If I become successful, my marriage will suffer. My relationships with my kids will suffer. I won’t have enough time to handle everything that’s on my plate. I don’t want to become someone that’s arrogant or obsessed. These are all fears that we have as humans surrounding the idea of becoming massively wealthy.

While everyone is talking about fear of failure in the business world, I want to discuss fear of success. How common it is, what it looks like, and what to do about it today on episode number 14 of The Hell Yes Entrepreneur. I’m your host Becca Pike. It is time for your weekly dose of Hell Yes Coaching. Let’s go.

Hey, guys. I’m Becca Pike and welcome to The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast, the number one show for entrepreneurs looking to create their first six-figure year. If you’ve got the drive and you know how to hustle but you’re not sure where to channel your energy, we’ve got the answers. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Hey guys. Before we begin, I have a super sexy celebration for you. It is time to celebrate and highlight some of my students who posted in our Facebook community Hell Yes: The Entrepreneur Circle. Chelsea Moore. She said, “I am making $800 per week in my side hustle, and I’m once again turning away requests for services because I’m fully booked.” Hell yes. Kelsie Diane Barber said, “I just booked my last available client spot in the year. So excited to be fully booked out.” Nicole Stork-Heistad said, “My January to July income doubled last year’s January to July.”

Hannah Howard Wathen says, “I cut myself a check for the first time ever less than a year into being a business owner.” Hannah, I know that you have a brick and mortar business. So that is balling. Congrats to all of these entrepreneurs. You guys are what makes this community so, so, so fun to be in. Thank you for that. That’s the kind of shit that keeps me going.

If you guys aren’t in Hell Yes: The Entrepreneur Circle on Facebook, it’s a super fun community to be in. We are constantly celebrating asking questions, answering, hyping each other up, and living our best lives.

So today let’s get right into it. We’re talking about the fear of success. I’m going to tell you guys a quick story first about my own fear of success and how the awareness of this fear was enough for me to boot it out of my life for good. A lot of people think that in order to fix mental roadblocks that we’re having, it can take years of therapy and years of digging and growing and receiving new information.

I’m here to say nah, not true. Making a drastic change in your life, even if it’s breaking a thought pattern that you’ve had since you were a kid, can happen in the snap of your fingers. When we become skilled—yes skilled because it takes practice—at making decisions for ourselves and never looking back, we have opened the universe to our potential for any change we want to make. Fires me up y’all.

All right. So here’s the story. It was mid-2019 I think when I was on the phone with one of my coaches at the time. I call her Dr. Dotzlaf. She’s not a doctor by the way, but she is to me you know? What’s up Lindsay? On this call I remember that she interrupted one of my pity rants. She said, “Becca, do you have any fear of becoming successful?”

My first thought was no. Of course I don’t. My whole goal right now is to make this company profitable. I’m very well read in wealth and business and investments. I’m not fearful of becoming successful. But upon further digging, once she asked me questions about what my life would be like once I am wealthy, the unease started to emerge. It became obviously apparent.

So the fear that I had around being wealthy lied so dormant in the back dusty files of my brain that I was 100% unaware that it was a fear at all until she asked me enough questions that it was apparent. When I say I was unaware, I was really unaware. When we dug this up, I was caught off guard that this was a thought that I was having. It required someone coming into that deep, dark place in my brain with their flashlight dusting off the filing cabinets and unlocking years of hidden shit I had stored away never to be seen again.

What we realized on that day was that I had a belief about wealth that I wasn’t aware of. And I had a belief that if I became insanely wealthy, my children would be raised by a nanny completely. That I would be an absent mother. In my mind, success equaled being gone from the house. At the time, I had little ones at home. I believe that year my kids were like 10, 6, 4, 2. Here I was with a hidden belief that to be successful, I would be on business trips all the time.

Also randomly I had this mental image that I would be in stilettos in a penthouse office building in a pantsuit. Which by the way makes no sense whatsoever because that’s not at all the direction that I’m going in. That’s what my brain said because programming is funny like that. I’m sure I picked it up in a movie or something along the way.

