What are your first thoughts when you are confronted with something new?

  • Curiosity – I wonder how I’ll manage that…

  • Fear – I’ll never achieve that…

  • Rejection – Nope, that’s not my cup of tea…

If you answered the first option, you’ve got the right attitude for progression. If you chose options two or three, we’ve got to keep working on that.

If someone has solid self-confidence, they’ve mainly conquered their fears. The fear of doing something wrong consistently dominates unconfident people. Self-confident people are just like they want to be, and they don’t have much fear of failing or being rejected.

Control your thoughts and substitute the negative ones with positive and constructive thoughts. Concentrate on your strengths and look for others with the same interests. Use your thoughts to control your fear, and don’t be dominated by them and signal strength and stability with your radiance and body posture.

Fear of new things and situations and fear of leaving controlled living environments is entirely normal. The unknown brings uncertainty. Fear of wrong decisions also plays a role. You’ll always have good and bad experiences, and the difference is how you handle them. If you are open, optimistic and curious, then you’ll look forward to new experiences and to everything you can learn from them.

When you set your goals, check if they are really your goals, or are they from someone else? If you’ve found your goals, notice the feelings within you. How do you feel? Do you feel fear? Which apologies for why you can’t do it come to mind? In the beginning, it’s very typical to be attacked by sabotaging thoughts. Now that you know that, replace these thoughts with anticipation, curiosity, courage and strength. Once you’ve done that, you’ve taken one of the most critical steps, as most people never make it past this stage.

An exciting topic is the fear of success. I believe that many people sabotage their own success. First, they can’t imagine success, then they don’t believe in it, and if it is close enough to grasp, then they destroy it.

I worked with a person who was very talented and actually had all the character traits of successful people. But when he was close to success, he destroyed everything. Not only was he unsuccessful, but his fears and negative energy also affected the other people around him. He felt that he did not deserve success, and this negative energy was so strong that it neutralized his positive energy. As so often, he always remained saying: “God will help me.” This was a classic case of a lack of responsibility for his own life. He always blamed his failures on other powers or people.

According to my research, religion is an obstacle to success for most people, because people do not want to take responsibility for their lives and feel powerless in the face of any problem. Since religious leaders are dictatorial, they are interested in making their followers as compliant as possible. They achieve this with fear and try to keep people at an intellectually low level. Stupid people do not ask unpleasant questions and can be kept calm with simple gifts and considerations. If you don’t want to believe me, take a closer look at the dictatorial countries and organizations.

While some of us grow up in an environment where our successes are received with enthusiasm, praise and encouragement by those around us, most people do not. To be successful, you have to be prepared to accept failure. Unfortunately, people tend to measure us by failures, and when success comes, envy and jealousy come into play.

If you are afraid of success, you must analyse what you are so scared of.

If you’re introverted, you might be afraid to speak to an audience, and that could destroy your entire project.

Always do a SWOT analysis of your skills and focus on your weaknesses first. How could these affect your overall plan? Are you able to neutralize these weaknesses or even transform them into strengths and opportunities? Find ways to neutralize threats. Always think first of what you want and what makes you happy. Write down what expectations you have of yourself and what expectations your environment might have. The clearer they are, the easier it is for you to simplify and neutralize supposedly big threats.

The fear of success usually doesn’t mean the literal fear of success. People fear the results and consequences if they are much successful. Some people are afraid of earning too much money, which could spoil their character. So they were programmed from early childhood until it became a firm belief. The fear of success is often learned at a young age. Through years of manipulation, we accept beliefs that do not let us live happily or successfully. But, as I said, you are responsible for yourself and for how you deal with the wrong programming and manipulations.

Negative conditioning is achieved through negative manipulation, as with laboratory mice who have learned not to do anything anymore, because they always got electrocuted for it. Young elephants are prevented from running away by thin ropes. They learn over the months and years that this rope is their prison. When they are fully grown, they may break the rope loosely, but they don’t do it because they have learned and accepted it so well.

The fear of success is maintained and aggravated by avoidance. Regardless of what initially leads to a fear of success, most people unintentionally behave in a way that reinforces and strengthens that fear. The fear of success is painful and independent of other positive emotional traits and character strengths.

Do this if you suffer from the fear of success!

SWOT Analysis

Analyze yourself and find the causes of your fear of success. These can be wrong beliefs, wrong information or wrong opinions? Be honest and courageous to yourself, because lying to yourself will not help you to improve your situation. If you are not able to help yourself, ask for help. Accept your weaknesses because they are the solution to their problems.

Write everything down because this is the most crucial part. You initiate a dialogue with yourself and universal energy. If you start to put the situation into words, then you will get solutions and possibilities. Write a success diary and formulate everything positively and constructively.

First, summarize your thoughts in a mind map. This will allow you to write down everything that comes to mind quickly. Then you work out the individual ideas with details. Ask yourself the crucial questions: How, who, why, when, etc.?

As you write that, there’s a certain critical voice in your head that tries to talk you out of it. That’s your ‘weaker self’, led by your subconscious mind. Fears, worries and self-doubts are the house specials in the beginning. As you now know to expect that, you’re prepared and can keep on your path. If you do regularly a simple routine of thinking and writing about your fears, you will see how quickly you get solutions.

