50 Leading Thought Leaders on Leading with Anxiety

Introduction

If you have ever sat with a racing heart before a difficult conversation, lain awake cataloguing what could go wrong before a major decision, or felt the hollow dread of walking into a room where everything depended on how you showed up, you already know what it means to lead with anxiety. The research confirms what most leaders feel privately: anxiety is not exceptional. It is the normal texture of serious responsibility.

The World Health Organization estimates that anxiety disorders affect more than 284 million people globally, making them the world's most prevalent mental health condition. But anxiety in leaders goes far beyond clinical diagnosis. A landmark 2020 survey by Mind Share Partners found that 76% of workers reported at least one symptom of a mental health condition in the previous year, and leaders experience anxiety at rates at least as high as those they lead. A 2026 survey found that 81% of workers feared losing their jobs, placing enormous emotional weight on the leaders responsible for guiding those teams through uncertainty.

The prevailing cultural response has been to instruct leaders to project calm. Suppress the visible signs, master the body language of confidence, control the room. But this approach is failing. Leaders who suppress anxiety do not eliminate it; they simply route it into micromanagement, irritability, avoidance of difficult conversations, and the compulsive busyness that passes for productivity while genuine decisions go unmade. The anxiety does not disappear. It leaks.

What the voices on this list argue, through decades of research, clinical practice, and hard-won personal experience, is that there is a more effective path. The goal is not to eliminate anxiety but to develop a genuine relationship with it: to understand what it is telling you, to use it as information rather than instruction, and to act from your values rather than from the fear that anxiety generates. That is what leading with anxiety actually means. Not performing wellness. Not suppressing distress. Leading fully present, fully human, and fully capable despite, and sometimes because of, the anxiety you carry.

This list was compiled specifically to surface thinkers who have something real to say about anxiety in the context of leadership. It spans clinical psychologists, organisational researchers, executive coaches, neuroscientists, and practitioners working directly with leaders under pressure. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, works with leadership teams around the world to build cultures where the difficult conversations actually get had and the real problems get addressed. To discuss how Jonno can support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Leading with Anxiety Matters

The cost of unaddressed anxiety in leadership is not abstract. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety has consistently shown that teams with leaders whose anxiety manifests as threat-vigilance, defensive communication, and blame attribution under pressure perform worse than teams whose leaders have learned to stay present and curious under exactly the same conditions. The variable is not the level of pressure. It is the leader's relationship with their own internal state.

Research on what is called emotional contagion shows that a leader's emotional state spreads through a team within minutes of their arrival. When a leader's anxiety is unmanaged, it does not stay private. It becomes the team's anxiety. Meetings run at a higher register of tension. People withhold information. Creative risk-taking stops. The team begins to mirror not the leader's stated values but their demonstrated emotional state.

The organisations that perform best under sustained uncertainty are not those with leaders who don't get anxious. They are those with leaders who have learned to distinguish between the anxiety that is useful, pointing them toward something they genuinely care about or a genuine risk that needs attention, and the anxiety that is simply noise generated by overloaded nervous systems navigating too many ambiguous inputs at once. The thinkers on this list have dedicated their professional lives to helping leaders make that distinction. Their work belongs in every leadership library and on every executive team's reading list.

If you want support building a leadership culture where difficult feelings get processed rather than suppressed, and where your team can perform at their highest level even under significant pressure, Jonno White works with organisations globally to do exactly that. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start the conversation. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

How This List Was Compiled

The 50 people on this list were selected using four criteria applied consistently: genuine credentials in the field of anxiety and leadership, an active contribution to the public conversation through writing, research, speaking, or practitioner work, geographic and disciplinary diversity, and a deliberate effort to surface voices that readers may not yet have encountered alongside those whose work is essential reading. This list moves deliberately past the household names that appear on every leadership list to include mid-career practitioners, emerging voices, and international contributors whose work enriches the conversation in ways that the most frequently cited voices do not.

Representation spans the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, and beyond. Disciplines include clinical psychology, organisational behaviour, neuroscience, positive psychology, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, coaching, public health, faith-based leadership, and lived-experience advocacy. The list targets approximately 55% women, consistent with the demographic composition of the clinical and research communities working most actively on anxiety and mental health in organisational contexts.

For more on building team culture that supports mental health and high performance, check out my blog post '35 Best Thought Leaders Globally on Mental Health' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-mental-health.

Category 1: The Scientists Reframing Anxiety

These researchers have fundamentally changed how we understand what anxiety is at a biological and psychological level. Their work challenges the assumption that anxiety is purely a problem to be solved, arguing instead that it is a functional emotion whose signal deserves to be understood rather than suppressed.

1. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

A neuroscience professor and clinical psychologist at Hunter College in New York, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary has spent her career challenging one of the most deeply held assumptions in popular psychology: that anxiety is a malfunction to be corrected. Her work is grounded in decades of rigorous research on emotion regulation, attention bias, and the evolutionary purpose of anxious arousal, and her conclusion is both counterintuitive and liberating for leaders who have spent years trying to rid themselves of anxiety.

Tracy is the author of Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad), published in 2022, which reframes anxiety not as a disorder or weakness but as a natural response to an uncertain future that the anxious person actually cares about. The core argument is that anxiety is the emotion that points you toward what matters. Leaders who learn to interpret rather than suppress the signal become better at identifying genuine risks, communicating authentically with their teams, and making decisions that reflect their actual values rather than the path of least emotional resistance.

2. Alia Crum

A professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Mind and Body Lab, Alia Crum has produced some of the most practically relevant research on the relationship between how we think about stress and how stress actually affects our performance. Her stress mindset theory, developed through a series of rigorously controlled studies, demonstrated that people who view stress as enhancing their performance show better cognitive function, more productive physiological responses, and greater openness to feedback than those who view stress as debilitating.

Her paper 'Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response,' published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2013 and co-authored with Peter Salovey and Shawn Achor, is one of the most-cited empirical contributions to the field. For leaders, the practical implication is direct: changing the story you tell yourself about anxiety changes the biology. Alia's work gives organisations concrete, evidence-based grounds for reframing their relationship with pressure.

3. Ethan Kross

A professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan and director of the Emotion and Self-Control Lab, Ethan Kross has built a research programme of unusual practical utility for leaders. His work focuses on the inner voice, the stream of self-talk that accompanies every decision, every anxious moment, and every piece of feedback, and specifically on the difference between inner chatter that sabotages performance and inner dialogue that builds resilience.

His 2021 book Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It became a bestseller precisely because it translates complex psychological science into immediately applicable tools. In 2024 he published Shift: Managing Your Emotions So They Don't Manage You, which extends the work into the specific challenge of leading well under emotional pressure. For leaders who find that anxiety generates a destructive loop of catastrophising and self-doubt, Ethan's research on distanced self-talk, temporal distancing, and the specific conditions under which introspection helps versus harms offers concrete strategies that work.

4. Ronald Heifetz

A cofounder of Cambridge Leadership Associates and the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, Ronald Heifetz has built the most widely used theoretical framework for understanding why leadership generates anxiety in the first place. His adaptive leadership theory distinguishes between technical problems, which have known solutions, and adaptive challenges, which require people to change their values, beliefs, and habits. Adaptive challenges produce anxiety not because leaders are inadequate but because the work of genuine change is inherently threatening to existing ways of being.

