To Lucy

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I had high hopes for What’s Stopping You? when it was first published in April 2011. But I also nursed many doubts. As a High-FF (all explained within), this was perhaps inevitable. Fear of failure makes our doubts cast long shadows over our hopes and, before long, we are sabotaging ourselves with our negative self-beliefs.

For those with a high fear of failure this is a well known cycle. And one that, usually, results in arrested endeavour – potentially followed by frustration, depression, anger and resignation. Well not this time. Encouraged by my agent (Isabel Atherton at Creative Authors), my publisher (Holly Bennion at Wiley) and my wife (Lucy), I took the plunge. I wrote about the fears and doubts and insecurities that have plagued me since childhood, and about the research I’ve undertaken over many years to try and fathom out my condition.

What’s Stopping You? is the result and, so far, its reception has bowled me over. Originally published in April 2011, the book reached Number One in a major retail business book chart around May and stayed there until January 2012. It also won positive reviews, professional praise and, literally, hundreds of emails from readers that felt the book spoke to them personally and was helping them understand their condition and plot a more productive path.

Fear of failure is a mass condition, although one that often goes unrecognized in sufferers. And, after reading the book, many of those writing to me expressed the feeling that they now felt equipped for the (far from easy) journey ahead. They better understood the fears and doubts that prevented them making progress in their careers and personal pursuits and were more willing to accept who they were, including their own faulty wiring. And this realization was helping them chart a more sustainable, as well as positive, path ahead. It was also helping them deal with the inevitable barriers along the way.

As stated within, praise is a valuable currency for those with fear of failure, so my heartfelt thanks to those that offered it.

The book’s warm reception and strong sales has led to this second edition. In some cases the new edition tackles the “constructive criticism” offered by readers (usually a contradiction in terms for the High-FF). Though mainly it includes additional content based on reader requests. Primarily, this means the inclusion of 19 case studies. Mostly, these are people who contacted me following publication, although I do occasionally take a punt on a well-known or historical name, highlighting behaviour that is useful for illustrating the book’s needs.

Another addition to this edition is the Seven Steps to Navigating Fear of Failure. To be honest, I shied away from adding exercises in the original book. In my view, too many self-help books lapse into pointless and even nonsensical exercises, almost as an alternative to constructive prose aimed at understanding our frailties. “Say ‘I am loved and I am loveable’ in the mirror 25 times each morning” – that sort of thing (an actual exercise in one of my source books, I kid you not) – will soon have the reader feeling confused and mildly humiliated, which is exactly the sort of emotion High-FFs spend their lives avoiding. And, anyway, I was writing primarily for a British market (by which I mean for the Brits’ natural reserve more than our geographical location) that may find such emotionally charged and self-regarding activities, frankly, silly.

That said, the book’s stated aim is to help readers draw their own map of the future – something authentically theirs as they forge their own path through the jungle. This, indeed, involves “exercises” such as calculating our true values and visualizing ourselves in 10 years’ time. So I’ve added a final section that summarizes these needs. This means that the narrative of the book remains – allowing the reader to absorb the text in the knowledge that any required proactivity on their part will be handily reiterated at the end.

There are also some amendments to the narrative itself – mostly based on reader feedback. For instance, entrepreneurship is far from the only Me Inc. route, so there are added sections on freelancing and franchising or simply on adopting a new attitude within your current employment. And I have been more exploratory regarding High-FF traits – especially my own – many of which (such as rebelliousness in childhood) are far from obvious.

So please keep the feedback coming (via my website at www.robert-kelsey.co.uk). Or perhaps attend one of my “fear of failure” events. But most of all please keep pursuing an understanding of who you are, which should be part of a process towards accepting yourself – including your insecurities – and navigating your way towards a better future.

Robert Kelsey, recovering High-FF

FOREWORD BY LUKE JOHNSON

Most of us know that the secret to success is confidence. Good looks, intelligence, qualifications – all these help, but with many of the highest achievers I’ve met, their greatest asset has been their world class chutzpah.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t possess such bountiful self-assurance. We are racked with doubts. We focus too much on the losing shots, not our aces. So Robert Kelsey has written a book for the rest of us, everyone who lacks confidence, who can be too self-critical, who isn’t sure if they’re up to it or going to make it. And I think it’s a winner.

The truth is that such feelings are self-fulfilling. Just as the confident person creates the mental conditions for their own success, the person who lacks confidence creates the mental conditions for their lack of progress. This makes fear of failure a debilitating condition but also one where improvement is possible, not least because failure is the very thing that confident people don’t fear. As Robert Kelsey proves, the ability to fall flat on your face without it undermining your desire to keep trying is perhaps the most important quality those high-chutzpah types possess.

