THE LEGACY OF SUSAN JEFFERS PHD.

Back in 1987 one woman changed the way that millions of women lived their lives.
In a slim book with a catchy title, a middle-aged American psychologist called Susan Jeffers promised we could
take control of our destinies and make previously unimaginable leaps forward.
Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway was the first self-help book to crack the tough shell of British scepticism, and to
date it has sold two million copies in the UK alone.
Without Jeffers, who died last month at the age of 74, everything from Chicken Soup For The Soul to Women
Who Love Too Much might never have found space on the nation's bedside tables.
Before Feel The Fear, the British tended to find self-help simplistic or plain embarrassing. Emotional reticence
and the stiff upper lip were the order of the day; successful American self-help 'gurus' such as Dale Carnegie and
Norman Vincent Peale were considered to be snake oil salesmen.
But Feel The Fear did not just win us over to the concept of self-help, we became Jeffers' greatest enthusiasts.
Her British agent David Grossman told me: 'The book was a worldwide bestseller, but it had a bigger impact in
Britain than anywhere else.
'Susan's take seemed to match perfectly with our more timid or fearful attitude to things - so finding a new way of
dealing with that had a great appeal for people here, particularly women.'
The book was based on a series of lectures on fear that Jeffers gave at the New School for Social Research in
New York.
The brilliant title was dreamt up in a matter of minutes. Finding a publisher took longer. Her favourite rejection
letter read: 'Lady Di could be bicycling nude down the street giving this book away and nobody would read it.'