What is success?

The definition says: the achieving of something you have been trying to do with a good result or effect despite difficulty.

Success is not an end-product. Success is a journey. Success has criteria where you measure your own progress. In order to give yourself feedback or in order to self-reflect, you need to set your own success criteria because if you don’t, you will quite likely beat yourself up meaning you start to criticise yourself. Feedback is about 1 positive, 2 Even Better If and 2 positives – a kind of general rule. Important is that you start with positives, go to areas for improvement and action points and finish with positives. If you are ever invited to give feedback asked the person the feedback they would give themselves. So, what went well and is there anything you could improve or make it more efficient or whatever the feedback is on.

If I said to you …. Please throw a ball to me. You say: “Ok.” You throw and afterwards I say: "Well, the way you threw the ball at me was not the way I would have wanted you to." How would you feel about this? I start giving you feedback based on what you did not know. I did not set success criteria based on what to do in order for you to succeed in throwing the ball. I did not say that I wanted you to use one hand rather than two. I didn’t say that you needed to throw it with a stronger force. I didn't say that you needed to throw the ball over your head rather at the height of your ears. I didn’t say that I wanted to catch the ball. My feedback would be criticism, and this is what many of us have encountered. As an ex-teacher I can say that your children are used to success criteria and yet, they see themselves as failures when they don’t hit those criteria.

We also seem to have a belief that there needs to be progress all the time. I disagree with this. How about making progress and enjoy that progress before we can go for the next part of making progress. This is far more beneficial than the constant - progress. progress, progress. 

When I learned English as a foreign language, I was making progress over time and there were times when I did not make any at all. It was frustrating but here is the beauty...I recognised that I needed to reinforce the new structures, words, phrases first and I needed to practise this all first before I was ready to go onto the next part of progress. Why not just enjoy the progress made? We implement and then we look at the next progress with on eye on that next part of progress. No wonder many are worn out. Always higher and better rather than staying there for now, making it a habit or skill and then climb the next part. 

Many people have a fear of success, and as a comfort zone it is failure. The failure wants to keep you safe and small, useless and in many ways, you want to be right. The ego says so and who created the ego? You. Based on your experiences in childhood. Your conditioning. 

The ego sabotages our success because it has good intentions – to protect you from failure. The failure protects you from success because you don’t feel you deserve it – quite likely that this is your unconscious thought process that you are not aware of because at some point you were tired of thinking that and you put it in a filing cabinet and there it got stored in your subconscious mind. You started to dislike the failure inside of you and the battle started. This is the conflicting belief that is going on inside of you. This is the tug of war. Push, pull, push, pull….

Push, pull is quite toxic because one chases and the other one runs. So, there is a lot of toxicity inside of many and I do not mean narcissistic tendencies, but the ego can certainly act like a narcissist. Fear not! All can be reversed. 

Many people believe that if they drive a big car – that’s success. If they have a big house – that’s success. If they go on fancy holidays – that’s success. I am not disputing that it is part of success in our outer world but how real are those successes? All those successes in our outer world can disappear over night, they can vanish just like that and WHO ARE YOU THEN? We make our identity dependent on our achievements. When those achievements disappear, we revert back to who we believed to be as children. The hurt inner child emerges once again and it can be very painful. 

I know people and I am sure you do, too, who have all that but are still highly in debt. They make great money and still manage to be in debt. One needs to ask the question, how come? What is going on? And these are highly successful people.

What is going on? The simple answer? Emotions and emotions outwit any logic. Always! I am talking about those emotions that come from the superego. Those emotions you feel but you are unaware of them. You have done it too many times but a bank account does not lie. Your heart does not lie either and your gut feeling does not lie. Your ego does. Time to outwit it to achieve success that it felt from the inside and the outside follows easily and effortlessly. 

Go to Let’s Connect, sign in, say YES to SUCCESS TODAY. 

Success is a journey and Albert Schweitzer once said: “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”