The other day, in another video, in a galaxy far away, I've dealt with self-handicapping narcissists.
And inevitably, immediately there was another launch of people writing to me.
Not all self-handicapping instances involve narcissists.
Correct. Self-handicapping is a strategy. It is often used by narcissists, but of course it is used by many other people who have no narcissism, don't have a whiff of narcissism. They're not narcissists.
So it's not a behavior exclusive to narcissists. Anyone who is afraid of failure, anyone who is afraid of success, and anyone who is a perfectionist would tend to engage in self-handicapping.
Today I'm going to discuss these related fears, the fears of succeeding, the fears of failing, and the fears of being imperfect, also known as perfectionism, a form of obsession, compulsion.
But before we go there, I want to dispel a myth or reverse a misconception.
Success is when you're good at something. When you're accomplished at something, you're being successful.
If what you're good at is failing, if what you're accomplished at is failing, if your only achievements are having failed throughout life repeatedly, big time, then you're a success at failing, you're a successful failure.
Indeed, many narcissists, for example, self-aggrandize, boast, and brag about having failed big time. My bankruptcy was the largest in the state, they would say.
So there's haughtiness involved in failing impeccably, fully, repeatedly, regularly. It's a form of success.
And so the fear of success and the fear of failure are not entirely delimited. They're not entirely mutually exclusive.
And both of them involve grandiosity.
Grandiosity is a feature of healthy personalities as well. Everyone has self-esteem, to some extent self-confidence, a sense of self-worth.
And very often we inflate our worth. We overvaluate, overvalue ourselves, over evaluate, over evaluate ourselves.
For example, there's the famous Dunning Kruger effect, where stupid people are too stupid to realize that they are stupid, so they think that they are smart and intelligent.
That's an example of misapprehension of oneself, misappraisal and mis-evaluation of one's capabilities, strengths, but also limitations and shortcomings.
So bear that in mind as we proceed to discuss the fear of success or fear of failure, because it is very difficult for us to grasp ourselves accurately, to really assign our appraisal of our accomplishments, and divide these achievements or these outcomes into success and failure respectively.
So sometimes we regard a success as a failure, a relative failure, a failure in comparison.
If you get 200 likes on your post, that's nice, but it's a failure compared to your friend who has received 1,000 likes.
Similarly, we tend to re-evaluate or recast or reframe failures as successes, because, for example, it's too emotionally taxing and exacting. It's too onerous, it's too painful to accept that you have failed.
So you recast it as a success. You find redeeming features in the failure.
So it's a very murky area, very fuzzy, very problematic. There's no clear cut, black and white distinctions.
Okay, having said so, let's discuss first and foremost the fear of success.
One of the main reasons people are afraid to succeed is because they believe that the success is a one-off, that they would be unable to repeat it.
These are people with a low self-esteem or people who are unable to regulate their sense of self-worth, or people who are not self-aware and not introspective.
And so, they feel that they are imperfect. And because they are imperfect, the success appears to be random, incidental, even accidental, not something that is intimately related to the qualities, traits, skills, education of the person who has succeeded, but something that has happened because of luck or because of kismet or because of fate or because of karma.
So the success is perceived as extraneous, not endogenous, but exogenous. Something caused by the environment rather than by the person himself.
And this kind of person is going to be utterly convinced, firmly convinced, that there's no way to replicate the success.
And failing to replicate a success implies exposure.
If you fail to replicate the success of your first novel, for example, and your next books are duds and failures, that means you're a bad author, and you're exposed as an incompetent, inadequate author by trying again.
So, this perception of imperfection is known as the imposter syndrome, the belief that somehow your only success is it fooling everyone. You're succeeding to pull the wool everyone over everyone's collective eyes.
So there's an assumption of an ineluctable, inevitable, shameful, disgraceful exposure awaiting. That's the punishment in this morality play.
Success is perceived as a form of hubris, a form of haughtiness and arrogance which is punishable. And there is this punishment coming, and that is public exposure, humiliation and shaming, also known as narcissistic mortification.
Of course, these kind of people, they have an internalized bad object. They have a set or a coalition of introjects and internal voices that keep informing them, that they are by nature failures, that the success is a fluke. A fluke is just a one-off, and that they are inadequate and unworthy of success.
Okay, so this is the first cluster of interrelated problems that has to do essentially with perfectionism.
Next.
The next reason to fear success is the belief that success may attract abusers.
