Peter Principle says: “We all are promoted to our level of incompetence.”
This means two things in real life for your work:
It is good, because it identifies the gap for growth.
It is bad, because you have to put in the work to grow.
Though it is famously said that growth is the only constant in life, we all know how hard it is to keep up. Below are four fears that are stopping you from growing:
Reason 1 – Fear of Adaptability
New experiences and environments scare us, because we wonder what we have to do, in order to survive? What do we have to do, in order to keep authority? What do we have to do, in order to keep the grounds? And so our mental attitude towards change and adaptability is naturally negative. Because we feel we cannot survive, if we stop old habits that ensure we are in secure grounds; we cannot keep our authority, unless we keep doing things that guarantee our power and prestige.
Reason 2 – Fear of Learning
We shut our doors to learning, when we feel that we know everything we need to know, and that learning any new thing will disrupt us – we will have to experience the fragility of a beginner’s mind.
Reason 3 – Fear of Losing Ego
We generally attribute success to a person with a certain level of Ego. Far from the truth, the current research shows that there is no correlation between Ego and success; usually egoistic people never survive in the long run. And in order to protect our ego from depleting, we have to close doors of growth.
Reason 4 – Fear of Failure
Fear of failure is probably the number one reason, why people are not investing in their growth and shutting off the need to grow. Because of the uncertainty that comes, when one starts to venture off the path towards growth. Because growth would require you to invest in different aspects of your life, it would keep you away from being certain that you are on the right path. Because growth makes you learn, and in fact you have to experiment your way to become a person of growth – that is what will increase your chances of failure. Thus, since we attribute failure to embarrassment or a bad outcome in our life, we just shut down the opportunity to grow any further.
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