Measuring Success - Part Two

What is success?

All my life I have been a goal setter, a dreamer, a get it done type of girl and if you read my earlier post you will read about how much of that is spent in the measuring. For years I have defined success by reaching the end goal, the peak, finally achieving the one thing that can take months, years, decades.

I remember as a sixteen year old having a screenshot on my phone screen of a girl with a beautiful body, a strong, toned pair of legs, it was meant to motivate me however five years later I am not even close to having legs like that, so I have failed. I read a book and I get this sense of guilt for not finishing my own, for not succeeding in being able to see my novel on a shelf, therefore I have failed. I watch interviews of screenwriters explaining how they came up with the storyline for the latest Netflix hit, and I think that’s not me up there, therefore I have failed. With this mindset I am always in the ‘negative’, I am always crawling out of the pit, I am always ‘behind’ because in my head ‘in progress’ is the same as failure. My wild dreams that I have not even began to start have already failed, and it is so hard to convince yourself to feel passionate about something that is already doomed. 

How much different would my mindsets be if I learnt to define success differently? If I retrained my hardwired brain to say ‘you started, I am proud’ rather than ‘you should have started six years ago’? What if I learnt to celebrate the smallest of wins, the getting out beds, the chapters, the ideas being put to paper, the time I spend processing, the workouts I manage to do, each one of them. What if I had an end goal of being able to do fifty push ups, but still celebrated every single time I got one step further along the way. What if my end goal was to be an author sharing her words all over the world, but I still celebrated every time I sat down to intentionally write, every time one person read and connected with my art. How different would my mindset be, how different would my drive to meet my goals be, how great would it be to not start on the back foot, or by crawling out of the pit but instead celebrating that I started at all. 

Maybe you aren’t like me, and you have figured out how to celebrate yourself well already. Maybe you have nailed your definition of success. I applaud you. But maybe you are like me; gripping on to each failure as if it is more comfortable then admitting you can and will be successful, maybe like me you find it easier to live in the negative, if you are always failing, you can’t fail more.. right?

What if we allowed some of our dreams to die without labelling it as failing, if we were able to extend enough grace to ourselves, to allow us to change our minds even after we have made a dream public. What if we learnt to protect our time and energy and spend it on things we are passionate about  now, not the now lifeless things we wanted four years ago. It is okay to let go.

I have recently learnt that whatever the massive challenge, dream, goal is, it’s not reached in one moment of strenuous effort or one afternoon of rigorous attention. If I want to write a book, I have to write word for word, page by page, chapter by chapter. It takes a choice in a moment, a choice to say yes I will work on that, a choice I have to make over and over again until it is complete. I believe I have found that positively achieving something is all in this combination - small healthy repetitive choices, a bank of celebration for the small wins and an attitude that success is not only achievable but is unavoidable simply in the starting.

I am done with living life as I have to jump the staircase, when in reality it is much more effective and attainable if I use the stairs for what they are and climb. So if you need me I’ll be here celebrating each attempt and redefining success one full body push up at a time.

e.d