“What is success?”
Have you ever experienced when working with other people, what one person defines as “success” is completely different from how another person defines success?
Let’s say you’re running an email marketing campaign. Someone may feel the campaign is a success only if they get what marketing experts will say is an “above-average” open/read rate, let’s say 20%. However for someone else, who is continuously running email campaigns that average well-over 30%, 20% may not feel like a successful campaign. On the other hand, for someone who just started email marketing, even 10% may feel like a success on their first try.
You see, even in a small detailed section of business, people have varying views of success.
How do you think “success” will vary when it comes to “being successful in life”?
So I ask you again, What is success to you?
How do you know what you’re shooting for as success is really your own definition, or have you decided to live your life and build your business to reach the level of success as defined by somebody else?
Could that then be a reason why you are frustrated with your journey as an entrepreneur on trying to achieve “success”? How many times have we looked at somebody and said, “Oh, that person is totally successful”? How then do we know that in their mind they think they’re successful? And if that person communicates to the world and say how successful they are, how do they know that their definition of success is in alignment with what their audience believes is the definition of success?
See, as a coach, I always have to do my best to meet my clients at wherever they are in their journey to become their definition of success. But the challenge that I often face is, do they even know the definition of success as it pertains to them?
So my challenge to you is this: Have you been living your life and building your business based on a definition of success that was dictated by someone other than you? If so, could that be a reason why you’re frustrated? Could that be a reason why you’re struggling? Could that be a reason why you’re not as happy as you can be every step of the way in the growth of your business? If that is the case, then I have a solution for you.
If you feel all of a sudden now as you listen to me that your definition of success isn’t your own, then now is the time to really sit down and define that, once and for all, what success truly means for you, and the easiest way to do it is to ask yourself 3 basic questions.
Start off with a clean sheet of paper, write the word “success” at the top, and ask yourself this first question.
“What does success mean to you?”
If it helps just to write out non-sequiturs or single word or phrase answers, then do that. Keep asking yourself that question until you completely emptied out everything that’s in your mind of what success truly means to you and only you.
Then the next question you want to ask is,
“Why is success important to you? Why strive for success to begin with?”
Then the last question is this,
“How do you know then that you’ve achieved success? What is the evidence procedure that you can look at based on what you’d written down on the paper that will prove to you and only you that you are successful?”
What you’ll find then after doing this exercise is that you’re going to start to find more successes in your life which ultimately will create more happiness in your life. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s an end to it because then you can continue to create a stream of sequential successes in your life, in your business, in your relationships, in your health.
So I challenge you to really define what success truly means to you and just let go of anything else that anybody says of what they feel should be successful because only you can decide what success truly means.
What are you waiting for?
