fear

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with an ex Olympic swimmer who competed in Seoul when she was just 14 years old.  She didn’t fulfil her potential.  When asked why, her response surprised me. “I wasn’t scared enough”. Essentially, she attributed her poor performance to a lack of fear. Perhaps because she was so young, she hadn’t appreciated the scale of the event and the enormity of the opportunity. She’d experienced little pressure and therefore failed to rise to the occasion. The issue of fear came up again on the Today programme a couple of weeks ago. Dr Pippa Grange…