“Problems always involve risk.” – Anonymous

People want inspirational leaders.

• Do you inspire those you lead?
• Do you inspire them with your courage and willingness to take well thought out risks?
• Do you stay with what’s comfortable or push yourself out of your comfort zone and inspire others to do the same?

Can you imagine an athlete who only trains in comfort and never pushes into discomfort or pain when training? An athlete has to train into discomfort and even into pain to become stronger, faster, better.

Marty Seligman illustrated this concept in a discussion with Steven Pinker, author of “The Blank Slate.” Seligman says that the era has passed when you can erase, either therapeutically or through pharmaceuticals, feelings or emotions such as sadness, anxiety and anger. Instead, Seligman says, therapists and patients should now adopt the concept that he calls “Dealing with It.”

To illustrate the effectiveness of dealing with it, rather than medicating or “therapeutically” alleviating it, Seligman uses the ways in which the Armed Services train snipers.

Because it frequently takes a sniper as long as 24 hours to get into position and another 36 hours frozen motionless before he can get off a shot, sleepiness becomes a significant issue for the sniper. A therapist would prescribe drugs to keep snipers awake or instruct them in techniques to overcome fatigue.

But trainers take a very different approach, one that is closely aligned with Seligman’s notion of simply “dealing with it”: Snipers remain awake for days, nearly collapsing from fatigue as they continue to practice shooting.

Needless to say, they become very good at sleepy sniping.

How successful do you think you as an entrepreneur would be if you didn’t risk differentiating, and innovating? Entrepreneurs must continually challenge the status quo. Entrepreneurs live in discomfort. The best entrepreneurs thrive on being uncomfortable.

But what about Fearless Leaders who do have anxiety, but pretend they don’t?

We’ll explore that in our next post.

For questions about this post or for information on becoming a fearless leader, contact Dr. Cathy Greenberg and The Fearless Leader Group at (888) 320-1299 or by email at hello@fearlessequalsfreedom.com.