JANE CHIN, PH.D. ∞

When you are afraid to fail, you are afraid to start.

When you are afraid to succeed, you self-sabotage. You may find yourself doing something that would set you back at the most opportune moment. You know, when you’re just about to get that chance to show how good you can be?

Fear of success may come from a deeply ingrained belief that “we don’t deserve to succeed”.

This motivates us to continually sabotage our own efforts when we appear to approach something we value and love. This “something” may be a personal or professional goal – even supportive relationships that bring joy into our lives. Our childhood experiences may have led us to adopt this erroneous belief, especially if we were abused or bullied as defenseless young children.

My personal fear of success comes from my inability to keep “besting myself”.

This fear of success originates from a place of “lack”.

Thus, if I did something well, then in order for me to feel like I deserve love (or continue to deserve love), I needed to do even better. Always doing better and better proves very difficult after some time, and eventually, I’d fail.

In other words, I knew once I get to the top, I can either stay on top or head back down. Staying on top can become exhausting. Heading back down – often by way of falling down – is very painful.

So, my mind’s method to avoid emotional exhaustion or emotional pain is to simply avoid the opportunity altogether.

If I don’t seize the opportunity, I cannot succeed OR fail.

How do we stop this vicious cycle of self-sabotage?

We already know “how” to do it! Our mental capacity to move forward and our mental block to keep us where we are both 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 I still lose to my mind demons.

However, if I let the mind demons talk trash, and invest my energy not in resisting these demons but instead, in acting (and creating action), I spend my energy in the right direction.

This takes consistent practice, but it has worked for me.

How have you dealt with the fear of success?

Image by xLucas.

Originally published: Sep 30, 2008 @ 13:22