Lessons in Success
Is your radar working properly?
Success is a funny thing, isn’t it?
It’s so ingrained in our cultural narratives that we have to become a success.
But… what does it actually mean?
I think many of us, in our earlier years, are taught that success means ticking all the boxes. The house. The car. The relationship. The 2.4 children. The holidays. The steady, safe career.
These tick-box definitions of success seep into us - usually not through anyone physically giving us a checklist (although I wouldn’t put it past some parents on the more demanding/anxious end of the scale).
We don’t even arrive at these conclusions through anyone telling us what equals success (usually - ditto the demanding parents line). Instead, it’s more of a process of nudges throughout those early years - albeit sometimes pretty hefty nudges.
This was how I arrived at the conclusion that doing well in school, followed by a university education leading to a ‘good, solid’ vocational career which paid pretty well would be my path to success.
That, and finding myself a knight in shining armour as soon as possible.
Happiness - well, it was definitely part of the equation. I was lucky; my parents were always very clear that I should do what made me happy in life.
At the same time, though, there were so many mixed messages about what happiness was - not just from observing those close to me, but from society and culture: advertising, music, films, TV programmes, stories where the handsome prince always wins the day - and, again, they fed back into my internal stories about success.
We do that as humans, don’t we? We constantly benchmark our own expectations for life against what we see everyone else doing around us. At least, most of us do, when we’re young, impressionable and lacking in confidence - or even in the realisation that we have the ability to think for ourselves. That one sure took a long time to dawn on me.
Thinking about it, body image, too was a HUGE part of my success and happiness inner checklist for a long, long, long, long, LONG time - I remember friends’ parents being obsessed with WeightWatchers and exercise videos, and I started doing Cindy Crawford workout videos in my lounge as a teenager - basically deciding that unless I had a body like hers, I wasn’t succeeding in life. I was often given a hard time for my appearance as a kid (mainly my weight) - so that became my ‘must do better’.
I don’t think I’m alone in that - it’s pretty endemic.
If that’s your definition of success, by the way, then - no, I still haven’t ‘succeeded’ and I never will!
And I’m glad- because I wasn’t meant to look like Cindy Crawford, and I see now just how twisted and ridiculous it was to think that I had to look a certain way to feel worthy.
Yes, success in life, to me, has come to mean so much more than a bunch of things I can tick off a list and say ‘I did that'. I AM that. I look like that'. That isn’t success. That’s achievement (along with a large side-serving of torture and misery). And success and achievement are two very different things.
What I’ve realised is that success isn’t actually about anything external at all. We’re told it is - mostly by people who want to sell us things (have you noticed that?).
It’s not about how you look, what you achieve, whether you happen to end up in a relationship that works out, whether you have a family - or the career, the money, even whether you manage to make things work out in life. It really isn’t.
How do I know? I know - we all know - because there are plenty of people in the world who have all the things on that checklist, and more - yet they still don’t see themselves as successful. And they’re miserable.
Materially, yes, they can acknowledge what they have, where they’ve come from and so forth - but the feeling of fulfillment that they’re looking for still eludes them; taunting them like some distant dream that will one day come true.
The thing is - it won’t. Not until they learn to equate who they are with feeling fulfilled and, if you like ‘successful’, regardless of what they have or don’t have; what they’ve achieved or haven’t.
And that’s because success isn’t a milestone or a line in the sand. It’s 100% mirage - a completely imaginary mental construct. As is failure. Neither is real. Both come entirely down to how we feel about ourselves.
The point at which we become a failure is the point at which we decide we are.
The point at which we become a success - is the point at which we decide we are.
Success is an invisible bar we hold ourselves up against - which, until we learn that we have the power to bring that bar to us - always stays the same height above our heads, no matter how high we jump.
How do we bring the bar to us?
Well, that’s where it gets trickier - because the ability to bring that bar to us rather than constantly pushing it away requires us to believe that we are worthy.
Worthy of fulfillment.
Worthy of feeling successful.
Worthy of treating ourselves as successful.
Worthy of ultimately allowing ourselves to believe in our success, without any kind of external validation.
And worthy of love and self-acceptance - regardless of what we have or haven’t accomplished.
That’s not easy. Not easy at all - because most of us have had a lifetime of conditioning that’s taught us that success = supermodel abs, a steady job, finding the perfect partner, settling down, making plenty of money and ‘having it all’.
It can be very hard to break free; but when you do, and you learn to lean in to success as an inside job - wow, is it liberating!
I wonder what would have happened to my teenage self, if I’d realised that I could decide to feel successful without needing to seek anyone’s approval or tick off any items on that checklist.
Would I have found my way to this life I love, without leaving a trail of career destruction in my wake?
Would I have avoided the toxic relationships and desperate need for ‘completeness’ through approval and romantic partnership - and walked an easier path, doing what I pleased as a happily single female?
Would I have enjoyed my body more instead of punishing and criticising it - felt more confident and deserving and learnt to dance like nobody was watching a whole lot sooner?
I imagine some of that might well be true.
But I also ask that question from a place of no regret - because finding my way out of the situations my faulty radar got me stuck in has, in many ways, been the making of me.
It’s given me an appreciation of what it is to feel unworthy and unsuccessful - and huge empathy for the people I work with as a therapist; ‘successful’ people who find themselves stuck in that exact place.
It’s led me to making way better decisions in my relationships and life choices, finding happiness through learning what I really didn’t want after all. And it’s led me on a long journey of self-acceptance, which has taught me how to care for and treat my body like the incredible thing it is, no matter what it looks like and whether it ‘measures up’.
These are lessons that I’m planning to pass on to my own children - these, and the fact that they are always enough.
Does that mean I wouldn’t want them to strive to be successful - to make sure they’re financially secure, reach their true potential, follow the path to their dreams?
Not at all. Who wouldn’t want their kids to aspire to security and fulfillment?
But they’ll be learning that success doesn’t come with conditions or checklists - that security is fleeting and rediscoverable in SO many ways - and that they never need to define themselves by anyone else’s ideas of success.
Their success is whatever they choose to make it - and as long as they do this life with love, kindness and passion and do what makes them happy, they’ll be a huge success in my book.
This 👇🏻 literally IS my book.
And I’m going to be serialising it step by step, chapter by chapter, here on Substack. If you’re up for more lessons in creating real-life success through building your self-worth and learning to leave those old failure narratives behind, you might want to give it a look and subscribe!
