5 Tips for Personal Success
Achieving personal success is an attractive goal for many. People want to achieve the goals they set for themselves in all aspects of life, including sports, work, education, and relationships.
Many people believe that success is a mixture of equal parts hard work and luck. However, the reality is that there’s no magic formula for success. Each person, their abilities, and their specific situation will tip the balance towards either internal or external factors.
A key aspect to keep in mind is that personal success takes time and dedication to achieve. It isn’t something you can accomplish overnight. Although everyone wants and is highly motivated by success, obsessing over it isn’t beneficial for mental health.
Keep these keys in mind to achieve personal success
Due to the fact that personal success is a topic that interests many people, here are some simple tips to maximize your chances of achieving it.
1. Start meditating
The dizzying pace of your daily routine probably doesn’t allow you to reflect. In their daily lives, people get swept up in their responsibilities and forget to dedicate a few minutes to themselves.
In this sense, meditation can be the first step toward personal success. This discipline focuses attention on what’s happening inside of you rather than in your external environment. Thus, it makes it possible to organize your thoughts and direct your attention to what’s really important: the present moment.
The great advantage of meditation is that anyone can learn it and it’s quite inexpensive. This is because it doesn’t require specific spaces or materials. In fact, all you need to do is find a comfortable and quiet place.
2. Personal success: organize your goals and priorities
Personal success involves achieving many things, such as work gratification and fulfillment, familial stability, finding a stable partner, and developing your own abilities, among others. But taking on many things at once can be overwhelming.
There are so many goals that it’s impossible to focus on achieving them all at once. Thus, you need to know how to prioritize and distinguish between what you want and what’s urgent and necessary.
A tool that can be really useful for this is the Wheel of Life. This technique allows you to evaluate all the areas that make up your life with a circle. In addition, by visually representing everything in your life, it allows you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each one in a very easy way.
3. Learn to assertively say “no”
It isn’t easy for people to say “no” to others’ requests. The discomfort that these people feel is so great that, on many occasions, they prefer to give in, even if they don’t want to.
But constantly focusing your attention on others is an obstacle to personal success. It goes without saying that there’s nothing wrong with helping others. However, this becomes an issue when other people’s requests don’t allow you to meet your own needs.
Learning to say “no”, as well as the way you say, are equally important. Although assertiveness consists of expressing your wishes and preferences, you have to do it in a polite and respectful way. If you take both aspects into account, you can avoid negatively affecting your relationships.
4. Act like a leader and be proactive
One thing that characterizes people who have achieved personal success is that they don’t wait for others to tell them what to do. These people have an iron will and the self-confidence to make big changes.
Proactivity is the ability to anticipate situations. Proactive people don’t wait for a problem to fix it. Instead, they analyze the environment, detect potential problems, and act to prevent them from happening.
Usually, leaders are very proactive people. Effective leaders initiate changes themselves. They’re action-oriented nonconformists who seek continuous personal development.
5. Personal success: set short-term goals
Personal goals differ depending on when it’s possible to achieve them. If you can achieve a goal within a week or two, it’s a short-term goal. On the contrary, if it’ll take months or years to achieve, it’s a long-term goal.
Although personal success is a long-term goal, the plans we establish to achieve it are short-term goals. Short-term goals are easier to achieve and give you information on your progress.
On the other hand, long-term goals require a lot of motivation and commitment. This is because, as they take longer, it’s easy to fall into inactivity and procrastination.
Achieving personal success greatly depends on your mindset
It’s impossible to measure how external and internal factors influence personal success. In some situations, luck or context are more important to achieving goals while, in others, personal qualities carry more weight.
Regardless of the factors that play a role, you should only focus on those that are within your control. Focusing on factors that are out of your hands, such as luck or other people’s behavior, is counterproductive, as it distracts you from your goals.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Grant, Adam; Ashford, Susan (2008). «The dynamics of proactivity at work». Research in Organizational Behavior 28: 3-34
