Fear can cost us. It can cost our teams and our businesses, too. By developing safety mindsets, we can learn how to adjust to difficult situations and improve performance while we’re at it.

If you missed the recent Tech Fest webinar featuring Dr Amy Silver, psychologist, author and mentor, you can watch the recording of her 40-minute presentation here.

Where, in the following, would you rank your team?

In her work, Amy Silver finds that ‘Polite’ is where most teams hang out.

To elevate the position of your team towards Courageous, she advises:

1. Having a collective purpose: people need to feel that what they are doing within the team is of higher or equal value to what they could be doing alone.
2. Creating a safe space for others: each person needs to know how to make the other people feel safe.
3. Building self-safety: taking responsibility for your own belief system causing fear.

In the webinar, Amy focused on #3 – How to build self-safety by thinking of yourself as the host of a party …

Your emotions are your guests – fear is just one of them. Don’t let fear take over the party. Turn away from it if need be and towards other more enabling emotions.

Tips for creating self-safety

1. Separate yourself from the fear.
2. Show some self-compassion. Acknowledge that it is not shameful to feel fear or that you don’t deserve to be worried about your own situation.
3. Don’t allow fear to determine how you act. (That’s courage).

Bonus content: Amy has created a video library of 20 tips for creating emotional safety. You can access the full compilation here.

You can also view the Tech Fest webinar in full where Amy very smoothly switches between assuring the audience that it’s very ok for your home life to cross over into your work life, to her daughter, Autumn’s cameo appearance. (We’re calling it a set up!)

WATCH WEBINAR