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What is Success for You?

Focusing Success, Notes for the Journey with Sweetie Berry

Sweetie Berry Whose definition of success are you aligning as your own? Growing up, the definition of success for our nuclear family would have sounded something like: grow up, complete college, find meaningful work that you can be paid a living wage for, and serve the community where you can. Love your family and steward your gifts so that they may serve others. In my friend’s family the answer would have been: Find a job you can enjoy, commit to a marriage you can be proud of, and don’t let money be the determiner of your happiness. Yet the television, media and many blaring outlets would sound more like ” Make a million dollars and your life will be fulfilled.” If you ask my four year old neighbor, the answer will change daily, but today’s was “Success is about not being in time out because you messed yourself up.” Pretty astute don’t you think, he’s often the wise one among us.

Before you can define if you’re successful you may wish to consider what it is you want for an outcome in life and that includes your outcome in business too.

How do I want to show up every day?

What kinds of engagement/work do I prefer to create?

How will I spend the majority of my work time? What setting? What kind of cohorts or peers? What kind of clients will I serve?

Who is important to me in my life, how do I show up for them?

What choices do I have that I perhaps am not owning are a choice?

Where I live
What I do
How I engage with others
When I am paid
How I transact my skills for income
When do I laugh, what brings joy? How do I have fun?

What rhythms could be different?

Times of day I work
Sounds in my environment…music…ease…work space….
What am I fed by visually?
Do I like the schedule I am working…do I need intense days and quiet days?
Do I like rigid routines or am I bored if I do not have some space to change it up?
Where do I feed my mind? Classes, Courses, Sports, Communications?

What areas am I not supporting in my life that might need focused support?

Rest?
Fuel?
Exercise?
Spiritual needs?
Business paperwork?
Entertainment?
Relationships?
Finances?

What’s working in my life that I’d like more of?

In the last few years, my husband and I changed a good bit of how I work, how we work together, and how we enact daily life at home. Why? We had a good life, we had a home in the “right” part of town, we liked ourselves and our life. We realized, however, that our hearts were more about re-enacting a life we had known as children, we sought and bought a little piece of land. We purchased a home that would require work, but would be ours to grow this part of our life in. We focused on the things that worked in our marriage and work and decided that we would focus more on what worked for us and let go of some “standard” thinking that wasn’t working for us. I tend to be in an environment where “more, more, more” is thought to be the driving factor for success. However, Les and I continue to witness in our work separately and together, that accelerated income is only worthwhile to the point it doesn’t become the driving factor of your existence. We are simple folks, and we have an idea where “enough” is for our lives. Now don’t get me wrong, we love financial success and we live a formula in our incomes that produces it, but that’s just ONE part of what we define as success for our family.

What are your definers of success? We included the thoughts below in ours:

Time that focuses each other and our children as important weekly
A pace of living that allows for peace, not chaos internally, despite supporting complex projects.
Debt Freedom
The ability to share with others in time and in service
A relationship to each other that allows us both to grow
Stewardship of the gifts we were given in such a way that others can be given to in relationship, in time, and in giving
Dedicated time and places to cherish those we have chosen as family throughout the year.

Success is so much more than income earned, it’s a building a life that uses the foundation of who you are to support raising the life purpose that makes your heart whole. Are you ready to define what success is for you? Isn’t it important to take an exit time to time and check your map, fuel, and experience along the journey of your success?

What’s Your Recipe for Success?

Focusing Success, Notes for the Journey with Sweetie Berry

Each of us have the ability to create one our own recipe for life and our own flavor of success. For some it is fortune and fame, for others it is surrounding themselves with those they love, and yet others define success as a destination. Personally I think life is a daily journey and though I value vision, planning, and goals, the recipe I follow for my life is to set the goal to live a well-lived life every day. I grew up a rural doctor’s daughter, and I am very aware that tomorrow is not guaranteed, today matters.

As I work on my personal recipe for success I seek to learn as I go. For many years I believed success would come when an event or accomplishment was achieved. I have value for achieving income benchmarks. I love to set goals and reach them, but after many goals achieved, I learned that striving for accomplishments is noble, but living this moment more valuable. Are you living a well-lived life today?

