Episode 26: Do You Fear Success?

Most people talk about fear of failure, but what about fear of success? For many, the idea of actually achieving their goals feels just as intimidating as falling short. In this episode, I'll explore five common signs that you may be holding yourself back, not because you’re afraid to fail, but because you’re afraid to succeed.

Link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_complex

You can find Sara's books on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/sarasbooksonamazon.

 #FearOfSuccess #PersonalGrowth #SelfSabotage #DecodingTheUnicorn #MindsetShift #Leadership #Creativity #Motivation #DagHammarskjöld 

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY

In Episode 26 of the Decoding the Unicorn podcast, host Sara Causey explores the lesser-known fear of success, contrasting it with the more common fear of failure. She uses Dag Hammarskjöld's career transition from the Swedish government to the UN Secretary-General role as an example, highlighting the anxiety and fear that even successful individuals may face. Causey introduces the Jonah complex, a fear of reaching one's full potential, and outlines five signs of fear of success: self-sabotage, minimizing achievements, overthinking, avoiding growth opportunities, and fearing outgrowing relationships. She emphasizes the importance of love and a higher mission in overcoming these fears.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Fear of success, fear of failure, Dag Hammarskjold, UN Secretary General, Jonah complex, self-actualization, career changes, self-sabotage, overthinking, perfectionism, imposter syndrome, social anxiety, love and fear, Susan Jeffers, fulfillment of duty.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 26 of decoding the unicorn, the podcast. I appreciate you joining me today. In this episode, I will be talking about fear of success. Now I didn't misspeak there. This is not actually an episode about fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of failure is the counterpart that's spoken about most often. And we've all heard those stories, an inventor who made 50 prototypes, but finally, number 51 was the one that worked, and it changed everybody's lives, and it made the inventor millions of dollars, a failed entrepreneur, a litany of businesses that didn't work out, until finally they hit on the one that did now they're a billionaire jet setting all over the globe, and life is sunshine and roses. Intellectually, we understand that failure happens. We know that even the most successful person we've seen probably didn't trot out and make everything wonderful on their first try. Entrepreneurs fail. Awesome businesses fail. Awesome invention ideas don't make it. But what we don't often talk about is the hidden, sneaky little fear of success.

What if the unicorn wasn't a myth, what if he walked among us and wore a bow tie, a diplomat, a seeker, a man of frost and fire, misunderstood by the world until now, decoding the unicorn isn't just a Biography, it's a revelation. Discover the real Dag Hammarskjöld in Sara Causey’s groundbreaking book, decoding the unicorn, available on amazon.com

