What's Stopping You?: Why Smart People Don't Always Reach Their Potential and How You Can, 2nd Edition
- 3h 50m
- Robert Kelsey
- John Wiley & Sons (UK)
- 2012
A practical guide to attacking the most common of phobias: fear of failure. Since its publication in 2011, What's Stopping You? has offered readers a hard look at the quality of their careers and personal lives. For those who'd give themselves a solid "C+", this brutally honest guide to taking stock also offers the keys to self-improvement. By dismantling the fear inhibiting all achievement—fear of failure—author Robert Kelsey offers a set of seven steps designed to help readers map out their actions, and attain what once seemed elusive milestones.
Written for the frustrated underachiever or anyone who feels like one, this unique book addresses can the real obstacles hindering both professional and personal growth.
- Includes a new chapter with tactics for overcoming a fear of failure
- Explores methods for dealing with different types of people in a host of situations, such as getting a new job, pitching for new work, making presentations, or communicating clearly in an argument
About the Author
Robert Kelsey is a financial journalist turned City banker turned entrepreneur. Currently he is the founder and CEO of Moorgate Communications financial PR agency. He is also an author—publishing his first book, The Pursuit of Happiness (a “lad-lit” comedy on his life as an English banker in New York) in 2000.
Yet Robert calls himself a practitioner in failure after a childhood and early adulthood strewn with academic and career disasters. Determined to find an answer, he became a self-help addict—reading scores of books across the self-help genre.
Robert discovered that his problem wasn’t failure but fear of failure. He was a classic High-FF—someone with a high fear of failure—approaching difficult but achievable challenges with a sense of dread regarding the seemingly inevitable failure that awaited him and, therefore, seeking to avoid the challenge altogether: making his inevitable failure self-fulfilling.
Yet, while helpful, the self-help books also promised something they couldn’t deliver: a cure. Working with the London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, he discovered that, not only was his condition innate, it led him in totally the wrong direction with respect to goal-setting. Once aware of his condition, however, Robert Kelsey also realized that progress is possible as long as we take account of the fears that drive our insecurities, accept them as part of us, and find a way of navigating these self-constructed mental hurdles. What’s Stopping You? is the result.
In this Book
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What’s Stopping You? Why Smart People Don’t Always Reach Their Potential, and How You Can, 2nd edition
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Preface To The Second Edition
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Foreword By Luke Johnson
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Introduction
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Fear
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External Responses
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Failure As A Positive Experience
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Producing Better Responses
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Act
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Visualization
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Language And Behaviour
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Appropriate Goal Setting For Recovering High-FFs
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Strategy And Tactics
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Judgement And Ideas
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Managing The Process
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Self-Esteem
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Dealing With The Boss
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Progress As An Employee
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Networking And Interviews
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Leadership
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The High-FF Entrepreneur
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Alternative Paths For The High-FF
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Conclusion—The Point Of Recovery
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Seven Steps To Navigating Fear Of Failure
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Bibliography
