Pilar Jerico

Fear cloaks itself in many different disguises, and some of them are very difficult to penetrate, such as stress, “respect” or not feeling at one with the world. What’s more, tracking fear down from behind its various masks often requires you to become your own personal Sherlock Holmes. You should never run yourself down because you feel afraid, and start telling yourself that you are a coward or something worse. This is completely counterproductive and pointless. Rather, you need to be positive and proactive: the really interesting thing about fear is that it can provide a path to help you get to the bottom of what lies behind it. Asking yourself questions can help you along this path, questions such as What am I afraid of losing? or What good is fear doing me? When you’re concerned about your health, your loved ones or your belongings, answering these questions is simple: you are striving to protect yourself from pain and loss to ensure your basic survival in areas such as your health, work, house or money. As a curious aside, research carried out at University College, London has demonstrated that when we lose money, areas of our brain related to aggression or frustration are activated. Just think of the last time you couldn’t find your wallet or purse and you’ll immediately see the real-life confirmation of this research!

The problem of fear becomes more serious when its root cause is more subtle and difficult to pin down. Behind our fear of rejection (what will people say?), failure (not living up to your own or others’ expectations) or loss of power or status (position in the company, having a particular make of car), lies the fear of losing a mask or a role. This mask can take many forms, for example: being popular, always appearing to be on top of things, being the personification of success, etc. Moreover, if you dig a bit deeper, you come to realize that this mask is what gives you the security of feeling appreciated by others and is also very often what gives you your own sense of self-worth. And therein lies the trap. For example, when they’ve had a project go down the tubes at work, many people are more affected by their wounded pride than by the strictly work-related consequences. And this is bound up with their self-image and the role which they have assigned themselves.

If you are able to pinpoint what lies behind your fear and whether your fear is actually doing you any good, you’ll have made great strides in any process of personal change; because change is only possible once all the masks have fallen to the ground.

“Old age has two advantages: you neither have toothache nor do you hear the rubbish which those around you are spouting .”

So said the writer George Bernard Shaw. However, despite these undoubted advantages, we all struggle against the process of growing old. We look for eternal youth in the form of creams which promise us the impossible, and fill up our supermarket trolleys with products prefixed by the magic words organic, diet or macrobiotic; and when we think that this is no longer enough, we pay a visit to the plastic surgeon’s. In Spain 800 plastic surgery operations are carried out every day, and it’s a business which generates a turnover of 900 million euros a year in Spain alone … which puts the country firmly in the number one spot in the European Union and third in the entire world (according to figures provided by the Spanish Organisation of Plastic Surgery). This desire for eternal youth is rooted in our own fears and insecurities; and possibly one of our deepest fears is not being accepted or loved. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it:

“Man’s social instinct is not based on love of others but on fear of finding himself alone.”

The need to be accepted in modern-day society is bound up with notions of beauty and youth, the supreme values of today’s age. Looking middle-aged or old is definitely not the order of the day, especially in the case of women. A man with grey hair may be deemed to appear interesting; many women, on the other hand, try to hide the oncoming of greyness. This search for youth is at heart a striving for love and social recognition- but it comes, paradoxically, at a very high price to our happiness. Neither is it practical: trying to find satisfaction in something which, like it or not, has a sell-by date, is like betting on a horse that will lose the race, despite the forecasts of all the pundits to the contrary.

In a survey carried out in years ago in France, 89 per cent of the respondents thought that man needs to find meaning in his life. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl posited that modern society’s collective neurosis is grounded in a sensation of existential meaninglessness. It is precisely to paper over this sensation that we pursue things which we are afraid of losing, whether it be youth, good looks, a house which is the envy of our neighbours, or a prestigious job. Deep down, we have come to believe that our identity and our own personal worth depend on what we have and not on who we are. And this is the source of all our fears. Although we can hardly lose who we are, we most definitely can lose what we possess- including our youth. Perhaps we have been trying to seek happiness where it is not to be found. As Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at the University of Harvard, puts it:

“While we as individuals want to be happy, society wants us to spend and consume”

If we try to think about the people who have been most important to us in our own lives, we are hardly likely to single out those who were the best-looking, but those who have loved us just as we are, warts and all … those who have made us feel important and unique. Antoine de Saint-Exupèry, the author of The Little Prince, put it this way:

“The most important things in life are invisible to our eyes.”

