Fear of success is one of those odd phobias that people don’t really understand. After all, if you’re successful then surely you’re doing OK for yourself?
But for some people the fear is very real. If that’s you, here are some ways that you can get rid of your fear of success – hopefully once and for all.
Be more positive
Generally, being successful needs positivity.
If you’re forever being negative about the idea of succeeding, that’s not going to help you turn the situation around.
Take small steps at first – because you’re probably trying to turn round a lifetime of thinking success isn’t good. Pick on a few things that niggle you about the idea of being a successful person and chip away at those first.
Small steps lead to larger ones and most fears are actually more afraid of you than you are of them, even if they put on a brave face.
Confront your fear head on
I vividly remember the time I was first asked to do this.
I’d been tranced out and my mind was in a receptive state.
Then I was told to attack my fear – tell it (out loud!) to come out and face me so I could fix it.
Of course, since fear is almost totally in our imaginations, the fear didn’t materialize. And the more I asked it to come forward, the more it retreated.
A very surreal experience but one that you can do, on your own or with an understanding friend.
Find the positives you’ve already got
Everyone is successful at something, even if it’s a small item.
Dig deep into your mind and work out what you’re already successful at.
Then build on those successes – apply whatever it is you’ve done to succeed in those things to other things, no matter how minor the item is.
Because almost 100% of the time, the same principles apply to every aspect of success we enjoy.
Start a success journal
This can be a notebook or a purpose designed success journal (these tend to have inspirational quotes and other motivational things in them).
Get into the habit of writing down at least successes you’ve had during the day, every night before you go to sleep.
Success breeds success and doing this seemingly small exercise will help that to happen as well as putting positive thoughts in your mind before you go to sleep.
Identify your anti-success patterns
We’ve all got these.
The things we do to trip ourselves up on our journey to success, just in case we actually managed to be successful at something.
It sounds odd in the cold light of day but I’m sure you can work these out.
Maybe you procrastinate even longer than normal. Maybe you “accidentally” make a small mistake. Maybe you let the wrong words slip out of your mouth – the kind that should be kept inside your head or, better yet, discarded completely.
You’ll instinctively know what these patterns are.
Identify one or two of the most obvious ones, the ones that leapt into your mind as soon as you read the heading, and work on reducing or eliminating them.
Be more present
Most of us spend way too long wondering about all the “what ifs” that could happen.
Spend more time in the only time that actually counts – the here and now.
Revel in the things that are happening now, the things that you can actually affect if you put your mind to it.
The more you’re living in the present, the easier you’ll find it is to get over your fear of success because you won’t be thinking about your past actions as much and you won’t be over-complicating what could (or, more likely, could not) happen in the future.
Change how you speak!
Change the words you speak – out loud and in your head.
Turn negative words and phrases into positive ones.
I’ve done that in numerous places in this article. Not particularly deliberately but because I’ve been practicing this for years.
Simple changes – “not bad” turns to “I’m good” when asked how you are.
And while you’re at it, stop re-affirming that you “always do this” when the “always” refers to something you’ve not succeeded in doing (see how I turned a potentially negative phrase round there?)
Re-train your subconscious mind
Most of the time, our subconscious mind works with us.
But sometimes it can get out of sync – it listens to all your self talk, which probably explains quite a lot about why you’re worried about success.
Re-training it is a process.
It’s catching your negative thoughts about success and turning them round.
It’s also about planting new ideas that show you how good you’ll feel once you do actually succeed.
And it’s easy.
Just play this hypnosis track to yourself a few times over the next week or so and start to notice how your attitude towards success is becoming much more positive.
