Entre-Talk: Fear of Success

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: Fear of Success.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Hello entrepreneur friends, welcome to Entre-Talk. We’re going to talk about your business, talk about where your head might be at, specifically with regards to your business. And this week I want to talk about this odd thing that happens for many of us with regards to all kinds of goals, but it certainly shows up in our businesses a lot, which is fear of success. Now, I remember, I don’t know, way back in the day when I used to hear people talk about that they were afraid of being successful and I was like, “What? What are you talking about? Nobody’s afraid of succeeding. We’re afraid of failing.”

So I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I just, I couldn’t even relate to it until I’ve heard more and more people get coached on it and they don’t always use those words. They don’t always say they’re afraid of success. They use a lot of other ways to describe it, which I over time have decided, I think that’s what people are actually afraid of. I don’t think that we’re afraid of winning per se. I don’t think that we’re afraid of achieving our goal, even though that’s what people call it. I think there are basically four main other things that we are afraid of.

And I want to highlight them today because if you can relate to any of these, then first of all I want you to just know that you’re not alone. But second of all, we’re going to talk through each one and I’m going to talk to you about why it’s really just nonsense. What this is, this fear of success that we have is just the brain’s way of first of all, hiding, not exposing you to any potential danger or judgment or disappointment or any kind of negative emotion, if you will. And your brain is designed to try to prevent you from feeling negative emotion. So that’s the first thing that’s happening.

The second thing is the brain doesn’t want to work any harder than necessary, that is basically keeping you alive. So anything beyond survival the brain’s like, “Why are we bothering with any of this?” So I view this fear of success or these four things as just the brain’s way of trying to get creative and sell you on not doing any of this, not building your business, at least, certainly not putting in your best effort, at least hiding a little bit if not a lot or not trying at all. That is what your brain wants.

Your brain doesn’t want you to go try this. Your brain doesn’t want you to give it your all because it’s afraid of danger and because it doesn’t want to work hard. But you can manage that part of your brain and override that part of your brain if you understand what’s really going on. So let’s dive in.

The first thing that I hear people say that I categorize as fear of success is that they’re worried they won’t be able to live up to whatever it is that they think successful people are. When we look at people who have succeeded in their businesses in the way that we want to succeed and we put them on a pedestal. And we think that they are special or that they somehow have it more together than us, or that they don’t make mistakes, at least not very often, or that they know how to dress.

And literally I’ve heard people say, “I just feel like that the best coaches out there are always really well dressed. I don’t know how to dress myself that well.” It can be anything from that, from physical appearance down to, am I going to be able to keep my life together enough to be the person that I think these other successful people are? So if you’re putting successful people on a pedestal, that might then feel scary to you that you can’t live up to that.

But here’s what I want you to know, people that are successful are not better people than people who haven’t succeeded. And they don’t even necessarily have it more together. So if we take coaching as the example, a life coach who’s very successful, whatever that means to you, however you want to define success, is not necessarily better at managing their brains or their emotions or following through on their goals or whatever it is that they teach. They’re not necessarily better at it than somebody who hasn’t succeeded. They’re still human beings.

So that pedestal that we put people on is just something that happens in our heads, it’s a mental construct. It’s not based in reality. They’re not any better, smarter, etc. Now, do they start dressing nicer? Maybe some of them, I mean you can, but you don’t have to. As soon as you define success as looking a certain way and that it has to fit in a certain box, then that may cause you to find excuses. That may give your brain some excuses as to why we shouldn’t bother because we’re not that kind of person. We’re not going to be able to live up to that.

And then it’s sort of that whole impostor syndrome thing that sneaks in. But I promise you that it’s just a made up construct. Most people who are ‘succeeding’ achieving their business goals, achieving the goals they have for making an impact in the world would not say, “Yeah, I just really got it all together. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m just pretty great.” That’s not the reality. People who are succeeding are usually like, “Yeah, I figured some things out, and I still have so many problems and shortcomings, where shall we begin?” That’s the reality.

It’s not usually the successful person saying it, it’s everybody around them thinking, no, that’s not true, you’re amazing. People don’t believe them always, but that doesn’t change the reality that they’re still human beings and you can still be a human being and be successful, just saying. So we don’t need to fear success for that reason. You don’t have to become a different version of you, in fact, that’s not going to work.

