Ep 9: Define Success
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Love What You Do podcast. I'm Kelly Dugan, former HR executive turned career coach and personal brand expert. And I'm here each episode sharing strategies to help you uncover your unique value, leverage your personal brand, and take action to create a career you love.
Welcome back to the podcast, my friends. Today we are talking all about success, and if I were to ask you right now, what does success look like? What do you think of when you think of a successful person? What are some of those things that come to mind? I am willing to bet it's probably someone in a suit, [00:01:00] maybe a fancy watch, maybe they drive a really nice car.
Generally they have a good amount of money. We have all of these perceptions as a society about what success looks like. But today I wanna talk about a little bit more of a personal reflection on what success means for each one of us because. I believe that success does not look the same for everyone.
And when you spend all of your time searching for someone else's definition of success, you are left empty and unfulfilled at the end of the day. And, uh, this is not an idea that I just came up with. It's something that I personally experienced myself throughout my career. Uh, I've shared on the podcast before, before starting my own business.
I worked in corporate for about 10 years. And I really loved the work that I was doing, but I also had the opportunity to work with some very classically successful people. [00:02:00] And I would look at these people who had reached like the pinnacle of their career paths. And at the end of the day, I would think to myself.
I'm not sure they're living a life that I want. Right? On paper, I was doing everything to achieve that level of success, right? I was putting the hours in, I was getting the promotions, but what I felt like that was building towards when I saw a glimpse of what that actually looked like for others. I started to feel almost an inadequacy because I started to think, well, what the heck is wrong with me if that is not something that excites me?
Because while some people wanna climb the corporate ladder, while some people dream of being a C-Suite executive, while, while some people find immense fulfillment in leading teams and getting to live an executive [00:03:00] role. Some of us have other aspirations and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. So as I've shared on the podcast before, I am expecting our first little one, and I.
In fact, by the time this episode comes out, I really hope she is already here with us. Uh, and for me, I have always known that I wanted to be a mom. And honestly, the fact that I found a career that I love so much really caught me off guard because I love coaching. I love helping people. Uh, and I started to know that fairly early on in my career, but I was also balancing that with this feeling of knowing that I knew I wanted to become a mother and I wanted to be able to live a life that allowed me to have the flexibility and time with my kids the way that I grew up.
And. That was in a lot of conflict when I would look at some of these [00:04:00] classically successful role models that I had in front of me. And these are amazing people, but what I started to realize is there's absolutely nothing wrong with the person. Who chooses that path. But there's the path of, you know, executive leadership in that classic successful archetype.
But there's also absolutely nothing wrong with choosing something different. I. And when you're being called to choose a different type of success, but you are climbing a mountain that is leading towards a definition of success that doesn't feel right for you, that's when you're gonna be left with these feelings of inadequacy, these feelings of emptiness, this feeling, these feelings of frustration.
Uh, and I can speak to that 'cause I know that's what I experienced and ultimately. What I did was I had to sit down and ask myself. What is [00:05:00] success to me? And I needed to come up with that definition. And once I was able to define for myself that success for me wasn't going to be about status, it wasn't going to be about making the absolute most in a corporation that I could make, but it was gonna be about freedom.
It was gonna be about having freedom over my time and freedom to spend the time that I have in my work, helping people doing what I love to do. And I was so grounded in that definition of success that I was able to take action and make that happen for me in my own life. But it all started with actually coming up with that definition.
So that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about how you can come up with your own definition of success. Maybe you're listening to this podcast right now and you're having some of those feelings that I just described. You're having some of that unsettledness, you're having some frustration.
You're feeling inadequate in what you do, [00:06:00] and it may be because you're just climbing the wrong mountain. So when it comes to defining success, what is the first thing that you should do? Well, this is my favorite tactic for defining success for yourself, and it's called an interview with your future self.
So here's what I recommend doing, and you can do this along with me right now. You can pause this podcast a few times and, and really reflect on some of these, uh, questions. That we are going to answer together. But first and foremost, you're gonna sit down and you're gonna picture yourself living at your most successful peak.
So think of yourself in the future, and you have the opportunity to today sit down with that person, that version of you, and ask them some questions, and you wanna ask them some questions like, how do you spend most of your time? What kind of flexibility do you have? What do your finances look like? What talents and [00:07:00] skills are you using the most?
