The Big Leap

Hendricks builds the book around one observation from his practice. People assume that satisfaction arrives when the good news does, and instead find that something in them reacts against it: a run of success is followed by a slump, an argument, an illness or a piece of self-sabotage, and the thought underneath is usually that this cannot last or was not deserved. He calls this the Upper Limit Problem, an internal ceiling on how much good a person will tolerate, and his claim is that it does more damage than any external obstacle because it operates at exactly the moment things start working. He identifies four hidden fears he says produce it, and the programme in the book is about recognising which one is yours and raising the ceiling rather than fighting the symptoms. The accompanying idea is that of the zone of genius, the narrow band of work a person is uniquely suited to, which he argues most people avoid in favour of what they are merely good at. The material comes from work with high achievers rather than from controlled research.

Written from the publisher description, Open Library.

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• Gay Hendricks