Anxiety Is a Question You Can Answer

The experience of founding a startup is like climbing the tallest mountain you have ever attempted. You can't see the top yet, but you can squint toward the first peak. You've never done something like this before, and you finally have momentum - real momentum, urging you forward. The idea of proceeding is daunting, but there's no possible way you'll turn back now - and somewhere in the back of your mind, you notice a voice that keeps running.

Am I making the right decisions? Is this the right direction? Are we moving fast enough? Do I have the right people? What if I'm missing something? How do other people do this? What if the plan falls apart? What if I can't pull this off?

You might notice that every single one of those thoughts ends with a question mark.

It is anxiety’s nature to question. We experience it as a series of open questions - relentless, rapid-fire, often arriving at 2am - whose function is to scan the horizon for anything you might have missed, underestimated, or left unprotected. Anxiety stress-tests. It pressure-checks. It asks and asks and asks because its job is to make sure you're paying attention. It asks toward the edges of your experience, at the places you can’t quite see - at the limits of what you know and who you are. It asks because it cares, but it doesn’t often feel that way.

Anxiety is destabilizing by design. Its questions keep you from settling, making the ground slightly unsteady beneath your feet. That is healthy anxiety - anxiety serving its proper function. Anxiety cannot do its job if you feel too comfortable.

But anxiety is not asking you to fix everything. It's asking you to answer it.

When you slow down long enough to actually hear what anxiety is asking, you can meet each question with a response:

Am I making the right decisions? I don't know for certain. But I know enough to keep moving.

Is this the right direction? Based on everything I can see from here, yes.

Are we moving fast enough? We are moving as fast as we responsibly can.

Do I have the right people? Mostly. I'm watching the gaps closely.

What if I'm missing something? If I were, my anxiety would tell me. It hasn't stopped talking.

How do other people do this? I’m not sure yet. But I can ask. 

What if I can't pull this off? I don't know yet. But I'm the best person available to try.

These won’t necessarily be the answers anxiety is looking for. Anxiety wants certainty - a closed door, a guarantee, safety, sameness, proof. You won’t likely be able to give it that. What you can give it is acknowledgment: I hear you. I'm thinking about it. Here's what I know.

Even “I don’t know” is stabilizing - because it’s true. Anxiety doesn’t provide information about what’s true; it deals in possibility and threat. When “I don’t know” is true, it lands in the body as a stable place to be while you find your next step forward.

The part of you that can answer anxiety's questions is your inner authority - your self trust, however quiet it might be right now.

Your inner authority isn't confidence in the conventional sense - it's not the bravado of someone who's done this before. It's more subtle and truthful than that, especially the first time you're doing something at a scale that has no precedent in your own experience (or maybe the world’s). When the mountain is truly new, when there's no map and no one who's stood exactly where you're standing, your inner authority is the small, steady voice underneath all the questions that says: I don't have all the answers. But I'm still the right person to find them. One at a time.

The founders I've worked with who have scaled through seemingly impossible circumstances - who've delivered on promises that didn't yet have a plan behind them, who've built teams and products and companies in conditions of total uncertainty - none of them knew how they were going to do it when they started. They figured it out step by step, answering one question at a time. And every answer they gave - even the provisional ones, even the I don't knows - was a small act of trusting themselves.

That's how self-trust is built - how founders find their footing in ambiguity, and build a sense of comfort in the discomfort. Your anxiety will keep asking you questions. That's its job, and it performs it well. Your job is to keep answering. Question by question, answer by answer. All the way up the mountain.