Your Journey, Your Success: A Different Take on Achievement

Ever felt like a success by societal standards yet empty and unfulfilled within? We've been there. These external measures can often breed feelings of inadequacy and failure when taken as absolute standards. We invite you to join us on a journey towards understanding success from a fresh perspective. 

More info: https://www.thejourneyblueprint.com/
Contact: [e-mail]
Read the book: https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Blueprint-Following-Heros-Control/dp/0692132562/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hey everyone, and welcome to this episode of the
Journey Movement podcast.
This episode was inspiredbecause of a conversation that I
had with a dear friend recentlyand because of that
conversation today I want totalk about the difference
between how the world definessuccess and how the journey
defines success, because they'reactually pretty different and I
think this applies to a lot ofdifferent things in our lives.

(00:30):
But today I'm going to start byusing education as an example,
specifically my education.
Many of you know that I'm ateacher and I have been for over
20 years, and this is somethingthat I see in education all of
the time.
But it wasn't until I learnedabout journeys that I realized
why it's so damaging and whyit's so important that we don't

(00:51):
fall for the success trap.
Let me start by telling youabout me as a student.
I was honestly one of thosepeople for whom school actually
worked pretty well.
I kind of got the game ofschool, if you want to put it
that way.
I love learning anyway.
Even now, I'm always learningsomething, so being able to
learn new things was alwaysreally appealing to me.
But in addition to that, I gotthe rules, I understood the

(01:15):
moves I needed to make andoverall, my scholastic
experience would be considered asuccess.
I got good grades, I receivedscholarships that helped to pay
for my schooling and I got a job, ultimately doing something
that I love.
However, there's maybe a littlebit more to this story, because
if you had asked me at the timeif I felt successful, the

(01:37):
answer would have been no.
Even though on paper it wouldseem like I was successful, I
didn't experience it that way.
So we're going to pause here forjust a second to talk about
what success actually means.
If you go to the dictionarydefinition of success, you'll
find phrases like theaccomplishment of an aim or a
purpose.
In other words, there'ssomething that you wanted and

(02:00):
you accomplished that thing.
That is success.
However, there has been a verysubtle insertion, like an
unspoken part of the definition,if you will, that has tainted
how we experience success in oursociety at large.
The message that we get is thatsuccess isn't just the

(02:21):
accomplishment of any aim orpurpose.
Success is the accomplishmentof very specific aims and
purposes Achieving fame, wealth,social status or acceptance and
I actually have to laugh atthis, because when I ask my kids
if they need anything from thegrocery store when I go on
Saturdays.

(02:41):
I have a couple of kids thatwill always say money, power,
fame.
So even there it's leaked in,and I think it's a good
opportunity to check in withourselves and see how successful
we feel.
And I think here, right now, asyou look at your life, do you
feel successful?
And if you do feel successful,why do you feel that way?

(03:03):
And if not, why not Now?
If you had asked me before if Ijudged success by these very
narrow parameters, I would havesaid, of course not.
I see people all around me thatI would consider successful
that don't necessarily have anyof those things.
However, through the years, whenI checked in with myself to see

(03:26):
if I felt successful, thosewere the things that I judged my
own success by.
If people didn't acknowledge myaccomplishments, if I didn't
have a lot of money, if I didn'thave the right body or looks or
interests to be sociallyaccepted, then I didn't feel
successful.
The aims and purposes that Ihad accomplished didn't seem to

(03:47):
matter that much.
In fact, I still brush thoseoff in many ways when I talk to
people feeling like they reallyaren't a big deal compared to
the success in quotes that wehave been subconsciously trained
to look for in an even moreobstructed way of thinking.
Sometimes we look at the fameand the wealth and the social
status and the acceptability asan indication of who the person

(04:10):
is, maybe that they have morevalue as a person because of
those types of successes,regardless of how they came by
them, and that if we don't havethe same success, we are somehow
then fundamentally lessvaluable, less lovable, less
acceptable.
We spend a whole lot of timefeeling like we aren't
successful, labeling ourselvesas failures, as unworthy,

(04:33):
ignoring the true successes thatwe actually have.
And that, my friends, is wherewe need to pause and look at the
thought process, because, yousee, when it comes to journeys,
fame, wealth, success of theworldly kind those things don't
matter.
If these measures of successcome into someone's journey,

(04:54):
they are side notes at best.
That's because journeys areabout us becoming the best
version of ourselves.
Fame and wealth and socialstatus and acceptance only
matter if they are a part of usbecoming this best version.
The journey happens equally toeveryone, to rich and poor,
famous, unknown, sociallyacceptable or not.

