Fearing Success in My Business
I am writing this blog on November 4th. It’s four days into the new month. The last four days have been incredible. I’ve had high achievements in business, making good money, staying organized, living balanced, and doing really well. And this morning I woke up with this incredible desire to sabotage ALL of it.
It’s funny because when I started my business I could not comprehend the idea of the fear of success. The fear of failure made sense, but why would anyone fear success? I totally get it now. There are a lot of reasons to sabotage the good and fear success… For me, it’s often that I am scared I don’t deserve the good. It’s so much easier to keep myself down than to push myself up.
Having this information helps me in two ways:
I can identify the ways I’ve hurt my business (and myself) in the past because I was fearing success.
One of the most hilarious (now, but not so hilarious then) things that I used to do was get on a sales call with someone and then convince them of why they shouldn’t work with me. I was trying so hard to not be salesy, that I would ALWAYS send them to someone else, even if I could help them perfectly.
Can you imagine getting on the phone with someone because you are interested in their services, and them trying to convince you that someone else is better?
The sad part is that I now know with incredible confidence that I help entrepreneurs and the work that I do makes a huge difference in their businesses. I am a bomb website designer and have a great knack for problem-solving. I know that I could have actually helped those past potential clients, rather than making things more difficult for them.
Every time I get on a sales call now, I see it as an open opportunity to see how I can help. If what they are looking for is not what I do (or what I want to do), then I refer them out. But people know what I do before they get on a call with me, so this legit almost never happens.I can identify when I’m fearing success and prevent myself from self-sabotaging, or at least give myself some grace and support when it does happen.
This is what happened today. I noticed my desire to self-sabotage and I stopped it. I decided that regardless of how my business does this month, it doesn’t impact my view of myself.
And then I forgave myself for wanting to wreck it all.
It’s so easy to beat ourselves up. Forgiveness is a HUGE challenge. And it’s a practice.
To help myself today, I am not going to push it. I’m going to allow my success to just be, I’m going to trust my business to run itself (hello SEO), and I’m going to go work on some Hanukkah gifts.
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