We want you to be you and succeed other than the person that you become as you succeed, the things that you overcome that are becoming more of the version of you, that you want to be, yeah, you’ll be that. But you won’t be any more perfect. You’ll still be 5/050. You’ll still be half amazing and half a lot to learn. That’s alright.

Okay, let’s look at the second reason why we fear success. This one again, I coach on quite a bit and it came up again the other day where people will say to me, “Well, I’m afraid to really put my work out there or really go get clients” or do whatever it is that they want to be doing in their business. “I’m afraid to really go all in and do it, in fact, I’m not doing it at all or I’m only sort of doing it. I’m not really giving it my all because I’m afraid that once I do that, I’m going to have so many people that want my help, that I’m not going to have time for my personal life.”

Or sometimes it sounds like, if I let myself dive into my business, I’m going to get so wrapped up in it and so excited about it and it’s going to be so fun. And I’m going to have so many ideas and so much energy around it that I’m going to neglect then the rest of my life, whether that be my family or my own self-care or I’m just going to be really out of balance. And I don’t want to let people down and I don’t want to, whether that be your clients or customers or I don’t want to let my family down. I should just play small. I probably shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t do it very big anyway.

I’ll just kind of dip my toe in the water because if I go all in, my work life balance will for sure be out of whack. Does this ever occur to you? Do you ever think this? Some of you do, I know. So listen to me, first of all, good news and bad news. Just launching your website or posting on Instagram or publishing a podcast or whatever it is you’re going to do even if it’s the most amazing podcast ever, the most gorgeous life changing content on your social media or on your website.

Still, it’s going to take a while for people to know that you’re there, for people to find you and for people to feel the impact. It’s not going to be an overnight rush of traffic. I mean, maybe it will, that would be cool actually, if it did. I’m not going to say it’s impossible. It’s possible. And I think it would be awesome. I’d be thrilled for you if that happened, but I have never seen that happen for anyone I know, certainly didn’t happen for me that way. I’ve never seen it happen with any of the coaches I’ve worked with or entrepreneurs I’ve worked with.

I have only seen the opposite where it takes longer than we wish it would to even fill up our coaching practice. It’s going to be a gradual process. So you can tell your brain, “Just relax, we’re just posting content on Instagram. We’re just publishing a podcast. We’re just launching a website. We’re just writing a blog”, whatever it is that you’re doing. That’s all we’re doing. We’re not throwing caution to the wind. We’re not neglecting our children. We’re just putting some useful, hopefully useful information out into the world.

Now, let’s say one day you look up and realize that you have gotten your life out of balance, that you have been working more than you want to or that you have a lot of clients now, a lot of demand, a lot of customers. This is a good problem. This is a very solvable problem. You can at any time stop and go, “You know what? I don’t want to work that much.”

And yes, you might have to use some self-discipline if you love working on your business, might have to be disciplined to shut down the computer, turn it off at whatever time and be there for your family. And you might have some restlessness as your brain gives you business ideas that you want to be working on. Yeah, that’s possible. This is a very good problem though. Do you see what I’m saying? If your problem is I love working so much and I have so many ideas that I can’t stop. I’d take that problem for sure.

Or I have so many clients, so many customers that want my help that I just can’t juggle it all. This is a good problem and a very solvable problem. I can’t emphasize that enough. And odds are it won’t happen overnight, it’ll happen gradually. So you can manage yourself as you go. Don’t let yourself work tons of hours if you know that’s your tendency, start out with some parameters. Work reasonable hours and amounts of time right now so that you can still be there in your personal life the way you want to. And stick with that.

I promise you that your clients or customers will adhere to your schedule. You don’t have to adhere to theirs if you’re operating out of abundance and understanding the power of what you do. So I think we’ve thrown that one out. That’s nonsense. You get to choose how much you’re working and we can coach you through it if it’s challenging to do. But yeah, you’re going to choose it and it’s probably not going to happen overnight.

Okay, let’s go to number three. The third reason, and this a little bit piggybacks on number two but it’s different, I would say in that what I hear people saying is, “I’m just afraid that if I become successful, meaning a lot of people know about what I do, it makes a big impact. People really want it, they want the service I provide or what have you. They want to work with me. And I decide at one point that I don’t want to do it anymore, I’ll have to keep doing it because I don’t want to let people down.”

