Success doesn’t happen by accident. Success happens when you decide what you want, you make a plan to go after it and; you follow through on the plan until you have created the result you are after. That may sound familiar; there is one key point in that which escapes most people – you decide what you want. You are the one who must determine your path to success because it is you who must decide what constitutes success in your life. There are billions spent around the world each year by people who are desperately trying to become more successful. They focus on strategies but fail to realise that strategies cannot help them if they do not really know what they want.
You cannot walk your path to success until you have built that path and; you cannot build your path to success until you know your desired destination.
I have created a FREE Guide to living the excellence lifestyle and pursuing your dreams and goals.
Plotting your path to success
The following are all key areas in building your path to success. By ensuring that you understand each of them; you will be in a much better position to create your path to success.
1. Purpose
Your purpose is what you ultimately want to do with your life and; what you want your life to be about. It is based on the areas of life which you are most passionate about and, how you would like to impact them. Many people want to leave a legacy but a legacy is what is left behind when you have dedicated yourself to living and fulfilling your purpose.
To start thinking about your purpose, try answering the following questions:
- Describe your ideal world?
- What are your greatest skills, traits and attributes?
- How can you use those skills, traits and attributes to help create that ideal world?
If you would like to discover your purpose, check out the Living Purposefully Workbook.
2. Values
Values are the rules by which you want to live your life. Nobody else is going to punish you for breaking those rules but they are an important part of who you are and how you want to live your life. As such, if you fail to live by your own values, you will be unhappy with yourself and; you will lose confidence and self belief. It is important to note that you have your own set of values, whether you know them or not.
Continuously acting in a manner contradictory to your own values is a form of self-rejection and can seriously damage your self-esteem. Just as importantly; it doesn’t matter what you achieve, if you must act against your values to achieve it; you are not going to gain real happiness from it.
If you need to discover your values, check out Values Based Living.
Everybody has their own values by which they must live their life. But do you know yours?
3. The important areas of life
You may well be familiar with the wheel of life exercise. The exercise requires you to identify the most important areas of your life. You then assess how happy you are in each of these areas. The wheel is used to symbolise the need for balance i.e. if you are happy in one area but not in another, the wheel will not be perfectly round, so it won’t move with ease.
It is a very useful coaching exercise but it can mislead your thoughts about balance. People come to think that they need to allocate the same amount of time, energy, attention, money etc. to each area of their life to achieve balance. But that is not the case e.g. one hour spent with a good friend might bring you as much joy as 20 hours spent working on an important project.
You do need to know the most important areas of your life and, you do need to know what you need to be happy in each of these life areas. You can then create a path to success for each of these areas.
Some examples of areas which might be important in your life:
- Personal Life
- Finances
- Health
- Family
- Relationships
- Work and Career
- Leisure
- Personal Improvement
Note: It is you who decides which areas of your life are most important. You can certainly choose something which does not appear on one of the lists above.
4. Dream
Now that you know which areas of your life are the most important, you need to decide what is your dream for each life area. If you were living your best life, what would that area of your life look like. You may need to start with a paragraph or two but ideally, you would then be able to narrow that down to one sentence which states clearly what you wish to achieve.
5. Strategy
There are many ways to skin a cat. You have multiple strategies you could employ to bring your dream to life but it is important that you choose the one which best suits your personality, working style and motivation. It is this strategy which will then shape your goals.
I have created a FREE Guide to living the excellence lifestyle and pursuing your dreams and goals.
6. Goals
Again, there are many different actions which you could take to implement your strategy but if you want to create an effective path to success, you must choose the most valuable actions. Not all actions will produce the same result so it is important that you select the ones which will yield the best returns for the least effort.
If you want to set effective goals, check out the Ultimate Guide to Goal Setting.
Conclusion
Your path to success is something which you must create for yourself. Nobody else can really tell you what will make you happy and; nobody can tell you the best way for you to go about creating the life you really want. You must decide your own destination and create your own path for getting there i.e. your path to success. If you look over the 6 areas I have discussed, you will realise that in fully understanding and implementing them; you are becoming a lot more focused and you are far more specific about what you need to do. Equally as important, you will be able to identify the many things you do not need to be doing. You path to success should be narrow and direct; requiring as few actions as possible while eliminating a great deal of the stress, frustration and conflict which comes with performing tasks which add no real value to your life.