Success

What is success? What does it feel like to be successful?

I totally got sucked into the hustle. Into the ‘doing’ side of success rather than the ‘being’ side. Basing the success of my day, my business, myself; off of how many boxes I checked on the never ending to-do list.

This is a problem - the to-do list never ends. I am never successful and never going to be successful by this definition. This felt like being depleted, tired, blurry-eyed at the end of the day with less motivation than I started with and less direction. I was slowly making progress on my list and I knew more things would be added to it. Work-life balance meant taking space from this list intentionally.

There was a block between where I was going and where I was. There was a gap, a readiness gap, and a to-do list of things in the way before I was ready. I realized I needed to move away from this list and I made a commitment not to sign up for any new offers of webinars, etc, from this place of lack. To focus on the ones I already have coming my way. Not to buy any new books, but appreciate what I have, to buy less food and eat what I have. My vision of success had infiltrated all parts of my life into a subtle mentality of needing more than what I had.

Yesterday though! Let me tell you about Yesterday! It was the first day of the first week with the pressure off. With an open calendar and a feeling of joy toward the opportunities I had to learn from the resources I have access to. I was excited to start, and I only went part way through this business webinar before pausing it to really dive into the topic of discussion. I pulled out colored markers and mapped my thoughts all over the page. It felt expansive, there was time, I paused and looked at it and wrote some more. Started a new page and carried on with more clarity, more depth. I called a friend to bounce the idea off of her and we continued to talk for over an hour. I came back to it.

There was this feeling…. I think it was success. And nothing at all had been crossed off my to-do list yet, I hadn’t even finished the webinar, but I gained more clarity in business than I had in a while.

So what is success? My previous definition put success continually out of reach, and that effected my passion. But that feeling of success! I think we all know that feeling when it hits us, when we are not staring straight at it trying to force it but when it just comes to us and we have a break through.

There is a tool up on the resources page, you can find it here, that can help us unpack our beliefs around success and create a new and more inspiring definition of success to help motivate us. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it if you use it!

As I utilized this tool myself this morning, I walked through the process and the feeling of winning a race in high school, contrasted with the experiences of quitting two jobs that no longer served me and having a breakthrough with a youth I was working with in the rain forest of southeast Alaska, all examples I deemed as successful in my story. My takeaways from this exploration were that I feel most successful when I have the courage to play my edge, when I make consistent effort toward quality work rather than quantity, and that way of working relies on a level of self care. I feel present, mindful, joyful, energetic and excited. I am connected, trusting of myself and the universe, and am expressing my truth. This all depends on the thoughts in my head being grounded, considerate and kind to myself, encouraging, and celebratory of the steps I am taking forward. I think to the best races I have ever run and how I celebrated nearly every step I took and kept asking the question, “Could you run just a little bit harder, for just a few more steps?”. There were races I was not in that mentality, I didn’t perform my best, and I finished feeling embarrassed, as if someone could see those thoughts that were dragging me down the whole race.

While studying the yogic way I learned about the mentality of consistency in excellence. This included a level of pushing ourselves and patience to not get injured or burnt out. The emphasis in my story is usually on the pursuit of excellence, and the judgement of success around this. With this phrase it reminds me of consistency, pulls me into a place of mindfulness and consideration, kindness and self-care. Business is a new game for me, and I am not yet practiced in the art of consistent excellence in business, but I can pull from my experiences elsewhere and recognize the thought patterns that have been successful. I wish you all the same in relying on your past successes to help you move into a mentality of consistency, excellence, success, and pushing your edge.