A Seven Step Road Map to Success
It is natural for each of us to aim at becoming successful. The secret is that no one else can define what success mans to you because only you can determine what success looks like for yourself. If you alone know your personal meaning of success, then you are the one planning to attain it, communicating it to others to enlist the necessary support, and driving towards your destination with enthusiasm. Undoubtedly, that puts you in the driver’s seat of your own destiny.
Like all things in life, this journey too can be more fruitful when identified right, planned well, and followed through with strategic precision. Let us follow the seven-step road map presented here so you can craft your own journey in a systematic way.
Step #1:Understand yourself
Self-awareness is the foundation for understanding yourself, knowing what makes you tick and visualizing what success looks like for you. Not all of us have the necessary level of self-awareness to accomplish all this, but that could be developed with time and investment in yourself. Reading, self-reflecting, and hiring a coach are a good combination to kick start this journey that could take you beyond self-awareness to self-management, social-awareness, and relationship management; all elements that help develop your Emotional Intelligence (EI) measured by your EQ. Keep in mind that 20% of your success will be directly correlated to your skills and IQ while 80% will be correlated to your EQ.Therefore, you have a vested interest in developing your EQ!
Step #2: Discern what success looks like for you
Understanding yourself will help you identify what success means to you and what it would look like so you will know when you arrive at it. Being able to visualize success during the journey and recognize itupon arriving at your destination are both vital to not miss the opportunities along the way. Building a Vision Board is a good mechanism for bringing to life your definition of success. This can be done once you are self-aware and can be totally honest with yourself on what you want out of life. Often times, it is harder to put feelings and emotions into words, but a vision board will allow the images to speak to you and continue to evoke the enthusiasm that would drive you towards your success path.
Step #3:Take stock of what you already have
Once you know what success is to you, you need to take stock of what you already have as tools to draw from. These can range across skills, competencies, relationships, and opportunities. Make a list of these and capture how each of them will aid in your journey. Do not forget to include how each of them can help overcome obstacles and when they can be leveraged. You will have to reflect on these from time to time and be prepared to add to it as your journey continues. Think of this as a living list that evolves over the course of your journey. This list will be a strong motivator. It will also be a good reminder that you are not alone and have a support system of relationships to guide you towards your destination. Continue to cultivate and strengthen what you already have because these are your treasures to bank on.
Step #4: Identify the missing pieces
The next step is being brutally honest with yourself and identifying what are the missing elements ranging acrossskills, competencies, relationships, and opportunities. In this situation, alongside each missing piece, identify the risk of continuing to not have it and how you could go about developing it. Do not select one or two means of development; capture all approaches so when you get to the planning stage you have as many options open to you as possible. Greater the approaches to picking up the missing elements, better the chances are in accomplishing it.Sometimes, developing one of the missing pieces can unlock the door to obtaining others due to dependencies inherent in life. Hence, applying your EQ throughout this process becomes critical for a crafting a simple and easy to attain roadmap.
Step #5:Develop a plan
Success is arrived at by accomplishing a series of wins along the way. Your plan will help you craft yourjourney with the incremental accomplishments that will act as the building blocks of your success. Purpose of your plan is to realize your vision of success by using what you already have by way of skills, competencies, relationships, and opportunity. Your plan needs to containmilestones to identify accomplishments in route to your success. Some might say your plan needs to be sequential, but there will be times you would have to pursue parallel options to stay on track or make choices when arriving at the fork on your road. Therefore, I recommend prioritization and dependency identification as part of the planning process instead of focusing on remaining sequential. A good plan would have a timeline and influencing relationships to remain realistic. Flowcharting is a valuable tool for planning as it allows for decision points and choices available based on decisions made. Flowcharting is a skill that can be developed with the help of the right coach with the advantages helping both personal and business planning.
Step #6:Track progress and make course corrections as needed
Think of your success goal as the destination and your current state comprising of what you have and what you are missing as the integrated starting point. Your plan then is the vehicle to take the journey, from your starting point towards the goal. Just like you have a GPS to recalibrate your route when driving towards your destination, your plan too needs recalibration based on periodic assessment. Like the proverbial 3-year old, you must ask “Am I there yet?” and “Why not?”. These two questions will help ensure you remain focused on the goal at hand and not get sidetracked. As you take your journey, the world around you will also continue to evolve. This makes it vital that you track your progress and implement the necessary course corrections when needed to remain relevant in the evolving world as you seek your success.
Step #7: Celebrate wins and acknowledge your support system to build momentum
Make time to soak in your accomplishment, share with your network that has supported the accomplishment, and celebrate, as you accomplish the identified milestones. Document and memorialize the accomplishments and the celebration because when things do not go your way, down the road, you will need these wins to motivate you and your network to stay the course. I cannot overemphasize the importance of a positive attitude that will help you see the glass as half full instead of half empty. Your attitude, strength of the network, and momentum from wins are the motivational forces to reaching your goal and embracing your success. Your journey is not just about the end result; you must make time to enjoy the journey. Once you reach your goal, there is no siting back because success attained needs to be maintained.
As you read though these seven steps, think about how you can apply it to build your own success journey. Over the next weeks, we will further explore some of the concepts introduced here. Take the opportunity to ask questions and engage here so I can better focus on the explorations to meet your needs. We are living in an era of massive unexpected and uncontrollable change. This is the time we need to help each other to build and thrive as a community. While your success journey is yours, you cannot travel that path alone. Same goes for each one of us. Therefore, by supporting each other, our community can get to a better place.
Author:
Dr. Kasthuri Henry, PhD, MBA, CTP, Six Sigma Black Belt
Business Strategist | Coach | Trainer | Author | Educator | Speaker
