Mindset Monday - Redefining Success: Creating Clarity to Optimize Performance

This is episode 260 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast and another episode of Mindset Monday. This is the short little episodes that I do. All about mindset that helps you perform optimally in your leadership and your life. Now, what I've noticed is that so many people don't consider themselves leaders. And the people I'm speaking to, I know you are a leader. You are someone who likely has people who depend on you, whether it's your family or whether it's people that you work with. And if that's the case, you are a leader. And I want you to be able to identify as that because so many people need those who are going to lead and have that positive impact on those around them. And that's what we want. We want to help you create your empowered leadership. So today our topic is Redefining Success. I am your hostess with the mostest, Kari Schneider, and I am not in my most professional podcasting setup right now. I'm actually recording this from way up north in Northwestern Ontario, where I am redefining success literally in my life right now and have had to redefine it each year on this project that we're doing way up north here, we're restoring an old fishing camp, 80 year old log cabins, and restoring this project into a space that can host business retreats, wellness retreats, maybe family events like family reunions or weddings. So it's a very, very exciting project. And at the same time, it can be daunting. We are in that messy middle. We're seeing progress, but there's so much to be done and I am recording from up here. So I thought I would give you that little visual of, of where I am and why I'm here. And the way it relates to this topic in Redefining Success is because I've had to keep doing it while I've been here, while I've been working on this project. So, first of all, when I made the notes and I researched and I really put this topic and this podcast note together, I looked up the definition of success. And success is it can be defined as the achievement of one's desired aim objectives or the attainment of a favorable outcome in a specific endeavor. It involves accomplishing meaningful and fulfilling milestones that align with one's individual, professional or personal aspirations. So in other words, it is Very, very subjective. Success is whatever success means to you. So here's where the issue comes in, and this is why I've created this topic. Redefining success is that I keep seeing with my clients what I who are setting goals and going for these big things in business, in life, in their personal lives. And then they're. They're kind of off track. They feel like they've lost their compass along the way. And when we get into it, I end up discovering, or we peel back, we discover together that the definition that they had of success is now different than it was five years ago, ten years ago, six months ago, even. So then there's this necessary necessity of redefining success. So you might have outgrown your past success definition. You might have had a change in life circumstances. You may have an old version of success that's literally irrelevant to you now because of who you've become or what matters to you now. And then we wonder why we're not compelled to keep meeting the goals that would bring us along that path to success. So. Or we may even find we're pursuing goals that don't lead us to where we want to go because we realize that's not where we want to go anymore. So therefore, it's very, very important to gain clarity around what success means to you. And we can easily do so. It's so much easier to do so when we narrow it down to three key categories in life. And these categories are the ones of career and mission. So what is your career that you're in or your mission in life? And they don't have to be the same thing. So someone might have a career or a job that is a significant part of their life, but their mission may be something very different. So it's whatever that career or mission is to you. It's basically your purpose. If your purpose is raising an amazing family and you have a career in medical supplies, and medical supplies are great to pay the bills, but it doesn't really matter to you as your life purpose, then your mission is raising the family, even though you have a job or career in medical sales. So distinguish. When I say career slash mission, it's whatever your purpose is for you. You can have a job that's very important to you and not have it be your mission, and vice versa. You can have a mission that's very important to you and not have it be the job or one and the same. You could be retired and have had a career or mission that was very purposeful and important to you and Then in retirement, you have a shift in your purpose and mission and there's something else that you're focused on. Maybe it's giving back, maybe, maybe it's volunteering, maybe it's being on boards and providing your expertise. Maybe it's investing or angel investing. So it changes as you change along the way. So career mission is one category. The next category is relationship. So your success in relationships. And the last category is the success for yourself. What do you define as being successful personally? So this might be your values, it might be how you consider yourself. So you want to be able to define success in those areas. Now when I took a look at this and I realized that, oh my gosh, if I have clients that are needing to redefine the success, I know that I redefine my success in these areas at least annually, at least every year, I try to redo my values for sure, every 12 months, sometimes even every six months, redo my values, recheck in with what my values are. So I realized that if I look back at what success meant to me back in my 20s versus now, it is vastly different. Vastly different. So I want to give you this as an example, because I think that by doing so, this will help you consider some things for you as, as examples that I give you. So for instance, if I look at my career mission in my 20s, I would say that I defined it. I defined success as simply making a living doing what I love, making a living doing what I love. Now