Leading Through Fear — How to Guide Your Team (and Yourself) Through Uncertainty 

Blake Schofield (00:03.566)
Real leadership. Real life. Real impact. No more choosing between your career and your life. Here you’ll find honest conversations, science-backed strategies, and inspiring stories to help you thrive at work and truly enjoy your life outside of it.

I’m your host, Blake, and I’m honored to help you create more impact with ease.

Blake Schofield (00:38.092)
Last week, I was talking with a group of senior leaders and one of them said something that stuck with me. He asked how to lead his team when everyone is fearful, overwhelmed, or disengaged. He noted how we are in a time of change and there doesn’t seem to be a clear path forward. And I could feel the uncertainty of how to answer that question lingering in the air. The elephant in the room.

As the discussion continued, I realized the opportunity to share what I’ve come to know to be true. And in that moment, I could tell that what I shared shifted something. It opened up a different possibility. And my hope is that I’m able to share my experience in a way that can do that for you too. Because right now, across most industries, businesses are being challenged to change how they are structured, how the work gets done, innovate with AI, and ensure that they don’t get left behind.

Goals, expectations, and the pressure keep building. But I don’t need to tell you that. It’s easy to tell ourselves to push through or to try and motivate ourselves or others with positivity. But when fear and uncertainty are high and there isn’t a clear path forward or a quote-unquote “end in sight,” we have to learn how to lead and live differently.

Here’s the tricky part: when things get uncertain, leaders often go into their own version of survival mode. We tell ourselves, “I have to stay positive,” or “I can’t let my team see that I’m worried.” We start overmanaging, doing more to try and compensate because it helps us feel safer and more capable. We talk more, but we listen less. We try to control the outcome instead of guiding the process. And even though our intention is good, what our team feels is pressure, not safety.

When people feel unsafe, their nervous system reads it as a threat, not leadership. They either fight, pushing harder until they burn out; they freeze, quietly doing the bare minimum, hoping things blow over; they fawn, over-accommodating to please everyone, eventually getting to a place where they can’t keep going anymore; or they flee, mentally and emotionally checking out, or going to find another job. Leaders pushing harder, demanding results in survival mode only amplifies the problem.

Blake Schofield (02:57.612)
It exhausts people, stifles innovation, reduces creativity and engagement, and leads to burnout or attrition. Now, these are skills I’ve had to personally learn, not from a textbook, but through life. In my 18-year corporate career, I survived and led during several layoffs, transformed businesses multiple times, changed career paths multiple times, moved cross-country, started over, went through a divorce, and I’ve reinvented my business several times as well.

I’ve lived through uncertainty and transformation again and again, and I’ve come out on top over and over again. I’ve not only lived through uncertainty and transformation again and again, but I’ve learned how to thrive through it and come out stronger on the other side. I learned the skill of stepping out of fear and into possibility, resiliency, and innovation.

And what I’ve learned is that thriving through change doesn’t come from control. It comes from alignment — from understanding how you’re wired, managing your energy, creating space to innovate, and leading from a grounded, authentic place. That’s how you move from survival mode to sustainable success for you, your team, and your family.

One of my favorite quotes is from Virginia Satir: “Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” This is just human nature. By and large, we’re resistant as a human species to change. So leaders must learn the power and possibility of uncertainty and help their teams learn how to embrace change.

These are skills you can learn and fears you can overcome, but it requires acknowledging the reality. Our workforce is forever changing. And holding on to “what used to be” is actually the risk. Learning how to embrace uncertainty and adapt to change is where all of your power lies.

Why does this matter? Well, when we experience change or uncertainty, our body interprets it as a threat or high levels of fear. And what happens is our creative and problem-solving part of our brain literally shuts down.

Blake Schofield (05:22.550)
What does that mean for our teams? Lower innovation, more mistakes, higher disengagement, and more “just get through it” behavior rather than growing through it. For leaders, understand that pushing with fear-based urgency might get short-term compliance, but at some pretty significant risks of sustained performance, growth, and the adaptability you need for a changing world.

I want to share with you four practical leadership moves that you can take today to start helping yourself, your business, and your team move forward.

Number one: Lead with vulnerability. It is okay not to have all of the answers. Honesty builds credibility, not weakness. Meet people where they’re at. Acknowledge and speak to their fear, worry, or disengagement. Do not ignore it. Don’t pretend that things are fine when they’re not.

If there’s uncertainty, acknowledge it. If layoffs happened, talk about it. If people are scared, say, “I understand, and it makes sense that you feel that way.” When you name what’s real, you lower the threat level in the room. You create a shared experience instead of people feeling alone. Be honest about what you do and don’t know. Transparency matters. It builds trust.

Leaders often think confidence and being a confident leader means certainty. But that’s not true. True confidence is the ability to be transparent — to say, “Here’s what I know and here’s what I don’t know, but I’m with you in it.” That clarity builds more trust than pretending to have it all figured out.

When people trust you, they stop wasting all that mental energy guessing what’s really going on. They can refocus their energy on creative problem-solving, which is exactly what you need. You don’t have to have all the answers; you just need to be honest and meet people where they’re at. When your team knows that you’re with them, they feel a part of something bigger than themselves. They start looking out for one another and finding ways to move through things together.

I personally experienced this when I went through a significant round of layoffs at Target in spring of 2015. Rumors had been swirling, but the morning we all walked in, calendar appointments started being put on different people’s schedules. And the buzz started — texts back and forth, messaging and whispers about who had meetings on their calendar and who didn’t.

At the end of that day, over 1,700 people were let go. The line of people exiting the building is something that I will never forget. It shocked everyone to their core — including seeing some of the most talented people in that building let go.

