By Ryan W. Quinn
Over the past couple of days, I have stumbled across the topic of fear enough that it is on my mind. One example can be found in this 60 Minutes interview of Wael Ghonim–the Middle East Google executive who was a leader in Egypt’s revolution last February, where Ghonim said, ”The only barrier to people’s uprise and revolution is the psychological barrier of fear.” Another came from Valerie Strauss’article in the Washington Post online, ”When an adult took the standardized tests forced on kids.” After raising some serious questions about how our system is evaluating children, teachers, and administrators in the school system, she asks, “How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution?”
From Fear to Courage
These are just the examples that can be found in the news. The fact is, those of us who author this blog hear stories of fear from the managers, administrators, and students we work with all of the time. As I thought about this, again, I realized that this has been a recurring theme in our blog. So, in hopes that it will help our readers, I am going to compile a list of links to blog entries that we have written on this topic here:
- Where Is the Courage in Organizations?
- Positive Leaders’ Courage Can Help Us Overcome Our Own Fears
- From Courage to Resilience
- Being a Positive Leader By Positively Cultivating Your Mindset
- Embracing Failure to Help Future Leaders Find the Courage to Succeed
- Who Could You Call?
- Making progress, Finding Meaning, and Employee Performance
These entries provide a nice resource on the topic that people can refer to again and again when addressing issues of fear and courage.