Fear Less

Because you can be an extraordinary individual performer yourself, but still feel inhibited or uninspired to perform at your very best because of the culture that you're operating in. So, I guess for me it expresses that I also intend to work at an organizational and system level, you know, when I work on performance. It's the individual and the organization – hence the culture coaching term.

Rachel Salaman: That makes things very clear. So, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up writing this book about dealing with fear?

Pippa Grange: When I first went to Australia, I was about 25, I think, and I'd just finished university and I'd been traveling and I headed off down to Australia, and I decided that I wanted to work in the performance psychology arena.

And as I started to do that, one of my first jobs was to work one-on-one with people, Australian rules football players, with the stuff of life really, not their performance stuff on the pitch, but the stuff that was troubling them in life, hindering them in life from being their very best or from feeling fulfilled. And that was drug[s] and alcohol, relationship difficulties, anxieties, and various other things.

And I expanded on that role with a whole heap of other sports, and then it became broader than that still, and I worked with business and CEOs and other kinds of performers like musicians, comedians, CEOs, and I noticed a startling pattern, a familiar pattern in every single person that I worked with, almost – there was always this underbelly of worrying about not being good enough ("Am I enough?") that sat with the performer.

And we can say, "Well, that helps people be at their very best in some ways," – which hopefully we'll talk about [later] – but I also felt that even when people were winning, on the scoreboard or on the balance sheet, they weren't actually enjoying their wins, they weren't feeling their wins at a very deep level. So hence my expression – fear is a thief.

I felt that, basically, however good somebody was, they weren't experiencing their success in a way that was valuable to them. So, consequently, that led me down a path of incorporating the idea of fear into a lot of the work I do. And when I had the opportunity after the football World Cup in 2018 to write the book, I thought that was a great opportunity to see if I could share the conversation more broadly with people.

Rachel Salaman: That's great, and a couple of things to dig into there. Firstly, you mentioned working in Australia and now you're living and working in the U.K., and you've worked in many other countries. How does fear and how people handle it differ around the world?

Pippa Grange: Yes, I love that question. I think that fear, our experience of fear, is kind of similar. The way that it shows up in our bodies, in our minds, in our emotions, and the experience of it is probably fairly similar globally. However, the thing that does differ is the stimulant, the fear stimulant – what it is in anybody's life that causes them to be fearful.

So, I do really notice some differences in that in different regions of the world. For example, in England, I feel coming back to England – and I've been back three years now after a long time away, 22 years away – I really noticed, or re-noticed, I guess, how much English people seem to be concerned about not looking silly, not being shown up, not putting themselves in a position to be embarrassed, and how restrictive that can be for English people, and making sure that they're not "the butt of the joke" in some way. So there's quite a lot of shame that shows up in that.

And then, for example, in New Zealand, where I worked for a while also, I noticed that the fear stimulant might have been much more like disappointing the group. So, not standing outside of the group, not being seen to be in any way undutiful or unloyal to the group is a big deal, in that respect.

So, there are some differences across cultures most definitely, and regions. And it varies across organizations, too.

Rachel Salaman: And we'll talk about organizations in a moment, but first I wanted to pick up on what you said about working with the England men's soccer team during the 2018 World Cup, which was unusual because these players were praised for their teamwork as much as their performance. How much was addressing their fear part of that work that you did with them?

Pippa Grange: You know, when we're very fearful, one of the first consequences of that is we become very insular. When we're in a constant state of anxiety that we're going to be seen as not good enough, you're very focused on yourself. And then it's hard to put yourself in that position where the awareness and the connectivity to other people is authentic and can result in excellent teamwork.

So, fear does a couple of things. Firstly, it makes us less intelligent – we actually become so narrow in our thinking and less able to use our rationality in some ways, our logic. We can get spilled over into emotion and that means that we are just swept by that and we're not focused on the things that make for great team, which is generally about the other person or the group outcome.

Fear also "does a number on us" in terms of how much attention we have to give to a broad range of things, to share our attention across multiple aspects of performance, and it turns our attention inwards to thinking about what we're doing right or wrong.

So, teamwork becomes quite strained in those respects because somebody is focusing on their own performance rather than on the group performance, which requires you to think more broadly.

Rachel Salaman: So, in your experience, what are the similarities between fear in sport and fear in business, as you've worked in both spheres?

Pippa Grange: I think there are some very strong similarities in many ways, and particularly when it comes to how the individual is managing their fear. If it happens to be a relationship that's difficult for you – in sport that might be player to coach, or between two players, and that can absolutely be the same in business. But also if there's specific aspects of performance... That idea of, "Am I performing well enough?" and the constancy of that can be very similar.

