Product Description

We’ve all been there: that make-it-or-break-it moment of our careers—on the brink of a deal, poised at the starting gate, under the spotlight waiting to speak or perform in front of our peers. At this point, where everything seems to be on the line, most of us experience one overriding reaction-fear-and this fear can have negative physical, mental, and emotional consequences on how well we do our job.

Don Greene, Ph.D., a renowned sports psychologist, teacher at the Juilliard School, and "stress" coach to top executives and entertainers, has spent decades studying fear and its effect on performance. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Greene shares the proven techniques he has used with Olympic athletes, Grand Prix drivers, the Vail Ski School, Golf Digest Schools, the New World Symphony, and Merrill Lynch traders to help them perform their best under pressure.

In his years of working with Olympic and professional athletes, network news anchors, classical musicians, actors, dancers, trial attorneys, brokers, and CEOs, Dr. Greene discovered that there were certain commonalities in people's responses to high-pressure situations. Untrained, these individuals' reactions were allowing fear to take over and affect decision-making, poise, and display of skill. But Dr. Greene found that by applying methods such as the centering technique, these same people could work through their fear and perform better than ever before.

Fight Your Fear and Win begins with a self-assessment performance survey that will allow you to pinpoint your own reactions to stress: how you handle distractions, how you are affected by nervousness, your mental outlook, your response to fear, and your ability to bounce back from failure. After completing this self-assessment, the book takes you through the seven essential skills required for optimal performance:
1.

Determination
2.

Energy
3.

Perspective
4.

Courage
5.

Focus
6.

Poise
7.

Resilience

Interspersed with true stories from Greene's wide variety of experiences training everyone from the San Diego S.W.A.T. team to singers at the Metropolitan Opera, each chapter includes a series of mental and physical exercises that will help you track your progress. This simple twenty-one-day plan will make a profound difference in the way you approach challenging situations, and allow you to think more clearly and creatively under pressure. Whether you are giving a closing argument in a courtroom, making a presentation at work, auditioning for a role, or stepping up to the first tee, Fight Your Fear and Win is the ultimate tool to conquering your fear and achieving success when you need it most.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #302825 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-12
• Released on: 2002-02-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780767906265
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Renowned performance coach Don Greene, Ph.D., leads readers on a strategic, goal-reaching mission in this compact, powerful, and often fascinating handbook. A former Airborne Ranger and Green Beret (among a long list of other impressive credentials), Greene believes fear is only conquered by action--not by lying on a therapist's couch. To that end, he urges readers to assess their current skills (by taking a relatively simple survey provided in the book), pinpoint their weaker performance tendencies, then "embark on a training regimen" to flex seven specific fear-conquering muscles: determination, energy, perspective, courage, focus, poise, and resilience.

Greene uses each chapter to tell a story or two about a client--ranging from Olympic athletes to professional musicians to SWAT teams--whose fear scenarios provide a steppingstone for analyzing the seven skills mentioned above (determination, etc). He then quite eloquently describes how fear attempts to thwart each particular skill, and offers clear methods for retaliating ("centering down" to counteract ineffective nervous energy, or using anger constructively to develop resilience). The eight appendices outline his three-week prescription for mastering each skill, plus the key for scoring the skills survey. While his occasional military references and sports analogies offer glimpses into his commando training and sports psychology background, Greene never comes off as a stony General nor as a hyped cheerleader. Rather, his graceful writing style is rich with humor, candor, and valuable information. Forgivably cocky at times ("Nobody in the world has done as much as I have to bring out people's best"), Greene simply knows his stuff and--to the reader's benefit--presents it beautifully. --Liane Thomas

From Publishers Weekly
A self-help powerhouse with specific appeal to the business market, this persuasive book delivers concise analyses of stress, self-defeatism, the problem of identifying goals and so on, and recommends specific programs to overcome them. As a sports psychologist and performance coach to world-class athletes, Wall Street traders, police sharpshooters and professional musicians, Greene has perfected a plan for performing under intense stress, which he claims has helped thousands of clients. Like Rhonda Britten in Fearless Living, (see Forecasts, p.79), Greene does not focus on the source of one's fear. Yet in contrast to Britten, who treats underlying emotions, he concentrates on techniques for improving one's performance, drawing on military training, martial arts, visualization and mind mapping. Greene identifies seven areas of concentration namely determination, energy, perspective, courage, focus, poise and resilience and their components. Readers can measure their performance tendencies and identify difficult areas with an assessment test (soon to be available online at www.dongreene.com), though it's somewhat tricky to grade. Appendixes offer ambitious three-week programs to help readers hone each of the seven skills. With its neat separation of exercises from descriptive text, careful summaries of each point and exhortations to toughen the skin and build muscle, the book is reassuringly logical and lean. When Greene (a Ph.D., former competitive diver, West Point graduate, Green Beret) says it's never too late to recover from a major setback, readers will believe him. Agent, Alex Smithline, Scovil, Chicak & Galen. (On sale Mar. 6) Forecast: This muscular book's true-to-life examples and tested methodology will win legions of readers, and could earn Greene long-term bestsellerdom.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Praise for Don Greene?s Fight Your Fear and Win Program:

