What Does Success Feel Like?

I thought I knew what suc­cess was, at least for me, and that ‘suc­cess’ was a con­cept that was easy to define in tangi­ble, con­crete, mate­ri­al­is­tic terms.

I had done the usual self-help, busi­ness build­ing exer­cises that have you define how you know when you are successful, what bench­mark you use for defin­ing your success. I’m sure you know the type of ques­tions I am refer­ring to. “You know you are suc­cess­ful when_______?” And like most peo­ple, I had filled in the blanks by defin­ing suc­cess in terms of the usual mea­sur­ing sticks: dol­lars earned or things bought. “I will be suc­cess­ful when I am earn­ing $250,000 a year, have com­pletely remod­eled my home, and have a new Audi or Mercedes sit­ting in my driveway.”

While these are all really nice goals to work towards, I am beginning to real­ize that ‘suc­cess’ is not a thing that can be held and mea­sured. ‘Suc­cess’ in all of its immense glory — is a feeling.

So rather than con­tin­u­ing to ask myself “How much money do I need in order to con­sider myself as a suc­cess?” I have begun ask­ing myself “What does suc­cess feel like?”

From this per­spec­tive, suc­cess takes on a whole new iden­tity and becomes sig­nif­i­cantly more fun to pursue.

When suc­cess is defined by how it feels, you don’t have to wait for cir­cum­stances beyond your con­trol to hap­pen in order to feel suc­cess­ful. You don’t have to wait for the money to come in, or the house to be remod­eled, or for the tim­ing to be right for you to quit your day job. You can be suc­cess­ful right here, right now, sim­ply by chang­ing the way you feel about being successful.

So what does suc­cess feel like??

For me, suc­cess feels like per­sonal free­dom, auton­omy, hap­pi­ness, and feel­ing afflu­ent. All four of these feel­ings can be achieved right now with­out my hav­ing to wait for any sig­nif­i­cant changes to take place in my life.

You can feel suc­cess­ful right now sim­ply by chang­ing the way you feel.

For me, feel­ings of per­sonal free­dom, auton­omy and hap­pi­ness are all influ­enced by the choices I make all day every day, and are often the result of my atti­tude and behavior as much as they are by the actions I take. If what I am doing does not increase my feel­ing of free­dom, auton­omy or happiness, then I can change my behavior, my actions, and my thoughts until I find ones that do increase my feel­ing of free­dom, auton­omy or happiness.

If being suc­cess­ful is some­thing that will make you feel happy or afflu­ent when you are suc­cess­ful, then why not feel happy or afflu­ent or how­ever you want to feel right now!! Why wait??

As for feel­ing afflu­ent, I am find­ing that there is a whole lot of really inex­pen­sive things that I can do that are lux­u­ri­ous and gen­er­ous and make me feel so afflu­ent. Buy­ing a small bou­quet of flowers from the local cor­ner store, or tak­ing the time to watch a favorite movie, or hav­ing some­one else do the dishes, or buy­ing one rich and gooey double-chocolate Bel­gian choco­late brownie and enjoy­ing every last morsel of it, or donat­ing $20 to a favorite char­ity………….the list is endless.

Since like attracts like, the great thing about feel­ing suc­cess­ful is that the more suc­cess­ful you feel, the more suc­cess you attract and the more suc­cess­ful you become. At least, that is what has been hap­pen­ing in my life and let me tell you, suc­cess feels great!!

What does suc­cess feel like to you?? And how are you going to bring more of those feel­ings into your life right now??