tim's journal

Acrophobia

Over the last couple days, I have been measuring scalp-electrode impedance over frequency on myself. The process takes quite a bit of time and requires that I keep my head rather still (mostly because my setup is rather delicate). In order to do so, I've been reading online. Today I stumbled across James Waldroop and Timothy Butler's The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back: Overcoming the Behavior Patterns That Keep You from Getting Ahead. I found it looking for books on anger management, after losing my cool with #1. They call the first bad habit acrophobia, i.e., never feeling good enough.

Why acrophobia? Acrophobia is the fear of heights, or, more properly, the fear of falling from heights. This happens when you are where you shouldn't be. If you've ever looked at a job offer letter, or a college acceptance letter and thought, they must have made a mistake, or been in a meeting where you felt totally outclassed and out of place, that is what they mean. Waldroop and Butler's book covers bad habits, Achilles' heels, as they call them, that cause talented people to fail. Think of them as personal glass ceilings. In this case, acrophobia either consciously or unconsciously causes some to sabotage their own careers in order to get back to where they are supposed to be.

They give the example of Paul, a quant banker with an MBA from the University of Texas. After a few years of excellent performance, he was assigned to manage a group of Harvard, Wharton bankers who, when the Mexican peso collapsed, lost millions of dollars. Paul, as you might guessed, felt completely out of place and not worthy of this position. This reflected in how he interacted with people, e.g., not being able to delegate down to how he walked. It got so bad that people, while recognizing him to be hard worker, did not really go to him for advice. They started to see him as how he saw himself, a quant that got lifted up too high. This story has a happy ending though, since Paul consulted Waldroop and Butler, who identify his problem and help him overcome it. One interesting advice: walking with your hands behind your back. It forces you to slow down and projects the image that even with all the crises around you, that you are in control. Hmmm, I need to work on that.