Living a successful life. What does that mean? Success in your friendships? Your love life? Your finances? Your career? Your health?
Sometimes success can be elusive, perhaps because your definition of success is different than mine and different from your neighbour’s-and what a good thing that is!
Success is not a destination and if you think about it in those terms, you may never get there. Success is more a journey, something you can experience every day and no doubt do. When you become more aware of your everyday successes, confidence naturally grows, and when it does, life can feel more satisfying and the bigger successes are sure to come!
Here’s a task that really helps you keep track of your successes. At the end of the day, sit down with a pen and a piece of paper. Predict what kind of day you’re going to have tomorrow on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best kind of day possible, and 0 being the worst. Write down what you’re going to do to help you be at that number.
At the end of the day tomorrow, think about what kind of day you had on that same scale. Was your prediction right? What did you do that helped you have the kind of day you did? What did you do that helped that number from being lower?
Repeat the exercise again for the following day.
Keeping track of what’s helped you succeed, even in the smallest of ways, can be really powerful. You can use that record when things aren’t going so well to help you remember your successes-to feel better and also to get some ideas on what you could do that will help in the future.
Keeping track of your successes builds momentum. It gives you strength, courage, and motivation to keep going even when the going gets tough.
People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed.
~Tony Robbins
In the book, The Power of Focus, authors Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Les Hewitt, suggest a similar process they call the Success Log. They suggest keeping a scrapbook of everything you’ve been successful at from the earliest of days.
Learning to walk and to ride a bike are two examples. Creating these “positive mental stepping stones” reminds you that you have and you will be successful again.
