The Alchemy of Fear: How to Break the Corporate Trance and Create Your Company's Successful Future

Gilley encourages managers and employees to bring emotions out into the open and use them as a stepping stone to positive action. -NAPRA Review

Selected by New Age Journal as one of its "Best Books of '97," one of only three business books so selected. Selected by The Executive Program book club as its alternate selection for March '98. To be featured by The Business Digest, Paris, France, in a spring '98 issue.

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"In a simple, easy-to-follow, heart-felt manner, Kay Gilley guides us into the arenas of our fears so that we can use them to grow. It's about time this kind of work came to work." Martin Rutte, coauthor, Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work

"This is important reading for all of us who know fear, wish we didn't have it, and often are unaware of how much it destroys life. Leaders should read this book." Preston C. Bottger, Ph.D., professor of the practice of management, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

"Kay Gilley has written a deeply touching and eminently practical book that speaks to the heart of each person within our organizations. This wise book is a must read for those yearning to fully integrate who they really are with what they do." Craig Neal, Heartland Institute and Conscious Business Alliance

"This is a wonderful book and you will do much good with these concepts and skills." Thomas S. Watson, Jr., author, Connecting People, retired Chairman/CEO, Watson Rice

The Alchemy of Fear is a handbook for action. Drawn from the author's extensive experience, it examines workplace fear, what emotional competence looks like at work, how we handle fears at work, and the love and energy that result when we do these things.

Kay Gilley is CEO and senior consultant of Intentional Leadership Systems, a firm dedicated to building conscious leaders and intentional organizations. Bringing over 32 years experience to her work, this seasoned manager is dedicated to healing the separation with self that has limited individuals from achieving their potential in organizations. In her public speaking and her work with individual leaders and intact leadership teams, she breaks their individual and corporate trances so that organizations can rediscover life, foster latent creativity and reclaim their whole potential. She is recognized globally as a leading edge thinker on issues of spirit, consciousness, and ethics and how they relate to business.

Kay is author of three books. Leading from the Heart--Choosing Courage over Fear in the Workplace is the first of a trilogy of books designed to assist leaders at all levels of organizations learn how to be fully present and conscious in their work and in their lives. The Alchemy of Fear--How to Break the Corporate Trance and Create Your Company's Successful Future, the second of the trilogy, transforms fear into teacher, friend, and guide to success. Leading from the Heart was named as one of five "Books to Work By" and The Alchemy of Fear has been recognized as one of the "Best Books of l997." She just completed the third of the trilogy, Coping with Chaos--Living with Intention for Fall '98 publication.

Kay is also collaborating author of The New Bottom Line--Bringing Heart and Soul to Business. Other writers for the project include: Ken Blanchard, Tom Peters, Thomas Moore, Anita Roddick, Medtronic CEO William George, and Angeles Arrien.

Anchored in concrete business examples and down-to-earth business language, her books guide the reader through the process of achieving consciousness, including specific personal exploration activities.

Kay brings over 32 years experience working in general and human resource management to her current work as a leadership and organizational development consultant, specializing in guiding the development of conscious leaders and what she calls "intentional organizations." She most often has worked with fast-growing entrepreneurial companies.

In the Summer of 1994, Kay participated in a delegation, sponsored by the Citizen Ambassador Program, which advised the Ministry of Labor, the People's Republic of China, and Chinese business people on the motivational, philosophical, and technical considerations of developing that country's first-ever labor and employment law. She also assisted a multi-national corporation in developing an intentional joint-venture company with a Chinese partner in PRC.

Kay received her M.S.I.R. (Industrial Relations) with a minor in law from the University of Oregon Graduate School of Management, receiving the Award for Academic Excellence for her program. She received her PHR (Professional in Human Resources) from the Human Resource Certification Institute (Society for Human Resource Management) in December 1991. She resides in Durham, North Carolina.

From Chapter Five "Whatever the source of the chaos, the response almost always is the same. One or two indicators are identified and tracked. People talk about them a lot. Much discussion focuses on control and getting more out of people....