My life has the bumps and bruises we all go through. I’ve made choices I wish I hadn’t, I’ve overcome things that’s were not fair and other situations that simply were of my own doing…as we all have. When I met my husband, Les, I saw in his life a peace that was like none other. I realized in that period of my life that an inner peace was essential to my well-lived life recipe. That wealth was freeing, but daily life was richer when shared with other hearts, laughter engaged daily and I would learn to let go of fear, or at least push it aside in faith. I too often had the habit of believing the lies fear tells me and would allow those lies to interrupt my joy.

Personally I am fueled by beauty. Beautiful scenes, music, relationships, or visuals are a very replenishing space for me. I am fortunate that beauty can be perceived almost anywhere. It’s part of my recipe for success to recognize that I am happiest when I seek the beauty in all people and situations, and do not succumb to mindlessly going through the day or engaging the habit of criticizing myself or others. It’s such an easy thing to let one’s thoughts be undisciplined.

My recipe for success changes as I go. Each season of my life requires a fresh look at the ingredients. Like over baking a cake, I find that too much adherence to one method or another ruins the joy of daily living. This week snow completely changed my agenda, yet there was much grace and beauty to be found in the rest, and different page being an extra day or three in the hotel cause.

Recipe are best when they can be tweaked. What do you enjoy about your days? Who makes your heart sing and your day better by simply engaging them? Where in your work do you feel vital and alive? Recently I discovered a role at work I provide for clients is truly something I adore doing. Before I had considered myself only in that role of producer when another, more qualified producer, wasn’t available…however after reviewing films, I realized they are and joy I have producing products with my clients produces an effective process. After pausing to really take in what happened, I realized the best days in the studio is not when I hire the producer, but when I engage AS the producer.

The recipes changes and grows as we do. My experiences and engagements have brought me new awareness and no longer is the old recipe the best one. Isn’t that how our recipes grow too? We taste something better and we learn there are more options on how to makes our favorite dish. At times we make our favorites from scratch, and sometimes the short cut plug and play ingredients are okay to. The best recipes always allow for substitutions in my life…accommodating the life I actually live, not hold on to some rigid standard.

What is your favorite recipe for your day? Each day we’re investing a precious commodity of time into something or someone. How is your recipe coming along? Are you engaging ingredients that support your living a well-lived life? Are you being nourished by the methods and shared experiences your days bring? Is your recipe for life bringing you an existence that you want to live?

Perhaps it’s time to consider your daily life success recipe. Become aware and choose to explore “what is…” Happening around you and within you today. How about a time out each day to simply check in your self? May be that if you do, you’ll find what parts of your daily success recipe are working for you. And if you find your recipe isn’t working…wel, the very next thing is realize that you are the master chef in your life’s recipe and you can change what is on the menu…and keep testing the recipe until you find one that support your life…an leaves you satisfied as you end they day.

Personally, I’ve been re-writing my recipe for a well-lived life and I’m loving this marvelously messy new experience…. And it all begins with asking yourself…”what is working in my life?” “What isn’t’ working?” And “What would make today work..today?”

Behind the Scenes of Success

Notes for the Journey with Sweetie Berry, Uncategorized

Isn’t it interesting to see what is behind the scenes in the images we see in life?

I work with speakers, authors, and brands who teach, serve, and support individuals to grow themselves, their businesses and their families. Social media so often presents a “perfect image” of what that person, business or brand should look like, but real life is much messier….and is an important part of creating success!

During a recent photo shoot with the ultra talented Sheri Oneal Photography, I was kindly invited into the home of my dear friend Cindy Laverty. Cindy, a life coach for well able women, and the writer behind DiscoveringFranklin.com and co-founder of Franklin Flannels, the hip new brand in Franklin, Tennessee, is simply an amazing person. Sheri Oneal and I have worked together on a few lovely projects over the years, and I admire her takes on corporate photography, her personal writing at Thinking Diva, and in general, am simply smitten with all she does. As a photographer Sheri listens carefully to her client’s needs and then keeps the shoots fun and easy. My goal was to have a new set of headshots so that I looked like “me.” I’ve recently changed realms in my personal and professional life and shed a good bit of “I have to’s” from my life and traded them in for “this is my joy” and I wanted my pictures to reflect that. Cindy’s little dog was so sweet as the executive producer of the entire shoot!

