Fear of Failure or Fear of Success? What's ACTUALLY Going On
Are you afraid of failure? Are you afraid of success? Or do you rapidly oscillate between the two and can't decide which one is actually holding you back? By the end of this video, you'll know what is actually going on so you can finally move on and start achieving your potential.
Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.
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If left to its own devices, fear has the power to derail our lives and leave us feeling hopeless and empty. Helping my clients face their fears instead of being at the mercy of them is one of the most important things I do in my coaching. Now it's your turn. Let's get started.
Before we get to the root of things, first let's get a little more familiar with the fears of failure and success. When one is afraid of failure, it's not as simple as being afraid of not being perfect, of doing things wrong, of breaking something, messing something up. Wrapped up in the fear of failure is the fear of the consequences that we would experience if and when we fail.
Those consequences can include losing our job, losing our family, losing all of our money. Oftentimes, our brains are really good at going to worst case scenarios and we're afraid we'll end up alone, penniless, homeless. Personally, I tend to be afraid of being hated by people, of being despised.
The fear of success, on the other hand, is where we're afraid of doing things right, of getting it perfect, of getting a lot of accolades. But similar with the fear of failure, we have to go a step deeper because with the fear of success, we're afraid of the consequences of that success.
For example, those who win the lottery and suddenly have a lot of money, their relationships tend to fall apart because there will be people trying to get that money from them. There will be people who can no longer empathize with their position and just stop talking to them. It can be a really lonely thing to win the lottery. And while that is an extreme example, I share it just because when you're afraid of success, you're afraid of those kinds of things. (laughs) You may be rich, but you might still be alone. And we tend to be afraid of losing important people in our lives or losing the possibility of developing more relationships with good people that we wanna have in our lives.
Now, one might think that those two fears are mutually exclusive, even though they do have that common element of the fear of the consequences, but they're not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible to be afraid of both failure and success. But knowing that you're afraid of both isn't necessarily helpful information. For those of you who are trying to get to the root of your limiting beliefs so you can dismantle them, which can be really important mindset work, constantly vacillating between these two fears can be really confusing.
So let's simplify it, shall we?
If you constantly ricochet between these two fears, what you're actually afraid of is change. Likely because it took you a long time and a lot of work to feel relatively safe under your current circumstances. And because of that, you feel like you have control over your life right now. If things were to change at all, either for the bad or for the good, your safety and control would no longer be guaranteed. You'd have to figure it out all over again.
If you feel called out or experienced an aha moment just now, let me know down in the comments.
Like we did when explaining the fears of failure and success earlier, let's take this limiting belief mindset work one step deeper than the fear of change. How do we do that? By diving a little bit deeper into why.
If things were to change at all, you'd have to figure things out all over again to ensure your safety and gain control. Why is that scary, perhaps, even terrifying? I'm guessing it's because, at some level, you do not trust yourself to be able to handle things.
You don't trust yourself to be able to save yourself or pick yourself up in the event of failure.
You don't trust yourself to earn, let alone, deserve any success
You don't trust yourself to show up for yourself when it really matters.
Long story short, I'm guessing you're afraid of change because you don't trust yourself to be able to handle it and take care of yourself, let alone protect yourself, from any possible new dangers.
Big oof!
Here's the rub however. Is it true that you shouldn't trust yourself or is that simply another limiting belief? Whichever it is, I've got you.
To start dismantling a limiting belief, if that's what this is, you first want to state the original limiting belief and then derive it's opposite. So for example, in the case of the limiting belief being, "I don't trust myself," the opposite would be, "I do trust myself." So that's step one.
Then step two is to come up with concrete, specific evidence as to why the opposite is actually true. Keep in mind that it can be really difficult to find concrete, specific evidence of the opposite of your limiting belief. But that is why this exercise is so important. Because when you find evidence for the opposite, it starts dismantling the original limiting belief.
Since finding evidence around self-trust can be so nebulous, let me give you a few examples from my own experience about what self-trust looks like for me.
For example, like I talked a lot about last week in this post, if I tell myself, "I'm only gonna do 15 minutes of work on something," that's all I'll do. I will stop after 15 minutes and not keep going.
