Success Intolerance

Have you ever believed that you are afraid of success? If so, this episode is for you. We are never afraid of success. What we are afraid of is what we will make it mean when we get there.  By learning to increase your capacity to feel positive emotions, you make yourself more able to attain your goals.  Join me as  I teach you how to navigate success intolerance as a way to live up to your potential. 

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Transcript

 Hey babes. What's up? How are you doing? I'm actually feeling a little sleepy. I have days where I wake up at 4:00 AM and I just can't get back to sleep. And the thing is, I tend to go to bed early and at that point I've had six hours of sleep, but that doesn't necessarily mean I am arrested. And today was.

One of those such days and my eyes are just feeling a little bit heavy all day. Also not ideal for me is I've had a lot of breaks throughout my day between calls, and this is just not the best setup for me. It's just how this day ended up because of like cancellations, et cetera. So I am managing my energy through all of that, and I just wanna point out that this is a great example of a time that it really helps.

For me to ask myself the question, what do I need right now? So I just got in from sitting outside as a result of that question, and I will eventually probably take a nap today, but I didn't wanna do that before my last call because it will completely shift me out of like a coaching mode. So I went outside to help me.

Pull in some energy from the environment and get some vitamin D yatty and also gave myself a break from screen time. And I definitely came back in refreshed and ready to make decisions like the decision of what we are going to talk about today. And I got to work ready to go. And so to date, I wanna talk about success intolerance.

And you're like, what the fuck is that? But basically, success intolerance is the inability to experience positive emotion as a result of your accomplishments for a sustained period. I might have made this up, I don't fucking know, but doesn't that sound brilliant? But really what we're talking about is, um, the capacity to tolerate positive emotion, which I believe we have talked about before.

And I think it's super important to talk about it in regards to success because it really impacts us when trying to achieve our goals in that it can prevent us from even trying to achieve them. So first off, I want to address the thing I hear from people a lot. And that is that they think that they're afraid of success.

I think that's not true. I will offer that it's not success that people are afraid of. Success in and of itself is not scary. And for this episode, we're just gonna assume that you're able to define success in a way that positively impacts you. Um, if you aren't, you need to do that work, but that is not what we're talking about today.

So decide how you wanna define success. And we have to keep doing that. We have to keep redoing that. We have to do that on a project to project basis. We have to do that on a daily basis. But like, just decide what success means for you. Success does not feel bad. You are not avoiding the feeling of success or really the feeling that is caused by the thought, I am successful, or I have succeeded, or this was successful.

That's not what you are avoiding. That's not what you don't want to feel. You like that feeling. What you're leery of is what you're making it mean. If you become successful, if you do achieve your goals, if you are living your best life. And killing it and all your dreams are coming true. What you're afraid of is like what?

Bullshit, self-sabotaging nonsense. Your brain is going to start telling you once you reach your goals, so in the case of making more money, what you're afraid of is like what your mother might think or your partner or your best friends, the people on the internet, you're focused on what they might think about you.

You're afraid of what you might think about you, right? These are all the things that you're afraid of, not the success itself. And the reason you do this in the first place is because of what you will make it mean if you do not achieve your goals. Because you've already set up this false premise that failing at achieving your goals means a ton of bad stuff about you, when in fact, it means absolutely nothing about you.

When you achieve a desired result, it simply means that you took massive action until you achieved your goal. Period. There is no morality to it. You are not a good person because you did that. Conversely, when you fail, you do not need to claim the identity of failure. You are not a failure. You failed. You just happened to fail at creating a certain result in that moment.

That's it. End of story. And it doesn't mean anything about your ability to one day achieve that you can still get there. But can you see how if you are already believing that failure means something about you, then success also means something about you. And if there's any kind of history of people in your life being less than enthusiastic about your accomplishments, then then you are going to default to believing.

That they're going to be saying and thinking fucked up shit about you. But here's the real reason I know that you aren't just afraid of success. It's because if you have made it this far, you have probably already achieved so much of what you have always wanted and some stuff you didn't want. Right? But you killed that shit anyway because hello, queers are overachievers.

Not all obviously, but like. A lot of us who like, that's how we experienced love and that's how like we learned how to love ourselves was through achieving. We, we achieved lots of shit that we don't even care about. But it is like adding to our sense of self and adding to our ability to, to like be able to like accept and feel loved.

But get this, you have done all of that. You have achieved all of those things and your world did not fall apart. You are a rockstar at getting shit done and you're still in one piece. So you've experienced success before. You know what it feels like. That's not the problem. So what is it that you're telling yourself is going to happen if you achieve your goals?

Maybe you're gonna lose some people or that you'll have to work really, really hard, or that you'll have to spend less time doing things that you love doing. And coaching is all about questioning our beliefs. So I would encourage you to spend some time investigating your thoughts about like what the proverbial other shoe is that you're waiting to drop.

Because the way that most people experience what they're calling like a fear of success or an aversion to it goes a little something like this, right? Something happens that you interpret as good. You hit your goal for the amount of clients you want. You feel happy, proud, accomplished, or some other positive feeling.

Then almost immediately your brain comes in with something like a question as to whether or not you can accommodate this. Like, what if I get burnt out working with all these people? Boom. That is what you're afraid of, the burnout that would come from overworking and spreading yourself too thin. And that has nothing to do with the success of being fully booked and everything to do with your negative thoughts about it because overworking and overwhelm are a choice.

