JUNE
Marty Byrde:
This might have been the best thing that could have happened. I spent a decade afraid of something, and when it finally arrived, it wasn’t at all what I thought it would be. And I wasn’t who I thought I would be.
Wendy Byrde (the wife):
What does that mean?
Marty Byrde:
It means you were right. Me burying my head in the sand wasn’t gonna keep us safe.
Ozark, Season 3, Episode 5
When Marty Byrde from the Netflix TV show, Ozark, endures what he feared the most, he actually becomes more daring, decisive, and commanding. The question is why. How does facing one’s fears make a person more effective?
Over the summer, I’ve decided to reflect on a few challenges of leadership in preparation for a course I intend to design for the Platform community. The first topic is confronting one’s fears.
Confronting Our Fears
Fear is real. Motivation speakers, educators, inspirational leaders tend to say that our fears are mostly in our heads. I know I am just as guilty as anyone for encouraging people to stop fearing what I believed was mostly in our imagination. But I am finding out that our fears are based on real concerns that we cannot easily dismiss. Except for those who are clinically paranoid, fear is not some hallucination of possible enemies who want to fry our brains. Yet even then, fears are based on some childhood trauma which they are reliving during stressful times. We are afraid of losing our jobs, our health, our children or our partners, our parents to aging and death. These are real concerns in real life so it is not surprising that fear keeps us up at night, make us get up in the middle of the night with sweaty palms and pang in the pit of our stomach, or worse yet, cripple or paralyze us from really engaging with the world. It is an inevitable part of our human existence to be fraught with anxiety; it stems from our human limitations, our inability to control what in our infinite mind is able to imagine. If we were animals, we would just live instinctually, without thought for the tomorrows.
While fear is real because it lays out the possibilities of what could be, once a person has experienced and have undergone these fears, they tend to develop a better perspective. I say, tend to, because some people like my mother who has obsessive-compulsive disorder and serious anxiety disorder, worries get worse with age. But usually, the beauty of aging, is coming into perspective. I must admit that when I was younger, my biggest fears were failing to live up to my high expectations and losing my parents. For some reason, money and fame were not high on my to-do list but I was ambitious and passionate about succeeding. And that success was integrally connected to pleasing my parents, especially my demanding mother. Sure enough, I experienced both of my fears. No matter what I did or do, I know that I cannot please my mother and I lost my father, my anchor in life. My fears were warranted since I had 3 breakdowns which consisted of a series of serious anxiety attacks and functional depression, one which lasted for 6 months, because I could not face my failures, and I still cannot look at a photo of my father. To say that our fears are unreal or unwarranted is thoughtless. Sometimes, our realities can be better or worse than our fears. For Marty Byrde, a character who launders money for a Mexican drug cartel, the reality was different than what he expected. But if he had lived against his fears, he would not have been in the same mental space, afraid of living. For me, my reality were worse than what I feared. But if I had stopped trying and pushing myself because of my fears, then I would have ceased to develop as a person decades ago.
Should we all stop living because our fears are real possibilities? On the contrary, we should actually live more passionately for the causes that we believe in. When I experienced what I feared the most, I realized that I lived yet another day. But you are right, breathing is not really living, necessary but not being fully present in our bodies to what we can offer the world. Yes, some days can be harrowing and there moments when death does seem better. Our emotional pain is NOT like a physical scar in which one is only reminded of the pain. I live with an awareness of my failures and my loss; the pain is always lingering somewhere, somehow and appears in how I approach my decisions, my actions. But in accepting the reality of life, that it is painful, difficult, and anxiety-ridden, then I take failures and loss in stride. If I do not accept and demand that life becomes what I expect, then I can get stuck, crippled, or paralyzed. We are prone to say, if I get X, then I will do Y or if I do X, then they will accept, love, appreciate, see me. So really, you are waiting for the perfect circumstances (based on some fairy tale or movie) to really live out your potential, to make that decision, to dare. Then we would be living like Marty who lived in constant dread for a decade because he was afraid of making a mistake and ending up in a barrel.
Yes, fears are real, and yes, when our fears become our reality, they can bowl you over like a boulder, and yes, we replay our pain in our bodies, minds, and emotions. But that is life. We will fail, we will suffer, we will die, and knowing and accepting that reality will make you an effective leader. Why? Because you would have realized that life is inevitable and our fears cannot stop it from becoming. It is in our words and actions, not our fears, that we can make change. So make that decision, go out and fight, take life for what it is, a battleground in which we cannot wait for perfect circumstances to live our lives. We cannot control our lives to avoid our fears. No, it is in confronting them that we can take away its power to paralyze us.
Sam
Founder and Executive Director
June 1, 2020