Certainly, success is not about being ambitious – that’s easy. It’s about overcoming adversity. And in my experience, what separates the winners and the losers in life is how they handle disappointment. Achievement in any field is impossible without setbacks. What separates the field is not the setback, however, but the response to it.

This book offers help to those that, up until now, have been stymied by setbacks – indeed, may have even avoided participation for fear of encountering a setback. Yet the great point of the author’s advice is that it is both philosophical with regard to the nature of fear and its impact on achievement, and practical. For those who may be paralyzed by a fear of failure, it offers a way through – not through the impractical nonsense of many self-help books, but through step-by-step advice on the fears that attack us at each stage, and how we can think and act differently for a better outcome. The remarkable sales of the first edition of this book are proof that Robert’s message has resonated with thousands of readers.

The author has not invented a new philosophy or programme for living. Rather he has summarized the contents of scores of relevant self-help books – picking the bits that work, ignoring the elements that don’t. His aim is to create a tailored route for those who may simply be trying to avoid failure – helping them get a better result. There are, after all, reams of such volumes in print. And while some are useful, many of them are not. The author has covered the waterfront, and has selected the most useful and reliable advice from his research of hundreds of psychologists, therapists and self-help gurus.

What’s Stopping You? is also a highly personal book. The author talks in depth about his career journey, how he overcame his own demons by studying the literature, by really analyzing his own issues, and by developing techniques to deal with them. Sometimes amusing, sometimes cringing, sometimes painful – his own experiences add to the impression that this is a book written from the heart, even if it is aimed squarely at the head.

Robert Kelsey is a rare beast because he runs his own business – but he can also actually write. He participates and he also reports – and thinks deeply about the challenges. Word processing has enabled everyone to churn out reams of material. But few who tackle these types of subjects actually have any literary ability: in reality their prose style can be awful. Poor writing makes a book hard to read and difficult to remember – and more than anything I enjoyed reading this book. And that makes a difference when so many business and self-help books are bought and never read – partly because they are essentially unreadable. But Mr Kelsey’s text is highly enjoyable and eminently fluent.

Not all the tips here will work for everyone. But there is a sufficient range of topics for any reader – and especially any reader that has suffered from a debilitating lack of confidence – to find something relevant to their situation: from goal setting to handling work colleagues, from discovering your true values and motivations to starting a business.

So I wholeheartedly endorse this book, and encourage the casual reader to put it on their bedside table and browse it at regular intervals: for inspiration, for understanding, and for pragmatic advice. I’ve enjoyed reading it, and I think you will too.

Luke Johnson
Chairman of Risk Capital Partners and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce

INTRODUCTION

“Failure is not an option,” said the actor playing Gene Kranz, flight director for Mission Control in Apollo 13, the 1995 movie dramatizing the near-disaster of the third Apollo mission to the Moon. But he was wrong. It was an option, which is why he said it. Kranz knew that his team had to think the unthinkable, invent the uninvented, do the undoable. And this meant employing classic alpha-male posturing to force them beyond their fear of failure.

He knew that failure was staring them in the face but, given the consequences of failure, any other option was not only preferable but imperative. Had he said “failure is almost certain, but let’s have a go anyway” his team would have been unable to get beyond their fear of public humiliation for suggesting a potentially daft idea. Yet daft ideas were the only thing that could save the astronauts, so Kranz had to find a way of getting them on the table – hence upping the stakes in order to overcome his team’s individual fears.

Fear of Failure

Yet Apollo 13 is a movie and those words were written by a script-writer (despite the real Gene Kranz later adopting them for the title of his biography). The fears that prevent us from achieving our goals are usually private, mundane, nuanced and sometimes so subtle that many of us may not fully accept their impact on our thoughts and actions.

As Kranz knew, fear of failure can change our behaviour in ways that render failure a near certainty. Fear paralyzes our decision-making, throws our judgment, destroys our creativity and removes previously easy fluidity from even everyday movements. Yet as mental conditions go, fear of failure is not only one of the most common – with millions of sufferers in the UK alone – it is also one of the least acknowledged or acted upon, partly because those with the condition are so paralyzed by their fear of humiliation or public embarrassment they suffer in silence, or even in self-denial, rather than seek treatment.

They are chained to the seabed, unable to swim towards the sunlight above due to their fears and insecurities. Of course, some may express their fears through depression or anger without even realizing what lies behind such symptoms – making them hostage to behaviour that further confirms their inner fears and further destroys their potential for progress.

