Do you make success impossible for yourself?

Have you ever had the experience of bopping along, taking care of your clients and living your life, when suddenly you decide this is not what you signed up for?

Welcome to the club.

I believe many entrepreneurs deal with this feeling at one point or another in the life of their business.

And I believe that, for some of those entrepreneurs, the business truly has failed to be as fulfilling as expected.

But I believe that many other entrepreneurs are just coming to grips with the fact that their life and business look differently than they’d anticipated, and therefore they must be “not working.”

Can you say “great way to keep myself from feeling good about myself and my business”?

It’s frighteningly easy to mistake the means to an end for the end itself.

Don’t downplay your success just because it looks differently than you thought it would.

For example, let’s say I decide it’s time to get my message out there on a big scale. I further decide that the way to do this is to write a best-selling book.

But what happens if the book never gets off the ground, yet the videos on my YouTube channel get thousands of unique views every week? Have I failed to accomplish my objective, or have I just gotten there by a different route than the one I’d planned on? Is my message still stuck at the starting gate, or did it arrive at the finish line wearing different clothes than what I’d been looking for?

If you insist your success look a certain way, you’ve developed a blind spot to signs of success that don’t match your preconceived notions. And that means you could end up bemoaning your lack of success when, in reality, you have succeeded – the success just showed up at the end of a route you hadn’t planned on taking.

The secret to not closing your eyes to your successes is to focus on the outcomes you want to create for your clients and for yourself. If you and your clients are experiencing everything you wanted, then does it truly matter how you arrived there (as long as it’s ethical)? I say no.

Have you defined “success” so narrowly for yourself that you’ve made it almost impossible to achieve it? (How’s that working for you?) What do you do to keep your eyes on the right prize so that you can bask in the satisfaction of a job well done – one way or the other? Please share your thoughts in the Comments section below.

(BTW, thanks to oatsy40 for posting the image of the “road closed” sign in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.)

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