His books Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994) and The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (2009), co-authored with Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow, remain the most intellectually serious treatments of what it actually feels like to lead through genuine uncertainty and resistance. For leaders who want to understand why their anxiety spikes not during operational problems but during change that matters, Heifetz's framework offers a structural explanation that transforms anxiety from a personal failing into a rational signal about the nature of the work.

5. Modupe Akinola

The Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, director of the Bernstein Center for Leadership and Ethics, and host of the TED Business podcast, Modupe Akinola studies the biology and organisational sociology of stress and its relationship to leadership performance. Her research examines how organisational environments generate stress responses, how those responses differ across demographic groups particularly for women and people of colour in workplaces not designed for them, and what leaders can do at the systemic level to build environments where people can actually perform at their best.

Her paper on adaptive appraisals of anxiety and their effect on performance in salary negotiations, co-authored with Alia Crum and others, is a landmark contribution to understanding how the same physiological anxiety response can either help or hinder depending on how it is interpreted. As host of TED Business, Modupe regularly translates cutting-edge research on stress and leadership into practical conversations accessible to working leaders.

Category 2: The Practitioners Who Work Directly with Anxious Leaders

These coaches, clinicians, and consultants work in the daily reality of leadership anxiety. They have built their frameworks from thousands of direct conversations with leaders who carry significant responsibility and significant internal distress simultaneously.

6. Morra Aarons-Mele

The most prominent voice in the world specifically at the intersection of anxiety and leadership, Morra Aarons-Mele has built an entire ecosystem of thought leadership around the premise that anxiety is normal in leadership, that hiding it causes more harm than it prevents, and that the most effective leaders have learned not to eliminate their anxiety but to understand and work with it. She hosts The Anxious Achiever podcast for LinkedIn Presents, which won the 2023 Mental Health America Media Award and consistently ranks in the top ten management podcasts globally.

Her book The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower, published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2023, named one of Thinkers50's ten best new management books of the year, is the single most practical guide available for leaders who experience anxiety and want to lead at their highest level without pretending to be someone they are not. Morra also teaches executive education at Harvard and advises global organisations on mentally healthy leadership. Her forthcoming book on neurodivergent professionals in leadership, The Atypical Achiever, is scheduled for 2027 publication.

7. Jerry Colonna

The CEO and cofounder of Reboot, a leadership development and executive coaching firm, Jerry Colonna has spent more than twenty years working at the intersection of therapy, entrepreneurship, and leadership. A former venture capitalist who experienced a significant breakdown in his own career, Colonna brings the authority of someone who has lived through the kind of leadership anxiety that cannot be managed with productivity techniques or mindset hacks, and who found his way through by facing what he calls the 'hard inquiry' rather than avoiding it.

His book Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up, published in 2019, is one of the most honest accounts of how a leader's unprocessed internal life, including anxiety, grief, shame, and unmet needs, shapes organisational culture in ways that no amount of strategy can compensate for. Colonna's coaching practice works specifically with founders, entrepreneurs, and senior leaders who are effective enough that their anxiety becomes invisible to their organisations but corrosive to themselves.

8. Steve Cuss

The founder of Capable Life and a leadership coach with deep roots in both clinical psychology and pastoral leadership, Steve Cuss has developed one of the most practically useful frameworks for understanding how anxiety operates in teams and organisations rather than just in individuals. His book Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs, published in 2019, makes the crucial distinction that anxious leaders do not just suffer personally; they transmit their anxiety to their teams through specific behavioural patterns that create stuck, reactive organisations.

Cuss draws on family systems theory and Bowen theory to explain why leaders who have not developed the capacity to manage their own anxiety will repeatedly recreate the same dysfunctional dynamics no matter how many new team members they hire or strategies they adopt. His work has been adopted by organisations including Magnolia, associated with the Fixer Upper brand, who described his visit as helping them 'put words to the anxiety that so many people feel both on a personal and professional level.' He runs online training programmes and coaches leaders globally through Capable Life.

9. JP Pawliw-Fry

The cofounder and president of the Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP) and co-author with Hendrie Weisinger of Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most, a New York Times bestseller and Inc. Magazine top ten book of 2015, JP Pawliw-Fry has spent more than twenty years researching and teaching what he calls the Last 8%: the crucial final portion of a difficult conversation, decision, or performance that leaders most often avoid because their anxiety reaches a threshold that triggers avoidance or aggression.

JP's framework gives leaders concrete tools for extending their tolerance for discomfort, building what he describes as high connection and high courage cultures, and making better decisions at exactly the moments when anxiety makes worse decisions most likely. He surveys over 40,000 people monthly through IHHP's research database to track how emotional intelligence and performance under pressure evolve over time, giving his work an empirical grounding that distinguishes it from motivational content.

10. Marie-Helene Pelletier

A leadership psychologist, executive coach, and governance director with more than twenty years of experience working at the intersection of leadership, insurance, and mental health, Marie-Helene Pelletier brings an unusually rigorous institutional perspective to the question of how leaders sustain their performance through anxiety over long careers. Based in Canada and working globally, she has developed a framework she calls the Resilience Plan: a personalised approach to maintaining leadership performance that treats mental health as a strategic resource requiring deliberate investment rather than a personal vulnerability requiring concealment.

Her book The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health, published in 2024 and winner of the 2025 Axiom Business Book Award Gold, is one of the most practically structured resources for leaders who want to manage anxiety proactively rather than reactively. As a governance director who sits on multiple boards, she also brings a uniquely insider perspective on how anxiety in senior leadership affects organisational governance and strategic decision-making.

11. Rebecca Zucker

An executive coach at Next Step Partners and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review on the intersection of psychology and leadership effectiveness, Rebecca Zucker has written extensively about how anxiety, impostor syndrome, and social comparison operate in senior leaders who, by every external measure, should feel secure but persistently do not. Her coaching work focuses on the gap between external achievement and internal experience, which is one of the defining features of high-functioning leadership anxiety.

Her Harvard Business Review article on managing anxiety at work has been widely shared by leaders who recognise the pattern she describes: high performance maintained at significant internal cost, with anxiety operating as a constant background hum that depletes energy, undermines relationships, and periodically breaks through in ways that surprise the leader and confuse the team. Her work is particularly valuable for leaders in professional services, where the culture of competence performance is most deeply entrenched and anxiety is most thoroughly hidden.

12. Aliki Myrianidi

The founder of ThriveMind Consultancy and the 2025 UK Evergreen Award winner for Best Anxiety and Stress Management Expert, Aliki Myrianidi is an accredited psychotherapist, psychologist, and executive coach who has developed an integrated approach that combines psychotherapy with leadership coaching. Working primarily with executives, senior leaders, and high-performing professionals in the UK and internationally, she focuses specifically on the experience of leaders who are functioning at a high level externally while managing significant anxiety internally.

Her methodology integrates psychodynamic understanding, cognitive-behavioural approaches, and executive coaching frameworks to build what she describes as emotional clarity and resilience in leaders: the capacity to understand the sources of their anxiety, develop effective responses, and build sustainable leadership practice that does not depend on suppression or avoidance. Her recognition as a leading expert in her field in 2025 reflects both the quality of her work and the growing demand for practitioners who work specifically at the leadership-therapy boundary.

