Thoughts about fear

A slightly more abstract post this time around, and not one at the light and fluffy end of the spectrum. Like most unpleasant emotions fear isn’t something that’s often talked about often in any context aside from the physical. Right now though, fear is an interesting thing to me, as it’s not what I thought it was. I think it is very easy to conflate fear and terror as the same emotion, and they are not. I thought fear was a big, showy emotion like anger or happiness, but it’s not.

When thinking about what fear actually is, I find it easier to start with thinking about its big, showy cousin: terror. Terror arises in response to threats to your physical safety, real or perceived. It is by its very nature short lived, such is the drive it creates to resolve the situation. That’s not to say it cannot recur, but it’s an acute emotion, not a chronic one.

I think that fear, however, is the opposite. It’s a creeping thing, like smoke. You can be surrounded by it and not notice it. Critically, it’s very good at masquerading as something else. It’s as if it lurks unseen, subtly shaping our emotional and intellectual responses to day to say things. Amongst other emotions it can feel like stress, resistance and sadness, but I am noticing that it’s often there underneath so much.

Given that it’s often hard to even notice, it’s even trickier to nail down quite what one is afraid of. Terror, now terror is easy. When we’re at the top of a cliff and feel a racing heart and a sense of vertigo it’s very easy to know exactly what terrifies us. When we are sitting at our desks and wondering why we can’t bring ourselves to start working on a presentation it’s a lot harder to notice, let alone nail down exactly what we are fearful of.

This is one of the reasons that fear has been on my mind recently. When you’re working in a ‘high freedom’ company, fear is the thing that stops you reaching your potential. Perhaps this is only true for metaphorical firefighters, but I believe that to really be successful, in an outstanding way, you have to be able to think about the company as if you were an owner. That means bringing all your talents to bear on the issues of the day, and this is not easy.

The problem is that, in our minds, we were hired for one specific set of skills. Whether it’s software engineering, people management, operations or whatever, we were hired because we were particularly good at one thing. One of the mindset shifts that a startup requires though is that that’s just the beginning. Or at least, it can (and perhaps should be) in order to live up to your full potential. This is because there are so many gaps that you can see but you’re not sure that you’re qualified to fill them. This is where the fear sneaks in. What if I lose face? What if I fail? What if I offer to do a thing and there are no takers? It’s safer to wait for another person to get hired who specialises in that area.

This makes it very, very easy to take the ‘safe’ route, and just do the specific thing that we were hired for. To leave the rest undone, as no one has asked for them anyway. No one will know. This is fine. Only it’s not, because you know. You’re left with the knowledge that there was more for you, right there. That you could potentially be more, if only you would reach out and take it.

I don’t have anything like a complete answer on what you do about this, but I have some thoughts. The first step is, I think, simply noticing. Noticing and getting curious. I’ve found it works best when you decide to be constantly curious about the way you’re feeling. Curiosity is like a superpower, it removes the judgement and heaviness from sometimes quite tricky emotions and lets you begin to see what might be creating them underneath. The other thing that helps is realising that emotions live in the body, and our bodies are much slower than our minds.

For me, fear is felt in the chest, terror lower down. I find it helpful to give it a shape, texture, colour etc when I notice it, as doing so forces you to slow down and let your body do its thing without your mind racing off to the next thing. Labelling the feeling correctly and giving it some time often lowers its intensity, and puts you in a place where you can decide how to react to it. This act of noticing and noting may help you see quite how often it comes up, potentially a lot more than your mind would expect. And that’s good, as with that knowledge comes the ability to change things.

Next, you need time. These patterns of behaviour have likely been around a long time, and are not easy things to surmount. I think it helps to journal about what you’re noticing, or to write blog posts that help you think ;) The third step, I think, is to wonder. Really take a little time and imagine - what could your life be, in every dimension, if you could live it without the fears that you’ve identified? How much more fulfilling could it be? Creeping, insidious fear keeps us from the peak of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs more than anything else I think. So goes the saying, we are often our own worst enemy.

In writing and thinking about this, for me I think that most fears boil down to an aversion to one thing - rejection from the group. Other people have made entire careers out of discussing our innate need to belong, be it to a family or to any kind of group. So perhaps the only thing that we truly fear is not being allowed to belong. We fear that by sticking our heads up and being noticed that we will be ridiculed or forced out. This line of thought opens up another - thinking about our personal and professional relationships through the lens of attachment theory. Perhaps companies (like families) can make it easier for people to surmount fear by creating the kind of working relationship that mimics a secure parental relationship? Digging in to this would be many more blog posts, or maybe someone will make a career out of it. I’ll keep it in my back pocket in case this whole software engineering thing doesn’t work out...