I, I look back at the circumstances in my life and I can see absolutely why I would think that is my definition of success. And because I was saving money for university by working in various roles such as I pumped gas, I worked at my dad's tree nursery, I worked at a pulp and paper mill and did all kinds of jobs, from cleaning, to driving a fork truck, to being a pipe fitters helper, to being a cord cutter, like you name it. I did all kinds of jobs to waitressing, to hostessing, pumping gas at a gas station. I did so many different jobs, but none of them could I see as my career or mission. Even working in a pulp and paper mill, which paid such amazing money, I knew that I would take less money to have something that I loved. So I had very clear distinctions. And my definition of success at that time was, was making a living doing what I love. And then in my 30s, because I actually had my dream job, I still didn't care so much about what I made. But my main mission, my definition of success was getting Athletes at the highest level of sport to the Olympics, getting them qualified for the Olympics, getting them prepared for the Olympics. That ended up being my definition of success. It really had very little to do with anything financial because I was actually meeting my original definition of success, which was making a living doing what I love. And then in my career mission, my definition of success became different. It became more around the goals of getting these athletes to the Olympics and getting my clients to whatever transformative success that they were going through at the time. And then in my 40s, my definition of success was being able to provide for my family, because by this time, the expenses had gone way up. There's the mortgage on the build, the business building, the gym building. There's four kids in sports that require a fair bit of money and travel, and then a baby as well. So my definition of success at that point, looking back, hindsight, 20 20, I don't know that I could have seen it at the time, but my definition of success was providing for my family. However, now I'm in my 50s. Holy cow. Never thought I would get here. But I am actually in my 50s and at this point at 50. So maybe it'll change in a year. I can redefine my success again. But at 50, my definition of success is helping achievers perform optimally in leadership and life while loving what I do and attaining financial freedom. Now, I don't know if you hear the difference there, but that is a big difference from what it was back in my 20s called making a living doing what I love. Now, helping achievers perform optimally in leadership and life while loving what I do and attaining financial freedom is a completely different ball game. And there's more to it, because that might sound so much more specific. However, it's not specific enough. And this is why I'm doing this podcast for you, so that you can see what it takes to truly define your success. That's what you want, is to truly define your success so that you have a chance of getting there. If it's not clearly defined, you won't have a chance to get there because you're going to be missing the mark over and over and. And getting close to it, but maybe not getting there. Exactly. So we're going to go over this again, but I'm going to give you some examples in relationships and examples for myself in self as well, because if you haven't done an exercise like this in really defining success, then it may seem a little ambiguous. And this is why I want you to hear what my definitions of success were so that you can look at yours in a way that goes, oh, just curiosity, just observation. We're not making any judgments, oh, that was awful, or oh, I could have done better. It's none of that, it's just going. Interesting how my perspective changed over time. Interesting how now I define life differently. So in relationships in my 20s, I don't know, this is a skill. Scary when I look back at it. I think my definition of success at that time was to be in a relationship with someone I love. Pretty pure, pretty simple being in a relationship with someone I love. By the time I was in my 30s, I'd learned a fair bit about relationships and what was working and what wasn't working. And by that point it was to be in a relationship with someone I love, who loves me, who is fit, who is responsible, great parent. So basically to be in a relationship with someone I love who has these types of characteristics that align with my types of characteristics. So there was some affinity, there's some parallels that work for the two of us. Not opposites attract, but rather two people who have a lot in common. That's what I was looking for. So I had more clarity. Whereas in my 40s, my, I had so much going on. In my 40s I had four kids who were teenagers. In my 40s we, there was navigating things with the teenagers, with my stepson's mom, with my husband, with my in laws, with my parents, with a young toddler. So I had so many relationships. And then, then there's my clients and the business and making sure people are clients are happy. I felt like in my relationships success was getting along in my relationships, just that's it. There wasn't any sort of high reaching thing. The stage I was at in my life was just aiming for getting along in my relationships. I would, I was happy with that. That's fantastic. However, now in my 50s, my definition for success is very different. And it looks like that I am loving toward my relationships. I'm spending quality time with the people I love and really enjoying that time with the people that I love. That is a far cry from being in a relationship with someone I love. In fact, I have so much more control and influence and power in my relationships because they're more about my feeling of love and me showing up as love in my relationships, not having a bunch of expectations on what they do or who they are or whether they love me or not, but really just showing up as a loving human for my relationships. So that leaves us with self and I hope you notice again the very big difference and I hope there would be a difference between my 20s and my 50s and I'm sure there'll be a difference between my 50 year old self and my 55 year old self. So if I look back at my 20s for self, my definition of success in my 20s for self would have been to work hard, play hard, do good things. Pretty simple. I gave her, I gave her in so many aspects. I burned the candle at both ends, I worked my butt off, I made money, I played really hard, I studied really hard. Maybe I made too many gaps of not studying. So then I had to study really hard because I wasn't studying very hard. But I worked hard, I play hard, I tried to do good things and be a good person. That was my, that was myself that summed it up in my twenties, in my thirties though by that point I had gone through a separation and divorce of my high school sweetheart who I'd been with for gosh, nine years. I had had my first child, I had, I had experienced so much more. And my definition, I think at that time of success for myself would have been to be self reliant. And also I was extremely focused on health and fitness and performance. And I raced a lot. So I wanted to really be in that top 1%. Any race I did, I expected to be placing in the top 10 minimally and ideally a podium so a metal type finish I would top three. So those for myself were the standards and the success definitions I had for myself in the 30s. But in the 40s I was so fried. And you can, you can imagine that if my 20s were work hard, play hard, do good things and my 30s were being so self reliant, being top 1% fitness, there wasn't a lot of room for recovery, restoration, relaxation. By my 40s I had had pneumonia, I had had some awful back injuries for years. I had nerve damage bilaterally down both my legs. And all I really wanted to do personally was to be healthy enough to be able to run again. And so in my 40s, myself, my success was to stay healthy, not be getting colds all the time because with all the kids in the house, that's what how is happening and heal my back and to run again, that's, that would have been success to me in my 40s. And I mean that's 40s, that's a big decade. But that's what if looking back on it, that's what it felt like to me is that I needed some level of success. And if it was personal. It was that I wanted my health and that I wanted my back to be healed. I wanted to be able to walk long distances without my leg going numb or my foot dropping. And so I got really, really fast that those things became very important to me. But now, now I've had an autoimmune diagnosis, I've become much sicker than I ever thought was possible. And I've been managing that for many months now. And I've been healing, I've been improving, I've been getting better and better. So now if I look at what is success for myself right now is to love myself, to take care of myself, to grow myself. That means success to me. Now that is an entirely different ball game to me. And what I want to impart on this message is that it's not enough to have that kind of definition. The definitions that I gave you of, of helping achievers perform optimally in leadership and life while loving what I do and attaining financial freedom, for instance, that seems so much clearer than making a living doing what I love back in my 20s. However, if you really want success, you have to be so clear that a six year old understands what you want and understands what it looks like. You have to be so clear that your brain can see the image of what it looks like and how it's done. And so there are further questions to ask to really define success. And if you don't have a notebook out yet, now is the time to get one. Because these are the questions that need to be asked in order to truly understand. And the reason that I've gone through examples of my own is so that I can give you a real life example of how we would get it truly clear. We want clarity of that redefinition, redefining of success. So we go back to the definition of success that I have now for career and mission. Help achievers perform optimally in leadership and life while loving what I do and attaining financial freedom. So here are the questions I would have to ask and answer in order to truly gain more clarity. Now it's okay if you can't answer every single one, but just asking the question has your brain start to look for the answers so that you can have more clarity in this. So here are the types of questions for what I had described as the definition of success in career and mission. I would ask what type of achievers? You know, because I could, I could. These could be achievers in underwater basket weaving, these could be achievers in skydiving. So what type of achievers what does optimal performance look like in leadership and life for these achievers? So what does it look like? What do they do? What is optimal performance? Are they really great at washing their car? So having clarity around it is really, really important. How will I know that I love what I do? How do I know that? So when I answer these, I'm going to come up with answers like what type of achievers? Most of the achievers I work with are either coaches of some sort or they run businesses or they're CEOs. So typically I'm dealing with founders and CEOs and coaches or teachers who lead other people. Those are the types of achievers. The other part of those achievers is that optimal performance for them looks like they have amazing relationships. It looks like they are really feeling growth in their life. It looks like they are fit and healthy. They care about those things. So that's what optimal performance looks like for their leadership in their life. How will I know I love what I do? Because I'm so lit up to get up every day and do the things I do and be with the people I get to work with. I'm excited and passionate. That's how I know I love what I do and I actually want to create more. When they have problems, I look forward to helping them. I am excited for their transformation just as much as they are. Those are the ways that I love what I do. Another question. What is financial freedom? I've talked about attaining financial freedom. Well, what is that? And if I really want to get clear, there's a number of value to it. There are steps and prerequisites for that number. Value or milestones for it. What are some of the milestones? Along the way would be