Category 3: The Emotional Intelligence and Feelings-at-Work Pioneers

These thinkers have built their body of work on making emotional life at work legitimate, nameable, and navigable. Their contribution to the leading-with-anxiety conversation is the foundational work of demonstrating that feelings belong in leadership and that organisations that pretend otherwise perform worse.

13. Amy Edmondson

The Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, twice ranked the world's most influential management thinker by Thinkers50, Amy Edmondson pioneered the concept of psychological safety: the shared belief within a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, speak up with incomplete ideas, report errors, and challenge the status quo without fear of punishment or humiliation. Her research established that psychological safety is the single most important predictor of high team performance.

The connection to anxiety is direct and structural. Psychological safety does not eliminate anxiety from organisations; it redirects it. When psychological safety is absent, team members' anxiety about how they will be treated when they speak up suppresses the information flow and honest conversation that organisations need to perform well. When leaders understand that managing their own anxiety is a prerequisite for creating psychological safety, the personal development work becomes organisational strategy. Her book The Fearless Organization, published in 2018, and her 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well are essential reading for any leader who wants to understand the systemic effects of how they relate to their own and others' anxiety.

14. Susan David

A psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and founder of Evidence Based Psychology, Susan David developed what she calls emotional agility: a framework for developing a flexible, non-judgmental relationship with your own emotions, including the difficult and uncomfortable ones that most of us either suppress or get hijacked by. For leaders, emotional agility offers a practical alternative to both emotional suppression and emotional flooding, the two most common dysfunctional responses to anxiety in high-stakes situations.

Her book Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, published in 2016, and her TED Talk on the same topic, which has been viewed more than eight million times, make the case that the leaders who perform best under sustained pressure are those who can acknowledge difficult emotions without being controlled by them. Her work has been adopted by organisations globally as a foundation for leadership development programmes focused on resilience and performance under uncertainty.

15. Liz Fosslien

An author, illustrator, and narrative leader currently heading brand and content at Atlassian, Liz Fosslien has built one of the most distinctively useful bodies of work in the emotions-at-work space. Her gift is translating complex psychological research into accessible visuals and plain language that people actually share, save, and apply in their own teams. She is the co-author, with Mollie West Duffy, of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work, published in 2018 and named a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, published in 2022.

Both books address anxiety directly: No Hard Feelings tackles the social performance of composure at work and the hidden costs of emotional suppression, while Big Feelings addresses the specific landscape of difficult emotions that leaders and team members face during uncertainty, loss, and significant change. Liz posts consistently on LinkedIn about the small daily decisions that determine whether a workplace actually supports or suppresses the emotional lives of the people working in it.

16. Mollie West Duffy

An organisational designer, executive coach, and co-author with Liz Fosslien of No Hard Feelings and Big Feelings, Mollie West Duffy brings a designer's eye and a researcher's rigour to the question of how organisations can be structured and led in ways that make it possible for people to acknowledge and work with anxiety rather than hiding it behind performance. Her background at IDEO gives her work a systems perspective that goes beyond individual tools to ask how physical and organisational environments shape emotional experience.

Mollie has consulted with leadership teams at companies including Slack, Casper, and IDEO on organisational design and culture. Her contribution to the leading-with-anxiety conversation is the practical insight that anxiety in organisations is as much a design problem as a personal one: when meetings are structured to suppress dissent, when leaders are never seen to be uncertain, when performance reviews punish candour about what is not working, organisations manufacture anxiety rather than simply experiencing it. Her work gives leaders the tools to redesign the environments that generate unnecessary anxiety in the first place.

17. Marc Brackett

The founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center at Yale School of Medicine, Marc Brackett has spent his career developing a rigorous, evidence-based approach to what he calls emotional intelligence: not the soft-skills vagueness that the term sometimes carries in popular usage, but a specific set of skills that include accurately perceiving emotions in yourself and others, using emotions to guide thinking and creativity, understanding how emotions unfold and change over time, and managing emotions effectively.

His RULER approach, an acronym for Recognise, Understand, Label, Express, and Regulate, has been adopted by schools and organisations globally as a framework for building emotional literacy. His book Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Our Teams, and Our Societies Thrive, published in 2019, is particularly relevant for leaders who need both a personal tool for managing anxiety and a framework for creating teams where people can name and navigate difficult emotions rather than pretending them away.

18. Joshua Freedman

The CEO and cofounder of Six Seconds, a global emotional intelligence non-profit with a presence in more than 150 countries, and the author of Emotion Rules: How to Lead in the Age of Feeling, published in March 2026, Joshua Freedman has dedicated more than twenty-five years to making emotional intelligence practical, measurable, and strategic for organisations. His State of the Heart study, a global analysis of emotional intelligence tracking EQ trends across more than 160 countries since 2011, identified what he calls the Emotional Recession: a sustained global decline in emotional intelligence scores with direct implications for leadership, burnout, and organisational performance.

Six Seconds has developed validated psychometric assessments used by over 7.5 million people in more than 160 countries, including the US Army, FedEx, Qatar Airways, Microsoft, and the United Nations. For leaders navigating anxiety in a period he characterises as one of rising burnout and falling empathy globally, Freedman's work provides both the measurement tools to assess where a team currently sits and the development frameworks to build the emotional intelligence that makes anxiety navigable rather than paralyzing.

Category 4: The Anxiety Reframers and Authors

These voices have shaped public understanding of anxiety through writing that reaches general audiences, not just clinical or organisational specialists. Their books and platforms have given millions of people, including leaders, new language and new frameworks for understanding what anxiety actually is.

19. Ellen Hendriksen

A clinical psychologist and senior clinician at Boston University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, Ellen Hendriksen has spent more than twenty years working clinically with social anxiety, perfectionism, and the specific forms of self-criticism that undermine otherwise capable people's performance and wellbeing. Her books How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018) and How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists (2024) speak directly to the experience of leaders who hold themselves to standards so high that anxiety becomes a permanent condition of striving.

For leaders, Ellen's particular contribution is the practical insight that social anxiety and perfectionism in high-achieving people do not usually look like classic anxiety disorder presentations. They look like overpreparation, difficulty delegating, chronic imposter syndrome, and the compulsive editing of communication to manage how one is perceived. Her clinical experience and accessible writing style make her one of the clearest voices on this specific intersection of anxiety and leadership performance.

20. Scott Stossel

The editor of The Atlantic and author of My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, published in 2014, Scott Stossel is the most prominent journalist to have written with serious depth about his own severe anxiety disorder and its relationship to professional performance. His book, which draws on decades of his own clinical treatment alongside a rigorous intellectual survey of the history and science of anxiety, is remarkable for its honesty about the gap between what leaders and high achievers project publicly and what they experience privately.

Stossel's argument that anxiety can equip people to be better leaders, because anxious people are more attuned to threat signals, more empathetic to others' distress, and more vigilant about what could go wrong, has been widely cited in the leading-with-anxiety literature. For leaders who have believed that their anxiety represents a fundamental limitation on their effectiveness, Stossel's personal account and intellectual analysis offer both recognition and reframing.

