Connect to Create?Success | Phase 1: Be Curious

Last year I co-authored in a book; The Successful Mind, tools to living a purposeful, productive, and happy life. Over the next five months I’ll be giving you individual sections to be able to digest it easily.

To become successful, the one action you need to take is to give yourself permission to?feel.

When you allow yourself to feel, you will become more connected. The state of connectedness is where we are able to access success. And when I reference ‘connectedness,” I do not mean gathering with a group of friends for a happy hour, taking a mental health day to binge-watch television, or booking a vacation to enable escape pattering.

By “connected,” I mean connecting to your mental or emotional roadblocks as well as societal conditioning that prevents you from being your authentic self. In other words, making the effort to come to terms with the mindset or dis-servicing beliefs you might have that prevent you from being able to articulate how you feel, who you are, and what you want in leadership, personal relationships, and self-actualization.

Over the next five months, I will be breaking down the five phases where connection and creation of the success can occur at any moment in time. Connection creates the sense, and your mindset creates the state.?

These are the five phases we’ll be examining.

1. Be Curious
2. Confront Disconnect
3. Reidentify Yourself
4. Get Clear and Live into Your Values
5. Commit to Habits That Align with Your Values

Phase 1: Be?Curious

What if I were to tell you that you are very likely living your life under a preconceived idea that someone else has conditioned you to believe about how you are intended to live?

Let’s take 50% of today’s population of 8 billion people and apply the above to it. That would mean there are 4 billion people in the world living a life that they think they should be living based on the preconceived ideas of others. Four billion people living confused and disconnected and going through the motions that society has cultivated for them.

In my professional opinion, this is a crisis and must end.

If you are reading this, there is a high probability that your life is lacking something, or maybe you are just passionate about self-growth and development. Either way, both scenarios symbolize the mindset that things can always be better. In the coaching world, we call these “reframes” and “paradigm shifts”.

The reality for most is we have been conditioned to think we need to be a certain way, to have a specific identity. The belief system that by a certain age, we should have a specific degree, profession, or relationship status. The pressure of being in a specific profession means we are meant to live a certain way or behave a specific way. And the problem is, this conditioning neither supports nor allows our mindset to become creative. It prevents us from being able to increase our awareness, especially towards emotional intelligence.

Why is emotional intelligence important?

Your lack of emotional intelligence prevents you from being able to connect and experience yourself, others, and the world from a lens of truth, security, and connectedness, what I call the TSC lens. Without TSC in the internal and external way of how you are living and showing up, the likelihood of you experiencing a true sense of success will not be possible.

Author and founder of the Heartmath Institute, Doc Lew Childre says it best,?

“Realize that now, in this moment of time, you are creating. You are creating your next moment based on what you are feeling and thinking. That is what’s?real.”

A helpful tool to reference to enhance your emotional intelligence can be Dr. Marc Brackett’s cognitive resource called the RULER:

R = recognize. Pause throughout the day and check with your mind and body. Ask yourself, “at this exact moment, what is my emotional state?”

U = understand. Be an “emotion scientist.” Why are you feeling this way? What is causing it? Ask yourself, “What could have triggered this feeling?”

L = label. Put your feelings into words. Be specific. Broaden your emotional vocabulary. Ask yourself, “am I sad? Melancholy? Unfulfilled?”

E = express. Converting emotions into words improves your health. Talk about your problems or write them down. Ask yourself, “who do I know with whom I feel safe being vulnerable?”

R = regulate. Experts recommend three strategies for regulating emotions. 1. Perform positive self-talk in the third person (i.e., he, she, or they). 2. Reframe your feelings in a positive way. 3. When you feel a negative emotion, ask yourself, “what would my best self do?”

This brings us to a particularly important theme — what is success and how do you achieve it?

Most of us know that success means different things to different people, yet for some reason success seems like a challenging thing to acquire. For instance: to persona A, success is determined by the state of mind a person is in. To person B, success is having a tangible status, such as family, professional title, house, or car. To person C, success is being able to do what you want when you want.

All the answers are relevant but not reality. What felt like success at 15 years old will feel different at 51. What last month’s success was will be different from what tomorrow’s success will be. This is reality. This is how life works.

However, if you are disconnected and living on autopilot from a preconceived notion of what you think you should be doing, you will miss the opportunity to feel your current day’s success.

Success is created internally. The sooner you take personal responsibility in creating it, the sooner you will experience it. The energetic state of success is always present, interchangeable, and ever-evolving.

This sounds like a simple concept, but, as a society, we have lost our fundamental ability and our disciplined way of life to slow down, stay present, become creative & play through curiosity.

The preconceived conditioning prevents you from knowing or making the choice to get a clear read on:

• Your state of mind
• Your desires
• Your true wants vs needs
• Your habits

Therefore, we are going to dive into these a little deeper. You cannot experience or feel a state of success if you are unable to articulate and know what the context of success means for you. This is often the biggest mistake we make in our search for the creation of success. We focus entirely on creating a mindset we think we should have to become successful versus feeling the present-day success we already have (again, a conditioned tactic).

If we are unaware of the current state, we are mentally, emotionally, financially, physically, and spiritually in — becoming successful will not happen. Our demand for security and values are two primary pillars that create success. Without having a sense of understanding solely of these two pillars of our lifestyle, there will be roadblocks that create a disconnect.?

Knowing, articulating, and applying these areas is how we can become proactive in experiencing a state of success. And having a mindset of understanding that our security and values will change as time evolves will allow us to stay in a state of mind where success is always present.

…stay tuned for Phase 2.