So with this one, people view success in their business as a one way street, now that I’m on the street, people know about me, people like what I do, they want my services. I can’t quit. I can’t let them down. And I say, “Why not?” Did you know you can literally at any time just change your mind if you want to. You can decide, hey, I’m glad you’re loving all this, I hope it’s helped you and I’m out.

And you can pass the baton to someone else or you can just say, “People, I love you and I’ll see you later”, and sign off. You literally can at any time. So are you going to be letting people down? I mean, maybe, but guess what? They’ll go find someone else. You’re not the only one that can help people, you’re really not, I promise. And you can recommend someone else or whatever.

There’s so many beautiful, generous ways to handle this but if your brain is telling you, “We shouldn’t do this because it might be really successful, and you’ll have a big following and a lot of demand, and then you’ll have to keep doing it.” And I call nonsense, at any point I can just say, “You know what? I’m done, see you.” You literally can. So tell your brain. “Settle down, we don’t have to worry.” Again this would be a very good problem if we had so much demand that we didn’t know what to do?

Okay, last, fourth reason is kind of a summary of these first three. It’s this overall feeling of if I’m successful, this will happen to me but it might include some other things like I just might become really full of myself. I might start thinking I’m better than everyone else or I might in some way like I said, lose control of myself and then just work all the time. I might become overly obsessed with money. I might become greedy. I might lose track of my priorities and what matters.

So it’s this overall, some version of this will happen to me. I’ll become this version of myself that I don’t want to become. Now, the hole in this argument is that it assumes that that’s not a choice and it kind of assumes also that it would just happen overnight. Things like that don’t happen overnight. We don’t change our priorities and everything overnight. It’s a series of small choices or lack of attention to choices that lead us down a path like that.

So first of all, build your business in the way that you want to run your business when it’s successful. If you don’t view yourself working 40 hours a week, don’t work 40 hours a week right now. If you want to make sure that you keep your priorities straight and that you don’t value money over people and relationships, then don’t value money over people and relationships right now. And watch yourself, keep an eye on your head if you know that you have a tendency to go in a direction that doesn’t serve you and make a different choice.

It’s easier to redirect yourself in these small choices that lead up to the end game, than to get to the end and realize it. But even if you get to the end and realize it, wait, I’ve totally over-prioritized this thing, I’ve changed my priorities, I am comparing myself to others or I’m overly competitive in a way that isn’t serving me, whatever it is. Even if that happens, even if you’re not paying attention and you just wind up there and you look up one day and realize it, it’s still never too late. You can always use your agency to redirect yourself.

So again, the way you achieve success does matter. I recommend that you be intentional about it, that you manage yourself, that you get some coaching through it. Let me coach you through it if you want. Going to be opening up the opportunity to go through a business program in September, end of August, beginning of September depending on whether or not you’re a current student in the business program. We have a whole new program coming next year, spoiler alert.

But at any rate, whether it’s me or another coach, get some help with keeping your head in the right spot, because the way you build your business should be the way you want to run your business once you’re successful. But if you do that you have zero reason to fear success. Don’t let that primitive brain that is afraid because it thinks there’s danger, by the way, it’s right and wrong about that.

In other words, people might judge you. You might offend somebody. You might be disappointed, because you’ll try something that doesn’t work. That’s all real, but none of that is actually dangerous. None of that is actually problematic. The way I built my business was using the coaching tools to manage myself through all of that so that it didn’t become something I couldn’t handle and so that I knew that it wasn’t dangerous.

So get some coaching with it. But don’t fall for that primitive part of your brain that thinks it’s dangerous and that doesn’t want to try new things, doesn’t want to figure out new technology, doesn’t want to have to learn and try new things when what you’ve already been doing has kept you alive so well. Do not fall for that part of your brain because your dreams, your passion, your goal will eat at you if you do. It’s just a different kind of pain.

It’s the kind of pain that you look back on and go, “I wish I would have tried.” We don’t want that kind of slow, dull, safe pain. We’d rather have the pain of growth, the pain of seeing what we’re capable of. It’s painfully the way. Are you in? Alright, thanks for joining me today everybody. I’ll see you next time on Entre-Talk. Take care.

If you are a coach, healer or expert who is not yet making six figures, or not sure you’re set up properly to grow to seven figures and beyond, go take my free training. It’s at jodysfreetraining.com. I’ll see you there.