You are not afraid of failing. You are afraid of it working.

Last week, during an accountability meeting, we were discussing higher order behaviours: stepping up as CEO of your business; saying a number without flinching; being the one who is quoted; standing up in front of your peers; making and honouring bold plans for your business. And during the meeting, one designer shared that she feels she is the block to her own progress. She described the sense of an internal plug that she can’t pull out: wondering why she can’t, along with worrying about what would happen if she did.

I know how she feels. I feel it too. It’s like a knee-jerk ‘no!’, a decision that your body makes on your behalf before your conscious brain has had a chance to ponder pros and cons.

Magnets facing the wrong way is the image I keep coming back to. Not a wall, which you could climb, and not a weight, which you could get stronger and lift. A repulsion to the work that increases the closer you get.

That last part is the useful bit. If something is difficult or beyond your current level of skill, it’s just consistently difficult, it doesn’t get more difficult the nearer you get to it. If the resistance rises as you approach, it’s not a simple matter of degree of difficulty, it’s something else altogether.

So here is my answer, and it took a day of thinking and reading, and seven or eight versions of this blog post to arrive at a possible theory.  

One sensation, three sources

The block in your chest feels like one thing. It is not. There are three quite different things that produce an identical sensation, and they have three different remedies. Applying remedy one to problem two or three is, I think, the reason this never shifts for people who have been working on it for years.

Can’t. I do not know how to do this.

Mustn’t. If I do this, it will be undeniable that it was me.

Daren’t. If I do this, I will be liked less.

Can’t is a training problem. Mustn’t is a self-concept problem. Daren’t is about a cost you will personally pay. They may feel similar in the body - a plug - but they are not remotely the same in the world.

Can’t, and why it is almost never the answer

Can’t is the most straightforward and the easiest to fix. A gap in knowledge is a comfortable thing to have, it needn’t reflect on your self-image, and you can fix it by reading, studying, or practising.

Here are two tests you can use to see if your problem is ‘can’t’.

The success test. Imagine doing the thing, and it goes well, in public, with your name on it and everybody knowing it was yours. Does the block ease, or does it tighten?

If being seen to be the kind of person who operates successfully at this level doesn't bother you, then the resistance you feel may simply be uncertainty about how to do the thing.

But, if the sensation tightens, it probably isn’t that you lack skill or knowledge. Something that tightens when you imagine public success isn’t a ‘can’t’ issue - read on.

The anonymity test. How would you feel if the thing happened successfully, and you were paid for it, but nobody ever knew it was you?

If anonymity makes you relax, this isn’t a ‘can’t’ issue, you have an issue with attribution - again, read on.

Mustn’t - the internal consequences

In 1960, in Psycho-Cybernetics, plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz reported that patients whose faces he had successfully altered frequently did not feel any different afterwards. He concluded that the self-image was the thing setting the ceiling, and that a person’s outer life cannot rise above the version of themselves they carry internally.

Self-verification theory, developed by the psychologist William Swann from 1981 onwards, observes that people act to confirm the view they already hold of themselves. Not the flattering view. The existing one.

In Swann’s studies, given time to think, people chose the assessment that was worse and truer to their existing account of themselves over the assessment that was better.

Your system simply has a strong preference for a world in which the existing account of you keeps being true, and it will spend real effort to keep it true.

The magnets metaphor fits well here. The resistance rises with proximity because proximity is what makes the evidence undeniable. This is where the automatic ‘no!’ intervenes, specifically on the senior, visible behaviours, not so much on the difficult private ones.

If you do something well, but nobody knows, this can sit quietly alongside your self-concept. Success with your name on it, in public, in front of people who will remember, cannot.

That is mustn’t. You know how to do the thing. But you can't reconcile yourself as being a person capable of doing it. 

Why mustn't (and daren't) are worse for women

Research suggests that society is picky about the kinds of success it will allow women to enjoy.

Collaborative success is the permitted form: not stand-out, tall poppy success, but collective success that shares the credit. However, further research shows that this version of success is permitted because it is the form in which the credit can be taken away from you.

In studies of mixed teams where a task succeeded and it was not obvious who had done what, observers rated the woman as less competent, less influential and less likely to have played a leading role.

Other studies show that, in academia, men receive tenure at much the same rate whether they publish alone or with co-authors. Women become less likely to receive tenure the more they co-author. Collaboration is not neutral. It is where credit goes missing.

Society smiles on a successful woman on the condition that it remains structurally impossible to prove she was responsible.

The finding that settles it

In 2022, Christine Exley and Judd Kessler asked over four thousand adults and more than ten thousand schoolchildren to assess their own performance. Compared to men, women rated themselves about thirteen points lower on a hundred point scale, roughly a quarter below the average response.

The gap persisted when the assessment was private and would never be shown to an employer. It persisted when participants had been given perfect information about their own results, absolute and relative, so it was not that they believed they had done worse. And it was already statistically significant in eleven-year-olds.

If the discount runs when nobody is watching, when there is nothing to gain by modesty, and when you have been handed your own score, then it is not a calculation about the room. It is the account of yourself that you carry into the room, and it matters not whether anyone else is present.

