Your brain is an amazing and infuriating thing. And I feel that one of the purposes I am here to fulfil is to help you focus on making your brain useful, rather than painful.
The idea of success is a good example: you may be saying your biggest dream is to be successful. Some of my clients say they want their businesses to be successful or that they want to be as successful as other people who are in their field. But it all falls apart once I ask what that success would look like.
Your brain keeps serving you this idea of success as something desirable, but unless you get really clear on what that means to you, you’ll suffer unnecessarily.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this and about what I consider to be the key ingredients for success.
1. Vision: this is an articulation of what you think success will look like.
How much money do you want? Who benefits from what you do? What do you want your life to look like? What is the criteria that needs to be met for you to feel successful?
It can be money; freedom to do what you want; safety for your family; a daily schedule that allows you to be with your kids in the morning; it doesn’t really matter so long as you are clear. Otherwise you’ll forever be chasing a vague notion of success, while trying to manage a mind that keeps telling you how useless you are (we all have that).
2. Strategy: how will you accomplish your vision?
You may not know all the steps but start considering a path to getting there and get started. You can figure a lot of things as you go along so don’t use this as an excuse not to get started.
3. Skills: what do you need to know? And what is missing?
This can be a tricky one, because your brain will think you don’t know enough. But I want you to be brutally honest with yourself here - and always on your side. You can do 100 certifications before you ever start anything. Rather consider all the things you already know that allow you to get started. And plan for anything that you really need to learn as you go along.
4. Structure: what will you do every day, every week, every month?
A daily structure with clear actions that you do every day no matter what will not only be helpful but also likely to keep you going when your brain will want to convince you it’s not working. This is particularly useful on days when you feel down; rather than create more mind drama with wondering what to do, stick to your daily action list and keep taking action.
5. Mindset: managing your mindset is, by far, the most important and also challenging ingredient.
But the secret here is to look at the other four and ask the question: what would help me most today?
Maybe you need to remind yourself of your why, your vision. Feel into that again. Maybe you need to evaluate and tweak your strategy objectively. Maybe today is just a very low day and all you need is to sit down and get inspired, learn something new, and do nothing else. Throughout it all, your daily action plan will keep you going.
These five ingredients come together beautifully and allow you to stretch and learn; most importantly, to not give up.
Love,
Monica
Site was designed with Mobirise