Pippa Grange - Fear Less

A stimulating book for performance and life. We all need to understand fear, and learn how to create the right environment to be courageous. Quality read!

Eddie Jones

Practical, powerful, profound. Pippa Grange promises freedom from whatever it is that holds you back

James Kerr, bestselling author of Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About the Business of Life

Encourages us to look at our sources of fear, know them and even embrace them so that we may live with more emotional freedom. I recommend this book

Julia Samuel, bestselling author of Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass

An owners manual for a fearful age

Michael Calvin, bestselling author of The Nowhere Men and State of Play

The England team appears in a better place psychologically than it has for generations and the credit goes to psychologist Pippa Grange

The Guardian

Gareth Southgate knew that Pippa Grange could hold the key to transforming the World Cup squad. England were a better team with her onboard

The Duke of Cambridge (Prince William)

The woman behind that World Cup penalty shootout miracle

Daily Mail

Shes amazing everyone listens when she talks

Dele Alli, Tottenham Hotspur & England

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Vermilion, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

Vermilion is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright Dr Pippa Grange 2020

Cover design by James Jones

Dr Pippa Grange has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in the United Kingdom by Vermilion in 2020

penguin.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781473572560

For Ablaye, whose feet-on-the-ground perspective and love of life are truly inspiring. Your example reminds me how much we gain from living a fear less life.

What if I told you that your life is run by fear?

That might chime with you, or it might seem unlikely.

Either way, if you dont feel fulfilled or truly successful, I can promise you that fear is ultimately whats holding you back. If you are quick to judge others or harsh on yourself, fear is speaking. If your life never feels enough, fear is the culprit.

I have spent 20 years working as a performance psychologist, helping people find better, happier ways to work and play. And the conclusion I have reached is that all of us are driven by fear. All of us.

Yet, strangely, thats not a depressing revelation or a permanent life sentence. In fact, once you acknowledge the role of fear, it quickly leads to a truly radical conclusion: if you can shrink the effects of fear, your life will be transformed. That is why working with fear has become the bedrock of what I do.

But first let me explain how I got to this place. My job involves working with leaders and athletes, CEOs and performers, counselling them to get through difficulty or to build resilience and, of course, to succeed and to win. Ive spent most of my time in locker rooms and boardrooms, trackside, poolside, pitchside and courtside, often as a sole woman within a team of men.

Ten years ago I noticed my approach changing. I began to see that the real shifts werent happening at the level of performance coping, toughing it out, battling to win but at a deeper level. In my daily conversations, the same themes would come up time and time again: shame, inadequacy, loneliness, jealousy, dissatisfaction. These felt very familiar in my life Id imagine they might be in yours, too.

For instance, I would speak to athletes soon after theyd smashed personal bests or even world records. Rather than being full of joy, they would already be feeling pressure around the next race, the next challenge. Or Id talk to an incredibly successful business leader whod accumulated all the status symbols of success, but they would only be able to see their own faults.

I also worked with people who had missed out on a trophy or a big opportunity, but who nonetheless werent broken. In each conversation, Id try to go deeper, to get to the root of what was happening for these people. I wanted to know why some people felt unfulfilled even as they succeeded, and others felt fulfilled even in failure.

Digging down, what I found underneath was fear. I realised that fear appears in our life in many guises. And its these hidden fears that drive us to feel our lives arent enough, that prompt us to spend our time worrying about competition, comparison, chasing targets and seeking status, being a perfectionist or over-controlling. Fear turns life into a battle, tells us we need to hide our real selves, that we can never have enough or be enough.

So, I thought, is there a way to change this? What might living with less fear look like?

I started by looking inwards. I realised that I too had grown up with fear at the heart of my being. I was a council-house kid in a single-parent family that had its issues with alcohol and drug addiction, as well as domestic violence, and I had lost a brother to suicide. Through all of this, my mum, my earliest role model, adopted a Churchillian fight them on the beaches stance, interspersed with bouts of giving up. I grew up thinking being fearless meant shutting down emotionally and toughing it out.

I acted like a smart-arse, mainly to keep people from getting too close. Yet on the inside I was a reserved, studious nerd. And that was my ticket out: I got myself into college, and then, with the help of an inspirational lecturer, to university, all the way to two doctoral degrees one completed, the other one still ongoing and some incredible jobs working with top sports teams around the world, from New Zealand rugby league to Australian swimming and football in England, as well as a whole raft of Australian rules football teams.

Although from the outside I looked like a high-achiever, on the inside I did not feel fulfilled just like the people I was having conversations with. My underlying fear left me believing I had to fight to win at life, to fake it, to hide who I really was.

During these one-on-one conversations with people successful in their field, I kept coming up against fear, in all its different and destructive forms. So I started to look for ways we can talk about fear, to explore underneath the surface issues that were showing up, such as jealousy or dissatisfaction, self-judgement or perfectionism.