Birmingham Success School – Week 2: with Robert Kelsey, Author of 'What’s Stopping You?'

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:15 in Training

Where: Spring Educational Society, 4 Vicarage Road, B15 3ES
Date: 14th March 2013
Time: 18:15
With: Robert Kelsey, Author of 'What’s Stopping You?'

Index

Biography
About the Success School
Who’s it For?
The Sessions
Photos

Biography of Robert Kelsey

Robert Kelsey is author of What’s Stopping You: Why Smart People Don’t Always Reach Their Potential and How You Can? the bestselling book on fear of failure and other career-limiting insecurities. Published in April 2011, it remained WH Smith’s number one business book for nine months.

Prior to writing the book, Robert was a financial journalist turned City banker turned entrepreneur. Currently he is the founder and CEO of Moorgate Communications financial PR agency. He was also previously an author – publishing his first book, The Pursuit of Happiness (a “lad-lit” comedy on his life as an English banker in New York) in 2000.

Yet Robert calls himself a practitioner in failure after a childhood and early-adulthood strewn with academic and career disasters. Determined to find an answer, he became a self-help addict – reading scores of books across the self-help genre.

Robert discovered that his problem wasn't failure but fear of failure. He was a classic High-FF – someone with a high fear of failing – approaching difficult but achievable challenges with a sense of dread regarding the seemingly-inevitable failure that awaited him and, therefore, seeking to avoid the challenge altogether: making his fear of failure self-fulfilling.

Yet, while helpful, the self-help books also promised something they couldn't deliver: a cure. Working with the London Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy, he discovered that, not only was his condition innate, it led him in totally the wrong direction with respect to goal-setting. Once aware of his condition, however, Robert Kelsey also realised that progress is possible as long as we take account of the fears that drive our insecurities, accept them as part of us, and find a way of navigating these self-constructed mental hurdles. What’s Stopping You? is the result.

Session Summary

This practically-oriented session will explore psychological barriers that tend to hold people back, and more specifically the fear of failure. Robert Kelsey will offer down to earth advice on making the most of your potential by recognising, accepting and learning to negotiate your insecurities.

He will offer a 7-step guide to dealing with fear of failure so that it will not sabotage your educational, professional or personal progress.

There will be short exercises to help you apply some ideas to your own lives, and time for questions and discussion.

About the Success School

The Birmingham Dialogue Society Success School is a four-week programme of evening seminars intended to help inspire, encourage and equip young people to aspire to and work towards success.

Participants will hear the inspirational stories of a range of successful professionals in a friendly and interactive environment. The School will establish an ongoing network through which participants, staff and speakers can share ideas and opportunities. Students who have attended for at least three of the sessions will be given certificates. Click here for further information and poster.

Who’s it For?

The School is primarily intended for young people of 16-21 years of age, and the Dialogue Society will initially advertise within Birmingham. We hope to welcome participants from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds.