Overcoming Fear of Success
6 Ways to Stop Sabotaging Your Relationships, Career, & Life Goals
People fear success because they don't feel good or smart enough to live up to their achievements. These 6 practical steps won't erase fear, but will encourage movement.
“Fear of success” may sound strange, because who wouldn’t want to be successful? Successful people have money, power, fast cars, personal trainers, hired help – there doesn't seem to be much to fear.
Success is scary because it involves change. It can be intimidating and hard to handle. Success also involves more challenges and responsibilities – and that is threatening.
To learn the signs of self-sabotage, read How Fear of Success Works.
6 Ways to Stop Sabotaging Your Relationships, Career, & Life Goals
You may always feel fear of success or fear of failure, but that doesn’t mean you’re paralyzed. These tips won’t make fear disappear – they’re practical steps to success.
1. Figure out why you’re sabotaging your goals. You don’t have to go to a psychotherapist to figure out why you fear success. Talk to people you trust, write in your journal, and be honest with yourself. What are you afraid to admit? What’s holding you back from losing the extra weight or asking for a promotion at work? You don’t have to go further than that. Just accepting your reasons will give you a sense of freedom.
2. Prepare. A huge sign of self-sabotage or fear of success at work occurs when you don’t study for the exam or work presentation or big project. You subconsciously or deliberately sabotage yourself when you fail to prepare by, for example, partying all night or choosing the wrong work partners. The more you prepare, the more your fears may subside.
3. Accept failure as part of succeeding. “It’s a common assumption that if you really try your hardest to get something and don’t get it, you’ll be shattered – so it’s safer not to risk going out at all,” says Barbara Sher in Wishcraft. “That is totally false. The exact opposite is true.” If you try and fail, you won’t feel as bad as you think. You’ll gain experience, education, contacts, and self-confidence.
4. Be scared. Scared of asking, trying, working hard, pushing yourself, sharing your dreams? Big deal. We all are. Read Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. If you don’t have time to find the book, then just make it your motto. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway will help you overcome fear of success.
5. Compete against yourself – not others. “Competition in which one person must lose in order for us to win tends to undermine the best in most of us,” says Robert K. Cooper in The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Potential for Leadership and Life. “It makes us wary and distrustful of others, causes us to withhold and distort information, makes us intolerable of uncertainty and change, and it so narrows our focus that constructive creativity is practically shut down.”
6. See your skills as changeable. Research shows that if you think your professional skills and abilities are fixed, then you’ll become anxious if you’re successful. Psychologist Jason Plaks from the University of Toronto and research scientist Kristin Stecher from the University of Washington found that people who think their capabilities are fixed get disoriented when they succeed, and their performance then spirals downward. To overcome fear of success, view your skills as changeable (and change them with education, training, research, or mentoring).
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