How to Empower Success with a Personal Process
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How to Empower Success by Personalizing the Process
Success is a universal goal. No one sets out in life to be eternally rejected or to never achieve a dream or goal. But as a society we tend to put success up on a pedestal and expect ourselves and others to conform to one idea of success and one path to achievement. We burn ourselves out, striving for perfection.
A one-size-fits-all approach to success is a sure path to failure—and not just failure, but often a path to giving up entirely. While we would like to believe all this pressure comes from society, the truth is that our own beliefs and perceptions about success are just as much to blame. Empowering ourselves for success starts with adjusting our own mindsets and behaviors to cultivate an environment of continual growth, no matter the specific situation or circumstance.
We'd all love a check list that comes with a guarantee for success. But the reality is that sometimes you do all the right steps, put in all your best effort, and it still doesn't work out. No one wants to buy your manuscript. You didn't land the job or promotion. Your business didn't take off. As much as we want to believe that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, life requires some partnerships and support from others.
So if there are no guarantees for success, how in the world do we pursue it?
Defining Success → Empowering Success
A personal definition for success is one of the most important factors for achievement. Constantly chasing after someone else's idea of success—even society's ideas of success—is a sure way to burn out quickly. Having a goal that is specific and meaningful to you increases your likelihood of success because you have a motivation beyond wanting to look “successful” to others.
The American Heritage Dictionary offers two definitions of success: “1. The achievement of something attempted. 2. The gaining of fame or prosperity.” So often we combine the two and assume that if we do not complete our goal well and gain fame or prosperity, it's not real success. We assign more value to some successes than to others. We mistake fame, fortune, power, and possessions as success, yet we acknowledge the kernels of truth in the stereotypes and tropes that tell us the pursuit of those things will leave us empty.
When shown a salesperson who made five sales and two pitches in a day and a person who got out of bed, cleaned a room, and prepared a healthy meal, whether we agree or not, we're more inclined to say the salesperson had the more successful day. We don't account for the personal motivations and battles behind each kind of success. We don't always consider the individual starting places, networks, and daily environment others are working with. What a top business executive considers success and what a person battling depression considers success are going to be vastly different. But neither success is inherently worth more than the other.
Empowering yourself for success means embracing a definition of success that you can attain and that has value to you. It doesn't matter what others think of your personal successes, as long as they mean something to you.
Empowering Success Through Structure
The way you approach your goal can contain some very poignant indicators as to whether or not you will actually succeed. Without a structure and plan to empower success, it's possible that you'll struggle to accomplish your goals. We're not always taught how to fold steps, timelines, and checkpoints into our goals. This is why we sometimes copy our role models and crave the structured outlines created by gurus such as Stephen Covey. We long to believe that if we embrace his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People we'll be guaranteed to succeed at anything. But many people end up discouraged that what Covey presents is not a simple checklist for success but an outline to use for structuring your plan for success. You also need your personal definition of success.
We read these books and blog posts and find that they somewhat state the obvious: Be proactive. Start with the end in mind. Put first things first. Covey's list of habits isn't revolutionary, but the habits can help us think about specific steps and processes we need to follow in order to be successful. Making the plan can seem like a lot of work, on top of the actual work to succeed. But it's invaluable. Physical achievement of the goal begins with mentally creating and defining the goal—preparing for success. It's the design phase before the building phase, and one that cannot be skipped.
Let's say the goal is writing a book. For many people, successfully writing a book gets blurred with the success of publishing a book. These would be two separate goals, with two separate definitions of success. Successfully writing a book is just that, writing it. The preparation phase would lay out the details of your book—plot, characters, audience, length.
Just as important, though, is considering why you want to write a book. Writing a book because people have always told you you ought to is not going to be a strong motivator when you're knee deep in the story and nothing seems to be working out. Any strong motivator is going to come from yourself, not from another person. Maybe your motivation, then, is because you have a story you want to tell. Maybe your motivation is that you want to learn more of the craft by practicing it. By having a personal and positive motivation, you set yourself up to keep pushing forward when obstacles crop up. This empowers you for success, empowers you to keep tackling the next step of your plan, because you are invested in the process and you stand to gain something invaluable and otherwise unattainable.
Once you've planned it out, the actual writing needs to be broken down into smaller goals. Your book isn't going to be written in one day, but daily goals will go a long way to finishing the project. A daily goal might be to write a certain number of scenes or a certain number of chapters. It might look like hitting a certain word count or writing for a certain length of time each day. As you dive into the daily goals that build into the big goal, remember to review whether it's working for you. Maybe your goal is to write 10,000 words a day, but you're struggling to get the words out. Show yourself some grace and allow yourself to drop the word count until your writing muscles can keep up. The best way to burn yourself out is to set unrealistic goals and refuse to budge. By regularly asking yourself, “are my daily habits successful?” you allow yourself room to revise anything that isn't working for you and create a more successful process.
