Susan Jeffers

Susan Jeffers was an American psychologist and self-help author best known for Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, a classic guide to acting despite anxiety.

Susan Jeffers spent years as a psychologist and educator before publishing Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway in 1987, a book that has sold millions of copies and remained continuously in print for nearly four decades. Its central argument is disarmingly simple: fear is a universal and permanent feature of growth, not a signal that you should stop. The real problem, Jeffers argues, is not fear itself but the belief that fear indicates danger or incompetence. Learning to act in the presence of fear, rather than waiting until fear subsides, is the book’s core message — and it is one that has genuinely helped a large number of people.

The book blends cognitive-behavioural ideas with positive affirmations and exercises, and its tone is warm and encouraging. That same tone can feel relentless to more sceptical readers, and Feel the Fear is firmly in the tradition of American self-help that emphasizes attitude and mindset over structural circumstances. The framework of “pain-to-power” thinking works well for many anxiety-related blocks but is less well-suited to situations where fear is a rational response to genuine risk or external constraint.

For its intended audience — people held back by self-doubt and risk-aversion — Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway is exactly what it needs to be: direct, practical, and generous with encouragement. It lacks the scholarly rigour of more recent psychology-based self-help, but its core message has aged better than many books from the same era.