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When people used to say to me, “I think I’m just afraid of being successful,” to a certain extent, I dismissed that this was even possible. I always thought, “None of us wants to fail, but we all want to succeed, so why would you be afraid of being successful?” However, it’s a common thing that holds people back, and recently I realized how scary success can be.
You need to be brave to choose success because, unfortunately, there will be people in your life who won’t be thrilled about how far you’ve come. Sure, some people will be supportive, but some of the people you truly care about and are closest to you will not like it. So, this is a very real fear, but understanding this idea of Success Courage will change how you view success, whatever success looks like for you.
Whether you want to become a talented writer, an artist, a well-known thought leader, rich, or anything else you consider to be successful, tune in this week to discover how to embrace this idea of Success Courage. I’m showing you how to spot the part of your brain that is afraid of success, and I’m sharing how to remind yourself that there is genuinely nothing to fear, and people judging your success isn’t actually a problem.
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If you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. It’s available now on Amazon in print or kindle version.
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Why it takes courage to truly embrace your own success.
- How I’m defining success for this episode and why it’s a deeply personal concept.
- Why our society often judges rich, well-known, highly-skilled people.
- How other people’s opinions exacerbate our own judgments of ourselves.
- Why even choosing happiness requires a high level of courage.
- How to see where your brain is creating fear around your potential success.
- 3 kinds of people who are going to judge you, and a completely new way to start viewing these types of people.
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- Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity through Conscious Thinking by Jody Moore
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- 382. Rich People
- Brooke Castillo
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 386, Success Courage.
Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.
Hey, everybody, I’m going to talk to you today about success courage. This is a topic I have suddenly become very interested in and a topic that I did not pay very close attention to in the past because whenever people said, “I think I’m just afraid of being successful”, I sort of in the back of my mind thought, come on, who’s afraid of being successful? I get that we’re all afraid of failing. None of us wants to fail but we all want to succeed. So why would you be afraid of being successful?
And yet it’s a common thing that people say and people feel. And I don’t think it was until recently that I really appreciated how scary success can be. So I’m excited to share with you my thoughts about that but first I want to share with you something else. I want to share the sweetest message that I got today. Right now we are selling an annual pass to Be Bold that you can give as a Christmas gift or you can buy it for yourself as a Christmas gift, or you can do both. You can give it to all the people that you love and buy one for yourself.
And here’s what I want to tell you. So Be Bold, we open and close the doors at various times throughout the year. It’s my coaching program where if you want to get coached and you want to learn more from me, and you want to take what you’re learning on the podcast to the next level, you’ve got to come in to Be Bold. That’s what we do there. But when we open it throughout the year you can pay month to month or you can pay for a whole year at once.
And I always recommend to people that they come and they give it at least a year to change some of the neural pathways in your brain and see really the impact in your life. But for some people paying month to month works better, budgeting wise and you also can just come and try a month and then leave, and stay as short or as long as you want. So at any rate with the annual pass you’re paying for a whole year. You’re getting a letter that says welcome to Be Bold, here’s how you login and all that, that you would give to your loved one on Christmas day or whatever holiday you celebrate.
You also get a little booklet called But What If I’m Right, a cute little illustrated booklet of wisdom to wrap up. And today I got a message from somebody who’s in Be Bold and I’m going to go ahead and keep her name anonymous because I didn’t check with her on that but she’ll know who she is. And my customer support team forwarded it to me and I just wanted to share it with you because it was so sweet.
She says, “I’d like to share with you the reason I switched back to the annual membership. I thought we couldn’t afford the large payment right now. I told my husband my plan to just go month to month and cancel if things got tight financially. He immediately responded with, “Be Bold has been so good for you and your mental health. If you’d like to stay in we will totally find a way to make it happen. This is an easy investment choice.””
Then she goes on to say, “I couldn’t agree more, will you please pass that on to Jody for me.” So there you have it. Thanks so much to my sweet client who sent that message and her husband. And I’m so glad to hear that its impacting you and I promise that if you want to have that same experience, come and join us at jodymoore.com/gift. That’s where you get the Christmas gift pass with all the fun bonuses. And I would love to take care of you in Be Bold, or your loved one.
