Fear names the threat. Anxiety leaves you guessing.
Fear focuses attention. You recognize the threat and act. A car speeds toward you. You jump out of the way.
Anxiety produces confusion and helplessness.
Fear and Anxiety
Fear’s threat is specific.
- “I’m afraid we’ll miss the deadline.”
- “I’m afraid the client will reject our proposal.”
- “I’m afraid I’ll blow the presentation.”
Anxiety’s threat is existential. Rollo May said, “…anxiety threatens the basis of selfhood.”
- “I don’t know where I fit anymore.”
- “I can’t seem to do anything right.”
- “Everything feels uncertain.”
- “I’m overwhelmed, but I don’t know why.”
Fear gives you a target.
Anxiety puts danger in everything.
5 Questions to Turn Anxiety Into Fear
Help people move from ambiguous anxiety to specific fear.
#1. What feels threatened?
Complaints about workload might conceal fear of failure. Resistance to change might reveal fear of becoming irrelevant.
#2. What’s the worst that could happen?
Ambiguous possibilities create helplessness. Naming empowers.
#3. What do you know for certain?
Anxiety feeds on imagined stories. Facts restore perspective.
#4. What can you control?
Helplessness shrinks when people identify choices.
#5. What useful step can you take today?
Action produces clarity.
Provide Orientation
Anxious people need more than solutions.
It’s dismissive to say, “There’s nothing to worry about.”
Remind People
- Who they are.
- How they contribute.
- What matters now.
- What’s unchanged.
- What you will face together.
Say, “Let’s identify what you’re afraid might happen and decide what to do next.”
Turn anxiety into fear.
- Identify the threat.
- Clarify the facts.
- Choose an action.
How can leaders help people identify a specific fear beneath anxiety?
Do This to Answer Anxiety Leadership Freak
The distinction between anxiety and fear comes from my reading of Man’s Search for Himself by Rollo May. He also wrote, The Meaning of Anxiety.