How passionate are you about the work that you're doing? And my favorite question, what are you most grateful for right now? So with those questions, you want to actually write down your answers. You can stop and think about them, write them down, but you want to capture those answers as if you are answering as your future self at that most successful peak.
And when you look at what is most important to that person. You start to really understand what is most important to you and what you have to do now in order to set your future self up for that reality. So this is a, actually a coaching technique. It's called a reframe, uh, and it allows us to just kinda get out of our own head of the day to day and think about ourselves in a completely different circumstance.
So I am a strong believer in there's [00:08:00] no better person to ask about yourself than yourself. So that's what we're doing in this exercise here, and once you've had some time to reflect on those answers, that's when you can sit down just as I did and figure out what does success look like for you. As I described before, for me, put most simply success was freedom.
It was being able to build a life for my family and spend my working hours doing the things I loved to help people. You might have a completely different answer. And whatever that answer is, is valid and it is worth fighting for. It is worth working for because at the heart of loving what you do. Is knowing what it is you're building towards, and that starts with defining success for yourself.
So once you have that definition of success, what do you do from there? Well, this is [00:09:00] maybe the hardest part of all of this, but once you know what success means to you, the next most important thing that you have to do is put on the blinders. And you have to stop paying attention to how everyone else is defining success, and particularly, you have to stop comparing yourselves with someone else's measuring stick because.
You are going to be seeking your definition of success and the person next to you should be seeking out theirs and what looks like progress on the path to success for this other person might look nothing like progress on your map, and it doesn't mean that they are more successful than you are. It just means they're on a completely different journey.
But as I can imagine as you're listening to this podcast right now, that's easier said than done sometimes. Because I can tell you when I decided that freedom was gonna be the most important thing for me, and I [00:10:00] took action to make that happen in my own life, it was really difficult to look around at people who were seeing monetary successes in their corporate jobs, who were seeing promotions in their corporate jobs.
When I did something that felt like taking a step back to build in order to grow. And I had to make a conscious effort to stop comparing myself to people who made different choices than I wanted to make for my life. And I had to start celebrating them for what they wanted and celebrating myself for what I wanted.
And once I started to make that mindset shift, everything changed because I was able to celebrate my choices the same way that they're able to celebrate theirs. And that brings me to the last piece of this, which is once you have defined success for yourself, once you have trained yourself to put on those blinders and not pay attention to what [00:11:00] other people are doing and building in their own lives, then you have to take action. So depending on what you're doing right now, you may want to completely switch career paths in order to help achieve your definition of success. And if you find yourself in that situation, and that feels a little bit daunting, I just wanna remind you, we do have our discover your career path self-paced on-demand coaching course that I offer through your place at the top.
I'm gonna make sure the link is included below for that course, but that is an opportunity for you to be able to stop and think what career path is going to allow me to seek out this version of success that I now know is most important to me. And once you've decided what that path is, you have to start taking action to help yourself get there.
Because I will tell you, once you know in [00:12:00] your core that you are doing something right now that is not leading to the success that you want, it is very difficult to continue to get up and go to work every day without a plan to help you get where you wanna be. However, I do wanna throw out there that defining success for yourself does not always mean a career change.
Sometimes it just means changing your mindset, right? You could stay in the exact same career path in the exact same job that you're in right now, but just the acknowledgement that you are no longer comparing yourself to people who are defining success differently than you, and you are finding that fulfillment and joy in other ways.
That might be enough. Because you are investing in you. It doesn't matter where you work, it doesn't matter who's paying you. You get to define what's most important to you. And if you start using that measuring stick to define your personal [00:13:00] success and ignore everyone else, like we talked about, sometimes that mindset shift is enough action, and you might be right where you need to be.
So regardless of where you are on this path of defining success for yourself, maybe you have your definition, maybe you're still crafting that definition. Maybe you're juggling between is it a mindset shift that I need or do I need to completely switch my career path? I am telling you this is some of the most valuable work you will ever do when it comes to loving what you do because it is not possible to love what we do if we don't first know where we're going and what success in that looks like. So don't wait. Take this opportunity to define success for yourself.
Thank you so much for joining me on this episode, my friends. I cannot wait for you to do this work [00:14:00] and define success for yourself because it changes everything. I truly believe that I'll see you next time.
Thanks for joining me on today's episode. As always, if you're looking for coaching support or would like to submit a question, you can drop me an email at [email protected].
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