FEAR

Fear is the worst disease you can catch, the most destructive. It moves faster than light. It strikes the mind and the heart at the same time. It cuts off your limbs without a sword, freezes people, traps them in a nightmare, stops their hearts. Yet it also makes people feel more intensely, and awakens the instinct of self-preservation.

Fear, a dominant emotion, is responsible for unanticipated behaviours and reactions.

There is nothing nice about fear. It creates anger, hatred, envy and guilt. It is the only emotion that leaves us naked in our mental mirror, and makes us angry because it reminds us of our weaknesses. Fear brings guilt.

Fear is the motivation to do nothing, to remain static, to let the other person die, but most of all to let you destroy yourself. You do not, of course, admit that you are afraid. The label “scared” is too big to wear. We wear other labels in its place such as focused, absolute, strict, or whatever is in vogue at the time or comes to mind to justify it. Fear is the beast that is within you since the day you were born.

In workplace bullying, fear is the common protagonist and the common factor that triggers many different reactions. It can turn a straight line into a circle. When after walking straight you decide to walk in a circle, the path does not change: the action is exactly the same. The circle has a pattern, the pattern becomes a habit. The habit, however bad, becomes an institution, a rule, and then in most cases you ‘accept’ the environment in which you move, even if it is full of traps. It corrupts and slowly kills.

The fear of revealing professional incompetence or losing an acquisition is a strong motivation that drives employees to practice workplace bullying. Especially in cases of personal or psychological instability, workplace bullying becomes serious for the target.

Fear creates groups that band together to avoid harm or be used as tools of the bully. They act as his arm, in some cases doing the dirty work. But they do it because they fear that in the future the one who has been targeted might become a threat to them.

The fear of losing one’s job on the other hand is to a large extent what drives workers to undergo workplace bullying. The paradox is of course that someone is bullying you precisely to make you lose your job, either through dismissal or resignation. You thus learn to live with the fear and anxiety of a death row inmate who does not know when he will be executed. This waiting multiplies the intensity of the intimidation, as the targeted worker constantly re-enacts all the tensions in himself, even outside working hours. Fear mutates into low self-esteem, lack of initiative and depression.

Fear breeds fear, and with mathematical certainty leads to disease. Fear shatters the internal structures of a person, whether employee, organization, or company.

We cannot eliminate feelings of fear from ourselves. There is no human being who is not afraid. We don’t have to try to do it because we can’t. What we essentially owe to ourselves is to learn how to manage it. We all have the solutions to deal with fear. Just because we are afraid of drowning in the sea doesn’t mean we won’t learn how to swim. Why should our lives and our work be any different?

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