(05:16):
Clearly, the journey doesn'tdifferentiate based on those
factors.
And the even more difficultreality is that for success to
occur in the journey, it hasnothing to do with the
achievement of something.
It has everything to do withbeing capable of achieving that
something, and there's somenuance there.

(05:36):
So let's go back to me as anexample.
I remember very vividly sittingin the testing center at BYU,
where I went to college, andlooking at a test that I was
about to take.
After answering the first Idon't know one or two questions,
I scanned through the rest ofthe test and came to a striking
realization I was going to acethis test.

(05:57):
I mean ace it and that seemslike a good thing, but in one of
those powerfully destructivemoments of journey level
understanding, I could see thatI wasn't going to ace it because
I knew the content.
I was going to ace it becauseI'm a really good test taker and

(06:17):
the writer of the test was aterrible test writer and I in
fact aced the test.
But I walked out of thereknowing that it wasn't because
of what I knew or what I hadlearned or what I was now
capable of doing in regards tothat content area.
It was because I knew how toread a test.

(06:39):
Now, for some, acing the testwould seem like a success
because there's an emphasis ongrades in education, just like
there's an emphasis on wealthand fame, as though grades are
some indication of what I'mcapable of doing.
But in that class it wasn'ttrue.
I succeeded at this external,superficial standard of success,

(06:59):
but I failed at the actualstandard.
I wasn't capable, and I've seenthis in schools over and over
not just schools, but we'llfocus on this for a moment.
Kids will take a test.
They get a question right, butthey may have no idea how or why
they got it right, and if youask them, many of them can't

(07:23):
predictably replicate thatanswer.
So the actual learning, theactual growth, the actual change
towards this better version ofourselves hasn't occurred.
But we act like the correctanswer is the point, regardless
of how the student got there.
No one follows up when studentsget questions right.

(07:44):
We only follow up if they getthem wrong.
Now to society.
A good grade means that we'redone, regardless of what we know
or what we don't know.
This happens in jobs as well.
We get a promotion or we get alot of money To the journey.
If we don't know it, thejourney isn't done.
Success only comes as we gothrough the process, as we make

(08:08):
the changes, as we becomecapable.
Then the grades or thechampionship or the promotion,
they don't really matter,because we get to take that
capability with us, regardlessof the outcome.
Teams who lose championshipsstill have all the things that
they've learned and they get totake those things with them.

(08:28):
People who apply for jobs butdon't get them are still capable
of getting other jobs, and Ihope that makes sense, because
really that's the point.
The actual outcome is secondary.
Becoming capable is whatmatters most.
So what is the ideal that I'msuggesting, then?
That we question every singleright answer as well as all the

(08:52):
wrong answers?
Of course not.
That is way too labor intensiveand teachers are already
stressed.
But I do think it would behooveus to check in on occasion to
see if students or employees orplayers can talk us through what
they're thinking, how they cameto the conclusions that they
did, how they see situations,what they take into account all

(09:15):
of those things, because I thinkthose conversations would be
illuminating.
But even more than that, maybewe can start shifting the focus
of these superficialmeasurements of success and
actually get to the deeper, morelasting indications of actual
change and learning and growth.
I was talking to a colleague ofmine about this idea of success

(09:36):
and excellence, and it was areally fascinating conversation
about how we measure and definethose two words, success and
excellence and as we weretalking, it occurred to me that,
in one way, these two wordsembodied the point I'm trying to
make really well.
You see, the major shift thatwould need to happen is that we

(09:58):
start to emphasize outcomes thatyou can't cheat to achieve.
You can cheat your way to goodgrades People do it all the time
you can even cheat your way toa championship.
You can cheat your way to apromotion.
You can cheat your way to fameand wealth and social status,
and that's where I see thedifference between success and
excellence.

(10:19):
Success is something that youcan, according to current
measure, cheat to get.
Excellence, however, issomething that you can't cheat
to get.
It takes work and practice.
Letting go.
Things that journeys provideresult in excellence, and in
many ways, it's the differencebetween doing and being.

