In Times of Crisis Leaders Help People Turn Their Fear Into Determination
People don’t fear change, what they fear is loss. We all face the risk of loss in our lives, or what we perceive to be loss. Loss and fear are both part of the natural human condition. During times of crisis your sense of loss is accelerated: changes happen quickly and beyond your control. Our fear is what makes literally makes matters worse.
In times of crisis, when our collective fears rise together, the role of any “good” leader is to help people lean into their fears and connect to some sense of noble purpose that will enable them to turn their fear into determination.
Fear is a powerful and necessary emotion. In a rational sense it is what preserves life by increasing your awareness of your surroundings and helping you sense danger. It also preserves societies by drawing people together to seek safety through proximity, loyalty and a bond of common needs and interests.
It may even be that romantic relationships are just as much of a response to the fear of isolation and the risks of being alone as they are about sexual attraction. Families serve a functional benefit to providing a shared means of providing safety for children – and a sense of safety for married couples. At the core, as much as anything else, love, one of life’s most potent emotional states – may actually be driven by our fears and about seeking safety for ourselves.
A healthy dose of fear empowers us to do good things. It is unhealthy fears that tend to be destructive. In times of severe crisis, our fears get muddled. It’s hard to know whether your feelings are rational or not. It is the uncertainty of crisis that calls for leadership to help people sort out what they feel in order to decide how to act – and what to do.
Irrational fears tend to be debilitating. They are fears revolving around events that we either cannot control, and concern for things that appear real – but are not.
When people are thinking rationally they soothe themselves. They reason situation and with each other – and turn to experienced and knowledgeable leaders to quiet their uncertainty. They look for meaning from their elders, spiritual leaders and to those who emerge around them with answers that quell their anxieties and restore their sense of safety.
But when people are irrational, by definition they tend to be delusional and incapable of differentiating positive or productive meaning from more harmful tendencies. You tend to make poor decisions. People acting irrationally destroy relationship, hurt others and even hurt themselves.
Groups that are acting irrationally in concert become angry mobs capable of enormous destruction. Leaders can emerge from such mobs and manipulate that anger to serve their own selfish or even devious purposes. Massive social movements ignited by fear are fueled by anger and have the flames fanned by such leaders.
The fear of loss, magnified by the inability to make sense of the cause represents the tinder waiting for a spark.
Great leaders throughout history have turned this around by offering hope to allay people’s fears and giving meaningful purpose to a course of action that serves a greater good. They see and demonstrate humanity through the strength they find through humility.
People will not just relate to you when they sense you feel like they do – they will trust you.
Ordinarily, we simply accept that we win some and we lose some. It can be argued that from the moment you are born you are dying, since death is the inevitable, unavoidable destination of all our lives. To some extent loss is nothing more than perception. Not just because life isn’t truly a zero-sum game, one person’s loss isn’t necessarily another’s gain — but because your sense of loss is purely a function of how you interpret the meaning of what you have and what you don’t.
We all control our own meaning of everything we experience.
Leaders help you manage that meaning by helping create a shared sense of purpose and collective destiny that shapes how people choose to understand things. The optimist sees each day as a new start, a day gained with infinite possibilities, while the pessimist sees it as one of a finite number of days you have gone and one step closer the end.
The same day can mean something different to everybody. Your job as a leader is not to mask or attempt to remove people’s sense of loss; whatever it is that anyone feels is their personal truth. There is no denying feelings.
All human reality is perception. Whatever you perceive is real. The Roman emperor and stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius said, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
In his book, “Sapiens,” the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari describes the enormous force of shared “imagined realities.” These are the pure constructs of human design.
Things like political boundaries and the laws that govern them, the value assigned to currencies and precious metals and every social, political or commercial organization – are all imagined realities. Yet they are every bit as powerful as the forces of nature. An imagined reality becomes charged with power when a group of people are willing to agree to adopt a particular point of view and convince others to enforce it.
Shared beliefs give birth to enormous resolve and determination.
They have built armies that have destroyed civilizations, driven research that has created weapons of mass destruction and the arms race between the United States and then Soviet Union – that not only threatened assured mutual destruction – but threatened all life on Earth.
Similar shared beliefs sent explorers from Europe in search of new worlds, built the sciences that explored and explained nature – and discovered how to harness and even seemingly defy nature by creating flying machines that thumbed their noses at gravity as they pointed towards the sky, and great damns that stopped mighty rivers and converted their power into electricity.
Imagined realities are the product of people having a shared sense of destiny or a common purpose. Their sense of truth is galvanized through the confirmation of those beliefs by others. As long as we all believe the world is flat – there must be an edge we will sail off of. And as long as my God is better or stronger than yours, it is our divine right to wield our mortal power of you.