And while the actor playing Kranz unlocked the potential of his team with one powerful phrase, we are unlikely to be so lucky. Even if we acknowledge our fears and seek to overcome them, we may find ourselves bewildered by the hundreds of self-help books offering more confidence, higher self-esteem, greater success and even “unlimited power.” Some deal directly with fear of failure. Others focus on related or underlying conditions such as lack of confidence or low self-esteem. Many offer a near-instant cure – the banishment of our frailties and the certainty of success – through a mental realignment injected into us via some, admittedly strong, motivational words and techniques.

But a health warning is required. Promising the chance to be born again as a new, more-confident, even fearless person is a false promise made to afflicted people desperate for a cure. Conditions such as fear of failure – as well as antecedents such as low self-esteem – are, as we shall see, innate. Once and however inflicted they are here to stay.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can understand our insecurities, accept them as part of us and make strong progress while taking them into account. In fact, in my opinion strong sustainable progress is only possible once we have accepted that our fears and primary beliefs are here to stay. We can develop a strong self-awareness of our fear-driven behaviours – and their root causes – and we can learn to live with who we are. We don’t have to banish our fears forever in order to move forward. Indeed, we can achieve our goals. As long as they are the right goals, our goals – not false goals potentially fed to us by external influences or our own faulty thinking.

And that’s where this book comes in. People with a fear of failure need a map. This book is not a map. In fact, we have to draw our own map and even that will require many redrafts before being even vaguely accurate. What this book provides, I hope, is guidance on how to go about drawing such a map: in draft, fuzzy at the edges, containing plenty of “here be dragons” elements, but a map nonetheless. Something we can grasp and regard as we cut through the thicket. Something that allows us to take those all-important next steps.

The Monkey on My Back

I have suffered from a debilitating fear of failure all my life – itself the result of poor confidence brought about by a low self-esteem developed in early childhood. At key moments in my life fear has led me to doubt my abilities 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. In fact, there was no shift­ing him, 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 realize it was their prognosis that was flawed because it took too little account of the fact I am who I am, and that the monkey comes too.

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 are (and the mon­key of course). 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 village-school teachers, and traumatized by the immediately preceding break-up of my family, I failed the 11-plus and ended up in an Essex secondary-modern turned comprehensive school. I left aged 15 with just one O level. Directionless, I was taken on by a local building surveyor needing 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, who were nice to me despite my gruff accent and manners. They encouraged me to return to education, so – realizing I was as capable as them – I enrolled on an evening A level history course and, five years later, graduated from the University of Manchester with a high 2:1 joint-honours degrees in Politics & Modern History.

But I was, again, directionless, other than a vague notion of going into journalism – a highly competitive trade rarely conquered through the application of vague notions. Yet after a few false turns I managed to land a staff-writer then editor’s role for a banking-focused magazine, which ultimately resulted in me becoming a banker in what the City describes as a “gamekeeper turned poacher move.”

As I relay in Part One, I was not a great banker. Paralyzed by fear, I worked in both London and the US before realizing 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 the height of the dotcom boom) – 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 skills and experiences to start Moorgate Communications, a financial public relations agency aimed at banks, which has been a sustainable and fulfilling enterprise ever since – even growing through the financial meltdown of 2008–09.

Oh, 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 humorous, laddish writer in the Nick Hornby or Michael Lewis mould. However, the book sold less 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 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. Terrorized by my own insecurities, I have been a nightmare to work with and apologize 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 – although it took a deeper hold of me back in the UK as I began to realize the problem was not a particular job or person or set of circumstances. The problem was me.

Ultimately, and as described within, this landed me in the hands of a professional psychotherapist. Yet far from complementing the work of all those self-help gurus, the therapist – 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 ahead.

Certainly I still fight the fear every day, as well as my low self-esteem. But I now realize 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 in this book.

PART ONE

What is Stopping You?

1

FEAR

Ask what was stopping me and I can tell you immediately: fear. Fear of failure in fact. Relationship-issues with parents, siblings, teachers and peers can be a cause, as can other traumatic events in childhood – especially ones where we feel demeaned or humiliated. But the fear can build from tiny beginnings into an uncontrollable phobia that can mentally paralyze the sufferer in adulthood. It can also strike us at various stages in our career – even once we have built up strong confidence in a particular area.

My disastrous investment banking “career” provides a potent example in my own story. A seemingly confident financial journalist with a strong and detailed knowledge of corporate banking, I caught the eye of a leading corporate bank and, after a protracted interview and assessment process, persuaded them I had the perfect training and background for joining their growing corporate banking team within the investment bank.

