Do you find yourself in a strange loop of self sabotage?

Like you say to yourself “I want to start my own business” or “I would love to be in a relationship” or “I’m going to hit the gym 6x per week” and yet you don’t follow through.

At first, it seems like you’re suffering from a fear of failure or fear of rejection, because that’s the only thing that would make sense. Except… you CAN handle failure and rejection.

So what’s REALLY stopping you?

In this video, we explore the secret barrier called the fear of success, and how it stops you more than fear of failure ever could.

Dan’s Top Resources

Books

Dan has 3 bestselling non-fiction books available in both written and audio form:

• The Naked Truth, his latest release, shows you how radical honesty builds self-confidence and relationships
• Nothing to Lose explores how to build confidence from the inside by correcting the programming in your brain
• The Legendary Life is a very practical, action-focused guide on how to plan and execute a life plan that brings you your ideal lifestyle

Online courses

Dan continues to put out high quality online self-paced courses through the Udemy platform

• Shamelessness: how to relieve yourself of the “not good enough” story
• Powerful Honesty: takes you through step-by-step development of your communication skills to be more charismatic and powerful in your honesty
• The 3X Confidence and Authenticity Masterclass program: use the famous 3X Model to build confidence in all areas of life
• Financial Freedom for Beginners: includes everything from budgeting, to getting a raise, to investing in the stock market, to starting a side-business and more
• Overcoming Your Fear of Rejection… Permanently!: covers the psychology of “rejection” and what actions to take to make yourself immune to the fear of it

full transcipt

what’s up peeps so today I want to do a little quick one on something that it’s commonly called the fear of success what I want to talk about specifically has how often clients I work with believe that they’re afraid of failure and yet the evidence doesn’t make sense and it turns out they’re actually afraid of success so before I go into how that is it’s really important to define what failure and in success are because they’re simply different labels that we give to outcomes of our behavior and our efforts now often people talk about failure is something going wrong and therefore having bad attached to it pain suffering so on and success there’s something going well and having lots of pleasure and an increased quality of life attached to it this story’s not quite accurate because there’s another way to look at failure and success that allows us to make a lot more sense out of the fear of success and the self-sabotage that leads to consistent failure what if we define failure as things staying the same so failures you you attempt to bring something new into your life and that attempt does not change your life and so you stay the same so if I go to the gym and I lift the same amount of weight as last time I don’t achieve a higher level of weight that’s a failure I’m staying the same I’m lifting the same amount if I see somebody at a party that I’m attracted to and I don’t go and talk to them there’s no a new board into my life my life stays the same socially that’s a failure in staying the same if I don’t start a business and keep working my job even though I want to start a business then that’s a failure I’m staying at my job I’m staying the same so you can see that failure is merely never making an attempt that’s strong enough to actually changelings okay well that’s one definition of failure which brings us a definition of success I want you only go for a second of the idea that success is pleasurable because we can clearly see in the definition of failure that failure can be quite pleasurable at least in the moment I might be nervous about going to talk to their person at the party and so when I tell myself I don’t have to talk to them I get a relief that’s actually quite a pleasurable sensation now my life won’t change it will stay comfortable in a sense so there’s no real pain in the moment now later on with nothing great is happening in my social life then I’ll feel the pain but right now as I relieve myself from that effort of going too much further than usual I feel pleasure we’re a success if I was to go and talk to that person and it went well that’s not necessarily going to be a pleasurable experience for me now in the long term it will be I’ll be proud of myself options will have opened up in my life oh I’ll be wiser and more experienced and have greater quality but right now it might be quite painful to do that for example if someone who’s never been in a relationship before when they first actually get into a relationship there’s a lot of pain and suffering you get all people-pleasing as you try to manage how the person heaps of jealousy issues come up for the first time in your life you have to figure out sexuality a long term sex life with somebody deeper conversations uncomfortable conversations changing your lifestyle fit someone and there’s a lot of pain in the success of getting into a relationship there’s a lot of pain in the changes so when we say that somebody’s afraid of success what we’re really saying is they’re afraid of significant change at least in a certain area of their life and it’s not correct to say they’re afraid of failure because everything they do is a form of failure it’s keeping things the same it’s entropy nothing is improving that thing is changing so a lot of people say they’re afraid of failure but if you look at their life they’re constantly failing to change failing to improve they look at their life and they say it’s comfortable therefore I’m successful in yet by the definition of failure being keeping things the same there is no success if they’ve stayed at the same dead-end job for 10 years they’re good at the job they say I’m good at it and they call that a success but the fact that they hate it and they’re not taking any risks to change it is in fact a failure they’re keeping things the same so when your brain tells you that you’re afraid of failure I’m afraid of rejection you know I’m afraid of looking stupid in front of people I’m afraid of running out of money you’ll find that often the behavior that you’re doing right now actually makes all those things you’re afraid I’ve come true if I don’t go and talk to the person in that party I’ve rejected myself so rejections already occurred it’s as if they’ve rejected me it’s if I haven’t even given them a chance so rejection is guaranteed you know if I if I if I don’t try and start my business my finances might be safe and stable but I won’t feel financially secure I won’t feel like I’m in control of my finances so I’m actually bringing that insecurity to life so the idea that you’re afraid of failure is often contradicted by your behavior you embrace failure you’re making it happen all the time by not changing things I want to emphasize that it is much more likely that you’re afraid of success because success means significant painful change you know a lot of people think I’d love to become rich and famous but they never do anything towards that because deep down they know that that change of lifestyle would be horrific to them they’re so not prepared for it you can see this when people accidentally succeed like winning the lottery somebody suddenly gets millions of dollars the research clearly shows that they will absolutely ruin themselves with that when not only will they lose all the money they often end up in a worse financial situation at the end of it all they end up in debt despite winning millions of dollars because they weren’t ready for that change was thrust upon them the only reason I’m doing this video is just to highlight that you lie to yourself when you say you’re afraid of failure if you’re keeping things the same if you’re keeping things the same then you are all good with failure you will you live in the dream failure wise you’re somebody who exposes themselves to failure every day by not going for things because the end result is the same as if you went for it and failed you fail by default which also brings up the the reason it’s okay to be scared of success is because the success does not automatically equal pleasure certainly not in the short term real success is confusing you’re going back to beginner level at whatever you’re doing you’re gonna have to rewire all the map of your neural activity in your brain to suit this new lifestyle that you will have created with your success I mean when I started my business my whole world changed eating socializing spending money figuring what to do with my day self-discipline getting out of bed in the morning all of those things had to be rewritten by me starting a business it wasn’t just an instant oh yeah now I’m free I can do what I want and anything it was kind of worse than what I had before initially then as I stuck with it the pleasure came the freedom as I adjusted to the lifestyle the new map was written so I don’t have a particular purpose for making this video other than to snap you out of the illusion that you’re afraid of failure and rejection you’re not because you’re doing those things to yourself all the time nobody is afraid of it would do it all the time if you really were afraid of failure you’d be succeeding like crazy you’d be doing anything to improve your life at every second no you’re afraid of change and mint okay but call it what it is and so next time when you think oh no I’m afraid of failure grab yourself free right now I’m choosing failure because that takes you what I’m comfortable with I’m afraid of having a better life I’m avoiding a better life right now because it hurts to transition into a better life I hope that helps you write below comments or email me down at Broderick codons in with your thoughts about the fear of success and the self-sabotage that comes from there subscribe to the YouTube channel and I’ll catch you all next time