After Dark

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take."

I don't know where my memory of that prayer is from.  Whether it was one that I was taught as a child or had heard and remembered from some other time, I do not know.  However it was these lines that came to mind as I struggled to get to sleep last night.  My thoughts were all over the place; no doubt the result of too much over-stimulation from watching the latest version of Loose Change 9/11 on the History Channel.  As I lay there, eyes wide open, waiting for some feeling of sleep to overcome me, I thought back onto the documentary and it prompted me to start thinking about fears and phobias.

We are all prey to fears, some perfectly rational, others irrational.  After all, we live in an age of anxiety.  You have only to turn on the news to see yet another random act of violence or misfortune.  Much of the rise in anxiety is related to people feeling their connections with others are less stable--there's been an increase in divorce (although it would appear the GFC may have helped reduce that trend), fewer people are getting married and they're less engaged in their communities. Surveys show that while many peoples lives are improving in every material way, their expectations for happiness are also rising and they feel less satisfied. Well publicised acts of terrorism and natural disasters such as the Boxing Day Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have also increased these stress levels.  However less well publicised, and on a more personal level, are the phobias that afflict huge numbers of people everyday.

I, for example, have a fear of spiders (arachnophobia) and it matters not which type of spider.  I know that this fear is irrational unless, of course, you are talking about funnel webs, black widows or tarantulas!  Other well known phobias include claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) and agoraphobia (fear of open spaces).  Phobias such as those above have been around for many hundreds of years.  However, our modern life is also creating new phobias.  Take this one; Nomophobia;  A fear of being without your mobile phone. 

Fears range from cataclysmic (meteor impact destroying civilisation) to individual (arachnophobia), however it is possible to manage them.  Lester B Pearson, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to resolve the Suez Canal Crisis in 1957, said "misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace."  So, to reduce our fears, we need to educate ourselves.  According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I have more chance of dying from heart disease, cancer or car accident than I do of ever being involved in a terrorist attack or spider bite.  According to the University of Adelaide, there have been no confirmed deaths by spider bite since 1979. 

Fear drives our behaviours, emotions and reactions.  By learning to understand and in so doing, govern them, we reduce their impact.  So too with change.  Fear of Change (Trophobia) is well catalogued and common.  Through effective communications reducing lack of knowledge about the change and minimising the ignorance, we in HR can help our employees cope more effectively with that change.  Knowledge then becomes not so much about power and more about freedom from fear. 

And Finally...

I leave you with a quote from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, given in his first Inaugural Speech as President;

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

All the best

Jim