Faith. Is that a weird word to use in a business context? I can just hear the venture capital clients I work with screaming “I don’t want my CEO’s having faith! I want them getting results!”

But what if you need faith to get results?

This has been such a hard time for people. I see and feel their fear, their reluctance to take risks or try new things or step outside the comfort zone of what they are used to and can predict the outcome of (even if the outcome is the same old thing they don’t like). And if people are “in trouble” — if they think they are failing, or are in conflict, or have been told they haven’t been performing well — they really go into “hunker down” mode and try to avoid feedback and experimentation and opening up (all the things they need to do in order for things to get better).

I saw the movie Eat Pray Love over the weekend. (Yes, I know it was a chick flick, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a source of inspiration). A line from the movie said “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the path to transformation”. Sure, a year off traveling in Italy, India and Indonesia doesn’t seem like ruin to me, but I understand her feelings about the “dismantling” of her life that led to the trip.

Sometimes we just can’t seem to “give up” — our image, our safety, our predictable lives — until we have no other choice. Also in Eat Pray Love, one of the characters describes the “ego” ( the identity we create to deal with the outside world): “That’s just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what your ego does. It keeps you feeling separate…tries to convince you that you’re flawed and broken and alone instead of whole….Your ego’s job isn’t to serve you. It’s only job is to keep itself in power. And right now your ego is scared to death cuz it’s about to be downsized.” Our ego fights pretty hard when it feels us becoming strong enough to dump it.

So, if you are one of the people in fear, one who is trying to hold on and hold out..ask yourself whether you would be willing to get on the path to transformation. See if maybe it is time to let some of what you have been clinging to fall away…and see what new, healthy, creative part of you will be revealed. It is time to pay less attention to fear, and more attention to faith. As Sharon Salzberg says in Faith “It means feeling our fear and still remaining in touch with our heart, so that fear does not define our entire world”