7. Re-Defining Success

Jul 2

Today’s episode is going to be short and crispy. Before I ask the question I want you to think about, remember in my first episode I told you that two of the three core tenets of what I do here are reclaiming the corporate dream and building conscious businesses and the question I’m inviting you to explore is kind of where these two things intersect.

My question is: Is it time for you to re-define what success means to YOU?

When you enter the corporate world, the target for success is pretty well defined for us. It’s like we got handed a to-do list and each milestone we crossed off, each promotion, each raise was one more thing done on the pathway to retirement.

Success is defined by your loyalty to a company, your ability to follow the rules, to achieve bigger titles and reach new income brackets. This was the traditional definition of a well lived life.

Until people like you and me started to question– is it? Is this what success means?

Because I found myself following the path, doing the thing, crossing off the milestones and it didn’t make me feel like I was living life at all. Something felt off about it.

I found myself asking questions like ‘Is this it?’ ‘Is this all there is?’ I thought I would feel different. I thought I would feel different.

The funny thing about entrepreneurship is old habits die hard. I did it myself, I have and do coach others who do it and I’ve seen some pretty big names in the space do it - we try to define our success by a title, how many employees we have or how much we make.

And what I’ve seen behind the curtains of some big names out there is, when they do hit the dollar amount that is deemed successful, they start asking themselves the same questions…is this it? Is this all there is? I thought I would feel different.

What has become abundantly clear to me is if you are in the business of creating a conscious business – one that is intentionally focused, heart-led, purpose-driven, one that wants to make an impact it can’t be driven by the old structures.
Money targets are just that – targets, goals and achievements. They are something we celebrate for having achieved…and then what? They aren’t the measuring tool used to define success.

For me, the idea of success shifted from a dollar figure, a title, how many people I manage to it actually being an embodiment of what’s most important to me, how I define living, my values.

It’s ok to want your business to be successful in the transitional sense, cash positive, growing. Maybe the real distinction to make here is, rather than re-defining success is to disentangle what personal success is from business success. We can build a business that is plush with cash but if we are doing it in a way that doesn’t support the life we want to build what’s the fucking point.

Maybe what we really need to do is get clear on what personal success is and build our business that enables us or moves us closer to the embodiment of that.

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Until next week. ILY BYEEE.

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