What if I told you that success starts with realizing how successful you already are?
It is true. As a leadership and success expert, I get asked a lot about the “keys to success.” My first response is always, “Before you start changing, adding or subtracting, spend some time evaluating.”
Success is more than how much money you make, what job title you’ve achieved, or what accomplishments you’ve accumulated. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but real success is broader. It’s about the kind of life you’re living and who you’ve chosen to become.
When you think about success in a more holistic way, it requires resilience, confidence, and other aspects of mental strength that I talk about in depth in my latest book, The Mentally Strong Leader.
A true measure of success requires introspection on a range of questions beyond the typical “how much” and “how high” metrics. If you can answer “yes” to the following six questions, you are more successful—for now—than you may have realized.
1. Do you live your values?
The little things you do every day show who you are. The small impressions you make leave a big and lasting impression on you. The question is: Do you choose to behave in accordance with your values? For example, if a core value is kindness, are you consistently kind, even when it’s difficult?
Living your values intentionally shows that you are focused and disciplined, both of which are forms of success. Doing so is no small feat—it’s not easy to clearly articulate your values, let alone live them intentionally.
If you’d like to get started by articulating your values, there’s an exercise in The Mentally Strong Leader to help you do that.
2. Are you working for your life?
We all have to work IN our lives, navigating our daily routines to get things done. But sometimes we get stuck in habits, systems or processes that no longer serve us – or anyone – well.
The greatest success comes from work IN your life too.
Are you occasionally drawn back to imagine the life you want to live and the person you really want to be?
Are you occasionally drawn back to imagine the life you want to live and the person you really want to be? Are you reflecting to discern if you are going where you really want to go?
This is how you spot the unhelpful patterns and habits you’ve fallen into—and give yourself a chance to change them.
3. Do you appreciate what you already have?
As the Rolling Stones once lamented, “You can’t always get what you want.” But happiness and success come from focusing on what you are I DO have.
I know from my own experience – and I imagine you do too – that it’s easy to get caught up in feeling like what you have is never enough, to always be looking for the next thing, to be constantly looking for the next rung of the ladder. climb up
The ability to constantly show gratitude for all you have and have already achieved, versus always needing more, is a key trait of the most successful people.
4. Do you have a growth mindset?
As you strive for success, you will make mistakes. The key is: how do you react?
Do you let mistakes get you down? Or do you only see yourself as successful? whether are you making mistakes, making incremental improvements, and adapting along the way?
5. Are you doing the work to be ready when opportunities arise?
True success requires you to fall in love with the process of improvement and achievement, not just the achievement itself.
This can be difficult at times, especially when the work can feel repetitive, uninteresting, or too far from what you ultimately aim to do or get. But it’s the attention to the little things that pays off in big moments.
True success requires you to fall in love with the process of improvement and achievement, not just the achievement itself.
For example, I am often asked about becoming a professional speaker. People tell me, “I’d love to get paid to speak on stage for an hour.” But doing so requires intensive research to uncover insights worth paying to speak and hours of repetitive testing. It’s a process.
As Ina Garten points out in her new memoir, you have to “be ready when fate strikes.”
6. Are you striving to achieve your goals, not someone else’s?
A friend of mine recently told me that she felt like a failure for not getting a promotion she wanted. But when I pushed him to define what success really meant to him, it wasn’t that promotion at all.
She had fallen into the trap of thinking, “This is what I must want.” She realized that success for her was having a team that could coach and nurture her – something that she could achieve in the role she was already in.
It breaks my heart to hear someone say they don’t feel successful based on this someone else’s definition instead of their own. When you define what success means youyou can find out how successful you already are.
Scott Mautz is a speaker, trainer and LinkedIn Learning Instructor. He is a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he led some of the multibillion-dollar company’s largest businesses. He is the author of “The Mentally Strong Leader: Build Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors“Follow him LinkedIn.
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