Fear is a catalyst and anger is a tool.
The power of standing outside your emotions to develop superpowers.
True story.
It was 9.30 on a Monday and my boss was trying to add me to a zoom meeting.
Only I didn’t know.
I’d just finished blasting through a counter proposal for a UK client with the sales team. We started at 8AM and worked at pace to square their demands with our red lines and come up with creative solutions to unaddressable rifts. I then built the fastest set of slides to get something ‘pretty’ (i.e. up to standard) in front of the executive team for a decision. I managed to do all that in 90 minutes — gold medal territory at pace.
I hit send and went to make a cup of coffee and use the loo.
I came back to my desk at 9.40 to an email from my boss.
“Are you joining?”
Joining what?
I open up zoom. There a message there too. “Where are you?” And then another one, “Micheal tried to add you to the call but you didn’t answer so we went ahead.”
Ok. I respond asking for another add or invite. No answer. I ping Micheal and he sends the invite across.
Subject: Proposal.
It was for the deal I had been working on in the morning.
I join. The meeting was well underway with a heated debate. They were going over the ground I covered with the sales team in the morning.
I try to interject and get sidelined every time. Questions get raised that I have answers to, but when I present them the group just moves past them. Demands and asks get raised and allocated to a VP on the call, but when I try to say the work’s been done, it gets completely ignored. By the end someone else is being asked to develop the proposal.
The proposal that I built that very morning.
No one listened.
I was pissed off. This was a fast moving negotiation and sometimes it was hard to connect the dots, but this was extra. The proposal that was developed was brilliant, and to have some other person thrown into the mix to pick it up when the work was done was a punch in the gut to say the least.
Could I have done more to be heard? I didn’t think so. It was a tough group feeling insecure about the deal. That emotion was coming out and they were bulldozing through anything in sight.
I emailed my boss. I’ll spare the detail but he was clearly upset I wasn’t there to kick off the call, hadn’t seen the work that was done in the morning, and not taking any responsibility for not including me on the invite or email trails where this was being discussed. The combination of my absence at the start of the call and him not having the work to discuss put him on edge. He was not in a problem solving state of mind. He was lashing out. He was angry. He was scared. I wasn’t going to get anything constructive from him.
A choice
The experience of being dismissed, overlooked, and ignored could have easily made me shrink. I was also angry at my boss for his mean spirited response and blame. There was this feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nausea? Hint of tightness? Something. I was uneasy and felt my place threatened.
It was making me want to retreat.
It was fear.
“What will move this deal forward right now?” I asked myself.
I had loads to do, stepping back from this and letting someone else carry it was more than welcome. I was tempted to turn my back and move on. It would have been comfortable to take a “Screw you” attitude.
But I did something else instead.
The work from the morning was solid quality and this deal was moving fast so time was critical. I emailed the VP that took the takeaways from the meeting with a topline status update and shared the work. I explained the logic and copied in the people I worked with. I offered to walk him through what was done and offered to continue to work on the proposal either independently or with him. I shared background and sources, some analyst reports and a briefing I had done on the client. I offered to be flexible with a 15 min slot to touch base or hand over.
In other words, I calmed the hell down and took a rational action. I leaned in. I did something that made me feel a little crap that would push the deal forward as fast as possible.
I didn’t succumb to my discomfort. I didn’t lash out. And I didn’t reatreat.
The thing about fear
Fear does funny things. It’s a visceral emotion that overrides logic and reason.
And it doesn’t take much to trigger it. Anytime our place in the world is threatened it kicks into high gear. And that includes having our status and power at work threatened, feeling undervalued and disrespected, or simply not seen. Someone cutting in line at a coffee shop or rushing past you on the street can trigger it.
Most people feel fear impulsively. We have ingrained pathways of how fear plays out for us as individuals. And these pathways were forged in childhood and remain largely subconscious patterns.
Insecurities and ego make fear worse. They’re like a prism that turns a ray of sunshine into raging fire that consumes anyone and anything in range.
Fight or flight.
Fight or flight are the headline responses to fear. Most people either start a knife fight (figuratively) or retreat into the shadows when they feel threatened. Neither is constructive.
The fight response can show up in various forms. Outright aggressive actions are less frequent but can still occur. These include rash actions, raised voices, intimidating behaviours, irritability, overt fighting, visible frustration and strong language. Passive aggressive behaviours are more common and just as destructive. Sarcasm, unhelpful questions intended to tire and distract, seeding doubt masquerading as ‘devil’s advocate’, gossip, smearing others in a friendly way, and two-faced behaviours.
The flight response is far harder to spot, as it can easily look like someone just getting on with things. This happens when fear gets stuffed it down before it’s fully experienced. When you cut the emotion off entirely and rob it of an outlet, it festers and simmers and has an impact in less clear ways. This can lead to retreat, withdrawal, and self-dismissive actions where you assume you’re not needed or relevant which makes the initial problem worse. It can also lead to hiding, laying low, and avoiding follow up because you want to avoid awakening the difficult feelings. It’s the emotional equivalent of running the other way.
