Tag Archive: Perfectionism

May 15

Fear of Failure or is it the Fear of Failing?

Fear of Failure or is it the Fear of Failing? I was reading someone’s blog. They are a personal trainer, not a sport psychology consultant. I’m not saying that because I’m academically prejudiced about personal trainers. Just about the best friends I have are trainers and coaches and I borrow concepts from them all of the time. I just want to make it clear that their definition is based on their experience. As I guess you could say are all of ours.

They were talking about FEAR. Primarily Fear of Failure. It was a decent piece as far as it went. The writer unfortunately does not understand the subtle difference between Fear of failure and fear of failing.

They wrote “FEAR can be scary; it can definitely hold athletes back from accomplishing many great things. But as a trainer my job is to take that Fear and turn it into a positive. Turn it into something that the athlete can use to strive to become better. For example, my Fear is failure, I do not want to fail at anything I do, so I push myself to achieve greatness at all things. I do not always succeed but I learn many great lessons from my failures. We as athletes, coaches, parents have to turn the Fear of something into a positive, so we can achieve greatness on all levels. We need to strive to be better today than we were yesterday”. I do wish it was just that easy, but they made some interesting statements. Most of all it got me thinking about the difference between Failure and Failing. Read the rest of this entry »

Jul 08

Jack of All -Trades –Master of None– Perfectionism

by Mike Margolies

My book The Athlete within You is almost ready to go to press. It was a long journey. It is interesting how I feel about it. Writing over the years has been a real pain in the ass for me. Call it perfectionism, fear of failure or whatever you would like. When I was in graduate school back in Virginia we had a discussion about this very topic. The gist of it was that my professors laughed at the idea that I was a perfectionist. They said, as I obviously put so little effort into my technical writing, that while perhaps I feared failure, I was just a lazy, though brilliant, student.

Over the years working with many people, I have determined in my own lazy, but brilliant way, that as I thought back then, they were way off base. I think people can become so perfectionistic that rather than attempt to do something to their own unreachable standards, they just shut down. Moreover, because they fear failure, the move on to another activity. When they find success there and start to master that area of their life, they may become once again caught up in this cycle of perfectionism and fear of failure. Perhaps this is where we find the saying Jack-Of-All-Trades, Master of None. (please comment at the end with your Perfectionism stories)

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Apr 10

All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten

by Mike Margolies

All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten was written in 1988 and through the years has developed sort of a cultish type of following. It is often quoted as being the basis for what we know. The rest of our education, both in school and out is just an addendum. Some use it against our schools and others in support. Just depending on what they are attempting to challenge. I thought I would take it from a different perspective, as I don’t work with kindergarten kids; I work with high school athletes and adults.

Most of the perspectives I have read about this book is in regard to how we really do learn all of our life skills in our early years. I certainly am not going to argue that point and that perhaps the rest of our learning experience is the learning of facts and figures. I would like to discuss however that not everything we learn at this time is useful to us as human beings. This is also not meant to be a critique of the school system, because many of the things we learn at this age are from parents, siblings, friends as well as teachers.

The reason I am looking in this direction is that so many of my clients can trace some of part of their negative behavior back to these early times. Many think that it is an experience they had much later, but let’s take a look at some common experiences in and out of sport.

One of my favorite storyteller, singer, and song writer’s is the late Harry Chapin. Most people know him for Taxi. He wrote another song called “Flowers are Red”.

Harry Chapin – Flowers Are Red lyrics | LyricsMode.com

It’s all about how a teacher that criticizes a young boy about his drawings and takes an energetic, young child with a vivid imagination and crushes his vitality. I suspect a lot of us have had that person in our lives. My kindergarten teacher was like that. I drew a lot of people using triangles for bodies. I was told I was stupid and would never be an artist. Funny the things we remember. Even some of our really good teachers didn’t always get it right. Read the rest of this entry »