Isn’t deciding that we’re enough as we are, empowering? After all if God designed me, why not realize I am a Creator original?

Choosing to be enough has surely has been empowering for me. Too many years I worked daily on why I wasn’t enough instead of supporting where I am strong and where my gifts flow more freely. Can you relate? About December 27th I realized that at 51 years old it was time to live my best life this year. 2015 was an amazing year, partly due to new perspectives learned in Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever program. When we focus daily on tasks before us with a lens of what matters most to go forward miraculous things happen. In my life that meant saying no to more things that were ” guilt driven should’s” in my head instead of “this is taking me where I want to go.” The year was messy, but marvelous as I said “no” to more activities that we not fulfilling my life goals and said “yes” to more activities, thinking and actions that mattered for my family’s and personal success.

Are you staging your daily life for success? Are you trying to work without proper lighting, reflections and an environment for your best result? Like taking a picture with poor lighting, a life without a vision is simply not as in focus. My hope for you this day is you’ll take a moment this week to truly sit down and make three columns.

What is working for me?

What is frustrating me?

What would my ideal day look like?

Those three questions really changed my life last year and are a part of my weekly review each Sunday night as I plan my week. I hope you’ll join me! I’ve got an exciting process that will begin after Valentine’s day where you can join me in in a supportive environment if you, too, would like to be in a community of supportive voices!

Thanks to my friends, and for the skills they bring to the table as professionals in their area, my shoot was fun and painless, it surely helps to hire the professionals you need for the job at hand!

You Can’t Go Until You’re Able

Focusing Success, Notes for the Journey with Sweetie Berry

I think that most folks have their own ideas of limitations in their life. For some it may be the hard start we began with. Others may be living with regret of a previous failure or a fear of humiliation, while others still simply are frozen until they know enough to know they won’t fail. Some live with limitations in vision, in movement, in income, in historical events…we all seem to have some concept that we are limited in some way.

We learn as we go if we choose to take action to enhance outcomes. Sometimes that action is to pause, other times it is to analyze, and yet often it seems, the action taken is to do nothing to advance the outcome desired. So many parts of successful business only present themselves when a step is taken towards the goal.

Hmmm. The “I wishes” of my life, without a plan, have very rarely gotten me anywhere, how about you?

My friend shares daily practices of writing, for that is consummately who and what she is, a successful and oh so able writer. She writes when she is traveling, she writes when she is home, she writes on the good days well, you get the idea. She may have been born with one of the most extraordinary minds, but without the practice we would never have the gift of her books we do. We become what we focus our time and energy to, and that includes becoming simply a worrier, a spendthrift, or whatever else we define and believe are able to do or be.

I like to work with able folks. Do you know what qualifies that? The ability to say “I may not know that now but I am teachable and I’m able.” You see, if I go through a “What is…” conversation with a potential client, there becomes an invisible line that shows up on how the individual or team perceives their need. Each of us tend to affect our business and life outcomes by how we limit or expand our able-ness to succeed. If we believe we have to be able to do everything, we limit ourselves. If we believe we cannot learn, we limit ourselves. If we believe that no matter what, it’s going to go badly, we limit ourselves.

What if your desired success was simply a matter of determining it’s recipe, then, like a recipe for a brownie, gathering the ingredients and mixing them up until they are baking the delicious flavor of life you’d like to engage? Life is a good bit like that. You can learn. You can gather information. You can combine and engage new actions and retractions until your recipe is truly your path to the outcomes you see. It’s interesting how once you’ve got that initial outcome in your vision, how truly facilitative just that step is. However, I am also going to remind each of us that it’s important to not just work to “achieve, achieve, achieve” the next steps, but to pause, reflect, play, and see if this actuation of your life is the version you thought it would be. Goals are only truly met when they create peace and support joy, healthy relationships, and learning in your life. In the long run, if it’s simply about “more” you’ll be sorely disappointed.

