How to Keep Fear from Taking Your Leadership Hostage

It is a bit cliche, but I’ve learned far more from failure than success. As you suggest, failures have also taught me to trust more in God than trying to depend upon myself. Richard E. Stearns covers this well, especially for business executives, early in his book The Hole in Our Gospel.

Great post. Thank you for sharing.

Fear definitely gets a bad rap. I don’t think it’s Fear’s fault, it’s how we deal with it. Fear is meant to be an adviser, not a monarch. Things sour quickly when we abdicate to Fear.

But in it’s proper place, fear serves me well. It keeps me safe, it matures me, it leads me to the edge where life abounds, and—most importantly—it gives me the opportunity to be brave. Without fear there can be no courage.

Many years ago I learned to ask “what’s the worst that can happen?” when I was about to enter my first horse show as a 32 year old novice rider. Learning to ride was the plan of a friend to help me over come a terrible loss and grief that had driven me to a deep depression. When I faced the ring of mostly under age 20 riders I was terrified. The worst that could happen was that I would fall off into the mud and I’d be embarrassed. My trainer asked next, “what’s the best that could happen?” my response, “win the blue ribbon!” and I laughed realizing it was silly to imagine I could win but the experience of riding would be fun. When I faced that fear and saw there was an upside too, I rode into the ring, still scared. When they announced the blue ribbon it went to “Meisha and Carla!” Yep, a ribbon and 10 bucks and cheers of all my young 4-H friends who had secretly been helping me over come my grief. At that moment, life began a new for me. Facing my fear was the obstacle that, when overcome, resulted in much more success than I had imagined!

I really enjoyed this post. I have really struggled with fear in leadership as well. When I first graduated from College I was managing a million dollar retaurant and I was nervous. Mayof the people working there had been working there longer than I have been working at all. Despite my fears, I learn to face them by listening to the people who had been there and learning and understanding the culture. When I failed at something, I would debrief the situation and ask what went wrong, what could I do differntly. How could this be better and what parts am I missing. Part of my issues though came from growing up in a single parent household, I had to learn to be self-sufiecient at an early age and grew up with this mentality that people would let me down and I was the only one who could control things. Beware of “once bitten, twice shy.” really related to me because was afraid in the beginning to empower others and tended to try and do everything myself. Once I came to terms with this and turned it over to God, I started to see the rich life of the leader who empowers and challenges those around them. I have found more satisfaction in seeing other people grow and succeed than myself and that has driven me to this day.

Fear is a strong motivator, either to do something or to avoid something. It can be helpful to try understand your own motivations and see if fear is part of it.

When I was in high school, the music teacher was laid off because of budget problems. I took it upon myself to start a glee club. I went into that situation with the desire to succeed, but little else. We met a couple of times, but the club never got off the ground. That failure has greatly influenced the way I handle meetings when I am the chairman of a committee or when I moderate some other kind of meeting. As much as possible, I am prepared ahead of time so that when we meet we are not sitting around deciding what we need to discuss but we can jump directly to the decisions that need to be made.

Fear is a great guide. It’s a great indicator of what you should be dealing with right now.

I remember that there were certain points in my life where I was motivated by fear. One very clear instance that I will never forget is when I was trying to break out of being an uneducated blue collar worker jumping from job to job, to finding a career that would help to fulfill the goals I wanted to accomplish. I had no formal education or training, but I made a decision.
I started by asking myself what do I have to offer? I naively thought I had the “gift of the gab” and could use that to woo my way into a six figure income. I then created a resume that highlighted that “talent”, no lies, nothing unethical, just a really strong focus on that and my hunger to get the chance to prove to a company that I could do it. That and using recruiters were what got me to my first interview for a “real” job.
The interview was set up, I got dressed to the nines and looked gooood. I was cocksure and I was going to get that job.
About twenty minutes into the interview the guy, who was sharper than me, across the boardroom table said to me “Who the F&^% do you think you are?”, I am not exaggerating the expletive, that is precisely what he said to me. He went on to say or ask “Do you know how much time and money is at stake here? Not just for me flying in and conducting this interview, but the job itself is a $70K a year sales job selling our product to the likes of Lockheed Martin, NASA, etc. And you come in here as a snot nosed, unprepared and wasting my time by not even knowing what we do???? Get out of my sight” and that was how the interview ended.
Now I don’t agree with the “how” things were said, but I will tell you that the person was right. I scurried out of the interview as a child man about three inches tall. I remember sitting in my car almost crying, then getting angry because of how I let myself get into that position and let someone else affect me this way. I was very afraid of this happening to me again, as you said “once bitten, twice shy”. Thankfully I was angry enough about the whole thing that it plowed through my fear, instead of letting it discourage me from trying again, it actually motived me to say to myself “That will never happen to me again”.
The next interview opportunity I received was for a company that performed engineering services and they were looking for a sales rep. I studied the company, I studied the industry, I called their competitors, I took one of their competitors sales people out to lunch and quizzed him till could barely stand me anymore. I found out who the players in the industry were, I found out why they were looking for a sales rep and what they were hoping to accomplish. I quizzed myself on hundreds and hundreds of questions that could be asked of me and rehearsed my answers. I even found out who the managers were and what they liked and disliked by finding reasons to talk to their secretaries. I did everything I possibly could to prepare myself. I even stalled the phone interview for a few days to get the information, and then stalled the personal interview as well so I could have time to prepare.
You have probably already figured out that I got the job. I beat out almost 50 other candidates that where professional engineers and professional sales people. Later, the GM let me know that the reason I got the job was that I was the only one that was interviewed that clearly understood the industry and what the company did. That was my first step towards actually getting those six figures and becoming VP of a company with 13,000 employees and offices worldwide. Fear motived me, and I thank God for that.

Facing your fears is a great step. Beth Moore introduced this practice in her book “So Long Insecurity”. God told her to go ahead and visualize the worst in a “scare your pants off” kind of way and then to think about what would happen once the worst was over. When you get past the fire-breathing dragon of fear and decide what you’ll do if your plan doesn’t work, then you’ve empowered yourself with preparation and taken the power out of the enemy’s hands.

I like what the great American inventor, Thomas Edison said:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Helpful as always. Thank you for posting. I especially appreciate you using the numbering, then I don’t have to re-read to look for a summary. Very helpful, very efficient.

I try to look at the challenge of fear as a cube. The process of examining a minimum of six solutions seems to keep me busy enough that the fear cannot become overwhelming. Besides, this world is of our making and believing that allows me to dismiss the fear. God’s love is pure Love – no room for fear!

I believe the biggest mistake someone can make is the fear to make a mistake, you will never learn anything if you play it safe and take a passive position, most people will not respect a passive leader!