How right he was! Real beauty cannot be seen, and we can all aspire to it, regardless of our looks. The more we can accept and love ourselves as we are, the happier we will be. And isn’t happiness what we’re all looking for?

“Without friendship no one would want to live, even if they were to have all other possessions […]; for what is the point of prosperity if it is deprived of the ability to do good to one’s friends?”

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

Friendship makes life easier, as Aristotle affirmed over two thousand years ago; and friendship does not just exist between friends, it can also exist between parents and children, and within couples (although its presence in couples was only contemplated centuries after the philosopher’s death). Friendship rescues us from loneliness, which can become especially pernicious at times of great pain, as Bradburn demonstrated in 1969. In the United States, 26% of people admit to feeling lonely and being depressed and unhappy. In my own country, Spain, the figure is similar: in a survey carried out in 1991, 20% of people owned up to feeling unhappy.

Friendship is not just necessary if we want to avoid feeling lonely; it also enables us to share with others, to live a fuller and more authentic life … and even to increase our life expectancy! This is the finding of a research project carried out at Flinders University in Australia. Over the course of ten years, researchers there analyzed the social relationships maintained by almost 1,500 people over the age of 70, and established a correlation with how long they lived. Their conclusions are very revealing: the people who had more and better relationships had 22% more chance of surviving. Friendship, it would seem, is the elixir of youth. Friendship also lowers the risk of suffering a heart attack, according to research published in the journal Heart in the U.K.: people who have already suffered one heart attack are twice as likely to suffer another one within the space of two years if they don’t have a good friend, a family member, or a partner to confide in.

We might ask why the art of cultivating friends is not a compulsory subject on all school curricula. Friendship is possibly one of the most important sources of strength to help us overcome problems and to improve ourselves as people. In myths and fables, all heroes can count on a friend; a guide may not cross their path, but a friend is always there. Friends are like a life raft at difficult times; they make you see that you are not alone and that you can share your pain. Sometimes you can experience this sense of comfort with people you least expect, or with someone who you only meet once in your life, but who is there for you just at the right time. Often it is unnecessary for the other person to say anything: the fact that they are there with you is enough to help heal your wounds. Such is the magic of friendship.

There’s no evidence whatsoever that men are more rational than women. Both sexes seem to be equally irrational.

Albert Ellis, psychologist

Possibly, one of the clubs with the largest membership lists in the world is the club of people who’ve been sacked. Even so, we often find it difficult to tell even those close to us that we’ve been fired, and losing one’s job is usually a deeply painful experience. Albert Ellis, one of the most influential psychologists of the 20^th century, explains why this is so. He says that our way of thinking follows an ABC pattern: A is the initial fact which sets our thoughts in motion; B is our mental maps; and C is our subsequent behaviour.

When faced with being dismissed, the break-up of a relationship, or any painful event (the A of Ellis’ formula), there are some people who might say to themselves (Ellis’ B): “I’ll never get another job”, while others might opine “my dismissal was completely unfair” or “I can’t stand this happening to me”. All these reactions will clearly lead to despair or to anger (stage C). When we are mad at the world, all this negative energy only serves to harm us and is really unbearable for those we come into contact with. However, the same event can be lived through differently if we think: “this is an unpleasant experience” or “unfortunately, I’m now one of the millions of unemployed”. The objective facts haven’t changed, but our way of experiencing them, and the time it takes us to get over the pain will be very different (to the relief those close to us). The key to this difference is the mental maps we use to interpret reality. This explains why two people see things quite differently when confronting the same situation. So, being laid off, or any kind of unpleasant occurrence, is something that we may not be able to avoid (A), but we can choose the mental maps we to use to view the event (B).

