through your mind? Maybe the examples and pictures just keep gushing out. Like opening a champagne bottle with a sword. Or maybe you are thinking: The last 12 months were quite tricky – what successes could I have achieved? Or maybe you're just trying to figure out how to answer my question: Am I talking exclusively about professional successes or also about personal ones? And what can be considered a significant success? Is it enough to have acquired a project with a dream customer? Does making an effort to go jogging regularly and lose three kilos count? Or is nothing worth mentioning except the first million net annual income or a dream wedding in Mauritius?
From my experience, I can assure you that people react very differently when asked about their recent successes. If you hesitated even a little bit in your answer, this little exercise has already revealed one thing: It is not part of our daily routine to visualize our successes. Many of us never realize what they have already achieved in their lives – both professionally and personally. However, when it comes to making decisions – but also in crises, from personal life crises to shutdowns in the event of a pandemic – it is incredibly helpful to remember past successes. After we perceive what we have already achieved in the first step, we can understand it in subsequent steps and recognize its patterns. Finally, we can draw strength from our past achievements and find solutions to challenging situations more quickly in the future. And this is what this chapter is about.
Commitment, support from others or pure luck? Typical interpretations of success
Patrick is experiencing a rollercoaster of emotions. His initial euphoria about his dream job has turned into doubt and nervous uncertainty. He wonders whether a job at the top of his company's hierarchy will still be as fun as his previous job. Could he end up losing his beloved freedom in Japan? Was he now on the road of becoming the slick career guy he never wanted to be? After his mother pointed it out to him, he also worries about what the new professional situation would mean for his relationship and Laura's previously unfulfilled desire to have children. But maybe Patrick has already successfully mastered similar turning points in his life? He had never reflected on this before. When Laura asked him about his most significant achievements to date, the look on his face just said, "Huh?"
Patrick's reaction corresponds to one of four typical reaction patterns that I experience when I talk to people about their past achievements and ask them how they think they have achieved them. There are certainly people like Patrick who have never asked themselves what their greatest successes are and how they managed to achieve them. Here are three more common answers:
● "I've always worked hard and fought for my successes. It was hard at times, but I fought my way through. In the end, my success has always proved me right. I know I can count on myself."
● "I owe my successes to other people. I had a supportive home, invaluable teachers and mentors, and consistently great teams. I am grateful for what I was able to learn from all these people."
● "First of all, I was lucky. I was always in the right place at the right time. Doors opened for me and I walked right through them. Life is a sequence of coincidences. Only in hindsight may we imagine that there are patterns."
What is your answer? Pretty sure it won't correspond one hundred percent with any of the three I have mentioned. But maybe one of the answers sounds a bit like you? Assuming that you aren't like Patrick and consider the question alone to be strange. This is alternative four.
There is no right or wrong interpretation of your past successes. But by recognizing what interpretation pattern is most likely for you, you will learn a little more about yourself. You are on track to discover your personal principles of success. From the outside, one might say that just about every career includes certain parts of the three patterns mentioned above: commitment and struggle as well as support from others and, ultimately, happiness. But objectivity does not matter here.
What are the greatest achievements of your life so far?
I invite you to focus your attention beyond the past 12 months and onto your entire life so far: What do you consider to be the most significant achievements of your life to date? I am referring to both professional successes, such as your first steady job or your first management position, and personal successes in the broadest sense, such as your first child's birth or running a marathon. Career milestones often seem more tangible to us than private successes at first glance – after all, we are used to listing our professional development in a resume. However, in this case it doesn't matter what you would include in your resume. But rather how important success was and still is for you personally. One of my greatest professional successes, for example, is the first seminar I held entirely in English more than 20 years ago. This is hardly a valid point for a resume, but for me personally, it was a milestone.
Personal successes are just as important here as professional ones! My personal list includes my son's birth, the academic celebration of my graduation in business administration or the wedding anniversary with my husband. Personal successes can sometimes be rather dramatic and sometimes pretty low-key. For example, I know a man who learned to walk again as a teenager after a swimming accident. A huge amount of willpower and a defining success for this individual! Or a woman, whose greatest successes include, in her opinion, the fact that she was able to put aside a behavior that originated in an
overprotective childhood and started to face life with all its ups and downs. This is a long, tenacious and not very dramatic process – and at the same time one of the greatest successes of this person. What comes to mind when you think of your professional and personal successes?
Exercise: Your greatest professional and personal successes
You can use a large piece of paper, small sticky notes (Post-its®), and a pen if you like. You can also use adhesive tape to attach two smaller pieces of paper together to create one large sheet. The important thing is that you have enough space to fit ten or more sticky notes on the sheet.
Now grab your pen and divide your paper with a horizontal line into two halves of equal size. The upper half is for your professional success, the lower half for your personal success. On the right end of the line, add an arrowhead. The line/arrow is now the timeline from your past to the present.
It' s entirely up to you how far in the past you want your timeline to begin. You can start at the time of your high school graduation, enrollment in school or at birth. Or you can start with your past lives – if you believe in those and think you might have some knowledge about it … You decide!
Now use the sticky notes to write down your greatest successes to date using keywords. Then stick them along the time axis in the appropriate field for professional or private successes. Allow yourself at least twenty minutes. Some successes may be less obvious and only come to mind after a certain amount of reflection.
Sticky notes have the advantage of being able to discard individual events and replace them with those that are more important to you. Now fill your sheet and rearrange the notes as necessary until the overall picture appears coherent. Examine the result for a moment. What does this trigger in you?
Please do not toss the sheet just yet but put it aside for another exercise later in this chapter.
It is a decisive moment to look back on the greatest successes of their lives for many people for the first time. Whether it is purely in their mind or with the help of the exercise described in the box. Biographical knowledge is mostly subconscious knowledge – most of our past experiences do not occur in everyday life. But we haven't completely forgotten formative events, we can recall them. (In unique states of relaxation, such as hypnosis, we can remember almost everything).
This process of placing and becoming aware of past successes
