Exceptional Leadership & the Neuroscience of Fear

Everyone has a brain. Not everyone really knows how to use it.

Your brain is an amazing instrument, capable of helping you achieve all kinds of great things – success, wealth, and love, to name a few. But there are times when your brain can be your worst enemy, sabotaging your dreams and turning you into something you do not really want to be.

Put simply, there are times when your brain wants the opposite of what you want, and unless you rise above its ancient programming, it will win.

Take fear, for example. Our brains keep us alive, keep us motivated, and keep us functioning with fear. Deep in our ancient brains is the fear center, called the amygdala. Through fear, the amygdala prevents us from doing things that can harm us, and it can push us forward to accomplish things because those accomplishments will alleviate fears we have about the future. A reasonable dose of fear, properly managed, is a good thing.

But our brains really don’t have any judgment about fear. As long as you’re willing to listen, your amygdala will keep scanning the world around you for things to be afraid of, pumping that information into your system, and magnifying it until it drowns out nearly everything else. The media know this: fear increases ratings. Marketers know this: as marketing expert Seth Godin has written, “Fear is a universal emotion, it’s viral and people will go to great lengths to make it go away.” Political scientists have shown conclusively that people vote for the person they think is most likely to deal effectively with their greatest immediate fears. 

During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt began turning the country around in his first inaugural address when he said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” In fact, the full sentence he pronounced is even more pertinent: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Today, the growing presence of unreasoning fear is leading us all toward making unwise decisions in dealing with worries and risks, causing many of us to retreat at the very moment when we should – and could – be advancing. Exceptional leaders learn to understand and bypass unproductive fears, and to use fear’s energy to galvanize new breakthroughs while others are standing still or going backward.

Fear Today

Your brain’s amygdala has no dreams of a great future, no wishes for yourself and those you care about. It has no goals at all beyond the merest of survival instincts. When it hijacks your thoughts and actions, it is hijacking the best of what makes you you.

It is particularly capable of hijacking you because the hormones that the amygdala triggers actually improve the brain’s capacity to remember bad things. As one neuroscientist has written, “Fear is certainly the most effective way of gluing a memory in place.”

An awful emotional experience will be vividly encoded and remembered. Such traumatic memories last, and they are potent. To make matters worse, they don’t even have to be personal experiences, and they don’t even have to be real. Our brains make no distinction between things that happen to us, things that happen to others, and made-up things we might read in a novel or see in a television drama: imaginary evils. 

In times like today’s world, the amygdala sits on a throne in the cranium, ensconced as king. Meltdowns seem to be occurring right and left. Not just financial meltdowns, but imaginary ones, media and gossip driven, as people hear rumors, watch emotion thunder through the stock market, hunker down, take shelter, seek only safety, and pinch their visions of what they can accomplish and what their futures can bring. The more we see that around us, the more we are inclined to do the same ourselves – fear is contagious, viral.  And we are watching it hijack brains everywhere.

I’m not saying there’s nothing to be afraid of. I am saying that once the amygdala gets its way, we all are inclined to over-worry and overreact – by a factor of five or ten – to fear and to handle it in ways that will only make things worse. Which will make us more afraid . . . and so the downward spiral goes.

The wisest businesspeople and the most astute leaders know that those whose brains help them to achieve their biggest dreams don’t melt down when times are tough, they step up. Nelson Mandela clearly observed: “There is no passion to be found playing small⎯in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”  

Richard Branson, one of a handful of today’s greatest entrepreneurs, recently wrote, “Every economic downturn is an amazing opportunity to win far more customers and trust and market share…if you have the eyes to see the opportunities and the ingenuity to go capture them.”

Harvard Business School professor Nancy Koehn studies how entrepreneurs build successful brands; she recently wrote: “Brands offer key benefits – especially in times of trouble. But they don’t do this on command or on the spot. They do this as a result of ongoing investment [in leaders and teams and accelerated growth] and commitment. Given this, it makes good strategic sense … to pay careful attention to brand – not just your company but to yourself as a brand, your team and solutions as a brand – in the midst of turmoil and doubt.  But to do this you must innovate – in your message, in meeting your prospects where they are, not where they were even a few months ago, and more.  After all, most of one’s rivals are likely to be running away from brand. So there is competitive advantage to be had.”

Your company is a brand, and so are you. This is the time to continue building the brand people will look to for sound judgment and reasoned perspective from today forward in the years to come. 

Right Now

Right now your amygdala is almost certainly telling you not to not listen to what’s in this essay. It’s probably telling you, “Why you? Let them step up, let them take the risks, let them dream their crazy dreams – you and I will hang on to what we have and hope that it’s enough until things get back to normal.”  

