The Worrier – Difficult Person Type 7

So today I want to talk about the Worrior. And the Worrier is type seven in my nine types of difficult people.

And a Worrier is quite easy to spot at work. First, they tend to be a bit aggressive, and the reason they’re a bit aggressive, a bit snappy about things is because they’re often terrified of making mistakes.

And this is the great paradox of the Worrier at work, because they’re so focused on not getting stuff wrong or not making mistakes, they’re often a bit unreliable and they will drop the ball at key times and actually make mistakes. And they take the same approach to their teams. Worriers of all the types of difficult people, Worriers are the most likely to become really awful micromanagers.
They will stand over their team making sure nothing goes wrong, and of course, they don’t give their team the time and the space to learn and grow and to do a good job, and their team end up making mistakes as well.

So I like the Worrier. I mean, I like all the nine types of difficult people. That’s why I work with them. Worriers are kind of easy to help because once you show them the patterns, once you show them that the mistakes are actually being caused by their attention on not making mistakes, and that they become unreliable and they drop the ball because of that, once you can show them those patterns, they’re kind of, the door is open for you to help them.

And if you are leading or coaching a Worrier and you want to help develop them, the most important thing you can do is to help them understand that it’s okay to make mistakes. To normalise that sense of getting something wrong, recovering from it, and learning from the experience and that whole idea of falling forward.

And the more you can do that, the more you can role-model, here’s a mistake I made. Here’s how I recovered from it. Here’s what I learned from it, and even here’s what that mistake actually made possible. The more you can role-model that for them, the less their focus stays on getting things wrong, and the more it shifts to what is it that is actually important about what they’re trying to do.

And the second thing you’ll want to do if you’re leading or coaching a Worrier, is to help them soften their focus instead of keeping their eyes on the [00:02:00] thing that might go wrong. Help them keep their eyes on the prize. And you’ll know this, if you’ve ever taught a child how to ride a bicycle and you say to that child, oh, there’s a concrete post over there, don’t hit that post.

Well, you know, the first thing they’re gonna do is they’re gonna ride their bike. Straight at that post. Actually, what you wanna do is say, oh hey, like, you know what? This is a really cool place to learn how to ride a bike here. And I’ll tell you what, there’s like a line of trees over there. We kind of get roughly over to where those trees are.
We’ll stop and then we’ll think about whether or not we might wanna ride back again. Just soften and widen the focus, move their focus away from the thing that might go wrong and keep their eyes on the prize.

So for more tips and coaching on how to deal with all kinds of challenging dynamics and build great working relationships, look out for The 9 Types of Difficult People, follow me here, or get in touch if you want more coaching and more support.