How do you know if you’re successful yet?

How do you know if you are successful yet?

This is a big topic right?

Do you feel successful as an entrepreneur? Are you achieving what you set out to achieve? How do you measure your success? And, if you feel successful now, if you feel successful already, are you done or are you plateauing a little bit and are you itching to go to another level?

We're talking about some big questions in today's blog. Big questions, but really, really important ones.

So many of us set off on this journey, on this adventure that is entrepreneurship and we are so busy doing the “do”, we are so busy spinning all the plates, that we forget to look up and just check that we are heading in the right direction (and that we are enjoying it as well).

That it is delivering what we want it to deliver.

Or we achieve what most people - what a lot of people - would deem to be really successful and we look around and it just feels hollow - it doesn't feel right for us.

Or we set an ambitious target, a really big goal, and we go out there and we give it everything and we smash it, and yet we feel numb. It doesn't feel like we expected it to feel.

Today is all about reconnecting - or maybe connecting in the first place - with what success means to you and I promise that you are going to feel excited and empowered as a result of today's blog.

I'm going to start with the story of my first business. I've been in business nine years this month, which I'm deeming successful, but this coaching business is my second business. My first business was a technology recruitment business and it looked awesome on paper. I had that business for five years. My accountant was really happy with me, I had a team of seven so I’d grown it to a decent size. I was doing “all the things”, I had amazing clients - the clients were just a joy to work with, really, really lovely people. I knew I was adding value to their businesses from the work that I was doing and I was being invited onto BBC Business Breakfast News, Think Money and BBC 5 Live as a Career Expert. I had that recognition, and on paper it looked awesome and it looked really strong but…

I was miserable absolutely miserable.

I had that Sunday night feeling, where you're dreading going to work because you just don't know if you can bring the energy.

I was faking it, I was mustering enthusiasm for the team, but it just wasn't real I didn’t feel integrity with who I was because I just didn't love what I was doing.

And then…

I came back to work when my youngest daughter - who is now almost five - was 2 weeks old because the business was not in a shape for me to take a proper maternity leave. At the time, I kidded myself that I was displaying flexible working, I was displaying that I was living the dream, in that I could bring my baby to the office.

I remember client calls on one hand whilse breastfeeding in the other, and feeling like I was having it all, but I was absolutely kidding myself.

It was not success.

I like to describe it as being in a golden cage. I just couldn't see a way out, and all that continued until I had this Epiphany.

I was up walking on the moors and I just had this Epiphany that this was not my life.

I could not do this anymore. I had to just call a halt to everything, and go and pursue my absolute dream. That was my line in the sand.

I shut the recruitment business down and I went quiet for a little.

I kind of slowed down to speed up, and I created the business that I have today.

Sometimes it might be a bit of roller coaster. It might not look as great on paper as that that recruitment business did, but I am living life full of joy. I've got a 100% authentic and aligned business that just feels awesome, and I skip into work every day.

My belly is full of fire and it just feels amazing.

So, when I talk about living your version of success, I really, really do put my money where my mouth is.

I see the difference that growing a successful business according to my version of success makes in my life, and it makes in my clients’ lives as well.

Let me tell you another story, this time of a client.

The client is a female managing director of a tech business and she came to me because she was being absolutely hamstrung by her investors. She'd scaled her business to a certain level, and then done what every good founder is encouraged to do, and had gone out to get investment.

The investors wanted their pound of flesh. After all, they were investing in the business to get a certain return on their investment, but there a clash of approaches and clash of integrity of values.

She was under pressure all day, every day, getting messages like ‘Why haven't you done this yet?’ ‘When are we hitting this number?’ ‘What's going wrong?’ ‘You need to sack this person’ ‘You need to do this thing’ ‘Your ideas are wrong’.

She was living in constant conflict with what she deemed to be successful, which was a happy culture with people who wanted to stay there, giving people time to get up to speed, but her investors were forcing her to jump when they said jump. Their version was absolutely focussed only on the bottom line, contrasted with what she knew to be right.

Another example of another client who is also a CEO of a technology business. She was the CEO in name, which looked great on a letterhead or on her email signature, and on LinkedIn she got invites BECAUSE she was CEO of a tech business, but she was leader in name only. When we had a conversation, it turned out that her version of success was having the freedom to do what she thought was right in the business, but every single decision that she made, every call that she made, every product line that she pursued, every hiring decision she made, was undermined by her founde,r who couldn't help but stick their nose in at every decision.

Every day was the same, not giving her freedom to stretch her legs, do what she thought was right, and she had to eat Humble Pie all the time. It made her sick absolutely made her sick because she was being undermined in front of the team.

She was doubting herself, and in the end, she ended up not taking the big risks that she needed to, in order to be successful, because she felt so undermined and unable to pursue success, in what she felt was right.

Another client, now this particular lady is the founder of a marketing consultancy. She was just about surviving and keeping going. She wasn't a rookie, but she was stuck in the weeds, she was spinning all the plates, she was spending her time doing low value tasks. She had lost sight of what success meant her and why she had launched her business in the first place, which for her was to see her kids in daylight and to disrupt her industry.

She'd drifted so much, in just focusing on surviving, that she had forgotten what success meant to her.

In one more example, I was working with a managing director of a SAAS company technology company, where she and her co-founder had decided it was time for her to step up to be a CEO rather than managing director. "We sat down, we looked at each other and we thought.. ‘What IS a CEO?’ Neither of us had a clue as to what a CEO actually did, so we got a stack of Post-its and wrote down what a CEO should be, and we literally plucked out of thin air, from our best guesses, and from her version of success, what a CEO could be, and we made that into her job description. That that was years ago, and that woman is a damn millionaire now, so this stuff is important!

If you have recognised yourself at any of these I want you to remember this: You have got an opportunity right here, right now, to draw a line in the sand and redefine and reconnect to (or connect in the first place with) your own personal definition of success.

I'm going to invite you to take some time today if possible to take yourself off for a coffee, somewhere where you're not going to be interrupted. I'd like you to disappear for a walk for half an hour, just give yourself some thinking time, where you're not going to get distracted and pulled back into the weeds.

You can write this down, you can walk it out, you can voice note it to yourself. I'm going to share some questions with you take the time to answer these slowly. I don't care how you do it but if any of these stories have resonated with you today, if you would like to feel more successful, this is an opportunity for you.

Question 1: What does success mean to me?

Question 2: How do I define success if, I had to explain it to a four-year-old?

Question 3: What values are involved in my definition of success, and in order to achieve that, what do I need to stand for? Who do I need to be?

Question 4: What's my vision for success? Like, way out in the future, big picture, macro stuff? Where am I headed? What's my definition? How will I measure it? How will I know when I've got there? How do I want it to feel? (that's a really important one)

Question 5: Where am I compromising on this vision now?

Question 6: Whose definition of success am I currently working towards? (this one can be quite confronting)

Question 7: What's one action that I can do today to draw my line in the sand, and move one step closer towards my version of success? Just one baby step, something that I can put into action immediately today

Good luck, let me know how you get on.