For example, if you make a lot of money, suddenly all your friends turn into gold diggers, self-interested leeches. You can't trust anyone anymore.
This induces a kind of paranoid ideation.
And so why find yourself in such a situation? Better not succeed and remain one of the gang, an average Joe, just someone who goes through life, happy-go- lucky.
So success is associated in the mind of such people with inevitable doom and fall. It's like fall from grace, it's like being expelled from the Garden of Eden.
Success is temporary. It always leads to dissolution, disintegration and inevitable punitive measures. And success attracts parasites, attracts life forms that are highly exploitative and cannot be trusted.
And then the situation is hypervigilance. This results in hypervigilance.
Success is associated with a constant state of suspiciousness and paranoia, which is a very unpleasant way to live.
Okay, next thing.
Survivor guilt.
I'm sorry, I'm in the throes of COVID-19, so forgive the even worse accent than usual.
Survival guilt.
The belief that if you were to succeed, your family would be left behind. Your siblings, for example, would be left behind. You would soar into the stratosphere of riches and fame and everyone you care for, everyone who cares for you, would be left behind.
It's a survivor guilt, leaving people behind.
And sometimes people say, I'd rather give up on success. I'd rather give up on a lucrative job in finance, or I'd rather give up on becoming a famous author, or I'd rather give up on being a celebrity author, or I'd rather give up on being a celebrity, because I want to spend time with my family. I want to fit in. I want to maintain my friends, my friendships with people, my familial connections, and the warm, and accepting, fuzzy and a loving environment where I belong.
Success is perceived as a kind of isolating event. It has isolated outcomes.
Success puts you apart. You become distinguished, of course, but also in a bad way. Distinguished in the sense that you become distanced and somehow cold and somehow inaccessible. And somehow is surrounded by a yesman and gold diggers and exploiters and so on, having lost the people who truly loved you and truly cared for you.
Success also is bound or liable to provoke envy in people. And envy is the ugliest emotion to drive people to do crazy things to you and to your success. People will try to drag you down, take you down, destroy you, undermine you, challenge you.
Your very success is an invitation to all these predators, all these haters, to converge upon you.
Who needs this? You say to yourself.
And of course, having lost family and loved ones and siblings and friends, because you are now so much more than they are, because you are now a success while they are middling pedestrian mediocrities at best and maybe failures.
So having lost all these people, this triggers a new abandonment anxiety, separation insecurity. It is like the fear of a child who finds himself all alone in a shopping mall, having lost mother's calming presence by his side. Abandonment anxiety.
Some people, there's a group of people who are schizoid. They are averse to the multitudes. Far from the madding crowd. They hate the limelight. They may be shy, may be avoidant, maybe socially anxious.
Success is associated with too many people. Too many people. Even if you are a hoard youth who isolated himself, became a hermit later in life, you still have to interact with people. Your accountants, your lawyers, your...
I mean, that's a meaning of success. Success simply implies a multiplication of social connectivity and connections and the need to maintain all these.
And who wants this? So quite a few people don't, and they're known as schizoid. But all people are averse to added responsibilities.
Responsibility automatically triggers anxiety. So when you're successful, your responsibilities multiply and so do your anxieties.
You'd rather keep things simple. Who needs to complicate life more than it already is? Who needs to introduce new threats, new possibilities or potensions for downfall, public ridicule, exposure. I mean, who needs all this?
And the responsibilities. If you're running a successful company, you're responsible for employees and for their families and so on. If you're an author, every word you say has an impact on people. If you're a YouTuber, it's the same. If you're a professor of psychology, you teach psychology, your students are at a very vulnerable age and very impressionable.
Success comes with responsibilities. And responsibilities tend to complicate life rather than simplified.
And this is all known as backlash avoidance. That's a clinical term. The fear that success would render your life uninhabitable, unlivable, because it would provoke haters, create social problems, burden you with responsibilities, and then there would be a multiplication of the possibilities of failure.
This is especially true if you've been traumatized in the past or been abused in the past when you've been successful. If whenever you've been successful, you've somehow, you've been punished, penalized, especially by parental figures.
If you believe yourself to be an imposter, then you have a very low self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the belief or the conviction that you are capable of attaining and obtaining and securing goals and accomplishments and things, that you are able to extract favorable outcomes, beneficial consequences from the environment via your choices, decisions and actions.
And so the vast majority of people actually have low self-efficacy. They don't trust themselves so much. Those who do usually overvalue themselves and they are kind of narcissists. They are low expectations in most people and most people have a sense of self-worth that is pretty realistic and limits them in this sense, because it alerts them to their shortcomings and other limitations.
