything, ask yourself what that customer needs you to do. And then just do it. It doesn’t matter what you think, it matters what your customer thinks.

That ad pictured above for the book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, suggests that avoiding people is just part of being quiet. Actually, crossing the road because you don’t want to make small talk with somebody is an anxiety disorder symptom. Reacting to that anxiety will only make you experience more anxiety in the future, along with all of the depression, regret, and other co-morbid unpleasantness that goes along with feeding compulsions.

Quiet makes an argument for businesses leveraging the power of quiet superheroes but it makes some missteps in not having a clear understanding of the difference between quiet and anxious. And that’s a big difference. Catering to the introverts in your organization will deliver dividends, but encouraging anxiety disorders will lead to projects falling apart and employees on long-term sick leave.

Back when I struggled with anxiety disorders, I also thought it was a good idea to avoid crossing the street so I didn’t get caught up in small talk. And I had tons of reasons, too: It feels uncomfortable. What if she remembers I didn’t respond to her last email? I feel awkward telling him I don’t have time to chat. He probably doesn’t like me, anyway. I probably don’t like him, anyway. Do I even remember her name? And so on.

That is not introversion. That is just pure and simple social anxiety. It’s a reaction to an uncertainty. When we struggle with an anxiety disorder we believe so firmly in our reasons for avoiding human contact but always feel terrible later about being lonely and unable to connect or relate to people. It took me decades to see the connection. I was desperate for relationships but would compulsively invent reasons to not engage with others for fear of messing it up or it not turning out “right”. And the less I engaged with people, the more difficult and fearsome it became. And that only made me more desperate for it, which only seemed to make the excuses louder: “I’m not a people person. I need my alone time. I’m intelligent–I’ve got important things to think about. I’m good at thinking. I’m good at analyzing.” I wrongly assumed that being friendly would somehow compromise my intellectual abilities. This is a common, false connection that people with anxiety disorders make–when we’re trapped in the cage of our anxiety disorders, we believe that our compulsion imbue us with superhuman abilities. They don’t. You can get rid of all of your compulsions and instead of losing yourself, what you actually find is that you’re finally able to be yourself. Whatever you thought you excelled at before, you end up being ten times better at when you’re not devoting all of your time and energy to compulsions, anxiety, and regret.

What that ad for Quiet is describing is not somebody who is quiet, but somebody desperate to be loud that has muffled her true self by stuffing fear down her throat. And that’s a big problem for organizations. Encouraging that muffling is going to cause your business to lose out on great ideas. The gap between who she knows she is and who she is acting as in public will eventually become so enormous that most of her energy will be devoted to maintaining the bridge across that gap she’s constantly having to cross between those two selves. Eventually you’ll lose that employee. He’s desperate to connect with others so if your company encourages the anxious compulsions that are preventing him from connecting with others, eventually he’ll leave. He’ll say they didn’t like the people there, that it wasn’t a good fit, that they just didn’t click. But all of that was preventable.

Build a healthy approach to anxiety among your employees and colleagues. If somebody at work is uncomfortable and anxious about something, don’t take that as a sign to avoid something. That anxiety is a symptom, not a cause. It’s a sign-post pointing to a larger issue. Understand what’s at the root of that anxiety and help your employees to accept and move through it. You’ll have healthier employees and a healthier organization.

When it comes to avoiding anxiety triggers, approach them in the same way you would if you had a physical injury: understand what’s causing the pain and stop that, do specific exercises to recover from the injury, and then gradually but consistently reintroduce the trigger, learning to embrace it in a healthy way so you don’t run into the same problems again in the future.

Whether you’re lifting heavy weights in the gym, or lifting heavy weights in your everyday life on the path to recovery, may those weights get heavier and you get stronger in the new year.

Happy New Year!

- Mark

This slide deck contains some great ideas on leading your team after something goes terribly wrong. The workplace often becomes a hotbed of unhealthy controlling and coping behaviors driven by anxiety, and when something goes wrong, those behaviors are going to escalate as each team member tries to avoid feeling bad. It really helps in a situation like that to acknowledge the feelings that are going to emerge, make fun of them, and move on to finding and fixing systemic problems. And you look for systemic problems (whether it’s dealing with changes at work or changes in your own life) because you have to plan for a future when you’re going to be as stupid as you are today.

It really is the Swiss-army knife of lessons. Take it everywhere. Use it on everything.

I love saying Corpus Callosum out-loud. It sounds like the name of a gladiator arena or a gigantic cyclops. But it actually means “tough body” and it’s the bundle of brain fibres that connects the two hemispheres of your brain. If you chopped open your skull and stuck a finger between the two hemispheres of your brain, you could easily push all of the way down until you hit the corpus callosum. But that would be gross so don’t try that at home.

The corpus callosum is the bridge that facilitates communication between the two hemispheres. So when you see a written word in your left field of vision (if you’re right-handed), the trolls on the right side of your brain (which processes your left field of vision), quickly run that word down to the corpus callosum to transfer it over to the left side of your brain where you do language processing.

This back and forth is going on all of the time across the 225 million axons (give or take a couple million) bundled into the corpus callosum. If we didn’t have it, we’d only be able to consciously read, for instance, with the right field of our vision. These male birds, for instance, because they lack the corpus callosum, can only check out girl birds (or male birds if they’re so inclined) with one eye: “One-eyed Wooing”. But, on the positive side, we might be able to stay up indefinitely. A component of what enables dolphins to put one side of their brain to sleep while they other watches for sharks might be because they tend to have a narrow or even non-existent corpus callosum: “How Dolphins Stay Awake for Two Weeks Straight”

I said “consciously read” back there because your brain knows way more than you know. So just because something goes in one hemisphere and doesn’t make it across the corpus callosum to the part of your brain that normally processes it, doesn’t mean you don’t “know” it. But this is going to fry whatever you thought you knew about “knowing”:

When neuroscientist Michael Gazzinaga was a grad student, he was involved in studies on patients who had received a corpus calloscopy—when the corpus callosum is severed to help prevent seizures. Researchers would show a picture to the right hemisphere of the brain only, and then ask the patient what he saw. But because the picture of the bicycle never made it to the left side of the brain where the word for bicycle was, the patient would say that he saw: “Nothing”. However, the researchers found that the patient could use his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) to draw the bicycle. Half of his brain knew what he’d seen and could use half of his body to express that. Learn more about that research in this fascinating New York Times article on Dr. Gazzinaga: “Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony”.

Your corpus callosum is doing a lot of work to help prop up the illusion that you have a unified self up in that brain of yours. Let’s hope it keeps up the good work.

Sometimes it’s valuable to deal with symptoms so you can then free yourself up to tackle your real problems. But when it comes to recovering from a mental illness, focusing only on the symptoms can cause you to keep on feeding the problem and engaging in lots of unhealthy behaviors that only make the illness worse over the long-term.

If you’ve got a lion on your back gnawing away, and it’s causing you lots of pain, don’t just take something to get rid of the pain and then ignore the lion—it’ll keep on eating until there’s nothing left.