Everyone wants to be a success in both their personal and professional lives. Unfortunately, not everyone will take the steps necessary to become a success. What about you? Are you ready to step out of your comfort zone and write your own success story? Only you can do it!
What does success look like to you?
To some people being successful means they have their own business, a large house, and enough extra money to spend on anything they want. Others see success as raising children to be productive members of society, rather than sitting in a prison cell.
There are many ways to view success and many ways to reach it.
Before embarking on this exercise of writing your own success story, do you know what form you would like to see your success story take? In what ways do you want to be successful?
** What’s holding you back from being the success you want to be? **
Why should you actually write this down?
The biggest reason to write your success story is so you’ll have a way to measure your achievements.
Another benefit is that you’ll have a reference for a later date. If you use this method to achieve one type of success, there’s no reason why you can’t use this process again for any future success you may desire.
Do you know where you’re going?
Before you head out on a journey across the country there are some steps you probably take:
- Determine your starting point.
- Mark your ending point.
- Plot the route you’ll take with stops along the way.
It’s much the same for becoming a success except that your journey will start with writing your own success story and determining the goals to get you there (the route you need to take). The final destination is your success.
** Has there been a point in your life when you’ve been successful? **
How do you see yourself now?
Currently, where are you in relation to your final goal of success? The answer will depend on the goal you’ve chosen.
- Are you starting a new business venture?
- Do you need to lose weight?
- Have you decided to learn a new skill?
Your success story begins when you know where you are and have a plan on how to reach your ultimate goal. To help determine where you are, and what you may want to include in your new plan, look around you.
Are you currently doing things that may be sabotaging your chances of success? This may have been part of the reason you haven’t been successful in the past. Are there habits that hold you back? Do you need to go back to school to reach your goal?
Decide now that you’re willing to do whatever is necessary to become a success, and include the necessary steps in your plan.
** Do you have the training you need to become successful in your chosen area? **
What changes do you need to make?
Do you see yourself as a failure or a success? What type of self-talk do you use? Amazingly people don’t really think about these things when they begin to search for success. The answers you give to these questions can determine whether or not you’re successful.
Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” In other words, how you think can have a large impact on your reality and how well things work out for you.
See yourself as a success or see yourself as a failure, the choice is yours.
If you realize that you’ve always seen yourself nearly making your goals but never actually obtaining them, you can change that in your mind. Writing your success story can help.
** Do you sabotage your own success by the way you speak to yourself? **
How do you write a vision of your future with YOU as the main character?
Let’s get back to how to write your own success story. If you’ve taken the time to look around you and think about your past, you have a pretty good idea of your starting point. You’ve thought about how you’ve done things before and determined that doing the same thing again isn’t going to get you the success you desire. It’s time to begin writing your story.
Get out some paper and a pen and start crafting your story. There’s something therapeutic about putting pen to paper and seeing the words flow onto the paper. If you really hate to physically write, of course you can type your story if you prefer.
Instead of writing an autobiography, you want to write a story of your future as you would like it to be.
Your goal is to write your story from a detached point of view rather than a personal one. Writing in the third person (using a name rather than saying “I did something”) enables you to create the story any way you like.
** Will you make necessary changes in order to become the success you want to be? **
Are you comfortable with your past and where you’ve come from?
Write about the character using familiar elements of your own life:
- What’s the character’s background?
- What has happened in their life to make them the person they are?
- Were they a child of divorced parents or were their parents happily married?
- How many sisters and brothers did they have?
- Where did they attend school?
- Did they have stability in their life or did their family move around a lot?
- Did they have many close friends or were they more of a loner?
Each of these aspects of the character’s life made an impact on the person they’ve become.
Talk about the character’s successes and failures. Explain how they handled any failures they had and how they refused to accept defeat. Tell how the character picked himself up, dusted himself off, and then forged a new path rather than following the same path that had led to the failure.
Describe their journey to the successes they’ve experienced. For instance, list the steps the character took to become the youngest manager in the company’s history. Portray in detail the many awards they’ve received for saving the company money.
Whatever it is you want to accomplish, write it down as if it has already happened.
