Success is a huge topic in executive coaching. Of course those who are interested in building a successful life often are those who reach out for coaching. They understand that work with a professional coach can help.
Success is a hot topic with my clients as well. Who doesn’t want success? It sounds great!
Yet, when you begin to dig into it, success can also be a painful subject. Painful because, as for all of us (myself included), success may have come with various setbacks and challenges that had to be overcome. These may have been difficult or painful.
My Story of Success
I’ll use my early life as an example. When I was 18, I was studying law and wanted (I thought) to become an attorney, which, as you can see, didn’t happen. (The only aspect of law I used eventually was negotiating corporate contracts.)
My life began with few things you might expect would lead to success. I was raised in a neighborhood that wasn’t great. Growth wasn’t fostered. There was little support for growth, such as counselors, to help us. Yet I was always curious and had good grades (except for one year where I almost dropped out of high school for a year, but I did come back and even went to college).
At that time, I was working as a cashier. All my friends were skeptical that I could be a success. In fact, success for me at the time was looking pretty blurry. I knew I wanted to keep going where life would lead me. I would never settle for what I had and what others thought I should have.
My mom was a single mom who had no education and no idea how to support us or help us get into college. In school, we were told to aim for something but not to aim for the stars. Aim for something closer to us.
But my optimism led me to continue to work hard and keep searching. I really believed it would lead me somewhere. I began to work on my level of integrity and get connected with my own values, though I didn’t use those terms at the time.
There’s No Such Thing as Luck
That’s how it all started, a poorly paid part-time job as a cashier. Then I got to become a manager in that store and supervise 80 people. Then I got the opportunity to work for an American company that opened their doors in France and did business development for my other company.
Eventually that led to me to leave France after 30 years and take a job based in the United States, where I eventually came to live. Recently I ran into friends from my early life who remembered that the we were only expected to reach for the things that were right in front of us, under our noses. They were really impressed to see me living in the States, having had a career, being a full-time coach, and demonstrating what we all saw as a great deal of success!
Their reaction? “Oh, you’ve been lucky.”
There is no such thing as luck.
I’m here to tell you: you create your own luck. Things do not simply fall out of the sky. You need to work hard while believing even harder in what you feel you can accomplish. You have to set an intention to be very focused on your goals.
In 1999, I applied for my green card, and for years nothing happened. Everybody lost hope in my ever getting my green card, but one day it finally showed up. Suddenly, I was paralyzed for two months about making the decision to move forward with what I had wished for, for so long. But yes, I did decide to move to the states. I left my home, I took my fiance with me (who didn’t want to move at all), and we tested it out.
Where I am today was not luck at all. I took chances. I triggered these changes and moved here. I firmly believed that Jan, my fiance, would join me here. That happened four years later. Now it has been 17 years, sharing our lives and living these adventures together. It has been very powerful.
May You Have Success You Could Not Have Imagined
Success is a place where you find yourself connected to yourself and your values, interconnected with others. And success for me today is something I would not have been able to imagine when I was 18 years old. To live my passion for empowering people, and to share stories and space and a love and energy with people every day… this is so powerful.
This is how I define success for me. I’m so glad I didn’t listen to my friends or the school counselors of my early life.
You should define success the way you want to, too. If your dream today is to have the big house, a high-paying $200K job, and if thinking about this makes you feel happy, excited, connected with yourself, and interconnected with the world, that’s great!
Think about your own definition of success. Don’t believe what others are saying you should do or how they are measuring your actions against their definition of success. Build your own definition of success, then keep moving toward it. Keep dreaming about it. Keep putting the small pebbles in front of you to get exactly where you want to go.
There is no reason for you to settle for less, or to settle for things that are not making you feel happy and interconnected.
I hope this story has helped you to get to know me a little better and to get to know yourself. And to challenge yourself in your success.
This is so important for us as human beings: to define success on our own terms. And if you are a woman, it’s even more true in society today.
This is your life. Success should be yours. And it should not be the success of anybody else, but your version of success. Nobody else can tell you what success is for you.
How do you define success for you?