Achievemephobia is ubiquitous

A reader offers a personal interpretation of fear of success in organisations, reflecting on resistance to change and disagreements about goals.

This is a reader’s personal account, edited for readability and privacy. Ages and circumstances refer to the time of submission. It is not a clinical assessment.

After developing an approach that we believed could address organisational dysfunction, we found that the same people who complained about workplace abuse wanted nothing to do with a fix. We don’t know why that is the same, but I interpreted brief reactions to proposed changes as signs of what I called fear of success. I believed this pattern was more common than fear of failure. As the stakes increased, I noticed people becoming silent or seeming to freeze. Those were my observations and interpretations, not results from a validated clinical test.

While many phobias can be hidden from public display, like the phobia of failure, I felt that hesitation about success became visible during discussion. I interpreted the silence as difficulty finding a reason to reject a proposed improvement, although I could not know another person’s internal thought process.

My view was that fear of success could become stronger as the issue became more significant. The more significant the success to the person’s way of life, the more likely he will freeze up. I wanted people to discuss these reactions early, but an informal conversation cannot diagnose a colleague or establish why they disagree.

Think about what fear of success means to goal-seeking . Can you really trust a fellow traveler who fears reaching his espoused destination? The more you appreciate the extent of Achievemephobia, the more you can understand the apparent madness of current affairs. What will “fixing” organizational dysfunction mean to society? In the political climate I was writing about, I wondered how established interests would respond to major changes.

I also interpreted political conflict through this idea, though political disagreement is not clinical evidence of a phobia. This kind of power warrants careful consideration in anything you plan to do. My preference was to discuss goals and reservations early. You want to go down the road of life with people who really want to attain the goals they espouse. You want to be surrounded by people who really want to solve the problems they complain about.

Achievemephobia needs to be given far more attention than it has been getting. I doubted that the organisational pattern I described would have a simple fix. Our proposed approach was to discuss the pattern and help people recognise and address barriers to a goal. The goal is the goal.