Last week was about making the time to take care of yourself and your team in order to ensure you and your team are ready to perform.  This week is about the mind body connection as it relates to fear.  You’re probably familiar with the concept of the mind body connection.  The idea is that your brain and body are linked, so what happens to one impacts the other.  Recently, I learned a lesson about this from virtual reality. 

My virtual reality story.  In real life I stood on a board on the ground that was about ½ inch thick.  Then, I put on the virtual reality headgear.  When they turned on the program I was hundreds of feet in the air over a tree covered mountain.  My goal was to walk on the board to a small tower.  Sounds simple right?  The problem is that I’m afraid of heights.  The moment the program turned on I froze in fear, because all I could see was myself high above the trees and a deadly abyss below.  I just kept babbling, “Dude,” over and over again.  Meanwhile, my team laughed in the background.  (It’s great have a supportive group of people around you.)  At one point I said something along the lines of, “My brain knows this is not real, but my eyes and body think it is.”  I kept repeating to myself, “This isn’t real,” and eventually I was able to walk across.

Oversimplification of the century, your brain has a primal part that’s focused on raw emotions and survival and then it has a more rational part.  Everything is fed through the primal part first.  In this story, my eyes saw danger and I froze.  I was completely amygdala hijacked (click HERE to learn more about this).  I was frozen, because my eyes saw danger and my body responded accordingly.  The truth is that the danger didn’t really exist.

So what does this have to do with work?  Our flight or fight system and amygdala hijacks can still happen at work.  How many times have you found yourself overly anxious about asking a question or making a “dumb” comment?  How often have you been terrified of making a mistake?  I’d argue that we have these reactions, because our bodies sense fear.  In some ways it’s like virtual reality, because we sense fear but the real risk is minimal.  I wasn’t actually going to fall hundreds of feet off of a mountain.  I could have fallen ½ inch off of a board, but that’s it.  Likewise, when it comes to these situations at work, our bodies might think that asking the question, making a comment, or making a mistake might feel like you are going to fall hundreds of feet to your death, but probably not.  If we can breathe and use our rational brain to analyze the situation, I believe that we will often see the risk isn’t as great as we thought it was or we will find a way to mitigate that risk as appropriate.

The challenge: Are you letting the fear control you or are you pausing and thinking through the fear to find what the risk really is?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry