7 Ways to Create a Life of Success Without Ceilings Success without ceilings keeps us inspired, growing and creative.
By Sherrie Campbell •
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I recently attended a red carpet even for my new book Success Equations: A Path to Living an Emotionally Wealthy Life in Nashville Tennessee. One of our publishers gave a very inspiring talk to all of the authors who were present. He's a career football coach, business man and publisher. This amazing man taught us the difference between winning and succeeding and what this difference means when developing any brand, any product or business. This talk was so inspiring that it feels unfair to keep it to myself, so I will share it here.
To get to where we want to go in our business endeavors we must learn to focus not on winning but succeeding. Winning is a moment-to-moment process that has a start date and an end date. Succeeding is a long, uphill climb that builds our resilience and fortitude to create a life of success without ceilings. We need the following to stay in the process of succeeding:
1. Leadership
If we want to succeed, it is a must that we become the leader of our own life and of that voice that speaks to us from within. If we can't lead ourselves well, if we cannot find inspiration from within, if our inner voice is constantly berating us, it will be very difficult for us to effectively lead others. We must believe in our vision and our purpose so deeply that our fears of risk and of blind commitment come second to charging forward to test and see what we're capable of.
Success of any kind takes internal leadership, humility and the ability to communicate and network well with others.
Related: The Strengths and Weaknesses of 4 Distinct Leadership Strategies
2. Integrity
The greater our leadership abilities, the greater our knowledge, the greater our passion grows for what we do. The more honestly we show up, the more we demonstrate to others that we honor our word and their time, the more successfully we build solid, trusted networks. When we have integrity, we don't quit. We do whatever it takes to manifest what we want to see happen in our lives. We accept there are no short cuts to success that will bring us anything lasting or meaningful. We must have the integrity to be patient, to be truthful with ourselves and others and to be a person of our word. To have integrity we need to prove time and again that we do what we say we're going to do. The more integrity we have, the more other people trust they can depend on us to follow through.
Nothing will take us further in life or business than having integrity.
Related: The Importance of Integrity: Now More Than Ever
3. Vision
To succeed beyond our individual wins, our vision of success has to continue to evolve and grow. With each win, we also face the new challenge of defining and training for our next win. Success without ceilings is a type of success that keeps us inspired, it keeps us in the process of growth and the consistent flow of creativity. Visions are never black and white when we focus on winning rather than succeeding. Succeeding is a journey, an evolvement process and one that has us reaching for and living levels of life that drive us further into the depth of what we and those working with us and for us can accomplish and share in. Visions are meant to be shared and experienced together.
Winning can be accomplished alone, but creating lasting success requires a team.
4. Commitment to Excellence
To succeed in the long-term, we can't just be prepared for the challenge in front of us. We must commit to a new level of excellence at every turn. Living with a commitment to excellence means we never ever give less that what we're capable of giving. Giving the very best of ourselves to each detail of our business, to our brand or to our product will show itself in the results. Excellence takes discipline, passion and commitment. This type of commitment doesn't allow us to rest after a win. Excellence is always about being proactive. It keeps us striving for that elusive taste of success that is just out of our reach.
With a commitment to excellence what is elusive will soon become a reality.
Related: The 10 Commitments for Excellence in Business
5. Intentional Impact
We don't just want to have an impact on people, we want to intentionally infuse them with a sense of purpose and motivation. We want those we touch to feel so inspired that we are able to establish deep and meaningful emotional connections with them. When we include others in our vision, we become much more than an individual success. We morph into a team bonded by an emotional bond held so strongly that it serves to support the vision, grow the vision and take the vision forward to next level, and then to the next. On any team when a coach can develop an intentional and emotional impact on their players, those players feel like they're a part of something bigger than their individual role on the team.
Team members feel they are connected to their comrades, to an empowered leader, to a family and to a crusade that makes all the pain and hard work it takes to succeed well worth it.
6. Faith
Any effort or endeavor we engage in requires the faith to be patient through the more challenging and painful times along the journey to success. Part of succeeding is also failing and learning to come back from those failures. It is through our failures we learn to overcome our fears. We gain the experience of having to come from behind, of having to re-set our sails whenever necessary to get back on course, and to learn when to take a different path up the mountain. All of these experiences are what give us the faith and resilience to overcome.
It is going through the up's, the down's and the uncertainties along the road that we develop the deep value of faith; the faith in ourselves to succeed long-term.
Related: The Winning Traits of Faith-Based Leaders
7. Never satisfied
To get to where we want to go in our life, it takes training, it takes education, it takes grit, it takes losing, it takes getting back up and it takes the desire to always want more than the individual wins we have achieved. We must view ourselves as the eternal underdog to our goals and to compete against those goals until we achieve them. To rise above winning and transmute ourselves into true success stories, we must continue to elevate our game, raise our standards, try new things, break ceilings, break the rules of status quo, be willing to redefine and re-invent ourselves, set new goals, and always be willing to get back to the drawing board. Never be satisfied.
Never ever be satisfied with where you are, when you can always achieve more.
