What makes me feel successful might be the complete opposite to what makes you feel successful. And that’s quite OK, so long as we are both acting in ways which move us closer to our version of success.
Let me give you an example.
Imagine two people who studied law together. One has a career in corporate litigation, becoming a senior partner in a prestigious law firm, in charge of a large number of staff, earning a very big salary, and working long hours in the office each day. The other spends many years working for an NGO as a poorly paid human rights lawyer, travelling overseas to remote locations and advocating for the disadvantaged.
Who would you say is the most “successful”?
It depends, of course, on how each defines and measures success for themselves – both in their careers and their lives. As outsiders, we can only speculate. Perhaps the first lawyer measures success by the hours they put in at work, the size of their annual bonus, or the prestige of the cases they take on. The second lawyer might measure success by the number of people they help, the relationships they build on the way, or by the accolades they receive for their work.
So consider, for each of the different roles you play in life – as a mother, an employee, a partner, a daughter, a friend, a business owner, a member of a sports team – what does success mean to you? The truth is, it really doesn’t matter what success means, so long as your decisions and actions get you closer to achieving it. And that’s why it’s so important to figure out how you measure success for yourself.
Here are some questions to get you started:
- What is truly important to you?
- What gives you the strongest sense of achievement?
- What drives and motivates you?
- What kind of life do you want?
- In 5 years, what does your most successful future look like?
- Who do you most admire, and why? What do you think drives them?
- What are your strengths, and how do they contribute to you achieving success?
- What are you inspired to create and share and be?
And remember, how you define success can change over the course of your life. Think of that high-powered corporate lawyer who spent 16 hours a day in the office, or that in-the-trenches human rights lawyer who spent six months of every year travelling overseas. Perhaps they both, after successful ten-year careers, had children. Perhaps each of their priorities shifted a bit, and achieving a good work-life balance became their new measure of success. Now each is looking for ways to maintain success in their career, while also being with their children as they grow up.
This doesn’t mean that they have to give up the things that used to be important to them. But the decisions they make will be tempered by their current priorities. Perhaps the high-powered corporate lawyer looks at how they can work from home some of the time – maintaining their salary but spending more time with their children. Perhaps the human-rights lawyer looks for a cause closer to home where they can still put their skills to use in the service of humanity, without having to travel so much.
No matter what, until you work out what being successful really means to you, you’ll never quite know whether to take that new job, whether to work full or part-time, whether to be a stay-at-home mum, whether to quit that tedious job and follow your dreams, whether to live in the city or by the beach…
When you’ve worked out what success really means for you, the rest just doesn’t seem as hard. Your decisions and your actions become no-brainers. You now have a crystal clear barometer for everything you do. Your measures of success become your sign posts for making those tough decisions, and suddenly they don’t seem quite so tough.