Where in your life do you think you are currently failing? Don’t be ashamed to look at it and name it. We all have some area of our lives where we feel as if we haven’t achieved success, or aren’t doing as well as we would like.
Take the example of the person who is stuck in what they consider to be a dead-end job. They wake up with no pep in their step, no joy in their heart, as they dress for work. Every day feels like either drudgery or routine. It’s not the worst job in the world they say to themselves. It pays the bills. It keeps the wolves from the door. It gets me out of the house.
This person is very successful at playing it safe. They are successful at staying in an old, possibly familial, paradigm. They’re very successful at setting limits to what they are capable of. They’re successful at justifying their unhappiness as the norm.
By my definition, success is whatever we are good at doing or being.
It is not always accompanied by a great feeling. It doesn’t always feel good. It doesn’t always serve us, but it is successful just the same. When you get that, when you begin to look at your life with honest eyes, you’ll begin to see success everywhere.
What about the other end of the spectrum. The vastly successful billionaire, who has his eye constantly on the prize? He loves mergers and takeovers. He loves the art of the deal. He loves winning, coming out on top. Clearly, he’s a success by most measures. Does his need to see his profits grow endlessly not indicate success? Does his focus on making money and lots of it, not indicate that he has a success gene right in the middle of his DNA?
Is he also successful perhaps, at not looking at what drives him in his pursuit of greater and greater wealth? Is he successful, at avoiding looking at how the system of more, more, more, might be impacting the world in not so nurturing ways? Is he also a success at defining his success in limited ways?
Even success that feels good, that reflects how well we’re doing by society’s standards, can also have fear thoughts embedded in it. If that successful person is not willing to look at certain areas of their psyche, for fear of what they might find there, then they are also very successful at avoidance and deflection.
Success is everywhere. We just need to redefine it.
Once we see what success really is – an outer expression of our inner world, beliefs, expectations, and experiences, then we no longer need to see it as something that’s difficult for us to attain. We begin to see that we are inherently successful beings. We are in fact, hard-wired for success.
Even when circumstances outside of the control of the person are dictating their experience, that success is hiding somewhere. What is it that causes that person to get up every day, even in the midst of war, atrocity, hunger, exploitation? What causes them to wake up and keep going?
For each person, it will be a different motivating force. For some, it will be family. They have people they love and care for, who need them, who depend on them, and that will be their daily motivator. For others, it will be anger, resentment or resistance to their circumstances that is their drive. Then there’s those who will be motivated by hope, optimism, religious beliefs, faith, or the belief that things will change for the better, which gets them through the day, the hour, or the minute.
Each and every one of these drives and motivating factors that cause that person to keep going, keep getting up, keep moving forward, keep resisting, keep fighting injustice, keep looking out for their families, keep hoping, are also based on success. Success is not a moral issue. It is an indication, a pointer, to where your beliefs and your actions, align.
There is no one who is not successful at something.
When we get that we are all successful in many, many, ways, every single day of our lives, then we can step away from the success mystique. Don’t we secretly believe that there is some mystique to those we deem successful? They have something that others lack. They have a specialness that we cannot attain. They have a focus that we could never emulate? They have that certain something that we only wish we had to the same degree.
So when we can acknowledge that we do indeed have all of those qualities to the same degree as anyone else, we are no longer limited in what success can look like for us. Once we can acknowledge that success is indeed everywhere, then the energies of possibility, potential, and I wonder, can begin to take hold in our experience.
What if you could accept that success is everywhere, all the time, especially in your own life, then what becomes possible for you?
What would you stop avoiding? What would you try? What would you be willing to change? What would you be willing to live for and how would you then live your life?
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This article was originally published on blog.thewellnessuniverse.com and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: David Gavi on Unsplash