21. Britt Frank

A licensed clinical social worker, trauma specialist, and author of The Science of Stuck: Breaking Through Inertia to Find Your Path Forward, published in 2022, Britt Frank writes and speaks specifically about the neuroscience of avoidance: why anxiety so often produces paralysis rather than action, and what leaders and high achievers can do to move through that paralysis without relying on willpower or motivational narratives that do not account for how the nervous system actually works.

Her work is particularly valuable for leaders who experience anxiety not as a racing mind full of worst-case scenarios, the most commonly described experience, but as a peculiar blankness, a numbness, an inability to start the very things they know they need to do. The Science of Stuck addresses this specific manifestation with both neuroscience grounding and practical tools, and her active social media presence makes her one of the most accessible voices on the trauma-informed dimension of leadership anxiety.

22. Lori Gottlieb

A psychotherapist, New York Times bestselling author, and co-host of the podcast Dear Therapists, Lori Gottlieb brings to the leading-with-anxiety conversation the psychotherapist's core skill: the ability to help people tell the truth to themselves about what is actually driving their behaviour. Her memoir-and-practice guide Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed, published in 2019, was an immediate bestseller and has introduced millions of leaders to the idea that seeking help for anxiety is not weakness but competence.

For leaders, Lori's most practically relevant contribution is her articulation of how the stories people tell themselves about their anxiety, such as 'I'm just a worrier' or 'I need to be perfect' or 'I can't let anyone see this,' maintain the very patterns they want to escape. Her book and her practice both focus on the collaborative rewriting of those stories, which is precisely the work that high-performing leaders who have managed anxiety through achievement and avoidance often need most.

23. Emily Esfahani Smith

A journalist and author whose work draws on positive psychology, philosophy, and existential thought, Emily Esfahani Smith contributed a crucial reframe to the anxiety-and-leadership conversation through her book The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness, published in 2017. Her TED Talk on the same theme has been viewed more than five million times. The reframe is specific: anxiety in leaders is often not really about the immediate challenge but about meaning, about whether the work they are doing and the way they are doing it reflects what they actually care about.

For leaders who find that anxiety persists despite external success, and this is an extremely common pattern among high achievers, Smith's framework of meaning as the antidote to existential anxiety provides a more durable response than stress management techniques. When leaders can connect their daily decisions to what they genuinely believe matters, they build what Smith calls a narrative self: a coherent sense of identity that provides stability even in conditions of genuine uncertainty.

24. Angela Neal-Barnett

A professor of psychological sciences at Kent State University and an award-winning expert on anxiety among African American communities, Angela Neal-Barnett addresses a dimension of leadership anxiety that most mainstream resources ignore entirely: the specific texture of anxiety experienced by leaders from marginalised groups who carry the weight of both their own performance expectations and the scrutiny and systemic barriers of organisations not originally designed for their presence.

Her book Soothe Your Nerves: The Black Woman's Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Anxiety, Panic, and Fear, and her extensive public education work on culturally competent approaches to anxiety, have made her one of the most important voices on the intersection of race, identity, and anxiety in high-achieving people. Her work has been cited in Harvard Business Review's landmark 2020 'Leading Through Anxiety' article, and she is one of the most active contributors to the ADAA's public education programme.

Category 5: The Neuroscience and Wellbeing Researchers

These voices have built the scientific foundation for understanding what anxiety does to the brain and body, and specifically how leaders can develop physiological and psychological tools for staying present and effective under conditions that trigger anxious arousal.

25. Judson Brewer

A psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University, Judson Brewer has produced some of the most accessible and empirically grounded work on the neuroscience of anxiety, habit formation, and the specific way that worry creates self-reinforcing loops in the brain that leaders experience as chronic, inescapable anxiety. His TEDx Talk 'A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit' has been viewed more than 20 million times.

His book Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind, published in 2021 as a New York Times bestseller, translates his clinical and neuroscience research into a practical guide for people who have tried willpower, positive thinking, and stress management techniques and found them insufficient. The core insight is that anxiety is maintained by specific reward-based learning loops in the brain, and that awareness practice is more effective than suppression at disrupting those loops. For leaders who want to understand why their anxiety is not responding to rational approaches, Brewer's neuroscience framework provides the explanation.

26. Romie Mushtaq

A neurologist with additional board certification in integrative medicine and the founder of BrainSHIFT Institute, Romie Mushtaq has built her career at the intersection of neurology, mental health, and corporate leadership. Her concept of the Busy Brain, drawn from her clinical and organisational research, describes the specific neurological state that characterises high-achieving, high-anxiety leaders: a brain running at sustained high activation that cannot effectively shift out of threat-response mode even when the immediate threat has passed.

Her book The Busy Brain Cure: The 8-Week Plan to Find Focus, Tame Anxiety and Sleep Again, published in 2024, offers a structured approach to the neurological dimension of leadership anxiety that goes beyond mindfulness to address sleep, nervous system regulation, and the specific workplace habits that keep the brain in a state of chronic threat activation. As a speaker at corporate events and a contributor to publications including Fox Business, NBC, and CBS, she brings a neurologist's precision to the anxiety-and-leadership conversation.

27. Kristin Neff

A professor in the department of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a pioneer in the scientific study of self-compassion, Kristin Neff has demonstrated through rigorous research that self-compassion, the practice of relating to oneself with the same kindness and understanding one would offer a good friend, is not only more effective than self-criticism at improving performance but is specifically associated with lower anxiety, greater emotional resilience, and more accurate self-assessment.

For leaders who use anxiety-driven self-criticism as a motivational tool, believing that letting themselves off the hook will lead to complacency, her research provides compelling counter-evidence. Self-compassionate leaders make fewer defensive errors under pressure, bounce back more quickly from setbacks, and are more willing to acknowledge mistakes and learn from them. Her book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, published in 2011, and her extensive academic work published in peer-reviewed journals, are foundational to the field.

28. Tony Schwartz

The CEO of The Energy Project and co-author with Jim Loehr of The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal, a New York Times bestseller, Tony Schwartz has spent decades working with leaders on what he identifies as the root cause of most performance problems, including anxiety-driven decision-making: chronic energy depletion. His framework reframes the leadership anxiety problem as an energy management problem: leaders who run their nervous systems at sustained high capacity without investing in renewal are chronically more anxious, more reactive, and less capable of the clear thinking and calm presence that effective leadership requires.

His follow-up book Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live, published in 2010, extends the framework to the organisational level. The Energy Project has worked with some of the world's largest organisations to redesign work practices in ways that support rather than deplete human performance capacity. For leaders who experience anxiety as a permanent state rather than a situational response, Schwartz's energy framework often identifies the structural causes that no amount of mindset work can address.

29. Cassie Holmes

A professor of marketing and behavioural decision making at UCLA Anderson School of Management and author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most, Cassie Holmes brings research-backed insight into a specific source of leadership anxiety that is rarely addressed directly: time poverty. Her research demonstrated that both having too little time and, counterintuitively, having too much unstructured time generate anxiety and undermine wellbeing, and that the specific type of time use that most reliably reduces anxiety is discretionary time spent in ways that feel meaningful and connected.

