Definitions of success

"What's your
definition of success?” – is a question all coaches are asked at some time or
another.  Often the people asking this
question claim that "no one has a satisfactory answer". In other
words because they can’t answer the question no-one can. Or, probably more
accurately, everyone’s answer is entirely subjective, and so invalid.

 

That
said, I think we must insist that whatever success is cannot be merely
subjective, no matter how many people brainwash themselves into believing so. One
useful thing to do to establish what success may be is to ask a room full of
delegates/friends what they think it is. You will find that most people have at
most 3 concepts. But take somebody who says, ‘It’s achieving goals’ and you
write that down. Another says, ‘It’s about family’. When you then ask the
person who said ‘goals’, so family is not important to you (or the other way,
ask the ‘family’ person why goals are not important to them) they invariably
concede, ‘Why, yes, family is important to success as well’. It’s just that
most people never fully think through what success means, or – more cruelly –
haven’t got the memory to remember more than either two or one things!

 

Success,
then, is not a smorgasbord of one or two things, but seven areas in which we
need to achieve a result; and each of these seven things are interdependent. At
different points in our life one or more might be highlighted and become
critical for us.

 

What
are these seven areas? They are: self-esteem, energy, loving relationships,
wealth, meaning, growth and self-awareness. The bare headings can easily lead
to misunderstandings, and with more space I would say a lot more specifically
about each one of these. For example, by wealth I do not mean being rich. And
by self-esteem – which incidentally breaks down into 3 major components – I am
including the ultimate success benefit of life – Peace of Mind – since this is
clearly correlated to our feelings about ourselves.

 

One
good coaching exercise is to ask the client to rate themselves out of ten on
each of these 7 areas, having first contextualized exactly what you mean by
them. Then, you really have identified a core issue to work on – for the lowest
score is the weak link in their life situation at this moment.

 

I
have a one page summary/template to use for this purpose – it is astonishingly
powerful. If anybody would like a free copy of it, then email me and I will
arrange to send it to you on the understanding that credit is given to the
source.