I work with exceptional individuals and teams. They are exceptional because they have chosen to learn past their limitations. They have all been without, they have all been beginners, they have all made tragic and at times, debilitating mistakes. At times their hardships have been breathtaking to acknowledge but they faced them. They also keep going and sometimes the very hardships they endured set the stage for the success they experience. The rest of the story? They are successful because they are learners. They are teachable. They expect to make mistakes, they realign with new information and experience and they expect to find out what they don’t know. They also do not expect to do it alone. They are voracious readers, learners, listeners, communicators with others and they seek within themselves to learn as they grow their experience. Successful business people keep narrowing the focus of their next step needs as they actuate. They expect to then step back and expand next steps in learning as each area of their business lives becomes more successful.

It’s a bit like the difference between hoping and doing. You see, actions that matter may look like:

Pausing to study the realm of where you are trying to go.
Studying others that may offer clues to how to deconstruct what is required.
Going ahead and putting up that landing page or imperfect logo.
Choosing to monitor and adjust so personal opinion is balanced with objective measure of outcomes
Asking, reading, or listening to others who have gone further than you have had experience to go. (You know, between articles, libraries, YouTube, TED Talks, and local resources like incubation centers for entrepreneurs, there are so many free resources we truly have no limits on what one can learn)
Solidifying time spend on their work to a measurable time each week with focus on one task at a time.
The ability to daily focus on living more than in one area of your life. Success requires whole health, whole participation in: living, eating, relating, playing, resting, fueling, learning, believing.
Choosing carefully whom you surround yourself. This is a vital part of building yourself and your goals.

The recipes for success are fairly simple and learnable. It doesn’t make them easy, but they are indeed often simple. The real question is are you willing to learn, to try new ways of thinking, to learn to truly step back and see your options. Are you willing to let go of stinking thinking as Zig Ziglar would have said. When I am asked if I think an entrepreneur can succeed, or their new plan is doable, the most important question for success I ask is…

Are you teachable?

More than experience, more than financial fitness, more than connections and networks, the ability to be taught, to learn, and to keep learning is the determiner of success in my experience. The good news is, each of us were born with that capacity in amazing supply. What have you learned lately? How have you applied that learning? What do you need to unlearn? What has learning brought you?

If you have not been teachable, are you willing to consider it’s perhaps an awareness you need to have in every situation of your business. I’ll talk more on that another day.

But I’ll leave you with this thought: You can’t succeed until you are willing to see and know deeply that you are able.

To Begin Imperfectly

Notes for the Journey with Sweetie Berry

The well able mind, like a targeting device, prefers to align the outcome. Like an infant given an automobile, the purchase may later be realized to be more than the child could handle.

Action, actual experience and reviewed results have great value in our lives. Worry, fear, concern for inabilities without actions simply stall our chance of ever experiencing life. Before we can align all the pieces of a puzzle, we often need an understanding of what either the mechanical outcomes should be….to fit the pieces together…or an understanding of the picture that the pieces create. Researching, learning, trying to ascertain what can be’s are fine, but nothing beats simply beginning once a base level of understanding is achieved.

Why is it that so many of us in business and in their daily life disregard the value of simply beginning? We learn as we take action, and the solution sets that may then be discovered are ever changing. We align our experience, new opportunities present themselves, and the wealth of actually taken steps towards what will or won’t work. aligns new opportunities..and adjustments to make. Life is a process, in all its many forms.

There isn’t a universal recipe for a well lived life….for we are as different as the snowflakes that fall and the stars in the sky. What is one heart’s dream would be another’s less favorite experience. Media and social channels prescribe their version of our best lives, but often with a less than honorable foundation of purpose. Our riches truly begin from knowing our heart and launching the experiences that we can navigate growing and learning as we go.

