I want you to make sure that YOUR success roadmap is the right way up for YOU.
There are many, many different roads to success and not all of them are right for you. Do you know what success means to you? Do you know what will be at the end of your road to success? Will you enjoy the journey?
When I ask people what success means personally to them, I’m often met with a blank look. I don’t want you to be one of those people. I want you to know exactly what success means for you and I want you to make sure the success roadmap that you’re following is taking you there.
Before you set your goals – Make sure you’ve got your success roadmap taking you in the right direction!!!
I had a long chat with my teenage son last night about his future. He’s about to choose his options and has decided he wants to become a professional YouTuber. Update 2019: He’s now at college in his second year as a vocal artist (singer). I’m super proud of him and he’s got his success roadmap the right way up.
We talked about lots of things and he understands fully that he’s likely to come up against some people who don’t think this could be a real career path…(blah, blah, blah). Update 2019: He still comes up against people who don’t think singing is a real career choice, as do I as a full-time blogger.
Anyway, I wanted to share one thing that I said to him and it’s something I used to say to my coaching clients when they talked to me about their goals. Note – I no longer offer private coaching.
Make sure you’ve got your roadmap in the right direction!
So how will you know? That’s easy.
Ask these two questions.
- Will I enjoy the journey? or Am I enjoying the journey?
- Will I enjoy the destination?
If you answer no to either of these then you’re probably not going in the right direction.
If you answered yes, keep going. The journey may not always go exactly as you expected, you may hit upon some roadblocks along the way. But as long as you can keep answering yes, you’re on the right track.
Presley Swagarty, author of Be, Do and Have more say “Goals are the roadmap to success” and I absolutely agree. He goes onto say that we wouldn’t set out on a journey without knowing the destination and that’s true, well at least it is for most people.
I want you to be really clear about your destination. If you’re not sure yet, grab a free copy of my Ideal Business Workbook.
What if you’ve been working towards a goal for a long time and you realize your success roadmap is facing the wrong direction?
A lady I was coaching some time back had this realization. She had been working towards a goal she didn’t actually want. This is what she said to me when she realized that she didn’t enjoy the journey and she didn’t even want to get to the destination she’d set.
“But I’ve been working towards this goal for so many years now, I’ll be a failure if I give up now!”
Now you may be reading this and thinking well that sounds crazy but I can assure you this lady was not alone in these kinds of feelings. I hear this kind of thing time and time again.
We seem to have an inbuilt fear of failure. This used to be a huge problem for me personally but I’ve done lots of inner work to release this fear.
It’s powerful and we can use that fear to push us forward, but what happens when we do get that realization that the goal we’ve been working on is not what we want anymore?
Certainly, what happened to me was I found I’d given up on all my goals and the goals I was working on were someone else’s. I was trying to want the end destination but I didn’t. I wanted a whole new direction.
Thankfully for me, I got that new direction. I know now how to make sure my goals are my own and that I keep my success roadmap the right way up, moving me in the direction of the goals I really want to achieve.
You CAN change direction – change your destination
Also, know that you can change the destination as many times as you want. For example, if you’d have asked me in 2012 what my success destination was for my business, I would have said something along the lines of, I want a full online coaching practice. By 2017, I realized that I wasn’t enjoying that destination anymore, so I sat myself down and asked myself a lot of questions and realized I needed a new destination and a new success roadmap. At the end of 2017, I stopped coaching completely and became a full-time blogger. It was a great move for me. I absolutely love the ongoing journey and destination.
Your final destination and your stopover destinations to success
I think the easiest way for me to explain this one is to give you my own destination plan for my future. By the way, it’s taken me many years to fine tune this one.
My final destination = I am completely financially free. I am able to live my life completely the way I choose and I know that I am financially able to do that forever. I can live solely from the interest I earn on savings and investments if I choose to.
If you’ve been around me for a while, you’ll probably know I’m a Gemini and typical Gemini’s have kind of a split personality – You can read about it here My Gemini Mind and Success What I want one day is not necessarily the same the next day or even 5 minutes later for that matter, so being super specific with things like a house, a certain type of car was never going to work for me personally.
The statement I share with you (my destination) covers everything perfectly for me and it feels really good when I focus on it.
My roadmap is going to have mini, stopover destinations along the way. When my life was turned upside down in 2010, I wasn’t ready to be a full-time blogger. I needed to gain experience as a coach first. This now really helps me to give valuable advice in my blog posts and the downloads I create. As I update this post (September 2018) I’ve just reached another destination in my blogging career. I have a different blog called Ideal Weight Challenge has just hit a major milestone.
I went over 25,000 sessions in 30 days and became eligible to join Mediavine. This is going to allow me to really focus on the content I want to write and still get a really good, constantly increasing income from that blog without the need to do sponsored posts.
I’m sure there will be many more destination stopovers along the way and that’s a really good thing.