What's different, though, is that the results in sport tend to be very visible in the short term – you won or you lost on the scoreboard that weekend. It's very apparent how you performed and the feedback cycle is extremely quick, whereas in business that tends to be a much longer feedback cycle, to understand whether the result was a win or a loss, so to speak.

But I think also in sport your performance is in full view as an athlete, particularly individual athletes like tennis players, for example. It's down to you, there's nowhere to hide, you performed or you didn't, and everybody can see it. Whereas in business, again, when we work in more complex environments with multiple people, it tends to be less obvious who is performing or how performance is going in the very short term. I think they're [the] central differences.

Rachel Salaman: Interesting. So does that mean that dealing with fear can be similar in both those fields as well?

Pippa Grange: Absolutely. The way that performance psychology works in sport [is] you might work with the team, but you also would work with an athlete one-on-one, depending on what was going on for that person. And that's the same as executive coaching or any kind of direct performance intervention in a business sense.

So, when people work with business coaches or executive coaches, that's the same kind of work: let's get down to actually what's happening, clear the path, build some skills, deal with the emotion, and move forward to a better outcome for you. That's the same general principle across both.

Rachel Salaman: Now we've touched on this a little bit, but could you talk a bit more about the differences that you've observed between fear in individuals and fear in teams?

Pippa Grange: When it comes to working on this as the psychologist in a group, I think when you work one-on-one, the individual is more likely to be able to express to you what they're afraid of.

What I notice in teams is that fear is usually quite unexpressed. It's something that can be very repressed, unspoken, it's weighty, people don't feel good, don't feel right, but they can't actually name that as fear or they won't name that as fear, whereas working with the individual they probably will.

And the problem with that in teams is that fear is very contagious. When there is a sense of needing to be very careful, or a sense of pending blame and shame around the corner, or fear of being shown up in the team for not being good enough, that's very weighty – but, if it remains unspoken, I personally feel that's quite toxic in teams.

So when I go into a team, what I try and do is invest the time upfront to get people to express "what the ghosts in the walls would say," as I refer to it: what are all the stories that don't get told? Where does fear lurk around the corridors here?

And have people tell the stories of fear, even if it's not directly about them, so that you can try and get a picture of how fear is manifesting in a team or an organization – because I think it's less clearly expressed, or people will underplay it as a factor in performance, in teams.

Rachel Salaman: The subtitle of your book talks about winning at life. But, by definition, where there are winners there must be a hierarchy of achievement, including some losers, unfortunately. So I was wondering: what does winning at life look like for people who are naturally average?

Pippa Grange: I love this question! It kind of gets to the very essence of the book, really. This idea that our worth is tied up with results.

So even the maths suggests to us that we lose many more times than we win, in terms of results. And, in fact, the endeavor of trying to be your very best requires failure time and time again – that's learning ground, as long as we are actually learning from it.

I feel like there's such a skew – we're really over-biased towards winners, where actually we win and lose all the time, and all of us lose in different ways. The problem, though, for me, is this idea that our worth is tied up with results. If we include the idea of being fulfilled, then there can be no naturally average. It's the question I ask, "Must we always measure "good enough" with a hierarchy or are there other ways that we can see ourselves that speak to performance in life?"

Rachel Salaman: So it's not a zero-sum game. Everybody can win at life?

Pippa Grange: Exactly.

You're listening to Mind Tools Expert Interviews from Emerald Works.

Rachel Salaman: Now, we've talked a little bit about "good enough" fear, and, as you mentioned, in your book you also talk about "in-the-moment" fear. And your book is full of great tips for dealing with both. Very briefly, could you share a couple of tips for bossing the "in-the-moment" fear – when we feel nervous before a presentation, for example?

Pippa Grange: In sport, we generally work with an athlete to have a preperformance routine. So even if they're not expecting to be nervous and they feel nervous on the day, they have something already "rote," already learned, that they can go to, rather than try and do it right there in the moment.

So, I would say that to any of your listeners, anybody in business particularly, that it's not a bad idea to have practiced what helps you bring your autonomic nervous system back to where you want it. It helps you manage your anxiety or emotion back to where you want it, and you've practiced it.

That's what I call "processing." So, it might involve breathwork. Breathing sounds ridiculously simple, but it's extraordinarily effective – the mind will follow the breath. Basically, if you can calm your body, your mind will follow in that respect. A cool, deep breath, let's say in a situation where you're feeling overly activated, you might want to just take ten cool, deep breaths. Put the four corners of your feet on the floor, make sure that you're dropping your shoulders, relaxing your jaw, unclenching your hands, and just take ten deep breaths to actually process it.

People also choose to use a mantra or a statement that helps them in that moment, such as, "I've done this a thousand times before and I only needed to do it a hundred to be good enough." Which is one that an athlete I worked with used very regularly which really worked for him.

