Workplace fears( see next ) As humans, you will always feel fear (NLP, 2011) Fear is one of the

greatest impediments to human progress according to Neuro Linguistic Programming taking two possible forms: self-imposed fear and externally imposed fear: the former is based on a persons past experiences, childhood, internal views and values, the latter created by outside stimuli such as management, organizational structure, and culture as well as current events, in other words beyond the individuals control. Fear is an emotional response to an unpleasant state accompanied by physiological, cognitive, and behavioral changes (Suarez, 1993), which imposes limitations upon our potential and ability, ruining our relationships with the others (NLP, 2011). Stan Deetz states that the interaction processes that surround and foster fear leads to behaviours creating a rapid and destructive negative cycle and causes you to feel anxiety, insecurity, and a complete lack of positive feeling.( NLP, 2011). The process of positive interactions can help build rapport and strong relationships while negative interactions can lead to fear. In the 21st century, an abundance of communication mediums at the workplace can lead to complications in relationships and interactions. Communication should be specific and clear, establish true dialogue, are carefully read and listened to, stay positive, and make a habit of onthe-spot communications. (Craemer, 2010) Communication is a real issue at the workplace, in America, as a multicultural society formed of many nationalities, from Chinese to Native Americans. Precision means saying exactly what you mean to say. Clarity means saying it in such a way that it will be understood by the person receiving the message. One barrier to clarity is vocabulary. Some people also misuse words they think they understand. Vague words or phrases that have no specific meaning are a problem with both precision and clarity. If you want a specific result, you need to give specific instructions. (Slagale, 2011) Unclear vocabulary can lead to fear of not understanding, fear of uncertainty, and fear of asking for clarity. Current fears related to the workplace include inadequate credentials, being overworked, being under-worked, outsourcing, fear of workplace atmosphere, ineffective leadership, competition, being judged, balancing work and social life, fear of failure, fear from past experience, fear of being fired.

The media suggests that all Americans have a realistic chance of being fired and this heightens the already elevated anxieties among people who face little risks (Glassner, 199, p. 111). Media bombards us with negative happenings and thus our fears increase. According to Thomas Feller, From the beginnings, narrative fiction television tended to portray and reinforce the division between the private domestic sphere and the public workplace or occupation or deploys the workplace as the other space defining the limits of home and family. Television has thus had a significant influence on the understanding of the relationship between family and work in American culture. (2011) Comedies comment on Americas widening income gap, its citizens pervasive fear of being downsized for reasons beyond their control, and the selfishness that takes over when people fear that what little they have is to be taken away. (Seitz, 2011) Television shows portrayal of fear in the workplace has a significant impact on viewers interpretation of real workplace, even if it is only subconscious. Today management has evolved and needs to continue to adapt with the changing times, influencing people by offering them motivation, loyalty, creativity. The recent events have played a huge part in increasing fear at the workplace. 9/11 generated panic and worry about the inevitability of another terrorist attack; this media-hyped fear spilled into personal lives and consequently into the workplace. Peoples subconscious fear and uneasiness, anxieties and discomforts created jumpy reactions for the years to come. Deetz insisted on American people understanding the meaning of the terrorist attack, which was an attack on their identity, not on their territory. Constructions of fear lead to radical responses based on interactions. Why do we let fear change our outlooks and understanding? (Deetz, personal communication, November 15, 2011) This was a horrible event, but there were many in the long history of American policies, and its reaction played off of Americas culture of fear. There was a domino effect Once a scare catches on, not only do its advocates have the offensive advantagebut they can also use the scare as a defensive weapon in other disputes. (glassner, 1999, p.17) Hurricane Katrina was the next big fear-inducing event as people fell victim of fear fueled by media and mishandled by government. This natural disaster demonstrates the importance of a responsive, punctual and proactive attitude, when faced with fear based circumstances which affects a large category. The same happens at the workplace. The faster one responds to fear or

the threat of fear, the more manageable fear can be. Critical and rational thinking when a crisis occurs is the key to maintaining peoples performance and satisfaction. The occurrence of the 2008 financial crisis has had the largest impact on Americans and the stability surrounding Corporate America. After the market crashed, the economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, raising the unemployment rate to 7.2 percent. More than 10 million Americans are now unemployed. Many more millions of Americans worry about their own job security. These anxieties are transforming the workplace. Employees may be working harder, experts say, but they may also be less productive. (Marks, 2011) This massive economic depression has caused fear not only in the workplace, but also to those seeking to enter it. There is a lot of anxiety about getting jobs, keeping the job and how to navigate their way through the workplace. People think it is more of a zero sum game, like there are a certain number of jobs out there and if they arent the right person or kind of person then they are doomed to fail.( Hertzog, personal communication, October 12, 2011) With the collapse of seemingly stable corporations such as Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Stearns and Countrywide, we see a snowball effect of fear stemming from all parties involved. Media, the main source of information and infamous for gaining recognition through reporting attention grapping stories, loses credibility because it is not consistently promoting an unbiased message and often lacks transparency. We can see the harmful effect of not being transparent when it comes to media changing its story angle mid-crisis just as we can see the consequences of managers not showing transparency in the workplace. The presence of fear will sustain in the workplace if managers and leaders do not practice transparent communication. Many fears and frustrations from the economic collapse predominantly come from corporate greed and lack of a secure system designed to fix these issues. Fear is an emotional response that travels through organizations by way of communication, organizational structure and culture, management and is impacted by current events. People should accept fear as it is, they must learn how to cope with the effects of fear on their behaviours and attitudes, they need a grounding practice of fear; acknowledge fear and face it in order to walk through the other side. (Margaret Wheatly, 2011) People need courage to deal with their personal and social problems as courage is not the absence of fear, but the management of fear. (Suarez, 1993)