Daren’t, the biggest, scariest cost - the external consequences

Which brings me to the third source, and it’s one I have been working on personally this year.

There is a real social cost for visible female agency. It is not paranoia. A meta-analysis by Melissa Williams and Larissa Tiedens, covering seventy-one studies, found that explicit dominance behaviours, asking for the raise, claiming the floor, being direct about what you want, drew penalties for women.

But look carefully at what the penalty was. It did not damage perceptions of the women’s competence. It damaged how much they were liked.

(Does that sting for you? It does for me.)

So the block is not wrong. It is correctly recognises that success will not come for free, and it has identified the currency, which is warmth rather than credibility.

There are very good evolutionary reasons why we need the approval of society. If a subliminal fear of losing approbation, of being shunned in some quarters, is the source of the block, it might be oddly reassuring to know that your instrument is working. You are not broken. You have an accurate detector.

But here’s where the cost really mounts. 

The studies cited above measure a reaction to a single act, or to a single described person, judged once, usually by strangers. 

But what the designer with the block is faced with is not a series of discrete acts. It is a change of disposition. She is deciding to change, to become a person who prices her work properly, says the number without softening it, takes a public position, and puts her own name where the practice’s name used to be. Do a thing once and you were assertive on Tuesday. Do it as policy and you are assertive, which is a sentence about who you are rather than about what you did.

And it’s not just your clients who will notice. A change in how you carry yourself is delivered to everybody you know at the same time, and there is no way to deliver it to one party at a time. Peers. Suppliers. Contemporaries who knew you before. Friends. Family.

Self-verification is not only something you do to yourself. Other people hold accounts of you as well, and they have the same preference for those accounts continuing to be true. If the people around you carry a version of you in which you are modest, accommodating and pleasingly unopinionated, then you are not merely changing your own behaviour. You are invalidating a document that other people are also using. It's likely there will be some fallout. 

The block in your chest worries about the loss. It doesn’t concern itself with the benefits.

The same mechanism runs in the other direction. As the people who verified the old account drift, people who verify the new one come closer, and your client list is made of the second group. The people who will pay properly for your work are, by definition, people who hold an account of you in which your work is worth paying properly for. It's harder to recruit them while you are busy confirming the other account. And this is not a consolation prize. It is the entire commercial mechanism of the thing you are trying to do.

The block is wrong - choosing 'no!' is not free.

Being universally liked is not neutral. It too comes at a cost: the number not said, the position not taken, the post not made, the project that went to somebody louder, every year, compounding. There’s no parallel life you’ll ever see that confirms what might have been, which is why this cost is never calculated.

So the trade is not between a cost and no cost. It is between a cost you can see (you change, and this might be received badly in some quarters), and a cost you have been paying silently for years but have no measure of: the cost of staying the same.

"Just be prepared to be disliked" fails as advice. It is not wrong. It is the second step, but first things first.

What the first step actually is

Not affirmation, what you need is evidence. Telling yourself you deserve it is a claim, and claims do not move a system that runs on verification. It will simply be filed alongside all the other things you have said to yourself in the car.

You do not talk yourself into a new self-concept. You build an irrefutable case that it has already happened. 

You assemble the evidence. You name the causal chain. You establish which decisions were yours and what would not have happened without you. Not "I deserve this", which is a claim, but "here is what I decided, here is what followed, and here is the part that I'm personally responsible for".

You aren’t lucky. You work hard. You need to assemble the evidence of this. It’s one of the reasons why I am 85 issues into a newsletter that publishes weekly statistics on how my business has grown, and what I’ve done that week to make it happen. I'm relying on this body of evidence to help me accept any success that might arrive. 

The role of values

‘NO!’ wins when we haven’t calculated the cost of obeying it.

This is where I see values performing a meaningful role. A woman who knows what she is for can carry an accurate fear without being governed by it. The fear stops being a veto and becomes a line in a decision.

Defining personal and professional values is often the very first exercise I complete with clients. Values need to be settled, in advance and honestly, knowing the person you intend to have been (when 90 year-old you rocks on the porch and reflects on your life). Then you can make informed decisions about how you will behave and actively accept the consequences: internal and external. 

And the answer is allowed to be no

I’m not saying, "push through!".

Sometimes the block is a correct decision arriving before your logical brain has been consulted. The behaviour genuinely is not for you, or not yet, or not at this price, and the sensation in your chest is a well-informed refusal rather than an obstacle.

No is a legitimate answer, and you must feel free to give it, otherwise you can’t trust the rest of your decision making.

So, to the designer who asked

(And whose permission I sought before writing any of this). 

The block in your chest is probably not one thing, and it is almost certainly not doubt about whether you are any good.

It is some proportion of a refusal to be identifiable as the cause of your own success, which is treatable with evidence rather than encouragement. And some proportion of an accurate forecast of a real cost, which is not treatable at all, because there is nothing wrong with it. It is payable, but best you calculate first how much it is likely to cost you, and how much you've been paying as a consequence of not stepping up.

One of the biggest worries I had about my own business this year was not the market or the competition. It was me, and specifically it was an instinctive ‘no!’ that I knew was hovering in the wings, just waiting to sabotage any future success, unless I could point to empirical evidence as to why I deserved it.