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Avoidance of success… but it is more natural than you think.
It sounds nonsensical that you would fear success, but most likely you do.
That fear comes from unclarity.
Success feels daunting, it feels like a big freakin’ should.
It has happened to my clients. Someone was doing quite well. became the top of the class, and bam, dropped it all, and dropped below the level they were at when they started.
Let’s look what’s under the hood… so we understand, and so we can prevent it.
First: let’s look what the world considers success…
…then we’ll see how that is different from how we want to live. And then we’ll look for more invisible dynamics.
Well, the world considers success, what the magazines talk about, what the TV talks about, what some of those books, magazines talk about is the kind of success where you have no time to do anything… work 24/7.
Or where you must have a yacht and entertain and give parties, because what?
None of it sound, at least to me, like freedom.
And for most of us, most of you, freedom, feeling free to be, to do what you like to do, just hanging out, is not something you’d willing to give up for money, for fame, for success.
Some 35 years ago I invented in some course to become a publishing empire. Sounded good…
But when I got to visualize what it meant, it meant wearing shoes to work. And that was a dealbreaker for me.
Interestingly this exact shoe thing was one of the dealbreakers for me, when I was aspiring to be a Landmark Education Forum Leader… the darn shoes. And standing all day. Ugh. No.
My ideal day, what makes me happy…
…is getting up when I want to get up, and have my first cup of tea. I like to get up hours before the world wakes up… those alone hours are truly mine.
My ideal day also includes activities I like to do. I like to talk, I like to write, I like to converse.
And then I like to spend hours upon hours reading what I want to read, which is fiction. And I can only really read in bed… so there is that.
I like to have some unsolvable riddles, like this one: why would someone get scared from the shadow of success… more than from the shadow of death.
A few times before I asked people what their ideal day would be… and the answers I got were disappointing. I asked the wrong questions, and I got wrong answers.
So here is the same question asked differently: what are things that you think make you happy.
Remember that the first cup of tea has a central role in my happiness. You can’t have that exact feeling in a hotel. So traveling is out. So not having English Breakfast, Tetley, would mean not that. I can’t have that anywhere else but in my own kitchen, hours before dawn.
So when I ask what makes you happy, think small… Think what you want daily… not pie in the sky… but right now, and later on today… and tomorrow.
Think freedom. Think being able to go to a yoga class every day. Or think having time to play computer games. Having a lot of free time… maybe a few months in the summer for … for summer, got it?
What the world considers success seems to not include any freedom.
The best word I think for the success the world means is should. Should do, should be, should sound like… and ALWAYS.
So no wonder that when the shadow of that kind of success is cast upon you, by some actions of yours, you want to stop… and backtrack.
Heck no.
I’ll be honest with you: when I look back at my work history and success, I worked more when I was not successful.
I guess it was because of some misunderstanding of life.
More doesn’t mean merrier.
More often means: without foresight. Without clarity. Without really knowing what I am working for.
And when you don’t know what you are working for, when you don’t have a context that is clear, concise, and realistic, then you spin your wheels a lot… producing exactly nothing.
You see context is decisive.
But your default context is running everything… unless you remember that unless you have an empowering context for your activity, or your life, preferably the same, you’ll be ineffective.
Remember, the empowering context needs to be realistic and ahem… empowering for you.
If you put fame and success as your context when you are starting out, that context is stifling. And doesn’t include all the things that are necessary for you to feel free, to feel happy. So you revolt. Because fame and success is the world’s concept… not yours.
When I published a magazine for gentlemen’s clubs… you know go-go, topless, nude girls dancing… My context was: bringing authenticity and dignity to an area of life where there is none. And true to what Kabbalah teaches, living like a channel, I first brought authenticity and dignity to me, to myself, to my life, and then the same flowed out of my writing, my treating my topic matter with authenticity and dignity.
Publishing that magazine helped me chase away my demons, molestation, abuse, rape, and become authentic and a person with dignity.
Obviously once mastering that… more than a decade, I set my sight at growing and becoming a human being…
Human being is the next evolutionary level of the species. Have I attained that? Muscletest says ‘no’.
