Sabotaging Success
By Mary Cook, M.A., R.A.S.
Typical definitions of success include having a loving partner, financial wealth, and a thriving career. These are admirable goals and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. The problem lies in the false belief that through obtaining them, we will feel happy and fulfilled. Furthermore, we want our fantasy of these goals and the desired emotion, to manifest permanently.
Not only are we aware of countless people that have achieved far more than the above goals, yet remained unhappy and unfulfilled, we have personally experienced this as well. After a brief exhilaration, we typically realize that we have failed to reach a new positive emotional plateau. We might feel disappointed that our goals did not measure up to our fantasy of them. Our achievements may require unwanted ongoing maintenance, responsibilities, learning or growth on our part to sustain them. Or they may present us with a whole new set of problems. If they indeed meet our highest expectations, then we fear changes, diminishment or loss of what we’ve acquired. And yet, despite the lack of lasting happiness and fulfillment, we set new goals for success, with the same delusion that they will be our emotional deliverance.
When our attention is focussed on wanting something different from what we now have, we will fail to arrive anywhere that gives us an improved emotional and mental state. In fact, the new places, faces and outward circumstances have the uncanny ability to stimulate the same old internal themes, thoughts and feelings from which we tried to escape.
We have the idea that success resides in the future. Yet the only power we have is within the present moment. And although the standards for success consistently and persistently rise above wherever we are now, we fail to question our primary assumptions. Instead, we continue to reinforce negative and stressful feelings of insufficiency. Thus we end up sabotaging true success and happiness.
Primary personal beliefs begin in childhood, in circumstances where our well being is in the hands of other people and external events. The ideas that we are not “enough” and we do not have “enough”, and we are dependent upon the external world to correct this, are deeply embedded in our minds and our behavior. The more stressful our childhood is, the more tightly we hang onto fear based beliefs and protective defense mechanisms.
When life expands and deepens, instead of amending our earlier assumptions, we generally distort new information or fail to apply it to our personal circumstances. Thus it is the energy of past fears of inferiority and insufficiency from our childhood dependent state, which propels us toward achievements with false hope. The motivating energy of a goal will create an achievement that holds the same energy. So we are in a cycle of sabotage.
