Mastering Fear: Harnessing Emotion to Achieve Excellence in Work, Health and Relationships

150 Pages·2016·0.87 MB·English

by  Robert Maurer

MASTERING FEAR
Harness Emotion to Achieve Excellence in Health,
Work, and Relationships
ROBERT MAURER, PHD
WITH MICHELLE GIFFORD, MA
Copyright © 2016 by Robert Maurer, PhD
and Michelle Gifford, MA All rights reserved under the Pan-American and
International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in
whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the
publisher, The Career Press.
MASTERING FEAR
EDITED BY ROGER SHEETY
TYPESET BY KRISTIN GOBLE
Cover design by Rob Johnson Cover image by alexemanuel/iStock Printed in the
U.S.A.
To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-
848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on
books from Career Press.
The Career Press, Inc.
12 Parish Drive
Wayne, NJ 07470
www.careerpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP Data Available
Upon Request.
DEDICATION
F
or my friend, Steve Albert, whose courage, humor, passion, and compassion
has inspired me to write this book and whose love and caring has given me
strength and comfort.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
am deeply grateful to the clients, the individuals, families, and organizations
that have entrusted me with their confidence, reached to me for help, and given
me the gift of contributing to their lives. Special thanks to my cowriter, Michelle
Gifford, who has put words to my thoughts, added her wisdom and clarity, and
who made this book possible. We are indebted to our agent, Sharon Bowers,
who saw the potential of this material, and gave us support and guidance
throughout this journey. For my wife Dia, and our cat Spot, who were both a
source of energy and much needed distraction from the rigors of writing. To our
publisher, Adam Grant, and our editor at Career Press, Kirsten Dalley, who have
worked to bring this project to fruition and provided their insights and
encouragement.
F
—Bob Maurer or Mike and Jacob, who have steadfastly and with great heart
supported every dream I’ve chosen to pursue—practical or not; and for
Grandma, Aunt Karen, Connie, and my sisters, who have each provided me
inspiration as this book came to life and who respond unfailingly every time I
reach. With gratitude to Robert Maurer, my friend and mentor in this topic, who
invited me to take part in this worthy adventure. In this time together, he has
taught me more than he’ll ever know and those I love.
—Michelle Gifford
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Laws of Success
Chapter 1: The Biology of Fear
Chapter 2: What Not to Do With Fear
Chapter 3: The Healthy Response
Chapter 4: Mastering Fear
Chapter 5: Staying Healthy
Chapter 6: Work Success
Chapter 7: Creativity
Chapter 8: Relationships: Sustaining Intimacy and Trust
Chapter 9: Why People Choose the Wrong Path … And How to Re-Choose
Chapter 10: The One Essential Skill
Chapter Notes
References
Index
About the Authors
INTRODUCTION
The Laws of Success
The success of humanity hinges on learning the laws of nature.
—Buckminster Fuller
W
e all strive for success. We work hard to achieve competence, recognition,
and rewards in our work. We dream of finding the perfect mate and feeling the
joy of giving and receiving love. We endeavor to eat right, exercise, and
maintain good physical health. Yet for many of us, the success we yearn for
remains elusive; and maintaining success seems impossible. Why do some
people seem to have such a hard time succeeding in the three key areas of life:
work, health, and relationships? And why do certain people achieve success only
to destroy the very accomplishments they’ve worked so hard to attain?
These are questions I have struggled with for many years in my work as a
business consultant and clinical psychologist. I’ve wondered why some very
disciplined, successful people persistently fight weight gain, smoking, alcohol,
and drugs; why individuals who desire romantic bliss repeatedly choose partners
unsuitable for commitment and intimacy; and why stress disorders, which
underlie so many other challenges, seem to be getting worse despite all of the
research and experts out there to help.
Consider these all-too-familiar scenarios:
A hard-working, dedicated employee is promoted to a leadership position. He
has trouble delegating and becomes increasingly ineffective, difficult to get
along with, and aloof.
A romantic relationship begins with great optimism and excitement, then one
partner becomes steadily more critical and distant, and finally disappears.
An individual achieves a dramatic improvement in health, changing lifelong
patterns of drinking, smoking, or overeating; then a stressful event occurs and
s/he resumes the habits so painstakingly changed.
Each person was devastated as their dreams slipped away.
As a professional working to help people at all stages and in all walks of life,
situations like these confounded me for years and I wanted to know why. It
