the test will make you nervous? Because studying
itself makes them nervous. The mere thought
of the test makes them anxious, and they don’t
want to feel anxious. Which, of course, makes
them twice as anxious at the test.” “So, the person joins the gym and tries a few
things, which makes him sore,” said Shannon. “He
assumes he’s doing something incorrectly and
quits the gym, because he doesn’t want to be bad
at it – or he doesn’t know how to be good at it.”
The problem with training and preparation –
for athletes and, likely, for other high-performers
in business, medicine, law, music and almost
every other professional pursuit – “is that we’re
in a talent-based society,” said Shannon, “with
everyone telling the youngster how great he or
she is. As a result, many high-performers don’t
attribute their success to training and preparation,
they attribute it to just being good at it.” Why not ask for help? Because, she said, a
foundational tenet of our mindset is not wanting
to appear insufficient. “We have a tendency,
called social desirability, to portray a picture of
ourselves that’s desirable to others around us.”
Jim Thorpe, for example, probably never tried
a sport he wasn’t immediately perfect at.
“And when ‘perfect’ becomes the expectation,
we all fear failure. It’s inevitable.”
Forget, for a moment, the professional athlete.
Let’s look at the weekend athlete who goes into
a gym to work out, to lose some weight.
This tendency to portray a false picture of
ourselves – confident, capable, self-sufficient –
can be applied to every challenge in our lives.
“Nobody goes to work and says, out loud, ‘I’m
not real confident.’ Everybody goes to work acting
confident, regardless of whether or not he or she
is. The problem is, someone should have told
them, ‘When I started, I wasn’t real confident,
either. Confidence comes from preparation
and experience, training and successes. You’re
new. How could someone new have as much
confidence?’
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