What is the effect of fear on performance?

[Joseph B.]

Every single person is different and the way that they react will be different, unless trained to react a particular way. A person who has never been punched in the face, will not protect their face unless it has been ingrained into them with training, however, the training for that is normally, punching that person in the face. The point is that you have to expose the individual to the situation as best you can, and train them how to react to the situation, through desensitizing their reaction of fear, stress, anxiety, panic, aggression, etc. Everyone reacts differently, everyone has a different emotional response to different situations, so in order to how someone will react, we expose them to it as best we can (simmunition, role playing, scenarios) and than evaluate the persons reactions, discuss the emotional responses, and than work to desensitize them from the emotional aspect, while encoring the desired reaction to the particular situation.

I have seen people have emotional response in simulation training and real world operations, that varied from shut down to unable to move fear to the total other end of over aggressive complete pissed off. You can't possibly train for every situation like this, but you can prepare for many situations by continued exposure to similar situations.

My $.02

[JDM]

A better question is... what is the effect of performance on fear?

Mitigation?

[feudist]

Mitigation?

This, Surely.

[MDS]

It seems clear to me that if your training makes you confident in a given situation, then you won't be as fearful. If we're discussing how to avoid fear, then I think preparation is a key part of the answer. By all means, if there's a hypothetical situation that scares you, then train - physically and mentally - to a level of performance that would make you comfortable if that hypothetical came true. You probably won't be afraid as much, and therefore your performance won't be impacted as much. Or you might be really scared, anyway, because a) we all react differently from each other, and differently from ourselves day to day; and b) some things are dangerous and scary no matter how good you are.

If you feel non-trivial amounts of fear while you're executing some complex task, how will you perform compared to when you're not feeling any fear? Regardless of why you do or do not feal fear, I think that's the main question - at least that's my read on it. Getting rid of fear is important, too - hardening your mind to danger, raising your level of proficiency, putting your trust in God, all these things can reduce or eliminate fear and its effects on performance. But I think it's a trap to ignore the question: if all else fails and your body is doing all the fear-related biodynamic things at warp speed, how will you perform? I believe any answers you find will live totally inside you in ways that make it impossible to truly communicate them, but considering the question, discussing and experimenting are useful exercises.