For leaders whose anxiety is deeply entangled with the feeling of having too much to do and never enough time to do any of it well, Holmes's research provides both the explanation and the solution. Her work has been published in top management and psychology journals and covered in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR, and she posts actively on LinkedIn about the science of time, wellbeing, and decision making.

30. Arthur Brooks

A professor at both Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School who teaches leadership and happiness, a CBS News contributor, and author of sixteen books including the number one New York Times bestsellers From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life and Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, Arthur Brooks writes and speaks at the intersection of the science of happiness, Buddhist philosophy, and leadership effectiveness in ways that are directly relevant to the anxiety experience.

His column for The Atlantic on how to build a good life, which runs regularly and draws on research from economics, psychology, and philosophy, frequently addresses the specific anxiety that drives high achievers, and specifically the paradox that success in conventional terms often intensifies rather than reduces the anxiety of leaders who built their sense of security entirely on achievement. For leaders whose anxiety is existential rather than operational, Brooks's work offers the most intellectually serious and practically grounded engagement with what they are actually facing.

Category 6: The Clinicians Bridging Practice and Leadership

These practitioners work at the interface between clinical mental health and leadership development, bringing therapeutic insight to leadership contexts and making clinical knowledge accessible to leaders who would never think of themselves as needing therapy but who benefit enormously from the same tools.

31. Chloe Carmichael

A licensed clinical psychologist based in New York who works with high-performing individuals and teams, Chloe Carmichael is the author of Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety, published in 2021. Her core framework is practical and specifically designed for the type of person who is unlikely to seek traditional therapy: the competent, ambitious, high-achieving professional who experiences anxiety not as incapacitation but as a constant background hum of overthinking, overpreparation, and difficulty switching off.

Her 'Nine Tools of Nervous Energy' gives leaders concrete, cognitively grounded techniques for redirecting the analytical capacity that their anxiety generates toward productive ends rather than allowing it to cycle in unproductive loops. Her book has been covered extensively in The New York Times, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, and her clinical practice serves a client base of executives, entrepreneurs, and high-achieving professionals. She posts actively on LinkedIn about the psychology of performance, anxiety, and the specific challenges that high achievers face.

32. Steven Hayes

A professor of psychology at the University of Nevada Reno and the originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), one of the most empirically well-supported approaches to psychological flexibility and the management of anxiety, Steven Hayes has produced the theoretical and clinical foundation that underlies much of the most effective modern anxiety management work. His central contribution to the leading-with-anxiety conversation is the concept of psychological flexibility: the ability to be present with difficult internal experiences, including anxiety, without either suppressing them or allowing them to determine behaviour.

His book A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters, published in 2019, makes ACT accessible to general audiences including leaders, offering a framework for moving toward what matters to you rather than away from what frightens you. For leaders whose anxiety drives avoidance of the very decisions and conversations their organisations most need them to have, the ACT framework provides both the conceptual foundation and specific tools for building a different relationship with anxiety. He is active on LinkedIn and a regular contributor to professional and public discourse on anxiety and psychological wellbeing.

33. Luana Marques

An Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Director of Community Psychiatry PRIDE at Massachusetts General Hospital, Luana Marques served as the first Latina president of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Her book Bold Move: A 3-Step Plan to Transform Anxiety into Power, published in 2023, translates decades of clinical and research expertise into a practical guide for leaders and high-achievers who are caught in patterns of psychological avoidance, doing or avoiding the easier thing rather than the courageous one.

She brings rigorous clinical training and an unusually warm, accessible communication style to the anxiety-and-leadership space. She is one of the most prolific contributors to public education on anxiety management, with frequent media appearances in publications including the Washington Post, NPR, and CBS News. Her work specifically addresses anxiety management for high achievers and people in demanding professional roles, focusing on the cognitive and behavioural tools that actually work under the conditions of sustained pressure and uncertainty that leaders face.

34. Nicole Thaxton

A clinical psychologist, speaker, and emerging author who focuses on emotional endurance, high-functioning anxiety, and sustainable leadership, Nicole Thaxton speaks to leaders, parents, and organisations about the specific experience of anxiety that does not look like anxiety: the high-achiever who keeps delivering results while privately experiencing persistent exhaustion, emotional overload, and a sense of operating without adequate margin. Her debut book, released in April 2026, addresses the intersection of high-functioning anxiety and leadership sustainability for professionals in demanding roles.

Thaxton is one of the freshest voices in this space, actively building her platform on LinkedIn and having announced a major focus on visibility and content output in 2026. She brings both clinical training and lived experience to her work, speaking from the dual perspective of a practitioner who has worked with anxious high achievers and a professional who has personally navigated the specific anxiety patterns that leadership and public life generate.

35. Garath Symonds

The founder of Reconnect Coaching and author of The Anxious Leader: How to Lead in an Uncertain World, Garath Symonds approaches leadership anxiety through the lens of the Tavistock Tradition, a psychodynamic approach to group dynamics and organisational behaviour that views many of the most persistent challenges in leadership as expressions of unconscious group anxiety. His core argument is that leaders are constantly burdened by anxiety and that their management of this anxiety determines their effectiveness: rational thinking and effective leadership occur when leaders take the time to sit with the temporary discomfort, vulnerability, and anxiety rather than reflexively acting to relieve it.

Symonds is a former student of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust's consulting and leading in organisations programme and a practitioner with deep experience in both one-to-one leadership coaching and group work with leadership teams. His book received endorsement from the Tavistock faculty and represents one of the most intellectually grounded contributions to the psychodynamic dimension of leadership anxiety, a perspective that is underrepresented in the predominantly cognitive-behavioural and positive psychology orientation of most anxiety-and-leadership content.

36. Russ Harris

An Australian physician and psychotherapist and the author of The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living, one of the most widely read introductions to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for general audiences, Russ Harris has made the ACT framework accessible to millions of people globally who have found that traditional approaches to anxiety management, including positive thinking, relaxation techniques, and cognitive restructuring, produce temporary relief but not lasting change.

The Happiness Trap, first published in 2007 and updated in a significantly expanded second edition in 2021, has sold more than one million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages. Its core argument, that trying to eliminate uncomfortable emotions including anxiety is itself the primary source of suffering and that psychological flexibility is a more effective goal than happiness or the absence of anxiety, is one of the most practically transformative reframes available to leaders who have been trying to manage their anxiety by suppressing it. Harris posts actively on LinkedIn and continues to teach ACT workshops globally.

37. Mary Lamia

A clinical psychologist, professor at the Wright Institute, and author of multiple books on the psychology of emotions in high-achieving people, Mary Lamia has spent decades working with and writing for leaders, students, and high achievers who find that their emotional responses do not match the rational, composed presentation that their professional roles seem to require. Her work on emotional processing styles in high achievers offers a framework for understanding why some leaders' anxiety is immediately motivating while others' is paralysing, and what each style requires to function at its best.

Her work on task-motivated and emotion-motivated processors, and the specific anxiety patterns associated with each, is particularly useful for leaders who want to understand why they respond so differently to the same stressor at different times, and why some of their most capable team members seem to shut down under conditions that the leader finds energising. She posts actively on LinkedIn on the psychology of emotions, productivity, and the specific challenges of leading with a complex emotional inner life.

