Living Without Fear

I listened with interest to an interview with Cheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, earlier this week, about her strategy for engagement with smaller businesses and ways in which the company is planning to increase its focus on providing added value to its users. At the end of the interview, when asked about her own personal success she said ‘What would you do if you weren’t afraid?’

This got me thinking about many of the seemingly rash decisions I’ve made in the past, when I was considerably younger, and considerably more fearless; selling the house, giving up the job, travelling around the world on merchant ships, and losing a husband along the way; going to the USA to work for three months, with one suitcase, and returning 10 years later with a container load, and a new husband. The list is endless, and although I wouldn’t change any of my experiences, for better or worse, I fear that such exciting carefree adventures are now all in the past. The reason?  Nowadays I’m much older, if not wiser, with more responsibilities, and am, at least for some of the time, afraid of the consequences of my actions. It is not a situation that sits easily with me at all, but times, as well as I, have changed. I can well recall when a person could leave a job with a certain degree of alacrity in the certain knowledge that another one would be ready and waiting in the wings not too far around the next corner.  We really did never have it so good.

That, sadly, is not at all the case today. Many youngsters are leaving university with good degrees, and huge student loans, and still struggling to find any kind of job, let alone one that they’d like as a stepping stone onto the career ladder, or even somewhere affordable to live. The fact is that no matter what our age, our education, or where we live, life has become so much tougher, and along with that we have all become much more risk averse. Our work places are struggling to become pristine risk free environments, and we are increasingly afraid to allow our children, those of us that are fortunate to have them, to take the risks that will help them to cope later in life and take those leaps of faith that will propel them out of their comfort zone into the realm of what is possible, rather than what is safe and predictable; to live their dreams.

It is in this environment that great things can be achieved, when unfettered by rules and the caution brought about by bitter experience; to really be able to reach our full potential as individuals. There are of course exceptions and some of the greatest achievements have been made by those who were bred into an environment of fear; they may well have felt that such was their life they had nothing further to fear.

Anything is possible, as long as we believe it to be so, but it can only happen if we are not hampered by fear; the fear of the ‘what ifs’ in life.

Despite my more cautious approach I’m still considered a risk taker by many, but when I look back on my life I really have very few regrets. Perhaps the current feelings of fear are just in my head and it’s time to shake them off.

As Franklin d Roosevelt said in his inaugural speech ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’