Hello, this is Emma Ganon, and thank you for listening to this podcast. I just wanted to let you know that my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, is out on May the 18th.

I think it's my best book yet, so I'm excited for it to come out. And the book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness to money, to productivity, to celebrity, to the idea of finally arriving, and how chasing a version of success that doesn't align with your values can really take you off track, and this book is about getting back to yourself.

Breaking free, finding a new way forward, and it's available on May the 18th. If you love this podcast, you'll love the book, and it's available soon from all good bookshops, so you can order yours now. I hope you like it.

Hi, this is Emma Ganon, and welcome back to The Success Myth Diaries. This is a brand new mini series to accompany my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, which is out on May the 18th of this year.

If you haven't already, go and check out the other episodes in this mini series, but my book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness to money, to celebrity, to toxic productivity.

And I'm looking at all the different ways that traditional success is constantly marketed to us, how to spot it, and also how to kind of realign ourselves with our own values and our own goals, and make sure we're working towards something that we actually want, rather than what society wants for us.

To celebrate, I'm interviewing some of my favourite people about what success means to them, and today I've got the performance poet and author Tim Claire.

He's written two fantasy novels and nonfiction books, award winning nonfiction books, should I say, including we can't all be astronauts, which won best memoir at the East Anglican Book Awards, and coward a brilliant book out now on paperback about why we get anxious and what we can do about it.

It's a really great book about anxiety and has helped me personally a lot. He's also the podcast host of Death of a Thousand Cuts, which is a podcast for readers and writers, so I think you'd like that too.

In this episode, we discussed his three success myths around anxiety, achievement, and the myth of the finish line, so I hope you enjoy this episode with Tim.

So I'm really excited. I've got the amazing author Tim Claire with me on the success myth diaries.

And I can't wait to talk to you about your success myths, but before we do, I just needed to say, because I've obviously posted it all over Twitter, but your book coward, which is out in paperback now, is fantastic.

It's really funny. It's really well written and researched, and it kind of on a personal note got me out of a bit of a weird funk at the end of last year, so I just wanted to say thank you.

Well, that's you're very welcome. That's obviously thrilling for me to not that you were in a weird funk, but the other bit, the upward climb, it's lovely to hear.

Obviously, you know, you write stuff and you want it to reach people and for them to like it. So that's lovely. Thank you.

Seriously, I was reading bits out loud to my husband. I was like, this is exactly what it feels like. And I think sometimes with anxiety, just sometimes you just need to know that you're not completely losing it and that other people have been through it, which they definitely have.

So if we talk about your first success myth, because it's kind of on this topic, the myth that you can cure your anxiety is an interesting one because obviously there are so many things sold to us.

I mean, even in your book, there's a very funny chapter on something that you tried, which was like swallowing poo from a stranger.

Listeners are going to be like, wow, you've really jumped into a random bit of the book there. But you've gone through this book, basically sort of with this like investigative journalist lens of like trying to solve your own anxiety.

And I guess the point of the book is that we end up learning that we kind of have to embrace it. But anyway, over to you.

Yeah, so it can seem a bit sort of miserable list to start to say, you can't cure your anxiety because the obvious retort to anyone who's a sufferer of anxiety is look, well, clearly there are people who are not as anxious as me.

So that can't be true. But often we have this idea when you're like really anxious, we want ways out of it. And there's this idea that if we knew the right series of steps to take if we had the right medication.

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