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?
An updated version of this article may be found on my main website:
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
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
Thanks for sharing. I’m still dealing with it. I don’t know how to overcome my mind yet. I must get some sort of payoff by having a fear of success. Sometimes I feel bad if I’m better or do better than other ppl or surpass them. If I win something or get the best grade in the class, I feel embarassed and guilty for doing better. It’s pretty messed up that I feel this way and that I let myself sink lower or do worse than others so that I won’t feel guilty. None of it makes any logical sense whatsoever.
There’s a famous quote: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
This is so true, yet hard for me to accomplish.
Jenn,
I understand what you describe – that you feel bad if you’re doing better than others or surpassing them.
One question you may want to ask yourself and think about is this: By doing better, are you automatically making someone do worse? (looking good or bad is not the question here)
Or, by doing worse, are you guaranteeing that others naturally do better? (again, looking good or bad is not the question)
The quote you gave came from Nelson Mandela, and it is true. Many of us are afraid of our true potential, because once we reveal it, we have a responsibility to accept ALL that comes with this revelation – the rewards AND the challenges of acting from this light within each us.
This turns some of us away, because we have the wrong idea that “uh oh, now we must be perfect”. Not so! Being the true person you are, with all the power you have, DOES NOT MEAN YOU DON’T MAKE MISTAKES. We’re human beings with errors in judgment and occasionally lapses in common sense. We will make mistakes, we will fail, we will win, we will do well… these are all part of the natural cycle of life.
It is always the simple truths that are the most difficult to accomplish.
My secret is this: even when I sometimes don’t believe I “deserve” success, I go for it anyway. Don’t listen to everything your mind tells you, especially when you aren’t sure if the voice you’re listening to truly belongs to you.
Another secret is to succeed for someone else’s benefit. Once I experience this success, I can then see the answer to, “what additional good can I do?” For example, if I didn’t earn a certain amount of $, then I wouldn’t have been able to donate the $ I had been able to donate to a charity that I really believe in, and have been involved with for many years (using art to heal victims of domestic violence). If I was so afraid of success that I held myself back, then I wouldn’t have been able to contribute to this organization and help them put workshops for kids who have nightmares from witnessing their own parent beating up the other parent. By self sabotaging, not only am I not doing myself any favors, but I couldn’t help this charity help kids break a cycle of violence.
Wow thank you Jane, i had 4gotten that powerful quote by Nelsön Mandela! God bless you, you,re doing an amazing job by healing with your love + light!
Just to give credit where credit is due, the quote is NOT Nelson Mandela, it is Marianne Williamson, from “A Return to Love”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Williamson
You’re absolutely right – that quote came from Marianne Williamson’s book! I learned about that common mis-attribution since that comment but totally forgot about my above comment.
I had heard someone do the same thing by opening her speech with it, and I wrote her a note afterward telling her that it was actually Williamson who said that in her book, not Mandela.
Wonder why this was so commonly mistaken and credited to Mandela.
That said, Williamson herself did not come up with it:
So the original author / source of this quote remains anonymous, perhaps by design.