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The precursor of the fear course was initially designed and developed for the emergency services and disaster managers and came out of ongoing research and work by David Wilkinson into Emotional Resilience, which in turn has come from his ground breaking work on people's (primarily leaders) reactions to ambiguity. Many people have problems with uncertainty, risk and ambiguity and often poor decision making by leaders and managers can often be back tracked to adverse emotional reactions to uncertainty. David also discovered that poor performance in crises situations for people like police officers and disaster managers also often stems from their emotional reactions to the situation. Whilst David was conducting this research he was also in the process of training trainers to develop disaster managers for events like the Tsunami, 9/11 and other large scale disasters. As a result of this work he started to incorporate work on emotional intelligence into the training. However he soon discovered that whilst most people understand emotional intelligence and in normal situations can apply the principles, when they are faced with 'big' events the techniques do not always work. As a result of this he then set about a long term research project, that is still continuing, to examine how to develop emotional resilience that can help people deal with situations that are just too much for them, without removing or deadening the emotions to the extent that they lose touch with their intuition of empathy with others. From this work David designed and ran a series of highly successful Emotional Resilience workshops for members of the emergency services and disaster workers that are still running around the world, helping such workers cope with highly stessful and ambiguous situations. Whilst David was Head of Department at Cranfield University he was asked if his techniques could possibly help academics how have to faceand lecture to large groups. So he devised a short course for them that was so successful that other universities asked to run the course as well. From this sprang the public and academic versions of the Fear Course which are one day workshops backed up with online support. The feedback from participants has been amazing and very positive. The course is now being used by individuals across the UK to successfully deal with issues like: - Nerves before lectures or presentations
- Seizing up when faced with meetings
- Anxiousness about socialising or meeting people
- Anxieties and fears of the unknown even when it's not rational
- Having to deal with difficult and aggressive people
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