The people in your life love you...but they want you to fail

 

We assume the people in our lives, our family, our friends, our colleagues are rooting for our success. It's nice to think that isn't it? Unfortunately, it's simply not true.

Of course there will always be people in your life that genuinely wish for your success, but much more often than we'd like to think, even the people who love you the most, may wish for your failure and in some cases even try to sabotage you (before you get mad, give me a chance to explain...)

There are two reasons for this:

1. They don't want to lose you. Often times the people around you subconsciously don't want you to succeed because they're afraid that success will take you away from them. On some level they think that you'll move on to "bigger and better things."

This happens in so many contexts, but weight loss is a common example. A woman may think she actually wants her husband to lose weight for health reasons, but subconsciously she may be terrified at the idea of him actually being successful, for fear he may leave her when other women find him more attractive.

2. It makes them feel inadequate by comparison. Think about an area in your life that you're really dissatisfied with. Let's say it's your finances (you're struggling to pay the bills). Imagine that tomorrow you get a call from a friend who tells you he just sold his company for 10 million dollars! Are you happy for him? Be honest...

You might be happy for him. But if you were really honest with yourself you may admit to being at least a little bit resentful (often times darn right jealous). Why?

When the people around us succeed, especially in an area of our life that we are currently experiencing dissatisfaction in, we are forced to evaluate ourselves by comparison. At this point we have two choices:

1. Use their success as motivation to inspire us to achieve similar success in our own lives.

or

2. Criticize and tear this person down!

Which one do you think is easier and therefore most people do? Option 2 of course. This doesn't make them a bad person...it just makes them human.

Here's the point: The people in your life love you. That's a fact. But change makes us act irrationally, and most of the time we're not even aware of it.

I'm not saying that you should go around second guessing everyone in your life, trying to determine whether they're genuinely happy for you or not.  But you'd be foolish to ignore the possibility that they aren't fully rooting for you. So what should you do?

The best thing to do, is to love the people around you. Know that they really do care about you, but find your true advice and encouragement from people who you know are congruent in their support and even better: have an incentive for you to succeed (like a paid coach). This isn't a romantic notion, but it works.