Figure 2.1 The limbic system showing the amygdala and the hippocampus
2
EXTERNAL RESPONSES
In his landmark 1994 book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes the instant impact various emotional incidents have on the body. For instance, anger makes blood rush to the hands ready for action. Meanwhile, the heart rate increases and there is a surge of adrenalin. With fear, blood rushes to the skeletal muscles such as the legs, the face blanches and the body momentarily freezes as it decides whether hiding may be a better option than running or fighting. Meanwhile, there is a flood of hormones that puts the body on general alert, making us edgy and incapable of concentrating on anything other than the threat to hand.
Such a response offers obvious short-term advantages – especially if we are truly threatened. However, as Goleman says, someone experiencing these physical responses to an emotional state for any length of time is like a “car stuck in a perpetual high gear,” with all the attendant physical damage this implies.
Yet it’s the brain’s response that causes the more permanent damage. These high-drama moments cause the amygdala – which Goleman describes as a key cluster of components in the limbic system dealing with emotions such as anxiety, distress and fear – to signal other brain regions to strengthen their memory of the incident. This creates a bigger imprint within the memory, which generates a new neural “setpoint” that can cause a lifelong resetting of the brain’s default (i.e. instant) responses to even tangentially similar situations – making us respond with fear, perhaps without even realizing why.
“Such traumatic memories seem to remain as fixtures in brain function because they interfere with subsequent learning – specifically, with relearning a more normal response to those traumatizing events,” says Goleman.
This is not dissimilar to cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Like Miller’s rats, both the memory and the ability to learn have gone awry – a process psychologists call “fear conditioning” in which something that is not threatening is treated as a threat simply because it is immediately associated with the past traumatic event that created the fearful default setting in the brain.
Equally importantly, the fear response arrives via a “neural hijacking” – an emotional explosion in which the limbic system proclaims an emergency, “recruiting the rest of the brain to its urgent agenda,” says Goleman. This hijacking, which is instantaneous and arrives in an emotional surge, overrides what Goleman calls the “thinking brain” – leading to instant emotional responses based on fear, whatever the reality.
Figure 2.1 The limbic system showing the amygdala and the hippocampus
I have no doubt that this is exactly what happens to those with a high fear of failure. Past traumas have hardwired fear into us, generating our own version of PTSD that leads to fear conditioning and fear responses when the memory is triggered. Yale University’s Dennis Charney states, in his paper The Science of Emotion – Understanding PTSD, that studies have shown that such traumas can occur at a very early age or even in the womb (perhaps passed through the mother), so we may not even be conscious of the events that trigger our own version of PTSD.
And, crucially for High-FFs, trauma in this instance can mean incidents of public humiliation or episodes involving demeaning parents, siblings, teachers or peers. These traumas, although mild in comparison to serious cases of PTSD, can still generate fear conditioning that induces a neural hijacking when prompted. According to studies into PTSD, even brief or mild exposure to traumatic stress – especially when young – can permanently damage the hippocampus (a key part of the brain for the formation of memories), stopping normal new cell growth. This means that we will always evaluate information via this fearful default setting, making those neural hijackings – and the associated fear response – inevitable.
And our hormones only add to the problems. Threatening situations or other fear-inducing traumas cause the hormone cortisol to be secreted, the production of which is enormously influenced by our early upbringing.
“In normal people [cortisol] levels go up and down according to what is happening at any given moment,” says Oliver James in his influential 2002 book on family survival, They F*** You Up, “but if we were living in a highly stressful family in our first six or so years of life [or suffered other stress] this acts like a thermostat, setting our cortisol levels too high or too low in adulthood.”
James states that adults who suffered childhood traumas experience damage to their cortisol regulatory system resulting in it either closing down, which can lead to low empathy and callousness, or becoming jammed on permanent alert, which can lead to stress, anger, anxiety and depression.
