What's Stopping You?: Why Smart People Don't Always Reach Their Potential, and How You Can

Impaired Mental Capacity

Evans makes an important point because, as we shall see, those of us with fear of failure may well have such fears due to an impaired mental capacity when it comes to reasoning and evaluations – perhaps due to poor conditioning or traumatic events as a child – meaning that we are also vulnerable, with fear being our response to that vulnerability. So emotions remain important in the modern world, which means that an impaired capacity to use our emotions to evaluate situations is potentially disastrous – or at best paralysing.

Does this therefore enslave us to the potency of our emotions, forcing those with impaired evaluations into self-destructive behaviour? Not always. Plenty of people behave in ways not dictated by ...