Fear, Run After Me…

About… emotions

What do our emotions tell us? After joy and anger, we now approach the misty shores of fear, in search of its sources and its lights. With Florent Pennuen, Executive Search Consultant and Coach at Grant Alexander.

“It is not by looking at the light that one becomes luminous, but by plunging into one’s darkness.” — Carl Jung

Fear—an emotion we fear! But what if we learned to love it?

Because fear can be life-saving. From the standpoint of primal reflexes, it is there to protect us.

And when the fear of being ourselves fades, when we reconnect with who we are, we no longer fear simply being. We feel alive with what we truly are.

In the face of real danger, fear plays a protective role.

It activates the reptilian brain, or archaic brain, which engages our basic instincts to shield us. If we detect a potential danger, our body enters a state of “anxiety” and mobilizes the necessary means to heighten both our physical defense system and our emotional and mental state in order to cope. Adrenaline and noradrenaline prepare the body to fight or flee. Whether we choose to confront or escape the source of our fear, we need that extra surge of energy produced by the adrenaline our body releases.

If we climb a step higher in the brain’s system, we encounter the limbic brain, the physiological center of emotions, where affectivity reigns. Its essential function is survival through successful adaptation to the social environment: empathy, social status, integration into a group, convictions and beliefs, a sense of security… It is also the hub of mechanisms of motivation, success and failure, pleasure and displeasure… Here is where we, as humans, can learn to manage our emotions—and especially fear—in order to turn them into tools for growth.

Far from being a handicap, fear is a tool.

It is up to each of us to learn to love it, to understand it, to gently “control” it—and make it an ally. Between its primary function of survival and its social function of protection lies another significant role: that of self-knowledge and personal development. So what is hidden behind this emotion that we may have to learn from ourselves?

Fear can help us become aware of our desires, because behind every fear there is a hidden desire. To uncover it, we can ask ourselves: What is fear telling me? What do I fear not having, not being able to do, or even more deeply, not being able to be? The answer we give to this question will point us to what we desire—and above all, to what we truly need: being. And this is, of course, fundamental to personal growth.

Fear can also help us push beyond some of our limits—provided, however, that we first go through the stage of acceptance.

Welcoming our fear does not mean agreeing with it or even fully understanding it. But it does allow us to decode it. When we are afraid, we are in the dark; when we welcome a situation, we are in the light. And it is this light that allows us to see certain things. Once fear is accepted, we can face it—and access new potential, new capacities and strengths that we had not recognized before.

Florent Pennuen – August 2019
florent.pennuen@grantalexander.com