The fears keeping us from our own success
For some of us the fear of failure is so crippling it prevents us from trying new things or going for the life we truly long to live.
However, fear of failure isn’t the only obstacle when it comes to achieving the things we long to do, but strange as it may sound, the subconscious fear of success and being successful plays a huge part in how we deal with our ambitions.
Being afraid of being successful may sound a bit silly at first, because isn’t success what we should all strive for?
In fact many of us do have some subconscious fear of success to some degree.
Success, or the idea of what being successful will entail on an individual level is a lot more complex than it seems.
The idea of being successful can bring up various assumptions and ideas of what your life as a successful person will look like.
Some of the most common conceptions about success and the perhaps negative attributes it may bring with it include; change(fear of change), handling criticism, being in the spotlight, turning into someone else, and losing support networks.
Breaking down these different subconscious fears can help you analyse and reflect whether you have any of these, and if you do work with them.
Fear of Change
It is human nature to feel comfortable with what we know. We often long for a better life while at the same time clinging onto the life we know because it feels safe. This subconscious resistance to change is obviously preventing us from fully moving towards the life we long for . We need to accept that even if we don’t proactively create change for ourselves and move forward in life, change will still persist as a constant even if we are living our lives passively. Life will move on and change will occur eventually regardless of how much we cling to things staying the same. Thus we have no choice but moving forward. If change is inevitable, there is no point to fear the changes that success will bring.
Handling Criticism
Those who chase their dreams and become successful will always be a target for critics. Thinking of the criticism we might receive if we strive for the things we’ve always wanted and perhaps even become very successful at them can be daunting. Dealing with judgment is difficult for most of us. We want to be liked and praised by others- and yes unfortunately success isn’t always a likeable attribute. People may envy us if we are successful, talk about us behind our backs etc.
Now if there is anything I have learned on my relatively short time on this earth, it is that people will talk and judge regardless of what you do. People will always have something to say. If you do nothing, they will criticise you for being boring, if you chase your dreams they will call you delusional and if you are successful they will say it’s just because you had “the right connections” or that you’ve had some other opportunity that wasn’t available to them.
Hence, people will criticise no matter what, so you may as well be happy and successful and let them talk.
Being in the spotlight
Becoming successful at something can mean that you suddenly get a lot of attention. Having people who admire you and look up to you can put a lot of pressure on you and might be very stressful at times. Some people may enjoy being in the spotlight more than others but it always comes at it’s price.
However, there are ways of dealing with the pressure and attention that this aspect of being successful may bring. The more grounded and balanced you are as a person, the easier it will be to deal with being in the spotlight.
Turning into someone else
There is this delusional idea that successful people will turn into someone else and perhaps even become ruthless and nasty. I believe that this concept mostly comes from movies where everything is highly overdramatized and a poor wretched character is suddenly blessed with incredible overnight success and is unrecognisable to his former self. This isn’t how things are when people become successful in reality. Being successful may give us more financial freedom or more recognition for what we do but it won’t drastically change our character. No matter how successful we may become, we will always be in control of how we act and what we believe in. This doesn’t mean that we won’t change at all. Growth and change is inevitable and natural but it won’t mean a drastic overnight change and suddenly becoming an entirely different person.
Loosing support networks
If we become successful and manage to build the life we have always wanted for ourselves, our environment may change and we may be surrounded by new, different kinds of people. This doesn’t mean that we will loose contact with good old friends but we will perhaps have a new work environment, new colleagues or perhaps even move countries. We may not have the same support network as we had before but have a new one instead. Things will be different and that can be scary. We feel comfort in having the good old same environment even if that environment is shitty. There is no need to fear. As mentioned before, change is constant, regardless of what you do and that change will also apply to the people in your life. People will come and go, such is life. Even if you did stay in the same place and kept the same support network, things still would eventually change and people still might leave your life in one way or another.
These are just a few of the subconscious fears that people have around the idea of success and being successful. You may resonate with some of these and be able to work on them. I personally resonate very much with quite a few of these and am on my own journey of battling my subconscious fears of becoming the most successful version of myself. It is often the subconscious factors that prevent us from reaching our fullest potential. We need to dig deep before we can shoot for the starts.
