7 Skills to Improve Your Mindset about Your Professional Success

"There is a powerful driving force inside every human being that, once unleashed, can make any vision, dream, or desire a reality." -Anthony Robbins

Mover and Shaker

To be clear, the term Success or Successful is not reserved for just Hollywood, CEO’s, VIP’s, Head Honcho’s, Big Kahuna's, or Top dogs. Successful people appear in every walk of life and at every stage of life.

Your first goal on your quest to be successful should be to maximize and grow your personal success skills, so you can intentionally deal with the world in which we live and life’s circumstances. These success skills help you move from where you are to where you want to go (your vision).

Expanding and growing your success skills is much easier said than done. I find that the concept of adding success skills is still lost on many people today. The myth that some people are born to be successful and the rest of us "not so much" still seems to permeate our culture even today.

The good news is that nothing could be further from the truth. Every skill you need to be successful and intentional can be added to your skill set if you decide to do so.

Out of Your Comfort Zone

If we're growing, we're always going to be out of our comfort zone. — John Maxwell

Deciding to set out on the journey of growing your success skills is a great decision. However, this decision will put you in challenging and painful situations that will force you to learn and grow, stretch what you thought was possible, change your mindset, and take you way outside of your comfort zone.

Your cozy comfort zone prevents you from growing and becoming successful. Growth is never achieved inside your safe place. It's achieved in the toil and sweat of perseverance and in the pain that comes from pushing yourself past what you thought you were capable of and on to new undiscovered levels of success.

It’s achieved by trial and error. It's accomplished by failing and falling nine times and getting up ten. Every skill you add to your success in life will only come because you decided to take a risk, step out of your comfort zone, and learn and grow.

The Seven Success Skills

Have a Clear Vision - Decide What You Want

“Don’t let others tell you what you can’t do. Don’t let the limitations of others limit your Vision. If you can remove your self-doubt and believe in yourself, you can achieve what you never thought possible.” ― Roy T. Bennett

Maybe you feel like you are traveling through life with no clear destination in mind. It’s like your a ship with no sail or rudder, being tossed around by the winds of life. You feel like life is taking you for a ride, and you can’t control it.

There is a way to control your success in life. You can know exactly where you’re going and how you’re going to get there, but it requires that you have a plan and a Vision for your Future.

Goals are critical, but first, to make your goals work for you, you must determine where you’re going and what you want to accomplish.

You start by asking yourself a few questions:

Who do I want to be in life? What’s important to me? Where am I going?

What kind of experiences do I want to have? What will get me out of bed every morning? What do I care about the most?

What have I always wanted to do but didn’t have the courage? Where would I rather be spending my time? What inspires me most?

What do I want to accomplish in my life? What do I want my income to be, my savings, vacations, and adventures?

How do I want to be remembered?

What do I want my marriage, my family, and my relationships to look like?

I strongly recommend that you take the time to write down the answers to these questions and put them together to create a Vision for your Future. Refer to it often and read through it daily to keep you focused and motivated.

Your Vision for Your Future will be a living part of you. It will morph over time and change as you change.

It will grow as you grow and learn as you learn who you’re becoming, where you want to go, and what you want to accomplish.

Every year you’ll look back at who you were the year before, and you won’t even recognize yourself because of how much you’ve grown. All because you took the time to create a Vision for your Future.

Take Action Daily

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” ―Dale Carnegie

Too often left out of the process of setting goals is taking daily action. You get so excited and focused on the outcomes you forget to make a monthly, weekly, and daily plan.

Creating a plan, writing out individual daily and short-term goals, and crossing them off one at a time as you complete them helps you realize that you are making progress towards your success goal. Progress towards the Vision for Your Future.

Monthly goals help you decide what you need to do each week. Weekly goals help you determine what you need to accomplish each day. Daily goals help you to decide what you need to accomplish each hour. The idea is to ask yourself what I can do today to take another step towards my goals and the Vision for my Future.