Okay, so let’s talk about success courage. It takes more courage than I think I realized until recently to be successful, it does. It takes a lot of courage, you have to be brave to choose success. And the reason why is because other people won’t like it, some other people. Some people will love it but a lot of people, some of the people who your care a lot about in your life will not like it when you are successful. So I want to talk about what I mean by success first of all.
Success is a very personal concept. What is success, is different for every single one of us. Now, we might have some things that overlap, for example I may decide I want to have a coaching practice that is thriving, that generates a certain amount of revenue, serves a certain number of clients etc. And somebody else may say, “I want that same thing.” We might have some overlapping ideas of success. But still none of us has one thing that we consider success in our lives.
I want to have that coaching practice and I want to be able to work certain hours. And I want to be able to spend time with my kids. And I want to be able to enjoy what I’m doing. And I want to be able to travel or not have to travel or there’s so many small nuances within even a particular objective like that. But certainly overall what is success varies from person to person and I think that is fine and good and healthy. So I’m not trying to tell you what success should look like.
But let’s just take some of the common examples of what is success. Let’s say you want to make a lot of money, you want to be your rich. I recently did an episode all about rich people that you can go back and listen to after this, but it takes courage to be rich. I just listened to a class in my teacher, Brooke Castillo’s program, Self Coaching Scholars, called How to Use Your Beautiful Mind to get Rich. It’s a series she’s teaching.
And in the first class she talked about this that to be rich, especially if you’re going to own it, embrace it, and admit that you’re rich, requires courage because some people won’t like it. In fact, I want you to think about this. Who do we judge more, people who are rich or people who are living in poverty? My guess is we judge rich people way more.
I remember years ago going to dinner with Brooke Castillo and a smaller group of colleagues, there were maybe six or seven of us. It was a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant and the bill came. And we all went to get out our credit cards to help pay and Brooke was like, “Are you kidding me? I am paying for this. Do you know how rich I am?” So Brooke is a great example of someone who embraces her own success. She will flat out say, “Do you know how rich I am?”
The reason when I tell that story to people they laugh is because most of us are afraid to say that. Why are we afraid to say that? Because people will have thoughts, negative thoughts about us that we shouldn’t be rich and we certainly shouldn’t say that we’re rich. So it requires courage to be rich but being rich is not success for everybody. For some people they just want to be a little bit more well-known but let’s take an extreme example of this. Let’s take an A List Hollywood celebrity.
Is there anybody who gets judged more than a celebrity, or politician, or somebody who’s really in the public eye? Probably not because so many people are aware of that person that just by sheer numbers you’re going to have more opinions and more judgement. Not only that but they’re only aware of what they see and know which is not a very complete picture of that person. So the more well-known you are the, more people are aware of you for whatever reason, the more judgment you’re subjecting yourself to.
So those are the two most obvious old school version of success, making a lot of money, being well known. But let’s talk about some that are probably more common for a lot of us in terms of how we define success and why it’s still scary to us. Let’s say success to you is becoming a really talented writer. Maybe you’re inspired by other authors that maybe you love to read, you like to read novels, or poetry, or whatever it is. And you’re inspired by people who can write well.
And you have this little voice within you that’s like, “I kind of want to do that. I wonder if I could do that. I’d like to get good at that. I think it would be cool to be able to write like that.” In order to get good at writing you have to first be bad at writing and write anyway and then subject that writing to criticism or feedback. That’s how you’re going to get better, by seeing what lands for people, or by getting at least feedback from an instructor, or a teacher, or peers, or other people.
The more people you can expose your writing to and the more you can tolerate people telling you where it could be better, the better your chances of getting good at writing. Even once you’re ‘a great writer’, you’re still going to have people that criticize it, don’t like it and disapprove of it. And what that does for us is it triggers our own self-doubt and fear which we already usually have to a much greater extent than anyone else. And so you’re ability to tolerate other people’s opinions is why success requires courage. You’ve got to be courageous to be successful.
The same with art, maybe you want to be an artist. Well, you’re going to have to attempt to create whatever kind of art you want to create. You’re going have to tolerate your own judgment of it first of all and keep going anyway, not listen to the voice in your head that tells you you’re no good at this, you should just quit. That requires courage. It’s scary to even if you don’t have other people judging it, your own judgments are frightening, aren’t they? I know mine are. Can you tolerate that and can you keep going anyway?
