How Clear Is Your Vision?

by Gayle Gregory

Don’t let today’s climate of fear take control of your workplace …

“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.”  James Joyce

In today’s economy it is very easy to adopt beliefs that we normally wouldn’t entertain. We often do this without noticing that’s what we have done. Stop for a moment and see whether or not you are fearful, worrying about your financial future, or cutting back on investments in education, training, or in capital assets to grow your business and make your products or services  more sustainable. Is this behavior normal for you? If not, you might have absorbed the beliefs of the masses, the energy of fear that is permeating our world today.

It is a truly rare person who finds themselves unaffected by their exterior environment, able to see clearly and discern what is real and what is not. It usually takes years of self-understanding, created through deep and sometimes painful exploration, to build up immunity to the energy of mass belief. The possibility of unaffected decision-making is available though, to every organization and to each individual within, and the return on investment is immediate.  Immunity begins to build the moment we begin to conscientiously investigate our beliefs and grows with each new insight of what is, in fact, true.

Until we have done the personal work, it is impossible to view our outside environment without the influence of our internal beliefs and ideas. We all have our sets of beliefs, those ideas we have inherited from our parents and from society. Most of the beliefs are based in self-protection, making certain we are safe and secure. This is the primary directive of the amygdala.

“… the brain structure which appears to be at the very center of most of the brain events associated with fear is the amygdala (Greek for almond, its shape). The amygdala seems to respond to severe traumas with an un-erasable fear response.” www.psycheducation.org

While perhaps un-erasable, my experience is that the fear response is integrate-able and therefore, transformable. Fear only remains fearful because we fail to explore, to meet it head on. As we dare to engage the fear, we can learn from it and see the ideas that cloud our ability to broaden our vision and create a larger future for our organizations. If we choose to avoid it, it will control our responses and decisions, and decisions made within a foundation of self-protection, whether that be organizationally or for us individually, will always be short-sighted and have unintended consequences. Our current world situation and the decisions made by our financial institutions are cases in point.

Leaders who begin to understand and explore the ramifications will have an intense edge over those who do not. Vision and strategy, what we dare to dream for the future of our organizations, is directly affected by our beliefs. Execution of the strategy, as well, is controlled by the beliefs of the entire team from the landscaper to those occupying seats in the board room.  Communication, the common thread through every facet of business life, is as well. Our beliefs show up in the way we communicate, in the words we use, the physical clues to what we really want to say, and the other non-verbal, often non-conscious, aspect of beliefs that color what we dare communicate and how we communicate – passively, aggressively, directly, or indirectly. It works from both directions, in what we are willing to say as well as how we hear what another person says. We can only communicate in our hearing and speaking, what we believe to be possible. And that is directly determined by our level of fear. We do not hear or see what is outside of our beliefs. This is so deeply entrenched that scientists created double and triple-blind testing because they knew they wouldn’t see what they didn’t believe to be possible.

Begin to pay attention to your thinking. Watch your reaction to the newspaper headlines. Listen to the talk around the board-room table and begin to discern if people are playing not to lose. Stop long enough to understand if you and your team are in control of your organization’s future or whether something else is. Clear out the cobwebs of belief and dream big. Learn to move forward fearlessly. At the least, slow down long enough to see your fears clearly and free-up your decision making. Or, get out of the way of those willing to do so. Our workplaces, and society as a whole, depend on today’s leaders more now than ever.