Yet once inside the door my behaviour changed. I became fearful that my knowledge was paper-thin and I possessed nothing more than a talent for empty bravado. Of course, this was probably true, but was no different to the majority of bankers in the room – all with very narrow experience compared to my breadth of knowledge across the corporate banking spectrum (exactly the knowledge required for selling the corporate bank’s range of financial products). But having sold myself well during the recruitment process, once a practicing banker I became scared of putting a foot wrong – leaving them wondering what had happened to the confident, even cocky, person they’d employed as their next hotshot “originator.”

My role was to source US$100 million-plus financings for the bank to arrange and distribute to investors. As a journalist, these deals looked easy. I assumed the bank found a willing borrower, asked for some security (in this case trade-receivables such as oil shipments), handed over the money and waited for it to come back with interest. But half the banks in London were doing the same, forcing me into one of the scariest margins of the 1990s corporate borrower universe: Russia.

In the mid-1990s businessmen were being gunned down on a daily basis on the streets of Moscow, and my clients – the newly privatized Russian oil companies – were certainly menacing organizations to deal with. Yet that wasn’t the bit that scared me. In fact that helped mask my real terror, which was the bank discovering how little I knew about how to structure one of these deals. I couldn’t calculate the volumes of oil required to repay the loan, or establish what volumes had to be where, when, and how they got there. It looked way too complex for my simple brain.

And the fact no one in the bank had this knowledge – we simply took the information on trust from the oil companies – didn’t seem to bother anyone but me, which was a key part of my problem with banking. Taking such risks is the nuts and bolts of the industry. Yet I couldn’t help visualizing one of about 20 disaster scenarios being played out in various hostile environ­ments somewhere out there in the post-Soviet steppes – all of which would have rendered my banking career over in a puff of public humiliation.

Blind to Office Politics

Being risk-averse and technically inept should not have meant curtains for my banking career. Fear stalked the corridors of the entire bank – as did technical ineptitude come to that. The ultimate reason for failing as an investment banker was that all those technically inept and risk-averse bankers prospered by being hotshots at office politics. They had strong judgement regarding where the bank was heading and could make self-enhancing decisions on that basis.

But I was awful at office politics. And I had terrible judgement – based on trying to hide my fears and insecurities rather than focusing on the interests of the bank (or myself) – which led me to trust the wrong people and back the wrong deals. My behav­iour changed to the point where I came across as a fool, and soon started being treated as one. Any deal on my desk looked dodgy for the simple reason it was on my desk, and any new project that came my way soon acquired a distinctly hot-potato feel to it.

Even the transfer to America – sold to me as the “move that could make you” – was no more than turning-out-the-lights on a failing office. The only way I could make it work was by discovering the one entity that would hoover up our loan structures no matter what: Enron.

Yet rather than focus on the skills required to become a competent banker – especially the soft skills such as calculating who could and couldn’t be trusted and recruiting people to my cause – I soon sought a way out of banking. I fell back on my core skill of journalism and started writing about my life in New York, which before long had a greater hold on my imagination, and time, than a banking career that I was rejecting, seemingly before it could reject me.

Emotions and Their Role in Survival

I detail the fears and behaviour that destroyed my banking career because they seem odd given that it took some guts to win the job in the first place. And I had clearly been judged as having the required knowledge and at least the capabilities of learning the trade by my seniors within the bank. Yet, as we shall see, those suffering from fear of failure are often able to take extreme risks in situations where failure is almost certain. Meanwhile, they find themselves paralyzed by everyday situations that involve only moderate but often very public risks. And they are more than capable of changing their behaviour in ways that make failure more likely. All of which makes fear of failure a debilitat­ing and self-fulfilling condition seemingly at odds with today’s career needs.

So how did we get to the point where so many people sabotage their own advancement through such self-harming behaviour? In his book Emotion: the Science of Sentiment (2001), British philosopher Dylan Evans tackles this conundrum by asking an important question: given the fact emotions such as fear and sadness seem to be “hardwired” into humans, why are they so bad for modern careers? Or looking at it the other way: as such emotions seem to offer no economic advantage – in fact just the opposite – why have they not died out in the process of natural selection?

He wonders why we have not evolved to behave like Spock in Star Trek and judge life’s trials in purely logical terms. The conclusion appears to be that Spock’s home planet of Vulcan was an abundant paradise entirely free of disease or predators. Meanwhile on Earth, Evans contests that emotions evolved as a rapid-reflexive action aimed at survival – hence it often arriving in an uncontrollable nerve-surge through the body.

