“The first step is clearly defining what it is you’re after, because without knowing that, you’ll never get it.”

–Halle Berry

Introspection

Introspection is your ability to look inward and objectively view and analyze your actions, abilities, and emotions.

Yes, this is quite literally the first step you have to take, by asking yourself a set of questions I’m about to give you, you will understand where you are positioned in your journey to success.

#1 Knowing how you want the ending to look like (Defining your success)

This is highly important because you need to know your destination before embarking on your journey, defining your success requires you to think deep, but if you know what you ultimately want to achieve that puts you on the right track as far as I can tell.

Here’s a scenario: two guys Jack and Tim both want to achieve success in their respective fields, Jack knows that at the end of a 2-year period he wants to head most of the projects run by his company, whilst Tim, on the other hand, has a fuzzy picture of what he wants to ultimately achieve. It’s important to build a mental picture of your end goal, doing this allows you to make the right decisions that lead to the right ending.

#2 Assessing your Strengths 

Yes, this is by far one of the most important aspects of reaching your goal, why because understanding what your good at is vital towards competence, productivity, and self-confidence, emphasizing your strengths leads to achieving highly in whatever your good at. If for example you know your charismatic and you find it easy to talk to people with little difficulty then learn more about persuasion techniques because it goes in line with your strength (plus you’d make a great salesman) or if you find it easy to come up with exciting ideas that you think can add significant value to a project, take time to improve the database from which you draw ideas from. The main goal here is understanding yourself because a man who understands himself brings more value than one who doesn’t.

#3 Assessing your weaknesses

Weakness is a trait any achieving human being will have to face, weakness is what makes your strengths shine, by accepting your flaws and registering them as part of who you are not only will you be at ease with the essence of who you are, but it will radiate into everything you do. A person who doesn’t acknowledge their flaws won’t be as competent as one who has, for example, Tim who is exceptionally gifted at problem-solving, has excellent drawing skills and is great at analyzing data but who is also a narcissist and has horrible interpersonal skills insists on becoming the salesman for his company, but doesn’t realize he won’t succeed, if Tim had evaluated himself he would have realized that he is more suited to handling the company’s problems as opposed to making sales. In short not assessing your weaknesses could severely cripple your overall performance, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work to improve your flaws, putting in extra effort into fixing what is broke will lead to you being a well-rounded individual.

#4 Asking yourself what you think is holding you back

And finally, the most important aspect of the introspective questions.

Are there any personal problems holding you back? Do you maybe think that achieving success is hard? Maybe you don’t have enough support from family and friends? Are you too busy with things that society expects from you? Does the world seem too competitive? Maybe it’s not your time yet? Perhaps depression and anxiety are weighing you down? Could it be that you’re in a relationship and your family needs you?

Well that’s all B.S those aren’t the reasons holding you back, the only thing and person holding you back is YOU, if you’re not willing to change your mindset from a person with excuses (reactive person) to a person who owns up and takes action and actively goes into the world to find solutions to the problems they’re facing (proactive person) then I’m afraid success isn’t for you, hold up hold up, do you even know how hard life is? Things aren’t that simple! (this is probably what you’re shouting inside your head), I know for a fact life isn’t as simple as that, as a matter of fact, I struggled with most of the aforementioned questions, I still don’t receive support from my friends and I had major depression which still lingers within me but in spite of that I decided that I wanted to change for the better, to reach the success I had dreamt of before and that’s why I dedicated my time researching and implementing what I had learnt until I could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, the same light I want you to see as well, there’s a way to change your mindset and reach your goals and that’s by doing what was previously listed and doing the items to be listed in future blog posts.

I have faith that you took something from this and you will be joining me next time for yet another comprehensive look at what it takes to be successful.

Next blog topic: Building a success mindset. 

Sayōnara.

Next blog in 3 days!