Everything’s going great — so why do I feel so miserable?

You dream of achieving the next goal, and when you get there, you freeze. You’re seized by fear and dread — all day, every day — and you can’t figure out why. You think it’s tough when things are going badly — when you’re just scraping by, bringing in barely enough revenue to stay afloat, or when every investor says no — and that those awful feelings will disappear when you get through it all.

But things are going great, and suddenly, your stomach is tied up in knots. You’re Netflix binging, snapping at your partner and having trouble sleeping. How come? Everything is going great:

• You hired that amazing business development lead.

• You’re turning away consulting clients because your product business is booming.

• You closed that round of funding.

You tell yourself, “I’m supposed to be happy. But I’m completely miserable.”

Of COURSE you feel miserable. But it’s not for the reasons you think.

You think your stomach is tied up into knots because the investor who funded you is going to be watching every move you make. You think you’re upset because you’re going to miss all the customer contact you used to have. And you think you’re losing sleep because if you focus on your product, your bread-and-butter consulting business will fall apart.

But that’s not why. It’s because when you look ahead, suddenly you’re going to be playing a new game — one you haven’t played before. You don’t know the rules, you don’t know the players, you don’t know whether you’ll be good at it. You may win, you may lose. You just don’t know.

Of COURSE you’re afraid? Why wouldn’t you be?

Jumping into an uncertain future is naturally going to throw you off balance. It’s going to bring up fear and anxiety. That’s our natural response to something new.

The unknown — even when it’s something to celebrate — throws us off balance.

So what do you do?

First, fear and anxiety are practically the daily reality when you’re running a startup or growing a business. What if, instead of resisting that fear, you allowed to just be there with you. Ignoring it or suppressing it will only make it worse. What if you look at that fear and anxiety as the surest sign that you’re doing precisely the right thing, learning and growing by doing what you’ve never done before.

Next, how about envisioning what’s next before you get there. Act as though you have already achieved that next big target. Ask yourself today what you would be doing right now if you were already at that successful next step. Living into the future not only makes it more likely to happen, but you’ll already be ready when you get to the next phase.

Most of all, what if you could tone down the mental chatter of fear and anxiety and replace it instead with a store of self-compassion, convinced you will thrive no matter what, and that you’ll figure out what needs to be done when the time comes.

We imagine we’re going to feel different, and better, when we achieve the goal we’ve been working so hard to hit. But often the opposite is true. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just being a human being — someone whose instinct it is to stick with the safe and known. But the unknown — even when it’s something to celebrate — will throw us off balance. Allow it, expect it, and most of all, enjoy it.