Joy, distress, disgust, fear, anger: all played a key role in helping our survival in the “state of nature,” says Evans. And to an extent we rarely acknowledge, such emotions continue to play an important evaluation role today, just a more subtle one. Evans provides evidence of this by observing those unable to use their emotions for evaluation.

“Those that lose their emotional capacity through brain damage tend to be easy victims for the unscrupulous,” he observes. “Forced to rely on their logical reasoning, they make disastrous choices about whom they can trust.”

Impaired Mental Capacity

Evans makes an important point because, as we shall see, those of us with fear of failure may well have such fears due to an impaired mental capacity when it comes to reasoning and evaluations – perhaps due to poor conditioning or traumatic events as a child. And this means that we are also vulnerable, with fear being our response to that vulnerability.

So emotions remain important in the modern world, which means that an impaired capacity to use our emotions to evaluate situations is potentially disastrous – or at best paralyzing.

Does this therefore enslave us to the potency of our emotions, forcing those with impaired evaluations into self-destructive behaviour? Not always. Plenty of people behave in ways not dictated by their emotions. The stiff upper-lip of the English upper classes is no myth, but is an external response rather than inward feeling – a training from an early age to hide emotions rather than change them – not dissimilar to the poker face of the professional gambler who may inwardly be in emotional turmoil. Yet such responses are only ever a mask. In reality “quiet desperation is the English way” – at least according to Pink Floyd.

Such masking takes training and is, in any case, an unsatisfactory response in the modern world where we are encouraged to express ourselves, or at least to behave in ways that generate trust and understanding rather than distrust and misunderstanding. And such a masking may simply delay a terrible reckoning – a breakdown as the mask slips and then collapses due to the pressure. Far better, surely, to try and understand our emotions, as well as how emotions such as fear can motivate and demotivate us, and how they can impair our evaluations and change our behaviours. Surely self-awareness trumps self-denial every time?

Experiments in Emotional Manipulation

In his book Motivation (1975) psychologist Phil Evans details the relatively short history of academic experiments on our emotions – and particularly on fear – and how they impact our motivation.

For instance, in 1948 the pioneering American psychologist Neal Miller experimented on the impact of fear on behaviour by placing rats in a box with two compartments – one black, one white – with those in the white zone consistently given electric shocks. The rats were soon exhibiting great reluctance to venture into the white zone, even overcoming physical barriers in order to escape to the safety of the black zone. And before long, Miller’s harassed rodents needed only to catch sight of the white zone to exhibit signs of extreme stress. Miller concluded that fear as a driver can be quickly acquired, can change behaviour profoundly, and can internally condition the rat to elicit a fear response when subsequently triggered (i.e. when reminded of the trauma).

Unsurprisingly, such emotional conditioning is also applicable with humans, at even a subtle level. Evans cites Judson S. Brown a post-war American psychologist who thought that, due to fear, humans spend much of their time in search of “reinforcers” such as money and in performing “operant responses” such as holding down a job. In Brown’s opinion, what a person was seeking was potentially less important than what a person was avoiding. He considered that a person could be said to be making money, but could equally be motivated by the fear of not making money.

For me, Brown’s focus on avoidance is beginning to get to the heart of the matter with respect to fear as a driver. Yet when studying fear’s motivational potential the most important contribution comes from John W. Atkinson of Stanford University.

In the 1960s Atkinson undertook a series of experiments on children that was to nail fear of failure as a behavioural driver. He actually set out to discover what motivated people to achieve, or how “achievement motivation” or the “need for achievement” developed in children. Yet his experiments are now equally celebrated for their discovery of the opposite dynamic.

Again, detailed by Evans, and following on from earlier experiments by David McClelland, Atkinson (with G.H. Litwin) involved groups of children in reward-based games and activities and recorded that the children approached the tasks in two quite distinct ways: anticipating success or anticipating failure. Atkinson noticed that this divide had an enormous impact on the individual’s approach, performance and behaviour during the task.

An individual’s attitude (and the outcome) was dictated by whether they had high or low levels of “achievement motivation,” concluded Atkinson. Those with high achievement motivation were driven by both their need and their expectation of success. They focused on the reward of task fulfilment and behaved in ways likely to generate success.

Meanwhile, those with low achievement motivation were motivated by a fear of failure, and sought to avoid even moderately difficult tasks due to their expectation of failure. What most concerned them was the humiliation of failure – resulting in them employing a series of tactics to either evade the task or disguise their avoidance (which included disrupting the entire task).

Atkinson’s discovery forms the key divide in this book, so bears repetition: