Is there something you're afraid of?

A core idea psychologically is that fears are motivating much of our behaviour.

For some it’s spiders. 

For some it’s vomiting. 

Others are afraid of gelatinous substances because it feels yucky.

For others, being confined to small spaces is terrifying.

Yes... offices I’m talking about you!

A core idea psychologically is that fears are motivating much of our behaviour.

It goes back to Sigmund Freud’s defence mechanisms that we use strategies unconsciously to protect our self from anxiety.  The difficulty is however, is that if it’s unconscious how do I become more aware of what I’m afraid of.  Susan Jeffers famous book ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway’ exhorts us to take action because everyone feels fearful about doing new things. And if other people are out there doing new things, trying new ways of thinking, then maybe we can try it too by turning passivity into assertiveness. The fear of the fear is more incapacitating than the actual fear is what she posits.

Projection is one of the most difficult aspects of defence mechanism to get our head around.

That’s where we have a fear of a feeling and so we ‘give’ our feeling to someone else; we say ‘oh gosh, Maggie is angry today’ when that may be actually how we are feeling, but because we are such a nice person, we might struggle to admit that we can be angry.  Accepting that we might be subject to doing this to others is a big step to processing more of the undercurrents at work. Again, our fear of our feeling makes our way of dealing with it, probably unproductive.  Rather than naming the feeling and trying to deal with that.

The other major defence mechanism operating in many workplaces is repression.

This is where we unconsciously push threatening feelings out of our awareness and we may overcompensate (strenuous denials for instance) to ensure that those feelings are kept tucked away. This is not to say that workplaces should become more therapy orientated, but we can certainly benefit from acknowledging some more uncomfortable feelings in a structured process to help name fears about change, or fears about relevance or fears about the meaning of our work. This may help soothe our unconscious self so that we don’t get influence by these unacknowledged fears, by saying, for example as a teacher; ‘that child is impossible to deal with as they are so stubborn’ which may be more a reflection of our own internal state ‘given’ to one of our students.  Particularly in situations where our job role requires us to be ‘the leader’ ie the teacher being the leader in a classroom, our actions can have a huge impact on the group dynamic.

I like to think of that group leader role as imagining their behaviour magnified by a power of 10 because of the highlight effect that is attributed to the teacher or leader’s actions or statements. Therefore it is vitally important that teachers or leaders in that role are very aware of how they are coming across.  It may feel like a lot, but some of our PD can help you understand this more thoroughly.