Tuesday, April 16, 2019
How emotional fears are ruining your career.
www.fastcompany.com: Fear is a powerful tool. It sends a signal to your body when danger is present and tells you when it’s time to run a way. But it can also cripple you from taking positive actions. Your mind sees the possibility of failure as a threat, and you immediately want to protect yourself by staying put and doing nothing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
This concept of fear or failure is something we talk about quite a bit in our Leadership and Ethics class. This article talks a lot about the practical consequences of how fear, or emotional fear, can affect a person. Things like being quiet in meetings or avoiding risky situations. At the end of the day, what we talk about in Leadership is that allowing fear to control your actions inhibits your ability to be a good leader. Leading is about taking risk, about being willing to be wrong and trusting yourself to know that mostly you’ll be right. It’s such a hard thing to get over, and it takes a lot of active conditioning. You have to try and train yourself to accept that being scared usually isn’t a good reason not to do something. You have to be ok with being wrong in order to allow yourself to be right.
This article was super helpful to read. I always forget how big fear a role is in when I don’t do or say things. This article addressed fear in a great way by both showing how it manifests in someone’s day to day work life as well as how it works scientifically. I am always looking for reminders or new scientific ways of looking at emotions so it is a helpful reminder in this article to read about how fear is experienced universally by the body and is a huge hindrance. I was surprised to read that fear in the workplace is the most experienced fear but this makes sense as the workplace controls people’s lives so much. If you don’t have a job and aren’t making money then you are failing in this heavily capitalistic society. This article provides not any revolutionary tips but provides good reminders about how fear holds you back and ways to look around fear in these situations.
The points that Anisa makes in this article are definitely things I face too. My fear of a lot of different things tends to hold me back from a lot of opportunities to get my ideas out there and to meet more people. I always assume that people are going to either not care about what I say, or think it’s idiotic, and therefore I usually keep pretty quiet. Like it says, “Silence, in contrast, is instinctive and safe.’ I think I miss a lot of things from holding back ideas and points that I could say. I also focus a lot on not making mistakes and not coming across like a failure, which ties into not wanting to ask others for help. It’s something that I’ve slowly been trying to get better at because I know that asking another person for help on certain things could have potentially saved a lot of time or stress. I just need to get over the idea that I need to be completely independent.
This is something that I actually think about time to time, and it really has the ability to get in the way of meeting deadlines and deciding things due to the sheer fear of something changing in my life. You see it mostly in things like investments, making deposits, and anything really that involves money and action, and I really think can't give you the best answer as to how to combat this because I think that many of these fears that people have are pretty valid. As Emma said, I think that fear is caused by the inability to take risks and the inability to take a leap of faith. I know just as much as the next person, how easy it is to let opportunities pass you by, let application deadlines get ahead of you, and its not because someone is lazy or apathetic, its probably because they're scared that they're not going to get the answer they want.
I deal with a lot of the work-related fear the author talks about. I feel like I have a constant fear of failure brewing in my head, and while it motivates me to always give my best, it brings so much inhibiting anxiety into the mix as well. I feel like if I had the motivation, and lacked the fear, I could be so much more successful in anything I pursue. I became a lot more aware of this tendency this year, and I have been trying to better it. I started with asking for help when I need it instead of staying silent, which the article mentions as one of the major things holding people back. In such a high stress, high pressure environment as Carnegie Mellon, a lot of times it can feel like you are supposed to immediately understand something or already know. Finally understanding that this is not the case has made asking questions and speaking out so much easier for me, so hopefully I will see a positive growth.
Yikes what a title. Any time I am making a decision that will affect my future, education, or career I really try my best to honestly ask myself if I am letting a fear of failure influence my decision. That practice is something that my parents have pushed on me a lot since I was little. Sometimes these fears are fully fabricated in our heads and they hold us back from contributing, trying something new, or being in an unknown space. Being able to push through that and trust in yourself and your own abilities is a really valuable skill, and one that is necessary to be a leader that encourages your team to move forward. My dad always said that if you aren’t a little bit scared, it means you don’t care. That was a little bit extreme, but what he was saying made sense. You always want to be moving forward into something new and big. That being said, sometimes the fear is justified. Sometimes it is telling you that following that place will land you in a place where you are too uncomfortable or unhappy. There is always balance with this, and learning to navigate is critical.
This article was based on the workplace but I found it eerily similar to a classroom environment. I am someone who asks a lot of questions and really tests the commonly heard phrase “there are no stupid question.” In most classroom environments I feel comfortable asking questions because I can recognize everyones has different knowledge and my knowledge or lack thereof will not make anyone look at me differently, even if I don’t understand something the first time. But I also am commonly afraid to ask questions in more professional style environments like crew where we are supposed to know the information. Some of this fear comes from grades being heavily weighed on how much we are able to put in practice what we have learned, so when you ask a question you are demonstrating you do not know what you are expected to. The part of this article where they advised against thinking of the worse situation felt wacky, because we have all been in embarrassing situations before and guess what we all survived dignity mostly intact so if I am able to say the worst thing that will happen is I get embarrassed for not knowing I can realise I will survive and get a funny story out of it.
Post a Comment