Judith here. Do you or your friends and/or work colleagues struggle with frustration? Anxiety? Insecurity? Breaking promises? Missed deadlines? Puzzling, even maddening behaviors?
What’s going on?
My husband Jim Sniechowski and I call it The Fear of Being Fabulous™ and it’s the result of Unconscious Loyalties and Forbiddances that are most often hidden from conscious awareness. Yet they are powerful enough to trump even the most determined and articulate of conscious intentions.
Before you continue, to help you understand The Fear of Being Fabulous and what’s involved in overcoming it—please take a few moments to answer these questions. And if you don’t immediately relate to them, think about staff members or friends or family members for whom they apply.
*** Have you ever felt you deserved a raise and/or promotion and you wanted it, but you felt held back internally from asking for it?
*** Have you wondered why, with your excellent track record, you even had to ask for that raise? Why weren’t you just being given it since you deserved it?
*** Do you shy away from reaching out to senior staff members and/or executives who should actually know more about your work and what you can do for them because it seems like “playing politics” or “kissing up to them”?
*** Do you attend meetings where you know you have great input you could add to the conversation, but you hold back thinking you would be seen as pushy, showing off, or competitive?
*** Maybe you achieved a level of public success that went beyond anything you’d yet attained and it was followed by sleepless nights, workaholic perfectionism, and/or a bunch of negative head talk driving you to doubt yourself. Have you had that happen?
For every “Yes” you gave, you were meeting your Fear of Being Fabulous! It functions much like the ocean’s tide when it becomes an undertow, invisibly pulling a swimmer who is near shore out into the ocean. Keep in mind that these swimmers often have almost reached solid footing at the shoreline when the undertow pulls them back.
Perhaps you are familiar with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle’s song “The Closer Your Destination.” Here’s the important part of the lyrics:
Slip slidin’ away
Slip slidin’ away
You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away
Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, describes this same unconscious pull back as resistance.
“Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. It will reason with you like a lawyer, or jam a nine millimeter pistol in your face like a stick-up man.”
Pressfield goes on to alert his readers: “We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us.”
Why would we live in fear of our most fabulous talents and skills? It’s simple really. When we Overcome the Fear of Being Fabulous we have to leave home. We leave our unconscious loyalty to the values and restrictions we were raised with, often more in the emotional atmosphere than even in words or punishments. We betray our roots when we authorize ourselves to be all that we can be.
When I first wrote about this in my original “Doom Loop” Influencer post one man commented that it was “pop-culture psychobabble.” Another thought that “wallowing in the past is a waste of time.” And two men called it “Twaddle.” Pretty serious blowback to commonly understood unconscious forces that everyone struggles with.
Why would people need to object so virulently? Because when you get ready to Overcome the Fear of Being Fabulous—ready to move beyond the roadblocks and resistance caused by Unconscious Commitments that have been pulling you down, down, down—and you haven’t known why—you have to get ready for your life to open up and for your understanding of who you are to expand. You have to see that how you’ve been living has been untrue to who you really are, and is a mirror expression of what you absorbed so early in your life you couldn’t ever consider whether it was legitimate or even respectful.
When you open your awareness to the secret power of Unconscious Forces that have been playing out in your life—suddenly the trajectory of your life becomes easier to understand and your so-called “failures” make a whole lot more sense. In fact, your new successes can and very often will drive out into the open even more “inner demons” that have kept you blocked off from the deeper truth of your ability to have a fabulous life.
That’s the power of Overcoming the Fear of Being Fabulous, and that’s why it’s so important to do the excavating that will reveal what you’ve actually been loyal to—and it hasn’t been to who you really are!
Judith Sherven, PhD and her husband Jim Sniechowski, PhD http://JudithandJim.com have developed a penetrating perspective on people’s resistance to success, which they call The Fear of Being Fabuloustm. Recognizing the power of unconscious programming to always outweigh conscious desires, they assert that no one is ever failing—they are always succeeding. The question is, at what? To learn about how this played out in the life of Whitney Houston, check out http://WhatReallyKilledWhitneyHouston.com.
Currently working as consultants on retainer to LinkedIn providing executive coaching, leadership training and consulting as well as working with private clients around the world, they continually prove that when unconscious beliefs are brought to the surface, the barriers to greater success and leadership presence begin to fade away. They call it Overcoming the Fear of Being Fabulous http://OvercomingtheFearofBeingFabulous.com.