What is your fear level?

I have been reflecting on my own career and some of the things that have been happening at my work recently and came to some realizations that I wasn't expecting. When things are getting challenging at work, or more importantly when I'm not performing at my best, a measure that correlates fairly closely is my level of fear. It could be the fear of losing a job, fear of screwing up, fear of letting down a teammate, fear of not delivering for a customer... you get the idea. There can be a lot of things that bring about fear in your job and in your life.

The downside of fear is that it can start putting us into a downward spiral that can be hard to pull out of. When a mistake happens, or you don't deliver as needed, you begin to operate in a heightened state of awareness, which is good because we don't want to make the same mistake twice. But when we move past awareness and into a state of fear we start second guessing ourselves and probably making more mistakes.

One of the greatest things a leader can do is eliminate fear. Good leadership requires us to raise the awareness level of the things that are most important. Bad leadership is when there is so much awareness people cross over into being afraid of those things.

Eliminate the fear and improvement will happen.



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