Maybe you want to perform, maybe you want to be a singer, an actor, a dancer on a stage, maybe you want to, if you’re going to win awards, if you’re going to win games, if you’re going to become a great athlete. Any of these things require courage my friends but listen, here’s what else requires courage, just choosing to be happy requires courage. Just choosing to laugh more, choosing to even go out in the world and fight for a good cause requires courage, you know why? People will judge you for all of that, they will.
You go out and you fight for a cause you believe in, you’re going to probably have an opposite cause first of all, people who believe the opposite, who are pushing back against you. But even people who believe in your cause are going to tell you you’re doing it wrong, or that you’re not the one who should be fighting that fight or what have you. I’ve seen it happen over and over again with people who do non-profit work, people who are working to change legislation in ways that they think would better serve our country, people who are trying to serve underserved populations.
I see them get judged relentlessly by people. And again back to just being happy. If you’re going to be a happy person overall, none of us is always happy, nobody’s always happy. But if you overall are pretty happy, pretty easygoing, pretty much enjoying life, feeling really grateful and liking people for the most part you will be judged. People will say that you’re naïve, that you have your head in the sand, that you’re privileged, that you’re unaware of what’s really going on in the world, that you’re uneducated.
I could go on all day about the judgments people have of people for being happy, fascinating isn’t it? It requires courage to be happy, to fight for a cause, to pursue your goals. Now, here’s what I want to say. Let’s just pause for a moment and answer the part of our brains that’s afraid to succeed so that we can gain some courage. I don’t think we’re going to ever completely override the part of us that just wishes everyone liked us and approved of us. I think that is a human condition to just sort of desire that even though we know it’s not realistic and not even necessary.
But I want to better inform the part of your brain that knows it’s not necessary so that you don’t have to generate as much courage. Courage is just, I’m afraid and I’m going to do this anyway. But if we can minimize the fear we don’t need as much courage, are you with me? The way I want to do that is by reminding your brain, reminding you that there’s really genuinely nothing to fear, that it’s okay that people are judging your success or your happiness, it really is.
Because as far as I can tell from the years of coaching and the many, many self-help and psychology books I’ve read, and my own observations of the world, there are three groups of people for the most part who are going to judge you. And none of them are dangerous, and none of them have anything to do with you, they have to do with where these people are. And I can say, I’ve been in these groups and still do end up in these groups. We probably all do, at times. We all judge one another at times. So let’s just talk about these groups.
Number one. People who feel threatened by you. Sometimes as you go out in the world and start trying what you want to try, or doing what you want to do, somebody else who maybe is already doing that thing will notice you coming up alongside them and suddenly feel threatened by you. Or maybe they’re doing their own version of something but they notice you succeeding and they feel threatened, they feel competitive. They’re afraid that your success is in some way going to take away from their success.
And remember by success, I mean it can be a whole host of things. It could be attention. It could be a relationship. I see this a lot with women, that when a woman becomes friends with another woman that her other friends feel threatened. So it’s coming from a mindset of scarcity. Scarcity says that things exist in a pie, that don’t actually exist in a pie. In other words if you take a piece of the pie there is less pie for me.
So if friendship, and connection, and love is a pie and my friend is loving you and connecting with you then you’ve just taken some of the love and connection that’s available from my friend. I will feel threatened now. And instead of staying in my own self-doubt or shame it’s a lot easier to project that out onto you and start judging you or judging my friend. So people who feel threatened by you. Here’s one of the things I like to keep in mind.
I’ve had this happen only a couple of times in my eight/nine years of being a coach and owning a coaching practice. But there have been one or two occasions that I can recall where somebody else who’s doing similar work to what I’m doing in the world has judged me. I mean there’s probably been many times people have judged me but as far as I’m aware that I became aware of in a way that was really obvious, and outspoken, and vocal, and posted online and things. There has only been two occasions.
But what I like to remind myself is wow, that person is in some way feeling threatened by me and I’m sort of flattered by that. Because when I look at that person I see that they’re doing amazing work and they’re really succeeding in so many ways. They’re reaching so many people. They’re helping people. They’re changing lives. They’re figuring out their marketing and sales. And the fact that they’re threatened by me is kind of flattering. I know there’s no need for it. My success doesn’t have to take away from their success.
