I’ve been thinking alot lately about how to define success. Its such a subjective and personal thing. What looks like success for one person may not look the same for another person.
When I say the word “success” what comes to mind for you?
Is it achievements? Education? Making money? Having a long term relationship? (By the way I would love it if you comment below and let me know one word that comes to mind when you hear the word “success”!)
I’m listening to an audio book called “How to Get Out of Your Own Way” by Dr. Daniel Amen which is about just that, getting out of unhealthy habits and moving forward in your life. He says that success is very personal and “not how others perceive your successes but how you feel about success” (loosely paraphrased!). You can have achieved alot but if you don’t feel at peace with it you won’t actually feel that you are successful. I suppose in this way its all about your mindset.
I’m not really a task oriented person, I’m an experience and feelings oriented person.
In the past I’ve always defined success as how things looked for people who are more organized, more task oriented, more achievement focused, more “Type A”, if you will, than me, and because of that I’ve often felt like a total failure.
I always wished I could be more like one of those people and felt like I wasn’t living up to my potential because my success didn’t look like their success.
Now I know that I get to define what success looks like for me.
I get to decide what it looks like for me to live as the best version of myself. Its not going to look like someone who is highly achievement oriented but thats okay because this is my life, not theirs.
I kept myself from moving forward because I would play what I like to call the “whoa to me” card: Whoa to me, if only I was more (task oriented, organized, focused, skilled, etc). Whoa to me, I can’t be successful because (insert any areas of weakness here). I allowed myself to not move forward towards my personal goals because I felt that in order to progress I needed to possess certain character traits and I used the excuse of lacking those traits or skills as a reason to not move forward.
What I realize now is that those were all total excuses and a way to keep myself from facing things I was afraid of or things that were challenging.
Sometimes progress is hard, you have to work to confront negative self beliefs, work at changing your inner monologue and the way you talk to yourself, learn new skills, and get out of your comfort zone.
I also realized that most of those character traits and skills are completely learnable.
Some things may never come naturally to me but I can develop my organizational skills, learn techniques to help my focus, learn specific skills like writing, and hire help when needed (like hiring someone to design my blog).
In particular I’ve been thinking of how this relates to living abroad and how to define success in this particular period of my life. I’m going to talk about that in another post because before I get there I need to be able to dream and visualize what I actually want my life to look like. Forward thinking and future planning are pretty challenging for me because I tend to live in the moment and take what comes, a trait that helps me be very adaptable but doesn’t help me move forward in my life (something Dr. Amen addresses in his book).
In my next post I’m going to talk about how to “vision cast” (or vision board/dream board/think about what I want for the future) in light in having a bit of an unstable future because of hashtag expatlife. And in upcoming post in this series I’ll talk about how to define what success looks like for you as an expat.
I would really love to hear how you define success!
Comment and let me know what word comes to mind when you hear that word “success”!
Diane says
Hi Kacie! Love this topic! Success is something I’ve thought a lot about over the years — how I viewed it in fast-paced NYC working a corporate job in the USA and how I view it now as someone who has lived in France for a while and had to reinvent herself in a lot of ways.
For me, success is about freedom. To live how you want and be in control of your time. I think of it less in terms of material things and more about our state of being, like if we feel happy when we wake up in the morning and have a purpose.
I think we can get caught up in other people’s definitions and then once we have that big house or fancy car, we realize that those things were never in line with our own version of success. I just mean in general (I don’t have a fancy house or car!), the importance of defining success for yourself. France has allowed me to slow down and take time to think and just be and I’m so grateful for that.
Amanda Carlisle says
Yes! I completely understand your point of view! Moving overseas you have to redefine success for yourself and be okay with not lining up with other people’s expectations for you all the time (ie You’re taking the kids abroad…You didn’t buy a house this year with this market?…etc). Culture plays a big part of expectations for success too. Thank you for sharing your response to my post!