Today I am returning to my usual blog and hope you are all feeling relief and some form of freedom is returning to us to raise our spirits. There may be a negative aftermath to this, but some counselling will help erate that. I had been discussing fear of failure,
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There are nine types of intelligence and we all have our own unique creativity
Before I begin this blog, I would like to send my best wishes to all those people, who read it every week. I am very conscious of the awful plague that has us locked down and how stressful this is for many people. My prayer is that all of you
The constant need for approval is crippling. It comes from parental lack of affection for the child
The need for approval is a deep and hurtful wound from childhood. I was driven by the need for approval. As a Principal, I needed approval from the students, the staff, the parents, the Board of Management, the Department of Education, the townspeople and the trustees! And my perfectionism was
A feeling of incompetence can lead to the controlling impulse
We have been looking at incompetence in the last blog. Unfortunately, it has been shown that feeling incompetent is one of the drivers for power and control, the basis for bullying. As the carrier of shame and a feeling of defectiveness, it drives the human to present a capable front
Teachers should ensure that their students are thoroughly instructed to ensure a feeling of competency in later life
Since parents are responsible for their children’s formation, including educational development, there is a lesson to be learned from the discussion in the last blog to ensure that the direction need is met. Most children must develop slowly in terms of learning, otherwise there is always a sense of unfinished
A feeling of incompetency pervades our thinking and behaviour
If you are not shown how to do things you may feel defective and a fraud, even if your achievements are noteworthy. The uninformed inner child binds you and you become afraid of change, avoiding new opportunities to enrich and give more meaning to your life. Petrúska Clarkson, who writes
If our dependency needs are not met, in adult life our inner child is crippled by fear
Jason continues his story about his crippling anxiety The course started and, unfortunately, old habits started to rear their head again when preparatory course assignments started. I started to skip some of the work that we were to do, and contributed nothing. I was lucky that the workload was small
Jason’s fear of failure was utterly debilitating
If we examine the fear of failure that Jason, the case study in the book, harboured, you will see that his was paralysing. Unlike my fear, it was evident and palpable and clearly in his awareness as he prepared for two interviews in preparation for his professional training. He found
People with fear of failure do not like unfamiliarity.
One of the links between both the incidents referred to in the last blog was novelty and unfamiliarity. They were both situations that I had never experienced before, and in that connection fear of failure can be linked to social fear and toxic shame. But, there are also other lessons
My own fear of failure inhibited me although I was unaware of it
The first example of my fear of failure happened in 1979. As I mentioned in the last blog I was unaware until recently what my difficulty was. I had graduated from University College Cork with a Ph. D in History and shortly afterwards a position as a History lecturer in