Daily progress turns into weekly progress, which becomes monthly progress, and before you know it, you look back, and you can’t believe what you’ve accomplished in such a short period.

This is especially important if your goal is a little bigger than usual or long-term. Because every day, as you cross off goals and priorities for the day, you’re building confidence and courage that keeps you motivated and moving closer and closer to your Future.

The action of writing down your goals and your priorities for the day and completing them is what creates the momentum to achieve your goals and dreams and become successful in life. You won’t get to where you want to be without deciding to take action daily.

So, how do YOU take action daily?

Wake up every morning, and before you start your day, take the time to write down the three most important priorities or goals for your day. Even better would be to write them down the night before.

Brian Tracy calls it, "Eat that Frog!" Pick the biggest, slimiest, and hairiest frog and eat it first.

Write down the three things that, if you were to accomplish them, they would be significant wins for the day and will move you closer to your goals. Prioritize them; start with the biggest one first.

Resolve in your mind when you leave for work each morning that these three priorities will be completed by the end of the day.

Once you’ve completed these three priorities, Celebrate the win. I’m serious, celebrate it. Have yourself a personal pep rally! Because YOU ARE ROCK’IN IT NOW!!!

Get excited that you’ve accomplished more in a day than most people accomplish in a month and have taken a major step towards your goals and towards your vision.

Set Realistic and Unrealistic Goals.

“I think goals should never be easy, they should force you to work, even if they are uncomfortable at the time.” — Michael Phelps

Step out of your comfort zone. It’s time to stop listening to those who would have you believe that you should only set reasonable goals. People who fear failure seldom succeed because failure paves the way to success. We learn far more from failing than we ever do from success.

Setting Unrealistic Goals is hugely purposeful. One, they force you to deal with failure, which is part of the learning process, and two because the purpose is not to set realistic goals and achieve them; the aim is to establish large difficult, change your life goals, and continue to work them until you reach them. This is how you become the person in your Vision.

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” — Confucius

Your confidence and courage will grow as you accomplish ‘unrealistic’ goals. You will start to believe that no dream or vision is too big for you to achieve.

You'll become more determined and motivated to achieve the things you once dreamed about but were afraid to believe could happen for you.

Identify and overcome obstacles.

Success is to be measured not by the position one has reached in life as by the obstacles he has overcome. — Booker T. Washington

When you consider your goals, it’s crucial to identify the potential obstacles between you and achieving your goals. As you identify these obstacles, go ahead and pre-determine what you’ll need to do and how you will need to prepare to remove them or move around them.

This strategy may seem contrary to some of the advice you’ve been given on goal setting, but it works. Once you’ve identified the potential obstacles and determined how you're going to overcome them, you’ll be far more prepared when they come.

You’ll feel more confident and will have the courage to charge ahead because you've already faced this obstacle in your head, decided how you are going to overcome it, and written down your plan to win.

Obstacles are the most significant deterrent to goal setting. We start with our goals; we have lots of confidence and energy, then an obstacle comes along, and we fold like a cheap suit because we didn’t prepare for it mentally.

We hear that voice in our head say, “See, I told you it wouldn’t work.”

If you own the responsibility of being prepared when things don’t go well or hit a roadblock or obstacle, you will be on your way to achieving your life goals. Life is going to happen; obstacles are going to occur; plan, and be prepared.

Winston Churchill said, “The price of greatness is responsibility.”

Own the responsibility of being prepared for the obstacles that will come, be confident, push through, and get excited that you're on your way to achieving your personal success.

Aim Small, Miss Small.

“I don’t care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don’t harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there, you’re never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants.” -Zig Ziglar

In the movie “The Patriot,” Mel Gibson plays Benjamin Martin. In one scene, Martin and his two sons ambush a unit of British soldiers. Martin asks his boys, “Do you remember what I told you about shooting?” Their answer: “Aim small-miss small.”