There’s a few other common response paths like freezing and appeasing, though they tend to be more specific version of flight.
Fear makes people destructive
What’s common across these pathways is people blinded by their fears tend to blame the world around them for their problems. If only they had a better boss. If only the business had a better culture. If only they were born to wealthy parents. Or less wealthy parents. If only they had gone to Harvard. If only they had been an investment banker. If only they married an investment banker. If only they were a man. Or a woman. Then…then…then they wouldn’t have this problem. Then they would be taken seriously in the meeting. Then they would have had the invite. Then their boss would have ‘respected’ them.
Scared people victimise themselves.
And this makes them punchy — verbally, maybe physically. Maybe at the gym. Maybe on social media. Maybe with their friends. Because they feel entitled to it.
And if the scared let that fear take over, they quickly accelerate their own demise. And try to take as many people down as they can with them. Especially the people they feel vitimised by.
Because in their world, it’s not their own fault — it’s someone else’s fault — so they feel entitled to it.
This is a race to the bottom that, in time, destroys reputations, relationships and careers.
But there is another way
If you can learn to stand outside of your fear, you can control is.
And if you can control it, you can use it. It becomes a tool.
Being able to stand outside of it is the key here. Learning to see it, zooming out from the experience and becoming an external observer of yourself and the situation, is a superpower.
And it’s hard.
It’s really hard.
But it can be done.
There are people that learn to identify their fear as it unfolds. For these people, as a stressful situation unfolds, time slows down. They breathe deeply. Try to relax their bodies. Actively work to still their minds. They take information in without judgement and hold it objectively. They can spot the presence of their fears based on the reactions they’re spotting in the breath, body and mind. They’re able to stand outside of it and watch it unfold, like a spectator. Like a voyeur. Observing someone through a one way window.
This creates space.
And space lets you make choices.
The mental and physical reactions become strategic actions.
Here, anger has the potential to become a tool, and withdrawal a strategy.
Fight and flight cease to be response pathways, and become a quiver of responses to target to a situation.
Fear management in action
I’ve used an audible sigh in a negotiation to signal that I’ve said all I’m going to say. I was getting stressed out about loosing out on value and scared of that impacting my job, but I got it in check and in a fraction of a second considered a range of options as a response. Before I knew it, my heart was calm and I was signing with a fake exasparation. My counterparty promptly responded to my sigh with “Ok, let me take that away and I’ll come back to you with where the flexibility is.” And they did — the moved to accomodate my ask. All I did was sigh. A sigh says a lot of things in a fraction of a second: ‘You’re irritating me by not moving forward,” “There’s nothing else I’m going to say,” “I feel like you’re wasting my time,” “I’m serious, but I’m having a hard time taking you seriously,” and more. It’s an effective way to communicate a lot of messages. But it’s only available if you can step outside the fear and let your brain do its thing fast enough to surface that option.
I’ve thrown my arms up alongside an exasperated “What’s the point?” when trying to get a project approved, with just the right balance of anger and boredom in my voice. I let my tone get irritated and my volume rise a touch — just a touch. We were on the 5th business plan for a new product and the CFO was asking for yet more research. I’ve indulged these requests for months. We were in analysis-paralysis and no more number crunching would de-risk this any further. There was no more answers to find under rocks. We had to act. I was the most junior person in the room, and something about that exasperated line jarred the group out of their self doubt and into movement. There was a long pause, some broken comments, and 10 minutes later a green light. Getting angry, especially if you’re in a lower position of power, can show you mean business and know what you’re talking about. But you need to control the fear — and the frustration and anger it causes in the moment — to choose the right response. You can’t get swept away into withdrawal or anger. Of course using anger all the time is not going to work. But used strategically, being able to pump anger like an accelerator pedal can be extremely effective.
I’ve avoided an argument over a pricing approach to use my silence as a stimulant for the group. It was the kind of situation where normally I would have taken a ‘professional’ route of balancing views and working the group. Only this time, time was scarce and the whole group was caught up in he-said-she-said without evidence. Opinions were running the show and we were about to make a bad decision that would have a long term impact. There was fire being thrown in every direction. “Ok, well let me know what you decide,” I said eventually, deferring power and authority. I was running the work until then, it was the first time I withdrew. I left the work in their hands. At the next meeting when I asked what they wanted to do, 5 out of 7 people said they wanted to go with the pricing strategy I put forward. Withdrawal can be a strategy, but you have to be clear headed in the moment to realise that and figure out how to use it.
Parting thoughts
You know that feeling you get once you’ve handed in your notice, and you get a bit more brazen and forward? That’s the mindset you want to be able to reach on command.
That mindset is clear and rational. It’s unplagued by insecurity and ego.
Fear is a powerful catalyst once you learn to separate the emotion from the response.
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