S6E5 Mastermind Sneak Peak- Defining Deep Success...

That's everything that we're gonna cover in this month. And all of these questions stem from really how we define success and not how we define it on the surface, but how our actions reflect our deeply held beliefs and values. Naval ravikant a Silicon valley venture capitalist, and an incredibly wise person says desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And I don't think most of us realize that's what it is.

I think we go about desiring things all day and then wondering why we are unhappy. So fundamentally how we define success is about what we desire. In this episode, I wanna really unpack how we go about defining success. And I wanted to kind of give you a sneak peek or a taste of some of what we cover in my 12 week elite mindset training for entrepreneurs mastermind that actually starts next Monday, August 15th.

So. You don't have to be an entrepreneur or even to sign up for my mastermind to use the framework that I'm gonna give you. This is applicable for everyone to help you really define what deep success is. But it'll also just give you an idea of some of what is contained. Some of what we talk about in that elite mindset training for entrepreneurs, if you are interested in it. So I wanna begin with looking at what deep success is.

So what most people don't realize is there are actually layers to our definition of success. This is why people can achieve an extraordinary amount and still be left feeling empty. Because while they may have met the criteria for the upper levels of success, they're still missing, understanding and meeting the deeper levels of what true success is. So let me lay out what these different layers of success are to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

So the first layer is the appearance of success. And this is what we see on everybody's Instagrams, tiktok, any social media. These are also the people that we typically put on pedestals. So the ones who've achieved success. It could be your actors, the millionaire CEOs, the sports stars, the rock stars, whatever it is, we look at their life and we see success, quote unquote. We see people who have made it. They've achieved everything that they wanted in life. They have the big houses.

They have the super fancy cars, lots of money. And we calibrate our definition of success to their appearance of success. And this distinction becomes very, very important because it is actually an appearance of success. There is no correlation between what appears to be a success and what actually feels like a success on a daily basis. So many of you longtime listeners will know the origin story of why I actually created success engineering.

So it started with me reading Start with Why by Simon Sinek in the book, he goes to the Gathering the Titans at MIT. We have a bunch of multimillionaire entrepreneurs that are getting together. They're growing, they're developing, they're improving themselves in their business. And one of the speakers asked the audience, how many of you have achieved your financial goals? 80% of the people in the room put their hands up.

Most of them don't have to work another day in their lives, but the speaker followed it up with how many of you feel like a success and 80% of the people that have their hands up, put 'em back down. And that story catalyzed the creation of Success Engineering, both the podcast and the coaching that I do with entrepreneurs, because I realized there's something that even the multimillionaire entrepreneurs are missing.

And Simon Sinek goes on to talk about Success and achievement are not the same thing. Yet we often mistake one for the other. Achievement is something you can reach or attain like a goal. It's something tangible. It's clearly defined. It's measurable. success in contrast is a feeling or a state of being, and some people in the pursuit of success, simply mistake what they achieve as the final destination.

This is the reason they never feel satisfied no matter how big their yacht is, no matter how much they achieve. The false assumption that we often make is that if we simply achieve the feeling of success will follow, but it rarely does." So this is where we really get into it. So we need to ask ourselves, what is the quote unquote final destination. And so this is how we unpack to the next layer of success, which is the feeling of success.

Underneath all of the appearance of success that people have actually lies the question, how can I feel like a success in every area of my life? And I like to classify life into six main categories that have subcategories with each. There's lots of different ways to classify it, but this is what I do. You might notice a correlation between these classifications and the recent change that I made to the monthly topical focus for the podcast.

So you have your category of physical, which includes your health, your body, your fitness. Sleep recovery nutrition. Then you have relational. So you have your intimate relationships. You have your groups that you're a part of the collective, you know, how you define collective identity and relationships. You have mental.

So your clarity, your focus, productivity, learning skill, acquisition, Emotional our awareness, our acceptance of our emotions, our understanding of them, how they are signposts to fundamental needs that we have Financial. So this is, you know, in our business, this is personal and then spiritual. So this could be a certain religion. It could be purpose finding fulfillment things like flow. Presence, stuff like that.

And I have found that there is a link, especially for entrepreneurs with feeling like a success and feeling enough, so much so that sometimes I use these two interchangeably. So we can begin by asking the success or enoughness question in each of these categories. So how can I feel like a success or feel enough? With my physical body, with my health and with my. How can I feel enough as a spouse or a parent or a friend or a leader?

You can insert whatever, you know, relationship variations that you want into that equation. Then mentally, how can I feel like I've done achieved, accomplished, contributed, learned enough. How can I actually have clarity and peace of mind and not have my brain running at a hundred miles an hour?

And in emotional categories, how can I learn to navigate through this life with my emotions and appreciate what they're trying to protect me from and tell me about what I truly value my fundamental needs. Financially. How much is enough, right? Like, why do I need the money that I'm accumulating? Is my money supporting and accurately reflecting the things that I say that I value.

