From a July 17, 2003, National Institute of Mental Health news release:
"Gene more than doubles risk of depression following life stresses."

Among people who suffer many stressful life events over 5 years, 43% with one version of a gene were depressed compared to 17% with another version of the same gene. Which version you have can have a long range effect on your life and happiness because it determines how we handle stress. The research also revealed that those with the short or stress-sensitive version of the serotonin transporter gene were at higher risk for depression, particularly if they had been abused as children. How many of you in this room were aware that there can be two versions of the same gene and how many of you knew that a gene can have this effect on your state of happiness?

In the June 2003 edition of Psychology Today an article on CEO depression mentions the large incidence of child abuse found among the top CEOs in the nation. Yet no matter how many stressful life events they endured, people with the long or protective version experienced no more depression than people who were totally spared from stressful life events. The short version seems to confer vulnerability to stress, such as loss of a job, breaking up with a partner, death of a loved one, or a prolonged illness, reports Drs. Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt, University of Wisconsin and Kings College London and colleagues, in the July 18, 2003, issue of Science.

The Secret World of CEO depression clearly states that, “For a shocking number of CEOs, getting to the top brings only crippling emotional bleakness. Indeed, success has surprising psychological traps for almost all senior executives.”

I remember a research program published in Life magazine sometime in the middle 60s that included interviews with ten of the top CEOs in the nation in a search for common denominators. The most intriguing was that they all believed they were successful because of the fear of not being successful. Negative motivation of this kind leads to perfectionism and long hours. According to Dr. Albert Ellis, the second most influential psychotherapist of all time, celebrating his 90th birthday party at the Albert Ellis Institute of New York City said, and I paraphrase, The pursuit of perfectionism and self-esteem is the worst disease known to man or woman, because it says that, I did well, therefore I am good, which means that when I do badly - the worst of me is true. In the end, the big losers are the family members because as the CEOs become more successful, they learn to substitute money for presence. It doesn’t work! Intimate bonds constitute our natural state. In their absence, neither the body nor the brain functions normally, intimacy is lost, isolation sets in and, as is well-known, isolation in all social mammals leads to depression.

Males are socialized to master their fears and negative feelings or risk the onset of obsessions with food, alcohol, drugs, gambling and/or sex. As these dynamics play out, guilt and stress are magnified and CEOs tend to resent the families’ lack of appreciation for the pain they endure on their behalf. Females, on the other hand, whose identity and wellness is found in intimate relationships, are less vulnerable to performance and are socialized to express their fears and negative feelings making them more likely to find support elsewhere when needed. Their strength is in affiliations and associations with family and friends, while children, feeling neglected, never get to know the CEO parent and everyone is obliged to find intimacy elsewhere.

In the life of a successful CEO, handling career stress signifies an ability to overcome obstacles in order to persevere in the face of competitive threats, to adapt to change and to endure grueling periods of deprivation.

In adapting, they must learn new specialized skills and the ways of using them. Above all they must learn to deconstruct the status quo in order to create a new paradigm or prototype of excellence. Picasso said, “All creation begins with destruction” and destruction sets the stage for crisis and extreme risk.

To be successful, the CEO must conquer crisis. I find it interesting that in the Chinese alphabet the written character for crisis is two symbols, the first is for danger and the second for opportunity. So in crisis we focus on one or the other. To help successful people get back on track, we must teach them how to move away from danger and to refocus on opportunity. Engaging opportunity leads to passion, change and endorphins. It doesn’t get better.

Successful CEOs have a high record of achievement to maintain. The more successful they become the more the risks intensify leading to conservatism and the loss of confidence and ultimately to the fear of humiliation, with shame leading to failure, depression and so on. It’s a slippery slope

Professor Chris Argylis of the Harvard School of Business and Education has devoted much of his career to analyzing intelligent, successful people’s resistance to being reeducated, when they are in positions of authority and leadership. He claims that among other things, they are almost always successful at what they do, rarely experiencing failure. So they are unlikely to learn from failure. When their strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism and put the blame on anybody but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.

He believes that the root of this resistance is a general human tendency to act in accordance with four basic values:

1 – To remain in control
2 – To maximize winning and minimize losing
3 – To suppress negative feelings
4 – To behave rationally to the greatest possible extent

As stated before, the fear of failure mindset is designed to avoid the threat of humiliation, shame and failure. Defensive motivation encourages highly visible individuals to keep private their feelings, thoughts, inferences and especially those conclusions that shape their behavior. They avoid objective personality tests not wanting to know about themselves, not wanting others to know about them. They tend to spend most of their lives hiding and doubting. If they have the need to see a psychiatrist, they do so at six in the morning and pay cash.

There are two highly successful, major personality types. The most recognizable is the type A personality. They go a mile a minute, are usually linear in thinking and fearful of stopping. Self-esteem or failure arrives in quarterly reports. The fear of failure leads people to expect too much of themselves and disappointing corporate numbers lead to the highly emotional response of self-devaluation, a consequence usually not of real life events but of our own faulty expectations, interpretations and self-demands. It is unavoidably clear that when self-esteem is built on achievement, you’re only as good as your last deal. The only residual is the money and if you’re not the biggest fish in the pond it’s not enough.

Once successful, the CEO is often in constant crisis usually asking, is that all there is? Even worse the CEO knows that with all his success, psychologically, nothing has changed. He is still the same person and must go on pretending to be what others expect him to be.

The type A typically avoids time alone, buries the pain, the isolation and the stress in the workload and struggles on to an illusive, golden time ahead. It never comes to be because what is really needed is a dependable strategy for building and maintaining self-esteem. Self-esteem based on performance in the boom/ bust world of capitalism is a prescription for disaster. We need to refocus from ambition to integrity which ordinarily leads to spirituality, enlightenment and the path to the satisfaction of our deepest most fundamental needs. Near the end of his life, Tolstoy said that it took a lifetime to learn that the most important thing we can do for ourselves is to serve others. Face it, we’re not bull, bears or sharks; we’re social animals, what we do for one another is what makes us human. It can be best understood by recognizing that in the pursuit of mental health, one must learn how to be responsible not only to themselves, but to others as well.

