- Wainwright Yu turned his anxiety into a proactive, strategic planning system in his tech role.
- Yu also leverages his ADHD's mental roaming to understand complex business issues and opportunities.
- By managing his ADHD and anxiety, Yu uses mindfulness to transform challenges into career strengths.
One day recently, as I walked out of the office, my ears and neck felt hot. My throat was dry. My breath was shallow. I felt nauseous and suffocated. "What am I worried about?" I asked myself.
This feeling is not new. I remember stepping out of a college classroom as a freshman more than 20 years ago, feeling much the same way. A sudden feeling of anxiety gripped me without warning.
I stopped where I was and ran through a mental checklist of the important things I needed to do that day. Submit assignment, check. Read assigned chapter, check. Reach out to a classmate about the group project, check.
"Everything is fine," I told myself. "Everything I need to do is either done or is on track. There's nothing more I need to do right now."
While unmoderated anxiety can be paralyzing, I've turned it into a built-in surveillance and notification system for me in my career.
I'm a Big Tech professional
I'm a director and general manager at a Magnificent 7 company, where I've worked for the last 14 years. On the surface, I have many of the traditional markers of success: I earned a full-ride college scholarship, a summa cum laude degree, an MBA from Stanford, and a Big Tech track record. I also experience anxiety and have ADHD.
I think of my anxiety as a biologically programmed system that continuously scans my environment for threats and helps me focus my attention on important things that may have fallen out of sight.
Here's an example: the night before an annual strategic review with our CEO, I was feeling nervous. Lying in a savasana pose on the floor, my mind was full of thoughts.
I ran through the paper we were going to review, point by point. I identified questions that might be asked and came up with multiple answers to each. As I followed each thread of thought, I uncovered more potential questions or ideas. This went on for hours.
I didn't sleep much that night. I was too energized, too awake, too…ready to go.
I carried this energy and all these ideas into our meeting the next day. The discussion went well. Not only was I able to predict some of the questions that came up, but I was also able to earn trust by proactively addressing issues the audience hadn't thought about yet.
The same is true for ADHD
ADHD brains struggle to grasp details without the bigger-picture context. They are impatient to reach outcomes and the dopamine hit that comes with them. Living more often than neurotypicals in the default mode network (DMN) of the brain, ADHD brains roam, looking around the topic of focus rather than directly at the topic of focus.
These habits of the mind can be debilitating. The lack of detail orientation and the tendency to skip to the end can be seen as laziness. The frequent mental roaming can be seen as distractibility. Who wants to work with or be led by a person who is lazy and distractible?
But these habits of the mind can also be strengths
I once sat in a conference room reading a document that my team had written proposing a new strategy for our business. I skimmed it and then asked myself a few questions.
"What is this paper trying to tell me? How would I summarize its logical arc in just a few words?" "How do I know if the proposed strategy is good? What criteria would I use to decide?" "What are the most important assumptions the team is making? Are they true?"
As I contemplated the answers, my mind started to wander: thinking about other things I heard about or learned that day or week, perhaps from people I spoke to or in books or other papers I read.
I thought about what else was going on across the organization. What were the opportunities or issues most top of mind for my customers, my peers, my partners, or my boss? If I zoomed way out to the 40,000-foot view of this, what would I see?
"Is everyone ready to discuss?" The question broke my reverie. "Yes," I said. "How might we approach this if we thought of this product as our equivalent of Costco's rotisserie chicken?" I asked. The answer, of course, is to choose a price point that delivers unbelievable value to build a brand customers trust and draw foot traffic into the store. We could apply this to our own business.
Our strengths need to be managed, so they don't become weaknesses. Our weaknesses, when managed, can become strengths.
Central to living a productive and fulfilling life is knowing ourselves, the values, traits, and tendencies at our core, accepting these with openness to both the good and the bad they bring, and, equipped with this knowledge, more mindfully choosing how to live and act.
Because of my anxiety, I'm always looking around corners. In making business decisions, I see many steps ahead, nervous about the traps that lie ahead. To harness my anxiety as a gift, I write down all of the risks I see, stack rank them by likelihood and severity, and work with my team to take action on those that sit at the top of the list.
To obviate the downsides of my anxiety, I practice mindfulness, learning to insert a pause between impulse and action, so I don't jump at every shadow that lurks around a corner.
I've learned to use my ADHD to help me find and focus on the big rocks
I use my tendency to hyperfocus on what I'm interested in to give me the energy needed to be relentless at solving hard problems. My ability to hyperfocus on work I enjoy and businesses I believe in has given me the drive needed to power through the hard times at work, eventually earning me several promotions.
To obviate the downsides of ADHD, I create mechanisms that ensure I don't forget important details. Mandatory checklists before the final 'go' decision, defining and measuring the 'definition of done' ahead of time, and recruiting others to keep our team and me accountable to finish what we started are examples of these support mechanisms.
While anxiety and ADHD have their downsides, I've learned to look at them as much for their benefits as for their disadvantages.
Wainwright Yu is a technology executive, mindfulness teacher, and leadership coach who supports neurodivergent individuals as they discover and harness their (often hidden) strengths.
