Success Defined

"Success is a journey, not a destination." - Ben Sweetland

Success is achieved when a stretch goal is met overcoming problems and difficulties by conscious effort and by application of capabilities, resources and methods. It is to be differentiated from luck, chance and doing what comes naturally without effort.

NLP Solutions: Three Guiding Principles

Success depends on both what you do and how you do it.

Being creatures of pattern and habit, we unknowingly achieve success and construct our failures. Taken together, the three NLP guiding principles - (i) failure is not an accident; (ii) feedback is the foundation of success; and (iii) success has a structure - can help you change old habits of thinking and your success hit rate. Once you have taken these three guiding principles on board, you will have at hand a valuable source of information - an effective prescription for exactly the progress you desire. "These three principles make it possible to turn what we used to think of as setbacks into success, get the feedback we need in order to know what to do next, and figure out the key factors we need to get right if we are to succeed".

The Trap of Fixation on Success

Success is nearly a magical idea for most people. In his Book The Active Life, Parker Palmer points out that in the West fixation of people on success discourages them from risk taking "because it values success over learning, and it abhors failure whether we learn from it or not. It always wants to win but win or lose, it inhibits our learning. If we win, we think we know it all and have nothing more to learn. If we lose, we feel so defeated that learning is a hollow consolation... It traps us in a system of praise or blame, credit or shame, a system that gives primacy to goals and external evaluations, devalues the gift of self-knowledge, and diminishes our capacity to take risks that may yield growth."