Facing the fear of success

Something I learned quite a while ago hit me like a ton of bricks.

The fear of success for most people is actually GREATER than the fear of failure.

People are somehow more afraid of things working out in their favor than they are of them all falling apart and falling flat on their face.

This makes sense to me, because failure is comfortable. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, most of us can turn around and look to our past to see a whole bunch of failures.

Failures at work, failures in relationships, in friendships, in parenthood, in family, you name it. There’s often no shortage.

For those of us who tend to walk on the wild side of life and take big risks, we see lots and lots and lots of times it didn’t work out at all. In fact, we could likely make an entire portfolio, not of successes, but rather entitled “Epic Failures of All Time.”

The resonance of failure energy makes “success” energy feel foreign. Our nervous systems aren’t use to this feeling.

Yet.

In this very interesting way, things working out might actually trigger a fight or flight nervous system response. The process goes something like this… you face a trigger, your nervous system has a little freak out recalling all the ways it ended up disastrous before and you go into a response. Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn.

It’s a funny thing about how the body stores trauma, memories, loss, grief, failures. If you’ve ever read The Body Keeps The Score you’ll understand this concept. When something happens in our life that ends sourly, it often imprints into our being that A = B.

An easy example of this is someone close to us gets diagnosed with cancer then dies. Our bodies store that belief and experience as cancer = death. From then on, anytime we hear the C word, either in our own lives with people we know, or from others, we automatically link a death sentence to it.

But that isn’t always the case, is it? In fact, there are far more people who live WITH cancer, beat cancer temporarily or forever, who don’t die from cancer at all.

But because we had a traumatic experience with it, this is the neuropathway that has been carved out in our brain. There’s now massive fear associated with it. It now has a trigger response. From where we now sit, A will always equal B.

Unless we’re aware of it. This is where somatic healing and therapy come into play, where a practitioner can essentially help you get into the muscles, fibers, tissues and cells of your body (where these memories are stored) and help you release them. Then it’s a lifelong journey of reprogramming these beliefs.

It’s hard work. I’ve had to do a lot of this, and I get tripped up each time. Yet I press on, as we must.

Circling back to the original point of this post, I believe that failure is so ingrained in us at a deep core level that we come to expect it. We sort of hope for the best, but expect the worst.

Energy flows where the mind goes.

“A” happens, and then A = B.

So let’s bring it back to the fear of success…

Success, it working out, you falling in love with the right person, landing the job, buying the house, having the kid, insert any number of “successful” situations in here inevitably conjures up all kinds of feelings - namely excitement.

Holy shit this is actually happening!! This is amazing!!

And then fear.

It’s my suspicion that this fear of success ultimately stems from the fear of loss. If we get the thing, we can lose it just as fast.

We get the job, we can lose the job.

We get the relationship, it can end in heartbreak.

We get the house, the kid, the thing, the feeling, the situation - we can lose it in some way.

When we look at it through this lens, it makes total sense why a lot of us stay in failure mode. It’s comfortable. If you don’t have the thing, you can’t lose it.

So what we’re really afraid of isn’t feeling success, or being successful by our own definitions. It’s actually the fear of losing it once we’ve gotten it. We fear the end. It being taken away somehow.

So we stay small. We choose to stay in the kiddie pool instead of swimming in the ocean.

I do want to mention though that somehow this can actually play out in our favor. An easy example of this for me is back in 2012. Right before I got married our house was robbed clean.

Clean.

Jewelry, clothing, valuables. Irreplaceable valuables. Sentimental valuables.

They took everything, even the microwave.

The blessing was that our dogs were home while it happened and were left untouched.

It was this experience of extreme violation and loss that ultimately changed the way I viewed and interacted with the material world. Anything you buy, things you invest in, could easily be taken away from you in the blink of an eye. A robbery. A fire. A tornado.

It was then I started diving into sustainability practices and the circular economy. Essentially obtaining items like furniture and clothing that were second hand. In my mind, this kept the attachment to such things very low. We place far more value on things we pay money for than things we receive for free or pay very little for.

This has suited me and brought a well of lessons and wonderful memories over the years. I’m not grateful for the robbery, I wouldn’t wish that kind of experience on anyone, but I’m grateful for what it taught me about value. I’m grateful for what it taught me about what to place value on, more specifically.

The point to my story is the experience of loss can be both a blessing and a cage.

Yes, the end of something (whether by death or ending) is always inevitable. It will end at some point.

Partnership will inevitably end (at least here in our human bodies), either by one party or the other choosing to end the relationship, or by death of one.

The job will inevitably end, either by getting let go, you quitting or you retiring.

You being a parent may never “end,” but the way in which your child needs you will always change shape and different phases of your parenting journey will end.

So if we understood that everything will always have an end somehow, can that change the experience we have of it in the present? Can we actually be more present with the situation as it is right now?

Can we identify that what’s keeping us held back isn’t necessarily the fear of it working out, but the fear of losing something we value and care so deeply about?

I wonder what would happen if we just felt that fear and went all in on it anyways. Dare to get your heart broken, as to love something or someone so deeply is such a wonderful human experience. It offers such an expansive view on life and allows you to experience being human in such a deeper capacity.

I wonder what would happen if you looked your fear of success/loss right in the face and went for the job you REALLY want. Started the business. Started the side hustle. Went all in on the relationship. Did the thing knowing there’s a real risk of failure or loss involved.

What kind of experience could taking that leap have for you? What kinds of blessings along the journey would you miss out on if you chose not to?

Yes, it could end in failure. It could also end up being one of the best things you’ve ever done in your life.

At the end of the day, we only have this life moment to moment. We can absolutely choose to live it in fear of the what'-if’s, of the losses, of the failures, of it actually working out.

Or… you can dive in and live the depth of this human experience, not just the width.