Handling Fear of Success Through Positive Psychology

¶ … Fear of Success through Positive Psychology

Perhaps we are blinded to the survival value of positive emotions precisely because they are so important. Like the fish who is unaware of the water in which it swims, we take for granted a certain amount of hope, love, enjoyment, and trust because these are the very conditions that allow us to go on living. They are the fundamental conditions of existence, and if they are present, any amount of objective obstacles can be faced with equanimity, and even joy. -- Martin E.P. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The above epigraph by two of the leading proponents of positive psychology is reflective of how important positivity is to a sense of well-being and success, but many people continue to lack the ability to recognize these deficiencies in their lives when they do exist. In a "Catch-22" scenario, this negativity can feed on itself and continue to hamper individual success. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once observed that people have "nothing to fear but fear itself," but the harsher reality for some people is that the fear of success, either conscious or unconscious, keeps them from achieving their personal and professional goals in ways that baffle themselves, their friends, family, coworkers and supervisors. While it would seem reasonable to assume that most people would fear failure more, studies have shown time and again that the fear of success is a very real phenomenon that can adversely affect people throughout their lives in profound ways. Fortunately, though, there are some useful tools and techniques available in the form of positive psychology that can help address these specific fears. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) explain and define fear of success and the effect on people; and 2) explain and define positive of psychology and how it can help to overcome the fear of success. A recommended action plan for this purpose is followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Fear of Success and Its Impact on People. A wide range of psychological conditions can affect an individual's work performance, including both a fear of failure and fear of success (Horner 37); the fear of success condition is characterized by employees intentionally performing below their potential abilities because of consciously or unconsciously perceived negative consequences associated with being "successful," including the perception that significant others may be dissatisfied or unhappy with the achievements (Lowman 53). Further, there is growing evidence, that anxieties such as fear of success and fear of failure are separate but potentially interactive, constructs in understanding certain patterns of workplace undercommitment (Mulig, Haggerty, Carballosa, Cinnick, & Madden, 1985).

Specifically, a fear of success refers to "a persistent tendency to avoid behaviors that may be associated with achievement, particularly when success looms imminent, and to minimize accomplishments or attribute achievement to factors not controlled by the individual" (Horner, 1968 cited in Lowman 74). Other conditions that characterize a fear of success include a sense of low self-esteem, being preoccupied with external evaluation, and a competitive orientation (Lowman 74).

While there remains some debate over the efficacy and supporting rationale behind the fear of success construct, it has nevertheless resulted in a growing body of literature, and there is evidence that it is able to predict at least to some degree real-life work and school undercommitment phenomena. For example, studies have shown that women who suffered from free of success reported that they were more likely to become pregnant if they sensed they were about to become more successful in the workplace relative to a boyfriend or their spouse; other studies have suggested that among female clerical workers, women with a greater fear of success were more likely to evaluate their job performance negatively, even though such evaluations did not affect their job tenure (Lowman 75).

In this regard, Horner believed that such otherwise-inexplicable achievement behaviors could be explained in terms of relatively stable internal acquired dispositions; in the case of fear of success, the emphasis was on the dispositions that serve to impede achievement (Day & Meara 91). Fried-Buchalter (1997) notes that these theoretical constructs have been proposed to explain why some individuals select educational and career goals that appear inappropriately low in comparison with their abilities, engage in self-sabotaging behavior with respect to their careers, or devalue and denigrate their actual accomplishments and achievements (847).

Research by Piedmont (1996) suggests that it may be possible that fear of success is "only the resultant anxiety experienced by individuals temperamentally predisposed to experience negative affect when they are placed in a stressful situation" (139). By sharp contrast, though, Kantor (1997) believes that the fears that are typically associated with a fear of success are primal fears, such as:

1.

Fears of being grown-up (which means having to leave a protective, sheltering womb);

2.

Fears of being a survivor, with the concomitant survivor guilt (which means leaving people with less behind and in the lurch); and,

3.

Being in reality (most people have learned by experience that few people can tolerate or appreciate another's achievements); in fact, "many [people] actually become hostile to others who are smart and effective people and then keep up with the Joneses by cutting the Joneses down to size" (Kantor 75).

