“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others” (1)
Commonly mistaken to be the words of Nelson Mandela, although they easily could be, I remember that the first time I saw this quote it scared me. Do we really do this I thought? Do we dim down our potential because we’re afraid of it? Yes, I think sometimes we really do. Success, achievements and happiness have their own problems and in some ways can be harder to live with than their polar opposites because they immediately provide us with something to lose. This is of course the trade off, the price we must pay to love and form attachments in this world, something we just can’t help but do. When we become bearers of things precious to us we become bodyguards of them as well, always watching and waiting for the slightest sign of trouble. And what could be more fruitful than realising our potential and in turn more costly to fall short of it.
So if our success (whatever that may be for each of us) has its disadvantages, do our failures have advantages? Is our fear of failure another way of presenting our fear of success and if so what could we possibly gain from not wanting to succeed? Quite a lot actually. Failing at something is painful but it does however offer a degree of certainty because then we know one way or the other where we stand in relation to it. It provides us with a sense of security, albeit a false one, because we no longer have to tolerate the ambivalence of possibility and uncertainty, both of which are imbued with that dangerous ingredient called hope.
“Hope” says the Architect the creator of the Matrix in the film ‘The Matrix Reloaded’, “It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness”. (2)
He may have a small point here although I think it’s the wrong way round; we would be more delusional if we didn’t hope. For the cynic however, hope is the scariest thing of all since it dares to offer an alternative to an already established world view. It threatens to rock the boat and make some new waves in the process. If given free rein hope can make anything seem possible and that is what makes success so terrifying. Success changes our narrative about ourselves and it changes us. A man who has spent his whole adult life living with the compulsion of having to check whether or not he has locked the patio door ten times a night even though he’s never unlocked it will experience himself very differently if one morning he wakes up and realises the compulsion is gone. Who would he be then? How would he assimilate his new found freedom (and identity) into a lifetime of believing he was made up a certain way and that’s just how it was? The terror of not being the person we have always been (a sort of death in itself) is what hinders us the most from choosing to live a different way of life as that would mean leaving behind everything we’ve grown to know even if unhelpful it is none the less very very familiar.
The fear of failure and the fear of success are one and the same; each is inherent in the other. It is the fear element that seems to be the common felon, the fear of being too good or not good enough. I wonder sometimes what would happen if like the patio checking man we all wake up one morning and discover that we’re unafraid to live out what we couldn’t dream of doing before, how would it be if we could just do anything without fear or anxiety.... If this were really possible then I think a life without any fear would be the most frightening thing of all. Maybe it’s not about eradicating our fears, maybe it’s about finding ways of living in the face of them and as that famous self help book goes maybe we should just,
“Feel the fear and do it anyway”. (3)
References
(1) Marianne Williamson (1992) A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles". Harper Collins. Chapter 7, section 3.
(2) The Matrix Reloaded (2003). Directed by Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski.
(3) Susan Jeffers (1988) Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway. Ballantine Books.
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