Security – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

Capabilities for overcoming obstacles

"Fear paralyzes us" (Mario Alonso Puig). I have heard that line many times, and it made me wonder how often in my life fear has kept me from doing things, or how often I let paralysis win and everything stayed exactly as it was. Another line I like to pair with it is "Rivers are easiest to cross at their source," from Publilius Syrus. Fear and reverence are different things. As a Roman Catholic, I have reverence for God, the fear of the Lord, yet I am not afraid of Him, because God is love. I revere Him out of respect, without any dread that He might strike me down if I do something wrong. Fear, on the other hand, is a feeling of anguish, usually caused by something with no basis that, in the vast majority of cases, will never happen. Can we feel reverence and fear at the same time? Can we have one without the other? Where does fear come from?

We are all born for something in this life, and when we forget it, fear creeps in: fear of failure, of rejection, of the unknown. I want to dwell on that last one. How could we not fear the unknown if we lack a clear life purpose? It seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yet once we discover there is something deeper that moves us to do what we want to do, that fear fades little by little because results start to come. And they are a particular kind of result, in tune with that higher thing that inspires us to keep going, our life purpose. Results that come from reaching objectives and goals aligned with our life purpose are the most powerful we can find. The key is first to know what that purpose is and then to act accordingly.

Analysis paralysis, which defined me at one point in my life, is nothing more than the barrier between ideas and action, and what lives inside that paralysis is fear. How do you fix it? There is no pill that shrinks fear. What there is, is action. As we act and face our fears bit by bit, we watch fear fade. I have seen plenty of people who are afraid of heights. Once I was lucky enough to take someone I love dearly as a passenger on one of my training flights, and to my surprise, when we landed, this person said, "Rodrigo, I have always been afraid of this kind of plane and especially of heights. I didn’t know you were practicing emergencies today, but thank you for inviting me." How often does life hand us moments like this? I mean opportunities to face our greatest fears, flying aside, and sometimes one small step makes the fear disappear completely.

Many companies, teams and organizations live in fear because they lack purpose. They only need to remember the original vision of their founder or founders to see that in the past they had the courage to face fears just as strong as the ones they live with today. That is why I am not a big fan of the saying "the good old days were always better." That past holds the evidence of how to face the greatest fears regardless of circumstances. Today the world presents challenges as great as the ones we lived through before. The nature, color, flavor and shape of fear may differ, but its magnitude and the way to tackle it are always the same. Another thought comes to mind: fear is a lack of fortitude, a lack of courage, in a word, a missing piece of human virtue. I sum it up this way: fear is the absence of a life purpose.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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