The fear will never go away until you do it.

Spring of 2009, in the Hawkins Hall Auditorium at SUNY Plattsburgh, a professor

addresses a crowd of Freshmen at the ceremony to celebrate their induction into the Phi

Eta Sigma National Honor Society. As the professor delivers congratulations and other

motivations, he declares with wise confidence: “the fear will never go away…until

you do it!” For the life of me, I can’t remember much of what was said up to that point

(I was 19, after all), but those words still ring in my head as loudly and clearly as they

did nearly two decades ago. The professor went on to explain further, and the lesson is

one I have carried with me ever since:

We go about life faced regularly with a certain type of choice. This isn’t your everyday

where to eat lunch-type choice but the potentially life-altering kind: whether to take a

job, ask out a crush, make a big purchase, say yes to that big opportunity, or even say no

to what no longer serves us. We wrestle with these decisions because of the stakes

involved, the potential fallout of making the wrong one, and stress about the weight of it

all. We tell ourselves we’ll wait for a sign or wait for our gut to settle and give clarity. We

await a day when we wake up with confidence in the choice that finally feels right.

Spoiler alert: that day never arrives. The irony of it all is that fear keeping us from

making that choice can only truly go away after we choose – and we see for ourselves

the outcome. Inevitably we discover that we survived the choice after all, and the fear

dissipates, even when the result isn’t what we had hoped for. At least we know what the

outcome is, and can stop worrying about what it might be.

In the course of our work as Performance Consultants, we encounter this fear all the

time. This is a fear we see from leaders that holds them back from making the hard

choices that leaders are called to make on a regular basis. Choices that can alter careers,

team trajectories, client relationships, or even whole businesses, but choices that must

be made for better or for worse. These choices, for the same reason, create fear. The fear

a leader feels over these choices and their outcomes won’t go away either, not until the

choice is made. As leaders, we’re going to just have to do it scared, because the fear

won’t go away until you do it.

Integra HR can help you get comfortable with the uncomfortable with staff

and leadership programs, from how to show up with Emotional Intelligence to

effectively navigating conflict, or even navigating change – we can make those hard

choices a little less hard.