A shared fear of loss forms an enormously powerful bond among people.
Loss is generally something we can get over. In time we adjust. Wounds – even emotional ones, heal, and people, on general, tend to be resilient. We accept loss as a fact of life – and the sting fades – and often yields to some form of opportunity.
Emotional losses can help us grow stronger and wiser. Or they can embitter you and cause you to retreat from the world, or even trigger the desire to seek retribution.
Losses of possessions likewise make way for both learning to protect what we need – or learning to let go of what we don’t. Innovations like wheels offset the loss of time by creating efficiencies. Loss of personal belongings led to locks – and loss of perishable foods inspired refrigeration – much as loss of innocent life gave rise to medicine.
It is the loss of power – and the losing of our way that give rise to our greatest sense of determination – and with that the greatest source of human joy.
It is through our determination that we accomplish truly meaningful and significant things. And it is through these accomplishments that you experience the deep sense of satisfaction that is the source of all joy.
As a leader, you must recognize that there is as much power in a shared sense of loss as there is in a shared victory. How you make use of that power is up to you . Your aim is not to dismiss the feelings of others, but to offer them the perspective of a noble purpose that helps them find meaning in what they can do and inspires them to serve a greater good.
Is it possible to even imagine life without loss?
Not all loss is bad. We all lose our baby teeth to make way for a permanent set. We must rid ourselves of some habits to make way for new ones. It’s “out with the old and in with the new.”
All progress has a foundation in the cycle of losses and gains.
Even the constructs of economic theory suggests the necessity of this same cycle in explaining the laws of supply and demand. While value circulates through all sorts of commercial exchanges – it can also pool and be accumulated as wealth. Some theorize this to be a so-called zero-sum game, suggesting that every gain has a corresponding loss.
Other economists recognize that value is constantly being created. Rather than dividing the total pie into smaller and smaller pieces – they suggest that through determination and innovation society is constantly figuring out how to bake more and more pies. Does determination change the game?
Einstein theorized it differently. In his law of conservation of energy he posited that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy is simply transformed from one form or thing to another – or from one place to another. (This is also known as the first law of thermodynamics.) It seems though, that the science of physics describes the “laws” of nature, but since all things economics are a function of human construct – or “imagined realities” – value may be exempt from the forces of nature.
Shear human determination may never be able to stop a typhoon – but through our value of life help us find ways to find safety away from its wrath.
The human inclination to value people’s lives above all else gives a truly noble purpose to our endeavors – and represents the single greatest cause for turning fear into determination.
The famous cartoonist, Charles Schultz shared that the reason why he created his beloved “Peanuts” characters was to preserve the wonder of youth that fades in our real lives. He described watching his children grow as witnessing a series of deaths.
His simple desire was to freeze the innocence of young children in place, yet as he wrote about them over time, they too transformed and evolved, shedding who they were to allow who they would become to emerge. It may be impossible to imagine life without death because death is an integral part of life. Even cartoon characters cannot be kept from growing.
We lose our children to all but our memories. Yet they are not gone. They are different. Singer songwriter Joni Mitchell, captured this truth about our mortality in her song, “The Circle Game,” writing,
“We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game”
The infant is gone forever as she transforms into a toddler, and again as she transcends towards full adulthood. Finally, the smooth-skinned beauty of youth takes new form in the wrinkles of time that etch our faces as we age – gracefully or not.
Living Beings are Growing Beings. And Growing beings are Learning Beings
Is it possible to simply grow without actually transforming yourself. Is it possible to refuse to let go of parts of who you are and leave them behind? Surely we hold on to many pieces of ourselves, sometimes even to our deficit, but over time, as best we might try to cling onto what we have – or want to be – things change. Loss is an inevitable factor in our lives.
To live we must grow – and the grow we must learn. Learning means we let go of one belief in exchange for another.
We can either grieve our losses or celebrate them. We can resist change or embrace the uncertainty that change always brings with it.
In times of crisis people are gripped with often crippling uncertainty – that is as fearsome as the loss we imagine as result of the losses we witness. But it is in these moments that you can truly discover the value of leaning into your fears. You can determine to get comfortable being uncomfortable and use your determination to conquer more than just your fears.
It is from times of crisis that new hope emerges. We find resilience and brilliance and heroes rising around us and within us.
Leaders will emerge to stir the ripples of fear into waves of determination that will wash over the uncertainty and sense of loss – and leave in its place the seeds for a better tomorrow.
My question to you is, will you be that leader?
# # #