For the purposes of this investigation, the fear of success will relate to that definition provided by Clarke (2005), who suggests that this fear relates to the feeling that, "If I do well, others will have higher expectations of me that I may not be able to meet" (124) as qualified by Chae, Estadt, Piedmont and Wicks (1995) who add that a fear of success means that an individual "may make no effort to succeed" at all (470). The implications of such fears in the workplace and in people's personal lives can have profound and long-lasting consequences for those who suffer from a fear of success.

For example, Messina and Messina (2005) report that a fear of success can result in:

1.

A lack of effort to achieve goals you have set for yourself in school, on the job, at home, in relationships, or in your personal growth;

2.

Self-destructive behavior: tripping yourself up to make sure you do not sustain a certain level of success or achievement you once had in school, on the job, at home, in relationships, or in your personal growth;

3.

Problems making decisions, being unable to solve problems;

4.

Losing the motivation or the desire to grow, achieve, and succeed;

5.

Chronic underachievement;

6.

Feeling guilt, confusion, and anxiety when you do achieve success. This leads you to falter, waver, and eventually lose your momentum;

7.

Sabotaging any gains you made in your personal growth and mental health, because once you become healthier, a better problem solver, and more "together," you fear that no one will pay attention to you. You are habituated to receiving help, sympathy, and compassionate support;

8.

Your choosing to do just the opposite of what you need to do to be happy, healthy, and successful.

9.

Reinforcing your chronic negativity, chronic pessimism, and chronic lack of achievement since you cannot, visualize yourself in a contented, successful life.

10.

Denouncing your achievements and accomplishments; seeking ways in which you can denigrate yourself enough to lose what you've gained (Messina & Messina 1-2).

Clearly, then, there are some serious issues involved when people experience a fear of success, but there are some useful tools and techniques available to help them overcome such anxieties in the form of positive psychology; these tools and techniques as they apply to both organizational settings and individuals are discussed further below.

Positive Psychology and How It Can Help. In 2000, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) described the positive psychology movement as being a response to an almost "exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline"; by contrast, positive psychology would seek to investigate "the positive features that make life worth living," including the study of "hope, wisdom, creativity, future-mindedness, courage, spirituality, responsibility, and perseverance" (5). According to the editors of The Journal of Rehabilitation (2005), the concepts of the positive psychology movement are not certainly new. "Many of the positive psychology tenets have provided the foundation for the growth and development of rehabilitation," they advise. "Research in the area of psychological adjustment to disability and attitudes toward individuals with disabilities are firmly rooted in positive psychology constructs" (4).

In fact, many of the recent studies on positive psychology suggest that these are relatively new approaches to helping people achieve better outcomes in their lives, but in the spirit of "We all stand of the shoulders of the giants who come before us," Walsh (2003) suggests that the basis for the positive psychological movement is not, in reality, all that new at all:

In fact, though today's positive psychologists often act as though they are christening a spanking new ocean liner, we notice that this boat has left the dock once or twice per decade for the last century or so. William James at the turn of the last century; the Mental Hygiene movement of the early 1900s; post-Freudians like Menninger, Anna Freud, and Jung in the 1920s and 1930s; R.B. Cattell and other personality psychologists in the 1940s; a raft of theorists in the 1950s, including Erikson, Super, and Allport; Jahoda, Tyler, Shostrum, Maslow, and Rogers in the 1960s and 1970s: all have investigated optimal states of being. (5).

Given the lengthy period these theories have been in place, one of the more interesting aspects of this investigation today is the fact that while positive emotions have been associated with longer lives and improved relationships time and again, there remains a paucity of studies concerning how to help people improve their outlooks on life and apply these tenets to their personal lives.

In their recent book, The Psychology of Gratitude, for example, Emmons and Mccullough (2004) report that, "The recent positive psychology movement has emphasized the importance of encouraging not only the reduction of negative emotions, but also the cultivation of positive emotions in daily life. Yet, psychology has seen a notable scarcity of interventions that focus directly and systematically on increasing positive emotional experiences" (243). According to Pajares (2001), positive psychology can been described as the study of human strengths and optimal functioning, with a primary goal of facilitating research on the positive personal traits and dispositions that are believed to contribute to subjective well-being and psychological health. "Such research stands in contrast to the traditional study of people's distress, pathology, and maladaptive functioning that continues to characterize American psychology," Pajares says (27). A general basis for positive psychology is the notion that it should be firmly based on systematic and scientific inquiry (Pajares 27).