And then in the spiritual side, how can I be more present with the moments of my life, with my kids, with my family, with my coworkers, my employees, what impact or contribution, what I'd like to leave on this world? And then what gives my life meaning and purpose. Asking these questions really starts to unpack what success would truly feel like for ourselves. And this also brings us to an important distinction, which is the difference between fixed success. And variable success.

So people tend to think of success as a fixed point. They're like, I'm gonna get to this certain spot. And this is what Simon Sinek talks about with achievement. You can measure that. So you are either successful or you are not, and really just like anything in life, it's a spectrum. So you're either moving toward what you want. Or you're moving away from it. Success is an ever changing adjustment to circumstances and the life stages that we find ourself in.

So it's important to continue to ask these questions, continue to refine, continue to tweak, make adjustments to our life. So no matter what happens, we can be showing up as the most authentic, integrated version of ourselves. Even if that authenticity and integration shifts over time. And so while asking these questions around how we can feel like a success in these different areas is an excellent place to start, it in itself, still doesn't get down to the deeper levels of success.

So our emotions can definitely be a signpost to point towards that, but we do need to continue digging and go farther past that. So feelings, as we all know, they can be very fickle. And if we're solely basing whether we are quote unquote successful or not based on our feelings, we can basically be brutally tossed around to just picture a tiny little robot in a massive ocean. You're just kind of going back and forth.

One day you feel like it, one day you don't feel like get a success in whatever area. So what we need to do is we need to dig behind these feelings and emotions into our true values that we hold. The stories that we tell about ourselves, about the world, the people around it and the identities that we've actually built. And these stories dictate not only how we feel, but everything from how we fundamentally perceive the world, how we interact with the world.

And the stories vary by circumstance by the environment by the people were in relationship to. And so, to unpack this area of success to really start to look at these stories, to look at the identities that we have. I like looking back at just an incredible seminal work done by Shirzad Chamine on positive intelligence and he identifies 10 different saboteurs or limiting beliefs that we typically develop in childhood as means of protecting ourselves or as ways that we want to receive love.

We use these mechanisms to receive the love from our parents. So while these mechanisms, they help us initially, and they're incredibly important. A lot of times they help us navigate through childhood as no parent is perfect and no environment is perfect. These saboteurs eventually end up holding us back and limiting our true potential. So some examples to give you an idea of what this looks like is the judge. This is a huge one. Everybody has it. So it's a judge for yourself.

It's a judge for other people. It's a judge for circumstances. Some of the other ones are being hyper critical or could be being a victim. Trying to control everything, trying to please everybody hyper achiever, you know, achieving our way out of not feeling enough being hyper rational. Those give you some examples of some of the ways that we use to hide our pain or to receive love. And we continue to do this as we progress into adulthood.

So how we unpack those as we needed to look at who we were before life layered on this armor and layered on this protection and how we end up protecting ourselves from the world. And one of the ways we can do this in a very simple thing. And this takes a lot more inner work and a lot more deep work to do, but picturing yourself as a kid.

You can either just pull up a picture of yourself in early childhood, or just think in your head, back to your happiest moment that you can remember from early childhood. And what values do you have as a kid that may have gotten covered over or may have gotten diminished or numbed or whatever we do throughout the years as we try to protect ourselves. So that those values and that identity lie underneath everything that has been layered on top.

And again, this is where the deep work starts to begin. And this brings us to the fourth level of success.

So underneath all of our stories underneath the identities that we tell ourselves really is being present and being aware with the moment that we have right in front of us and Victor Frankel in Man's Search For Meaning, which is regarded as one of the quintessential books on the meaning of life says, "We can realize that the meaning of the present moment does not only change from hour to hour, but also changes from person to person.

The question is entirely different in each moment for every individual. This is why we need to do this work for ourselves to define what success means. Deep success means for ourselves, what the moments mean for ourselves and begin to look at that. Maria Popova the author of brain pickings has this incredible quote, where she says I stopped measuring my days by degrees of productivity and started experiencing them by degrees of presence.

And I, I think about that and I go, what if that truly was our definition of success? What if being successful really had to do with how present are we able to be with every moment that we are given in our days in our lives. I feel this is one of the most valuable gifts that we can give to both to ourselves, but also to every single person that we interact with in our lives.

This is the greatest gift that I can give to my spouse to be present with her in every moment, it's the greatest gift I could give to my kids to be present with them, not thinking about all the stuff I need to be doing. And then for every person that I meet, if I could be present with them the value that portrays is immense. I feel like it's one of the best ways to actually live life, to its full list without regrets.

If you knew at the end of your life that you were present with every moment, I mean, that just carries the cumulative weight and depth of a life that's well lived. And so when we take this presence in this awareness, we can actually build upon this understanding of the values that we have, who we are as people.

And we can begin to bring the awareness and intentionality into our daily life and a practical framework for actually doing this is a situational awareness and engagement tool developed by leadership coach Allen Seale where he talks about when we encounter any situation, there are four levels of how we can choose to respond to that situation or engage with it. And so the first level is looking at drama, right? Situation comes up and we're like, why did this happen? Or it's this person's fault?