Category 7: The Wellbeing, Burnout and Organisational Health Voices

These thinkers work at the systemic level of how organisations create and sustain the conditions in which anxiety either becomes manageable or becomes overwhelming. They address anxiety not just as an individual challenge but as an organisational design problem.

38. Chester Elton

The co-author, with Adrian Gostick, of Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done, published in 2021, Chester Elton has spent decades researching and writing about the intersection of team culture, recognition, and employee mental health. His work on anxiety at work is grounded in extensive survey data and case studies from organisations that have implemented specific, practical interventions to reduce unnecessary anxiety and build the psychological safety that allows teams to perform under genuine uncertainty.

Chester and Adrian's research found that anxiety in the workplace had been rising for years before the pandemic and that the pandemic accelerated trends that were already well established. Their eight strategies for team-level anxiety management, which address issues including clarity, communication, contribution, acknowledgement, and connection, give team leaders a practical roadmap that goes beyond individual wellness to the specific managerial behaviours that either create or reduce team anxiety.

39. Adrian Gostick

The co-author with Chester Elton of Anxiety at Work and a leadership researcher who has studied what he describes as the anxiety epidemic in modern workplaces for more than twenty years, Adrian Gostick brings complementary research and a slightly different emphasis to the anxiety-at-work conversation that makes his partnership with Chester Elton particularly productive. Where Elton focuses on recognition and appreciation as mechanisms for reducing team anxiety, Gostick emphasises clarity, communication, and the specific ways that management behaviour either amplifies or reduces uncertainty-driven anxiety in teams.

His speaking and consulting work takes him into organisations across sectors and countries to help leaders understand the specific behaviours that inadvertently communicate threat and uncertainty to their teams even when the leader has no intention of doing so. The insight that most leadership anxiety in organisations is transmitted rather than generated, meaning it originates in individual leaders and spreads through the organisation via specific communication and behavioural patterns, is one of the most practically valuable contributions in the entire field.

40. Jennifer Moss

Chief Research and Strategy Officer at the Global Wellbeing Group, Harvard Business Review contributor, and author of The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It, published in 2021 and named by Thinkers50 as one of the ten best new management books of the year, Jennifer Moss has spent the past decade documenting the systemic causes of workplace burnout, with anxiety as its most consistent precursor. Her HBR work has been widely cited by CHROs, people leaders, and executives trying to understand why wellbeing initiatives that focus on individual resilience consistently fail to address the organisational structures that make people anxious in the first place.

For leaders who want to understand the difference between helping their teams manage anxiety and creating conditions where less anxiety is generated, Moss's work is essential. Her argument that most burnout prevention programmes focus on the individual, teaching meditation, resilience, and coping skills, while ignoring the workload, clarity, fairness, and values alignment issues that generate burnout, applies equally to anxiety management. She is a regular contributor to major media and posts actively on LinkedIn. Her 2026 Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International recognises her as one of the world's leading communicators on these topics.

41. Hamza Khan

A bestselling author, keynote speaker, and leadership educator whose TEDx talk 'Stop Managing, Start Leading' has been viewed more than one million times, Hamza Khan addresses a demographic that most of the leadership-anxiety literature underserves: the new or emerging leader who has not yet developed the experience or the tools to manage the anxiety that leadership generates. He co-founded SkillsCamp, a leading soft skills training company, and has taught at Toronto Metropolitan University.

His book Leadership, Reinvented: How to Foster Empathy, Servitude, Diversity, and Innovation in the Workplace, published in 2021, makes the case that the anxiety experienced by new leaders is often a symptom of leading from a framework built for a different era, one that valued performance over authenticity and results over relationships. He posts actively on LinkedIn and speaks at universities and organisations globally on the specific anxiety challenges facing the next generation of leaders.

42. Nic Smith

An Australian positive psychologist, workplace wellbeing consultant, and speaker with more than twenty years of experience working with leadership teams and organisations in the Asia-Pacific region, Nic Smith brings a strengths-based, evidence-grounded approach to the anxiety-and-leadership conversation that is particularly relevant for leaders in Australian and New Zealand workplaces, where the cultural norms around emotional expression in professional settings differ meaningfully from those that characterise most North American leadership development content.

Her work uses frameworks from positive psychology to help organisations move from average to exceptional by building the conditions in which leaders and teams can perform at their best without the chronic anxiety load that poorly designed workplaces generate. She combines more than twenty years of working with talent and leadership teams with the latest research from positive psychology to deliver practical, science-backed interventions that are grounded in how Australian organisations actually function.

43. Neha Sangwan

A physician, organisational consultant, and founder of Intuitive Intelligence, Neha Sangwan bridges clinical medicine and leadership development to address what she calls conversational intelligence: the specific anxiety that leaders experience around difficult, ambiguous, or high-stakes conversations, and the physical and mental health consequences of avoiding those conversations over time. Her work draws on her background as a physician treating patients whose physical symptoms, including anxiety disorders, were driven by unresolved relational and professional conflicts.

Her TEDx Talk on the power of words has been widely shared, and her book TalkRx: Five Steps to Honest Conversations That Create Connection, Health, and Happiness offers a communication framework specifically designed for leaders who find that the anxiety around difficult conversations is leading them to avoid the very interactions that would most benefit their organisations. She works globally with executives and leadership teams and is an active contributor to the conversation on leadership wellbeing through her LinkedIn content and speaking engagements.

Category 8: The Coaches, Advocates and Lived-Experience Voices

These voices bring the authenticity of personal experience and the rigour of professional practice to the leading-with-anxiety conversation. They are the coaches, advocates, and practitioners whose work reaches leaders who may not engage with academic research but who recognise their own experience in honest personal accounts.

44. Alyson Meister

The Dean of Degree Programs and Hilti Professor of Leadership at IMD Business School in Switzerland, Alyson Meister serves as co-chair of One Mind at Work's Scientific Advisory Committee and has made the intersection of mental health and leadership her central research focus. Her work addresses what she calls the systemic dimension of leadership mental health: the way that organisational cultures, leadership norms, and professional expectations either support or suppress leaders' capacity to acknowledge and address their anxiety.

Her recent Harvard Business Review writing examines the specific ways that vulnerability, which is required for authentic leadership but which currently carries real risk in many professional environments, can be offered in ways that build trust without exposing the leader to the exploitation that frank disclosure sometimes invites. She also contributed to the IMD discussion of anxiety in leadership's reframing of what it means to lead under conditions of sustained uncertainty, arguing that the goal is not courage in the absence of anxiety but courage that acknowledges anxiety and acts anyway.

45. Michael Gervais

A high-performance psychologist, co-founder of Compete to Create, and host of the Finding Mastery podcast, Michael Gervais works with some of the world's highest-performing athletes, executives, and special operations military personnel on the specific anxiety that comes with consistently performing at the edge of human capability. His framework distinguishes between the performance anxiety that is useful, the signal that something important is at stake, and the FOPO anxiety, the Fear of People's Opinions, which he identifies as the single greatest performance inhibitor he encounters in his practice.

His TEDx Talk on the Fear of People's Opinions has been widely shared among leaders, and his podcast frequently features guests who speak with unusual candour about their own anxiety and the specific tools they have developed for leading effectively in its presence. Finding Mastery is consistently ranked as one of the top performance and leadership podcasts globally, and his co-authored book with Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll, Win Forever, is widely read in leadership development programmes.

