Member-only story
Afraid of Success
You can’t move forward if you don’t know what’s holding you back.
Have you ever felt like you were sabotaging your own success? I have. People around me told me I did it because I was afraid of success, and I believed them for a while. I was too easily impressed by other people who were more successful than me. My definition of success was much narrower than it is now. It was too narrow. People who told me I was afraid of success don’t seem so successful anymore and it’s easy to see through their judgments now.
But it wasn’t just them. The idea that we are afraid of success is widespread in self-help literature; a murky area with many overlapping concepts and approaches. One of the better concepts is ‘self-limiting beliefs.’ This is where the action you take is dictated by what you believe you are capable of. If you believe that you cannot do something, or that something is not possible, or that you do not deserve something, you will not really try to attain it or achieve it, thereby limiting what is possible for you. Self-limiting beliefs can be challenged and changed, and when they are, performance, results, and life satisfaction are likely to improve.
Self-limiting beliefs are a useful concept, but fear of success is not. Trying to succeed by eliminating the fear of success is like ghost hunting; it’s a waste of…