In reality, though, there are various levels within the field of positive psychology that can help both individuals or organizations achieve success in their endeavors; for example, at the subjective level, the field of positive psychology concerns positive subjective experience as exemplified by a sense of well-being and satisfaction about the past; a current sense of happiness, flow, joy, the sensual pleasures, and constructive cognitions about the future as evinced by optimism, faith and hope (Lopez & Snyder 3). In this regard, the positive psychology movement has called increasing attention to such pleasant emotional states or to what Emmons and Mccullough (2004) describe as the "sweetest emotions": happiness, joy, love, curiosity, hope, and gratitude (6).

On an individual basis, positive psychology concerns those aspects originally identified by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) as being the positive personal traits that help an individual achieve a capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future-mindedness, high talent, and wisdom. Finally, at the group level, the discipline of positive psychology concerns civic virtues and the institutions that help motivate individuals to become better citizens, including an enhanced sense of responsibility, altruism, nurturance, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic (Lopez & Snyder 3).

In her essay, "The Positive Psychology of Youth and Adolescence," Grant Jewell Rich (2003) advises that while positive psychology represents a promising approach, the field faces a number of challenges. For example, "Positive psychology must address the issue of appropriate methods for inquiry, the issue of integrating and incorporating previous research from psychology and other relevant fields into the movement, and finally the issue of taking care to avoid 'prescribing' a single 'good life' based on the values or morals of a particular culture," she cautions (2).

Recommended Action Plan. Because every person and organization is unique, there can be no "one-size-fits-all" approach to overcoming a personal or organizational fear of success with positive psychological techniques; however, there are some general tools and techniques available that can help virtually any organization achieve their goals, and these approaches are discussed further below.

Personal Action Plan. The basis for the positive psychology movement can be found in the philosophy of counseling psychology (Walsh 5). According to Seligman (2002) the fundamental goal of the positive psychology movement at the individual level is to "catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life" (3). When this goal is applied to therapeutic interventions and psychological services, though, the focus changes from a model that emphasizes pathology to a model that is built on strengths. To achieve this goal, researchers will need to expand their scope to incorporate human strengths, resources, opportunities and deficiencies in the environment ("A Positive Approach to Rehabilitation Research and Practice" 3).

In this regard, Hulbert reports in her essay, "Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment," that Seligman maintains:

We are prisoners of our childhoods, only in the sense that 'bubbliness (called positive affectivity)' is a 'highly heritable trait.' Otherwise, our fate is in our hands -- or rather in our heads and our characters. By learning to argue rationally and accurately against the 'negative' emotions with which evolution has amply armed us, and even better, by building on the "strengths and virtues" we recognize in ourselves (cross-cultural research has inspired a list of 24 to choose from), we can become more buoyant and resilient. Not least, we can discover true gratification, which brings a sense of selfless fulfillment. (120).

All of this positivity may seem straightforward enough, certainly, but for many people the fear of success is a vicious circle that feeds upon itself. For example, in her essay, "The Fear of Success," Hara Estroff Marano (2002) suggests that in order to create and sustain success, "It is essential to find and release your fears of success. The more you leave the task undone, the more your fears will control you. . . . It's the monster in the closet. And it gets bigger" (2). Some of the basic issues involved in a fear of success include the fear that more success might lead to more loneliness, an anxiety that appears to affect women in a male-dominated society: "One of the core fears that arise from change is that success will lead to loneliness. Women especially fear success because they are afraid that being powerful enough to create the life they want will render them unlovable. Sometimes people fear success will mean being attacked by enemies, or besieged by others wanting money or other things from them" (Marano 3). Finally, Marano notes that some women might fear success because it would jeopardize their existing relationships by growing when their partners do not, and by introducing new situations into their lives that they fear they may not be able to handle (Marano 4).

To help overcome these issues, Marano recommends that people who suffer from the fear of success should ask themselves the following questions to help identify the specific concerns involved:

1.