When we have come to a decision, any second thoughts, however well-founded, are not welcome. As a result, we amass all the reasons we can think of in order to plough ahead regardless. Festinger coined the phrase “cognitive dissonance” to describe this phenomenon. Cognitive dissonance is the avoidance of keeping in our heads two concepts which are contradictory, such as “smoking is bad for me” and “I like smoking”, or “I never vote for left-leaning political parties” and “I think the centre-left party has a more coherent programme”. This mental duality creates an inner conflict and, as we tend to avoid uncertainty or pain, we strive to eliminate contradictory thoughts with arguments of all stripes. Moreover, we are very good at finding a whole kaleidoscope of pseudo-arguments to choose from. To take the examples above, we might say to ourselves: “it’s not scientifically proven that smoking causes lung cancer” or “political parties never carry out their programmes”.

Our capacity for self-deception in order to justify ourselves can be observed in all areas of life. To take a work-related example, we might say, “When I presented the plan, people were too tired to pay attention”, when the fact of the matter is that the presentation was crushingly boring. Or again, this time in the realm of personal relationships, we could say, “I don’t care about what he said to me” when in reality you were very affected by his words. Unfortunately, cognitive dissonance can also undermine the very fabric of our lives: just think of the multitude of people who do not dare to question their own lives because doing so might imply taking potentially traumatic decisions, such as splitting up with their partner or radically changing their career path. The first step to avoiding cognitive dissonance is to be aware of its existence; we then need to take decisions based on a realistic appraisal of the situation and of our abilities.

We all have a tendency to deny reality because we want to avoid taking decisions which in the short term will prove to be painful. In addition, our brain is delighted to provide us with all sorts of reasons to avoid suffering, and to furnish us with a blinkered view of reality and a selective memory in order to avoid any kind of self-doubt. However, our need for a false sense of security makes us slaves to ourselves.

Resilience comprises two different elements: the ability to keep it together when you are subject to great demands and pressures; and the ability to overcome difficulties, to learn from mistakes and to develop creatively, by turning difficult circumstances into opportunities.

The word resilience comes from the Latin resilio which means to turn round, to make a leap or to rebound, like elastic bands when they are stretched and then return to their initial shape. This concept was first used in physics; it was Michael Rutter who applied it to the social sciences in 1972. The first studies into resilience focussed on people who had found themselves in extreme situations: concentration camps, poor children living on the streets or women who were the victims of violence. Those of them who had been able to survive and to keep on living without throwing in the towel were termed resilient. A clarification may be in order here: resilience does not mean being invulnerable; resilient people suffer like anyone else. What sets resilient people apart is their ability to have a decent quality of life despite all the painful experiences which they have gone through.

What makes it possible for people to have a decent quality of life even when they have been born into abject poverty, or had parents who were alcoholics, or been abused as children? The answer was provided by Emmy Werner who, over the course of 32 years, carried out a study into people in the Hawaiian island of Kauai who had grown up in extremely unfavourable conditions. All the people who had been able to overcome their initial circumstances and to develop as human beings shared one thing in common: they had been able to rely on one person, whether a family member or not, who had unconditionally accepted them as they were, regardless of their temperament, physical appearance or their past. Boris Cyrulnik, one of the pioneers in the study of resilience, also reached the same conclusion. When he was six years old he managed to escape from a concentration camp after seeing both his parents die there. He lived in different shelters until he was finally adopted by a farming family who taught him to love life and literature.

More than two thousand years ago Heraclitus said: “We never bathe twice in the same river.” The same is also true of resilience. After going through a difficult time, we never return to the same starting point. In other words we are, fortunately, not elastic bands. All the difficulties or changes which we go through do influence us, and they can help to transform us. We know that they usually come at just the wrong time, although there is never really a right time, is there? The challenge we face is to consider these difficulties as an opportunity to give the best of ourselves.