Blake Schofield (07:48.750)
In the days and weeks that followed, I saw a lot of different approaches to handling that level of uncertainty. And for me, what became very clear was that my team was emotionally shaken. They couldn’t focus on work because all they could think about was the risk to them, the shift in how they saw their job or the company, and what that meant for themselves, their future, and their life.

So what I did was I pulled them into a conference room and I just opened up dialogue about how everyone felt. I gave them a safe space to talk about how they were processing things and what they felt. And then I opened up space for individual one-on-ones.

In the weeks that followed, in our weekly team meetings, I talked about what it looked like to move through uncertainty and change. I checked in individually as well as a group about how people were feeling and what they needed. And I started to notice that other leaders on my floor were asking what it was that I was doing because my team was performing differently.

My team was far more engaged, and there was far more teamwork as a result. It was something I did from intuitive knowing. When we as leaders sense that our team and our people are not okay, the most important thing we can do is acknowledge that. That is what separates the leaders who move through these circumstances with a greater sense of trust, with a greater sense of ease, and with the ability to truly navigate change.

The second practical leadership move is to regulate yourself first. Spot your own survival mode triggers. Do you go into fight, fawn, freeze, or flight? Recognize when you are reacting, and coach yourself to pause, realign, and act with more presence.

Sometimes it can be something even as simple as pausing to recognize, “In this moment, I am okay. I am safe. Everything is all right.” So you can take a step back from the overwhelm and stress and start to see what is it I really need to do — what really matters.

Because you cannot calm a room if you’re in chaos. So often, I see high achievers go into the action of just doing more. And while it can feel really great, it often is from a place of survival and not from a place of strategy. And that move to communicate more, to do more, to make all these things happen, can create far more chaos than it actually does clarity and momentum.

Because the reality is your team is going to mirror how you show up and your energy. So before you walk into a difficult meeting or you react to something new that’s come your way, take a breath, ground yourself, and ask: Am I coming from a place of fear or survival, or am I coming from a place of calm and clarity?

Because people don’t just hear your words — they feel your energy. And in times of leading through uncertainty and layoffs, that is what they will follow. How you show up is contagious. So choose clarity and calm, or suffer from chaos and confusion.

Blake Schofield (12:35.532)
Number three: Rebuild trust daily. Trust isn’t a one-time action; it’s built in micro moments. Every check-in, every time you admit a mistake, every time you follow through on what you said.

When people trust their leader, they don’t need to know the entire roadmap to feel safe moving forward. They know they’re not alone, and that changes everything. So how can you do that?

First of all, establish clear micro goals in uncertain times. Help the team anchor into next best actions rather than vague long-term, distant visions. We have to move from talking about a two-, three-, or five-year plan into: What do we need to focus on right now?

Support psychological safety. Encourage voices and worry-sharing. Ask, “What are we missing? What are you worried about? What are we not thinking about that we should?” Build grounding rituals like check-ins, team rituals, and safety briefs. Focus on what’s controllable and what really matters — the 20% of the actions that drive 80% of the results.

Help the team identify what they can control and a clear, compelling path forward, even amid uncertainty. When the world feels chaotic, the best leaders simplify to what’s in your control now. Where can we make progress today? Who needs support? And what are the things that really matter?

We need to ask for fewer things. We need to start cutting out the 80% of actions that drive very little benefit and focus on what really does matter to execute. A clear, simple path reduces anxiety and restores a sense of agency, which helps people feel empowered to have some sense of control and creativity again — and shift out of survival mode.

Share with your team what’s going on — how under stress and anxiety our brains shut down. Because when we’re in survival mode, we’re reactive, we’re defensive, we focus on doing more, and we miss the big picture. But to be in growth, reinvention, or creativity, we have to operate differently.

We have to create space for reflection. We have to stop and understand: Are we prioritizing the right things? Reduce unnecessary communication and tasks so people can really focus on getting back to creativity and moving things forward.

When someone’s nervous system relaxes, their thinking brain — the one responsible for strategy, innovation, empathy — comes back. But when we’re in survival, we experience reduced executive function. What does that mean in real life? People cannot prioritize clearly, they forget things, they become reactive instead of resourceful, and they focus on what’s urgent instead of what matters most.

Blake Schofield (15:00.728)
Understand this. Look for signs of this in your team and in yourself. Because when we ignore fear, those symptoms will multiply. But when we acknowledge it and we create safety, performance actually rises — not because people are being pushed, but because they finally feel safe again to move forward.

So today, we talked about how fear and uncertainty impact us, and what, as a leader, you can do to move through that uncertainty for yourself and your team. Here’s what I know to be true: if you want to thrive and adapt in today’s age, you must learn to optimize yourself and your people. That is the competitive advantage — and how to future-proof your success.

So as you step into this week, I invite you to ask yourself: Where might my team — or where might I — be operating from fear right now? And what’s one thing that you learned today that you can do to create more safety, trust, clarity, or calm?

Because the leaders who thrive in this new world won’t be the ones who push harder or “do more.” They’ll be the ones who know how to optimize their people and prioritize the actions that move the business and team forward — starting with themselves.

Until next time, lead with intention and create your impact with ease.

Most successful people don’t realize they’re in burnout because stress and exhaustion have become so normalized. But burnout is actually a sign of deeper misalignment between how you’re wired to thrive and how you’re actually working and living. Fix the misalignment, and everything changes.

Blake Schofield (17:04.695)

Take the free quiz at ImpactWithEase.com/burnout-type to discover your burnout type and get next steps to reclaim your energy, lead with confidence, and create more ease in your life and career.