Fear of authority figures in the workplace isn’t just social anxiety

People seeking help with their social anxiety often have a hard time dealing with people who have “power,” perceived power, or authority. They can be authority figures, people with high status, or those who have parental roles. However, it is not necessary to have social anxiety (fear of being negatively evaluated, embarrassed or humiliated, considered inappropriate and rejected) to feel anxious in the presence of someone in authority.

In general, we have been taught to respect all authority. As a consequence, we also have a deeply buried feeling of guilt over the possibility of being caught doing something that the authorities dictate that we should not be doing. Think about how you feel when you are driving and a police car appears. For most of us there is an immediate and automatic rush of adrenaline that not only makes your heart race, but also takes your foot off the gas.

Like social anxiety, fear of authority figures can be the result of factors such as

– Strict, critical or authoritarian parents who made him feel inadequate and powerless to do anything other than what he was instructed to do.

– Traumatic incident involving a person in authority who was embarrassed, humiliated, rejected or punished in some way.

– Response conditioned to feeling negatively evaluated, judged and powerless over time by an authority figure.

As a result, you tend to see that authority figures have more value and are more deserving of power than you because you are less worthy in comparison. You see this as the reason they have that role, the power and the discretion to use that power as they see fit … and you don’t.

These factors can cause you to perceive that anyone in an authority role has the right to judge you and the special power to arbitrarily threaten or act against you. You are left with the feeling that a person in this role cannot be trusted to have your best interests at heart. Therefore, you feel that you must appease them and seek their approval so that they do not use their power against you. Where this fear manifests itself most often is in the workplace.

While it’s understandable that no one wants to feel at risk of losing their job, when you’re afraid of your boss or someone in that role of authority, you can’t do your best. His performance suffers because his thoughts and emotions are focused on how they are evaluating him and how he can survive. Your thoughts are not focused on being as productive as you need to be. Instead, you constantly analyze everything that happens at work and worry about what it means. You begin to feel oversensitive to what your boss says and does about your value and position at work.

Given the option to interpret what he sees and hears as positive or negative, he will tend to spin it negatively. This is because you must be alert to potential dangers to protect yourself. The result is that you hold yourself less than your boss. He sees himself as needing to do whatever it takes to be a “good cog in the wheel” but, at the same time, stay under the boss’s radar. Of course, the problem with acting this way is that you are sabotaging yourself. You are acting in total contradiction to what you must do to be seen as an important, productive and necessary member of the team that the boss not Want to lose.

What can you do to tackle this difficult problem? You must follow a program that addresses all the components of your fear: cognitive, emotional, and physiological. You need

1. Assess your positive attributes (talents, skills, experience, job successes, and expertise) and your value as a worker and as a human being.

2. Evaluate the positive attributes and value of your boss as a worker and as a human being.

3. See that comparing yourself to your boss is like comparing apples and oranges – that you two have different roles that require different attributes and behaviors – that one is not “better” than the other – just different

4. See that your boss has authority and power by virtue of their role only

5. Examine your past successes in general and your work successes in particular to see the value of your work and regain confidence that you have something worth contributing.

6. Dispute automatic negative thoughts about your perceived inadequacy and your boss’s arbitrary use of power against you.

7. Stop when you begin to analyze situations related to fear.

8. Stop when you start to feel oversensitive to what your boss says and does.

9. Learn to relax deeply in anxiety-provoking situations so that you can think more clearly and rationally.

10. Displace negative emotions with humor to keep yourself more positive and in balance.

11. Visualize your boss as a mere human being and compare him or her in funny or silly social situations.

12. Visualize yourself calmly meeting with your boss, asking a question, making a comment, or sharing information.

13. Find colleagues who act confidently with your boss and model their behavior.

14. Recognize that only you have the right to judge and validate your worth as a person

15. Evaluate your own decision-making power as a competent human being and worker

16. Decide for yourself what you want to achieve at work and make a plan that you will follow to achieve it.