If you’ve been living in the past couple of decades then, more than likely, just like me, you’ve experienced the over all cultural phenomena of heightened fear in many aspects of your life with a big impact hitting your job or career.

On Friday, June 29, 2012 at 12:30pm CST I’ll be interviewing a highly regarded writer, speaker and management consultant, Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D. on BTR’ Hope42Day.  In her book and subsequent talks and info-sessions, Judy shares about the psychological recession behind the changing work force (especially in the U.S.).

Here’s an excerpt about  fear from the book, “The prolonged, sustained fear that is characteristic of a Psychological Recession assures that good news will be discounted while bad news is accepted as the stuff of reality. The tragedy is that focusing on fears only reinforces them.  In understandable but irrational ways, people who are frightened move ever forward toward panic. In this way, a Psychological Recession is self-fulfilling.”

This got me to thinking about my days in the world of recruiting technical experts for long-term contracts.  In the late 90’s as we headed toward Y2K (for those of you who live under rocks, this was when the techno world was mainly run by mainframes and the uproar was all about the dates not being programmed to be able to turn over to 20 from 19 (1999 to 2000) we were flying high.  There was so much work to be done that we could not find people fast enough. Then there was a brief respite with client-server technology (remember that?) being the latest and greatest movement since the mainframe and like a creeping tidal wave, the internet took off and the rest as we know it is history.  There was a lot of fear in those days because the work world was being turned ass over tea kettle from brick and mortar to dot.com.  The psychology of how historically held institutions turned over the usual way of doing business to the new way—because of the impact of technology — from banking to real estate undergoing changes in fascinating (and frightening) ways.

I believe what allowed so much change to happen so quickly was FEAR.  Many people feared all the new technology taking place because they did not understand it. Then all that new technology coupled with the bright young minds stepping  up to leadership posts that would have taken years for previous generations to hold, had many reacting out of sheer fear.

Here we are a handful of years down the road from the great American recession and many countries undergoing their own radical changes (because, yeah, like they say, we are all connected!) and lot’s of people are scared, scared, scared.  The good news is that if you don’t want to be one of the mass who is steeping themselves in fear, anger, and dark perspectives of what life is all about….this is a most excellent time to put on that wet suit of confidence, trust and an open mind so that you can surf this huge wave of fear (maybe even have a whole lot of fun while you’re doing it) and come out on the other side to lead us to another way of doing and looking at how we do business (and live in the world).  I think that is how great leaders are created.  I think there is a whole lot of opportunity for smart people who understand humans and the psychology of business.

How will you see the world today?