Redefining the Way you Look at Success — Lorraine Hamilton

Success, achievement, results, performance. However you describe it. It’s time to look at it differently.

In my group coaching program, that I affectionately call The Purple Hair Revolution, the participants are redefining what success looks like to them.

It’s a really liberating concept to adopt. I’m writing this blog post in 2020, and the world is in the throws of COVID-19. One thing that the worldwide pandemic has initiated is a global look at our own circumstances and what’s most important to us.

Do you feel threatened?

Re-evaluating what is important happens when something threatens our livelihood or threatens the people that we care about. Many people are starting to realize that they’ve been stuck in a rut, going through the motions in their jobs or careers. They know this is the time to really re-evaluate what’s most important and what we want for ourselves and our families.

That means redefining what success looks like. It’s what I help people with all day, every day.

The way that you experience the world is completely unique. So why do the majority of us subscribe to a mandated version of what success looks like? You know, the job, the car, the two holidays a year, the whatever is in your culture, in your environment, what are the mandated success measures? Do they really work for you?

How do we learn behaviour?

When we’re born, we don’t know how to behave, so we have to learn. And the way that we do that is that we behave in a certain way and then we’re either rewarded or penalized for that behaviour. The same pattern is taken into the school system. We behave in a certain way and we’re rewarded or penalized for that behaviour, whether that’s by the scores that we achieve in assessments or our behaviour in class.

Those rewards or penalties cause us to feel a certain way. We then take that same approach into the workforce. We behave a certain way and we’re rewarded, in that we get paid or we get promoted or we’re penalized. We get demoted, or we don’t achieve bonuses or we lose our job. And the money that’s attached to our job allows us to feel a certain way. So we might feel like we’re contributing, that we have security, that we can buy the things that make us happy or give us status.

The problem is that we’re always chasing the carrot. You know, when I get that promotion, I’ll stop putting in all these extra hours. When I lose the weight, then I’ll be happy. It’s always conditional because that’s the way that we’ve been brought up.

Redefining Success

To redefine success, you need to look past the what; the job, the car, the weight, the whatever, and look at why you want those things in the first place.

What’s the feeling that you’re trying to achieve because there are a million ways to achieve that feeling. And it is those feelings that will make you successful.

So I invite you to have a think about what’s most important to you. What are the feelings, what are the values that are most important to you and then get creative? What are lots of different ways that you can achieve those feelings or values and then start to think, well, what else is possible.

Originally published at https://www.lorrainehamilton.net on October 14, 2020.