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What's Stopping You?: Why Smart People Don't Always Reach Their Potential and How You Can by Robert Kelsey (view source)
Revision as of 14:58, 19 May 2012
, 14:58, 19 May 2012no edit summary
I read from curiosity. It's background is the story of a man who appeared to have the potential to achieve great things. In fact he was on the verge of real success on a couple of occasions but then seemed to sabotage himself. It came down to the fact that he had a high fear of failure, with a childhood history which made this all but inevitable. We all sit on the continuum between having a high fear of failure and being highly motivated by achievement: the question is what can be done if you're at the failure end of the scale. It was when I read that you can't change your insecurities - or your history - that I began to relax into the book. This isn't an 'instant fix' book to change your life in a few hours for an insignificant sum of money.
I always thought that people with a fear of failure were those I thought of as risk-averse, who ventured nothing so as to remain secure, but this is far from the truth. Kelsey cites the example of the game of hoopla. You can go for the targets closest to you - and this is what you might expect from those with a high fear of failure - or you can go for the target furthest away. It's not unusual to find that this is what high-FF people do. You see, it's not really a failure, is it, if no one expected that you would succeed? People with a high fear of failure are often the ones who take inappropriate risks. This was a eureka moment for me and I looked as at quite few people in a new light.
I'm not going to precis the book as you really do need to read it yourself, but it looks at why people are the way that they are, how they can set goals to move themselves into a more positive situation and how they bring the improvement about. It's positive whilst keeping its feet on the ground and thought-provoking. There are thoughts and quotes from ''a lot'' of self-help books but Kelsey hasn't swallowed the content unquestioningly ready to regurgitate it on cue. He's prepared to take the best of it (as for instance with neuro linguistic programming) without feeling that he has to sign up to the movement.