4 Reasons Scare Tactics In Self-Help Don’t Work
They’re great in putting pressure on you, but the results are not satisfying.
This is it. It’s sink or swim.
I told myself this mantra on a regular basis when I woke up in the morning. Near the end of my time living in my Halifax apartment, I delved into the world of sales in order to drag myself out of the lack of a job.
My first sales job was selling internet bundles to people. The company offered a cheaper rate in most cases than the competition so long as after the deal was over, we could rearrange another deal months down the road. Between selling bundles and having to call a call center to set the whole thing up, it was a bit of a slog.
And I was terrible at it.
Eventually the pressure just got to me and I began looking for some other sales jobs.
I did manage to find another sales job where I performed much better, but my approach then was very different. I stopped telling myself that it was an extreme situation and all I have to do is just try my best.
Combined with an easier sales pitch and product, I did very well with the job.
There was a time where I believed fear tactics worked best, particularly if they played on something more directly connected to your life. For a while I had a fear of returning back home to my parents. I valued my independence very highly and wanted to be self-sufficient and returning home would be a sort of death sentence for me.
With moving into Halifax and loving the city, I really wanted to be staying there. So I thought through fear, I’d be able to force myself to perform better.
I clung to that belief for some time, thinking that my Katimavik experiences where I experienced some growth was a result of that fear. After all, a sink or swim situation revolves around the idea of you adapting to a situation or failing.
But even when you fail, you do grasp things here and there and understand how things work.
The only issue is that through Katimavik, I had 9 months to overcome my social anxiety and get comfortable talking with different people. In the other situation, I was working to afford rent.
Ultimately fear tactics feel like they work but when it comes down to it, they crumble for a variety of reasons. And yet these are common tactics that I and many other self-help gurus encourage or imply.
They Create Extra Stress
To start, we as human beings struggle with managing stress. Even with thousands of articles and methods to de-stress, we still have ways of getting stressed out over things.
When stress becomes part of motivation, the intent gets twisted along the way and it can cause real damage. It’s stress that fuels people to work very long hours or to prioritize work over the rest of their lives for example. It’s also stress that can cause people to cave and just stop altogether.
Depending on the context that it’s being used, it can be a manipulation tactic. We see this all the time in self-help where the guru’s products and services claim to be these revolutionary tools that will change your life forever.
They take a legitimate concern and twist it into something that’s more real to you. Something that makes you worried or stressed out about deep down.
Self-help gurus recently have been putting out AI courses, preying on the fact that “AI might take your job”. For some people, taking the course could be one way for them to be getting ahead and either using AI for some side hustle, or using it for work.
There are many different reasons for why we do what we do, but historically when fear tactics are used they are not only effective, but result in one manipulating the masses to perform a specific action. But the issue then is people prioritize satisfying that fear rather than actually growing from the problem they are faced off against for very different reasons.
It Leads To Not As Great Output
When you are bought into something by fear, the actions that follow behind it are often not as good as they could’ve been — if they even happen at all. Because of the extra stress we pile onto ourselves, pulling yourself by your bootstraps becomes the only realistic option and that doesn’t always pan out.
There is a risk of us just shutting down from the stress, burn out, or get depressed about our situation that we put ourselves in.
And while those kinds of harsh tactics can work at times, raising up fear puts us into more of a state of vulnerability where we recognize what we’re facing is a problem. Not only that, but the whole drill sergeant act that comes from fear and tough love tactics doesn’t really do much to help when you’re in that vulnerable state of mind.
The end result is what I’ve mentioned before. It led to me wasting my time chasing after clients and not making any sales and coming back home stressed out more than ever before. Worried about whether I’ll make it to next month or not. It piles on more fear and stressors that prevents you from focusing and actually solving the problem.
It makes you shut down your reasoning and you latch onto another reason — whatever a self-help guru or some other outsider to your problem says.
And even when you do somehow manage to achieve results — like I did with my Katimavik experience — it could’ve been much better. If I didn’t stress out, I could’ve made stronger connections with those around me from that experience. Especially since I was one of the few in the group who spoke English and French and there were distinct language barriers early on and continued to be throughout the entire program.
It Works For Specific Mindsets
One large well-known study concluded that fear tactics work so long as:
- You are susceptible to the problem;
- And you’re confident in your ability to take action and prevent it.
While this study focused more on health problems, this could be used as a universal rule. You need to be in this particular headspace and that can be very difficult with fear tactics making you especially vulnerable to your situation.
Over time, I got better being around people and talking to people because I’ve built up my confidence over time. I excelled in my second sales job and not the first because I put more confidence in my abilities to convince people and persuade them to buy whatever I was selling.
The issue is that when it comes to fear tactics, it’s often used in a broad sense. It results in a similar manner to gurus offering blanket advice on things.
Even though a lot of people can generally relate to it, the specific advice might not work in practice due to the nuanced situations that people have in their lives and that the guru isn’t aware about.
As a result, it makes sense for it to work better in people’s situation where they know the problem, feel it, and are confident in solving the issue. In that regard, fear tactics provide more of a push.
But in cases where someone is vulnerable and unsure about themselves, it can lead to them being mislead about what the problem is in their lives or how to solve it. It can lead to them taking more risks, stressing out unnecessarily, and ultimately failing or getting middling results from their efforts.
It’s Not A Viable Long-Term Solution To Bigger Goals
Whether it’s covering a need or satisfying a long-term goal of yours, fear tactics often rest in the extrinsic motivation camp. The kind of motivation that gives you a massive push before dying out quickly short after.
We saw all this at work during the Great Resignation. While a lot of us chalk up the behaviour to pay — which can be true to some degree — a study found that a larger reason was just a toxic work environment. When it comes to our emotions, a bad place to work at can be alright if you have the intention of working harder to get into a better position or find better work.
But over time it leads to you being worn down. Constantly driving that fact you don’t like working some place and have a terrible boss threatening to fire you weighs a lot on one’s mind. It leads to the predictable behaviour that I’ve mentioned throughout this article.
It leads to you underperforming, getting demotivated, and in the case of this scenario, results in people just quitting to find some place better.
The issue with this tactic in the Western world is that we use these fear tactics to focus on consequences. In some cases they work when you’re in a specific frame of mind. But you’re leaving a lot of it to chance.
What works better — in the case of fear tactics — is to propose solutions and provide solid ones that people can work through. In workplaces, sales can be bolstered by using A/B testing, having more social media presence, offering deals to customers that sales reps can pitch.
In our personal lives it’s about looking for actual strategies, and asking those who are using these tactics questions. Piece together what their solutions are and whether they could fit in with a solution that works for you.
Even in cases where you don’t know the full answer, you can still base a lot of your judgement around your emotions. After all, fear tactics compell us to act on whatever solution is given to us. To ask questions, dive down, and feel about whether this is practical or reasonable to you is something you can be doing from there.
In the end, it’s all about showing a path and unfortunately a lot of self-help gurus don’t know how to do that. Even when we know the basic solutions to our problems, figuring out and establishing your own systems is better than buying into whatever fear tactics self-help gurus throw at you.
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