So, processing, to basically allow yourself to get back where you want to be so that you're in control, that's one tip. Another tip is what I call "distracting," and this I find very useful if you have to wait for your performance. So, for example, if you are due onto stage to do a piano solo and for some reason it's delayed by ten minutes, and you were just ready to go, and you have to stay in that activated state for another ten minutes, and you don't want to tip over... So, distracting yourself in those circumstances is very useful. And that might be done with music (and I think, actually, most of us do it on a regular basis with social media – this is the one time I think that's truly useful!), something like a sudoku puzzle, or just taking your mind into an active process of doing something different.

And then the third technique that I talk about is "rationalizing." So, because fear comes from the amygdala – and from what I describe as the "old circuitry" in our brains – it does hijack us and you need to take back control, and we need to engage other parts of our brain, the new circuitry, in bringing in rational thought to dismiss the anxiety, to work through it and be able to rationally say, "Well, no, actually there isn't anything that's pressingly fear provoking here, it's just my emotion, it's just fear, literally." And to be able to rationalize yourself back to where you want to be.

So, there's three quick techniques for the "in the moment" fear – the "umbrella" techniques – and each has many manifestations, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Rachel Salaman: As you mentioned, most of your book is actually about the other kind of fear, the "not being good enough" fear, because it causes so much suffering and gets in the way of fulfillment, and you have basically a three-step process for this. The first one is seeing the fear, literally. And this was really interesting. Can you tell us about using the imagination to create an image of our fear?

Pippa Grange: Yes, this is something I've been working with for a little while. When we use an image, there's a couple of things that happen. Firstly, if I ask you to give me an image for something that... You've just described a situation to me that's causing you some trouble and that's making you sad or fearful, and if I ask you to tell me about an image for that, and took you through the process, the first thing to note is that it would be absolutely yours and not mine. And I think that's very important when we're working with fear because we all experience it quite differently.

Another thing to consider with the image is that it has texture and tone that maybe language doesn't always, or it isn't always accessible to people. An image really can be... You can add bits to the image, you can explain more. In the book I talk about one of the people that I had worked with describing feeling like she was stuck in a bog and being bitten by mosquitoes and really struggling to wade through it, and there was just so much richness in her description then that helped me get to the root of what was going on for her.

And another example in the book [is] with Jake, where he described feeling like his fear was a grizzly bear because he was acting out – he found himself in bar fights and getting very stressed and expressing it out loud. And he gave me the description of the grizzly bear, but what was interesting was when he kept talking it was a grizzly bear in chains, and the chains were hurting him. The chains were chafing and the bear was unhappy, not just angry. Because the first surface piece is angry, but when you start to look at the whole bear, and what he was describing in the whole bear, you heard so much more of what was actually happening to that person.

So, I feel like if we just try and describe in language, it's like putting the lid on the jar – and there's still lots of the content rolling down the sides and we haven't caught it all. So it's really a way of allowing more descriptive material, more of the unconscious and the tone of things, to come through in what somebody is sharing.

Rachel Salaman: So, once we've seen our fear – as much as we can using some of these techniques – then we need to face it, that's the next step. And in the book, you talk about fear here like it's an adversary – "stealing ambitions," you say, and "dampening passions." How helpful is it to think about fear as external rather than internal?

Pippa Grange: That's a great question. I think it's both. I talk about it as sort of a thief and, as you say, stealing our passions. Because I do feel like it sucks out our ability to be present in our own lives, and it sucks out our enjoyment and fulfillment. But internally, obviously, we also have a phenomena, so it's both – it's both internal and external.

Rachel Salaman: As we mentioned, one of the manifestations of "not good enough" fear is perfectionism. How can we tell if we're being perfectionist, or just applying high standards – which is usually a good thing?

Pippa Grange: Because of the emotional tone that goes with it. So, if somebody has set very high standards for themselves, and that comes from a spirit of endeavor and wanting to get the absolute very best out of yourself – and I talk about this in the book from a sports perspective, of [the idea that] it does include the same amount of blood, sweat and tears as you think it does, it does require those exacting standards. But there's a difference between that, the emotional tone of that, which is "endeavor," versus the tone of perfectionism, which is, "I must not fail, no room for mistakes." It's a scary, fearful tone, to start with. And generally, with perfectionism goes an extraordinary dose of self-criticism or other criticism.

So, there is a negativity with perfectionism, even if it's internalized and not "spoken out" very much, whereas that doesn't have to be there with very high, exacting standards. There's a maturing from perfectionism to very high standards that can happen. That means that you drop that emotionally draining negativity and just stick with the high standards, and you don't need the judgment and the fear that goes alongside perfectionism.

Rachel Salaman: So, on the one hand, fear of failure can lead to perfectionism and self-criticism, as you've just said, but on the other hand it can also lead to under-achievement, because we give up before we've even tried – because we think we're not going to be perfect. So how can we navigate that minefield?

