What are your fears? And how can you make them go away?

"...The overreacting comes from fears, fears of losing face, fears of not being able to handle the situation because you are not in control over everything or fears by making you take dumb decisions that puts employees at a bad spot..."

The fall, is the season of the year when people tend to think about long walks in the park surrounded by a colorful nature, candles, and a warm cup of tea in the couch or just the crisp air. But fall tends to be something more, during the last couple of years in Sweden we have seen a lot of trick and treating amongst our children. Ghosts, vampires and other fearful costumes tries to give us the creeps.

Fall can also be a period for reflection or for others a quite hectic period both workwise and privately. But for all of us the start of fall means that the days become shorter and nights longer. With darkness we will see more monsters, more criminal activity and more scared people.

Me working as a police officer some years ago

So what does all of this has to do with LinkedIn and everyday work life? Well I have experienced so many situation where people’s way of acting during workhours has been connected to fears. The most common way of showing this is related to behaviors such, screaming, crying, making a mountain out of a molehill or as we Swedes would say make a chicken out of a feather. For me that has been working as a Police Officer in Malm?, Sweden’s third largest city fears has been a normal state of mind. I have experienced fears from ways you could probably not even imagine. I have seen life and death, I have seen fears of being hit by your partner or fears of being beaten by your parents or fears over losing a family member who has been in a serious accident. I′ve seen not all but a lot.

True fears should only be life and death everything else is only brain ghosts

I can sometimes have issues with people overreacting regarding matters that is not considered life or death. The overreacting comes from fears, fears of losing face, fears of not being able to handle the situation because you are not in control over everything or fears by making you take dumb decisions that puts employees at a bad spot. These are just few examples of what I considered to be fears for things that aren’t really true fears. Of course your previous experience makes you better or worse at handle them.

This is one way of making your fears go away

So how can you handle your fears if you don′t have a specific experience that tend to wash them away? Well one thing I learned during the Police Academy and during the years that followed was to face your fears with the help of mental preparation. The way you do this could probably vary a bit. For example mental preparation is used by many athletes. But what I learned was to think of different scenarios when an emergency call came in, like a person has been violent towards his neighbors and he has a prior history of violent behavior.

So before we arrived to the specific address I started the preparation by thinking of different scenarios that could happen when we would face the suspect. For example if the person would open the door and hold a knife in his hand I would need to be prepared by putting a bullet in the chamber and have the gun in my hand, if he would be calm I would need to face him with the same attitude so the situation wouldn′t escalade and so on.

Technique in an everyday work life

So how could you then transfer this way of thinking, mental preparation to everyday life at work making you better at handle stressful situation that might be out of your control? Well reading this blog post might be a good start and for some that might be enough, others might need to dig a bit deeper into the psychology of mental preparation. But the idea comes to this, when you start worrying about things that are out of your control or if you′re about to scream in anger at your employees for something they have done. Take two steps back count to teen and think about what the worst scenario could be and how and what you would do to handle them. Also think for a minute if you might be overreacting because of your own inner fears rather than the specific issues that has happened.

If you do this, overtime you will become more responsive to your surroundings and your fears will fade out to become something you would only experience during Halloween.

Text by: Henrik Axelsson, Communication Manager at Stora Enso, helping leaders and organisations improve their communicative skills.

Foto: Patrick Persson