Well, things might get back to normal – that’s always a possibility. And then, as Nancy Koehn suggests, how far will you be behind those who acted while you hid? And if things don’t get back to what we have considered normal, what then? What will you have learned about succeeding in a different world? What new ideas will you have tested, what new skills will you have developed, what forward movement will you have accomplished – what will you have learned about managing your brain rather than letting it manage you? And what will you have shown to your loved ones, your clients – and yourself – about not only about the kind of person you are but also the kind of person, and leader, you are capable of becoming?

These questions are, in fact, enduring. They lie behind the greatness of the words of Heraclitus: How one meets change reveals all.  And they appear in a hand-written note from Emerson in a Self-Reliance lecture he delivered in 1872: The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.  How exceptional is this life – and new story of success – you could shape in the midst of great change?

Advancing While Others Retreat

Just like Emerson, your brain is probably saying “Yes! Let’s act differently from habit and the crowd! Let’s create a better way to win during tough economic times and build a more exceptional future starting today…  No, wait!  Let’s hide out until this blows over! Yes. No. Yes. No…”  

But it’s not all or nothing.  And that’s what makes the brain a challenge: it thinks in binary terms: to be or not to be. That’s the way most animals think, in terms of binary either/or choices: fight this/flee that; eat this/don’t eat that; go here/don’t go there.

Humans have the unique genius to test new things in small ways, finding out what works and building on it, and seeing what doesn’t work and discarding it. Doing that honors rational fear by not going too far, at the same time that it challenges irrational fear by acting. It moves us, in uniquely human ways, toward our dreams instead of only away from our fears. It puts us squarely where we need to be, always, but particularly in an uncertain and scary time – in the laboratory of life, inventing solutions that will secure our best future.

It is a primary attribute of exceptional leaders that they expand while others are shrinking. They see opportunities where others perceive only threats; they raise others up where others are pushing them down; they stand tall when others are ducking. They do all that not with bluster or braggadocio, but with what can be called “quiet confidence”: a steady calm when the world is going sideways, backwards, or downward around them, which shows itself in communication that is genuine and deep, with compelling conviction and energy, from the heart, not just the head, connecting the near with the far.

The two general keys to accomplishing that kind of leadership are, as I have suggested, awareness and action: awareness that the brain has many ways of defeating its owner’s dreams, one of which is through the paralyzing power of fear; and action that puts the obstructive brain functions on notice: “I’m in charge, not you.”

Regarding awareness, the comedian Emo Phillips captured why it is so difficult. “I used to think my brain was the most wonderful organ in my body,” Phillips said, “until I realized what was telling me that.” It is hard, but not impossible, to separate who you are from what your brain is. It’s valuable to keep in mind what a leading brain theorist, Dr. Robert Ornstein of Stanford University, said: “The mind is a squadron of simpletons.”

 Each brain part has a specialized thing to do, and does it to the best of its ability, but it does only that, and it does it in isolation from everything else. It has no regard for your best interests, only for doing its small job. It’s up to you to be aware of what each of the “simpletons” is doing and manage their exuberance in the way that meets your needs, not theirs.

So the first essential strategy for keeping your brain parts working for you, and not just for themselves, is action.  Small clear new actions are best, linked across a longer time horizon, a year for example, and aligned with your highest and most exciting goals.  These kinds of innovative “pilot-tests,” as we call them in neuroscience, can be very powerful and sustainable, especially if you have a great mentor or team working with you along the way.

Second, if you want to raise energy and attitude, don’t wait for conditions to be just right – which they rarely are – first change behavior. In other words growth follows action which grows new positive attitude. And simple, clear pilot-tests build it fast and safe…

Such small actions can fit into anyone’s schedule without tearing a big hole in it. Third, they’re efficient: you can build on them quickly, or just as quickly you can toss them out and try something else. Big dreams without action are very pleasing to the amygdala, since in practice they are exactly the same as having no dreams at all – in both cases, nothing is ventured and so nothing is risked. That nothing is gained does not matter one tiny bit to the amygdala. 

Fear Is Just A Feeling

The second-century Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Fear, as I have said, can be very important and even productive, but nonetheless it is just your mind’s interpretation of the jingling and jangling of some neurons that have been excited by your amygdala. Listen to the warnings, but then make your own estimate of their meaning, and of the consequences to you of paying them too much heed. 

Then you can refute some other famous words, often attributed to the twentieth-century philosopher Vince Lombardi: “Fear makes cowards of us all.” Many of us, perhaps, but not all. 

What about you?

Deep within humans dwell those slumbering powers;
powers that would astonish them, that they never dreamed of possessing;
forces that would revolutionize their lives if aroused and put into action.- Orison Marden