another question. Why does this matter to me? Why does this matter to me now? It didn't matter to me in my 20s. It didn't matter to me in my 30s. There's a completely new definition of success now. Why does this matter to me now? Because I realize how important my life is and how much I care about fulfilling on what my potential is, my reach is and those who I can help. I care about fulfilling that potential. I love helping other people. I don't want to go without seeing that through. So those are some of the questions for that. Now if we looked at, look at the definition of success in my relationships, what is that? Well, I've got. I'm loving towards my relationship. I'm spending quality time with the people that I love and I'm enjoying, I'm enjoying the people that I love, truly enjoying the presence, their contribution to my life, who they are. So then I've got questions for that. What does it look like to be loving towards my relationships? Is it enough for me just to think and feel love, or am I doing some actions of love towards the people that I love? Another question. What does quality time look like to me? Is it enough to be watching a movie next to the person that I love? Or is it engagement of some sort, defining quality time? Here's another one. What does quality time look like to them? If I really love these humans, it's not just about my definition of quality time. What is their definition of quality time? How about this? How will I know that I'm enjoying the people in my life that I love? Am I laughing a lot when I'm with them? Am I bringing up engaging conversation about things that they care about? How will I know that I'm enjoying? Do I feel lit up by talking to them or do I feel drained? So these are ways I can discern whether I know I'm enjoying spending time with them. And then again, why does this matter to me? Really diving in. Why does this matter to me? And for me, it's that my life feels relatively empty unless I'm serving the people that I really care about. And that's my family, my husband, my clients. These people I care about, and I live to serve them. And so really having that quality connection with them is. Is the crux of my life. It's phenomenal. I love it. I absolutely love it. All right, so you're seeing where I'm going here. Now we're doing the same thing for self. If my definition for success in myself is loving myself, taking care of myself, growing myself, well, what does it look like to love myself? Does loving myself mean. Mean personal love? Does that mean orgasms daily or weekly? Does it mean that I get a massage? Does it mean that I work out? Does it mean that I eat healthy food or indulge in a dessert? What does loving myself look like? Because if I don't know that, then I'm going to get confused. And the what it looks like to get confused and I see this for myself, I see this for clients, is that you confuse self love with something that might be something that you're craving in a moment. You confuse self love with attention that might be negative attention. You confuse self love with. With things that are not actually loving. Because you may not have great examples of loving yourself in your life. Maybe your parents didn't teach you that maybe you didn't learn that from watching them. Maybe they were always the martyr on Martyr Mountain, trying to complain about serving everyone else and how exhausted they were. Who's been on Martyr Mountain? I have. Okay, so what does it look like to love myself? How will I know I am consistently loving twice toward myself? Is it that I've stopped beating myself up? What does that look like? What do I do to take care of myself? Do I work out? Do I eat well? Some of the things I mentioned. What is growth to me? Because that is subjective. My growth is not the same as somebody else's growth. So defining what growth looks like to me, what will I do to grow myself? Will I travel? Will I take courses? Will I read? Will I do all of the above? Why does this matter to me? Why does this matter to me? My number one value is love and connection. My number two value is optimal performance and vitality. So optimal health and vitality and fitness and performance. So knowing my values, knowing why these things that matter to me are so critical. For anybody who's watching this, it's on video, on YouTube. You're seeing me hold my. My earphones because I don't have my full professional mic set up here. And that's okay, because it is an example of this podcast and delivering this message mattering more to me than having the perfect equipment. And that's just another example as to why we want to get clarity around the definition of success in these three areas of life. Because then it is so much easier to create the goals, to create the. The. The. To see the obstacle that has to be overcome in order to get the goals, in order to get to the success. Because you're clear on what the obstacles are, you're clear on what the goals are, and you're very, very clear on what success means to you. So by all means, go forth and redefine success in these areas of your life. Use this as an exercise. Write it down and utilize it. Set this up for success for your life, because you deserve that success. If you can think of it, if you can imagine it, if you desire it, then it is for you. And the last thing I want is you to be held back by some level of confusion or lack of clarity. Clarity. So do this exercise. Get it clear for you, like I was describing the examples I gave about my life. And then when you do, you can have the ease of taking step by step towards what needs to happen for that success. So do this. If you know somebody going for success or going for a goal, share this episode with them. If you like it, please give us a five star review and a rating. This really helps. This is a labor of love that takes a lot of planning and execution and work and collaboration and we would love it if you shared it to other people in the world who you think it can make a difference for. So share this and use it. Use it to get to your success. Have a wonderful rest of your day, have a wonderful rest of your week and keep going forward for your definition of success.

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