The awareness of this fear though was all I needed because then I got to work on finding the evidence against the fear. I spent the next few days looking for women who created massive wealth in their homes while raising their kids.

One of my favorite quotes that I read was by Jenna Kutcher. She said, “Moms just didn’t used to have a ton of examples of what’s possible for motherhood. Examples of moms driving their kids to school every day and cooking pancakes on Saturday mornings in their pajamas while watching hundreds of thousands of dollars roll into their bank account just didn’t really exist.” Damn was she right, but that is absolutely changing. The more I looked, the more evidence I found of women millionaires who were claiming to work roughly five to max 20 hours per week.

If anything, I came out of this research project realizing that if I want to spend time with my kids then I have to become wealthier in order to have the amount of time and freedom it requires to have such a strong bond with them and have that much time with them in childhood. If I want that bond in that amount of time, then I have to work myself out of the grind and the rat race and learn quickly how to make money while I sleep.

The most common fear of success that I hear is this one. If I’m busy now, I can’t imagine how busy I will be once I hit that next level of success. So in translation, this person is protecting themselves from working harder than they are now. Or so they think, right? They’re not realizing that it actually requires less work for them in order to gain that much more success. You heard that right. It requires an entrepreneur to delegate more and to work less in order to hit that next level of wealth. The person grinding their face off does not create wealth. You can’t create wealth when you’re working by the hour.

The “immature” entrepreneur believes they must put in the grind and the work in order to create wealth while the mature business owner knows they must put in the delegation to be able to create more wealth. Because wealth happens when automation and delegation and leverage occur. There’s only one of you. You have a ceiling. If you can train and multiply yourself, you have no ceiling.

As the great Naval Ravikant said, “You’ll do better work if you’re bored rather than if you’re busy.” He’s absolutely right. That is hard to imagine and understand when we have been taught to grind out in order to create wealth.

If your fear of wealth stems from the amount of work you will have to put in once you reach that level, I want you to go out and begin looking for the evidence of why you’re wrong. Why wealth doesn’t equal exhaustion. Why the wealthy spend their days on their boats and on vacations and travelling while the middle class are the ones with bloodshot eyes and pounding coffee in order to make it through their day. Which one are you?

I know which one I used to be. I remember deeply being the one pounding my coffee to make it through my day wishing that it was cocaine instead. Until someone taught me proper delegation and multiplication of my staff, right? Don’t let this be the reason that you don’t become successful. We can teach you here at Hell Yes Coaching. We have coaches on staff who are experts on delegation. So just reach out to us.

I also reached out to someone who was vulnerable enough to tell me that their deep, deep fear of acquiring wealth and how that would ruin her happy marriage. She began listing off every celebrity couple she could think of that has been divorced, right?

I also know someone else who was vulnerable enough to share with me that she had a fear of success because she thought that she may lose her relationship with her dad. You see in her adult years, she is yearning for a good relationship with her dad. She has longed for his place in her life.

At the time, his only real connection with her was to give her money. He often gave her money when she needed it, and it was the only time that she ever saw him seem happy or fulfilled. She got to a point where she would play victim, ask for money, and watch him happily put his cape on and rescue her. She held herself back for decades in her own wealth in order to keep this sliver of a relationship with her dad because that’s what she felt like that was all she had, right?

Fear of success can look so many different ways. You may believe that once you’re successful, you won’t have time for your hobbies, right? Maybe you believe you aren’t deserving of the success, or your family will begin to look at you differently, right? Maybe you’re a woman and your husband has strong old school conservative views that a man should bring in more money than a woman. So you’re holding yourself back.  Just a side note. He will change his views once you retire his ass to a golf course. I promise.

Or maybe it’s that you won’t be capable of maintaining all that you’ve built, which is kind of like a combination of fear of failure and fear of success. There’s also a common fear that you will change or become mean or greedy.

