The Genius of Athletes by Noel Brick

Author:Noel Brick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2021-05-14T18:20:28+00:00

Chapter 7

What Are You Afraid Of?

How to Handle Fear of Failure and Perceived Threats to Success

IN SOME SURVEYS, people rate the fear of speaking in public as worse than the fear of death.

It’s easy to see why—for many of us, we might not ever feel as exposed, in such an inescapable format, as when we have to address a crowd. In this vulnerable situation, we experience the hallmark of public speaking anxiety: the psychological threat that our audience might evaluate us negatively.1

Adding to the angst is that, presumably, we’re speaking in public because somebody thought others should hear what we have to say. We might have to update our colleagues on a project, memorialize a friend at a funeral, present in front of our peers and professors at school, or talk about our area of expertise at a conference. These scenarios can trigger a stress response similar to the performance-related choke that the New Zealand All Blacks suffered in their 2007 Rugby World Cup quarterfinal, which we read about in chapter 2. Our anxiety means our throat goes dry and our breathing shallows—neither helpful for clear public speaking. We might feel helplessness, a loss of control, and our thoughts might become jumbled in anticipation of a negative evaluation by our audience.2 Whatever the circumstances, it’s hard not to think of the old saying, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Fortunately, most of us who don’t cherish public speaking don’t have to do it regularly. We do, however, often face similar fears when challenging ourselves. Especially in the planning or opening stages, thoughts of all that could go wrong can be incapacitating. That’s true for both long-term undertakings, such as starting a new job, and more compressed events, such as running a half marathon. The potential psychological threats to success can become self-fulfilling and otherwise interfere with our ability to perform our best. In this chapter, we’ll look at how to keep these fears from knocking us off track.

O Heavy Burden!

Imagine making the US Olympic track and field team and signing a professional contract with Nike just weeks after graduating from college. Wouldn’t you be ecstatic? But might you also feel the weight of expectations that come with such accomplishments?

That was the situation Steve Holman found himself in during the early 1990s. In June 1992, Holman finished his collegiate career at Georgetown University by winning the NCAA 1,500-meter title. Later that month, he placed second at the Olympic trials to make the US squad for that summer’s games in Barcelona. Holman was soon touted in magazines and elsewhere as “the next great American miler.” That accolade put the then-twenty-two-year-old in the heady company of runners like Olympic medalist and former world record holder Jim Ryun and Steve Scott, who ran the most sub-4-minute miles of anyone in history.

“Almost from the moment those articles were written, I personally felt the burden of that,” Holman says. “That was not inspiring to me. That’s irrational, but that’s how I reacted to it.

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