Don’t Volunteer to Bother Other People If You Can Avoid It.
You have enough of everything that happens in your life. Your bills, your job, your relationships, and your insecurities create a lot of anxiety for you. So don’t make your anxiety worse by taking on the worry that other people are trying to blame on you.
As designer Mike Monteiro explains in his book Dear Student Design, anxiety is conductive. If someone is worried about a problem, he wants to make it another problem. Sharing anxiety confirms this feeling and helps to relieve oneself of this burden. For example, if your client is concerned about a deadline, they may want to convey that concern to you. If you are worried about it too, you will pay more attention to it, or at least make them feel better about being worried. Except that this kind of endured anxiety often makes the situation worse and does not lead to good productivity:
When dealing with an anxious client, the trick is twofold. First, stay calm. Otherwise, nothing good will come of it. You are the expert hired by this person. Behave like this. Imagine cutting your finger while cutting a bagel. Are you worried. You wrap it all up. You go to the emergency room. You want your doctor to scream when he sees it, or look at it and say very calmly, “Let’s take care of this.” Be a calm doctor.
Of course, an alarm is not a switch that you can simply turn off . The reason anxiety loves to pass from one person to another is because it is effective. If someone you work with panics, you too can easily succumb to it. However, if you can remind yourself that some of your worry actually belongs to someone else – and therefore you can let it go and just focus on the problem – you may be able to lessen your own.
Stop Taking Others’ Anxiety | Dear design student