Here’s what I have to say about that. Listen. Money just makes you more of who you are. If you’re a decent human, you’re going to be a decent human with money. If you’re an asshole, you’re going to be an asshole with money. An asshole with money may use her power to hurt people because she’s an asshole. We see it happen often, and those people give wealthy people a horrible name, right? There’s even more good people who hold money. They just don’t make the news as much because their work isn’t as exciting as corruption for the news channels, right?

If you’re worried about changing as a person, I’ll tell you this right now. You won’t. Your circumstances will change. Your house may change. Your car will change, but you will still be little Hannah who loves to garden. But now instead of little pots on your apartment deck, you’re going to have gardens upon gardens of herbs and flowers and hopefully some weed too because you deserve that.

So let me give you some quick tips on this guys. If you have an inkling that you might have a fear or three of success, here’s the steps I think you should take. Number one, become exceptionally aware of the beliefs that you have around success. Awareness is 90% of the battle. I don’t just mean scan your brain for some possible fears. I mean go all in.

Sit down with a pen and a paper for an entire weekend and journal every single thought that you can possibly conjure up about your life and what it would look like with success in it. Journal about who you are, who you will become. Ask yourself who and what you will be spending your time with. Go deep with yourself, deeper than you’ve ever been. You’ll be surprised what you find in your dusty files, I promise.

Number two, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you. For real. If you’re still hanging out with your college roommate who’s 34 and uses his mom’s debit card to get gas, then you are 100% getting rubbed off on his beliefs about wealth. Even if they’re subconscious. Also, most people are uneducated on what success actually looks like in the real world if they’re not directly surrounded by it. We have ideas from movies and so on, but the more people you surround yourself with true success, it often butts up against what we’ve been told.

When I was broke AF and all of my friends were too, I kind of thought of successful people like aliens. I didn’t understand them. I didn’t know how they got there. All I knew was that they dressed differently than me and they talked differently than me and they hung out in different places.

Now that I am considered wealthy, I am surrounded by even more wealthy people. I realize that I was pretty wrong. We aren’t that much different. We all secretly crave tacos 24 hours a day. We all want to go home as soon as we arrive at a party. We all pee a little when we sneeze. Just kidding. Is that just me? Just me? Nah. I know it’s not. Shoutout to moms.

The truth is that when you surround yourself with wealthy people and educate yourself more on their lifestyle, you see that a lot of your fears are invalid. The most present parents I know are wealthy people. The nicest people I know, a lot of them, wealthy. The most giving people I know, the people with the most freedom and deeply embedded hobbies, wealthy. Start finding that for yourself as well because it was very eye opening for me.

Number there, look for evidence against your case. Whatever evidence you have stored, go out and directly find evidence that butts up against that belief. Then find more and more and more.

Number four, stop any verbiage that creates the belief that you’re fighting against. For example, if you say things like more money, more problems, you’ll start believing it. There are problems across every socioeconomic status. I’ve been poor as fuck, and I’ve been wealthy. I can tell you right now. More money does not equal more problems. That is inaccurate. I will agree though with more money different problems. That’s for sure.

I am not here to tell you that being wealthy should be everyone’s target. Some people don’t think much about their money or investments, and that’s okay. If you’re listening to this podcast, I bet that’s not you. I’m just here to remind you constantly to look deeper into your thoughts, always. Do you want to know the best way to become successful? Rid your mind of all your fears of successes and failures and just fill it back up with all the reasons it’s 100% worth striving for. And why being wealthy only makes you a better person and contributor to society.

If you can fall in love with the idea of success, you don’t need to know how you’re going to get there. That will show itself in due time. It will require work and discipline. But just remember. As Naval Ravikant said during his epic wealth tweet storm, “Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.”

That is it for me today. I’m about to hop off here, go on a walk in the sunshine, listen to my audiobook, and chill out so I can continue to show up for you guys at the very best of my ability. Know why? Because I fucking love you. Bye.

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Hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to today’s episode. If you’re looking to get more clarity and momentum for your business, visit hellyescoachingonline.com. See you next week here on The Hell Yes Entrepreneur podcast.