Overcoming the Fear of Success

How would you answer the question “Are you successful in life?”

I know many people who would say that they are not successful; at least they have not reached success in the areas that feel important to them.

This website is about Peak Performance not mediocrity. So let’s prepare to commit to a New Year with a winner’s attitude and consider what it means and what it takes for each of us to lead a successful life.

Most identify a fear of failure as the reason they are not successful. The fear of failure is perhaps the strongest force holding people below their potential. In a world full of uncertainty, a delicate economy, and countless misfortunes that could happen to anyone, it’s easy to see why most people are inclined to play it safe.

But playing it safe has risk as well. If you never dare to fail, your success will have a low ceiling. Most people underestimate their merit and ability to recover from failure, leading them to pass up valuable opportunities. The ability to fail big and fail often has been a mark of the spectacularly successful throughout history

However this blog is focused on those of us that are striving for Peak Performance and have started on the road to success, overcome several failures and are suddenly overcome with another fear, the fear of success. The fear of success is a common issue that arises when you are genuinely creating change and moving forward in your life. Not giving up when you start getting somewhere is often the biggest challenge we have to success. To let the Peak Performer in you out you need to stop resisting.  If it’s your fate to be great then do it!

All fears of success would be greatly reduced if we took our power back. It’s important to note that change comes from choice and we have always had that power. In fact often our deepest fear is that when we really reclaim our power and succeed, we have to face the knowledge that we have always been powerful enough to change all along and that we could have changed a year or five or 10 years ago.

Your friends and family will either support you or they won’t. The ones who resist you (the majority) are saboteurs out to stop you from real success. If you can do it and they can’t, well, sometimes that’s an uncomfortable thought for them to wrap their mind around.

Often we let the opinions of friends and families justify a mediocre existence. So how do you convince your friends and family that you will succeed and be a big success and that they should believe in you?

You don’t convince them of anything. You should never conspire with saboteurs and you should never seek approval from people who are irrelevant to your success.

Your friends and family may not be on the same wavelength as you and they are not the real enemy to success. It is not them that need to be convinced.

It is you who needs to convince yourself. You need to avoid self-sabotage, don’t be a traitor to yourself.

As Buddha once said “He is able who thinks he is able.”

The good news is, no matter how old you are and no matter how many times you have turned your back on success it is never too late. When you make the change you will only have one regret: “I should have done this sooner. My god, why did I wait so long? “. After you’re done feeling sorry for yourself from this realization, you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and say these words: I can do it, I will do it and no one will stop me.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

---

·         Everyone's scared. 

• No one has it all together. If you talk to any successful person, you'll find out that, not only were they scared to begin doing something different, they still get scared every time. It gets incrementally easier, but the fear never goes away. Professional athletes still get nervous before the game. Musicians still have butterflies in their stomachs before concerts. Authors freak out the night before their books are released. What you're feeling is no different than anyone else.

• Embracing fear is the most important consciousness shift needed to success.

• The more successful you are the stronger the fear becomes. People will sabotage themselves so they don’t have to feel the fear anymore. Fear stops cowards and fear powers winners

• When you’re successful everything is on the line, all eyes are on you and they’re all waiting to see if you will fail. It’s easy to give them what they expect, another failure. When you’re a failure nothing is on the line and there is no more pressure.

•   It’s not the absence of fear that makes you great. It’s action in the face of that fear that makes you great.

• If you want something better for your life then that you have to fight through that feeling of fear. The New Year is a great time to commit to stopping the procrastination and excuses for 30 days. You will be amazed at what you can accomplish. Then you can extend it 30 more days, and then 30 more until it becomes an established pattern of behavior.

·         No one's paying attention to you.

•  In reality people are often so worried about how things are going for them they don't have time to be concerned about anyone else - especially you. Consequently, people spend time worrying about other people, who really have no time to worry about anyone else because they have problems of their own. See how silly this all is? Oh, sure. There are some people who are paying attention to you. But, they're usually your spouse or family or really close friends. The kinds of people are going to be supportive of you, anyway. That's a good kind of attention.

·         You have to know where you want to go.

• What's the old saying? “If you don't know where you're going, any road will do”, I believe is how it goes. You need to figure out what your dreams are for yourself. Once you've figured out what you want to do, you can put a plan together to achieve it.

• I have come to believe that everyone needs to start somewhere. If you have a lot of credit card debt that you want to get paid off, that's a fine dream.  Just start dreaming and however big or small they are is good enough for now. Visualizing and accomplishing goals, however small, starts an important psychic chain reaction that lays the foundation and becomes the catalyst for success.

·         Do what makes you happy, and don't worry about others. 

• Obviously, you have to be smart about this. I'm not saying run out on responsibilities and obligations you have set for yourself. What I'm saying is that there are very few people in this world whose approval you should be after. Your spouse and kids, maybe your extended families, if they're supportive; that's about it. If a person doesn't have a vested interest in your success, you can confidently disregard what they think about what you're choosing to do. The only way you can count your life as truly successful is if you're doing what you're meant to do, regardless of what society at large thinks of it.

 

·         Success is a Creative Dynamic

• Whenever something is created, there's always something else that is destroyed. This is referred to as the courage to create -- because there is always that conflict. As you create something, something else is destroyed. If nothing else, ignorance is destroyed. And this very dynamic of creativity also applies to success. It'll often be followed with guilt -- feeling guilty that you've done something. That you've changed the order of things or that you've stepped outside the normal range.

• There may even be a feeling of doubt: "Have I done the right thing? What if I'm not heading in the right direction?" It's so very strange. We hear so many people who are succeeding wonderfully well, but their fear is: "Yes, but what if this wasn't what I was meant to do? What if I was supposed to become something else? Suppose my destiny was something else? What if I've somehow managed to land in this arena of success, and I'm flying along like crazy, and one day will wake up and realize I've missed the boat?"  Doubt and the concern around that -- that's part of the creative function.

• These fear reactions are normal. Understanding that will enable you to rebuild and restructure a whole different foundation for being successful. You can take the weight off and realize that it's not going to make you smarter or better-than or give you license. You can be prepared for the chaos, and when it comes, you can work with it. You can handle it. You don't have to freak out and run away. You can be prepared for the guilt and doubt that's going to arise in the very dynamic of creativity.

Keep Everything in Perspective

It’s important to keep in mind that no matter how important success might seem to you, it is still important to embrace it with balance; otherwise your journey towards success will turn into an obsession that will ruin everything that you truly love in life.

I’d like to end with noting that success is not a destination, it’s a journey, and it’s important that we take each step feeling grounded and balanced. Do not forget to spend time with your loved ones, enjoy your hobby or follow your passion, take care of your health and grow spiritually. This is the meaning of true success, the one that you can achieve only in balance.

Remember it is your right and purpose in life to be successful in whatever you are doing. If you believe in that then nothing will ever stop you from living a balanced and joyous life.