We Have Nothing to Fear but Fear of Learning

Danger Danger

Sometimes learning feels too perilous to pursue. Would identifying the creaky noise in the ceiling require you to enter a dark attic with bats? Do you always skip asking the opinion of a coworker who once berated the sweetest person in the office? Informal learning guru Jay Cross (Informal Learning), who has a policy to try almost anything once, tells me he's afraid to attempt rock climbing. He fears if he were having a wonderful time on a rock face, at some point he'd fail to find a crevice and he'd fall to his death. He doesn't want to learn enough to be able to try.

Imagined dangers can hold us back as much as real ones. The emotion center in the brain doesn't distinguish between what it remembers and what it imagines. Catastrophes you envision feel real. FEAR could be an acronym for F-fantasy, E- expectations, A-appearing, R-real. When we don't feel safe, physically or emotionally, we struggle to learn.

If you didn't fear bats or that coworker your queries might instead release brain chemicals that create anticipation, excitement, the thrill of discovery-or little reaction altogether.

Fear Forward

When you fear learning something new try these tactics:

1. Say aloud exactly what you fear. "Bob scares me" or "What if I fail?" Daylight makes fear seem less menacing. Then remind yourself that your reaction is natural and you can choose to address it.
2. Watch a highlight film. Visualize a mental movie staring you as a capable and competent person who knows he can endure under upsetting circumstances. Pull your clip from past experience or script it from your imagination.
3. Walk around the block or down the hall. Physically moving forward helps you feel strong and fit to deal with the situation.
4. Create a mantra. Say "I can handle it" to bypass the state triggering your fear.
5. Talk about what's stopping you. Tell someone what you need to take action. Perhaps you could use a helping hand, an extra telephone call to check in, or a specific resource or referral.
6. Adjust your reaction by unlearning it. While fears can make learning feel difficult, when we truly want to learn something it often seems effortless. Deliberate steps to unlearn our habits can open us to new ways of working.

Acknowledge fear by naming it, relate it to other experiences, recognize how a recent situation differs from past ones, and decide to try a different and new approach. When we gather our fears and then meet them, we can then work our way past them. If we do this enough, we change our feelings about our situation, and we can return to learning again.