Using dag as our example, his career in the Swedish government was growing outward, but not necessarily upward. Even though he could have been a shoo in for Swedish Prime Minister. He didn't want to align with a political party. He wanted to be able to vote his conscience and not be bound by partisan politics. Or that's not how we do it on this side of the aisle, you have to do quid pro quo. If you've ever seen that television show The Good Wife, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. We'll support you. If you do this, you have to scratch my back first. We're over here, and you need to join us. Don't do this, and we'll only give you the keynote speech if your wife shows up. It just all of these backroom deals and shady maneuvers. Dag didn't want to be part of that. So his career was growing outward, and he was continuously taking on more and more work, some of it domestic and some of it International. But what was that next step? What was that thing so that he could continue growing well, in his case, it turned out to be the secretary generalship of the United Nations. So dag goes from being cloistered away in Sweden to being on the international stage in a huge, massive way that can certainly stir up fear, nervousness, anxiety, and even though we have people who want to imagine that dag was an icon made out of marble. Oh, he never broke a sweat, he never worried. He never had a bad day. He was human. It's not fair to deify him to a point where he no longer had any humanity. That's just simply not true. As I said at the beginning of this episode, fear of failure is what we often think about. Well, I'd really like to leave this crummy job, but if I start my own thing and the business doesn't take off, I'll fail. What if I go broke? What if people judge me and make fun of me? What if my former co workers say I knew it was never going to work out for her. Isn't she stupid? Isn't it good that we stayed or we might be thinking, I'd really love to stop being an entrepreneur. I don't want to run a business. I want to live full time as a creative but I don't know how I'm scared. What if I think my art is good, but nobody else does? What if I write poetry or I make sculptures and nobody wants what I've done? What do I do? Then? Fear of failure is something that I think a lot of us can relate to, and we have the tendency to overestimate how many people are actually looking at us and care. About what we do. I'll use myself as an example. I had one semester of law school years ago. Hated it, hated it, and I knew this is not for me. I not only don't want to finish this program, I don't want to be a lawyer. This is not what I want to do with my life, period data, and I thought that I was going to get so much judgment from friends, from family, everybody, the whole ball of wax. And I remember one afternoon, I called my friend Tina, and I was like, I'm out. I can't do it anymore. I hate this, and I've decided to withdraw. I'm just going to take my W's and leave. And she was like, Okay, if you're not happy, you're not happy. And that was it. I was expecting. Oh, Sara, this is a bad idea. You're throwing your life away. You worked so hard to get into a good school, and you're on scholarship. And what are you thinking? What are you going to do instead? How are you going to make a living instead? It was okay if you're not happy, you're not happy, but we have the tendency to think that there's going to be some atomic bomb that goes off if we try something out and it doesn't work. But here's a flip side that's not talked about as much, the fear of success. Think about what dag was going through. He's working away in the Swedish government, and he's at this point of, well, I want to move higher. I want to do more. I know I'm not totally used to capacity yet. And then kaboom, he becomes UN Secretary General, which, at the time, that role was a lot like being president or prime minister of the entire world. It had a huge global exposure. Dag was in the paper constantly. He must have had some fear of success, some fear of, oh my god, I'm on the world stage. Because as an introvert, as an HSP, I know how I would feel. It can be downright terrifying when it's like, oh my God, I feel that everyone is looking at me. Maybe they weren't before, but they are now. There's a name for this called the Jonah complex. I want to read now from Wikipedia, because before we get into fear of success, I want to put some parameters around it and define it. After we do that, I want to give you five signs that you or maybe somebody else that you know, has a fear of success. So the Jonah complex is this fear of success or the fear of what if I rise to my own highest potential? What if I actually do become the best version of me? Abraham Maslow came up with the idea of self actualization, or realizing your own potential. What if you're afraid of that? What if you feel that you have some Destiny, some kind of greatness that lives within you and it scares you? It's called The Jonah complex, because of Jonah having this destiny to prophesy about the destruction of Nineveh, but he tries to run away from it, and he gets swallowed in the belly of the fish. And all of that from the Bible. Under the tab causes we read any dilemma, paradox or challenge faced by an individual may trigger reactions related to the Jonah complex. These challenges may vary in degree and intensity. Such challenges may include career changes, beginning new stages in life, moving to new locations, interviews or auditions, and undertaking new interpersonal commitments such as marriage. The crux of the Jonah complex distinguishes to the subject, an inability to differentiate humility from self helplessness. Other causes include fear of the sense of responsibility and work required that often attends recognizing one's own greatness, talents and potential. What I want to add to that is sometimes we have these grandiose dreams. Maybe they're not even grandiose. Maybe they're just something, a medium sized dream, if you will. And then it's like, oh, this is a responsibility. I have to like, do stuff I'll never forget my friend Eric telling me about buying a Mercedes. He there was a very particular Mercedes that he wanted in a in a specific color, the whole nine yards. I mean, he really had it picked out. When the day came that he bought that car, and he was driving it off the lot to go back home, the thought popped up in his head, you know, this is a commitment. You know, this is a responsibility. You're going to have to take care of this vehicle. This is not a cheap beater. If you want this car to stay looking nice and running nice, you're gonna have to take care of it. Sometimes we fear that we may not be able or willing to rise to the occasion once we have something that we've dreamed of, fear that an extraordinary life would be too much out of the ordinary and hence not acceptable to others, inciting xenophobic rejection. So I think this also ties into our fear of failure, that what will our peers say? What will our friends or our parents say if I tell them this didn't work out, I'm closing my business, I'm dropping out of school, I'm making a change. What are they going to think of me? And we imagine, in a fear of success, what if I do rise to some really high high and people think, Oh, she's too big for her britches now she thinks she's too important, even for those of us who pride ourselves on at least a streak of non conformity. Sometimes those issues of, Am I too different from the pack? Do I stand out a little too much from the herd, those fears can stoke up in us, fear, by association, of the ability honed being heightened and elevated as a subject to a traumatic, unrelated event, complex or memory. So that's like being triggered this event, this success, may trigger us and make us feel exposed, because some previous trauma made us feel exposed and we got hurt. Fear of seeming arrogant or self centered, difficulty envisioning oneself as a prominent or authoritative figure, which also ties into imposter syndrome, like, who am I to do this? DAGs legacy is certainly something where I feel qualified to speak on this topic, because, in my opinion, I want to be really clear on that. In my opinion, it feels and seems to me like for a long time, DAGs legacy has been the purview of academics and individuals who prefer DAG? I'm having to speak very slowly and methodically here, because I just don't want to put a foot wrong, individuals who, in my opinion, seem to me to prefer dag to be an icon, a marble statue.

