Help Leaders Shift Focus from What Others Think to Achieving Results

Jeff Bezos has overseen billions of dollars spent on failed innovation attempts at Amazon. Marc Benioff donates 1% of Salesforce’s equity, employee time or product back into the community every year.  Elon Musk founded SpaceX, a space exploration company with the goal of colonizing Mars.

If these moves seem risky, that’s because they are! Yet that kind of daring is precisely the launchpad needed for the innovations that prove groundbreaking and make modern companies successful. In contrast with the Jack Welch-style efficiency experts who were hailed as heroes in the 1990s, exceptional leaders in the 21^st century follow a different trend: They enable innovation by focusing on contributing to a cause bigger than themselves.

For many leaders, however, there’s one secret hurdle that stands in the way of such bold innovation and contribution: fear, and not the type of fear you’d expect. Fearing failure is only a symptom of the real impediment to creativity, growth and success­—fear of what others will think about you. If we can help clients learn to effectively deal with nagging worries about being judged, then they can be free to pursue groundbreaking ideas (and achieve unparalleled results).

Looking at successful leaders from the outside, it’s easy to believe those lucky few are somehow immune to feeling nervous about being judged by others. Quite the contrary is true. Neuroscientific research  has shown humans have a deep primal need for social connection. Leading psychology experts, like Matthew Lieberman, conclude that our need for social connection is even more fundamental than our need for food and water. In other words, it is by design that we, humans, feel fear and have natural instincts to protect ourselves from being socially rejected. That’s precisely why fear is such a difficult emotion to overcome: It’s there as a survival mechanism.

In order to overcome the fear of judgment in a long-term and sustainable way, we should work with the brain system as it naturally functions. The first step is helping our clients to recognize and name their fear reactions in situations where they feel they may be judged. The amygdala portion of our brain registers that fear of judgment and signals us to use one of four well-known fear responses: fight, flight, freeze, or appease. Fight is when we step up to the fight, often arguing or not backing down, trying to defend ourselves and maintain that we are right. Flight is shrinking away and avoiding a fear-inducing moment. Freeze is doing nothing, being so stunned or overwhelmed that our bodies don’t allow for any action. And Appease is going along with what we believe the other person wants.

Our clients’ reactions will vary depending on factors like the situation and the people involved, but we can help them to discover patterns. For example, you might find your client appeases their bosses in the majority of situations but will often fight with those who are at the same hierarchical level in the organization. By naming and recognizing these patterns, we create a new level of awareness, opening a new space for discovery and choice.

In fact, this awareness does more than just provide space: It shifts the part of the brain in which the client is engaging. Fear engages our amygdala while awareness engages our pre-frontal cortex, the front part of the brain where executive functions, like rationality and creativity, occur. This shift, of which part of the brain is engaged, is the key to overriding fear and breaking us free from it.

Another highly effective way to actively engage the pre-frontal cortex is by moving the focus away from the self (ego) and towards a greater purpose beyond the self.  Working with clients to articulate big picture goals, such as their life vision or a life legacy, can keep them consciously engaging their pre-frontal cortex in times when fear wants to take over. Clients can shift their thoughts from feeling judged for how they perform to being committed to creating a change they want to see in the world.

Our clients need tools like this more than ever before. The judgment in our modern world is unprecedented, from social media comparisons to global competition for jobs. Our fear of judgment could become an even bigger hindrance to our success; that is, if we let it.  The more we can push past our fears of judgment, the freer each of us feels to innovate and contribute to the world, thereby growing the possibility of our impact tremendously. Overcoming fear is not as simple as saying to feel the fear and do it anyway. Instead, our clients can feel the fear but override it, giving them back a sense of control and freedom in how they choose to react.

© Lisa Christen 2020