How are you accelerating your personal success?
The Next Level Journey is about finding a path to maintain your personal success. This article completes a 3-part series answering this important question: how do you accelerate success when the pace of life does not support the personal development?
There’s no question about it, most of us are living a frantic lifestyle.
There is price to be paid for this pace. It shows up in the decline of health, lack of direction, out-of-balance work-life, excessive stress, and relationship strain.
The way to accelerate personal growth is to slow life down.
Once you make begin to “slow life down”, you must choose to support your personal growth; this leads to principle two.
Life requires consistent reflection to be productive
The pace of life stands in direct opposition to your practice of this success supporting discipline of consistent reflection.
Let me repeat and encourage you to consider this statement:
“The Best Predictor of Continued Success is the ability and willingness to learn and change achieved through consistent reflection on your Story.”
-Steve Laswell
As you slow the pace down and engage your head and heart in consistent reflection on your story (i.e. – feedback, experience, success, and failure) you position yourself for continued success.
Now, Principle #3:
Creating space supports success in all of life.
Space includes both a period of time and a place to fit something in. To create is to bring something into existence. To create space means you make room in your schedule for an appointment with yourself with the goal to listen to your story, the events of your day, week, month, year…life.
What’s that you say? You don’t have time.
Benno Schmidt, Jr. took over as president of Yale in 1986. I like what he said about creating space and leadership…
“If I can’t put my feet on the desk and look out the window and think without an agenda, I might be managing Yale, but I will not be leading it.”
Let’s just say, you are the president of Your Life. Without time and place to give careful thought to the Story you may be “managing life”, but are you “leading it”?
If you are not leading your life who or what is?
Creating space supports leadership development. Truth, the facts or reality come to liberate us from limiting behaviors. Then, with improved performance comes better results . . . success happens.
What goes into “creating space”?
- Time
- Place
- Resources
What do I mean by “resources”? It can be any of the following or a combination thereof:
- Asking yourself open-ended questions
- Reading daily in a helpful book
- Talking with an objective friend
- Using a certified coach
- Writing in your journal
- Practicing a deep breathing
- Sending a smile to your face
- Laughing out loud…fake it till you make it
- Silence – quiet the voices, turn off the gadgets
- Listen
- Your story…that meeting, conversation, decision, experience, feedback, success, and failure
Creating space – time & place for reflective thinking and writing allows you to reconsider previous actions, events, decisions, feedback, experience, success, or failure…the Story.
What is your reward for consistent reflection on the Story?
Freedom. Growth. Success in life.
How much time do you have or want in your daily or weekly schedule for consistent reflection?
What’s doable? It can be 5 or 10 minutes, it will make a difference.
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Thanks for reading The People Project blog.
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