Stuck at the starting gate? Becoming success curious

Yet you don’t pick up the phone, those letter box drops are still sitting on your table, it has been days since your last post on social media, and you decided to go out for dinner last night instead of getting that study done for your licence.

Why is that? Are your goals not strong enough to pull you through? Do you like the idea of the dream life but can’t face the work involved? You can throw away the issue by putting it down to ‘laziness’, and for a lot of leaders that look down at the younger generations, they point at a distinct apathy towards ambition and desire to succeed.

This is a conversation that has been going on for decades, and yet instead of looking at the way in which we deliver the knowledge around success, we insist on beating the same drum in the hope that a flick will magically be switched on which will transform our businesses (or the businesses of those we lead).

So how do we get ourselves or our people off their arse and into success mode?

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

I can hear leaders whining now – “Here’s some guy who is going to tell me that I’ve been doing it wrong … what does he know?!” Understandable, but unlike some predecessors of mine, I’m not here to tell you that what you know is wrong. I want you to simply assess how you are presenting your knowledge, and how we connect our actions to our goals.

We know the elements that we need in order to head off on the path of success (discipline, consistency, drive, etc), but to explain what I feel that we are missing a trick when it comes to getting ourselves going, let’s talk about the need for sacrifice.

How do we perceive sacrifice?

We all know that the actions pertaining to sacrifice are required if we want to improve the state of our lives. For example, we know that we need to go out and prospect for business if we want anyone to remotely know who we are when it comes to selling their home – but that comes at the sacrifice of our time, energy and comfort.

However, sacrificing anything is never nice; add in the fear of rejection and you’ve got enough reasons to avoid it. If you were to Google the definition of sacrifice, the first thing that comes up is “offer or kill as a religious sacrifice”, and from our childhood days this is the association that we have with the meaning of the term.

When faced with sacrificing anything, the anxiety around it is heightened because of this very perception that we’ve carried around as humans since … well, forever. Or at least since a famous leader got pinned to a cross anyway!

Generally speaking, it means foregoing a short-term dopamine hit which is not easy to resist. It’s way easier to sit behind the desk and wait for business to hopefully come to you.

Now, the concept behind sacrifice is absolutely spot on – if you want to be successful in anything, there will be a cost associated in terms of how you’re currently running your life and/or business.

You’ve got to put those hours into planting seeds with home owners if you want to build your pipeline, but my suggestion is that we reframe the concept so that what you focus on isn’t the killing of your time and comfort, but on the image that we see for ourselves in the future.

Instead of sacrifice, consider LOYALTY

If sacrifice is the killing off of something in our lives in order to achieve something greater, then another way of looking at the same meaning is being loyal towards the future version of yourself.

We all struggle to say no to temptation from time to time because of the short-term happy chemicals. But instead of sacrificing them, let’s consider wiring ourselves to focus on being loyal towards the vision of who we want to become.

Sacrificing stuff means saying no to a lot of things, which makes us feel guilty towards the current version of ourselves. But saying yes because you are being loyal to the next version of yourself has a much more positive set of feelings around it.

You can refer to this as visualisation, and act like your goals have already been achieved, but that can lead you down the “fake it until you make it” path which can cost you plenty more if you’re not careful, because delusion may creep in. But if you associate letting go of things in order to honour the next version of yourself, that sounds and feels a lot more noble, I would suggest!

Same concept, but whereas one of them comes from a place of “killing off”, the other comes from a place of honour and nobility, which is much easier to process and feels more like gain as opposed to loss.

Now, this may seem like a small change because our actions are essentially the same either way, but the impact of associating the task with a positive energy or driver will help us and our teams to become a lot more self-motivating.

Like I said before, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel because as humans, we still have operating platforms that haven’t evolved essentially all that much. However, it’s obvious that the way in which our operating platforms interpret information has certainly changed over time, so it only makes sense that we perhaps need to alter the way in which we communicate to them.

Andy Reid is an auctioneer, speaker, podcast host, and author of Success Curious.