The ending of the 20th century the beginning of the 21st cent According to .the late 1990s were dominated by presidential scandals and national lectures about constitutional law out of Washington, but at the same time by a technological and business revolution that would change not only the country but also the rest of the world. Steve Forbes, business magazine mogul and former presidential candidate, declared that if he were to put something in a time capsule that best characterized America, he would take in addition to the Declaration and the Constitution, Id have a grain of sand, because thats the basis of silicon- the whole information age. It shows what a free people can achieve and only a free people can achieve writing whole worlds on grains of sand. A true symbol of American inventiveness. Today people take for granted communication and research devices such as BlackBerrys and iPhones, Internet connections, e-mail, personal computers, laptops, and Wi-Fi. More than 80 percent of Americans have computers in their homes and use the Internet. In the past, about twenty years ago, the cell phone was the size of a brick, today it is the size of a deck of cards or smaller. Home computers, used primarily for word processing, games, and number crunching, were the size of a medium suitcase and attached to a hard drive that was equally large. Going online or e-mailing a document was an unfamiliar term, scarcely available. In the 1950s, two American engineers, Robert Noyce, born in Burlington, Iowa, and Jack Kilby, born in Jefferson City, Missouri, independent of each other, invented integrated circuits known as microchips or microprocessors. Kilby together with Andrew Grove, born in Hungary, would take Intel into the modern age, transforming it from a manufacturer of memory chips into one of the worlds dominant producers of microprocessors, that supplies most of our home and work computers. In 1997 Grove was declared the Person of the Year by Time magazine which emphasized the impact of the mass-produced microchip. Millions of transistors, each costing far less than a staple, can be etched on wafers of silicon. On these microchips, all the worlds information and entertainment can be stored in digital form, processed and zapped to every nook of a networked planet.(34) Many other innovators joined Grove, with unique ideas about the information age which would change the economy, peoples lives, and the world. There was the king of the hill, Bill Gates,

who founded Microsoft after dropping out of Harvard. He became the wealthiest man in the world with his creation of operating systems for computers. Michael Dell dropped out of college to start his own company, by building customized computers. His idea, beyond the design of the hardware, was to sell directly to customers rather than through third parties. Two other college dropouts, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were perfecting the concept of easy-to-use home computers bearing the name Apple. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, apple computers were preferred by graphic design artists and college students. Their more modern-looking creation iMacs expanded more and more into home and small business use. Then e-commerce was seen as a great possibility, taking the World Wide Web from a research, personal interest, and information tool to a global shopping market. The Internet, firstly used as a Department of Defense project and then as a tool to link university research communication systems, gradually opened to public use in the early 1990s. Internet browsers like Microsofts Explorer and Netscape competed against each other to become the standard browser. Gates and Microsoft soon dominated the race by bundling their browser into personal computer operating systems that individuals purchased from other computer companies, ultimately making Netscape a memory. Steve Case founded America Online which made the public understand the use of the Internet, of the e-mail system and the new World Wide Web. Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 started an online book-selling venture that expanded into selling everything from vacuum cleaners to computers, ultimately creating its own electronic book. There came eBay, under the leadership of Meg Whitman, which democratized the American and international marketplace with an online auction house where anyone could sell anything and buyers could bid on the items. Then the search engines like Yahoo! and Google made searching for information possible to everybody. Business could be conducted without a telephone or an in-person conference as e-mail and telecommuting became more popular, in a few seconds via the Internet. Everything could be easily found with a simple click. All these explosive technological related economic growth known as the dot-com boom changed America and the whole world. The news and changes were measurable in mega and

gigabytes. But it did not last long as the early 2000s met the failure of the stock market value, and business men learnt the lesson of over-evaluation. The transition to the New Year was seen as a possible disaster as computer and other technology systems would automatically turn their dates over to recognize the year 2000 on 1 January and computer and infrastructure systems would shut down because of programming millennium bugs. But fortunately, everything went just well. The year 2000 ended with the result of the presidential election, for the first time, being thrown to the Supreme Court. The son of an old president, George Bush came on the promise of compassionate conservatism, as a uniter and not a divider. He wanted to solve the problems of the racial strife and the impoverishing ills of the country with the assistance of faith-based organizations and hoped to bring new respectability, now honor, and new dignity to the White House. However, his heart was set on domestic policy, primarily education and poverty issues. On the other hand Bushs faith-based initiatives, taxes, education, stem cell research started dividing Americans. But everything stopped for a moment on 11 September, when America witnessed a slaughter at the hands of Islamic terrorism. The results of many invasions from Afghanistan to Kuwait to Somalia, to Bosnia and Kosovo, were felt directly by the common American in their own land. It was a day that changed the history of the United States of America. Terrorism hurled itself into American minds and lives with the two jets that crashed into the World Trade Center killing thousands. Three civilian airliners had been hijacked and turned into enormous human and fuel-carrying missiles aimed at targets in New York City and Washington, D.C., crashed over Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nineteen young men- fifteen of them from Saudi Arabia- took over the jetliners using box cutters as weapons, and they used these airplanes and the people inside them as weapons of mass destruction. And mass destruction and slaughter were what America got. (book) It was a moment of death and tragedy, but it also proved to be a moment of goodness, of self-sacrifice, of decency. The next day was a day of mourning, a day of praying, the day of the war declaration given by President Bush standing on a pile of rubble in New York City in front of the crowds: I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will

hear all of us soon! It was the beginning of a war against terror and terrorism, against Osama bin Laden and his terrorist attacks.