The truth is that only stupid people become ultra successful. The tycoons and the presidents, these are actually in majority of cases pretty stupid people. And it is their stupidity that renders them successful because they overvalue themselves and they underestimate the risks.
Most people are not like that.
And so there's a fear, a fear of tackling success. It's a brittle material, mercurial and dangerously explosive. A labile sense of self-worth can lead to compensatory narcissism, of course, but that's only in a tiny minority of people.
So you see success and failure, connected to self-perceptions, these are very complex issues. And they depend crucially on your exposure to reinforcements.
Reinforcement is the mechanism through which we are encouraged to engage in certain behaviors and avoid others.
Success is a behavior. It's not an outcome. It's not a goal. It's not an end. It's not even the means. It's a state of mind. And a state of mind coupled with a repertoire of behaviors.
So behaviors and a state of mind are heavily influenced by reinforcements, positive reinforcements and negative reinforcements.
Positive reinforcements are rewards, basically. Rewards which increase the probability that you would behave in a specific way.
Whenever there is an occurrence of some type of activity, some type in response to a stimulus, internal or external, or whatever, there is some positive reinforcer. There's some reward.
Now, negative reinforcement is not punishment. Most people confuse. They think that positive reinforcement is reward, and negative reinforcement is punishment.
Nope. Negative reinforcement simply means that you would engage in a behavior that would avoid, remove and prevent or postpone a punishment.
So the negative reinforcement is not a punishment. It's the prospect of punishment. So the negative reinforcement is not a punishment. It's the prospect of punishment.
It's the potential of punishment, the looming punishment, which shapes this prospect, these potentials, shape your behavior in order to avoid the aversive stimulus, to avoid the consequences, to avoid the punitive responses, and so on so forth.
The probability of your behavior, a good behavior, increases because you're aware of the alternative. You're aware that if you were to misbehave or engage in misconduct, you would be punished. That's negative reinforcement.
So these reinforcements shape not only who you are. They start in childhood, so you become through reinforcement.
But these reinforcements also determine your choices, your decisions, and ultimately your actions, behaviors, and consequently the consequences.
And reinforcements conditioned you, conditioned you gradually to either succeed or fail. You're conditioned to succeed or to fail.
In effect, it's a conditioned response.
Because it is a conditioned response, almost, I would say, operand conditioning in a way, but because it's a kind of response that can be somehow modified and tackled, we can train people to be successful.
Now, I'm not talking about magical thinking. If I only put my mind to it, the universe will rearrange itself to yield success for me.
That's nonsense, self-interested nonsense by con artists and charlatans, online and offline. I'm not talking about this. Not talking about the secret. Not talking about the low attraction. I'm not talking about all these people. I find it hard to not puke when I think about them.
I am talking about training people with proven psychological methods to enhance their self-efficacy, their trust in themselves, become much more aware of their limitations and their strength in a realistic manner, not overvalue and not undervalue, define goals which are not grandiose and are definitely attainable, and then getting used to success gradually, attaining these minimal goals, time and again, condition you, this conditions you, to become successful in the future.
Reinforcement, and I will not go right now into the whole theory of reinforcement, it's an amazing field in itself, and I will not go right now into the whole theory of reinforcement. It's an amazing field in itself. I will dedicate to it a video one day about operand conditioning, classical conditioning and all this. I'm not going to all this.
But suffice it to say that success could become a positive reinforcement, but could also be perceived as a negative reinforcement, as a threat.
And we can train people to regard success as a positive reinforcer rather than a threatening negative outcome.
We can change what is known as negative schemas using, for example, cognitive behavior therapy.
We can rearrange the furniture in the minds of people who habitually fail because they're terrified of success, who self-sabotage, who self-handicap, who, because they're perfectionists, always procrastinate, never get anything done, etc. All these problems can be tackled successfully in therapy.
Pretty fast, by the way. Therapy needed is pretty short.
And this code can be rewritten. This is not narcissism where there's almost nothing that can be done. It's not psychopathy where there's nothing to be done.
This is different. This is just a set of sentences, automatic negative thoughts, set of sentences that define you, there's the parameters within which your mind operates, and these parameters limit your possible space of outcomes.
By rewriting these parameters, you will have become a totally different person.
Don't be afraid to succeed in transforming yourself into a successful person. Thank you.