Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement

258 Pages·2014·1.05 MB·English

by  Christian

Your Own Worst Enemy
Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement
Kenneth W. Christian, Ph.D.
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
I. Anatomy of A Problem
1. Aiming Low
2. The Cradle of Mediocrity
3. Settling for Less
II. Essential Tasks
4. All About Change
5. Prerequisites
6. Preparation
7. Action
III. And Beyond
8. Altitude Sickness and Other Predictable Problems
9. Defying Gravity

Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
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.
Nothing prepared me for what I saw. The bright light was extinguished.

P
ete 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 cardboard 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 awareness 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 understand. At first
The day after the wedding I took Pete aside. I needed to understand. At first
he deflected my questions. I finally steered the conversation 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 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 possible, 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
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 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 during 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 follow. 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 center, I had seen cases of serious learning disabilities. Clarissa did
not suffer 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 phenomenon. 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.
sure anyone else knew either.
It was late when I closed my files. I had been searching in vain for answers
to Pete’s haunting question. I was trying to give voice to something else too.
Beyond my affection and concern for Pete and the others, their struggles touched
something in me. These people had all arrested something vital within
themselves. Seeing the similarities in their struggles made me determined to do
something about what I saw and the incredible waste it represented. I wanted to
find a way to reach these people—people like the faces that came back to me
from my files—before they became as depleted and empty as Pete and Vince.
But where to start?

I
n the weeks that followed I scoured the scientific literature for answers. Earlier
in my career I had conducted research on self-esteem, focusing on what people
consider important and the criteria they use to evaluate themselves. Beliefs about
oneself and the world exert a powerful influence on goals and actions; I was sure
that these issues must be involved.
Research on underachievement, I discovered, focused on external behavior,
chiefly academic performance, and not on internal experience. Interest in the
topic had hit a peak in the 1970s before waning. Theoretical concepts and
methods of intervention became dated. Standard forms of psychotherapy yielded
mixed results, stretching two years or more without reliable consequences.
Group therapy showed more promise, but no results of any systematic use of
family therapy were reported.
I widened my search to other areas, eventually coming across research from
social psychology on self-defeating behavior: the paradoxical tendency of some
people to respond to the possibility of failing by deliberately sabotaging their
own efforts. Finally, I seemed to have a lead.
I knew by now that underachievement was an epidemic problem. Parents,
educators, therapists, and others desperately needed a new perspective that
would lead to hope and solutions. As I branched out from the research on self-
defeating behavior, I began to develop an encompassing view of
underachievement that offered new ways of intervening. I concluded that the
best way to proceed would be to come at the problem with an intensive,
multifaceted approach designed to shift the elements that kept underachieving
behavior in place. To accomplish this, we simultaneously placed the child in a
structured psycho-educational peer group, the parents in a parent education
group, enrolled the family in family therapy, and consulted closely with school
officials and teachers over a brief four and a half month period. With this
approach, I founded the Maximum Potential Project in 1990. Using these
specifically designed techniques we achieved unprecedented results. Children
changed their fundamental orientation to schoolwork and their lives. We saw
them become productive. We saw them become engaged.

I
n 1993 I was sitting in the studios of the San Francisco National Public Radio
affiliate KQED, having just been interviewed about the Maximum Potential
Project. As I started answering calls on the air, a curious thing happened. I
presumed I would hear from concerned parents, but calls began to come in from
listeners who said, “That’s me you’re describing. I was that kid who ducked out
on assignments and toyed with school. I still duck out. I want to live differently,
but I don’t know how.”
More than half of the callers that night were not parents wanting help for
their children, but adults wanting help for themselves. Some of the calls were
particularly wrenching. As I listened, I realized I had more work to do. In a
matter of days I set out with my associates to understand how we could help
Pete, Vince, Elise, and other adult underachievers change. I wanted to see them
become productive. I wanted to see them become engaged.
I found that while some underachieving adults seemed to settle in and accept
mediocre levels of functioning, many others, like Pete, Vince, and Elise, began a
long, torturous slide backward into disappointment, bitterness, and regret. As I
scrutinized more closely the issues they faced, I came to an inescapable
conclusion: the basic elements of the style I saw in all these people were nearly
universally present in the general population.
Everywhere I looked I found that people put limits on their lives. In fact,
people seem embarrassed about having or articulating dreams and seem more
devoted to squelching them than to pursuing them. They are bold about issues of
scant personal import, but timid about the desires of their hearts; they secretly
long to do more but remain frozen, passive. Furthermore, it became obvious that
the widespread tendency for people to start a new program of self-development
and then shrink back from its demands is in its own way a version of
underachieving. In short, I saw that adult underachievment—even in its extreme
forms—is an extension of such commonplace lapses as not finishing that book,
putting off that change in diet, or repeatedly falling behind on correspondence.
Underachievement is widely accepted in the popular culture, which puts
little value on persistence in the face of setbacks or on the unique pleasure of
working long and hard on something personally important. We like things to be
fun, quick, and easy. We are much more interested in prodigies and phenoms