Fear is no way to live!
When I was younger I used to embrace — even manufacture — fear. Fear of the quarter, the end-of-year, the pitch, the challenge, the unknown. Even sporting events that were supposed to be fun were often suffused with fear. I’d transmute the fear into anxiety, anxiety into energy, energy to action and action to impact.
But was it lasting impact? Not really.
A side effect was that I also embraced defensiveness, reactiveness, polarizing territorialism and general negativity towards my opponent.
Today in business, there’s a lot of fear and uncertainty. It’s been stoked, too. We need to get beyond it — to retire the fundamentally divisive view that only the paranoid survive and instead act confidently, and bravely on instinct, intelligence and principle. We need to run our teams without fear, develop trusting partner relationships without fear, establish our culture without fear, and live and grow fearlessly.
