June 8, 2024

Working Through Fear: Ending Success Roadblocks

Some people fear failure, and others fear success. That might seem nuts to fear success, but success brings responsibility, and some people are afraid of that too. If you really want to be more successful it’s time to work through your fear.

Signs of Fear of Success

If you fear success, there is a chance that you actively avoid it. You don’t make goals, remember deadlines, you aren’t self-motivated, and you often second-guess yourself. Ultimately, making decisions is difficult for someone who is acting in fear.

In fact, fear of success is so intense in some people that it seems disaster strikes them anytime they’re getting ready to taste success. They get sick, use drugs, and actively sabotage themselves. Some people almost never make decisions and in so doing don’t even realize they’re practicing self-sabotage.

To deal with fear, you can work through it by doing the following:

• Confront Limiting Beliefs – This could be about all sorts of things from yourself to what you think about society. You must remember that your life is just one of millions, and even though your feelings and experiences are valid, they’re not always a representation of reality.
• Surround Yourself with Supportive People – The more people you have around you that are positive and supportive of you and will tell you the truth, the better. People who want the best for you will not encourage you to stay stagnant in life. They’ll want to hold you up and help push you toward success. In short, supportive people are those who add and multiply to your life.
• Keep a Journal – A gratitude journal is helpful, but so is a journal in which you write down all your negative self-talk. After you let it all out, go back and correct what you wrote as if your child wrote it to turn it into positive self-talk.
• Revel in Past and Current Successes – The one way to get over the fear of success is to experience it. When you accomplish something difficult take the win, enjoy it, and allow yourself to feel good about it. It’s fun and life-fulfilling to be successful, and you should be proud of everything you fight through and overcome to achieve it.
• Ask Yourself: What’s the Worst That Can Happen? – For any given situation, when you are unsure of what to do, and you can feel the fear rising up and preventing you from making the good choice to move forward, ask yourself, What is the worst thing that can happen? This question has to send you down the rabbit hole. When you get tired of falling, flip the question around by asking, What’s the best that could happen? This will deposit positive thoughts into your mind and remind you of all the good reasons for taking the risk.
• Accept Discomfort – The idea that you can be successful in life without any discomfort at all is flat out wrong. The truth is when you feel uncomfortable is when you are most likely to learn something amazing or accomplish something noteworthy.

The more success you experience, the less fear you’re going to have. Challenge is the laboratory of learning, growth and development. So, work to achieve as much success as you can. And leave fear in the rearview mirror.

dhf

If you like this content, check out my substack newsletter about overcoming fear of failure at: https://theunreliablemind.substack.com/p/overcoming-your-fear-of-failure-part and https://theunreliablemind.substack.com/p/overcoming-fear-of-failure-part-ii