?Ask and a teacher appears. Don Greene has taken a group of talented people from our trading floor who wanted to raise their lives to a new level?professionally and personally?and given them better focus with clear goals that are achievable and rewarding.?
?Edward McMahon, Managing Director?Equities, Merrill Lynch

?Don?s program is great! He was able to give me a new perspective and different thoughts about managing my time and myself. I learned a lot about myself in pressure situations.?
?Andrew Darcy, NASDAQ trader and former Navy Seal

"Don Greene's work addresses the concentrated focus that is demanded in critical moments, and he translates a somewhat intangible notion into a concrete set of skills. The response of our musicians has been immediate and we often hear what a difference it has made in their concert performances as well as in their experience of the audition process.?
?Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director of the San Francisco -- Review

Customer Reviews

The technique of mastery: an Actor's perspective
As a professional actor I have searched the dusky shelves of libraries across the states studying the writen record of the craft of acting... and there are thousands of books offering endless advice about how to cultivate one's performance skills. The books are often esoteric and require some strange practices bordering on the mystical. From lying on the floor doing primal screams to over-analyzing the script as if it were a lab animal as opposed to a wild thing... these books always begin with promise and then lead me further and further into a labyrinth of confusion. Finally, I have found the book which contains a precise yet playful process which addresses the fundamental concerns of acting. Don Greene's book presents a technique for Mastery. As human beings we are constantly learning new skills and we rarely ask ourselves about how we learn. Don Greene gives a clear and practical account of how to cultivate not just 'skill,' but rather, the skill of developing skill, the mother of all skills. Prior to working with this material, I would come off stage after a good performance and have no idea how I entered into a creative state. Vice/versa, sometimes I would give a bad performance and despair that I couldn't act. I felt like I was at the whim of some unseen forces, the 'theatre gods' perhaps. Now I am discovering that my creativity is entirely within my control. I create my own states of creativity or blockage based on how I process the information coming to me all the time. How I interpret this information is largely responsible for the quality of my experience of life and how I perform in my own life. Whether I am performing Hamlet, dealing with an agent, auditioning, or enjoying liesure time at home, I find the new skills I am cultivating from Don Greene's book to be of immense value. Although the book is always scientific, precise, and practical, it suggests a profound transformation in the way we view what is possible for human beings. It challenges us to push the limits of the known and discover the vast resources within ourselves. Furthermore, Don's free online performance test helped me see clearly what my strengths and weaknesses were and thereby, focus my efforts on those particular skills which would improve my performance as effectively, efficiently, and economically as possible.

A must-have book you'll keep re-reading
A lot of self-help books have just the opposite effect than is intended: You feel so overwhelmed, so daunted by the work in front of you, you want to just hide or lie down. Not this one! Here's advice you'll enjoy reading and can't wait to put into practice--and you'll see results immediately.Greene is inspirational without sounding mushy; he's insightful without sounding like a shrink; and despite his military background, his tone is anything but drill sargeant--he's actually funny. I usually hate spending $20 on a hardcover, but this is the least expensive and most effective "therapy" I've ever gotten.

A must read for any woman who wants to perform her best
Thank you, Dr. Greene, for giving me an easy to follow, step by step program for overcoming my fears when facing life's most critical moments. I used the online survey... to identify the areas that were the most troublesome for me. What a help it was to then use the chapters in the book that addressed these areas so I could begin improving them. Once I began using the recommended strategies, everything looked less frightening and I began noticing positive changes both at work and in my personal life. As I'm continuing to improve my ability to center and take risks, it's becoming easier to tap into my own inner strength and courage. My confidence is growing and I find myself approaching otherwise daunting tasks with a new attitude. I believe that this book will help other women do the same.