Overcoming Anxiety At Work With The CVI

Experiencing anxiety about your work can be a leading indicator that you are not aligned with the requirements of the role. This may seem obvious, but it goes into a deeper subject of psychometric fit than merely "I don't like my job."

If you are a fish and are asked to climb a tree, you are not aligned to the requirements of your role. But what if you are asked to do something a bit more subtle?

Every day, we go about our lives completing numerous tasks both big and small. When we are doing something we enjoy, time goes by quickly. When things are really going well, we can get into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as a state of flow, or "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake."

Some people also call it being in the zone.

It's fairly obvious when you are doing things that match your personality and desires. The task just suits you.

What happens when you're doing something that doesn't suit you? Throughout your day, you can experience warning signs that what you're doing isn't within your wheelhouse. Perhaps you procrastinate getting started even though you really don't have anything better to do. Or maybe the task takes you longer to complete than it should. Or, to be blunt about it, you're just not very good at it no matter how matter how hard you try.

We call this task anxiety.

Warning Signs of Task Anxiety

• Boredom
• Procrastination
• Poor performance
• Nervousness
• Make excuses/Avoidance
• Time goes by slowly

These warning signs occur when you are doing something that isn't aligned with how you are hardwired. A very common reaction to these situations is anxiety.

Anxiety is a common reaction to circumstances that are out of your comfort zone. You become apprehensive about the outcome and your performance. You worry that you won't meet your own expectations or the expectations of others, be they real or imagined.

The first step toward reducing or even eliminating these micro-anxieties is understanding why they happen. Each one is a signal that you may be operating in an area that is outside of your psychometric profile.

Knowing that something doesn't suit you is one thing. Learning why is easy if you have the right tool.

The way you measure and understand your personality is by taking a psychometric assessment like the Core Values Index.

Although there are many psychometric assessments on the market, the CVI is the clear winner. It has the highest repeat reliability rating on the market, 97.7%, according to longitudinal studies.

After you take the CVI, you receive a full 17-page report that describes how you tick and the kind of activities that will get you into a state of flow. It also describes the kind of things that can make you feel task anxiety.

Here is an example.

Sharine is an up-and-coming leader for a technology company. She gets things done and excels at motivating others to get behind her vision and pull together toward shared goals.

But Sharine struggles with the administrative part of her position. Once a month, she must gather and analyze performance data and synthesize that into a detailed and thorough report that is presented to an executive committee. She completes the task, but she often has a hard time sleeping the night before. Sharine also puts off working on the report until the last second.

After taking the CVI, Sharine finds out that her psychometric profile is Merchant (28 points), Builder (22 points), Innovator (16 points), and Banker (6) points. This means she wants to spend the vast majority of her time doing things that align with the Merchant part of her personality.

Here are some great articles to help you understand how the CVI works:

• The Four Pillars of the Core Values Index Psychometric Assessment
• What Your Reaction to Conflict Reveals About Your Psychometric Profile
• Understanding the Core Values Index Report

As you might have guessed, Sharine is emotionally hardwired to avoid activities that align with the Banker part of her personality. Those with high Banker scores enjoy gathering information to a high degree of detail, ready to share that with others — often in a verbose and long-winded manner. Those with primary Merchant scores are the exact opposite. They only need 30% of the information about something before they can make a decision and move forward.

Sharine loves her job and she's very good at it, but the tasks that require her to engage the Banker part of her personality cause her anxiety. The best thing she could do is delegate those particular tasks to someone with a primary Banker CVI profile, freeing her up to focus more on tasks that align with her psychometric profile.

What is your psychometric profile and how does it determine which tasks will cause you anxiety?

eRep has an amazing tool to help you analyze your work load and determine what areas align with your personal profile and which tasks are outside your comfort zone.

We call it the Highest & Best Worksheet and it is available to anyone with a full/upgraded CVI.

If you want to reduce or eliminate those anxiety-inducing moments from your life, take the CVI and then complete a Highest & Best Worksheet. Identify where you are wasting time on tasks that don't align with your personality's DNA and focus more on areas where you can excel.