Nelson Mandela on Fear

With the public ceremony of Mandela's life occurring as I write this, you are probably thinking do we need another tribute to Nelson Mandela.  This post isn't necessarily a tribute as much as it is an opportunity to recap what we learned about fear and courage from Nelson Mandela and how this can be applied to your daily work.

With his recent passing there is no shortage of quotes being repeated from his many public speeches over the years.  There are a couple of quotes that are very relevant to where we are today as a society and a business culture and that I plan to use in the book.  This post will focus on one specifically with another post to follow on the second.

The first speaks to fear specifically.  As a recap of what Mandela had to overcome from a fear perspective to reach the heights that he was able to achieve here is a summary of the ways he had to overcome fearful situations:

• In 1941 he fled to Johannesburg to escape an arranged marriage and found work as a night watchman at Crown Mines, but was fired when the headman discovered he was a runaway.
• In 1947 as his career as an attorney was starting to begin he lost a mentor and daughter in death.
• Working as a lawyer in the anti-apartheid movement, he was repeatedly arrested for seditious activities and, with the ANC leadership, was unsuccessfully prosecuted in the Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961.
• In 1962 he was arrested, convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the state, and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Rivonia Trial.

Despite this and many more hardships underlying the bullet point headlines above he had this to say about fear:

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.  The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers fear."

As I have been writing the book Corporate Bravery it there has been a central question that must be answered.  Many want to deal with fear by insulating and inoculating themselves and those they love from the opportunity to experience fear.  And in many ways it is this attempt at dealing with fear that creates its own level of cultural fear in many organizations.  This doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to eradicate situations that create a culture of fear and cause decision making to be driven by it, but that we shouldn't try to avoid situations that are scary in a business context.

Instead, we need to put our employees in situations that can be difficult, and stretch their capabilities.  In a sense interject opportunities for personal fear in a way that allows them to overcome and learn from their decision making processes.  You can never truly make brave decisions unless you have been through the fire and conquered those situations where fear could reign.