Or, you know, I messed up or is a mistake or, you know, whatever we insert in there. And so often, we can get caught up in that, myself included. So we have this situation we have, we can and interact with it from a drama position. Right. But the next level is we can actually step back from the situation it's called, like situational awareness or situational engagement instead of looking at whose fault it is and pointing fingers.

We can actually step back and go what variables contributed to this situation being like it is. And that could be what role and responsibility did I have in this situation? Or what role responsibility did other people have? And also what can I do to fix the situation? What can I do to solve whatever problem has arisen. So that's situational awareness Above that though, and this is a huge distinction between the two of 'em, the next level is choice.

And this is where we actually step back from the situation. And we choose who do I want to be in this situation? And regardless of what is going on in the situation, we can choose who we want to be. And back to Victor Frankel and man search for meeting, he, he talks about the ultimate freedom that we have as human beings. This is our ability to be able to choose how we respond to situations. And this is coming from somebody who went through concentration camps in Germany, in world war II.

No, like namby-pamby really exploring the fundamental freedom that we have as people. So this again goes back to what we're looking at as little kids, right. We can look at who were we before all these layers are wrapped around us, but then also what does a situation demand? And it could, it could demand a different part of ourselves. There's some situations where we need to bring the powerful, passionate, strong parts of ourselves to the situation.

There's other situations where we need to bring peace and we need to bring calm and we need to bring patient to the situations. But knowing those and deliberately and intentionally choosing what we want to have in this situation is tremendous. And from that position, the last level of engagement with a situation is opportunity. And a lot of times when we intentionally choose who we're gonna show up as in a situation, a lot of times that opportunity naturally arises from the situation.

And we have the clarity to actually see the opportunity and potentially grab it. So I love this framework for how we can engage in situations. Again, we have drama, then you have stepping back in the situational awareness, a lot of how can we fix the situation, you have choice, who do I want to be in this situation? And then looking at where is the opportunity? And this is where the deliberate practice of being able to recognize what you are feeling.

Step back from those emotions, the thoughts, whatever is going on in the situation, choose who you want to be based on your deeply held values. Then look for the opportunity. This takes deliberate practice and it takes work and it takes intentional training to be able to do this on a consistent basis. And interestingly enough, this actually mirrors how special forces train through a technique. They call stress or fear inoculation.

So it's essentially where you learn to perform a skill in progressively more challenging and unpredictable environments, until you can execute that skill with precision, even when everything is chaotic around you. The example, especially with special forces is when you're learning to shoot. Right? So you're you learn to shoot with earmuffs on, you know, you have your gun, you're firing down range at a target. So very minimal external distractions.

Once you've mastered that skill and you can do that consistently, then you've been begin to slowly add in external stimuli unpredictability to challenge your ability to perform that skill. So in the example in the example of learning how to shoot, you might start to add in obstacles that you have to navigate around you add in movement. So you're no longer standing still, you're actually moving, navigating around these obstacles.

Then you might add in other people, you know, and these other people might be shooting at you, right. They might add in noises and explosions. And then you learn. slowly and progressively how to actually execute the necessary skill in environments that are very unpredictable and it appears to have very little control over. And so this is exactly what mental training is about.

It's about understanding who you are, then training and practicing to be able to choose, to show up as who you want to be, what the situation requires of you, regardless of how chaotic, how unpredictable it is, how tired you are, how stressed you are. So this is what we work through in my 12 week elite mindset training for entrepreneurs. So we actually dive into looking at how do we define deep success.

From uncovering our fundamental values, examining how we sabotage ourselves, how we can inoculate ourselves with from fear to taking these practical frameworks, to train ourselves, to be able to change our state, change our focus and show up in alignment with our authentic self, even when life is crazy.

So the mastermind is for entrepreneurs who are ready to, think deeply about what brings them to fulfillment, what brings him joy, peace, satisfaction, meaning, and purpose and really to define what success means to you and what you truly what your life to be like, and to be full of. So, If you're interested in that this is the last week to register. You can go to www.successengineering.org click on the mastermind application and schedule a call with me. I'd love to talk with you.

Hear where you're coming from. Here are the goals that you have and see whether it would be a good fit to work together. Again, that's success engineering.org, and you can click on the mastermind application for that. That's a sneak peek. I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek of some of just a taste of some of what we cover in the program. But again, you don't have to be an entrepreneur to use this framework.

You can take this framework, everything that I just mentioned and go, what really is success. What is deep success to me? You can use those questions around what would feel like a success in those different areas of life. And you can start to do that work. You can start to think about it, and then you can start to unpack, you know, who was I, as a kid before this. Stuff layered on top of me. And who do I want to be? And how do I wanna show up in these different situations?

So thank you guys again for your time. I don't take that responsibility lightly, and hopefully this framework provides something that you can begin to work through. Until next time, keep engineering your success.