seemed pointless to be helping people pursue and accomplish their life goals if I
could not also help them master the skills necessary to sustain them once
achieved.
But where would I look for the answers? Fortunately, the answers came
looking for me. For most of my career to that point, I’d been doing what
psychologists typically do: I worked with people who were struggling with some
aspect of their lives, identifying the specific problems they faced and helping
them to overcome those difficulties. This approach forever changed when I
walked through the UCLA Medical School library one day and saw, sitting on a
table, the book Plagues and Peoples1 by William McNeill. The cover intrigued
me, so I sat down and began to read. From that moment on, my professional life
would never be the same. The book described how the whole course of human
history has been radically influenced by diseases such as smallpox, malaria, and
yellow fever. What fascinated me most, however, was not the illnesses
themselves, nor even the devastation they caused. Instead, I was captivated by
how these plagues were cured.
Prior to my visit to the library that day, I had assumed, as perhaps you do, that
the way we remedy disease is by studying people who are ill and, from there,
brilliant researchers in top-notch laboratories develop the miracle drugs needed
for a cure. This is not, however, how the majority of these horrible maladies
were tamed. Take smallpox for instance. This great killer had been around for
thousands of years, taking the lives of an estimated 500 million people. Yet, the
cure for this dreaded illness was not discovered through scientific experiments
on the disease itself. Instead, it came about when someone began looking closely
at who wasn’t getting sick and then tried to figure out why.
In the midst of the smallpox epidemic in 18th century Britain, a country
physician named Edward Jenner became intrigued by a common folktale
claiming that milkmaids who had previously been sickened by cowpox would
never get smallpox. Without knowing how the immune system works, Dr. Jenner
developed a bold, creative experiment. He injected an 8-year-old boy first with
the cowpox virus, then with a very small dose of smallpox. The boy developed
resistance to the deadly disease and the use of this vaccination was thought to
have saved more lives than any other invention in history.
Studying those who have stayed healthy in the presence of grave illness and
discovering what was different about them has pointed the way to success in
curing other diseases as well. Building the Panama Canal was perilous work,
primarily due to the mosquito-borne infectious disease malaria. Many lives were
spared, however, when an inquisitive physician by the name of Dr. William
Crawford Gorgas began asking himself why the sailors aboard ships never
became ill, whereas the people digging on land were so tragically susceptible.
The difference, he cleverly surmised, was that the mosquitoes were drawn to the
still water near the canal, whereas the sailors were steadily surrounded by ocean
currents. Preventing this illness, he discovered, could be achieved by replicating
the environment of those who stayed well.
As I read these accounts, I began to reflect on my own profession.
Historically, the field of psychology had focused primarily on seeking accurate
diagnoses—labels for people’s problems—then designing effective treatments
from there. After reading Plagues and Peoples, I began to believe that more
significant breakthroughs could be made not by observing those courageously
struggling, but by looking at those who were succeeding and discovering what
they were doing differently. I concluded that, if psychology was to be most
useful, our work should be focused on determining how successful people thrive.
We should be replicating the conditions of those who are well.
With these thoughts in mind, I began searching worldwide for studies
attempting to identify the laws of success—those skills necessary for people to
succeed in all key areas of life: work, health, and relationships. Although I found
many published books on success, I was discouraged to find that a vast majority
focused on only one aspect of life: career success or relationship success or
physical well-being. However, as I persisted in my research, I discovered many
long-term studies that had followed large groups of people for years that
attempted to discover what circumstances and skills are necessary to overcome
adversity and sustain excellence across time. Among these investigations were
the Kauai Longitudinal study,2 the Terman Study of the Gifted,3 the Harvard
Grant Study,4 and the Study of Adult Development (Glueck Study).5 There is, of
course, no straight line to success and no one can achieve and hold onto success
without some setbacks along the way. However, each of these investigations
contributed meaningful insights regarding the fundamental principles or the