I love to be successful. I like to be good at things and feel like I’m accomplishing all the things I want to do. In fact, when my kids were younger and I had like a million things to do each day I’d love to make myself a list each morning. Even if there were things I’d already done I’d write them on my list and then check them off! So satisfying! I’d get this little rush thinking of how productive I was being and what a great job I was doing and the rest of the day would go that much better.
I did something similar to that in graduate school as well. I’d take a huge assignment, like a 15 page paper and I’d break it up into smaller chunks. I’d plan to read three articles or write two pages and each time I accomplished a small chunk I’d feel successful. I’d give myself a little victory speech and then I’d go on to the next thing.
People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tony Robbins
I’ve gotten pretty good at planning and even congratulating myself. Recently what I’ve found myself struggling with is how I define success. Take this blog for example. If I define success as writing a blog each week and posting it then I’m doing a fantastic job! I did that for a while and I felt great about what I was doing. Then I found myself wondering if anyone reads it? Do they like it? It is important? (What does that even mean…important?) As I started to shift my definition of what successful means for my blog I found myself feeling less and less accomplished. And that’s when the self-doubt starts to creep in. I tell myself maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe it’s a waste of time. After all, no one actually thinks this is important….and the spiral begins.
I’m reflecting now that I think what is really happening here is I started to feel like it wasn’t important. When I changed how I measured success from something concrete like writing each post and putting it on the internet to something entirely subjective like whether or not people like it, I really dug myself a hole of self-doubt. The thing is, in this example success is what I define it to be. I can stay with my older definition of just posting it or I can continue into this nebulous territory of likes and reposts and follows.
This example is pretty straightforward. But many examples in our day to day lives really aren’t. What does it mean to be a good friend? A great parent? A wonderful human being? What does it mean to be “good enough”? I was talking with a friend about expectations. If I decide I’m going to run an entire marathon and I can’t do it I could end up feeling like a failure. But what if I decided I would just start with one mile? Even one lap? What if I lowered my expectations a little and broke the bigger goal up into smaller steps? Then I could feel accomplished and tell myself, “Wow! Good job! You did amazing running that lap!!!” Maybe I could even do two laps and feel like I totally blew that goal out of the water! With that type of self talk and motivation I’d likely eventually end up running that marathon much sooner than if my goal was huge and I was always feeling like a loser.
Truly success is something we can define for ourselves. We can decide if and how to make our goals into smaller segments. We can choose what it means to do a good job. We can practice giving ourselves credit for our hard work and encouraging ourselves to be the best we know how to be. Many things in our day to day lives are defined outside of us. We don’t get to determine if the paper we turned in gets an A or a B or a C. We don’t decide if the job we did is good enough for our boss. But we can and do decide every day of our lives if the efforts we put in are good enough for us. And I don’t know about you but I can often be the harshest critic of all to me. So here’s to working on breaking things up into smaller chunks, redefining our definitions and truly giving ourselves credit for our…
