Creative Leadership Coaching

Think for a moment about something that scares you (not too much!). Now suppose you had the confidence that you could absolutely handle that situation. What happened to the fear?

In this sense, we might notice that our fears of external events and people, reflect our fears about our own abilities to adequately respond to challenging situations. 

Coach and author Rhonda Britten (2001) describes a “Wheel of Fear” in which we hold a perspective of a situation as being threatening and take habitual, reflexive actions that, in the end, create or perpetuate the very conditions that threaten us. For example, Britten writes about a woman whose deepest fear is “being incompetent.” This woman is attuned to any cues in her environment that might suggest that people have doubts about her, and feeling the fear, her reaction is to take on additional commitments that she can’t meet, leading to more fear and more projects! This cycle actually creates the incompetence it fears, and needs to be broken.

We will discuss a variety of good coaching strategies for breaking this cycle. The formula Britten suggests involves developing an awareness of our deepest fears about ourselves and the strategies we use to avoid them. Usually, these fears and responses (and the beliefs behind them) were established when we are very young. Becoming aware of them as adults, tends in itself to help create a positive shift in perspective: 

1. Identify your fear/trigger: “If someone I love, respect, or admire thought I were __________, I would be devastated.

2. Identify your core negative feeling: “If the people I care about thought I was (the trigger you identified…) _________, I would feel as though I were ________.”

3. Identify what you do reactively to avoid that feeling: “When I want to avoid having people think I’m ___(trigger), I react by ______________. ”

4. The wheel: When this doesn’t work and I end up feeling ______(core negative feeling), then I ____________. (Britten, 2001, pp. 48-56)

As Britten points out, this is also the cycle of addiction, including workaholism.

I invite you to give this a try, and let me know your experience.  

References

Britton, Rhonda. (2001). Fearless Living. NY: Penguin.