So can we be rewired to suppress Goleman’s neural hijackings or normalize James’s cortisol thermostat? Fears can subside over time through natural and spontaneous relearning, says Goleman (citing Charney). For instance, a child once frightened by a dog can lose their fear of that breed through strong positive contact with a similar dog later in life. Yet in many cases the distrust never entirely disappears. PTSD can prevent spontaneous relearning from ever occurring.
So profound can be the impact of the trauma that those neural hijackings create a fear response whenever the memory is triggered. In fact, each reminder can add to the trauma – turning childhood fears based on traumatic early-life events into major and paralyzing adult phobias. In many cases the brain never naturally relearns a milder reaction, which means that the learning process is impaired and the fear response can only ever be diverted through intense concentration and active relearning over many years.
From reading Goleman and James and other books describing early-life trauma and its impact on the emotions, I became convinced that – perhaps due to traumatic early-childhood events – those with a high fear of failure have impaired emotional responses that are not experienced by those with high achievement motivation. Responses, moreover, that lead to false evaluations, which, in turn, lead to fear-based external responses – themselves leading to poor results that further confirm our fears.
Those with high achievement motivation, meanwhile, are free of such negative and self-fulfilling responses. In fact, High-AMs clearly have what Goleman calls high EQ (i.e. a high “emotional quotient” – comparing it to “intelligence quotient” or IQ). And such emotional competence, according to Goleman, dominates our potential for success in life (he infers by as much as 80 per cent) – creating a major chasm between the achievement potential of those with high-EQ and those with low-EQ.
He lists high-EQ “competencies” as including the ability to self-start, to grasp personality-based politics and to get along with people. Other positive innate high-EQ traits, meanwhile, include a concern for others, self-knowledge, an ability to manage emotions, social adroitness, enthusiasm and commitment.
Of course, this also reads like a list of everything those with a high fear of failure are not. I failed on most of these counts and even those I didn’t – such as enthusiasm – could easily be judged as no more than a mask to hide deeply held insecurities.
Emotional intelligence (or high-EQ) is therefore vital if we want to make the move towards achievement motivation. Those with fear of failure need to develop skills in all the above areas, which seems daunting although is far from impossible. We may be High-FFs, with all the resulting baggage, but we are capable of emotional intelligence, however innate our fears and insecurities. We simply need to learn it. Broken down into constituent parts, each of Goleman’s traits is an attainable goal for the High-FF.
Our number one concern at this stage, however, is to get on top of our external responses to those neural hijackings. These are the key moments that disable those with high fear of failure – leaving us emotionally distraught and mentally derailed. Our external responses are the symptoms of our fear of failure and it is here where we should concentrate our first line of attack (or at least self-awareness). Whether those neural hijackings generate anger, frustration, anxiety or depression, these are the responses that produce many of the poor self-fulfilling results for those with a high fear of failure.
But if we can understand what we are feeling, and why, we may be able to start the process of creating better second responses and therefore begin to undermine those self-fulfilling behavioural changes caused by the triggering of our fears. This is unlikely to be easy, and nothing below is written flippantly. Yet self-awareness can help turn our thinking in a more positive direction, which will hopefully – in time and with many small confirming steps – change those external responses.
Perhaps the easiest external response to understand is the most extreme: anger. Anger is fear’s ugly sister, so while fear remains the hidden Cinderella, its noisy sibling is out and proud and extremely menacing. As emotions go, anger is by far the most apparent, as well as the most destructive. Not only do we lose control over our feelings, we lose control over our actions – sometimes destroying strong, long-term, constructive activity in seconds.
“No other emotion – anxiety, depression, even love – erases our control so completely,” write health practitioner Carl Semmelroth and psychologist Donald E.P. Smith in The Anger Habit (2000).
And anger goes way beyond pure rage. As Semmelroth and Smith note, critical thoughts, revenge fantasies and paranoid interpretations of others’ behaviour can all provide the context for anger, whether we outwardly boil-over, show irritation or inwardly seethe.
One route to overcoming anger is to understand its purpose. Anger is often an act of concealment, a way of hiding our inner feelings of guilt or confusion or hurt or – most likely – fear.