I have to remind myself that or else it’s tempting to move into the same scarcity, and the same defensiveness, and the same judgment that they’re in. But it’s kind of flattering that they think that you’re a viable threat when you’re not actually a threat. But do you see how you could take it as a compliment? It’s not scary, first of all. It’s just somebody in scarcity.
Okay, let’s talk about the second group of people who may judge you, not everyone in these groups is going to judge you but some of these people may when you start succeeding. People who don’t have what you have or haven’t achieved what you’ve achieved, but there’s a caveat. A lot of people who haven’t achieved what you have achieved are going to view you as inspirational. They’re going to look to you as an example of what’s possible and they’re going to be thankful that you’ve set the example and are showing the way and are planting ideas in their head about things that they may desire.
So a lot of people who haven’t achieved what you have and want to are going to really adore you and have a lot of positive thoughts about you. But there’s two groups of people within this category who may judge you. The first is people who are lying to themselves about not wanting what you have succeeded at. I see this happen a lot. I’ve been this person by the way, I’ll give you some examples. Sometimes my friends and I will find ourselves critiquing celebrities.
We’re like, “Man, look at her, she’s just so skinny. She needs to eat more. She’s had so much work done, her skin is just, oh, it just doesn’t look real. And man, she must have spent a lot of money to get her hair that way.” And we’re critiquing someone, it’s often a celebrity. I’m pretty good about not doing this with people that I know in the real world. But with celebrities we’ll start critiquing someone and then one of my friends who’s really funny will notice what we’re doing and she’ll stop and go, “Yeah, I’d hate to be her.”
And then we all laugh because we realize, we’re critiquing this woman because we secretly wish that we were that thin, and beautiful, and had perfect hair, and perfect skin, and looked as amazing as this woman in this photograph looks that we’re sitting here judging. We’re lying to ourselves. We’ll even say things like, “I would never spend my money on getting work done.” And again, I’m not saying that that’s not true. There are certain things that people choose to do that I wouldn’t choose to do. But also it’s not even a possibility for me in that moment usually when I’m judging someone.
And usually that kind of judgment has this little voice in the back of my head that’s like, “But I don’t know, it might be kind of cool to be able to get hair extensions and to look how that woman looks, that would kind of be awesome.” So do you see how that lying to yourself about not wanting it or maybe just their success is triggering for you whatever success looks like for you. But you’re lying to yourself about the fact that you do desire more.
You do desire to achieve, or attempt, or become something that you haven’t become. And seeing that person become what they desire triggers that self-doubt which brings me to the second people in that group. People who don’t have what you have and have tremendous self-doubt about their ability to achieve it or become it. We don’t like to see examples of people succeeding in ways that we wish we could when we don’t believe we could. It again triggers all of those doubtful thoughts.
But because it doesn’t feel good to judge ourselves we will often turn around and project it on to judging someone else which also doesn’t feel good but it has the illusion of power to us. It has the illusion of if I put you down I can rise up just a little bit above you so that I don’t have to be beneath you where my brain is placing me in the first place. It’s not doing that, no one is above or beneath anyone else. But it gives us the illusion of that, the illusion of being better than by judging someone.
When the truth is often it’s just about our own self-doubt, our own inability to achieve what that person has achieved. So as you become successful, or happier, or pursue things, or try things, or do whatever you want in your life there will be some of those people who will judge you.
Let’s talk about the third and final group of people who may judge you, requiring success courage. And then I’m going to tell you just some final thoughts on how to stay in courage. People who are close to you in your life, some of them, some of the people who love you, who are even your biggest supporters may judge you when you become successful in certain ways.
Now, some of those people who are close to you fall in those first two buckets we talked about. Some of those people who are close to you may feel threatened by you or they may secretly want to achieve what you’re achieving or some other version of it. And when it’s someone close to you it’s even more triggering. It brings up our own self-doubt and our own noise even more intensely.
But here’s the other thing that will happen and I’ve coached so many people in this situation is that people who are close to you may suddenly become concerned about you because they see you changing. They will see that your priorities change, that the way you think about the world changes, the way you think about yourself changes, the way you spend your time changes, the time you have in certain relationships. The things that you need, your own needs will change, your values in some ways will change as you become more successful at whatever you choose to do.
