How To Feel Successful

As an executive coach, I’ve spent nearly 20 years working with highly successful leaders who’ve hit a bump in the road. My job is to help them get over that bump by clarifying their goals and figuring out a way to reach them so that hopefully they can lead with a little more ease.?

I work with some of these leaders on my Harvard Business Review Presents?Coaching Real Leaders podcast, where I take you behind the closed doors of real coaching sessions. I also host the?Coaching Real Leaders Community, where I’m joined by an amazing group of leaders and coaches who come together to take a deeper dive into CRL episodes and their career issues.?

And in my?Coaching Real Leaders?newsletter, I share takeaways from the many coaching conversations I’ve had over the years. Whether you are a coach or a leader, my hope is that this will help you more easily navigate the challenges you and/or those you coach face.?

Several months ago, I began coaching a leader who from all appearances seems to have it all. He has impressive academic credentials and has worked at highly reputable organizations. He holds a leadership position that is hard to come by and has done well in it. He is well liked by many including his team, his peers, and his clients. And yet, there he was at our kickoff meeting sharing that he doesn’t feel successful. He said to me “I know I should be grateful for all that I’ve done and all the opportunities that have come my way. And I am. But I don’t feel like I’ve made it. What do I need to do to succeed?”

?Tom is not unlike Naomi who I coached on the episode “How Do I Get Through My Mid-Career Crisis?” of my Coaching Real Leaders podcast. She shared that in spite of all her accomplishments, she felt a level of malaise that made her feel like she needs to do more. What Tom and Naomi have in common (as do many others including perhaps some reading this newsletter) is a lack of understanding of what success really means… to them. When I asked Tom, “well, how do you define success for yourself?,” he was quick to list what some of his business school friends had accomplished, the industry respect his mentors had garnered, the business results his old firm was achieving. Everything Tom named had nothing to do with him. He defines his success based on what others were doing.

?And there lies the problem. As long as Tom uses others to mirror his success instead of seeing his own reflection, he will continue to feel unsuccessful. This idea didn’t land comfortably with Tom at first but after several months, Tom quietly shared with me

“I get it now. I need to stop operating on borrowed conviction.” ?

For those not familiar with the term, borrowed conviction is when you make investment decisions based on what others are doing or believing without doing your own homework. In Tom’s case, he was hinging his sense of success on others rather than himself. What he had in borrowed conviction, he lacked in self-conviction.

?So how does one move from borrowed conviction to self-conviction when it comes to their success? Over the course of his coaching, Tom came to rely on two questions to help him

1.?????What’s my purpose?

2.?????What actions do I take that align with my purpose?

Purpose: This is the one that can seem too big and conceptual to tackle and yet it doesn’t need to be. In answering this question, it’s about being clear about why you’re doing what you’re doing because YOU believe in it – without judgement. It’s important to build your purpose rather than rely on someone else’s or worse not have one at all because it is the one thing that is yours and yours only. In Tom’s case, he realized that up until now, he lacked purpose and quite frankly was just doing what he believed was expected of him for as long as he could remember (even though he is well into his 40s). Basically, he was fulfilling someone else’s purpose rather than his own. No wonder he found no true meaning in his accomplishments. As John Coleman well states in his Harvard Business Review article, “Purpose is a thing you build, not a thing you find.” ?So, the first step was for Tom to come to terms with what is it that he wants, envisions and desires for his life. He did this by defining the impact he wants to have and difference he wants to make. He wrote it down as a living document – one that he could come back to and refine from time to time.

?Actions: In his book “The Earned Life”. Marshall Goldsmith states that you are living an earned life when the things you do today are aligned with what your goals are and what you want to achieve in life.?For Tom, that means looking at where and how he spends his energy and determining whether his actions are aligned with achieving his purpose. Through this process, he realized that much of his time was spent being pulled in many different directions because of other people’s demands on him. Does this mean that Tom should ignore everyone else? No. It just means he needed to make room for what was important to him too. This shift in perspective enabled Tom to reevaluate his entire calendar and make significant changes that were more aligned with his goals. And that feeling of seeing a direct line between his actions and his purpose gave him that sense of success that he’d been chasing.

It's so easy to get caught up in what others do or expect and as a result lose our self in the process – it’s no wonder Theodore Roosevelt’s “comparison is the thief of joy” wisdom has stood the test of time. This does not mean we don’t notice what others are doing. But when we do, we find inspiration from them -- not intimidation. In Tom’s case, this meant using what he sees in others to inform him while coming up with his own path and measure for his success.

How do you define success? What makes you feel successful??