People sometimes ask me why I decided to write a book about fear. It all goes back to 1998 when I was writing my doctoral thesis about knowledge management (which ended up being about talent management). What really intrigued me at the time was to get to the bottom of why people don’t share everything they know. Back then the buzz words were databases, technology, quality and, yes, people management. But I don’t remember anyone speaking about the barriers to sharing information … except one article in the Harvard Business Review. Gerald Suárez, Director of Presidential Quality at the White House, introduced a relatively new concept: fear. The article he wrote got me thinking about our fears, which we almost always cover up with consummate skill.
I have to say that that article was an exception and it only skirted over the idea of fear. When I had the chance to go to the USA and to have access to the research databases of some universities, I found that there was hardly any mention of fear in the business world. It was -and still is- taboo. It seems as if admitting you are afraid were a sign of weakness, when in reality it’s what helps us survive. Thanks to fear we are cautious, and this is healthy. However, the negative flipside of fear is that it hinders our development and our capacity to take risks. I call this phenomenon “toxic fear” as it undermines our talents.
In the process of writing about and working in the area of talent, I discovered that fear is indeed the negative flipside, and that sometimes it is more productive to work towards people overcoming their fears rather than focussing on the area of motivation. I use this approach in my own seminars and coaching sessions and find that it produces very positive results.
I too was afraid to speak about fear! This may seem somewhat paradoxical. I thought: Are people really going to want to examine their fears when they spend all their lives trying to hide them? But in the end I thought, and still think, that we are all capable of something better, that our barriers to happiness are closely related to our fears and that there is a better way to live and to manage people. That’s why I wrote NoFear -which does not mean not to have fear but not to let fear have mastery over us- and why I was able to overcome my own fear.
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April 29th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
now in my rss reader)))