What do I hope to get out of pretending to be powerless?

2.

What do I get to avoid?

3.

Who do I get to punish or love?

4.

What emotion am I not willing to release? (the author notes that for many, people, "it is anger").

5.

What guarantee am I holding out for?

6.

Am I manipulating with self-pity?

7.

Am I feeling better than or less than?

8.

What am I afraid of losing if I succeed? (Marano 5-6).

After people are able to successfully identify their fears, Marano reports that they will then gain the requisite insights to be able to move past them and succeed in their lives. "You can release your fears either by visualizing your fear coming true in the future," she advises, "then creatively destroying it in your imagination. Or you can write out your fears and destroy the paper. Then play out the movie of your successful future in your imagination -- and you are on your way to a successful life" (Marano 6). Visualizing success is not a new recommendation, but it holds special significance for those seeking to use such positive psychological approaches to resolving their own personal anxieties that may be adversely affecting their lives.

Overcoming the fear of success using positive psychological tenets might be this simple for some people, but for others, the analysis and resolution will obviously be much more complex; nevertheless, many authors believe that people who suffer from the fear of success gain much by overcoming such anxieties, and they can do so in much the same way they would get to Carnegie Hall: "practice, practice, practice" -- because some people are "hard-wired" for the fear of success. According to Baxter (1993), "The truth is that we do have free will, provided, like this woman, we choose to exercise it. We can take the lessons of the past and learn from them, not be controlled by them. Use them as a springboard for growth, not as an excuse. We can be overwhelmed by what we lack -- or work from a position of strength -- maybe even try to help those worse-off than ourselves" (71).

Likewise, in their book, Motivation, Emotion, and Cognition: Integrative Perspectives on Intellectual Functioning and Development, David Yun Dai and Robert J. Sternberg report that the field of motivational psychology has proposed that positive affects vs. negative affects, on the one hand, and intuitive -- holistic processing vs. analytic -- serial processing, on the other, are interdependent" (224). These authors add that in many people who suffer from a fear of success, there may be an inherent bias towards mental processes that result in negative behaviors. Likewise, Fredrickson (2001) believes that the adaptive value of positive emotions and positive psychology can help overcome such fears, and uses the examples that "positive emotions including joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love -- although phenomenologically distinct, all share the ability to broaden people's momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, ranging from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources" (219).

Abraham Maslow referred to the pessimistic tendency many people have to focus on their deficits, deficiencies, and problems as being, "Low grumbles, high grumbles, and meta-grumbles"; rather than this mental process, though, Maslow recommended that people "shake free of this cultural relativism, which stresses passivity, plasticity, and shapelessness" and instead realize their potential by concentrating on autonomy and growth through the maturation of inner forces (cited in Baxter 71). More simply put: "Or, as Disney put it, why not look on the bright side?" (Baxter 71).

In this regard, Seligman and Peterson (2003) have suggested that an individual's strengths are trait-like qualities that can help them overcome their anxieties once both are identified and acted upon; Wolin (2003) includes three additional characteristics of strengths that are also relevant to overcoming such fears:

1.

While strengths are internal to the individual, their development and expression depend on more than natural developmental processes.

2.

Strengths can, and most often do, exist in individuals side by side with weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

3.

Strengths can be learned (Seligman & Peterson 2003 cited in Wolin 19).

As noted above, a fear of success can be either conscious or unconscious, but Pavlina (2004) suggests that, "Unlike fear of failure and fear of rejection, fear of success can be far more insidious because it's almost always unconscious" (3). This proponent of positive psychology suggests that asking, "What will happen if I succeed?" can help people overcome their fear of success because it serves to identify those specific issues that are restricting personal growth and achievement. Likewise, by recognizing what might happen even if an individual does not succeed, all of the dark and mysterious threats can be better identified and taken into account. The bottom-line from Pavlina's perspective, then, is that people must take a careful inventory of their personal strengths and weaknesses and recognize what is holding them back from achieving what is truly important in their lives. Scrutinizing previous versions of success can do wonders to help place these issues in better perspective for many people, she advises, and suggests that some goals may not be regarded as worth accomplishing after this personal inventory is completed.