All of us want to live a life of peace, joy, and success in one or more areas of life.
These are wonderful goals, and the good news is that you can attain them with the right attitude, effort, and effective tools. In the same way when you’re building a house, you need a blueprint, effort, and tools, building a successful life requires the same ingredients.
What is Success?
Success means different things to different people, but the consensus is that success means actively working toward and achieving your unique goals. The goals can be as simple or more complicated, such as:
- Marrying and having a family
- Feeling peace and contentment most of the time
- Owning your own home
- Getting a college degree
- Becoming CEO of a major corporation
The definition for success will vary for each person.
Key Ingredients of Success
There are certain ingredients or characteristics that propel people toward success.
If you want to be successful, you can’t just sit down and wait for it to come to you. There are men and women who have achieved all kinds of success who have been more than willing to share their secrets to success. If you want success, it’s a great idea to listen to what they have to say.
Create Goals and an Action Plan
If you don’t have goals, you’re like a sailboat with no sail and you’re probably just drifting with the wind.
If you want to be successful, you have to create goals and come up with an action plan to fulfill them. Successful people didn’t get to be successful because things dropped into their lap; they planned and worked for it!
- Do you want to start your own business?
- Get that promotion?
- Purchase that beach house?
- Send your child to the best private school?
- Double your income?
- Start dating again?
Write down your goals and create an action plan to achieve them. Think about where you are and determine where you want to go. Make a list and look at it every day. Keep success at the forefront of your mind.
Keep Score of Your Success
Here is one secret of highly successful men and women: They keep score of their success.
What this means is that they keep track of their successes as they occur. The reason they do this is because the actual act of achieving goals creates a huge surge in momentum toward the achievement of even further goals.
For example, if you’ve worked your tail off for the last two years to get the latest promotion at work, this achievement will reinforce the behaviors (taking on challenging projects, becoming an expert, displaying a positive, confident attitude, etc.) that created the outcome in the first place.
This will cause you to continue those same behaviors and those behaviors will attract even more success to you in other areas of your life!
How to Keep Score of Your Successes
The simplest way to keep score of your successes is to keep an online calendar entitled “Successes” and mark that calendar when you achieve something.
Whether your achievements are little or big, write them down so that you’re motivated to stay on the success track and not get discouraged when trials or obstacles come.
The reality is that sometimes things don’t go as planned and the tendency for frustration or the urge to give up will surface.
- What will you do?
- Give up?
- Get angry?
- Settle?
Rest assured that you don’t have to. When those things surface, get to your calendar and review all of your past achievements so that you can silence the negative thoughts running through your mind.
This will build your self-confidence so you can keep your chin up and make a firm resolve to push through the tough stuff.
You Can Find Successes
You can dream little and big dreams and take action toward making them come true.
It’s never too late to begin journeying toward success in any area. Begin today. Go ahead and create an online calendar and keep score of your successes.
If you go to Keep And Share, you can access a calendar for free. There you can keep track of your efforts, achievements, insights, and more.
You can also check out other free online calendars here.
You can even use these on your phone, making it easier to track any successes along your journey.
So go ahead. Give yourself permission to soar the skies with success as your wings. This practice has helped me so much through the years and I know it can help you too!
Updated from Mar 10, 2024
Photo by Eunice De Guzman on Unsplash