And I don’t believe this is a bad thing but it is an uncomfortable thing at times for the people around you. Sometimes they’ll view you as being inauthentic or fake because in their minds you are the person that they knew when they first met you. If this is a family member they’ve grown up with you. If this is a friend, they met you at a certain time in your life. And so they remember you in a certain way but you are an evolving person as are they. But if you purposely choose to evolve and grow by pursuing things in your life, other people around you won’t always understand it.
They think of you as an old version of you and you have old patterns and old habits of being in relationship to one another. And when you stop being that same version of you there is a lot of discomfort there. Sometimes what I see is that your vibrations just stop aligning. What I mean by that is your emotional state doesn’t line up as frequently as it used to.
So let’s say you have some girl friends who you hang out with and you all complain a lot about your husbands, or your life, or something and you work on yourself, you become less negative, you stop thinking about what’s wrong in the world and you start thinking about a useful problem, like a business your building or some other kind of goal you’re pursuing. And suddenly complaining about your husband isn’t as appealing anymore or you intentionally choose not to.
They’re not going to like that because they’re used to connecting with you at a low vibration. And if you’re going to stay at a higher vibration, they’re not going to like that. In fact they’re going to feel like you’re judging them by not going down that same path you’re used to going. So here’s the thing, this is all figure out-able, it really is. Its all figure out-able. And of course the first two that I talked about, if they’re not people who are close to you it really doesn’t matter, it’s none of your business, let people be people.
But for the people in your life that you’re close to, the relationships you care about as you achieve success just know that if some of them struggle with it, nothing’s wrong. It doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. It doesn’t mean they’re doing something wrong. It just means that you may have to redefine your relationship to them a little bit at least in your own head. It may mean that you stop expecting them to play a certain role in your life that they’ve played in the past.
It may be that you’re unable to play a certain role in their lives that you’ve played in the past. It may be that they aren’t going to be the place you go to, to complain about your rich person problems because they’ve got different struggles. And it’s not fair to expect them to be that for you and they don’t have to be that for you. I’ve seen this happen a lot with some of my fellow coaches who I’m close to as I’ve watched all of us over the last few years really grow our coaching practices.
There’s one close friend of mine in particular who comes to mind who’s said, she’s an immigrant. She’s like, “I have family who is still living in third world countries and some of them are really mad at me for my success. And they think that I just think I’m all that now and that I’m full of myself.” And she’s like, “I desperately want them to come with me. I want to bring them along. I want to help them. I want to help them achieve their goals and show them that they can have a better life too, but they’re sort of mad at me.”
I see this dynamic happen a lot. And what she’s come to realize is that she has to redefine herself in relation to them just a little bit and not be mad at them for being mad at her because everybody she’s viewing the world from where they’re at. The other thing is you can give people the benefit of the doubt. I’m not saying that everybody in your life is going to struggle in this way. Most people you can be the new you and a lot of them will come with you and it will be an easy transition. But don’t drag people with you. You can’t drag people along.
Let’s say you’ve discovered coaching, I see this a lot when people find coaching, they learn the model, they learn that their thoughts create their feelings. They become so much happier or more empowered and they want to bring everybody else with them but guess what? Not everybody’s ready and you can’t force people through an evolution like that. It has to be something that they choose and that they go through on their own time and in their own way.
So here’s what I want to say. Please be courageous enough to be successful in whatever way, whatever success means to you. Please have the courage to do it because the alternative is much worse. The alternative is denying yourself, it’s ignoring and neglecting a part of yourself that intrinsically wants to see what your life could be, and who you could become, and what kind of contribution you could make. Or just how enjoyable your experience while you’re alive on planet Earth could be.
And that is much more painful even though it’s a slow long drawn out pain, it’s much more painful than the courage required to simply know people will judge you, sometimes even people that you dearly love and it’s okay. It’s not about you, it’s about them and we’re all guilty of it. I’m certainly guilty of it sometimes judging successful people, I know I am. So it’s part of our human condition but what it is indicative of again when I’m judging others is work that I need to do on me, that’s it. So please go out there, and be successful, and be happy in all the ways you choose.
Thanks for joining me today, everyone, I’ll see you next time. Bye bye.
Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.
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