June 2019 update – I now have a 3rd blog Life and Business with Wendy – All three blogs are doing well in their own right and in a different way. Being accepted to Mediavine for my ads was a huge step and really pushed my blog earnings up.
I wrote this post about How I make money on as a blogger
Let’s do a little reframing ~ Reframing is when you mentally put a different frame around what is going on.
I’ll be a failure because I’ve been working on this goal for so long (now remember we’re talking about a goal that you’ve now worked out get’s a no to these 2 questions ~ Will I enjoy the journey? and will I enjoy the destination when I get there?)
Here comes the reframe…
I’m smart because I’ve spotted that I’m on the wrong path and now I get to change direction and head in the direction of the destination I want.
There’s almost always a positive reframe that you can put on any negative situation, play around with this idea in your own life.
So now you’ve got your roadmap pointing in the right direction, you know where you’re going (that’s your measurable goal), you’ve said YES, you’ll enjoy the destination and you’re all set to enjoy the journey even if it’s a bumpy ride.
Now before you head off, with your roadmap let me give you a few survival tips
1. What happens if I hit a roadblock on the road to success?
The road to success can be a bit bumpy. I can pretty much guarantee this will happen at some point, maybe not with the goal you’re working on now but at some time, so here’s what to do.
You have two options
Option 1: You can find a different route ~ it happens sometimes, where you just have to try something different. If what you’re doing isn’t working, try something different. Sometimes a little tweaking makes a big difference.
Or you can remove the block ~ this is always necessary when it’s an emotional block. If it’s an emotional block and you don’t clear it then it will travel with you wherever you go.
How to remove emotional blocks
We block ourselves in so many ways and these usually come down to negative or limiting emotions or negative beliefs what we’ve formed throughout our lives. EFT (Emotional Freedom techniques) often called tapping is a powerful technique that works with the energy in the body and in my opinion, it’s the best way to release these blocks.
For a demonstration of how to use EFT watch this short EFT video explaining the tapping points and how this is effective.
You can effectively use EFT on your own by learning the tapping points. If you find that you’re not getting results you can give me a shout or find an EFT practitioner near you.
2. What happens if I go off course?
The chances are you will go off course at some stage, maybe a few times and it’s okay, I think we all do it. I know I certainly do. I recommend that you have your goals written down and keep those goals in a folder. Review these goals regularly. I have mine on my desk with me every work day and I’ll often take them to read in the evening or even with me in the car if I know I’m going to have a wait. The reason I do this and recommend you do it too is that you’ll quickly spot if you’re getting side-tracked and going off course. You’re also focusing on your goals whenever you review them ~ The law of attraction states that whatever we focus in we attract into our life. It’s a no-brainer for me, write your goals down and focus on them.
3. What happens if a few months down the line I realize this isn’t right for me and I don’t want it anymore?
If that happens, read through this post again, pin it to your Pinterest board so that you can always refer back to it. This happens and again it’s okay. At the beginning of every year, I review my long-term, what I call my life goals. Because I can tell you 100% hand on my heart, the life goals I had when I was 16, 21, 30 are not the same as they are now. Some are but many got crossed off along the way and new ones got added. We are changing all the time. As we grow in ourselves and experience new things our goals will change and that’s completely natural.
Nothing is set in stone. They’re your goals to do with what you want.
I create and recommend you do the same, new goals for each year and then at least once a month I read through all of my goals for the year and check in with myself as to whether I still want to work on and achieve those goals. I then create my goals for that month based on these long-term goals.
At the end of the day, your goals are just that. YOUR goals. So you can choose when to work on them and when to let them go.
If you seriously want to achieve your goals ~ Focus on them. Write them down and keep asking yourself “What can I do now to move me closer to achieving my goal of…?
Get your answer and do it!
So there we go, I hope now you’ll be well and truly on the road to success.
More Pins of inspiration from this post.
Really great post and love your graphic. So many of us lose track of our goals. Thank you for sharing a great post
Thanks Steve. I absolutely agree. I hear people talking about their goals with so much enthusiasm and then a month or so down the line they’ve done nothing to move forward. Keeping your goals written down and close by to review is certainly key for me.
Great! Love this Wendy.
Thanks Yvette.
Great post and love the infographic!
It’s all true. We set a goal, take action, take more action then realise it’s what someone else wanted us to do. Darn! Back to the drawing board.
What we often forget is that goals, even if they’re written down, aren’t immovable objects – not cast in stone. IMO goals should be flexible because we change as we work on them so they must be able to be changed so they’re still congruent.
Lovely post!
So true Shan. Goals should always be flexible so that they can grow with us.
I love your infographic, it makes the reviewing process fun!
It is true that not all goals turn out to be quite what we pictured them from the outset and that is fine, we are all on a journey and sometimes that means taking a different turning.
Thank you Sarah. I’m an infographic novice. Always good to try new things.