“We’re gonna keep on keep on keep on keep on doin’ it right” – The Brady Bunch
This is post 5 in my quest for 30 in 30.
Welcome to the final installment of this series on failure. Previously I talked about failure having only two definitions.
The topic of this post technically falls under both of these definitions . I felt however that it deserved it’s own little space since it is about the most devious obstacle that most of us face. It’s the failure to start or to finish something due to the fear of success.
It’s really quite a strange phenomonon. When it happens to me I’m usually sitting at my computer. I’ll get a really great idea. I’ll think about it and get really, really excited… then I will promptly get up and walk away from it. I’ve caught myself doing this hundreds of times. A big idea hits, plain as day and suddenly I’m in the next room searching for a distraction. What in the hell just happened? One minute I’m mentally basking in my own genius and the next I’m hiding in the TV. Well, I’ve taken a lot of time to think about this and I’ve realized that, for me at least, it comes down to the same thing that was keeping me out of the game in the first place, fear of change.
Fear of change is actually just a fear of the unknown which can be a powerful thing. It’s what triggers our flight mechanism and it can be really useful in the right circumstances. Yet while it’s what keeps us from walking down a dark alley alone at night, which for most can be a true danger, it’s otherwise really just a huge pain in the ass that holds us back. Fear of the unknown does it’s worst damage when the danger is a perceived one and anything that can be related to the “danger” of success is just that. Perceived. Truly, is there really any danger in being good at something? What’s the worst that could happen? My own internal conversation usually goes something like this:
“What happens if I fail?
Wait, worse yet, what happens if I don’t?
People might start to think I know what I’m talking about.
They might start to come to me for answers.
What if I don’t have them?”.
I could go on and in fact, I usually do. There are hundreds of “reasons” to not be successful, none of them however, are real. They’re all just manifestations of my fear of change, my fear of the unknown.
How do we overcome our fear of change? We already have. We know now that there’s no inherent danger involved with changing. The truth is, there’s no danger involved with failing or succeeding either because succeed or fail, we’ll still be alive and breathing in the end. Knowing this basic fact is enough to overcome most anything.
Ok, so now we’ve eliminated our fear of change. Let’s extend it to our fear of the unknown. For those who have not had a significant experience with success, what happens when we reach our goals can be a mystery. I personally love a good mystery. Have you ever seen a live show where the twists and turns are dictated by the choices the audience makes? We deal with this a lot in improv acting. We don’t know what we’re working with until moments before we start a scene. We have to make it up as we go along reacting to the choices made by our fellow actors and by the audience. To get good at this we fine tune our ability to adapt and react quickly to what is happening. This is also exactly what we do to ensure that we don’t fail by not finishing. We adapt to new information that comes our way and we change as needed. Eventually our original idea becomes everything it’s supposed to be. So the tools we use to overcome our fear of success are the same tools we used to get moving and keep moving in the first place. The one difference is that we may have to use those tools in bigger and better ways. That is the easy part though.
I love to use a recording studio as an example. If you’ve ever seen the inside of a recording studio you know that the first time you sit in front of a truly monster sound board it can look pretty intimidating (see photo above) . There’s this massive sea of buttons, knobs and faders that stretch farther than you can reach in either direction. It’s hard to know where to even start when you’re sitting there, but to make it work all you have to understand what you’re really looking at. What a sound board really is is a repetition of one vertical strip of buttons, knobs and faders. That’s it. Once you know how to control that one strip, that one set of buttons, you can control the entire board.
Overcoming the fear of success works in much the same way. You already learned how to be successful by learning how to not fail. If you just keep doing what you’re doing you’ll keep on succeeding. Eventually you’ll have a bigger board to play with. The nice thing about that is the bigger the board, the greater the possibilities.
Thanks for being here. Talk to you tomorrow.
-JB
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Today’s music: Keep on
by: The Brady Bunch
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