Success and the fear of Failure

The other day I was reading Seth Godin's workbook for Poke the Box and he asked the question:

What are you afraid might happen if you took action on your ideas?  Do you worry that you will be destroyed?  Your reputation ruined?  Or like most people, are you really afraid you might succeed?

Fear of success?  With weight management?  Really?? 

And then I started thinking.....follow my logic and see if this rings true for you:

On the surface, success might be defined as reaching your goal weight.  But that's not wholly true, is it?  Most of my clients have reached their goal weight before -- so maybe success is reaching your goal weight and maintaining it?

For how long?  For many of my clients, success is defined by reaching their goal weight and maintaining it.....Forever!!  That is how they will know they have been successful --  by dying thin.

So what is happening is they are living their lives under the constant, imminent threat of failure...until they breath their last.

No wonder someone might have some mixed feelings about doing what it takes to reach their goal weight -- there is no finish line for them.  And their sense of well-being is riding on this!

Now, I have no good solution to this dilemma -- if I did, we'd all be happy because you'd be thin and I'd be a millionaire.  As it is, I think our best bet is for you to achieve your healthy weight and me to shoot for solidly upper middle class -- what do you think?

The best suggestion I can make here is for you to evaluate whether some of this rings true for you.  Sometimes, our definitions of success have been so deeply ingrained in us that we don't no longer verbalize them to see if they still make sense to us or not.

I'm not a huge advocate of having your goal be to die thin -- that seems pretty macabre!  If you can understand how you define your success, it might lessen some of the self-sabotage leverage Lizzie is spreading around in your brain.