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"We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and a mystery."
H.G. Wells

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Leadership Notes -- Thoughts on Leading People and Making a Difference in Organizations

Word count this issue: 550

Estimated reading time:   3.0 minutes 

 

I’ve been struck by the amount of fear around me. Not necessarily so much  in my close friends and colleagues, but in the ‘zeitgeist’, the ‘spirit of the times’ around us all. It’s like we’re all waiting for the other shoe to fall; is the economy really recovering? is the falling price of oil a good thing, a bad thing, a conspiracy? what of terrorists, are they not around every corner, waiting to kill us all? It’s like we’re running these days on a heightened sense of fear.

 

This is not a good thing. There’s a reason so many religious and spiritual texts tell us to “Fear not.”

 

A friend who is a neuro-psychiatrist was telling me over lunch recently that our natural state as humans is to be ‘slightly apprehensive’. We’re always scanning the environment looking for something out of place in case there is a ‘sabre-tooth tiger in the grass’. Think of it this way; apparently the back of our brains, the brain stem, the cerebellum, temporal lobe and occipital lobe, combine into what we might call the ‘lizard brain’. We share these parts of our brains to a great extent with lizards. Unconsciously, 5 times a second, we scan the environment for threats and rewards. Threats and rewards; when we get too many observations of either of them they actually take over from our thinking, our imagination and our ability to make rational decisions.

 

 

When our threat readers are stimulated too much, we become more risk adverse, our perspective narrows and our creativity slows down as our brain finds a haven in the safest option. We experience these moments when we go to fight, flight or freeze mode. (I should note too that when our reward readers are stimulated too much the same thing happens. Marie Antionette’s famous comment about the starving people of Paris from the luxurious world of Versailles was “let them eat cake.” Her reward readers were on overload and so she probably couldn’t imagine that there might be a problem.)

 

There appears to be a ‘happy medium’ for us as a species, somewhere between constant fear and constant luxury. This happy medium place is where we are working within a slightly apprehensive frame, scanning for both rewards and threats. That is when our neo-cortex, the front part, the rational part of our brains can be at it’s best. We see and understand risk, we gain new perspective more quickly and our creativity increases. 

 

Our current zeitgeist of fear is then a bad thing for us as a species, and most especially for us as leaders in the midst of the most dramatic change in work and society in the West since the Industrial Revolution. Our threat readers are being stimulated far too often.

 

 

So, Fear not! Take deep breaths, increase your self-awareness, and increase your other awareness. Work on your perseverance and keep learning something everyday. Find new ways to challenge yourself and others to think outside your comfort zone. We’ll be looking at each of these in greater detail over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about practical ways to find courage in the midst of the fear zeitgeist.