It means that if you aim at the target and miss, you miss the whole target, while if you aim at something specific (the bullseye) and miss, you still hit the target. This is why it’s important to have a “Bulls Eye” five to ten years into the Future. Something specific at which you’re aiming.

Benjamin Hardy states that: your purpose must center around ONE SPECIFIC OUTCOME. The more singular your focus, the more inspired and clear will be your path to achieving it. This is where it gets tricky for many people. You need to choose ONE GOAL. ONE OUTCOME.

Right now, you’re probably trying to accomplish too many things. You have competing goals that are stretching you thin and keeping you from being more effective.

This specific outcome is not just some general idea, but precisely who you want to become and what you want to accomplish. This will become your Key Goal, your One Specific Goal. All other goals will fall under this one key goal.

The more you narrow down exactly what your future looks like, exactly what you want to accomplish, your Key Goal, the easier it will be to create the goals to get you there.

Remind Yourself WHY Often

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If your WHY is big enough, you’ll be more motivated.

If your WHY is big enough, you won’t give up.

If your WHY is big enough, obstacles will seem small and insignificant.

If you have a big enough “why,” your “how” will take care of itself. Take a few minutes to write down all the reasons why reaching your one specific goal, your Vision, is so important to you.

WHAT WILL YOUR LIFE BE LIKE? HOW DO YOU WANT TO FEEL ABOUT YOURSELF?

HOW DO YOU WANT YOUR LIFE TO IMPROVE? HOW WILL THE LIVES OF THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU BE CHANGED?

WHAT GETS YOU OUT OF BED IN THE MORNING? WHAT KEEPS YOU UP AT NIGHT? WHAT EXCITES YOU?

WHAT SENTENCE WILL COME TO DEFINE YOUR LIFE?

WHAT DO YOU WANT PEOPLE TO SAY ABOUT YOU WHEN YOU'RE GONE?

Think over these questions. Write down in your journal the answers to the questions. Look for the WHY? Once you get clear on WHAT you want to achieve, it’s crucial to know WHY you want it.

The Why is what gets you up every morning and motivates you to go out and knock out your priorities for the day and move yourself closer to your vision.

Most people are so focused on achieving the goals that they miss all the important why’s. The WHY’s are what keep you motivated to put forth all the work and effort.

If you have big enough WHY’s for your goals and Vision for your Future, it substantially increases your chances for success.

Jim Rohn says, “When the WHY gets stronger, the HOW gets easier.”

Celebrate every Victory

“The more you praise and celebrate your life; the more there is in life to celebrate.” — Oprah Winfrey

When we celebrate our victories, our brain releases dopamine that energizes us and makes us feel good. It makes us want to take more action and do more of the same kind of things.

Every obstacle that you overcome moves you one step closer to realizing your goals, realizing your Vision for Your Future. This is worth celebrating!

One of the greatest things you can do for your confidence is to celebrate every win.

Have a mini-celebration at the end of every day because you knocked out your three priorities. Daily celebrations and mini-rewards create a mindset of winning.

Have a major celebration when you achieve one of your bigger goals. I'm talking throw a freakin fiesta in your honor, have your biggest supporters over, and celebrate the WIN!

When you face obstacles, decide now what you’re going to do, how you're going to prevail, and then get ready to celebrate. Overcoming challenges create an amazing sense of pride and joy in your accomplishments.

Celebrating your progress creates motivation and confidence. And when you’re feeling motivated and full of confidence, you are ready to take on more action and take on bigger challenges. Remember to enjoy the process.

When you start celebrating weekly, monthly, and then yearly victories, that my friend, is when you start to become a world-beater, a dragon slayer, a beast!!

Conclusion

Adding, expanding, and growing your success skills is the key to being successful in life. It is the thing that separates the winners from the losers.

It drives successful early morning routines, daily completion of top priorities, and the relentless pursuit of achieving. If you think that sounds hard, you’re right.

But as Zig Ziglar said, “It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be worth it.”