Are we really willing to remain unconscious and virtually deaf to our hearts and minds? Media 24/7 and input are often dulling to the point of deafening our spirits to our own consciousness. Are we willing to forego daily practices, experiences, and awareness of how limited our time is to truly do anything on this earth. Putting off to someday the wealth of living a well-lived life today is a tragic mistake so many make daily. Too often our avoidance of discovery, of feeling, of accepting responsibility for the outcome tells a sad tale.

I believe that intentional pausing throughout the day for short periods of time is a most important practice. Whether that comes as a run with your favorite shoes on, time at the piano, or simply praying or reading a quieting, reflective piece of literature. We learn by listening as my friend Dr. Martina McGowan would share. An when we can still our minds from the pressures, the “have to’s” and fears, so very often the path is whispered to us from God.

Like a toddler who cannot hear “don’t touch, that’s hot” we too often have to go about actions that we know will one day keep us short of the daily life we desired, and too often the cost is one of our areas of health. My father, the late Dr R H Nunnally, used to say “if your problem can be solved by income, it is not a very interesting problem to solve” for he watched people day in and day out make choices of thinking, eating, and living that destroyed their life in the name of not living a well-lived life daily. Casting aside the preserving of their minds and body’s for a never ending striving for things that didn’t matter. A difficult truth for a small town doctor, with an unquenchable thirst for bettering his mind and life. As I have told my classrooms and audiences from my own observations of so many learners, students, and studies:

“Be aware, we think ourselves to health or unwellness, in all areas of our lives, sometimes without intention, but always with consequences, both good as well as costly” ~ Sweetie Berry

This Christmas season, the gift you may consider giving yourself is action. Act on forgiving whatever hurts your heart. Act on moving towards the desires of our heart. Act on the diminishing of that which doesn’t serve you. Act on the needs of those you meet where they are. Act on the abilities you already possess.

This day, take action, maybe imperfectly, and risk living the life you desire.

Finding Enough

Notes for the Journey with Sweetie Berry

There’s a funny thing that seems to happen among folks in business I know. They have been raised to believe that ease and comfort are warning signs of some sort of malaise or laziness. That if their days are joyful and productive with relative ease, they aren’t doing enough. The individuals are hard workers, solid citizens, and often very involved in their families lives but they are living some beliefs that simply are not healthy. I know, I have been one of them.

Well able folks are often gifted the ability to do things without excessive hardship once the task has been learned. Somehow, this ability to learn, to do, to engage with effort gets misconstrued into believing that if something is “easy” or without difficulty it no longer counts as “allowed.” I see folks daily who continue to roam the professional world looking for something else to learn or do that would be more challenging because their thoughts do not align to allowing “ease” in their lives. Often they have earned the “ease” by working hard to learn a task or a skill, but that somehow doesn’t count for them. Sometimes it is boredom that engages the desire to keep looking for harder or more challenging tasks, and at other times it is that childhood voice that says “If the task is easy, it cannot be of value” which doesn’t make sense if the person learned to master the task.

There is a large difference between being bored with a task and not having value because it is “too easy” for you. In business I see many businesses fail because they are seeking “big answers” instead of doing the simple, repetitive things that makes their business profitable. Part of that may be a perspectives issue, valuing that which is outside of our realm to change, or a need to have “striving” in our life instead of “arriving.” Knowing when and where “enough” is for this moment or maybe for moments weekly or monthly.

The world’s messages are to continually work harder, go further, do more in every realm. However I encourage you to stop and identify what is success for you? What is working in your world? What is working for your family? When are you taking care of yourself, your family, your needs in the community? Where are the harvests of your labors in life? Are you living today the life you want to live? Goals are a great and important tool, are you setting goals in all areas of your life? health, relationships, learning, business, finances, spirit life? If our thoughts are ever on a merry-go-round of “enough is somewhere else and ease indicates I’m not doing enough” you may find that no matter what you do, it will never be enough until you know where that is in your heart.

If you’ve done the work to learn the tasks before you. If you’ve made the effort to do the work. Perhaps, just maybe, it’s time to recognize that where you are is a good place to be, and to allow the ease and own that where and who you are is enough. Growing is a good thing, learning is a good thing, but knowing that you are enough where ever you are is a great thing. Choose carefully your thoughts, for they are the well spring of your living.