Constricted by Fear

In the month of October as the ghouls and goblins appear on store windows and front lawns in your neighborhoods, one cannot escape that Halloween is right around the corner. This annual celebration of fear is an opportunity to find out where it plays a useful place in business or if fear is restricting your organizations full potential.

Let’s first understand that when the brain is stimulated by some external event which triggers the fight or flight type response, chemicals are released to prepare the body for a more physical response.  Your heart begins to race, nerve endings become hyper aware, muscles become energized and you ready yourself for what is about to take place.

When walking through a haunted house in the dark and you are touched or someone suddenly appears your mind and body react.  Because you placed yourself consciously into this situation you attempt to manage your fear reaction.  Some are better than others in this mind management effort.

The same is true in business.  Your path while building your organization can sometimes be like walking through the haunted house.  You don’t really know when that situation,  object or person is going to reach out to alter your reality. The question is how do you navigate those experiences and turn them from a negative flight response to a let’s learn from this and fight to the next level of growth response.

The trigger which starts your response is automatic.  Somewhat like breathing in that we don’t consciously think to breathe.  Much like breathing we can control how we breathe such as when the doctor tells you to take a couple of deep breaths. You control the normal breath pattern to a specific rate of taking in and releasing air. When a stimulus which causes a level of fear to be initiated, it has a couple of paths it takes at the same time.  The quick path which causes an immediate reaction and a slower more thought enhanced approach which produces a more complete reaction.  We have all seen this play out in the workplace.  An employee makes a mistake which causes a fear of loss of customer and revenue and the employee is terminated immediately only to find out that the employee’s choice was actually in the best interest of the company.  The quick response reaction to the fear of loss might very well have been the wrong decision. The slower response to the situation may have been better to this particular situation.  On the same processing path, I have seen too many decisions take the slower path and end up with no ultimate action taking place which contributes to the situation negatively because the action of the employee is negated as acceptable and then becomes a repeated behavior moving forward.

This week, examine the “Fear” factor in your organization.  Are their situations where you are succumbing to fear and it is holding you back? Are employees holding themselves back because they don’t want to be the subject of a fear based reaction from leadership?

Fear as a chemical reaction elevates the body to a new level of performance.  How can you take this understanding and apply it to moving your business forward and not holding it back.

Are you fearful of making the right decision? Call JKL Associates at (313) 527-7945 so you can best manage your businesses growth to the next level or results