Resources / Performance
Working with fear, not against it
When fear fires, planning and problem-solving go offline. The work is not to pretend fear is optional — it is to tell rational fear from misplaced fear.
Jon’s public essay opens with a one-on-one: a leader walks in ready to celebrate a report’s performance. The report walks in carrying a collapsed deal and the fear that trust will evaporate. Heart rate up. Palms sweat. In that state, recovery planning is unlikely — because executive function lives in the prefrontal cortex, and the older threat systems have taken the microphone.
Fear is necessary. Misplaced fear is expensive.
Crossing traffic without a crosswalk, fear is appropriate. In a workplace conversation where nobody is about to become a predator, the same physiology can still fire — and inhibit productivity, creativity, and communication for 20 to 60 minutes after arousal.
Three common workplace modes
- Fight — increase activity to become the controlling variable: over-gathering information, refusing help, micromanaging, talking over others.
- Flight — remove oneself as a probable target: avoidance, disappearing into non-critical tasks, going quiet in meetings.
- Freeze — no capacity to fight or flee: blank stare, shallow breath, inability to process or respond.
Sensory facts vs the meaning we invent
The essay’s practical move is separating sensory information (what you can film) from non-sensory meaning (“they will think I’m negative”). Irrational fear often lives in overgeneralized meanings carried from another context into the boardroom.
Rather than fighting fear, Jon’s frame is to give it a proper place in time and space: honor where it was useful, and choose new rules for the present context.
Fear isn’t the enemy of founder performance. Misplaced fear is.
That line also appears in Jon’s public FAS-linked X content; the essay above is the fuller treatment.
Compressed adaptation of Working with Fear, Not Against It. Detailed client vignettes from that essay are summarized at principle level for this preview rather than reproduced in full.