Why Courage Is Crucial For You
How to deal with fear
Courage is one of the Scrum values among respect, commitment, openness, and focus. But what does it mean to be courageous?
Courage requires fear because only if you overcome something you are afraid of you are courageous. When it comes to fear, we can distinguish between different types of anxiety.
Siegmund Freud distinguished:
- Real Fear: This fear arises as a reaction to a concrete, objective, and, above all, real fact. Example: Someone stands in front of you with a drawn knife at night.
- Neurotic Fear: This fear arises as we react to facts, thoughts, and ideas that exist only in our minds and are thus not real. Yet, in the face of this fear in our psyche, we unleash a whole range of defensive processes: Nervousness, need to escape, and feeling of loss of control.
- Moral fear: It arises when we fear that we will not be able to fulfill the expectations placed on us. These can be expectations of parents, colleagues, partners, or superiors. This creates fear of failure, rejection, loneliness, and dismissal. This fear is widespread.
The world of fear is very complex. However, all types of fears have in common that they require uncertainty. As today’s world gives less and less certainty and the world of life changes very quickly, calculability decreases more and more.
Fear as a success booster
The goal of most people is to lead a successful life. However, everyone defines success differently. For example, one sees a successful life in running a self-sufficient farm in the country, the other in becoming a manager in a large company. On the way to success, you always experience uncertainty and setbacks that make you afraid.
Think of fears as a friend. We can’t know how the world will evolve, and we can’t influence or change it in large part. What we can control, however, is how we deal with uncertainty. Uncertainty offers an opportunity from which something productive can emerge. But, conversely, the heartbeat accelerates adrenaline, and energy releases if one is afraid.
Look into your past. Have there been situations of uncertainty and change that scared you, but from which good things came out? Take these situations as inspiration for your present and future. Fears can be handled better if you are clear about what triggers the fear and then actively deal with it.
This is how you act courageously:
- Consciously perceive when you are afraid and determine the causes.
- Ask yourself how you can actively deal with the causes. How can you shape your attitude and your thinking positively and success-oriented? Act accordingly.
- Create a success diary where you write down uncertain situations, your thoughts about them, your actions, and the outcomes.
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a choice. (Churchill)