Dealing with Fear of Success
A reader wrote me after reading my post, “Fear of Success and How Kids Become Bullies”. How does one deal with this fear of success and continual self-sabotage?
I think our fear of success may come from a deeply ingrained belief that we don’t deserve to succeed. This then motivates us to continually sabotage our own efforts when we appear to approach something we value and love (ex. a personal or professional goal, supportive relationships). Our childhood experiences may have led us to adopt this erroneous belief, especially if we were abused or bullied.
My personal fear of success comes from my inability to keep “besting myself”, which came from a place of “lack”. Thus if I do something well, then in order for me to feel like I deserve love, I needed to do even better, which may be very difficult and therefore I’d fail. Sometimes to avoid this, I simply avoid the opportunity altogether. If there’s no way to succeed, there is no way to fail.
So, how do we stop this vicious cycle? We already know “how” to do it. Our mental capacity to move forward and our mental block to keep us where we are - come from ourselves. Somehow we’ve grown comfortable allowing the mental blocks to win each time, even when this gives us pain. Sometimes we are conditioned to believe that we deserve pain, and continual pain.
One of the ways I’ve found that helps me with my mental blocks is to not resist that I feel a certain way about myself, and then going ahead and doing it anyway. It’s like that saying, “feel the fear and do it anyway.” For example, “For some reason I choose to believe that I don’t deserve friends who love me. Oh well, I’m going to allow myself to be loved by one or two friends, anyway!”
I’ve found that when I spend a lot of energy resisting something, I end up exhausted and still losing to my mind demons. However, if I just let the mind demons talk trash (no resisting) yet still acting anyway, my energy is spent on the action. It takes consistent practice, but it has worked for me.
How have you dealt with the fear of success?
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2 Responses to “Dealing with Fear of Success”
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Thanks for sharing your personal experience with this. It took me a long time to realize that you can’t just suppress those feelings. Much of the current self-help craze doesn’t deal with these more substantive issues, but just gives quick fix methods for plastering over the problem.
Self-sabotage is incredibly common, and can’t be papered over by simply thinking positive and working hard. I have learned that your method - acknowledging, accepting and acting anyway - is very effective in at least taking those initial steps to overcoming these defeating beliefs.
Thank you, Quint! I’m glad you also found useful the approach that works for me