Hi Reader,

In 2009, a small team of neuroscientists set out to answer a question—can you really smell fear?

They began with two very different afternoons and a stack of cotton pads.

Afternoon #1
​Twenty volunteers ran hard on treadmills until their pulses raced. Researchers blotted the sweat from each runner’s underarms, sealed every pad in glass, and tucked the jars on ice.

Afternoon #2
​Then, those same volunteers suited up for their first skydives. As the plane hit 13,000 feet and the light over the door flipped from red to green, they tumbled into the open sky. Their sweat went into identical jars and the same deep-freeze.

Weeks later, a third group reclined inside an fMRI scanner for what they thought was a simple face-recognition task. Beneath the table, technicians piped in trace amounts of either “exercise” or “fear” sweat at random. Nobody reported noticing a smell—yet their brains noticed plenty:

• Exercise sweat: the amygdala, the brain’s alarm bell, stayed quiet.
• Fear sweat: the amygdala flared to life, and visual areas sharpened their focus as if danger had entered the room.

The invisible first impression

Humans are wired to read danger instinctively, below thought.

A single molecule of “fear sweat” reaches the amygdala in milliseconds, lighting up the alarm system long before language can form a sentence. That shortcut kept our ancestors alive on the savanna, and it’s still active under fluorescent office lights today.

If you walk into a quarterly review radiating unspoken anxiety, everyone breathes it in whether they notice a scent or not; micro-hesitations ripple across the room, questions grow sharper, and the energy tilts toward self-protection.

And even when you’re not sitting in the same room, the signal comes through micro-pauses, clipped sentences, and the way your eyes scan instead of land.

That’s why leadership atmospheres are chemical as much as cultural. Before a slide deck snaps into full screen, you’ve already delivered a message on how safe—or unsafe—it is to follow you.

Fear in leadership isn’t an issue. It’s when it’s unannounced or hidden.

When team meetings go wrong, it’s because people are acting from fear — scared that they’re going to have to do my work, that their voice won’t be heard, or that they won’t have enough resources.

And when somebody smells someone else’s fear, the amygdala gets engaged.

And when the amygdala gets engaged, we go into binary thinking. The room becomes a debate, and no one listens to each other.

What we have seen reduce the fear in organizations consistently: Asking for the underlying fear to be outed.

And when someone sees that their team sees and acknowledges their fear, the fear dissipates.

Go deeper: Listen to our podcast on Fear

Fear: A Path to Authenticity... Dec 10 · The Art of Accomplishmen... 36:21   ​

Big Love,

Joe

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