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FACILITATION | PSYCHOLOGY
Wetting your pants out of fear
(about fear, anger, transparency, and reconciliation)
It is hard to think of even one singular negative emotion that is not caused or driven by fear.
There once was a participant in one of my workshops who stubbornly refrained from responding to anything I said or asked. The great non-collaborator.
Having tried a few times to get the participant to participate, with all the friendly means at my disposal, but to no avail, I grew singularly frustrated. How could a human being be so obstinate? What for heaven’s sake was wrong with him? Why was she here in the first place? If you are unwilling to participate, then why join a list of participants? Aren’t participants supposed to participate? What did she think?
Meanwhile, the participant’s behavior worsened by the minute. Eventually, she stopped giving any sign of life altogether. It felt as if we were keeping a corpse in a coffin in the middle of the workshop space — and keeping the corpse there, was having a devastating impact on the dynamics of the kind of workshop that the others of us were trying to create.
