Do you feel successful?

Do you feel successful?

Or are you waiting until you reach a certain goal at which point you will regard yourself as successful?

Success is not necessarily just about achieving certain goals. It’s not only feeling successful when you’ve got that new job, when you’ve achieved that promotion, when you have reached the top of the mountain.

If you only regard yourself as successful when that milestone has been achieved, you will spend most of your time feeling unsuccessful. 

When I was working as an FD in the Corporate World, I achieved quite a bit of ‘success’, progressing to a relatively senior level, gaining promotions, helping deliver good business performance. That said, I often didn’t feel successful. I often didn’t feel fulfilled. I was often looking & striving for the next achievement &

For me now, success is about enjoying & embracing the journey. It is about overcoming the obstacles & challenges that come our way. It is about moving past ‘failures’ and seeking out the learnings to move us towards our goal. It is about celebrating & appreciating the small wins, the progress being made.

It is about actually genuinely feeling successful & fulfilled on a regular basis. 

What is your definition of success?

Habits....do you realise the impact they have on your life?

Are you successful or unsuccessful in your business or career?

Are you content in your life or are you frustrated?

It may surprise you but the answer to these questions is very much determined by your habits.

Not just your habits in terms of what you do, but also your habitual thinking. 

Our habits of thinking and doing determine who we are, what we believe and how others see us.

If you want things in your personal or professional life to change, it will often come down to changing your habits.

So how can you do this?

Awareness – understanding what is the unhelpful habit, when does it happen, what causes it and what are the consequences?

Replacing it – Take the existing unhelpful habit and replace it with something more helpful. If you habitually feel fear in certain circumstances, try and reframe it in a positive light, see it as excitement or an opportunity to learn. 

Be persistent – habits don’t change overnight, they have been built up over many years. Developing a new habit is like building a muscle, the more we work on the stronger it gets. 

Habits play a massive role in our lives, would you not prefer to have ones that were helpful as opposed to unhelpful?

Failure is part of life...but how do you react to it?

“ I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple is the best thing that ever happened to me” Steve Jobs

“ It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure” Bill Gates

“ Success is failure in progress” Albert Einstein 

We all experience failures, it is part of life , but how do you view it, how you react to it?

Your mind can do amazing things, however, very often it is your mind that stops you from pushing towards what you really want.  

The more lessons you learn from failure, the more successful and fulfilled you will become. 

So what can you do to improve your mindset around this?

Believe in yourself- you will receive criticism and negative feedback, however don’t let that stop you believing what you are capable of. 

Embrace learning - when you fail, don’t get despondent, don’t focus on what you have done wrong, but really seek out the learnings. What didn’t go well and what I can do differently next time?

Be courageous- when you fail, it can knock your confidence, it can paralyse you and cause you to retreat, to want to stay in your comfort zone and only try things which you are confident you can do. By being courageous and quickly trying again, you will continue to push forward despite the failure. 

Failure is an inevitable part of life, however, it is our mindset around it which really determines in the long run whether we truly succeed or fail. 

Limiting Beliefs....are they holding you back?

Do you ever say to yourself:

“ I’m not experienced enough to get that promotion”

“I can’t let people know that I’m struggling with this as they will see me as incapable and not up to the job”

“ I would like to take on that assignment but I’m worried that I might fail”

These negative, fearful thoughts are not uncommon and come from limiting beliefs, embedded in our mind. They have been built up throughout our lives and are determined by many factors including experiences of the past and what people said we could or couldn’t do. 

By accepting a limiting belief, it will become your reality, so once you hear the negative critic in your head, call it out, and ask yourself something which may question your limiting belief and help move you towards your solution as opposed to focusing on the problem.

Good questions to ask yourself include:

“Do I really know this to be the case or am I assuming it?”

“If my friend the same problem what would I advise them to do?”

“How else could I look at this?”

“What could be a more helpful, empowering belief?”

By starting to ask yourself different questions when encountering limiting beliefs, you will change your reality and move it more towards a future that you really want. 

The stories we tell ourselves!

You can’t control what other people say about you, but you certainly can control what you say about yourself.

The story that you tell yourself has a huge influence on how you turn up in the world.

It has a massive impact on how you influence and get on with the people around you.

If you believe that you are not capable of doing the job, you are probably right. If you believe that you are not worthy of that promotion, then it is most likely that others will share that belief.

So, if you are you are telling yourself some unhelpful stories, which are holding you back, what can you do to change them?

Self-awareness – Become aware of what the story is. Many of our thoughts are habitual and we are probably telling ourselves many of the same unhelpful stories on a regular basis.

Realise that the story is not you, it is simply a story and many other people have similar such stories.

Ask yourself “what else could this mean?” By reframing your internal dialogue, maybe that will help you tell yourself a nicer, more helpful story.

As humans, we are always telling stories and the great storytellers stand out by reframing the stories they tell themselves.

Month-end is Approaching!

Late nights, tight deadlines, pressure to deliver good results...month-end is approaching.

Are you an Finance Director or CFO & regularly experience challenges, stresses & increased pressure around the time of month-end?

Have you ever stepped back & thought, “what can I do to alleviate some of this?”

Here are some thoughts.

Manage expectations – if you expect the numbers to be down versus forecast, tell the CEO & other stakeholders as soon as you know, even if it is mid-month. People don’t like bad news, particularly now, however where bad news is the case, people want to know sooner rather than later.

Communication – in order to complete the month-end you’re often reliant on getting information from other departments on a timely basis. If this is not regularly happening, what can you do about it? Do the other departments understand why the info is needed? What the implications are if it is delayed? By communicating & educating them, it may lead to more buy-in to the process.

Materiality – if you have confidence the number is broadly correct don’t spend ages trying to get it exact.

Month-end doesn’t have to be stressful & by putting in place some of these steps you might start to experience a more manageable, less pressured end of month process.

Tony Shafar