Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement

305 Pages·2004·1.18 MB·English

by  Ken Christian

KENNETH W. CHRISTIAN, PH.D.

Breaking the Habit of

Adult Underachievement
I dedicate this book

to my mother and father,

who have always believed in me,

and even when they did not necessarily agree with me,

have always supported me.
Contents

Introduction
vi
I. ANATOMY OF A PROBLEM
1. Aiming Low
3
2. The Cradle of Mediocrity
34
3. Settling for Less
61
II. ESSENTIAL TASKS
4. All About Change
103
5. Prerequisites
127
6. Preparation
172
7. Action
196
III. AND BEYOND
8. Altitude Sickness and Other Predictable Problems 227

9. Defying Gravity 257

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 281

About the Author

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

I
was driving home from my friend Mark’s wedding weekend after
spending the night with his family. I had met Mark during my
freshman year of college, and we had grown close in the years since.
The previous afternoon and evening had been devoted to celebrating
Mark and his bride, Susan, but my thoughts kept returning to Mark’s
younger brother, Pete. Seeing him had been unnerving. Pete was in
sixth grade when I met him, and everyone had predicted great things for
him. Intelligent, charismatic, enthusiastic, playful, he was adored by his
family and drew people to him with his spontaneous zest for life. He
took accelerated classes and played basketball competitively year-round.
I hadn’t had regular contact with Pete since the family moved to the
East Coast. Even though I knew from Mark that Pete had slipped from
his pedestal—he had graduated in the bottom half of his high school
class and later dropped out of college, struggling to “find himself”—the
wedding was going to be the first time I’d seen him in years and I expected
to see some of that former exuberance. I wanted to reconnect with him.
vii(cid:1) INTRODUCTION
Nothing prepared me for what I saw. The bright light was extin­
guished.
Pete was distant at the rehearsal dinner. I approached him, but he
said he was jetlagged, then went to his room. The next day he
arrived at the last possible moment for the ceremony. At the reception
he dutifully made the rounds but avoided my gaze. Instead of casting
his former amiable spell on those around him, he looked like a card­
board cutout. He said the right things, but his remarks to family friends
about future plans and how he was doing sounded too cheery.
In my heart I knew he had not grown up. Time had merely passed,
and something shining had been lost. He still pretended the world lay
before him. Perhaps the deadness I saw in him was caused by an aware­
ness that the world had left him behind. The ambitious, imaginative,
mesmerizing kid I had walked to the lake with on summer nights and
taken for ice cream—the kid who called me “Doc” years before I got
my Ph.D.—was gone.
The day after the wedding I took Pete aside. I needed to under­
stand. At first he deflected my questions. I finally steered the conversa­
tion around to the past several years. Biting his lip, his head down and
fighting back tears, he began to speak.
“Look,” he said, “I screwed up, okay? I never thought I’d be where
I am.”
Pete stammered out his story. The year before the family moved he
had wanted a break from being the “perfect student.” He was sure he’d
get back to normal in high school when it really counted—but he
didn’t. “I always told myself I’d study next year, but I could never quite
get it going,” he said. “It never quite seemed worth it when next year
came. After a while I told myself I didn’t care.”
It never dawned on Pete that being engaged was not something he
could just switch off then easily switch back on again. When he made
his choice to take a break from being the perfect student, he began to
move in a decisively different direction, leaving behind some part of
himself. Before long he had forgotten who he had once been. The one
INTRODUCTION (cid:2) viii
thing he still cared about and excelled at was basketball. But he could
no longer rise above the competition on talent alone. He made team
practices but didn’t work as hard in the summer leagues, and by his
senior year he had encountered equally gifted athletes who worked
more diligently. Still, he ranked third in scoring in the county that year.
Then he allowed something simply destructive to happen. His high
school team qualified for the state championship tournament, but
Pete, the linchpin player at point guard, was in trouble with his grades
and in danger of failing his government class. His teacher gave him an
unprecedented chance to pass by writing a two-page essay on any topic
he chose related to the Constitution.
He never wrote it.
“What still kills me is that I didn’t decide not to write it. I just let
the deadline pass. Afterward I couldn’t explain why. The guys went on
to the tournament with my backup at point guard and got knocked out
in the first round. I let down everybody—the team, my family, me.”
After the basketball failure Pete went into a funk and never righted
himself.
For the first time he looked directly into my eyes.
“Tell me, Doc, what kind of person does that?”
His question was a kick in the stomach, because I didn’t have an
answer. I took a deep breath and did what therapists are trained to do.
I continued to listen.
The entire time we spoke Pete had a haunted look just behind his
eyes. I started to offer to help him find a therapist. Even as I said it my jaw
tightened at this automatic response. As a therapist, I knew what was pos­
sible, and I didn’t really think therapy would help. Now I felt haunted
too. Was his depression infectious, or was there something else right in
front of me, something I was missing? I told him I would get back to him.
As I drove away from the wedding, I realized that Pete’s situation
seemed naggingly familiar. I thought of Vince, who had come to see
me the previous year. Vince’s story was so different from Pete’s story.
Or was it? What was I seeing? What was I not seeing?
Vince was not a sought-after star. He didn’t have Pete’s presence or
natural charm. Though he was bright, he seemed lost, his face as drawn
ix (cid:1) INTRODUCTION
as Pete’s had been. But there seemed to be something else about him
that I could not put my finger on. I remembered how he had slumped
resignedly in his chair, gazing at the carpet, young, yet already very old.
He spoke of broken dreams and bad luck—none of the things he tried
had worked out. A string of opportunities and shortcuts he couldn’t
pass up had turned out to be detours into blank walls.
I also thought of Elise, who had had everything going for her but dur­
ing her first year of law school decided it was not worth it to continue
because she no longer wanted that kind of life. When she quit, she
thought that some time spent traveling would help her clear her head. But
she found that she had no other calling, no other path she wanted to fol­
low. Soon Elise felt aimless, consumed with self-doubt, and she became
convinced that she had hit her high-water mark and was receding.
Instead of going home, I drove to my office and started pulling
files. Here and there were names of other talented people like Pete,
Vince, and Elise, who had been languishing in a similar way when I
met them. Trying to find the way these people were connected, I began
to look for similarities in their childhood experiences. Then I recalled
Clarissa, one of my daughter’s friends from preschool, who began
school with enthusiasm and at some point faltered. Clarissa was bright
and had no learning problems. As a consultant at a rehabilitation cen­
ter, I had seen cases of serious learning disabilities. Clarissa did not suf­
fer from any such disability. And I did not detect anything that would
have interfered with her concentration. Like Pete, Vince, and Elise, she
simply seemed to contract and stop putting out effort.
Scanning one file after another of adults, children, and concerned
parents, I recognized that what I was seeing was not an isolated phe­
nomenon. My practice was made up of adults, couples, and families.
Perhaps 80 percent of the parents who had brought in their adolescents
had expressed, among other concerns, worries about their children’s
school performance. Sometimes these kids were like Pete—children
with potential, frittering it away. I had helped some of the children,
but with others I was not satisfied with the results of my efforts. What
was different about them, and what did they need? I didn’t know, and
I wasn’t sure anyone else knew either.