There’s one opinion I assert in What’s Stopping You? that may raise a few disbelieving eyebrows. It’s the notion that – in my opinion – everybody thinks of themselves as good people. And their bad behaviour, which many will admit, can be personally justified as forced upon them by poor opportunity or prejudice, or the righting of a perceived wrong. They were made to act in such a way, they’ll state, through circumstances not of their own making.
Certainly, this is how I’ve justified my own episodes of bad behaviour. There have been occasions when my reactions have been outrageous and damaging – ill-tempered, insulting, selfish and emotionally immature. And while I apologise now to anyone who suffered my nonsense, I maintain that – underneath – I was responding to what I perceived as an attack on me. That I was acting in my own defence. I was the victim (at least in my head), not the person on the receiving end of my temper or insults.
Yet this is a position I’m going to have to defend – not my own justifications (I know what goes on my head, at least most of the time), but those of people society condemns as “bad “ or “evil”. While the self-justification of a terrorist, even of Osama Bin Laden’s notoriety, is obvious (he felt his cause was just and required such extremism), can such a defence be made of bank robbers, murderers and or even rapists? These are surely selfish crimes, driven by uncontrolled greed or lust. Difficult as it is to assume from such a moral distance, I’m convinced it can – not from a moralistic point of view but from the wholly practical standpoint that, deep down, we all aim to be good people.
I’m not stating we are not responsible for the crimes we commit – we are 100 percent responsible. I’m just offering the view that those guilty of crime, in all its forms, will most-likely defend themselves on the grounds that they were forced to do it due to actions or circumstances that were not of their choosing. And that, given the choice – and differing circumstances – they’d have chosen peace, friendship, respect and a whole host of other positive reactions.
What’s this got to do with fear of failure? A lot. One of the most difficult aspects of any recovery programme for fear of failure is focused on our dealings with other people. It is our encounters with others that produce the fear-based and usually ill-conceived responses that send High-FFs (as I call those with fear of failure) in the wrong direction. Convinced we are under attack, we react defensively – aggressively even. This is the result of what Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence calls a neural hijacking: an emotional explosion in which the limbic system of the brain 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.
Is there any way we can prevent these neural hijackings? Again, as I state in What’s Stopping You? the unfortunate answer is no. I reason that fear of failure is an innate condition that is, in fact, a mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Traumatic events in our early childhood – some of which we may not even be aware of – have led us to respond with fear when triggered, leading to those neural hijackings that, in turn, lead to those terrible responses that, on reflection, we wish we could undo.
Is there an answer? Yes. While we cannot stop the neural hijackings, the poor responses they currently induce are not inevitable. Many of us, on reflection and after the passage of enough time for the emotional fog to clear, look back on those emotional fear-based moments and realise we may have misread or over-read the signals. We may have been under attack, but – probably – we misheard them or mistook the body-language or misunderstood the intention behind their comment or action. This realisation – hopefully (though certainly not always) – dawns on us after a while and we become embarrassed by our defensive response. A response moreover, that makes us appear the aggressor – adding to our sense of injustice and potentially sending us further down the path towards vengeful thoughts and actions.
The challenge, therefore, is to be able to have that second – better, more reflective – response sooner. In fact, if only we could have that second response as an instant reaction to the original neural hijacking, we’d have prevented the neural hijacking from generating the first defensive response (the one that’s turned us into the guilty party and left us isolated, alienated and embittered).
Developing a kinder response is, therefore, one of the most vital aspects of any recovery programme for a High-FF. We must think of everyone the way we want others to think of us: as essentially good people trying to overcome their own agonies and deal with their own insecurities. We don’t need to become evangelical about this. After all, few people like having their insecurities pointed out – something almost guaranteed to produce a neural hijacking in anyone on the receiving end. We just need to be aware that – at heart – everybody thinks of themselves as a good person and that any act or utterance that contradicts this conviction is almost certainly the reaction to some perceived slight or injustice. Or, more likely, we have misconstrued their actions.
And if we adjust our thinking to see it from their point of view, we’ve immediately transformed our view of them. Look hard enough and everyone has a justifiable viewpoint that, if we can empathise with, will deflect their perceived attack on - or threat to - us. And this, after a lot of practice, can help prevent those inevitable neural hijackings from producing those, far from inevitable, awful responses.
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