Pippa Grange: Yes, it's a tricky one. But I think that this is the essence of the method.

Firstly, see what's happening. Be able to stay with your fear, including your perfectionism, long enough to understand what's actually happening, and that it is fear showing up. If you decide that you're not going to put your hand up for that role or for that project because you might not be perfect at it, then how able are you to see that fear was part of that picture?

And then you have to look at what it's costing you. You have to create a compelling case for yourself to replace it with something that's stronger for you. The alternative is to stay stuck, and I guess the whole point of the book for me is that I'd like to help people become a little less stuck around these issues like perfectionism or jealousy or staying separate or criticism... that all have fear at their root.

Rachel Salaman: And you've taken us onto the third step, which is replace. So it's "see your fear," "face it," and then "replace it" – which is a really interesting idea. And you have several options for what we might replace it with in the book. One of them is "a different story," so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that.

Pippa Grange: Yes, life is made up of stories, narratives. Narratives inform us in extraordinarily dramatic ways, and I feel that perhaps we don't realize how often we have the pen in our own hand around those narratives. We get swept up in the narratives – cultural narratives, our parents' narratives, our company's narratives – rather than really exploring our own.

And so, what I'm inviting the readers to do, in regard to this, is to really have a look at what narratives are running them. And to think about what they might like to change in regard to that.

We can't always change our own circumstances, but we certainly can change the way that we tell the story of those circumstances. And that is profoundly powerful because it's stories that run our lives.

Rachel Salaman: How do we do that? Especially if we've tried and failed to do so in the past. Do we just need to activate our imagination, or are there some techniques we can try?

Pippa Grange: Yes, in the book I outline a number of questions that are thought starters and ways to provoke your thinking on the narratives that are running you now – but also what you would like them to be.

And I think that one of the things I would say, Rachel, is that we try to rush this stuff too much. And an "in-the-moment" fear we can deal with quickly. "Not good enough" fear, and replacing "not good enough" fear with something that is enduring and sustainable and stronger... it takes time.

So, if you've failed – as we said before, failure happens much more often than success, in lots of ways – so if you've failed at this before, I would say don't capitulate to that. Pick up the pen again, because we need to reiterate our own narratives regularly through life.

But most times we haven't spent the time really working out what the narrative is that's running us that we want to change, and then deeply investing in trying it out bit-by-bit. It requires some resilience and some self-care, and being willing to just take a bit longer to achieve that. And that's fine, because when you do change those narratives, they endure.

Rachel Salaman: You say we can also replace fear with purpose. So in this context, does it matter how big or small our purpose is or how meaningful it is? So, for example, our self-oriented goals, like losing weight or even getting more Facebook likes, are they purposeful enough to banish fear?

Pippa Grange: I would say not. If we're trying to be definitive about it, the difference for me is a goal – and goals are extremely valuable by the way – but a goal like achieving more Facebook likes or losing weight, it has an outcome and it is visible in a result, it is generally something that you could describe how you're going to get there, step by step.

A purpose is something much more winding. And a purpose is something that, generally, we don't add, we reveal about ourselves. And that might be your purpose as a parent and what kind of parent you want to be. It might be how much you want to invest in your team if you're a leader, and what matters to you, what's compelling to you about their experience at work every day. They're purpose things. You couldn't put them, necessarily, in a spreadsheet as a set of goals.

So, there's a significant difference, but purpose is an underrated way of banishing fear, because I mentioned earlier [that] when we're fearful we're insular. Purpose is generally about doing something beyond yourself, for the greater good, for the world outside you, for other people. So when we focus on that we naturally dial down fear.

Rachel Salaman: So, if there was one message you'd like people to take away from your book, and our conversation today, what would it be?

Pippa Grange: I'd like to encourage people to not try to fix "not good enough" fear really quickly, and find some courage to stay a little longer and understand your fear. And then accept that it's a journey to really change these things.

Sometimes I feel in psychology... There are some types of psychology that we can have a lot of technique and tips that really work in a short period of time. This isn't one of them, with "not good enough" fear. So, I would want to say be kind to yourself, be prepared to go on a journey – it's worth it. And don't get caught up in the fact that you're imperfect or failing at dealing with "not good enough" fear. It's kind of the opposite of what we want to achieve here. But, if you gave yourself a two-year journey to really navigate some of this stuff, I think that would be time very well spent.

Rachel Salaman: Great tip. Dr Pippa Grange, thanks so much for joining us today.

Pippa Grange: You're very welcome, Rachel. Thanks for having me.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Pippa's book again is, "Fear Less: How to Win at Life Without Losing Yourself." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Mind Tools Expert Interview from Emerald Works. Until then, goodbye.