Am I OK with that? Yeah. The destination, the arrival is immaterial. What gives me a life I can love and a life I can live powerfully is the every day, the journey. It is also what is authentic.
All those gurus who supposedly attained their goal cannot be authentic, because only someone on the journey can teach the journey.
There are a few things I didn’t have to learn… and therefore I cannot teach them. Like desire to receive for the sake of sharing. I didn’t have to learn it… only to recognize it.
But WE… I am still trying to wrap my mind around it.
I was born to a Holocaust survivor couple. They had no ‘we’… and I am still struggling with WE. Being inclusive: same thing. Compassion: I am still learning it. It is a flavor of WE.
So yeah…
Now what? What should YOU do now, so you can have your cake and eat it too… meaning have success and have your freedom to do the things you like to do?
Your first job is to get clarity about the things that unless you can have them in your success, you don’t want success?
When you are clear about what makes you content, you open the door for success. And it can come in. And it can stay.
Creating a context that empowers you to live your life your way is the way you keep that door open.
Get the newest context course… and a free live session in March.But learning about, even learning the skill are useless, unless you actually make it a habit… which you know takes a lot of practice, uninterrupted daily practice.
Having reminders pasted around your house eventually becomes a should you hate. Or reminders from me… ditto.
The context needs you to be joyful or it is not empowering, is it?
So after you learn to craft a context, you need to have a lot of handholding, spotting, to make it who you are, what your life is about.
Without that this knowledge is pretty useless…
Back in the early 90s I hired a coach at $250 a week to do just one thing: help me keep my context I created alive. Yes, we talked every week. But the purpose of all those conversations wasn’t to increase revenue, wasn’t to become famous… no. All those conversations had one single purpose: that I don’t forget that who I was, that who I wanted to be is authenticity and dignity in an area of life where there is none.
I didn’t just declare and hope that it will not disappear. Or that it wouldn’t devolve into a self-righteous reason to feel superior. Or that it wouldn’t devolve into a nice sentence that I share in my articles to look good but wouldn’t live by.
It was worth for me to pay $250 a week, albeit it was a lot of money for me. But it was worth it. I got what I wanted from it, and therefore I got what I wanted from publishing that magazine for eleven years.
PS: In looking for pictures for this article, I read a few pages worth of what others say. I found some useful stuff… here they are:
What is fear of success trauma?
A feeling of loss and abandonment from the past can cause you to fear success NOW. Fear of success trauma is when you fear success due to trauma from the past. Success feels threatening and overwhelming. In response, you end up holding yourself back and self-sabotaging your success.
Why does success give me anxiety?
One of the most common reasons we allow our fear of success to hold us back is an overwhelming fear of change. As humans, we thrive on routine, and we tend to fear anything unknown. The problem with that, however, is that change is the only constant.
You Worry Success Came Too Easily
But sometimes, we get lucky, and we find success before many years of hard work have passed. This can lead to feelings of guilt, because you might worry that you did not put in enough time or effort to be deserving of the success you’ve achieved.
What is the fear of success in the Bible?
The Jonah complex is the fear of success or the fear of being one’s best. This fear prevents self-actualization, or the realization of one’s own potential. It is the fear of one’s own greatness, the evasion of one’s destiny, or the avoidance of exercising one’s talents.
Is it possible to be afraid of success?
Being a perfectionist can cause us to always feel inadequate. This type of emotion makes it hard to want more success because we know it will never be enough. As a result, the fear of success can begin to form. In working to overcome perfectionism, there are 3 tools that can really help
What is the success syndrome?
It’s when you become successful at something and then subsequently become overwhelmed. This can happen if you get a promotion, become the go-to person for something, or take on new opportunities due to your new recognition.
In my humble opinion these can all be valid, but all of them can be ‘handled’ without therapy, and with the method I teach in this article… But you are free to pursue therapy, if you think of ‘fear of success’ as abnormal.
PPS: When I searched for ‘success avoidance’ I found just one site… and I think it is worth your time to listen to the article