And if you had positive feeling thoughts, And asked your brain to continue to focus on those, you would not be catapulted back into this negative land, right? Just because of the circumstance of you being fully booked. And then let's talk about some of these other fears, right? Like losing people, okay?

Like if you lose people because they don't like that you're successful, you can let them go. They get to have their thoughts. You don't have to try to control what they think about you. You can love them from afar. And what about working harder? Well, yeah, you're definitely gonna have to work like nobody gets anywhere, not working, but let's interrogate whether or not you're gonna have to work harder.

Most of the time when we're trying to grow, what we actually need to do is learn to work more efficiently, not harder. And we need to learn how to rest more so that we actually have the bandwidth for the growth that we're trying to accomplish. But here is the thing. I think one of the main reasons we do this is because of success intolerance.

So not being afraid of success, but rather not having the ability to hold onto the positive emotion. Because we have been conditioned to have a higher capacity for negative emotion than we do for positive emotion, and I do believe some of this is actually for survival, right? When we focus on solving problems, it helps us stay alive and.

When we don't have a lot of threats, we tend to make stuff up. Like anytime someone comes to me with a problem they clearly created, I know they have too much time on their hands. Bored out can make us very creative and it's good for us to experience, but we wanna make sure that we aren't using that creativity to make problems where there aren't any.

So the perfect question for this is, why is this a problem? If it isn't, your brain is going to answer accordingly. And a lot of times it just isn't. You're just making it up. I know for me, That my set point for positive emotion was really quite low for a very long time, and this was pointed out by a coach.

I was having all this anxiety over my internship to become a coach instructor for no fucking reason at all. And she asked me why I couldn't just let myself enjoy it like I had worked to get to this point and I was like not able to just relax and enjoy the process of like growing in this way. And wow, was that ever eye-opening for me?

By all accounts, it was going really well, but I thought I needed to be struggling in order to be getting the most out of it. So I was making all of this drama for myself. And so what she suggested was that I try increasing my set point for positivity and I was like, oh my God, you're so right. I do not let myself stay in the positive emotion of an accomplishment for very long at all.

So how do we actually do this? Well, we start to notice how long we allow ourselves to feel good before we ruin it. It's interesting because we tend to set limits on how long we're allowed to celebrate things in our lives, but we don't do the same thing for losses. Like people, myself included, will hold onto lost opportunities and make them their entire personality for the rest of their lives.

And yet, They'll have this statute of limitations on how long they're allowed to celebrate something. Like, think of something that you have achieved in your life. When did you stop celebrating it? Really think about that. One thing I know I still celebrate is being chosen to be a Soul Cycle instructor.

And yeah, the company was super fucked up and I had a, like, there was a lot wrong once I was finally an instructor, but I was really proud to be chosen. Only two people from my audition were selected. It was very hard to get into that training, and not everybody ended up on the podium at the end of it. So I celebrate that still 10 years later.

I did that in 2013, and I still celebrate that, that that was something that I was able to do. So whatever you accomplish this week, can you still give yourself snaps for it next week, even if you don't accomplish the next phase of that project? We tend to negate any form of progress if we aren't constantly moving the needle.

Fuck that shit. Your ability to give yourself props over the long haul is directly related to how successful you will become. Because it's that ability that keeps you showing up and relentlessly working toward your goal. I notice I said relentlessly and not constantly. There is a difference. Being unrelenting means you do not give up till you get there, but you do not need to be grinding 24 7.

We tend to do this when we're trying to outwork our fear. Don't do that. Don't try to use work and hustle so that you don't have to sit with your negative emotion. There will be fear. But again, it's not going to be a fear of success. It's going to be a fear of letting yourself down once you reach the success, right?

Like that, you cannot sustain that level of working. That's a really common one. So if we were unrealistic or we pushed ourselves too hard in the attainment of that goal, once we get there, we might have a thought like, I don't know how I'm gonna keep this up. Well, duh, right? Like you can't keep that up.

But that doesn't mean it's a failure. It also doesn't mean that you are afraid of the success. What you're afraid of or you are questioning is whether or not you have the ability to continue to work at that capacity. And I would say no. I would say you're gonna have to build in some rest, especially if you worked toward your goals in an unsustainable way.

One of the ways to assure that you are not working toward your goals in an unsustainable way is to create your calendar from an intuitive scheduling perspective. When you've really considered like your energy, your available time, the way your environment impacts how you're able to get things done or not get them done, that's going to be key in working toward your goals and being able to continue.

To keep going once you get there. So once you've spent time in one area of your life increasing your tolerance for success, it will start to bleed into other areas. You're building a skill. It's an emotional skill. So what do you have to be willing to feel so that you can get to where you want to go?

What positive emotions that you are letting slip away from you? Do you wanna try to cultivate more of? And hold onto longer so that they keep fueling you toward your goal. These are the questions that you need to answer in order to increase that ability to stay with the positive and achieve all of the dreams that you have for yourself.

All right, friends, that is what I have for you today. I hope that you are gonna take this and run with it and start thinking about the ways in which you need to really have like a come to Jesus with yourself around what your. Willing to feel when it comes to your positive emotion and how long you are committed to continue to cultivate that.

Have a great week. I'll talk to you soon.