Don’t be. It definitely won’t help and might make things worse. The good news is, there are things you can do instead.
Worry actually comes from the old German word for “wuergen”, which means to choke. And when you are choking, no oxygen is getting to your brain so your thinking is negatively impacted, and you are probably not making the best decisions.
Fear is a pervasive emotion in a world of mounting pressure. From the top to the bottom of the organization, and across the world, fear seems to be everywhere these days.
And yet, fear is an important emotion. Like all emotions, it is an indicator that it is time for motion, for moving, for doing something different.
“Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.”
–Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Unfortunately, fear also triggers the amygdala in the limbic emotional center of our brains. When triggered, the amygdala instructs our reptilian brain to release about 1400 chemicals into our system, which prepares us for a fight, flight, freeze or befriend response.
When you worry about your year end results, and give in to the fear instead of using it, you are actually imagining that the worst case scenario has already occurred.
Whether you are experiencing something or imagining something, your brain actually doesn’t know the difference and reacts the same way.
You imagine that moment when the judgement comes, and you are right there, as if it had already happened: Your amygdala fires, your reptilian brain releases hormones into your bloodstream and you are likely to engage in one of the following:
- Fight – You are already thinking about who or what you can blame for missing your targets. You are getting ready to fight and point your fingers at something outside of you.
- Flight – You are fantasizing about your next job, what you could do instead, taking away focus from the issue at hand.
- Freeze – You duck and cover and distract yourself, hoping that somehow magically, nobody will notice that you failed.
- Friend – You will begin to think about who could be your ally, who could excuse your failure for you.
The key issue here is that you already accepted the failure.
When you worry, you have already resigned to not making the results, unless you decide to embrace your fear, thank it for getting you into motion, and shift your mindset.
Breathe for a moment. Then imagine what would happen if it was different. What if you hit your year end goals? Maybe even exceeded them?
We live in a world where things happen fast, sometimes seemingly overnight. We have all had the experience of what a difference a day can make, where one day things seem hopeless, and the next, due to one single event, suddenly the world is bright and delightful again.
Our amygdala is a binary interface. Either it’s all good, or it’s all bad. Once we recognize that and learn to shift away from worry and back into optimism, we can activate our higher capacities of thinking.
So start with visualizing your achievement.
Imagine you already hit or even exceeded your numbers. Imagine, how great you will feel. Allow yourself to feel that gratitude. Your amygdala will switch and release 1200 other chemicals into your systems that allow you to relax, one of the keys for creative thinking.
As you visualize your success, look backward, what did you do more or do less of?
If you are not hitting your targets, it’s because of obstacles, something you get to do less of, or because you are not doing something, maybe something outside of your comfort zone that you haven’t tried or have avoided?
So, what obstacles can you remove?
Get your team together, shift them into a forwarding state, and ask them what the obstacles are that are in their way. Then focus on removing them.
Or, ask yourself what else you can do, even (or especially) if it scares you?
If you don’t focus on something bigger than yourself you have no reason to grow. Embrace the smaller fear of the activity, knowing that it will alleviate the bigger fear of failing at the end.
“What we need to do is say, ‘What’s the smallest, tiniest thing that I can master and what’s the scariest thing I can do in front of the smallest number of people that can teach me how to dance with the fear?’ Once we get good at that, we just realize that it’s not fatal. And it’s not intellectually realize – we’ve lived something that wasn’t fatal. And that idea is what’s so key — because then you can do it a little bit more.”
Seth Godin
Get into action. Get into motion. That is why you have emotions in the first place.
One of the things we teach people through #CreationLeadership is to self-manage, to be aware of when our systems get triggered and to shift into proactive action. Managing fear is one of the key capacities for the future – as individuals, in teams, and across the organization.
Fear, like hope, is contagious. If you are in fear mode, your team will be too, enabling fear to ripple rippling out ever further throughout the organization and into our world.
We are in need of more positive visions, for us as individuals, and for our world as a whole. Only when we learn to overcome worry, to shift again and again into our creative capacities, can we build a future we would want to live in.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to overcome it again and again.
You got this!
“It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There’s almost no such thing as ready. There’s only now. And you may as well do it now. Now is as good a time as any.”
Hugh Laurie
We work with leaders and their teams to get them out of reactivity and fear mode, and unleash their potential to create. If you want to increase the likelihood of our year-end success, contact us and set up an initial call!
