The sculptor carves the stone into a sculpture 
The warrior aims his arrow
The potter forms the clay pot
And, the wise man decides for himself
Buddha
The business world is often described as a cruel jungle that obligates any who enter to face many risks. The modern businessman has to watch his step and carefully choose how to respond to the many challenges he faces every day.
This complex mission brings a variety of automatic emotional reactions. If the businessman learns to utilize them as a tool for self-inquiry, they can work as warning signs.
Switching To Survival Mode
Fear, which is mostly fear of change, is an automatic emotional reaction. The strength of the warning signs are proportionate to the level of change about to occur. The fear of change makes us try to seek solutions in familiar ways.
When we operate on automatic pilot most of us choose the path of logic. From a survivor’s point of view we look for a familiar pattern solution, one that we have used before. It sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?
One of the influences of fear is a tendency to lock the brain into “survival mode”. When we are locked into this mode it is very difficult to identify alternative creative responses, to think outside the box, or be inspired.
That same fear of change was the source of a surprising article in the New York Times, written in 1903. The writer, driven by a quite logical fear, made an historic mistake when he claimed “a flying machine that actually succeeded might be the product of combined and lasting efforts by mathematicians, and mechanics within one to ten million years.”
Even Lord Calvin, known as representing the official view of science and academia in his time, claimed just a short time before the first airplane flew, that there was no possible way a plane could fly in the air.
It can be said that the social consciousness in the beginning of the twentieth century was locked in a mode that prevented breakthroughs in thinking due to a lack of reasonable scientific explanations.
The main goal of the modern businessman, in my opinion, is to choose between courageous response, one that is aware of the fear and utilizes it while taking risks into account, verses automatically suppressing fear and locking the consciousness.
Brave reaction is one that is aware of the fear and focuses on going through it.
What Is Fear?
In order to separate and choose between the possible reactions to fear, the Organic Training language suggests two different meanings for the word fear.
One meaning is an “emotional reaction” and that can be a driving force. The other way of seeing fear is as something physical, a kind of sharp reoccurring pain that cuts from the inside time after time. This cut comes from a repetitious logical analysis that leaves one unable to deal with fear.
Lack of inner awareness in the face of change and complete dependence on logical analysis is probably the source of many famous business mistakes.
For example, Tomas Watson, the chairman of IBM in 1943 said, “In my opinion the global market is perhaps, four or five computers total”. There was also Ken Olson, the chairman and founder of Digital (1977) who said, “There is no reason someone would want a computer in their home”.
Another incredible mistake that can be attributed to the fear of change, can be found in an inside memo from 1896, saying, “The telephone has too many shortcomings for us to considered it a serious form of communication. This instrument has no value for us.”
Awareness Is A Tool
Facing fear with awareness of its existence, and accepting the reactions awakened as a result of change allows us to examine new and creative ways to respond to reoccurring fears.
Historically, it is surprising to discover that on the same day that the article was published in the New York Times in 1903 claiming that airplanes are practically impossible, a bicycle repairman named Orville Write (the future builder of the first plane) wrote in his journal that “We unloaded the addition equipment for our new machine”.
Several months later, our human culture changed forever, and we began to learn that a plane can fly high into the sky…and if you design it right it can even reach other stars (only then you call it a space ship).
Enhancing the awareness of our ability to shape our lives with our own hands, allows each individual to act out of a choice rather than surrender to an automatic survival mechanism.
Automatic reactions originally stem from living in the primordial jungles of the past. However, the over saturation of information in the modern world makes it very difficult to function. This obligates the businessperson to be aware of themselves and their automatic fear reactions.