As US family counsellor Carol D. Jones writes in her 2004 book Overcoming Anger: “It’s just plain easier to tell yourself you’re mad [i.e. angry] than it is to say you’re sad, confused, hurt or frightened.”
That’s a powerful admission and one likely to chime with many High-FFs: it’s not anger, stupid, it’s fear.
And the fact that anger is mostly an external manifestation is a clue to its other core purpose. According to The Anger Habit, anger is often an attempt to control others. The angry person perceives that they are in a contest for power, and they are losing (hence the fear). Things are not falling into place as they had hoped, so they are trying to change the situation through coercion.
“Anger tells us that we are preparing to force others, or ourselves, to comply with some expectation,” it concludes.
Both The Anger Habit and Overcoming Anger focus on awareness and acceptance as the key ingredients for overcoming anger. Angry people must accept that the root cause of their anger is not the other person’s behaviour but their own negative self-beliefs. It is their inner feelings of fear and inadequacy that they are raging against.
Meanwhile, the godfather of motivational gurus, Anthony Robbins, goes a little easier on anger. In Awaken the Giant Within (1992) he sees anger, like other emotions, as an “action signal.” Anger can be a positive, he claims, if we “turn that emotional intensity into directed excitement and passion.” Many angry people feel locked in a cycle of fear and frustration, with their anger demonstrating their clear desire to unlock the cage and get going in a more rewarding direction. The motivation is there, but rattling the cage won’t get us on our way. We need to find a key. And that takes planning (see Part Two).
Of course this brings us neatly to frustration, anger’s little brother. Anthony Robbins also has a lot to say about frustration. He sees it as an exciting action signal because frustration actually comes from a sense of inner self-belief that we could and should be in a better place. It says the solution is within range but that we need to change our approach. In this respect frustration is very different to disappointment, which is a more final feeling – of negative acceptance – that we are defeated and will never attain what we seek.
Anxiety, meanwhile, is less easily dismissed and is, in fact, a symptom of PTSD – a long-term reaction to the continual triggering of the fear response. As we have seen, such triggering leads to avoidance of situations in which we may be triggered, with anxiety the response to even the prospect of such situations. Yet, according to Glen R. Schiraldi in The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook (2000), anxious people can become conditioned to fear even the tactics or distractions they use to avoid the fear response.
For instance, the earlier child frightened by the dog may become anxious at even the prospect of contacting a similar dog – maybe in a park or along a footpath – perhaps changing her route to school because of it, with even the new route eventually triggering anxiety because of its association with the original trauma. And it takes no great leaps to apply such anxiety-based behaviour to the avoidance tactics of Atkinson’s High-FF children.
Reversing this self-fulfilling cycle of fear and worry is no mean feat, and usually involves professional help. But, as Schiraldi states, we can learn to confront our anxieties through the acceptance of our condition and, through therapy, the erection of protective “boundaries” as well as the avoidance of “retraumatizing behaviours” (such as alcohol).
And we can also take tiny steps towards a less anxious future, perhaps learning over time to reframe our concerns by focusing on the positive, by not trying to right past wrongs (revenge fantasies stoke-up rather than reduce anxiety) and by forcing objective evaluations onto any anxiety-inducing situation (hopefully closer in time to the situation itself) – all as recommended by Dale Carnegie, one of the most famous self-improvement writers of the twentieth century in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948).
Which brings us to depression: “Depression is a thief that steals from people, robbing them of energy, vitality, self-esteem and any pleasure that they might previously have enjoyed,” writes Irish psychologist Tony Bates in Understanding and Overcoming Depression (2001).
Depression is typified by an unrelenting sad mood, an absence of energy, problems concentrating or remembering, a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed, and difficulties with sleeping and eating. In many ways it is the flipside to anger – an emotional response based on feelings of defeat and withdrawal, making anger seem like a positive fighting response in comparison.