Another example that some of you spoonies might relate to: I have a history of chronic headaches, and if I don't catch a headache within the first hour with adequate painkillers, I'm not gonna have much hope of dealing with it. However, because in my dark times I had a tendency to ignore those signs that I needed a painkiller and not take care of myself, and then suffer later, it came from a place of not feeling worthy of being taken care of. Like it was a really bad thing. But nowadays, for me to pretty consistently catch a headache early and then take a painkiller for it is a huge jump for me. And that is evidence that I am starting to truly trust myself and trust my experience, and that I have are right and it's okay, and is it important that I take care of myself.
One of the things that I am personally working on in my journey towards unconditional self-trust is in healing my relationship with food. I've been on my journey from disordered eating recovery since 2017 and allowing myself to stop eating when I'm full and no longer enjoying food has been quite the journey. (Note: Due to my gastroparesis, it's really really easy to eat past comfortable fullness, and bingeing after long periods of severe restriction was a problematic cycle for me.)
I am significantly better than I was, but I still struggle with that because I had 30 years of experience basically of pushing past my fullness cues, almost to hurt myself. It was almost a part of self-harm for me to eat that much. But I'm a lot better than I was, and I am continuing to improve that part of my disordered relationship with food.
So hopefully those three examples can help you to seek out concrete, specific evidence in your life why you can trust yourself right now. And if anything, you wanna keep accruing evidence that the opposite of your limiting belief is true until you at least balance the scales, and the limiting belief itself doesn't have as much power anymore.
If you want to learn more about this kind of work to dismantle limiting beliefs, I highly recommend checking out Byron Katie's "The Work."
It's also likely that you don't trust yourself in some aspects of your life, if not most of them. And the more you struggle to trust yourself, the more important it is to start building that trust. If you're wondering, "Well, how do I do that?" I will pose a question back to you. How do you learn to trust another person? It takes time and it takes gathering evidence over time that someone is trustworthy. You meet a stranger, you don't trust them right off the bat. If they're kind to you and nice to you and respectful to you over time, they become an acquaintance. The more you can trust someone to respect your boundaries and to be a safe person to be vulnerable around, that's when you start developing deeper trust. The more trust you build up in the bank, the better.
So how do you do that with yourself? You need to establish boundaries for yourself and respect them. So the example I gave earlier and I talked about in this video, is "Okay, I'm only gonna do 15 minutes of work on this thing and then I'm done." And you actually stop after 15 minutes instead of subconsciously expecting yourself to do more.
Another way you can build trust with yourself is keeping promises to yourself over time. And when you have little self-trust, you need to start with small baby-step promises; ones that are doable. You don't want to set a big five-year goal right out the gate when you don't trust yourself.
You also need to be honest with yourself. You have to tell the truth to yourself about what you're thinking, feeling, experiencing, about what you want, about what you don't want, about the boundaries you wanna have. Telling the truth to yourself is a crucial aspect of trusting yourself. And as an extension of that, you need to not gaslight or manipulate yourself, because that is the opposite of truth-telling. It's lying in order to manipulate and that's not okay. Do not do that to yourself.
And just like keeping promises to yourself, you want to be dependable. So if and when things happen that you need to respond to, you need to slowly build up the resilience to trust yourself to handle those in the way that you would prefer yourself to handle them. And again, that's not easy. That's a more advanced aspect of these steps that I'm outlining for you, and you can get to that by doing the first ones first.
And remember, building trust takes time, especially when there's been a betrayal of trust. This isn't a process to rush.
Now, you know why you struggled so much to figure out what you're afraid of most, failure or success, and how to start dismantling your fear.
For those of you who've been around a while, you know this is usually the part where I recommend people sign up for my free masterclass to help you kick procrastination and resistance to the curb. While that's still available and can be found at this link, I'm excited to share that my new live course will be starting mid-January and I'm now accepting applications.
This eight-week course is designed to have all of the tools, support, and structure spoonies need in order to spend their precious time and energy the way they would like to so they can finally achieve their potential and thrive.
But most importantly, the ultimate goal of all of my coaching (including, and especially this course), is to help my clients develop unconditional self-trust so they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can handle anything that comes their way and achieve their potential.
And if you're worried about how much the course will cost, please don't, because I've got sliding scale pricing. It is really important to me that my course be as accessible as possible. I can't wait to read your applications.
And for those of you who have been supporting me, thank you so, so much. I couldn't do this without you.
Again, check out these videos next to learn more about how to not gaslight or manipulate yourself:
If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back next week with my final video of 2021. See you then. Bye.