Carl Rogers, the father of humanistic psychology, said that people are fundamentally motivated by two things: to develop and to be loved. However, sometimes these two desires can be incompatible. For example, you plan to move away to get the job you’ve always wanted, but your family is not too keen on the idea and they let you know their opinion in no uncertain terms. So you’ve got a dilemma on your hands. Rogers said that problems occur when love is given with strings attached (“conditional love”). According to Rogers, love can never be conditional. If we try to get others to love us at the expense of denying our own desires and beliefs, we will end up paying a price. All decisions involve giving up something and bearing a cost. Moving away from one’s family and being alone is without doubt a painful experience, but so is betraying oneself and one’s innermost desires. It’s up to each person when faced with this type of dilemma to decide what price he/she would rather pay.

Joan Garriga summed this up with the brilliant phrase: “Growing means accepting blame”. Garriga, from whom I’ve learnt a lot, says that blame arises when we do not fulfil the expectations which others have of us. But if we want to grow, we have to be willing to pay that price. Not conforming to others’ desires does not mean, of course, being some sort of James Dean-like figure; it simply means being firm in our convictions. Sometimes we have no choice but to accept decisions which we do not agree with, as frequently happens at work. However, we must not ignore our inner voice. Being faithful to one’s ideals is an act of courage as it can cause us to be misunderstood, even by those closest to us, and leave us on our own. (We also might want to think about whether conditional love, to use Rogers’ term, is worth having…)

We all know that love and sex sell. You’ve only got to take a look at the rankings of the most visited web sites in the world: sexual contacts, products with the most outlandish claims and pornography. In Spain, for example, it’s estimated that a million people buy sex-related products every day. If sex is one of the oldest businesses in the world, it’s probably because it’s coded into some part of our genes. According to biologists, even the smallest amoeba in the world has two basic needs: survival and reproduction. It’s not surprising then that we, as far more complex beings, seek to satisfy such a basic need in more sophisticated ways. Money is without doubt one of the strategies we resort to in order to fulfil this need. It’s popularly assumed that the richer the person, the more success he (or she) has with the opposite sex. However, researchers have debunked this theory. After studying more than 16,000 people, the British economist Andrew Oswald and his colleague David Blanchflower reached the conclusion that there is no correlation between money and the frequency of sexual encounters. In addition, this result is equally valid for men as well as for women. What’s more, it appears that the factors which correlate most positively with having sex more often are marital separation, in the case of men, and being on the dole, as people have more free time. So it seems that money is no guarantee of frequent sexual contacts, despite the claims to the contrary of ads for cars and jewels.

So what does happiness depend on? The Erasmus University in Rotterdam in Holland has compiled an international database about happiness called the “World Database of Happiness” which includes data on 112 countries. Curiously, the happiest people in the world are the Swiss and the Columbians, according to the findings of this database. In another ranking by the London School of Economics, the happiest people in the world are the Bangladeshis, despite the fact that over half the people in Bangladesh live beneath the poverty line. So the perception of happiness does not seem to depend on the money we have, for all the claims of marketing to make us think otherwise. Deep down, the question of happiness is encapsulated in the dilemma posed years ago by the philosopher Erich Fromm: to be or to have?  If each of us looks back over our life to the times when we have been happiest, most probably we will remember meeting up with friends, strolls, contemplating a landscape or a work of art, etc. We will think of those times when we have enjoyed being, not having. Wanting to have more and more, whether it be sexual encounters, professional success, a better car, etc., brings with it a terrible trap: the more we have, the more we are afraid to lose what we have.

In times of uncertainty, it is vital for companies to develop closer relationships with customers, to get everyone in the organization pulling together, and to make sure that all available talent is put to the best possible use. Underpinning this, the idea of commitment is of central importance.

1.Commitment means giving the best of oneself. Commitment is at root a personal decision, whether at work or at home. It rests on three main ideas: giving the best of oneself, going the extra mile, and not abandoning the situation you find yourself in.

2. Commitment produces results. This was clearly demonstrated in a study carried out by the Corporate Executive Board. People who are highly committed make 57% more effort, outperform by 20% and are 87% less likely to leave a company compared to employees with a lower level of commitment.

