Yes, believe it or not - that is true. For those of you that have followed me for a while, you know that this is no big secret. I talk about my fear of success a lot, and I’m happy to share what it does to me, and what I’m doing to work through it.

This fear comes from something that happened in high school, which I’ll save you the details of that story for the moment, but basically, the situation resulted in my having success - a really cool success - and then my closest friends abandoning me. This also led to a really long, deep battle with relentless low self-esteem.

To this day, my mother still doesn’t believe that I have a fear of success or that my self-esteem was that bad… and that’s not a slam on her, that just goes to show how good I was at hiding it. On the outside, everything was honkey-dorey. I was seeing success regardless of the fear, and I appeared very self-confident in most situations. However, the mental anguish that I went through to achieve even the simplest things… yikes. If you were in my head, you would have had me committed!

I’m happy to say that the low self-esteem is pretty much a non-issue now, and despite my fear of success, I’m successful in every area of my life.

However. The fear is not completely gone. It still rears it’s ugly head. It holds me back, keeps me stuck from time to time, And I still have to work through it.

In the business context, every time I’m ready to forge ahead and get to the next level in my business, my old thought patterns turn up and begin their old familiar arguments “what if they don’t like you? What if they laugh at you? What if they think you’re crazy? What if you get really gooooood and all of your friends abandon you?”

This is why I work with coaches. This is why I work with Reiki Practitioners, and this is why I have an amazing support system around me.

You’ve probably heard or seen me talking about my friend Katherine lately and the amazing coaching program that I have the absolute honor of co-teaching with her.

I want to give you a sneak peek into what she has shared with me, and how it’s helped me so far.

I’m a huge believer in mind-set, and how it can hold you back. I’ve studied and taught Law of Attraction, I’ve worked with my own Law of Attraction coach among my other coaches… so I understand that when this fear of success comes up for me, I go into a pattern of self-sabotage.

And the really awful part of the self-sabotage is, at this point, it is so subtle, I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I’ve set goals, and still haven’t achieved them three months later. Then, I’ll go into “beating myself up” mode and the cycle starts all over again.

Anyway, Katherine was telling me about brain patterns (or, thought patterns) and how they form (for me, my high school incident), and how we just get stuck in them. So stuck, that it becomes really hard to break free.

She told me about the tools we can use to break our negative brain patterns and start forming new ones (break out of my fear of success and step into my whole-ness without fear). We’re going to be sharing these tools during our free teleclass next week.

I told Katherine that I was going to try these tools. I did. I’m not trying to be hype-y here - but amazing things are happening for me as a result of doing this work.

In a nutshell… I’m in the middle of a big marketing push in my business. Meaning, I’m expanding my reach and getting in front of more and more people that need the work I do.

At this point in my business, this means reaching out to some really wonderful people with a bigger following than mine. A much bigger following (I have a pretty big following at this stage of the game, and the people I’m reaching out to are, well… a bit further along than I am…).  And that is really intimidating to me. Really intimidating. Like, Fear-of-Success-Rearing-Its-Ugly-Head intimidating.

So, about three weeks ago, I began using the tools Katherine gave me. It took work on my part… it wasn’t magic - trust me. It took making time to do the work, and it took being committed to changing. But it’s not hard to learn, and it’s not hard at all to apply - you just have to be committed.

Anyway - I am absolutely excited because this week, I reached out to 3 people to create strategic partnerships. I’m thrilled that I was able to do this - just taking those steps was huge for me and helping me create new thought patterns!

I’m also having some really interesting other things happen. First, my schedule is lightening up. And I know that sounds counter-intuitive at first - I should want a really busy schedule, right?

Well, yeah, to a degree. But, what’s being cut out for me is the endless mind chatter and, as Katherine says, the busy work. I no longer feel compelled to fill every waking moment with ’stuff.’

Second, I feel so… expansive. I just feel so open - rather than closed, or piled under ’stuff.’

Third, I feel like the mind-set want to be aligned with… even when something seemingly unsuccessful happens… I don’t go into the Beating-myself-up mode anymore. I still feel whole.

This work has been amazing for me and I’m so excited that Katherine shared it. I’ll be sharing more about it over the coming weeks - and do feel free to join us for our teleclass next week where you can learn about the tools I’m using, and our coaching program that starts soon.