Pilar Jerico

Angela Mendez and Montse Mateos recently wrote an excellent article about the impact of fear in the workplace. In this post, I’ll elaborate on their ideas to help people face up to fear.

1. Don’t deny your fear. Accept it as a normal emotion which is felt by everyone. We don’t usually speak about fear because it is considered a sign of weakness; however, never experiencing fear would be highly dangerous. Fear is part of the make-up of our brains, and is the emotion which has most helped us to get to where we are as a species. So, being alive means experiencing fear from time to time. Don’t try to avoid something which is a natural part of all mammals’ brains!

2. Cushion the impact of fear by looking at each situation calmly, and rationally. Define an action plan when faced with circumstances that induce fear in you. How many of our fears actually come to pass? I once read a study carried out in the USA which said that the figure is less than 5 per cent. Whatever the exact number may be, you only have to look back at your childhood and teenage fears to realize that they were greatly exaggerated. Fear is useful, but we have a tendency to be overly affected by it. A good technique which you can use is to imagine what you would do if your worst fears were fulfilled. A manager in a company once told me that at the beginning of his career, he was afraid that he would lose his job, and end up penniless and begging on the street. He took a brave decision to face up to this fear: he went to speak to some beggars and, although he learnt about the hard life which they led, he also saw that they were able to get used to it, and to find room for friendship and small pleasures in their lives. The experience gave him the strength to unmask his fear.

3. Realize that we all have the strength to face up to the fears which beset us. Don’t let fear paralyze you. Resilience is the name given to the strength which enables us to overcome difficult situations. I think that hardly anyone is fully aware of how resilient they can be. At the current time we are in the middle of an economic crisis. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that humanity has had to face up to far more difficult situations, such as war or epidemics. We need to see things in perspective, and trust in our innate capacity to face up to difficulties, and in our basic survival instincts.

4. Seek help. Speak to friends, family, colleagues, or specialists, and tell them about your problems. You don’t need to deal with your problems all on your own. If you’re going through a bad patch, tell others about it and don’t keep it to yourself. As Iñaki Gómez told me after confiding in a friend, your unshed tears stay trapped in your body. Or, to put it more prosaically, silence and isolation make us weak and more prone to fear. So, seek the support of friends and people you trust. Speak openly about what is troubling you and about how you feel, without blowing everything out of all proportion. There are some people who seem to positively enjoy painting a completely bleak picture of their situation. If you know someone like this, don’t be sucked in by their pessimism, but try to see the opportunities and alternatives available.

5. Look to the future, and set yourself motivating goals and challenges. In the end, the best way to get rid of fear is to look at the other side of the coin: your hopes, dreams and new plans. The past never comes back, but you can create your future if you fully embrace it. Learn to enjoy your new situation and to laugh about what has happened to you. Start making new plans, whether work-related or personal. All this won’t happen overnight but, little by little, by trusting in yourself and with the help of friends or people you admire, you can build a new future. In the words of Nelson Mandela: “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear”.

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.