To deny this aspect of us is to mask the road to spirituality and truth and, like it or not, that’s all there is. The rest is egotism, greed and illusion. This is a purely human phenomenon and we can’t expect a social revolution to change it for us. The only way we can return to the truth is to recognize greed as a foreign, specie-neurotic disturbance that distorts our physiology, emotionality and spirituality. We can turn the corner by role-playing a new perception of what it is to be human. In my own experience I have learned that experimenting with a borrowed or assumed value can lead to new dialogues, insights and growth. We actually surrender our sophistication and set ourselves up to fail, with the expectation of learning something from what was otherwise unknowable.

Beyond that, as homo-sapiens, we must accept the evidence of our mediocrity and ordinariness as a necessary balance for human nature. The truth is we’re fallible. Acknowledging this can desensitize us from the fear of failure and doubt. It’s our god-given or evolutionary inheritance and no one can take it from us. We can only be separated from it by ignorance, fear or greed. Living the truth is a mark of character, wisdom and love. We learn as Tolstoy did that we serve ourselves best by serving others.

Refocusing from danger to opportunity leads to new possibilities and changes in our lives. Failures encountered through the passion of challenging opportunities are valuable learning experiences. Whereas, experiences we encounter in failure arising out of the fear of not succeeding are crushing. These lead to rationalizations that mask truth and deny us any opportunity for self-actualization.

If we deny this fundamental aspect of ourselves, we deny the inexhaustible measure of love and wisdom that lies locked up in every one of us. I believe it to be the greatest untapped force in the universe. We need only to reach out with love and our planet can become a Garden of Eden, as opposed to what it has become. This satisfies us at the deepest level and for that reason wants to happen.

And then there is the Type E personality. These people represent only five to ten percent of the population. They are easily identified with biofeedback instrumentation showing heightened theta brain waves, indicating creativity, intuition and even genius. As youngsters, they tend to have trouble in the public school system, often labeled ADD or ADHD. Of course this is a tragic misinterpretation of the facts. We only have to look at the public school system to see that it is designed to create consumers, workers and soldiers who are compliant, respect authority and obey orders. It works well for the vast majority of the students, but fails the less compliant, more gifted, creative students. The system is not designed for them and for that reason fails them and the needs of the nation.

Another aspect of this failure can be seen when these highly gifted individuals retreat from their natural way of learning in order to be successful in the classroom. In effect they adjust to the public school system by going into the closet and learning a better way to operate outside the closet. All this requires is to become a love slob. Which means adjust or surrender your gifts and your way of learning in the interest of being successful in the classroom. I see this as a national calamity; our brightest people are falling between the cracks and we’re not doing anything about it. This is the only case in which I believe charter schools can have a useful purpose. We’re not talking about this even though our students are falling behind the rest of the world in math and science. We’re losing our best opportunities for the future and nobody seems to care. This question deserves a paper.

Before moving on, we must recognize and acknowledge the fact that classroom testing is designed to reward the learning patterns of linear rather than global minds. This is best accomplished by an emphasis on details rather than the challenge for a deeper understanding of the material. Global minds ignore details as they pursue that deeper understanding. This kind of learning is more difficult, takes more time and is out of step with the system. So the more gifted and creative are distracted and prone to failure. As this condition intensifies, other evidences of their gifts and vague understandings of their poor performances become increasingly more evident, resulting in familiarity with failure. To the Type Es that learn to overcome crisis and become successful in life, success and failure become useful tools. This is very different than what we expect of the Type A children or Type E children in the closet and is a major Type E advantage.

Type Es are passionate, built for speed, inspired by challenge, unafraid of risks, living comfortably on the edge, finding their calling in creativity rather than management and performing best when they are liberated from the duties of an ordinary life. They learn to give up the harder focus of doing for the softer focus of being. This requires a support system in place at all times, at least an executive assistant or secretary. I’ve been told many times by former CEOs that this is what they miss most in retirement.

These supportive relationships often evolve in the home as well, gracefully or resentfully and if resentfully, lead to a Type E crisis, which is manageable and reversible and fully explained in the five day audio program called, “The Type E Personality – Living on the Edge – Without falling off”.

Here are some surprising examples of famous Type E individuals that made it through the maze:

Winston Churchill was last in his class at Harrow; Charles Darwin dropped out of medical school; Shelley was expelled from Oxford; James Whistler and Edgar Allen Poe were tossed out of West Point; Gibbons considered his education a waste of time. Einstein was a complete disaster. He didn’t learn to talk until age four or read until age seven. Thomas Alva Edison was castigated as inattentive and even addle-brained by teachers who couldn’t stand him and eventually he ran away from school. Poet Robert Frost was tossed out of school for daydreaming and Florence Nighningale, who revolutionized the field of nursing, was considered highly neurotic as a child, largely because her staid and dull Victorian peers bored her literally to the point of illness. Author Virginia Wolff was the bane of her teachers because she wouldn’t shut up and behave.

To a balanced, sophisticated Type E, personality failure is nothing more than extinction, for as long as there is life there is hope and where there is hope there is opportunity. This again is the Type E advantage and explains why they have a greater potential for success and the avoidance of depression. The reader can research this further on the Internet.

The CEO depression paradox: As a youngster, you didn’t understand the meaning of selflessness; so you built a system of self-enrichment which led to deception and losses in self-esteem. It created pockets of ignorance and a misinterpretation leading to more losses in self-esteem.