Stopping Short of Success

Many of you like having control. This condition is so prevalent that you establish comfort zones that may or may not be conscious to you. Unfortunately many of you build protective shells around yourselves in such a way you often sabotage your own lives. In particular, this article’s attention sets the spot light on you that do.

When you start projects that might lead to reaching some goal and you draw close to the outskirts of your realm of control, you withdrawal and abandon what you had achieved thus far. You seem to do this whenever you approach those special achievements you always wanted, but always fall short of accomplishing them. Either you are afraid of failure or you fear success. There are perhaps a multitude of reasons why you have built either of these behaviors, but ultimately it is because it will take you beyond what you have allowed yourself to be accustomed. You are paranoid about being outside of your barriers, your familiar territory. So as a result of this fear, you let go what you had a firm grip onto, often never seeing your dreams and/or desires come to fruition.

There are no great formulas or cures for these behaviors. You have to know that they are there and make a decision that either you will control them or succumb to their control; I know you really do not want the latter condition.

The Fear of Failure

Early James Bond movies featured a criminal mastermind Blofeld, who did not tolerate failure, i.e. a mistake in his organization resulted in death for the person in err. Some of you have similar expectations about failure, but not with the same consequences. Some feel that if you fail at attempting to reach certain goals, you are worthy of a form of death in a psychological sense.

The reality of our lives is that all of us have failed in the past and will certainly fail again in the future with some aspects of our lives; there is no escaping it. Another reality about our existence is that failure “does not” mean the end. In fact in many cases failure leads to a new beginning…if you allow it. We, and I stress WE, because I make mistakes too as you do. If you have taken notice during your life, while we were being educated we often made mistakes. It is by the understanding of what those mistakes were we learn what are the correct answers. Yes, we learn by our corrections. Some of us get it right after a few mistakes, while others might struggle a little longer; unfortunately this is how the education system typically measures each of us.