The Three Pillars of Success - Lessons From Keith Cunningham

One of the things I've learned on my own entrepreneurial journey is that there are certain things, certain practices that you can do that make success pretty much inevitable. And the truth is that the higher that you want to go, the better that you want to be, you know, becoming that best version of yourself, the more that you need people around you, who are they going to, firstly, hold you to account, but also tell you the things that other people are too afraid to tell you. And that can be quite intimidating, particularly in the beginning, because a lot of us like to have positive feedback for things we don't always like to hear, the things that can be more challenging, more negative, but it's from those places that you really grow. 

I was studying some work with Keith Cunningham, who's got a fantastic book, which is called The Road Less Stupid, and he has a thing which is called the three pillars of success and I believe these, in fact, I've heard these multiple times, not just from Keith, but I've applied them in my life for a number of years now, and they're very, very simple, and I do like the power of three. These three pillars are something that I would encourage you to have a think about and see if they could help you.

The first one is every single day when you get up make sure that you're very, very clear about your key outcomes, your key results for the day. This is not a to do list, this is not everything that you need to do, it's not getting the mail, it's not going shopping, this is the outcomes, and those outcomes should be very much related to your goals, be that the goals that you have for the next three months, or it could be that your goals that you have for the year, but you are making progress, so the outcomes are very clearly aligned to those. 

The second thing you've got to make sure of is that before you go to bed at night, make sure that you have planned the next day. I often say never start the next day until it's really, really planned in front of you. And that doesn't mean like filling your diary up with every possible space between whatever time you start, let's say eight in the morning, all the way through until six at night and having no white space, but it does mean making sure that you have the intention very, very clear. The practice that I have is I plan my day, my next day, at night before I go to bed, I've got a clear idea of what I'm trying to achieve, the meetings and everything else, and then when I write down my outcomes in the morning, they're already calibrated by what I've set in action the night before.

One of the things that is quite bizarre about this is if you do this practice and you get clear about what you're trying to achieve the following day when you fall asleep, your brain starts to work in this kind of mysterious way of solving problems. I often wake up and if there's something that I was challenged about before I went to bed, the answer is very clear in my head the next day. And then I use that process to, as I said, set the outcomes.

The third piece, the third pillar, is really about accountability. If you want to get there, as I opened up this blog today, if you want to get somewhere, you've got to have people around you who are going to support you, challenge you, hold you to account.

The experience I had with this, I had a fitness goal, I wanted to get really lean, lose some weight, basically to impact my running and just to kind of feel just a bit lighter on my feet, not that I was carrying heaps of weight. I went to a personal trainer and a lot of what I was taught from that personal trainer, wasn't really about how to exercise more, how to eat better, it was the fact that I had a weekly check-in and I had to have metrics around the various things that I was looking to improve, and that weekly check-in, because it was scheduled, because I had that person there who I knew was going to kick my ass if I didn't do it, made me take more action, it motivated me to take more action.

So, the sequence here is this, if you want to create success in life, it's very much there for you to grab, it's the gift that is there for all of us, but like most things in life, it's not necessarily difficult to understand, but sometimes it's not that easy to put into practice. Remember three things. First and foremost, make sure that you start your day with your outcomes very, very clear. Before you go to bed at night, make sure that you've planned your next day, so that you're very intentional with your time. For any of the big things you're trying to progress, make sure you have accountability, be that a coach, be that a mentor, be that someone in your sphere who you can work with, that's going to give you more certainty, more direction so that anything that you are trying to achieve is absolutely possible.

Nick Bradley

Scale Up Your Business

www.suyb.global