I'm Mora Aronsmeli, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

Each episode, we look at stories from business leaders who have dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges.

How they fell down, how they pick themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.

So here's a secret. If I ever picked up the phone to call you, I'd probably dread it.

In fact, I'd probably have canceled our call and then rescheduled it a million

times until you gave up trying to contact me. It's not personal. It's my social anxiety.

And social anxiety is strange. It makes no sense. Many of us can stand up in front of thousands

of people and deliver a killer keynote or stand-up set.

But if we need to mingle with a few people afterwards, we've become riddled with anxiety and run to hide in the bathroom.

This phenomenon is what the Australian comedian Jordan Ruskopoulos calls a shy loud.

When I heard Jordan deliver her TEDx talk, I just loved this coinage of a shy loud.

She explains, I'm only confident on stage.

Off it, I'm a timid, mumbly wreck.

I don't answer emails or the phone, and I struggle with deadlines.

But shy louts like me produce high quality work because of our

high fear of failure. Along the way, though, there can be really negative personality presumptions,

Jordan explains. Quote, that I'm lazy, arrogant, rude, aloof, lazy, unreliable. But she says,

I actually care so much that I'm often stunned into silence.

And that's the lousy irony of operating in a culture that values more smooth,

extroverted social interactions over fewer thoughtful ones. Living with social anxiety often means

living with the feeling that you're just

about to be discovered as a fraud who doesn't deserve anything. It means living with the threat of

...