Q: What if my secret fear is that I lack the ability to take my company to the next level?

A: Then you have the same secret fear as lots of other successful people.

The real question is, What are you going to do about it? Are you going to find a coach or an ally who can help you break down the walls between you and greater levels of success? Are you strong enough to build a team with strengths greater than your own? Or are you going to go through the motions, telling yourself you’re stretching and improving while everyone around you rolls their eyes and groans?

Here’s a newsflash: you’re not afraid of failure, you’re afraid of success! If you were to stretch, you’d risk removing all failure from your life; by staying where you are, you are guaranteeing a certain measure of failure in your life.

Where does this fear of success come from? It comes from your ego, which has somehow managed to convince you that you are afraid of failure. Your ego makes you equate criticism with failure, which is stupid. Does an athlete fear his limits? Does an artist fear a new medium?

No! Athletes expect to have limits, and that expectation allows them to find them and work on them without fear.

The power of the ego amazes me: the same person who jumps at the chance to hire a golf coach to take his game from an 80 to scratch will tell me that business coaches are a waste of time. What the person is really saying is that, “I am afraid of what you might say because my ego does has not yet accepted that I have limits in the business world.”

That’s too bad. You can’t improve unless you know what to work on, and you can’t know what to work on unless you’re willing to open yourself up to analysis! Knowing yourself is even one of Sun Tzu’s main principles in The Art of War.

You will always have fear. Fear is part of the human condition. You must be willing to act in spite of your fear if you want to succeed, and that means taming your ego. Your ego tries to confuse you, tries to get you to give up your dreams. It’s an illusion: when it does this, your ego is guaranteeing your long-term failure.

Fear is a state of mind; courage is a state of being.

Be great.

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.