46. Shawn Achor

A bestselling author, teacher, and researcher who has become one of the most widely viewed TED speakers globally, with his talk 'The Happy Secret to Better Work' viewed more than 26 million times, Shawn Achor's contribution to the leading-with-anxiety conversation is specifically about the relationship between anxiety, happiness, and performance. His research, developed during his years at Harvard and through the consulting firm GoodThink, established that happiness precedes performance rather than following it, and that positive affect including optimism, gratitude, and social connection reduces the anxiety load that otherwise degrades decision-making and leadership presence.

For leaders who carry significant anxiety, Achor's practical tools for building positive emotion are not about bypassing anxiety but about creating the internal resources that make it possible to act effectively even when anxiety is present. His books The Happiness Advantage (2010) and Before Happiness (2013) offer a research-backed framework for leaders who want to understand the relationship between their emotional baseline and their leadership effectiveness.

47. Minaa B.

A therapist, author, and advocate who built a significant platform on the specific intersection of community care, mental health, and leadership, Minaa B. (Wilhelmina Bolden) is the author of Owning Our Struggles: A Path to Healing and Finding Community in a Broken World, published in 2023. Her work addresses the collective and relational dimensions of anxiety in ways that go beyond individual coping to ask how leaders can build communities, teams, and organisational cultures where people are genuinely supported in their mental health struggles rather than expected to manage them alone.

Minaa's particular contribution to the leading-with-anxiety conversation is her insistence that anxiety cannot be fully addressed at the individual level when the communities and structures in which leaders operate are themselves sources of harm. For leaders committed to building genuinely psychologically safe teams, her work provides both the personal and the systemic lens. She has been featured on NBC, CBS, Oprah Daily, and in multiple leadership development curricula, and posts actively on LinkedIn about mental health, community care, and leadership.

48. Emma Hepburn

A clinical psychologist and author based in the UK, Emma Hepburn is known for making psychological concepts accessible to general audiences through visual communication and warm, non-clinical writing. Her book A Toolkit for Modern Life: 53 Evidence-Based Strategies to Improve Your Wellbeing, published in 2021, and her ongoing work under the brand The Psychology Mum, reach a large international audience of professionals including leaders who are looking for practical, evidence-based tools without the jargon or medicalising framing of many clinical resources.

For leaders outside North America who are looking for evidence-based support for their anxiety that reflects a UK and European clinical tradition, Emma's work is particularly valuable. She draws on cognitive-behavioural therapy, ACT, positive psychology, and compassion-focused approaches in a synthesised way that is genuinely accessible. She posts consistently on LinkedIn and Instagram and has developed one of the most engaged audiences in the accessible-psychology space.

49. Tasha Eurich

An organisational psychologist, researcher, and author of Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think, published in 2017, Tasha Eurich has built her work around what she calls the self-awareness unicorn: the paradox that most leaders believe they are self-aware but the research shows that genuine self-awareness, including accurate understanding of how one's emotional state is affecting one's leadership behaviour, is vanishingly rare.

For leaders whose anxiety operates below their conscious awareness, driving controlling behaviour, emotional reactivity, and avoidance without the leader ever consciously framing what is happening as anxiety, Eurich's work on building genuine self-insight is the prerequisite for everything else on this list. Her subsequent work and public contributions have focused specifically on how leaders can develop the internal feedback mechanisms that allow them to notice when anxiety is affecting their judgement, before it affects their organisation.

50. Jonno White

While the other 49 voices on this list are the thinkers, researchers, and practitioners who have shaped the world's understanding of anxiety in leadership, Jonno White is the person you bring in when your team is ready to act on what they say. A Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with more than 10,000 copies sold globally, and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in more than 150 countries, Jonno White works with leadership teams in schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world to build cultures where difficult conversations happen, hard truths get told, and leaders can show up fully rather than performing a version of themselves that anxiety has made safer than the truth. His book Step Up or Step Out is specifically about the difficult conversations and accountability challenges that anxiety most reliably prevents leaders from having. To book Jonno for a keynote, workshop, or executive offsite, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several thinkers who would appear on most lists like this were deliberately set aside in favour of fresher and more mid-tier voices whose work is less well-known but equally valuable. Brené Brown, whose research on vulnerability and shame is foundational to any serious conversation about anxiety in leadership, and Adam Grant, whose work on give-and-take and learning cultures has shaped how many organisations think about performance under pressure, are genuinely important voices. We chose to move past these household names so that this list could surface thinkers the reader may not yet have encountered.

Among those seriously considered but not included: Katy Milkman's work on behavioural science and behaviour change at Wharton is highly relevant but focuses more on habit change than anxiety specifically. Tali Sharot's research on optimism bias and the influential mind is fascinating but primarily addresses how emotions affect belief rather than leadership practice. Sarah Wilson, the Australian author of First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, wrote one of the most honest personal accounts of living with anxiety as a leader, and her content output has slowed significantly in recent years. Scott Stossel appears on the list and adequately represents the journalist-memoir tradition that Wilson exemplifies.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Leading with Anxiety

The most common mistake leaders make when they first encounter the idea that anxiety can coexist with effective leadership is to interpret it as permission to broadcast their anxiety without filter. The 50 voices on this list are not arguing that emotional dumping is good leadership. They are arguing for something more specific and more difficult: the development of genuine internal awareness of when anxiety is generating useful information and when it is generating noise, and the capacity to act from values in either case. A leader who has recognised their anxiety but has not yet developed the discrimination to know when to act on it and when to sit with it has not yet arrived at the thing these thinkers are pointing toward.

A second common mistake is to treat anxiety management as a wellness task rather than a leadership task. Booking a mindfulness app subscription for your team is not the same as developing the self-awareness to know when your own anxiety is driving you toward controlling behaviour. Offering an EAP is not the same as building a team culture where people can tell you when your emotional state is affecting the room. The individual tools are valuable, but they are insufficient without the systemic and relational work that the best voices on this list, particularly Steve Cuss, Alyson Meister, and Jennifer Moss, are pointing toward.

A third mistake is to use the 'anxiety as superpower' narrative to avoid the genuine clinical support that some forms of anxiety require. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is perhaps the clearest on this point: the argument that anxiety is useful data does not mean that all anxiety at all intensities is equally manageable through personal development. When anxiety is interfering with sleep, concentration, relationships, or physical health in sustained ways, that is a signal to seek professional support, not to read more books about reframing.

A fourth mistake is assuming that because you have managed anxiety successfully for years, you have nothing to learn. Many of the leaders who would benefit most from this list are those who have built the most sophisticated systems for hiding their anxiety, from themselves and others. Jerry Colonna's work on the hard inquiry is specifically aimed at leaders who have outperformed their way past the need to understand themselves and who find in midcareer, often after a breakdown or a crisis, that their avoidance has costs they could no longer not pay.

A fifth mistake is neglecting the team dimension of leadership anxiety entirely. The research on emotional contagion, particularly the work of Amy Edmondson on psychological safety and Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick on anxiety in teams, makes clear that a leader's unmanaged anxiety does not stay with the leader. It shapes every interaction, every meeting, every decision point in the team's life. Managing your own anxiety is not a self-care practice in isolation. It is an organisational leadership responsibility.

