Fear of Success
Date Posted: October 19th, 2009
A common mental block I run into when making some change in my life is a fear of success. What will happen if I succeed? And more specifically, will I be OK with the person I become if I succeed. I’m a cautious person. I don’t want to have to spend time repairing relationships or credit scores or anything else. Thus many times, rather than jump in head first, I’ll subconsciously stop myself from succeeding.
Does this sound familiar? Are you afraid of what people will think of you if you actually lose weight? Or more importantly, what you will think of you? Does that mean you’re the kind of person that’s focused more on physical appearance than inner beauty? Does that mean you’ll have to sacrifice something that’s important to you in order to make the time to eat well and exercise? Does that mean you’ll be the kind of person that sacrifices spiritual things for the physical?
Or what if you’ve always wanted to be an artist or an actor or a comedian? That culture has a reputation for promiscuity, ungodliness, and other not so wonderful traits. Does that mean you’ll have to develop those traits? Do you want to be that kind of person? Do you want to be thought of being that kind of person?
Or what about money? What if you were rich? How would you feel about being a wealthy person? What would that say about you? Is it something you want to be? Is it something you’re OK with being?
All of these things are fears of success, or more accurately fear of the kind of person you’ll become if you succeed.
There are a few ways you can tackle the problem depending on both your faith in your decision and your faith in your ability to deal with problems if it was the wrong decision.
Superman You have strong faith in your ability to fix problems associated with your change if they arise.
If you’re in this category, it doesn’t really matter how much you believe in your decision. Just dive in and see what happens. No matter how much of a hole you dig you’ll learn a lot, and you can climb your way out afterward if it’s not really where you want to go.
If you’re in this category, you probably don’t really have this fear of success thing either. 
“Compass say that’s the right direction, but the clouds are ominous” You’re fairly certain this is the right direction for you, but you’re a bit scared about what it means to be that kind of person. An example is the would-be artist who’s afraid of being the sinful person he envisions all artists to be.
There’s a few things you can do to ease this block:
- Identifiy what scares you Is it that you’ll be a bad person? That you won’t have time for what’s important? That you’ll have to drop all of your friends and family?
- Visualize yourself having your cake and eating it too Figure out how you can do the new thing, be the new person and still do what’s important to you.If you’re trying to stay your pious self, maybe while you’re pursing your art and getting to know artist type people you also spend extra time at Church or with people who keep you honest and good. Maybe find someone to talk to about the challenges you’re facing, someone who can honestly assure you when you’re still on the right track or who can warn you when you start veering off.
- Do it When your safeties are in place, start taking action to achieve your goal. If you’ve thought of everything, you should be able to make progress without your subconscious nagging you. And if you notice you still have the nagging feeling, figure out what it is and tackle it. Eventually you’ll weed all these issues out.
“My compass is broken” You aren’t even sure why you’re considering this goal.
This is deserving of its own post, but the short answer is:
- Figure out what’s important to you and where you want to go with your life
- Figure out what appeals to you about this goal
- Do those thing fit together?
If you can answer “yes” to question 3, then your compass isn’t the issue. Move on to the “Ominous Clouds” section.
Chances are you fall into one of these three categories. Hopefully this advice will give you some insight on how to deal what you’re facing.
At some point I’ll expand on the “broken compass” category, since a functioning inner compass is useful and not all that trivial to set up.
