How To Overcome A Fear Of Success

• Are you subconsciously blocking success in your life?
• Is your childhood limiting your adult life?
• Find out how to overcome a fear of success.

The opposite to a fear of failure, is a fear of success. This fear is strongly interlinked with your level of self esteem and self worth.

How worthy you believe yourself to be, will largely determine the amount of success you achieve in life, more so than the skills or education you have.

Understanding and improving your level of self esteem, is therefore the absolute key to overcoming a fear of success.

Do You Have A Fear Of Success?

An easy way to determine whether you have a fear of success is to ask yourself these questions.

• Have you ever felt you were close to achieving something big, then failed at the last moment?
• Have you managed to live a disciplined and productive lifestyle, then suddenly went back to your old bad habits?
• Have you seemed to reach a plateau in your life in terms of success, and no matter how hard you try, you cannot seem to get any higher?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you most likely have a fear of success.  Now it may seem strange that people should fear being successful, but what you should understand is that this fear arises from a subconsciously instilled belief that was most likely formed during your child and teenage years of life.

What this means is that consciously you may desire success, but subconsciously you do not feel you deserve it.

What Causes Limiting Beliefs In The Subconscious?

The majority of our beliefs were formed during our childhood, which is why I spent a lot of time writing about how childhood affects adult life.

However in summary, the way you were treated and the things you were told (particularly by your parents), all helped to create and shape certain beliefs in your mind.

Some of these beliefs may have empowered you, filling you with confidence. Whilst others may have limited you, filling you with self doubt.

These subconscious beliefs directly influence the type and level of success you will achieve in life. If you were made to feel important and special as a child, you are likely to believe that you deserve success, and success is something you will and should achieve.

However, if you were made to feel badly about yourself, the opposite will occur. Instead of feeling worthy, you will feel unworthy. Instead of feeling you can achieve success, you will feel you can’t achieve success.

The Effect Of Limiting Beliefs

A person who is filled with limiting beliefs typically has low levels of self esteem. The effect of this is that they subconsciously believe they are only capable of achieving a certain level of success.

If they start to achieve more success than they subconsciously believe they should, typically they will resort to self sabotaging behaviors that will bring them down to the level they believe they should be at.

This is also why people seem to reach a certain level of success in their life, and then can’t seem to get any further. Again, their subconscious beliefs are holding them back at a level they feel they should be at.

How High Can You Jump?

A good example to demonstrate this point comes from an experiment done with jumping frogs. Several frogs were each placed in separate glass jars, and covered with a lid to prevent them escaping. Food, air and water were provided for them.

At first the frogs kept jumping trying to escape, but each time they would hit their head on the lid. After 30 days the lids were removed.

Despite the fact that the lids were not there anymore, the frogs never jumped out of the jars, even though they could have easily done so.

During the 30 days the frogs were kept in the jars, they learnt that they could not escape from the jar. In essence, they formed a belief that the top of the jar was as high as they could go. Even when the lid was removed, this limiting belief system kept them where they were.

This simple experiment shows us the power of our beliefs systems. We all formed certain beliefs as a result of our childhood, and many of us still hold onto those beliefs even though they are no longer true, and are limiting our true potential.

To realise your true potential you must therefore realise that there is no lid on the jar, and that you can jump out!

Loving Failure

Another reason why people may have a fear of success, can be due to the conditioning they received as children. When they failed at something, they were given lots of attention and comfort by their parents.

As a result, they soon learnt to associate failure with pleasure, and subsequently sabotaged potential successes in the future.

Overcoming Your Fears

Rejection, a fear of failure and a fear of success are all common fears that will destroy self discipline. These fears lead to avoidance behaviours, which cause you to engage in less important activities as a means of avoiding something you have associated a fear with.

However, if you can remove these fears, you will greatly reduce the avoidance behaviours associated with them. This can be done by using the techniques I have discussed in previous articles, to link more pleasure to the activities of that which you feel the greatest fear.

Remember, fear is only as strong as its representation in your mind. The more you stand up to fear, the stronger you will become.

So if you are currently trying to live a more disciplined lifestyle, I suggest you read the articles on self discipline and become aware of any avoidance behaviours you may currently have as a result of fear.

This will help you to understand why some people are able to discipline themselves, whilst others are not.

If you need to improve your feelings of self worth, then I suggest you read 1 or 2 articles per day on the section of self esteem.

This will allow time for the information to sink in, and will help you better understand it. Healthy self esteem is fundamental to all success in life, and is definitely something you should invest your time into improving.

Low self esteem is often misinterpreted as meaning someone who is depressed. However this is not always the case.

In my experience virtually everyone has some degree of low self esteem, which is affecting their life in one way or another.

So unless you are 100% happy with yourself and your life, you would most likely benefit from working on improving your own level of esteem and self worth.