It’s important to be as specific as you can when you tell your story. See the successes you want to experience. Remember, you’re writing your success story. This will help you actually become the successful person you want to be.
** Have people in your past encouraged you when you’ve attempted something new? **
How do you see past failures?
Do you see your past failures as reasons why you can’t start over? Do you see them as obstacles to success? That’s one way to look at your failures, but it may not be the best way to view them. From another viewpoint, you probably learned something from them, and that’s a good thing!
Perhaps, instead, you see the times you failed as stepping stones that took you to another level? You may also see them as lessons you needed to learn in order to spur you into further action. If nothing else, they gave you experience in what NOT to do in the same situation!
Thomas Edison, when creating the light bulb, was asked about the failures of his first attempts. He replied, “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” He also said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
It may be a case of looking at the same glass and seeing it half full or half empty. It’s all in the way you perceive things.
What may seem like a failure when you’re in the midst of it may actually be a great learning experience that gives you the knowledge you need to succeed in the future.
Perhaps failing will allow you to see a need that no one has considered in the past. Because of your need, you end up coming up with a great solution!
You can start now to view future failures differently than the way you’ve viewed them in the past. There’s no reason why you can’t make changes to move forward rather than falling backward.
** Who do you know that can mentor you and guide you along your path to success? **
Where do you see yourself at the end of your story?
What’s your ultimate goal, the place that will indicate to you that you’ve achieved success? Again, be as specific as you can as to what your final destination will be. This is your view for your own future!
Along the way to your character’s final destination, be sure to include the following:
- A road map of smaller, specific, and attainable goals leading to the destination
- Measurable goals to gauge progress
- Did your character know when they had reached a particular goal?
- Did they have a subsequent goal to work toward when that one was reached?
The reason for writing out your success story in precise ways, and with as much detail as you can manage, is to see the success that you want for your own life. You want to be able to visualize the story in such a way that it’s nearly tangible.
Seeing your story with such clarity helps you recreate the details in your own life. You should be able to see what your character sees, think what they think, and feel what they feel!
** Does your desire to succeed run deeper than your fear of failure? **
A Sample Success Story
There was a young woman named Marie. As an only child, her parents encouraged her to try new things. She played a musical instrument, but she always wanted to dance. Even though she did well in school, she didn’t do as well as her parents had hoped. Still, they loved her.
They doted on her until she was nearly twelve. At that point, even though they tried to hide it from her, she heard her parents argue more and more as time went on. On her thirteenth birthday, her parents’ divorce was finalized. She was devastated and her faith in her parents, and who she thought she was, was shaken.
As the girl grew up, she wondered if she was the reason her parents divorced. She made it a point to excel in school, thinking that her parents might get back together if her grades were better. As hard as she tried, her parents never reconciled.
Marie threw herself into her education, but hesitated to become involved in a personal relationship. She graduated at the top of her class in law school. Prior to graduation she was hired by a large law firm in Virginia. Within 12 years she had become a partner in the firm.
Right before becoming a partner in the law firm, Marie took a chance on love. She began dating Dan, a college professor. They dated for a year and then became engaged. Although there are still times when she recalls her parent’s fights from her childhood, she has stepped beyond those doubts. She and Dan will be married by the end of the year.
** Are you ready to dig deep and write your own success story? What’s holding you back? **
Conclusion
Remember to use concrete words when writing your success story. Write in the past tense so your mind can begin to see the story as a reality. It’s already happened to one person and can happen for you, too!
Learning how to write your own success story can be therapeutic. Not only can it help you to see the potential you have for being a success, it can help you put down on paper things from your past that may be holding you back.
You can have the success you desire in every area of your life!
If you need to, you can go back to school to learn a new skill or refresh your knowledge.
Perhaps you’ve been a stay-at-home mom and now the children are in school. You have more time away from the children, so you can reach for the things you’ve put off.
Regardless of whatever stopped you from achieving your goals in the past, refuse to allow them to stop you now. Write a new plan to get past your limitations, and make that success story yours! Read it often and follow your plan until it becomes your reality.
And why shouldn’t you have the success you’ve wanted? You deserve it!