What Is Your Personal OS Platform – Faith, Fear or Fragility?
Every single day, you are running on one of three operating systems: faith, fear or fragility – and which one is in charge decides what you attempt next.
Faith is a winner’s game
Fear is a survival game
Fragility is a losing game
Winners, high achievers, go-getters
Have more than belief.
They have faith.
A knowing ….that everything will be OK.
That taking both leaps and baby steps
Forward and backwards,
Randomly,
In the pursuit of change…
Is always about growth.
Is always about innovation.
Faith, Fear or Fragility: Which One Is Running the Show?
The opposite of faith is disbelief
It’s fear.
It’s living by the rules.
Rules that confine you to the way you’ve always done things.
To stay safe.
That stop you from colouring outside the lines,
Pushing boundaries,
Challenging the status quo,
Busting expectations.
Fear is pure survival.
Faith is humanity 101.
The foundation of what you believe to be true
About whether you can, or can’t
- Pick up the phone
- Present to a group
- Plan a kick ass project
- Pursue a lifelong passion
- Make a difference
- Be a great parent
- Own your own mountain
Whose system is holding you back?
Your parents?
Your managers?
Your community’s?
Your peer groups?
Or… yours?
So,
As I see it, you have a choice.
Wrap yourself in cotton wool,
Protect your ego with bubble wrap,
Stay inside your four walls.
Or,
Break the system,
Bust out,
Be brave.
Because fragility will always be a losing game.
Faith, fear or fragility is not a one-off decision – it is the operating system running quietly underneath every leap you do or do not take. Most people never name which one is in charge, which is exactly why it keeps winning by default.
Naming it is the first act of faith. The second is choosing, on purpose, to run a different system than the one fear or fragility installed years ago.
If you want your team, your leaders or your association members to have this conversation properly – the one about which system is actually driving their decisions – Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations are built around exactly this shift from fragility to faith.
How to Tell Which System Is Running You
You do not usually get to choose faith, fear or fragility in the abstract. You notice it in a specific moment – the phone call you keep putting off, the idea you talk yourself out of before anyone else can, the project you shrink to fit what feels safe rather than what you actually want.
Fragility shows up as over-protection: guarding your ego, avoiding feedback, staying small so nothing can be taken from you. Fear shows up as rule-following: doing what has always been done because it has never gone wrong before. Faith shows up as movement – imperfect, uncertain, forward movement anyway.
None of the three are permanent settings. Faith, fear or fragility can shift within the same week, sometimes the same conversation, depending on what you choose to believe about yourself in that moment. That is the useful part – if it can be installed by circumstance, it can also be chosen on purpose.
Image Credit: My camera whilst walking the line at Pointe Au Pic, Quebec
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
BOOK A NO-OBLIGATION 20-MINUTE CALL
And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
