We Have to Overcome Fear of Success

We all have our comfort zones and 95% of the time we stay in them.

Very few people can be successful doing what they do naturally. What we do naturally is average and success requires exceptional performance. To be successful we don’t have to be the best there is but we have to be better than most.

We see successful people and think they did it without ever being scared. The fact is, successful people have learned to manage fear. Secondly, they probably get a rush off facing it and conquering it.

It is hard to be successful without the ability to challenge ourselves. It requires stepping out of our comfort zones and moving through acts that require personal courage.

Why do the acts require personal courage? Because we might not achieve each of our objectives. If we work up the courage to call on a big account at work and we can’t get in, have we failed?

And this is the first stigma we have to overcome. The stigma that to try something and not accomplish it is failure. The word should be banned from the English language. If we do not accomplish an objective we should develop a new strategy. If we never quit, we never fail.

We have a lifetime to achieve our objectives. We have to work on them everyday. We have to step out of our comfort zone. We have to be scared. We have to get high on managing our fear. Successful people are often petrified, but they know how to deal with it.

Let’s look at our brain structure. The lizard brain has been with us and every species for millions of years. It says run at the first impulse. 100,000 years ago man began to develop two new brains; the limbic and the cortex. These brains allow him to evaluate the stimulus and decide whether it is really life threatening.

The brains decide the level of threat based on our history. If we have never handled the threat, the brains are alarmed. If we have handled the threat the brains tell us we have handled this before and survived, so go ahead if you want to.

The more we push past the alarm buttons, the more comfort the brains have with more danger. I once tried to eliminate fear by sky diving. I figured, it scares me the most so when I learn to do it I will no longer have fear. I was wrong. It scarred the hell out of me, but I did learn I can manage that fear.

In reality we are not as afraid of success or failure as much as we are afraid of getting out of our comfort zones. We want to be like Clint Eastwood’s characters and just handle everything as though it was second nature. His characters are fictional.

How many people are bored? How many people think they are locked into something which they cannot escape? How many people think they are going no where? Their only crime is they are locked into their comfort zones and are afraid to take on real challenges.

Real challenges bring on change. Change brings on uncertainty. The lizard brain goes crazy with uncertainty. You need to build your tolerance to uncertainty and change. Success brings major change. You need to face challenges everyday and tell them, “You’re asking yourself right now whether I used five bullets or six, go ahead, make my day.”