success – Mindflight

“Success” might be nearer than you think

Some want private jets, some want huge houses, some want a six figure income, some want a spouse and kids and enough money to live on. Some want to run everything in the world. Some want political office. Some want a private island. Some want vacations in exotic lands. Some just want a steadily paying job.

My definition of “Success” has changed a lot over the years.

Once, I would have thought that I had to be rich. “Rich” meant a few million in the bank, a fancy car, trips to exotic places. I thought I’d probably never see “real” success.

Now, I can see that I have met many of my own definitions of success. I work a steady job and feed my little family on one income. We have a bit to put by each month. I have a paid off car, a little old, it’s true, but paid off. We eat good food and live in a place that suits us, and that we like. We don’t take any kind of government assistance. We have a few published books to our credit. We have time for art and living.

How did we get there?

By not giving up. By not becoming enmeshed in credit. By jumping on opportunities when they arose. By living frugally. By saying “no” to cable bills and smart phones. By saying “no” to the huge TV and the false need of a new car every few years. By standing by our friends and building loyalty with them. By not living beyond our means.

Some would still consider us poor, but it’s all in how you look at it.

What would greater success mean for us? Our dreams are still fairly simple. We want more exposure for our books, more books of ours on the shelf, more art of ours on the wall, one more nice computer. Someday we want a home that costs maybe two to three hundred thousand dollars. We want a bigger nest egg.

Those dreams are not so grandiose. They can be achieved with hard work and ingenuity.

Why not take a few minutes to measure the places where you are successful? Think about what real success means to you. Think about the paths to get there. Maybe the path is shorter than you think.

via Daily Prompt: Successful

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/successful/

Success – step by step

Healthy Living, Personal Growth, Tips for Writers

It’s good to have goals. Sometimes, no matter what we do, we fail at them and don’t think we can succeed. How does a person deal with that? We try and try and never get anywhere. This can happen with weight loss, creating a business, kicking a bad habit, writing a book. I’ve found that large goals are pretty hard to achieve unless you do it the right way. I call this Incremental Success. Here’s how.

Shift your Mindset

If you are going to succeed, it’s very important that you shift your mindset. You knew that, though, right? Easier said than done. The simplest way to do that is to take extra time out to focus on the successes you have made. Get better and better at doing that and soon it will be more natural to think of solutions before roadblocks, strategies instead of why you can’t do something.

Make Small Goals

Finally, keep your goals small. Keep your efforts incremental. That way you can notice and mentally celebrate whenever you achieve a step. Also notice those little non measurable aspects of success. In weight loss, for example, how it’s easier to get up off the floor after a few days of exercise, or maybe you are less winded after your walk.

Enjoy the Process

While you are not giving up and focusing on success, there’s a way to make it fun! Get interested in the process. The journey is as important as the destination. When you encounter a roadblock, you can almost make a game of thinking of ways around it. Get creative whenever possible. Accept that you will have failures and decide you will learn from them.

Don’t Give Up

Most successful people will agree that the main key to achieving goals is not giving up. That sounds incredibly obvious, but it’s also rather easy to do. Many of us give up by default. But persistence is the one thing that the greatest people in the world, past and present, share.

To continue with the weight loss example, here is how you might follow the incremental plan under this circumstance. It’s easy to see how this could translate to any long term goal.
First, shift your mindset and decide that you can lose weight. Focus on times in the past where you have shown self control. Prove to yourself in this way that it’s possible.

Next, instead of deciding “I am going to lose ten pounds” which seems like a reasonable goal, decide “I am going to cut 100 calories a day.” Or “I am going to take a fifteen minute walk every morning.”

Then, as you do this, notice all the small ways your new habit is benefiting you. Maybe you breathe a little easier. Maybe you feel a little better. Continue with new goals and keep them small.

Don’t give up. If you have a bad day, or even a lapse of a week, get back to it. Just stop giving up. Keep on doing it.

That is how you can achieve incremental success.

“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”

Sir Winston Churchill

“It is wonderful what great strides can be made when there is a resolute purpose behind them.”

Sir Winston Churchill

Rekindle your Passions

Thoughts About Life

Sometimes, when a person is being dragged down by nearly every aspect of life, they have to stop and really think about what they love. At that moment, they have the opportunity to reconnect with the passions that used to drive them. Not long ago, I found myself giving up on and turning away from nearly everything I ever loved, and nearly forgetting HOW to love at all. Sure, I could like things, but it was always transitory and a little hollow. There was no incentive to try or do anything because the reward for success was so small.

One of the things I used to love, and am learning to love again, was flying. I did quite a bit of it, but then my fear and social anxiety raised their ugly heads. I wasn’t successful in getting my license, and later financial troubles took me away from flying altogether. This hurt a LOT. Eventually I got tired of it hurting and started caring about it less. When we give in to fear and pain as I did, we die inside. Sure enough, I started caring less about other things too, like art. Art is the one thing I’ve loved since babyhood. Then various disasters struck and I started running from my fear and pain there too… it was a decline that ate away at my joy. Only now, coming out on the other side of it, can I see just how much.

I once started a flight diary. I lovingly described every detail of my aviation experience. I stopped when I quit flying. The question now remains, how do I want my story to end? In defeat, or victory? A famous aviatrix once believed that success lay mostly in tenacity, in not giving up. I was very good at giving up. How about giving that up? When I started this process, I wondered “do I have what it takes to say ‘from where the sun now stands, I will give up no more, forever?’ I wasn’t sure if I did or not.

I started rereading some of my old favorite authors, did art about flight again, read AirNav to get a look at what’s in my area. I felt tension build inside me, fear mixed with happiness. It was rocky and I still don’t have it down perfectly. I have setbacks. Still, overall, I felt more passion and joy reenter my life. In essence, I re-found myself.

You can do this too. Is there something you’ve given up because of fear or loss of hope? You can have it back again. Let’s feed the joy and let it outshine the fear.