3. Commitment is a free decision, not an imposition from above. people are changing jobs less, but does this mean that they are more committed to their companies? Hardly. The fact of the matter is that there are fewer vacancies going and people are more and more afraid of not being able to make ends meet. Although people are sitting at their workstations, this doesn’t mean that their mind is not somewhere else. Commitment is not a duty, it springs from a freely taken decision. This is something which managers should never forget.

4. Emotion, the most powerful ingredient of commitment. A few decades ago, psychologists identified two different types of commitment, rational and emotional. Recent research has shown that changing jobs is related to rational commitment. However, the desire to contribute or to look for another job is also linked to the emotions. When someone isn’t happy they abandon ship, either mentally or physically.

5. Commitment is nurtured. Commitment is not won or created overnight. It takes time to nurture it, yet it is very easy to lose. Why? Commitment is based on trust, and trust is like a glass. Once it’s broken, it’s very difficult to put it back together again without the cracks showing.

6. Commitment is influenced by day-to-day contact. Team leaders are the key to generating commitment. Quite often people do not leave a company, they leave their bosses, especially in Latin countries where the atmosphere at work is an especially important factor. In large companies, commitment is not generated by the pronouncements from head office. It is. however, reinforced in the day-to-day atmosphere at work, in relationships with colleagues and one’s boss, and in the interest produced by the job which one does.

7. Commitment is not eternal. Values change and the job market is much more dynamic than in the past. The consultants McKinsey report that in 1990 the average number of times people changed jobs in their life was two. In 2010 they predict that it will be ten. The challenge for companies is to make sure that while employees stay with them, they are as committed as possible.

8. Commitment starts with the company. If we want employees to be committed, senior management needs to lead by example. It is impossible to expect workers lower down the scale to be committed if management does not set the standard.

9. Last but not least, coherence. The hoary expression “our people are our number one asset” is often flatly contradicted by reality. Without coherence, there is no trust or commitment. In the words of Molière, “All men seem alike when judged by their words; it’s their deeds that set them apart”. In the specific case which concerns us, it is deeds and not good intentions which help to generate commitment.

What have we got in common with a snake or a donkey (without thinking of anyone in particular)? Paul MacLean gave us the answer to this riddle with his theory of the “triune brain”, popularly known as “three in one”. According to this theory, the brain comprises three interconnected neural systems which are the product of different evolutionary processes. These systems are the reptilian, the limbic and the neocortex.

It appears that we’ve all got some connection to reptiles, whether we like it or not. Our affinity is located in the oldest area of the brain, which is found in the upper part of the spinal cord at the base of the neck. The reptilian system is focused on action. It doesn’t think or analyze, but leads to action when prompted by the body. It thus forms the basis for instinctive modes of behaviour, such as certain types of aggression, the sexual instinct or the defence of our own territory. Looked at in this light, perhaps warmongers are closer to snakes than philosophers.

The second cerebral system is the limbic or the paleomammalian system. In evolutionary terms, it is younger than the reptilian system. It is located behind the face and envelops the reptilian system. According to MacLean, we share this system with all other mammals, hence its name. From the point of view of fear, the most interesting aspect of the limbic area is that it controls our emotions. So happiness, anger, love and fear, amongst other emotions, are processed in the part of our brain which most closely resembles the brains of dogs, elephants or donkeys. The limbic system can therefore justly be considered the affective part of our brain. It follows, then, that love is not the exclusive prerogative of humans, although we are the only ones who write poetry about it. Any imbalance in the limbic system leads to negative emotional conditions such as depression, loss of memory and morbid states of fear, among others.

Finally we come to the neocortex system, which is the exclusive prerogative of homo sapiens. This system enables higher-level thinking processes, such as the solution of problems or critical and artistic faculties. This neocortex contains a series of nerve cells which facilitate the production of symbolic language, which gives rise to abilities such as reading, writing and arithmetic. This explains why poetry can only be written by humans, even though many of its underlying emotions are shared by all other mammals.