ABSTRACT
Fear undermines success when it is elicited by the prior four emotions. Fear tends to be the tip of the Big Five iceberg. ‘I’m afraid I’ll get bored and quit’, for example, points to shame and boredom. The antidote to fear is to pause. To pause allows us to control our impulses. Anger is fear’s favorite destructive mask and to enact the pause here is to defer action of any kind while in the grip of it. We explore the Mezzanine exercise as a pause that allows us to play an incident out on the stage of our mind. You may find, in visiting the situation from ‘the audience’, that your initial fight or flight response lessens, freeing you to find the next appropriate action to take. The story of a media producer, and how he eventually built some independence from his job in order to take on freelance projects, is explored. The fear in this case was of taking creative risks that could result in financial loss, a fear that aborts many endeavors before they start. Fear of networking is also presented through the author’s foray outside her comfort zone to an in-person event culminating in a serendipitous result.