Face your fears

In the first step, you have analysed the reasons for your fears, and now it is time to neutralise them. If you avoid facing your fears, they will continue to exist and affect their lives. To avoid something that frightens it may feel like a short-term relief, but you confirm to your brain that you continue to be afraid of something and even reinforce it.

If you are afraid to speak in front of an audience, prepare yourself and find ways to practice it. At first, it will feel awkward and insecure, but the more you train it, the easier it will be.

If you are living in an environment that negatively influences you, then you should look for a more positive and competitive environment.

But to simply face your fears is sometimes not enough to find your success. If you want to build up long-term success, you have to work on your long term programming. First, you have to convince yourself, and then you can persuade others.

Start with small steps, but keep moving forward. Choose from the list of causes a relatively easily solvable fear. For example, the next time you have to call someone, you will prepare yourself and look forward to the call. Take the phone in your hand as often as possible and write fewer e-mails if you want to know something immediately.

Practice releasing the little fears and make it more and more your routine. Your newly gained self-confidence will give you the strength to deal with even the more significant fears. Your brain will simply learn that the fears are unfounded.

If you suffer from any fear, you have likely spent years, if not all of your life, training your brain negatively. It will take some time for you to program it accurately again and to make sure that success is not about fear, but about joy and happiness.

Get professional help

To face your problems and fears more efficiently, seek professional advice from a coach. A coach can help you to understand and overcome your fears and especially your fears of success in time and efficiently.

The fear of success is a very real, but often a misunderstood fight. This fear probably has a powerful origin in a person’s past.

Success is a simple as well as a complex concept.

Everyone wants it, but only a few get it. The reason is relatively simple because most people do not want to pay the price for extraordinary success. Success is life and success is freedom. Before you earn it, you must embark on a challenging journey. The journey to your success begins the moment you become aware of your desire for success.

For most people, success means an incalculable risk, disproportionate sacrifices, great disappointments, unfair competition, hard work and constant suffering. Focus on the other side and decide what success means to you. Success in life is a subjective concept. For some people, success can mean money, power and fame, and for others, it means being a caring, loving and committed person.

Define your own success by imagining that you have reached the end of your life and you are thinking about what you would have liked to achieve. Write it down and make your top 10 list. Use your lifetime to work on your dreams.

Concentrate on what motivates and spurs you on and not on what depresses and hampers you. Re-read the chapter on wishes and goals and how to achieve them. Always remember that with your thoughts, you can begin to change your reality.

Working with your fears is like fighting again and again. Prepare yourself that you will not win all the fights, but each battle serves you to learn something more and get more experience. Enjoy the success journey instead of being too focused on the result. It’s about your life because that’s the way. You decide how to deal with the situations, and you are responsible for whether your fears or happiness dominate your life. Don’t waste your time because every moment is unique and never comes back.

Talk to trustworthy people about their fears and they will see that many of them are not as powerful at all as they believed before. But be careful who you talk to because this is a matter of trust. Many of the people around you cannot or do not want to understand you, and some will feel envy or jealousy and hinder you on your way rather than support you.

People are merely great at lying and deceiving themselves. They always find excuses why they don’t do something and truly masterfully justify it instead of focusing on the solution. In a coaching session with 50 entrepreneurs and executives, I asked the group about the existing problems in their markets. Everyone explained to me why something would not work. Actually, it’s always the easiest part to criticize something and explain what goes wrong. After a few minutes, I stopped the discussion and wrote on the blackboard: “I don’t want to know why something doesn’t work, I want to know how we can make it work”.

The group was immediately quiet and thoughtful. I felt the focus change at that moment – away from the focus on problems towards the focus on solutions.

If you have a big decision to make, you may feel certain insecurity and anxiety. Sometimes it is easier to come up with an excuse and not seize the new opportunity. If fear was your primary motivation, then you know that you are deceiving yourself. Is there really a valid reason to press you before making a decision?

It is okay to realize that you are afraid. We live in a culture where fear is seen as a weakness, and no one likes to admit that they feel it.

There are ways you can deal with this stress and anxiety: take a deep breath, think calmly, use self-help programs, do sport, talk to familiar people or seek professional help.

Once you realize that you want something and that it is only your fear that is holding you back, you have enough confidence in yourself to hold on and achieve it. When you start, it is usually frightening, but you will thank yourself if you persevere and are courageous enough to achieve your goals.

Procrastination is a kind of fear of success and people hesitate because they are afraid. Because success is challenging to achieve, brings with it a special responsibility, it is much easier to hesitate and wait. Everyone knows that waiting does not usually lead to the desired results.

Possibly one of the fears is the fear of too hard work because especially today, the general resilience of people has drastically decreased, and they prefer to flee into modern ailments and diseases. Walking the extra mile is an achievement that only a few people still perform. Taking action can be easy or difficult and depends mostly on your attitude. Every problem includes its solution at the same time, but you have to be able to recognize and use it.

Success means hard and intelligent work and requires commitment, dedication, discipline and perseverance, as well as control over your fears. Hard work is not everyone’s cup of tea, and few will succeed because they are willing to face their fears and grow far beyond mediocrity. Real success is built on success and failure, and if you learn from both experiences, you will always be prepared for any situation.

If you are interested in a particular subject, contact me!

I can help you to dream your life and live your dreams!

Siegbert Till Coaching

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