Implementation Guide: Taking Action

The first practical step for any leader who wants to develop a healthier relationship with their anxiety is to name what they are actually experiencing. Ethan Kross's research on emotional labelling shows that simply giving an emotion an accurate name reduces its intensity and activates the prefrontal cortex rather than the amygdala. 'I am anxious' is a more useful cognitive starting point than 'I am overwhelmed' or 'the pressure is intense.' Specificity matters. 'I am anxious about what the board will say' is more useful still.

The second step is to distinguish between the signal and the noise in the anxiety. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary's framework of anxiety as information about what you care about, combined with Steve Cuss's family systems approach to recognising triggered versus values-aligned responses, gives leaders two complementary tools for this discernment. When anxiety spikes, asking 'what is this protecting?' and 'what am I actually trying to avoid?' often surfaces the genuine concern underneath the surface reaction.

The third step is to build what Jerry Colonna calls a safe team: a small group of trusted people, which may include a coach, a therapist, a mentor, or a peer cohort, who can hold honest conversation about what is actually happening for you in your leadership role. Amy Edmondson's research is unambiguous that leaders cannot build psychological safety in their teams without having somewhere safe to be honest themselves. The investment in relationships where honesty is possible is one of the highest-leverage investments a leader can make.

The fourth step is to engage deliberately with the bodies of work on this list rather than reading across them superficially. Russ Harris's ACT framework, Kristin Neff's self-compassion practice, and Judson Brewer's awareness-based approach to anxiety all require consistent practice rather than intellectual understanding. Choose one framework that resonates with your experience and spend three months with it rather than reading all fifty authors in the next year.

The fifth step is to audit the structures in your organisation that generate unnecessary anxiety. Jennifer Moss and Chester Elton's research, and the systemic work of Alyson Meister and Ronald Heifetz, all point to the same conclusion: much of the anxiety that leaders and teams carry is generated by avoidable structural conditions, including unclear expectations, inconsistent communication, arbitrary decision-making, and the absence of genuine psychological safety. Changing those structures is within most leaders' power and has far greater impact than any amount of individual anxiety management work.

Jonno White facilitates executive team offsites specifically designed to surface and address the real challenges in leadership team culture, including the dynamics where anxiety is being managed through avoidance rather than addressed through honest conversation. If your team is ready to have the conversations they have been avoiding, email jonno@consultclarity.org to explore how that work could look for your organisation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most important thought leaders on leading with anxiety? The most important voices depend on what you are looking for. For clinical foundations, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, Ethan Kross, and Steven Hayes are essential. For practical tools for working leaders, Morra Aarons-Mele, Jerry Colonna, and Chloe Carmichael are the most immediately actionable. For the systemic and organisational dimension, Amy Edmondson, Steve Cuss, and Jennifer Moss offer the most useful frameworks. The 50 people on this list were selected to give leaders a comprehensive view across these dimensions rather than any single one.

Is anxiety in leadership a sign of weakness? The research consistently says no. Anxiety is a normal feature of taking genuine responsibility under conditions of genuine uncertainty, which is the defining condition of leadership. The question is not whether leaders experience anxiety but whether they have developed a functional relationship with it. The voices on this list argue that anxious leaders who have learned to work with their anxiety, rather than suppressing or broadcasting it, are often more effective than leaders who genuinely do not experience it, because their anxiety keeps them attuned to risk, empathetic to others' distress, and honest about what they do not know.

How was this list compiled? The list was assembled using four criteria: demonstrated expertise in the field of anxiety and leadership, active contribution to the public conversation through writing, research, speaking, or practitioner work, geographic and disciplinary diversity across more than ten countries and eight distinct disciplines, and a deliberate effort to surface voices whose work is genuinely excellent but less widely known alongside the names whose work is foundational. The list prioritises voices actively contributing to the conversation in 2025-26 over historical figures, however important their foundational contributions.

Can I hire someone to facilitate workshops on leading with anxiety for my team? Yes. Jonno White, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with more than 10,000 copies sold globally, facilitates workshops and executive offsites that help leadership teams build cultures where difficult conversations happen and the underlying anxiety that prevents honest communication gets named and addressed rather than managed through avoidance. He works with organisations globally and travels internationally for facilitation engagements. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

What is the difference between anxiety that helps leadership and anxiety that harms it? Tracy Dennis-Tiwary and Jerry Colonna are probably the clearest on this distinction. Useful anxiety points you toward something you genuinely care about and generates information about genuine risk. It is functional, temporary, and informative. Harmful anxiety is chronic, disconnected from specific risks, and generates avoidance, rumination, or compulsive behaviour that depletes the leader's capacity without producing useful information. The distinction is not about the intensity of the feeling but about whether it has a specific object and whether the response it generates is adaptive.

What books should I read to start understanding leading with anxiety? Three books that together cover the most important dimensions of the topic: Morra Aarons-Mele's The Anxious Achiever for the practical leadership application, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary's Future Tense for the scientific foundation, and Jerry Colonna's Reboot for the honest personal and systemic depth. If you want a fourth, Steve Cuss's Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs addresses the team transmission dimension that the other three do not cover as directly.

Final Thoughts

The leaders who will define the next decade are not those who have conquered their anxiety but those who have learned to lead in its presence. The voices on this list represent the best available thinking on how to do that. They include rigorous scientists who have spent careers understanding what anxiety actually is at the biological and psychological level, brilliant practitioners who have sat with thousands of anxious leaders and developed frameworks that work in the reality of demanding professional lives, and honest writers who have made their own anxiety legible and in doing so made it easier for every reader to name and navigate their own.

If one idea runs through all fifty of these contributions, it is this: anxiety is not the enemy. Pretending that anxiety does not exist is the enemy. The leader who insists on performing certainty teaches their team that uncertainty is shameful, which means that genuine risks never get surfaced, genuine doubts never get aired, and the organisation navigates toward the future on the basis of information that everyone knows is incomplete but no one will say so. The leader who has learned to acknowledge, interpret, and act from their anxiety despite its presence teaches their team something more valuable: that it is possible to be both honestly human and genuinely effective at exactly the same time.

Jonno White works with leadership teams around the world to build cultures where that combination, honesty and effectiveness in the same room at the same time, becomes normal rather than exceptional. His book Step Up or Step Out is specifically about the difficult conversations and accountability challenges that anxiety most reliably prevents. The Amazon link is: https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD. To bring Jonno to your next event, offsite, or leadership development programme, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 35 Best Thought Leaders Globally on Mental Health

The conversation about mental health has never been louder. It has also never been more important to know whose voice to trust. The World Health Organization estimates that one in four people worldwide will experience a mental health condition at some point in their lives, and the global economic burden of mental disorders has surpassed USD $2.5 trillion annually. In workplaces alone, the WHO calculates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy approximately USD $1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

These are not abstract statistics. They describe the inner experience of the leaders in your organisation right now: the head of department who has not slept properly in four months, the senior manager who has started declining invitations because leaving the house feels like too much, the high performer whose output is unchanged but whose internal experience bears no relationship to their external presentation.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-mental-health