It is not uncommon for highly successful people to be driven by a motivation to escape feelings of fear and pain. Oftentimes the pain we’re avoiding has laid dormant and unfelt for a long time. Pain that in many cases, has driven us to excel. It’s usually emotional pain, sometimes traumatic pain. It might stem from not feeling seen or valued in the family we grew up in, or persistent worry about not being good enough. This can lead us to become driven to succeed under any circumstances, to work under the pressure of unforgiving, unexamined deadlines, to perpetually strive for the approval of our organizations and shareholders, constantly flooding our bodies with ever more stress hormones.
The pain and underlying fear of not being good enough can become powerful driving forces for throwing ourselves into constant work.
In a recent talk on Mindful on Wall Street, Matt Harris, cofounder of the multi-billion dollar investment fund Global Infrastructure Partners, captured this sentiment when he said that from an early age, he felt that his “worth as a human being was very much predicated on how successful I was.” This is a message many of the leaders I work with received early on, and the pain and underlying fear of not being good enough can become powerful driving forces for throwing ourselves into constant work.
How Avoiding Fear and Pain Can Impact Leadership
The need to belong and be seen as successful in an organization and by others is a powerful, psychological need. Yet in highly performance-oriented corporate cultures, the sense of belonging can be extremely short-lived, always dependent on the very last achievement. Even though someone may appear to be successful, they may feel only as good as their last success. And when an organization is set up in a way to constantly stretch the leader, they may feel or experience a constant state of overwhelm.
Striving for high performance, adapting to new challenges, or setting stretching targets are all great leadership qualities—The problems begin when we tie our self-worth and identity to our success. When we operate from a place of fear, it limits our ability to be creative, empathetic, and emotionally intelligent. This fear is also likely to mirror itself in the organizational culture that we as leaders create. In most cases, when we act from fear, we attract others that similarly operate from a fear-based place and create a culture that may severely hinder creativity, openness, and vulnerability. A tendency that is particularly problematic in times which require leaders to create psychological safety.
We become much more effective when we are not constantly worried about failure, we are more open to new ideas, we become more creative and more courageous. The following three approaches can help us find healthier and more productive ways to deal with fear and pain.
3 Ways Leaders Can Use Mindfulness to Work with Fear and Pain
1) Ask Yourself: Are You Seeking Out Stress?
It’s not uncommon for leaders to seek out stress in order to avoid pain. Stress hormones can be highly addictive (just like alcohol). I once worked with a senior executive of a major retailer who felt she needed to check her email right after waking up (usually after only a few hours of sleep), because the release of stress hormones upon seeing 50+ new emails (coupled with the lack of sleep) helped numb the anxiety and depression she otherwise felt in the morning. Mindfulness can help in the moment when fear and pain arise, and allow us to create space between us and those emotions, instead of impulsively acting on them. Mindfulness helped her be with the difficult emotions until they no longer frightened her. The practice is to surrender and allow our system to experience pain. When we stop resisting pain, we will often start to notice that it is simply a sensation like other sensations—and that we can be with it and learn from it.
Try This: A Mindful Breathing Pause. Commit to doing a few minutes of mindful breathing in the morning before checking your inbox.