How Habits Empower Success
Building a habit is perhaps one of the most important aspects of success. If you're a writer, you need to be in the habit of writing. If you're a photographer, you need to be in the habit of taking photos. In any field, you need to be in the habit of learning—learning new techniques, new skills, new processes. But building a habit doesn't happen over night. It's an extended process that, in itself, is practicing the steps to success.
Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habits, writes that habits go from cues to rewards to routines. To establish a habit you must first choose something to act as the cue for practicing. This could be a specific time of day, a location, certain people, tasks, or emotions. When you experience the cue, you then execute the desired habit action and follow up with a reward that you truly enjoy. Throughout the weeks you'll want to review whether the reward is empowering you to continue with the habit and whether, eventually, the intrinsic reward of the habit is more desirable than the extrinsic reward you're giving yourself (the endorphin high from working out is more desirable than the candy bar afterward). These steps come together to form the routine—cue, behavior, reward—that builds the habit.
As humans, we desperately want to believe that we're above such positive reinforcement and conditioning techniques. And while you can certainly work to develop habits through sheer force of will, the question becomes, is it worth it? It's not a short cut to know and take advantage of our psychological structure. It's working with our minds and our bodies.
It's important to remember that you've got to do what works for you while establishing a routine. For some people, setting time limits and working in designated work sprints is effective (check out the Pomodoro Technique for designing intentional work sprints and brain breaks). For others, concrete and specifiable bench marks are best. Copying you role model's successful routine isn't guaranteed to lead you to the same achievements. You are different people with different brains, bodies, and environments.
The McGraw Center at Princeton University highlights how you must know yourself in order to empower yourself for success. Knowing what distracts you or motivates you and knowing when and where you tend to be most productive are crucial keys for establishing routines that empower success. For example, if you know that you tend to get distracted by Internet research, you might focus on other aspects of the project while leaving notes for yourself on what you need to research. Then, after your project is laid out, you can come back and fill in the research. If you know working in a coffee shop will bring you into contact with too many friends to focus, empowering success may mean sacrificing the social atmosphere for one that embraces productivity.
Making allowances and compromises can also contribute to your success. All work and no play makes anyone a dull person. This is where quantifiable tasks can be helpful so that you can say, “when I've completed X, I will allow myself to go work at the coffee shop for a few hours.” Or, “when I've completed Y, I will go back to research and explore this subject without a time constraint.”
Practicing Self-Empowered Success
Self-empowered success begins with embracing your definition of success—a definition that will change and grow with you. A marathon runner doesn't begin with 26 miles as her definition of success. She might begin with simply accomplishing a run for the day, regardless of pace or distance. Once the body and mind start to be conditioned to the work, she will change the definition of success in accordance with her ultimate goal. Success will soon look like certain paces maintained or certain distances covered. These smaller steps of success are what will lead to her ultimate goal of a marathon. Without smaller steps, most runners would give up when they realize it's brutal—and generally unrealistic—to run 26 miles without training.
As you think about your goal and the achievements you want to reach, you'll be able to break the goal down into smaller steps, smaller goals that build toward the big one. Keeping in mind that success isn't perfection will allow you to let go of pieces of the process that don't serve you. You may find that what you thought would lead you forward is pulling you off course. This becomes an opportunity to consider whether your real goal lies to the front or to the side, and correct course as necessary.
This loops us back to having your personal definition and motivation for success. How many times have you wanted to change course only to have someone—someone specific or society as a general whole—give you the message that to change course is to fail, to give up, to prove that you don't have what it takes? Or maybe it's your own mind telling you these things. We begin to strive for success as an image of accomplishment and achievement instead of something that empowers us, feeds our hearts and souls. But if you accomplish something you don't truly care about, is it success? Does it empower you in any meaningful way? Denying yourself the ability to change course and leave behind the things that don't move you is a form of self-betrayal, particularly when you continue in these things in order to appear successful. When we give other peoples' opinions more weight than our own convictions, we start ourselves down a path of inauthenticity. Betraying ourselves and living without authenticity will leave us empty, regardless of the “successes” we achieve.
Embracing your particular brand and style of success goes beyond the accomplishment. You have to define success for you in a way that authentically reflects your values and goals. Only you can make your life the experience you want it to be. Empowering yourself through personalized preparation makes the process a success in itself.
For Further Reading:
https://www.franklincovey.com/the-7-habits/
https://mcgraw.princeton.edu/7-strategies-for-success
https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique
