Love & fear in the workplace

Love & fear in the workplace

Have you ever heard of something called the love and fear paradigm? It concerns a theory around the two most basic motivating forces of human beings: fear and love. The theory states you always have a choice where you want to be in life, or how you want to feel. Opposed to having no choice and letting everything that happens in your life, or rather what happens to you, rule how you experience and go through life and feel about it.

Awareness

The thing that separates both paradigms is awareness. Being aware of in which paradigm you are, gives you the power to make a conscious choice in which one you want to be. Which basically means that you can assert influence on an outcome.

The fear paradigm is all about scarcity, survival, extrinsic motivation and the triangle dynamics of the persecutor (bully), victim and rescuer (the Karpman drama triangle). Where the rescuer sounds like a good person, he/she is merely patronizing by not acknowledging the freedom of choice of the victim. The love paradigm, on the other hand, is all about abundance, giving a loving response, being self-reflective, aware, responsible and giving.

Freedom of choice

We have to admit, we are firm believers of freedom of choice. We believe that no one or nothing can take that away from us. Life can deal us a shitty hand; a lot of bad stuff can happen to us. But when it comes down to it, we always have a choice how we feel about things and how to act on it.

This doesn’t mean that we’re always capable of living our lives by this firm belief. Like anyone else our fears get the better of us on a regular basis. Fears like, not knowing the answer, not feeling loved, being found out, of missing out on anything, of dying even (one of our most primal fears) or for that matter fear of not always being aware.

None the less, call us dreamers or maybe even naive, we still remain firm believers in freedom of choice and being self-responsible for success and happiness in our lives.

Self-responsibility in the workplace

Building systems in which employees are continuously challenged and empowered to take control over their personal and professional development is what People like us is all about. We especially like to work with employers (business owners) who understand the importance of this and grow their business by educating and facilitating their employees to develop themselves. We call this social innovation. Experience has taught us that companies who really invest in this, not only experience higher employee engagement, but also have a much steeper growth curve.