Hidden Mind Patterns Limiting Achievement: Fear of Failure, Fear of ...

Hidden Mind Patterns Limiting Achievement: Fear of Failure, Fear of Success

Alina Constantin ? Lightman Consulting

Modern Tokyo Times

Success can take (www.lightman-consulting.com)?many shapes and can be defined in many ways but one thing is for sure: it is one of the most popular concepts of the 21st Century and it?s the ideal of every person regardless age, gender, culture or religious orientation.

Success is the ultimate goal that keeps many entrepreneurs focused nonstop on their businesses, looking for ways to accelerate their achievements and success. Every entrepreneur, organization leader, manager or employee has a different perception of success. For this reason, they engage differently in their relationship with success, according to their own perception of themselves and their perception of the skills necessary to accomplish their goals.? This is the main reason why some people can manage success better than others.

?I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear? ? Nelson Mandela

There are many examples of people who received an unexpected promotion but because they believed they don?t have the right skills for the job, most of the time they felt under constant pressure. They consumed a lot of time and energy worrying about all the things they couldn?t properly do because they believed they don?t have the right abilities and eventually ended up being less productive than they were expected to be. This constant internal pressure and stress turned into failure. What they actually did was to align the way they saw themselves and their abilities with the reality that resulted, thus accomplishing what is also known as self-fulfilled prophecy.

?We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear? ? Martin Luther King, Jr.

The low, medium or high level of people?s achievement speaks not only about their skills required for a particular task but also about their ability to understand and control their thinking and behavior. Dr. Jack Plaks, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto observed that generally, people believe about themselves that they know themselves well enough to be able to predict their own outcomes. However, if the outcome is unexpected, it becomes a source of high anxiety. If the unexpected outcome is negative, the anxiety produced is going to contribute to the effort of restoring the sense of mental prediction, as it was prior to the outcome. But when it comes to unexpected success, the various research into this area have discovered that people react differently in order to fulfill their perception of self and of their abilities. As results of his research, Dr. Plaks discovered that some people believe about their abilities that they are fixed and can?t change with learning (the level of intelligence in particular) and others understood that their skills are malleable and can be improved through learning. Students that participated in the research had been given a test and afterwards they have all been provided with a training program to help them understand the tasks they weren?t able to solve. Then, everybody took the same test again. Dr. Plaks discovered that even if everybody took part in the same learning session, the students with steadfast beliefs and perspective reported higher anxiety, performed worse and couldn?t handle success because it went against their established views.

?Fear has its use but cowardice has none? ? Mahatma Gandhi

In the workplace, flexible people are more likely to try new things, to allow their creativity to soar and to think in terms of solutions rather than personal limitations. Managers can increase their employees potential and implicitly the value that they bring to the organization. Rather than labeling the employee and putting them into their respective boxes and implying that this is what they can only do and this is the limit of their abilities, managers can create an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to try new things without the fear of failure.

The need of constantly being in control and always being able to predict outcomes has a very strong bond with the fear of failure. Fear of failure is the number one enemy of ambitious ideas and great achievements. If people are afraid of trying new things to avoid the feeling of failure or they believe they don?t deserve their achievements and success, in both cases they will find themselves in a place where anxiety and frustration takes the place of joy and enthusiasm. We all feel ?the fear,? some of us choose not to listen to it and do things anyway.

?Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear? ? Mark Twain

Success comes from within. Entrepreneurs, leaders and employees have the power to choose to see themselves as the owners of unlimited rough potential. This potential can take various shapes through continuous learning and exposure to new experiences that always are a powerful source of growth and improvement. Remember that information is not power, information is potential power and only through continuous action it turns into positive results.

Alina Constantin

alina@lightman-consulting.com?

www.lightman-consulting.com

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