Avionics News March 2013 - 79

Indeed, it’s courage that leads to the
success that builds confidence. The root is
forcing yourself to act, in spite of fear, and
do whatever you would do if you were brave.

compounds fear with detailed memories for both good and bad emotions.
We can instantly recall the love
shared at our grandmother’s table
but also the ridicule from the flubbed
history report in eighth grade.
Remembering each, we can experience their physiological effects all
over again. In the case of the latter,
we create habits and excuses to allow
us to avoid that feeling. Talk about
baggage.
We reinforce it regularly. With
some negative feedback, we learn to
fear being wrong, wasting resources,
change, choices, failure, success,
interacting, speaking, leading and
nearly every other work-related competency.
But if you’re a manager, eventually you’ll have to do some of these
things – and you’ll have to do them
fearlessly.
But fearless is a misnomer. Most
people regard fearlessness as the
absence of the emotion, according to Deirdre Van Nest, a business
performance coach and author of
Fire Your Fear. People think they
must exorcise fears before they act.

Actually, it’s about managing fear so
you no longer allow it to make decisions for you.
“That’s the skill people need to
have – not thinking that they can
get rid of fear, because that’s not
realistic, or even necessary,” Van
Nest said.
And you must harness it. Your one
employee who’s bullying others, for
example, requires you to suppress
your fear of confrontation with the
perpetrator so you can protect the
innocent employees who would otherwise pay the tab for your reticence.
Likewise, you must work through
your fear of failure before it costs
you opportunities for growth, both
individually and business wide.
Of course, fearlessness isn’t the
same as recklessness, according to
Van Nest, and you want to be discerning about the choices you’re
making. Staying away from traffic, lions and ledges are all obvious
fears to have, but you need to also
have the self-awareness to get to the
root of your concerns. Action that
addresses real danger requires a different strategy than a situation where

you’re just injecting unrealistic feardriven emotions into the mix.
Scared Straight
Even if it’s the latter, you may still
eventually and inadvertently achieve
the former. For Van Nest, fear exacted a personal price tag. She built a
business she loved, but found she
couldn’t sell her way out of a paper
bag. She would sit with a prospect at
the moment of the “ask” but couldn’t
bring herself to pull the trigger. In
one ear, she heard the booming voice
of reason urging her. But in the other,
she heard another reminding her of
how she would be crushed should the
customer say no.
After two years of this emotional
roller coaster, she quit. She was devastated by the failure, even doubting
she was made for entrepreneurism.
“Fear kept me from making what
I wanted to happen in that business,”
she said. “I realized over the course
of years that if I didn’t figure out
how to get past fear, there’s no way
I’d make it in any other business.”
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Avionics News March 2013

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