Here’s a question for you: Would you allow someone to invest $1 million in you?
Let’s say a very successful investor in your field meets you and sees extreme potential in you. This person sits you down and says, “Hey, I want to invest $1 million in you.” All they want in return is the initial $1 million back after you become a huge success.
Sweet deal, right?
So would you accept, because you totally believe in yourself? Or would you freak out and walk away, because you can’t deal with the heavy burden of having someone invest a huge amount of money on you?
If it’s the latter, it’s possible you have a fear of success. Many of my clients are surprised when I tell them that this may be what’s keeping them back. They’re usually familiar with the fear of failure. But the mere notion of fearing success can be embedded so deeply in their unconscious that it catches them off guard.
If you get an amazing opportunity and you turn it down, it’s because on some level, you believe that success is not for you. That more success and more money would make you a worse human being. Or that there would be too much pressure to deal with, and you wouldn’t be able to cope.
Maybe you are convinced that more money — and it follows, more power — could cause you to break your values. Make you corrupt. That it could attract temptation, and suddenly you’re one of those men who cheat on their wives because they’re now surrounded by gold-diggers. Generally, this is attributed to a fear of success. However, if you dig deeper, you could find assumptions about success that limit you, such as: more success means more stress; more money turns people into bad human beings; fame compromises happiness.
These preconceived notions are what stop us from becoming successful. We need to challenge these assumptions. Because, the truth is, we don’t really know if all these things are going to take place.
What if you were strong, wealthy, powerful, successful… and a good person at the same time? Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Because people don’t like to challenge their limiting beliefs; they’ll go to great lengths to prove that those beliefs are true and will search for validation that they’re right.
To give you an example, a good friend and I were having a conversation about a common friend that happens to be financially and socially well-off. We were discussing how he had mistreated another friend in common. When I finished my point, he said, “Well, I guess this is the quality of behavior you get from the people at the top.” I stopped him dead in his tracks, literally stopped him physically. I said, “Do you realize what you just said to yourself? You just told your mind that to reach the top, to be at the top, you have to be a bad human being.”
Now, my friend is a good person, so odds are with his limiting beliefs, he’s going to struggle to get to the top. Especially when I know that he’s been struggling in the area of finances. He will need to examine his concepts about money, power and their correlation with what happens to people who attain heights. Because I can argue that there are good people at the top, just as there are bad people at the bottom.
If you suffer from the same type of thinking, you should work on proving yourself wrong. Go searching for evidence that contradicts your limiting beliefs. Find the people that are rich, powerful and successful, who also happen to be great human beings, and question them. Read their biographies. Interview them. Tell them about your limiting beliefs and ask them to challenge those assumptions. Maybe they’ll confirm your assumptions and share with you how they dealt with them. See what they say.
Better yet, ask them to mentor you; that’ll keep you in check. If they don’t mentor you and you’re still afraid, just tell yourself that you’ll cross that bridge when you get to it. You’ll handle it when the time comes.
What about you? What about success scares you, and how do you deal with it?