At key moments in life, fear can lead us to doubt our ability to succeed. Here, Robert Kelsey presents an extract from his book, What's Stopping You? Why Smart People Don't Always Reach Their Potential and How You Can, to help us understand how we can overcome this fear and tread the path to success.
I have suffered from a debilitating fear of failure all my life - itself the result of poor confidence brought about by low self-esteem developed in early childhood. At key moments in my life, fear has led me to doubt my ability to succeed, which has profoundly changed my behaviour in ways that made success less likely: often snatching a humiliating defeat from the jaws of victory. And I have read scores of books in an effort to shift what I call the 'monkey on my back' - the creature that whispers fear and self-doubt in my ear at critical moments.
But the monkey hasn't disappeared. He just wouldn't go away, which didn't seem to compute with the literature I was reading, much of which promised both a cure for my insecurities and the certainty of dream fulfilment. Clearly, I was doing something wrong: perhaps not applying the methodology diligently enough or maintaining destructive behaviours and beliefs. Yet I now realise it was their prognosis that was flawed because it took too little account of the fact that I am who I am, and that monkey is part of me.
Surely, a more powerful book would describe a route towards progress from our own flawed perspective - answering the question 'what's stopping you?' with the answer: you (and the monkey) are. Yet it would also state that we must accept the monkey as a fellow passenger and plan to make progress anyway. It would spot and describe the likely barriers preventing progress, as well as the false assumptions they may generate.
Certainly, if we could see that it was our responses to those barriers that were producing the poor results, not the barriers themselves - nor was it poor luck, innate ineptitude or even prejudice against us - then we may be able to generate better results. We don't need a miracle cure injected into us, we just need to take account of our insecurities and navigate our way forward accordingly.
A practitioner in failure
I am a practitioner in failure with a childhood and early adulthood punctuated with one self-fulfilling educational and career disaster after another.
Written off as stupid by low-grade junior-school teachers, and traumatised by the immediately preceding break-up of my family, I failed the 11-plus (a UK secondary school admission examination), ended up in the local secondary-modern-turned-comprehensive and left school at 15 with one O-level.
I was taken on by a local building surveyor that needed someone to hold a stripy pole in muddy fields, although he kindly enrolled me on a day-a-week diploma course. Inevitably, I bunked the course - instead spending the days walking the streets of London with a day-return ticket in my pocket.
This eventually landed me a job looking after the vast residential property portfolio of the London region's gas board. I was 18 at the time and loved it. I was working for a large West End surveying firm full of graduates and professionals. They were nice to me despite my gruff accent and manners, and encouraged me to return to education. So, realising I was as capable as them, I enrolled on an evening A-level course and, five years later, graduated from the University of Manchester with a high 2:1 joint - honours degree in politics and modern history.
I had no career plan other than a vague notion of going into journalism, which - after a few false turns - led to my becoming a staff-writer then editor for a banking-focused magazine, and eventually also to becoming a banker in what the City describes as a 'gamekeeper turned poacher move'.
I was not a great banker. Paralysed by fear, I worked in both London and the US before realising I was simply not cut out for finance. Once again without a plan, I was recruited by a friend with a plan - for a dotcom 'incubator' (this was around the turn of the millennium) - and together we founded Metrocube, an 'e-business community' that incubated over 200 companies before being sold a few years after the dotcom crash.
Cured of my journalistic and banking ambitions, and somewhat bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, I then combined my experiences and started Moorgate Communications, a financial public relations agency aimed at banks, which has been a sustainable and fulfilling enterprise - even growing through the financial meltdown of 2008-09.
And I wrote a book on my banking experiences in New York, which was published in 2000 and had me all set - I thought - for a career as a humourous, laddish writer in the Nick Hornby or Michael Lewis mould. However, the book sold less well than I'd hoped and my dream was dashed.
An addiction to self-help
The book-writing career aside, it is possible to read the above and think I am, in fact, a long way from being a practitioner in failure. But that's because I have edited out the fears, frustrations, moods, paranoia, anguish and temper tantrums that have punctuated every one of the above experiences. Terrorised by my own insecurities, I have been a nightmare to work with and apologise now to any colleagues that had to suffer my nonsense.
But I have also made considerable progress in facing up to my fears and insecurities. Perhaps surprisingly, given my earlier comments, much of this has been due to my ongoing addiction to self-help books. This began while in the US, where the acres of shelves dedicated to the genre suggest an openness that the UK is only slowly adopting. It took a deeper hold of me back in the UK as I began to realise the problem was not a particular job or person or set of circumstances. The problem was me.
Ultimately, this landed me in the hands of a professional psychologist. Yet far from complementing the work of all those self-help gurus , the psychologist - plus further research of my own - opened my eyes to the gaping hole between what the psychologists state about our innate (but treatable) personalities and the near-instant and life-changing promises and cures on offer from the self-help gurus.
My first reaction to this was, not untypically, anger. The gurus seemed to be offering false hope and unrealistic dreams that could ultimately leave people further weakened. But then the penny dropped. Much of what they convey has been incredibly useful. Their tips and techniques can be both logical and inspiring. Someone rejecting their divinity with respect to the earthly paradise promised can, therefore, still make use of their often very practical, advice and methodologies - many of which pepper the pages of my new book, What's Stopping You?
Certainly, I still fight the fear every day, as well as my low self-esteem. But I now realise this is part of my chemistry and that such a chemistry doesn't condemn me. It just means I must take it into account. And it is both the flawed thinking and behaviour of those with a high fear of failure - as well as related insecurities such as low self-esteem - and the progress possible despite it, that I wish to convey.
Your insecurities are part of your chemistry. They cannot be removed through instant cures. Yet strong progress is possible once you realise who you are and take this into account.