They view DAG, in my opinion, as being cold, aloof and unknowable, and I hate that. I hate that stereotype of him, because, in my opinion, and in my experience, isn't even true. They they just don't want to see dag as being warm, funny, caring,

silly, paradoxical

and sometimes with a person who has these seemingly contradictory aspects of their personality, somebody who can put on a really nice suit and go to work in a high rise and make these big, important decisions that impact the world, but then also scamper off to the woods and wear nothing but a pair of khaki shorts and eat beans out of a tin. They don't know what to do with that. They know what to do with the cold intellectual who read literature for the Swedish Academy, but they don't know what to do with the DAG that got into the mountains or got into the woods and went feral, the DAG that shucked all of his clothes off and bathed naked in streams. I mean, it's like they feel that you have to pick one or the other, and they've made a clear stand, in my opinion, that they want to promote dag as the cold intellectual and nothing else. So I know a thing or two about like I'm on the outside man. Here are all these, you know, so called authoritative figures of who am I? Well, I'm somebody worth listening to. I think so. I promised you five signs that you or someone else may have a fear of success. These are not in any particular order. One, self sabotage when progress happens. This can be procrastinating, missing a deadline, forgetting commitments, right when things are about to accelerate. Success feels threatening. It feels scary. So this can even be unconscious. It could be an unconscious derailing before the momentum can build, like, oh, the Snowball is starting to go down the hill. It might become an avalanche. So let's just nip this in the bud right now, two minimizing or downplaying achievements instead of celebrating wins, they might be overly self deprecating. It was nothing. It's no big deal. Let's don't talk about it. I just got lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. That kind of avoidance of recognition, it can be a reflection that the person is uncomfortable with being visible, or it could be that they don't want the responsibility of owning that success, three, chronic overthinking and perfectionism. Oh, I can relate. I'm pointing right here at myself as a recovering type. A, yeah. Big time. The author, Ken achey, talks about the Type C personality, which, in its own way, is like a blend of type A and type B. It's like you're trying to make peace with type A, which he calls your accountant, the person that's always going to needle you and worry about money and all of that, and then type B, which is the visionary that's like, life is fake and money isn't real. Do what you want anyway, and then the type C person tries to blend those two together to maximize a way to live your vision, but without going completely nuts, I know for me, definitely the overthinking imperfectionism Is there. I've made some real progress, but it's still a work in progress. So people in this category set impossibly high standards they can revise endlessly. Yep, my hand's in the air. I'm a Tony Stark tinkerer. I want 100 Iron Man suits that each one I think is made slightly better than the last one, totally and or they never release their work. That's a big one for me. Hate the editing process. Hate. Hate giving a manuscript over to an editor because it's like, this is my baby, or even more so, if it's a project that I've done in co creation with dag spirit, it's like, this is our project, and you're an interloper. It's hard to let it go. On the surface, it may seem like those of us in this category are striving for quality, but it can also be a way to delay the risk. I'm scared of being judged, or I'm scared that if I succeed and people actually see my work, then they're going to have comments about it, and I'm going to be exposed, I'm going to be seen, I'm going to be visible. Or what if this is a fluke and I don't ever repeat it again, four avoiding opportunities that could lead to growth. So this could be passing up a promotion, an opportunity to collaborate with somebody that you think is amazing, an opportunity to give a public speech, or to do something else where you would be visible. And people in this category might say it's not the right time. I haven't paid enough dues just yet. Somebody else deserves it more than me, and it's often not a lack of desire. It's about the fear of what's going to happen once the success hits five, fear of outgrowing your current relationships. This might be worrying that you're going to alienate your friends, your family, your colleagues, maybe even your spouse or your kids. If I succeed, they'll resent me. They'll think that I'm arrogant, they'll think I'm too good. They'll think that I don't care about them anymore, that I don't make them my priority. And so it can be social anxiety that sometimes hold people back from really stepping into the next level. So if you are experiencing this fear of success again, I would point to DAGs legacy. I would also point to Susan Jeffers landmark book, feel the fear and do it anyway when we have a passion, when we have some driving raison d'etre, it's a lot easier to say, I'm afraid, but I'm going ahead. Anyway, I remember writing whenever I was in the process of CO creating with DAG, decoding the unicorn. I remember writing in my journal that love is like a blanket. It's like a blanket that seals you off from the cold, and it's hard for fear to get in, because when you're in so much a space of love, you don't have as much room for fear and for DAG. Fulfillment of duty was an expression of love. It was a way for him to say, I want to give something back to the world. I want to try to be bigger than myself. I want to try to do something meaningful for other human beings before my time is up. And so I think when we're driven by love, when we're driven by some higher mission, it does help. There's always the option of making excuses. There's always the option of backing out. It's not my time, maybe later, maybe when I'm stronger. When is there ever a perfect time for a promotion, for a marriage, for a baby, for a book, for whatever it is, the secret song that you have in your heart. When is there ever a perfect time for it? Spoiler alert, there's not. So what I would challenge you to do is to just consider what I've said today. Do you have a fear of success? Do you have a fear of really stepping into your best self and being seen?

Just some food for thought. Take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others. We'll see you next time you.