(10-21-2019, 03:40 PM)Shannon Wrote: It's not common, but not unheard of, for people to get themselves stuck in a perpetual feedback loop of afraid to succeed, and simultaneously afraid to fail.
I was afraid of failure for a while. Then I came across one of my favorite quotes:
No man ever became great, except through many and great mistakes. - William E. Gladstone
It's okay to fail, as long as you don't give up trying. The secret is, you can ONLY truly fail if you give up. Otherwise, all you have really done is learn one of the ways not to succeed, which narrows down your options and makes your next try more likely to succeed.
I'm curious why you are afraid of failure and success though, and embarassment as well.
As far as the fear of success goes, I’m curious too. My mom may have hit the nail on the head when she told my dad that I was failing in school on purpose so that I didn’t outdo him. (Dad lost a series of jobs and went from very successful to spending most of my life unemployed). My mother was very good at hitting the nail right on the head so long as the truth she spoke hurt someone.
My father’s favorite word was failure. It was usually applied to himself, he thought of himself as a failure from the time he lost the first job and mom discarded him in the same month. I idolized him though, so it makes some amount of sense. Maybe I just got so much of my concept of how the world works and how I should be from him that one (or more) of those parts of me that’s stuck in time feels really threatened by anything that would cause me to think of myself as a success. I’m not blaming my dad for any of this, he’s better now, but I have a feeling that my experiences with him between about ages six and twenty have a lot to do with anything that’s still getting in the way. I think it’s a big source of subconscious self sabotage. Matter of fact, I’ve had some pretty off the wall crap happen since I started using 5.5g subs and making inroads so I think I actually attracted circumstances to shut down what would otherwise have been a major success. (That might actually be a good sign, the subs were working on the shallower levels so well that the fearful parts of the deeper levels had to bring out the big guns)
That’s closely related to my fear of failure. I’m no longer afraid of any one failure. They happen, and as you said they can get us closer to success. What I’m afraid of is BEING a failure. I’m afraid that no matter how hard I try or no matter how many tries I get, I still won’t accomplish anything I really set myself to. That used to cause some wonderful behaviors like not trying so I don’t fail. I think it’s also made it so I keep everything from falling all the way apart.
I’m kind of stuck between the two yeah, good way of putting it. They’ve been in kind of a stalemate for a long time.
As to embarrassment, I don’t really have an answer. It’s probably my most visceral fear. In other words it’s the most likely thing to make me want to run from a situation or freeze. I don’t really know why.
Edit: All that said, I’ve been executing everything since USLM1 pretty well. What I think happened is FRM got all the surface stuff cleared enough and moved to a deeper level that it hadn’t even engaged yet. I could kind of tell that the last couple of times I had a job interview. I didn’t feel any nervousness at all. I didn’t get either job, but that’s progress anyway. Now I think that we’re dealing with the level that’s causing me to sabotage myself in ways that I can’t detect directly. Oddly, my conscious mind is a lot more engaged with the process now.
The fears I mentioned are no longer on the surface. They don’t ever dominate my thought patterns. But they are still down in the deeper levels somewhere.
