Fear: Name It, Frame It, Tame It
Image credit: Digby Scott / Midjourney.com
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Last year, I was standing backstage at the Viaduct Events Centre in Auckland, about to walk out and speak to 600 people at the NZ Institute of Directors conference. I'd never spoken to a room that size before, and I hadn't done much work in the governance space. I’d been invited to speak by the CEO, but that didn't change the maths in the room!
If I'd named what I was feeling in that moment, it would have been: “I'm afraid that these people won't see me as relevant, and my message will just land flat.”
Fear runs more leadership than people admit. Mostly, it's the quiet kind. You know: the fear of being found out, of making the wrong call, of letting people down, or of slowing down enough to let your emotions catch up with you.
Most leaders I know are good at carrying that weight. But fewer are good at working with it.
Over the years, I've ended up using a simple sequence for myself and with the people I coach. It's a three-part move: Name it, Frame it, Tame it. There's a worksheet at the end of this post if you'd like to use it.
Name it
Fear stays bigger when it's vague. Naming it specifically shrinks it down to something you can actually address.
UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman has spent years researching what happens when people put feelings into words. His work shows that the simple act of labelling an emotion reduces activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that drives our threat response. The fear doesn't disappear, but it becomes workable.
Backstage in Auckland, "I'm nervous about this" was useless to me. "I'm afraid these directors won't see me as relevant" was something I could work with.
Frame it
Once your fear has a name, put it in context. Ask yourself two questions:
Where's this fear coming from? Sometimes it's a real and present risk. Sometimes it's a story from ten years ago wearing today's clothes.
What's realistically the worst that could happen? And what's actually most likely? I reckon the gap between those two answers is wider than most senior leaders assume in the moment. Seeing the gap is what lets you stop responding to a catastrophe that isn't there.
In my case, the worst case was that I bombed and walked off. Most likely, my message would land for some and not for others, and I'd learn from the experience either way.
Both were true. Only one of them was driving the fear.
Tame it
Wild fears are scary. Tame fears we can hang out with.
You tame your fear by taking one small action.
That might be a conversation you've been avoiding. Or a question you've been holding back. Or a request for help you've been reluctant to make.
Action shrinks fear faster than thinking about it does. The leaders I see move through hard seasons well have learned to take the next small step while the fear is still there.
For me backstage, the small action was simple. I went out into the foyer before the session and had a proper conversation with three directors in the audience. By the time I walked on, I had three faces in that room I knew. It made the rest feel a lot less foreign.
Did the talk land? Yep! While the fear was still there when I walked off, it hadn't run the show.
If there's a fear sitting in your peripheral vision right now, the worksheet might be useful. You can grab it here.
What fear would you name?