"Chaos occurs when a system becomes 'utterly unpredictable.' By definition, chaos is a 'state...of total confusion or disorder.' Even though we are admitting, just by use of the word, that chaos is unpredictable and disordered, invariably managers respond to chaos by wanting control. They become linear, analytical, and focused on key measures or processes. They attempt to produce an orderly result in an environment that, by definition, is so unpredictable that it cannot be analyzed. It doesn't work. So, what do they do? More of the same--seek control to no avail. By the time I arrive, they are bloodied, bruised, frustrated, exasperated, exhausted, and still grasping desperately for control of the chaos....

"Most conventional management training or even conventional thinking has told us that we should control the system, control the workers, control key measures, and control the results. That is the trance from which most of us work, day in and day out. This approach works only in the most ordered of work environments and only minimally well then, because it stifles creativity, growth, and development--all of which are naturally messy, disordered, and chaotic. For most of us, however, it is the only trance we know, so we insist on sticking to it, even to the point of being totally depleted of our natural human energy for the creative process. This is supposed to work; it may even have worked before at some point. We're afraid to try anything else. We've been led to believe that nothing else works. The response to try to get control is a trance, but in chaos, almost anything works better than a trance. Chaos requires us to be fully awake and observant, eagerly and actively gathering information about conditions in our environment....

"As much as our trances would like us to believe that's all there is, a much larger part of our universe is composed of what we don't know...Not-knowing is an uncomfortable place. It requires us to be wide awake. It requires our trances to surrender to conscious open inquiry and the tension that comes from not-knowing in a world that believes we must know. And it requires questions.

"Questions invite a higher standard of truth. They help us individually and collectively to discover what we know that we didn't know we knew and what we didn't know that we didn't know. Unless a wake-up call jars our reality, most of us won't choose to doubt that our 'stories' are the truth. One of my favorite questions to ask teams of managers who believe they know how things are is, "What if the opposite were true?" To their astonishment, further exploration often demonstrates that some part of the opposite actually is true. They just didn't know....

"The power to move us to this new knowing that comes from our not-knowing lies in questions--open-ended, curious, naive questions. Open and curious inquiry allows us to play with ideas we might never have considered before. It helps us become aware of what we have assumed to be true that was false and what 'facts' really are just beliefs. It helps us discover how many of our habits and practices have grown out of our trances, because ultimately the power of the question is that it demands we leave our trances behind. The power of the question demands that we wake up long enough to search our cerebral and intuitive data banks and discover something new. It demands that we let go of entrenched believes motivated by fear-induced protectionism and speak from our inner truth and innocence."

From Chapter 9 Could It Be Love? "If we are to create an environment in which love can flourish, we can do it only through the boldest acts of personal courage and the power of love. To truly create love at work, we need to create a growth-rich environment and have both the courage and emotional competence to dwell in not-knowing long enough to discover what it means for us to be 'in love' right now in this particular situation. That may occur in months or it may happen in the blink of an eye. We must have the courage to be with it--to sustain the not-knowing while we come to know what our responsibility will be and what will be required of us. That will happen only if we are fully awake, fully in touch with every part of ourselves, and have the emotional competence to allow it to happen in a society that wants to make things happen.

"The most quintessentially spiritual thing that we can do is to hold ourselves in the mystery, what I have called the not-knowing, and open ourselves to learning. A constant tension stands between what we believed we knew and either the not-knowing or what we are coming to know that conflicts with what we believed we knew. The tension may never be greater than as we come to explore what it means to be in love at work.

"Fear and love cannot coexist but they are in constant juxtaposition. They symbolize every existential dichotomy we face in life: the ego trying to survive vs. our divine essence striving to thrive, the practical, feet-on-the-ground, get-the-job-done part of us vs. The part of us that wants to soar with the eagles, resignation vs. embodiment of our hopes and dreams, the cynic vs. the idealist. We have been taught to choose between them, implying that there is a right and a wrong, but the alchemy lies in letting go of the need to know right or wrong and accepting that both are true. The magic is in choosing to have it all."