New Year’s Resolutions: Our Greatest Fear
“Only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
This holiday week I had a proposal due. (Doncha’ just love those RFPs that land so close to the holidays?)
A young gal who works for me was sent to start copying pages at Kinko’s, while I finished pulling together pages.
I didn’t give her much instruction, and she didn’t call with questions, so I was surprised when I arrived and found that she’d copied every page on a color copier at six times the cost per page of a laser copier.
We were mostly finished, and the remaining pages had color, so I decided we would continue copying on the same machine and began collating the pages she’d completed.
However, she was upset by her mistake, realizing it was a costly error. (360 pages so far)
And then she began making more errors: punching holes on the wrong side of pages, copying double-sided pages to single sided versions, etc.
Her fear overtook her and created more errors. Now it got really expensive, throwing away color copies we couldn’t use. (586 pages final count)
How often do we let fear overtake us, thinking we are working harder, but actually just making a bigger mess?
Reset
We each need to find our reset button.
1. How do you know when fear is taking hold? Do you know what it feels like in your gut? Do you need to find this feeling so you can realize when you are entering this troublesome arena?
2. When fear is taking hold, how do you reset yourself? What kind of break will work for you in your environment? A quick walk around the block, a break for coffee, a walk to the mailroom, a break for the restroom and fresh lipstick (no George, not you.)?
Fear is rampant among proposal teams. Sometimes we catch it from anxious, anxiety ridden project managers whose jobs may be on the line. More often we self inflict the wound because we all take our responsibility very seriously.
This young lady is so fortunate. She has a crystal clear idea of what fear feels like for her. She also knows how much disaster it causes, because she had no problem with the tasks until the fear took control. She has living proof that the “only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”
Once we have this knowledge, we are powerful beyond measure.
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