Anxiety

THE TENSION

Anxiety. It rarely arrives as panic. More often it runs as a low, persistent hum - a background process that consumes cognitive capacity without ever fully declaring itself. For technical leaders, whose roles trade in precision and consequence, anxiety has plenty to attach itself to.

“When anxiety is running the background process, it is making decisions before you are.”

THE SCENARIO

Anika Mercer has been Location Information Team Lead at Landgate in Western Australia for eight months. Her team curates and distributes the state’s authoritative land and property location datasets - data that flows into government decisions, commercial transactions, and emergency services. The stakes are genuine and Anika knows it.

On paper, her team is performing well. Deliverables are on time. The quality metrics are clean. Her manager has no concerns.

Inside Anika’s working week, it is a different experience. She checks outputs that have already been checked. She re-reads emails before sending them, then re-reads them after. She arrives early to set things up before the team arrives and stays late to review what the day produced. She has twice postponed a decision about a new data partnership because she wants to be certain before she commits - and certainty keeps not quite arriving.

In last week’s team meeting, her analyst Petra raised a proposed change to the metadata schema. It was a reasonable, well-considered suggestion. Anika said she’d think about it. She’s been thinking about it since.

The team is starting to read the pattern. Decisions that should be made in a meeting are deferred. Suggestions that deserve a response sit in a holding pattern. The team’s energy, gradually, is tilting toward waiting rather than acting.

Anika is not struggling. She is functioning. But anxiety is occupying the space where her leadership could be.

WHAT’S DRIVING IT?

Anxiety, in the Being Framework, impacts the anticipation, uncertainty, and perceived risk associated with future situations. It fuels the constant prediction of potential consequences - and for a technically trained mind, consequence-mapping is a well-developed skill that anxiety can easily co-opt.

Anika’s vigilance is not irrational. The datasets her team manages matter. The consequences of errors are real. But there is a difference between appropriate diligence and the kind of anxiety that prevents decisions from being made, delays responses that are ready, and quietly teaches a team that the leader is not confident enough to move without checking twice.

Anxiety in leadership has a particular cost: it is contagious. When a team lead consistently holds back, defers, and revisits, the team begins to calibrate to that pace. The low hum becomes the culture.

A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH ANXIETY

A healthy relationship with anxiety means that although certain situations cause you to experience nervousness or unease about the future, you are still able to make appropriate decisions and take effective action. Rather than being paralysed by the anticipation of what might go wrong, you allow anxiety to make you attentive and prepared - and then you act anyway.

In practice, this looks like Anika responding to Petra’s schema proposal in the meeting, with a considered but timely response. It looks like the data partnership decision being made with the information available rather than the information that might eventually arrive. It looks like a team that experiences their leader as someone who can move forward even when the future is not fully resolved - which, in complex technical environments, it never fully is.

REFLECTION PROMPTS

• What decisions have you been deferring this month in the name of needing more information - and how much of that is genuinely about the information?

• What does your team’s pace and initiative tell you about the permission they feel to act without your explicit sign-off?

• Where in your working week is anxiety functioning as a background process rather than a genuine signal worth responding to?

• What would it look like to make one decision this week that you’ve been holding, with the information you already have?

If the low hum is something you recognise - in yourself, or in the pace of your team -

The Being Profile maps how anxiety operates in your leadership pattern: where it is useful, where it is costly, and what becomes available when you are genuinely with it rather than managed by it.

Get in touch at hello@mappingbeing.com.au

While the organisations referenced exist, the team lead, other people and the team name have been used for demonstration purposes only. Any resemblance to real-life people, teams, organisations or situations is purely coincidental.

Reference: Tashvir, A. (2021). BEING (p. 224). Engenesis Publications.

[Published: 13 July 2026]