Today's Barrier: Fear & Anxiety

In this economy, uncertainty is all around. When that uncertainty gives way to a a deeper sense of fear and anxiety, there are many immediate challenges with learning and performance.

With fear and anxiety at the core, related barriers such as a loss of focus on priorities, decreased motivation to tackle difficult challenges, and low resilience to adversity quickly come into the picture. More subtle, but no less important, are the barriers that slowly erode our long-term success in the workplace. These include decreased trust in the relevance of our work, loss of urgency for achieving difficult goals, and the inability to relate to and collaborate with others effectively.

If you discover that you are operating with consistent feelings of fear and anxiety, make an effort to name the specific causes of concern as they surface. By bringing these into the open, you have a chance of exposing the assumptions that often leave us feeling paralyzed. Once you see the source, simply notice how the factors show up and what outcomes they cause. This process will also bring into focus the things that you can actually influence, as well as the external factors that you simply have to accept and adapt to.

The cost of being overrun by fear and anxiety is too steep to stay in that frame of mind, so look to make subtle shifts toward empowerment as you exert influence over the incremental changes you can manage with confidence.