What frightens you and what is your deepest fear? These are common questions that may pop up to people’s mind, yet to which they are not surely and correctly able to answer.

As a human being, fear is always present like faith and hope, and is first of all a state of mind that is mixed with emotion and then translated into its physical equivalent. Sometimes for example, when a person is found to face with a delicate or scary situation, either does this one immediately jump out of his or her wits; or just try to cool down and take it as if it was all under control. The most common fear that has been seen to paralyze people is the fear of failure.

Who will not be afraid of failing in one’s undertaking? People are so scared of being stuck that they have always searched for ways to avoid it at some point of their lives. Fear is one of the most powerful forces in life. It may affect one’s whole life: one’s thoughts, decisions, behaviors, and actions. As a matter of fact, fear takes many forms and is mostly known as “phobia”, which may happen like there are various things as small as they may be but scare us a lot. One person may be found to be afraid of even trivial things, yet easy to get out of; while there are people who may struggle with a fear that they cannot control and which they even find hard to handle with.This is the case of the phobia of failure as if you find yourself being constantly scared of making mistakes, avoiding failure at all costs or just being afraid of not achieving your goals, you may suffer from what is called “atychiphobia”. In other hands, there is also “achievemephobia” or when you are just close to your goal and/or on the verge of success, but then you might be self-sabotaging. At first blush, it may not look like a fear, contrary to the phobia of failure which is quite common and ubiquitous in people’s everyday life. Nevertheless, this is another type of fear that may also touch people, which sometimes appear to be latent at first. Indeed, the fear of success is real, yet remains unknown or overlooked by most people.

Ti Caine, a hypnotherapist and life coach based in Sherman Oaks, California explains how this fear of success exactly works. Success may happen like a process through which one person has set a goal, backed it with motivation, positive emotions and vibrations, and kept sustaining it with the right vision of the future until it is really fulfilled. However, there are people who do not grasp what this phobia is like and are sometimes found to be stuck at the last stage of success. It may happen like they are not conscious about how they are self-destructing themselves and their goals, and even worst, they have doubts about their worthiness to success. In fact, it may be induced by several factors such as the feeling of being rejected or besieged by relatives or friends, the feeling of being unloved if one keeps moving forward in one’s search for success. For people who struggle with this kind of phobia, the hypnotherapist suggests them to find and understand it well so as to tackle with the way they could escape from it. Some advices he would propose include the forgiveness, like what people who are afraid of succeeding needs to realize first that they let it happen making the fear hypnotize them to such a point that it rendered them to lose their real courage and power. So to combat it, the first step on which Cain insists is “to identify the fear zones”, after that “to forgive oneself”. How? Through asking some questions associated with the fear itself while pretending to be powerless like doing a kind of role playing. Some questions may vary, depending on each one, but here are some examples: What do I get to avoid? What emotion am I not willing to release? Or what am I afraid of losing if I succeed? These will help destroy the fear in the subconscious mind and redirect it again.

Whether it is achievemephobia or atychiphobia, these strategies are applicable to both kinds of fear.

Sources: Psychology today