Face your fear: Freedom
If the leaders I coach are going to avoid burnout, they need to befriend their fear. Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom observes that some of our deepest fears don’t sound like fears at all. Take the way we might fear our freedom.
On the face of it, freedom doesn’t sound very scary. In fact, when asked, we might say we want more freedom, not less. But the bigger problem, Yalom writes, isn’t our lack of freedom but what we’re doing with the freedom we already have.
For instance, consider a leader who feels stuck in her job. Her boss is toxic, her coworkers are a mess, and she feels overwhelmed, overworked, and underappreciated.
Just like her last job. And the one before that.
She wants to break that pattern. But the only things she can think of doing, and the only places she even considers going, just repeat the cycle. Though she thinks a bit about what she truly wants, she always returns to what she feels is predictable and safe.
Even though her current way of living isn’t either of those things.
She comes up with a load of excuses for not changing. Too old or too young, studied the wrong things, worried about finances, can’t leave her aging parents, and so on. All are legitimate concerns. So she’s stuck. End of story.
Yet, Yalom would argue to the contrary. Because as frustrating as her situation might be for her, she has always been the author of her own story.
While there are many things in her life she couldn’t and can’t choose, she has the ability to choose what those things mean—and to make new choices to create a different future for herself.
In other words, she has much more freedom than she thinks.
But Yalom writes that staying stuck can seem safer because embracing freedom and the responsibility that comes with it is too scary. It means admitting she made mistakes, navigating the uncertainty of forging a new path, experiencing failure, learning something new, or finding out what she thought she wanted isn’t what she thought it would be.
But Yalom contends that only when we embrace our freedom to choose, when we become authors of our own stories, can we embrace our true humanity. Only when we accept responsibility for our lives can we truly lead ourselves and others.
But getting to that point can’t happen overnight. If we feel we have given away our freedom to choose—or have had our freedom to choose taken away from us by our circumstances—we need to get curious.
What would we do if we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted?
What reasons do we give ourselves for not doing those things?
What’s the payoff for accepting those reasons as true?
How might those reasons not be as true as we assume?
And if those reasons aren’t as true as we think, what would we do?
If answering these questions is hard, coaching might help. Book your free Discovery Session here.