Yet Bates’s recommendations for treating depression strike a chord with our programme for aiding those with fear of failure. Awareness of the root causes – such as negative early-life experiences or harsh, demeaning or controlling parents or other sown seeds for low self-esteem – is a major step, as well as knowledge of the destructive thought patterns that spiral into depression. We can attack these with deliberate attempts to reframe our thoughts more positively, he states, and by taking small actionable steps that slowly lift the clouds.
“Recovery from depression is a journey rather than a destination,” says Bates, echoing the sentiments of this book on both fear of failure and low self-esteem.
Yet Robbins is more forthright on depression – holding the depressed person responsible for his or her condition.
“In order to be depressed,” he says in his seminal work Unlimited Power (1987), “you have to view your life in specific ways.”
It takes effort to do this, he states, involving what we say to ourselves and in what tone. It also involves how we hold ourselves and how we breathe. And it involves playing games with our blood-sugar levels through poor diet and excessive alcohol.
“Some people have created this state so often though, that it is easy to produce,” says Robbins – pointing out that to many it can actually feel like the most comforting state to be in, helped by secondary gains such as sympathy from others and allowances from peers. But we had to work at getting ourselves into such a bad place, he says, just as we can and should work to get ourselves out of it.
Far from being callous, Robbins’s tough-love approach hits upon an important concept for any High-FF hoping to develop achievement motivation. We need to take responsibility for our thoughts and actions, as well as our emotional and external responses, no matter how they manifest themselves. This is a theme that runs right through the motivational universe and is something we must grasp, not least because any form of progress is impossible if we continue to blame others (parents, siblings, peers, teachers) for who we are and how we respond.
Whatever your personal history, no one else is responsible for your actions and your behaviour, or even your inner thoughts, evaluations and responses. You are. Blame is simply an excuse for inaction. Meanwhile, taking responsibility is the quickest route for turning those feelings of fear, frustration, anger or depression into better responses.
In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), Stephen Covey makes it clear that anyone seeking self-improvement needs to take complete responsibility for their responses in every situation. In probably the most important statement in what is the most influential self-help book in this area, Covey writes “it isn’t what happens to us that counts, it’s how we respond.”
He actually wrote “between stimulus and response man has the freedom to choose” but it is such a vital concept, I thought it important to put it in language that would help us remember it (Covey also wrote “in choosing our response to circumstances, we powerfully affect our circumstances,” which is equally memorable).
In other words, we may not be responsible for the external forces that intrude upon our lives – or, indeed, for what generated our self-beliefs in early childhood – but as adults, we are 100 per cent responsible for our evaluation of such forces, as well as the impact we allow them to have upon us and, most importantly, our responses.
The answer is not to deny responsibility (or “response-ability” as Covey prefers to construct it) by blaming others and circumstances. The answer is to embrace it. Taking responsibility for our past failures and current predicaments – and even our feelings – is a fantastically liberating concept. Just imagine – if you are totally responsible for where you find yourself today, even in terms of how you feel inwardly: awful as that may seem – discomforting as it is – it is also wonderfully empowering. It means you are totally responsible for your future. It is in your hands.
Taking responsibility is a giant leap towards achievement motivation – regaining Weiner’s “locus of control” even if the current self-view is a negative one (Covey also stresses that we may have to accept a negatively assessed starting point). Another is to recognize something equally important – that everything up until the moment we read this sentence is in the past. And that we cannot change the past.
“Put the past in the past and focus on the present,” said Dale Carnegie (1948). In fact he wrote “shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death,” but such prose can be off-putting to modern readers.
Carnegie blamed the past – and obsessing about past mistakes – as one of the central causes of worry in people. It is also a core reason why the monkey on our shoulder always has the last word – citing past failures as evidence that the future will be no different.
Yet the monkey is lying because he couldn’t possibly know. Just as the past cannot be changed, the future cannot be known. So we can choose to approach the future with fear – by listening to the monkey – or we can decide that the past is only relevant as a learning tool for the present and future.
By, first, taking responsibility for our actions and emotions and, second, accepting that we cannot change anything from the past, we have indeed taken control of our present, which is a pretty liberating thought.