Out Of Office

What does success mean to you, does it mean getting out of bed each day and facing the challenges ahead of you?

Does success mean facing your demons, and then being able to close the door on them?

Does success mean making stacks and stacks of money, to spend on anything you like without really thinking about it?

Following a fairly emotive conversation this week where my definition of success was challenged, I decided to declare my definition of success.

The last few years have been very difficult following some personal mountains that both my husband and I had to climb; we both lost our jobs within one month of each other back in 2008, and when you’ve spent years working on your “career” and rising to the echelons of supposed success, where you are earning a “nice” wage between you and you have attained the house of your dreams maybe, the luxuries of life, nice cars to drive, shopping without due consideration on how much you were spending on your food and general household goods; losing that income and the lifestyle, and maybe the security.

The belief that a you are secure in your lifestyle, that you have planned for your future and you will be able to retire at a certain age, you will be able to have the holidays that you want.

When that is taken away from you without due notice it can be totally devastating emotionally, let’s forget the financial side of this that’s hard to enough to cope with, plus you still have all those trappings to pay for, that lifestyle to either forget, maintain or try to recover maybe.
So to help us ascend this mountain of ours we both retrained and both started our own businesses, which we’ve both been running now for around a year each, and are both doing very nicely thank you; that’s where my question of success was brought into play.

I argued that very thing to somebody, that ‘we’re doing very nicely thank you,’ we are doing well with our businesses, but the accusation was laid at my door that I was contradicting myself by saying that, when I was also saying that I haven’t got the money for this or haven’t got the money for that. I didn’t bother arguing with my definition of success at that point it didn’t seem worthwhile but it did lead me to think that this subject was worthy of blog for a number of reasons; it can actually be very cathartic to face these challenges and to bring them into open discussion.
I have chosen you as my audience for this discussion, my associates, my friends, my business colleagues and even people I don’t know, and you may be just starting out in business or even have been in business a number of years, you may be one of those people has that has “made it”.

So in our  “middle-age” we’ve had to relearn, not just relearn our trade, but how to run a business, and to redefine what is important, what really can be managed with or without and our/ my definition of success.

Our/ my definition of success is building a huge network of business associates, colleagues people we can turn to for advice, and real friends; because one thing we have really learnt from changing from employee status to business people is that the people you work with as an employee are invariably just people you work with, no matter how long you’ve worked with them or how close you think you’ve got with that person when you no longer work there you slip from the memory, maybe this is simply the human condition.

So to continue with my idea of success;

• it’s getting up each day and getting on with the business and still being able to run that business each day,
• it’s by hearing referrals from business colleagues and clients, and people you network with saying how good you are at your job, how clever you were to do this, how great you were to do that,
• to relate/ interact with virtual strangers on a daily basis and become such close associates and friends
• it’s winning a new client.

Because certainly real friends have been made through all this;  and at the end of it, maybe just enough money coming in for life’s necessities is our/ my success, paying the bills is success, satisfaction is success, knowing we are doing a good job is success, the next new client is success, by achieving all this in our own name (despite everything) is SUCCESS!