"Not only is she more beautiful/thin/funny/smart/rich than I am, she's also got 1000x times more Instagram followers!!!"
I'm ashamed to admit this, but thoughts like these have been running through my head on the regular lately. I've been having a really hard time blocking the negativity lately. It's ironic because within the last several weeks, I've never felt more on track in terms of my career goals. I made the tough decision to leave my internship to focus my time outside of my current job on growing my personal training business. I've secured two clients whom I'm training twice a week, and I'm leading a successful outdoor group fitness exercise class once a week. I'm sure any outsider would wonder why I'm not ecstatic.
Frankly, I'm wondering the same thing. What's holding me back from reveling in my success? Why do I still feel paralyzed by fear that I'm not doing something right? The answer is fear. I keep asking myself: "Now that I've achieved this level of success, how do I sustain it?" As much as I'm afraid of failure, I'm equally afraid of success. How will that affect my life? My relationships? My well-being?
WHY do we often feel more insecure the closer we get to achieving our goals? The things that I dreamed would happen are happening, and my default reaction is to worry about what others are doing. What effect do they have on my success? Is comparing myself to others going to motivate me to push myself? Not likely. In fact, it's more likely to paralyze me than anything else because it makes success seem that much more elusive. Our minds play funny tricks on us when we observe others achieve feats that we find impressive: those feats suddenly take on a mythical quality that makes them appear so much harder or challenging which to our minds often translates into impossible.
The weirdest part about this phenomenon is that it distorts our hopes and dreams and goals into amorphous achievements that no longer belong to us. We forget our own goals to accommodate the bad feelings that accompany our envy--even though what we envy was never a personal goal in the first place!
So how does one conquer these feelings? The first step is to be aware of them. Acknowledgement that the source of the feelings is negativity helps to release them. Once released, there is more space to accommodate our individual goals and dreams and the action steps needed to get us there. If we are focused on our own goals, others' achievements can be just that--something someone else did--for which we can express genuine kudos as opposed to envy. These steps are not easy to take, but they are necessary if we want to live in our truth.
WHY do we often feel more insecure the closer we get to achieving our goals? The things that I dreamed would happen are happening, and my default reaction is to worry about what others are doing. What effect do they have on my success? Is comparing myself to others going to motivate me to push myself? Not likely. In fact, it's more likely to paralyze me than anything else because it makes success seem that much more elusive. Our minds play funny tricks on us when we observe others achieve feats that we find impressive: those feats suddenly take on a mythical quality that makes them appear so much harder or challenging which to our minds often translates into impossible.
The weirdest part about this phenomenon is that it distorts our hopes and dreams and goals into amorphous achievements that no longer belong to us. We forget our own goals to accommodate the bad feelings that accompany our envy--even though what we envy was never a personal goal in the first place!
So how does one conquer these feelings? The first step is to be aware of them. Acknowledgement that the source of the feelings is negativity helps to release them. Once released, there is more space to accommodate our individual goals and dreams and the action steps needed to get us there. If we are focused on our own goals, others' achievements can be just that--something someone else did--for which we can express genuine kudos as opposed to envy. These steps are not easy to take, but they are necessary if we want to live in our truth.
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