Ben Patton

Case Study 1: Hightened Anxiety

My first Case Study that I am reviewing here is from a series of conversations with a dear friend of mine. For that reason I will use an alias named Kevin.

Context

Kevin and I have been getting coffee off and on for over a year. Most of the times these conversations tend to some form of how catch up, how is the family doing, what are areas of growth in our lives, what are areas we are praying for growth, and how have we seen God working.

As life goes we inevitably run into times where situations change and we start to bend a little not fully understanding what is going on.

Kevin's Work

Kevin is a VP of sales for a banking company. As a VP he has many individuals under him who are responsible for sales as well as customer support/success. Kevin is used to crushing it in his work and burnout has not been in his vocabulary for as long as I can remember him. Work is something he tries hard at to honor his family and life out his faith.

In retrospect I (Ben) remember us having many conversations around what I do for a living, software related things, and that he made a few comments around how maybe AI could help him get more things done. I didn't think much of this at the time but this was an early indicator that something was changing.

The Sudden Flood of Anxiety

About 2-3 months ago Kevin had a panic attack in the airport and had to get emergency help. Panic attacks always give a sense of a heart attack and that something is deeply wrong with "you". At its core, panic attacks are an outward manifestation of an inward reality. There are most likely signs along the way that you are experiencing higher levels of anxiety and stress but often we just pass this off as "life in the world."

And then the panic attack hits and we cannot fathom how or why this happened to us. For Kevin the attempts to understand it were also met with confusion.

Understanding how Kevin is made

I will reflect on this a bit more below but in these times I think it is important to really know the person. This is where I think personality tests and productivity tests can really start to help us.

Kevin and I had both went through The Working Genius previously and I knew his Geniuses. His geniuses are Discernment and Tenacity. So keep that in mind and we will come back to this.

As we talked one thing Kevin kept pointing back to was a conversation/meeting he had with his boss and his team.

The boss had pulled Kevin and the other VP's of Sales into a meeting with their sales/customer success team. The sum of the meeting was the boss asking the sales/customer success teams what they could offload to their VP's so they could focus on customers and sales. This is a good thing to many cause for the VP's they get to serve their teams, the teams get to serve customers, and customer happiness and quantity makes revenue go 📈

And yet, for Kevin this is the event he kept referring to. As he was sharing he shared some about another assessment that they did at the company which is very reminiscent of Strengths Finders. His primary strengths are in execution and the one that stuck out to him was:

"You take psychological ownership for the work to be done"

Our realization

Having that assessment as well as The Working Genius assessment as context it became clear that Kevin's preferred way of getting things done is "being able to execute and get things done." That may sound simplistic but Kevin loves finishing tasks and executing.

Our realization was this: With the increased work load Kevin was no longer able to finish the workload.

So Kevin's frustration and anxiety increased because he was no longer able to lean into his areas of strength and although he was working incredibly hard things were not getting completed at the rate they were coming to him so his genius of Tenacity wasn't fully shining through.

Next Steps

In this case, Kevin didn't have to have a clear, "so what now." Our time together gave him enough ideas on not only how to approach his work, boss, and team but also on the spiritual side of things how to pray.

Often this is the case when we start to understand ourselves more and the situations we are in. We start to have clarity, or those around us can also give us some clarity, that helps us understand how and why we respond the way we do and then how to make progress in changing ourselves or our situations

Eagerly Over Spiritualizing

A quick note on the spiritual side of things.

In much of our Christian circles it is easy to immediately think of biblical commands, "Do not be anxious about anything..." (Phil 4:6). The danger here is that we completely remove the human side of our experiences.

In many cases it is common to seek help. There are two types of help that tend to be sought after where I live, counseling and biblical counseling.

In many cases biblical counseling is very helpful primarily because so many people who talk about the bible have very little idea of what it says and how it speaks to your situations. You and I need to know it has something to say about what I am going through and that God cares.

At the same time, an all too frequent story is that many people come out of biblical counseling crushed because the tendency is to always be pointing out sin issues and not speak to the humanity and individual nature of the person across the room.

Now both have faults and the best counselors here, in the spiritual context, mix both the human and biblical side of things.

Did Kevin need to know what sin was in his life? In this situation my answer is an emphatic no. Why? Because circumstances did change. He was still seeking to honor God. He was being prayerful. He was working and doing the things he knew he should be doing. We want to pretend as Christians that if we are not in sin then we will be zen.

But part of living life is finding out as a human you have limitations. Kevin was not trying to be more than he should be. He was asked to be more than he should be and was simply working as he did before and started to run into his limitations. This is part of finding out you are only human.

So I just want to make that known. I think this is really important in reflection, particularly for Christians working a 9-5, pursuing business, those who are entrepreneurs and so on. This is not to say you will not come upon things that are not worth confessing where you truly are being egotistical or something else. But to default to saying, "man something feels wrong and I must have some sin I need to confess" is its own form of bondage.

Conclusion

I hope this was somewhat helpful to someone. I was delighted to see Kevin's eyes light up and the metaphorical weight begin to fall off of his shoulders when he had some language to describe what was happening and why there was a suddent rise in anxiety.