(10:42):
I can do things that I don'thave any way to know that I
could actually do that thingagain, but if I am something
well, that's different Thenbeing that is the default, at
least until I change it througha journey.
So I think it's helpful for usto consider, first of all, how

(11:03):
are we measuring success?
Let's go back to the question asto whether or not you feel like
you're a success.
What do you consider to besuccessful, and why?
Is that your definition ofsuccess?
Is it something that is asuccess but you may not be able
to replicate that action?
Has your definition of successbecome a block to be able to

(11:26):
feel good about where you areand what you can do?
What can you learn from thethings that are going well that
could maybe help inform otherparts of your life?
And, equally important toconsider what are you excellent
at?
That it's time to own.
I guarantee there are thingsabout you, things that come
naturally to you right now, thatyou excel at.

(11:48):
Whether it's because you workedreally hard at it or because
it's your natural disposition,you are excellent in that thing.
So how can you tune into that,learn from that, apply those
lessons to other parts of yourlife, not just for the current
journey that you may be on, butto help others on their journeys
.
I worked for a company that hadhuge success at one point with a

(12:10):
specific product launch.
By success in this case, I meanfinancial success.
They made a lot of money, sothey unsurprisingly decided to
do the same launch the next yearand the next and the next, but
what I observed was that itbecame increasingly difficult to
achieve that same level ofsuccess every year, and in fact,
they weren't ever able toreplicate what had happened in

(12:32):
their most successful year.
Not that what they did waswrong, but they had achieved a
success that they didn't quiteunderstand.
They succeeded, but in spite ofwhat they thought, it
apparently wasn't for thereasons that they had previously
considered.
As they tried to do the sametypes of things, they got
diminishing returns, and thishappens for us as well.

(12:54):
We see something go well.
This could be business related,or health related, or
relationship related, whateverit is and we think we know why
it succeeded.
But if we notice that doingthose same things isn't having
the same results, it's possiblethat we haven't yet identified
the actual reason that itsucceeded in the first place.

(13:16):
If you're noticing diminishingreturns, it's time to step back
and reevaluate.
There's so much to think aboutwhen we try to do the same
action over and over and expectit to succeed.
We see this in business, we seethis in weight loss, we see it
in education the idea that wecan keep doing the same thing
over and over and get the sameresults is ignoring a lot of

(13:36):
different factors.
What worked in one situationmay not work in another.
The thing that you said at thatone time, when your spouse was
exhausted and stressed andthings were loud and all of a
sudden it made everything better, may not work when they've
slept well or they aren'tstressed.
So keep in mind the context whenyou're evaluating success and

(13:58):
also keep in mind that whatworked for someone else may not
work for you.
Just because someone had a lotof success using a particular
business strategy, for example,it doesn't mean that that
strategy will be successful foryou.
Or just because someone foundsuccess with a particular weight
loss strategy, that doesn'tmean it will work for you.
That doesn't mean it won't workeither, but we have to be aware

(14:21):
of that expectation.
You are not that person.
You are not selling exactlywhat they are or trying to
change the same behaviors thatthey were trying to change.
What comes naturally for themmay not be what comes naturally
for you.
You are trying at a differenttime and in a different place
and in a different way.
There are so many variables.

(14:42):
We spoke about this in anearlier episode about trying to
live someone else's journey.
We need to come back and focuson our journey as a way to tell
what's working and what isn't,not comparing our journey and
our tools to someone else's,because, for the journey,
instead of looking ahead of usto where we aren't yet, or to

(15:02):
the side where we see everybodyelse and how far they've gone,
the journey actually encouragesus to look behind us to measure
success.
How far have you come?
How different are you todaythan you were in the past?
Do you have moments where yourealize that an older version of
you would have blown off thehandle in this situation, and

(15:27):
now you're able to be more calm?
Or do you find yourself doingsomething effortlessly that used
to be incredibly difficult?
The journey wants us to be inthe energy of momentum, and we
can only do that by looking athow far we've come.
I guess, in the end, we get todecide what success means to us

(15:47):
and what excellence means to us,and where we want to apply
those ideas.
Do you have to be excellent ateverything you do?
Only if you want to Do you needto stop chasing financial or
social success.
Only if you want to.
Regardless, the journey will bethere to help you move to that
better version of yourself,often in spite of what we want

(16:08):
or plan For me in this momentsince it will probably change I
want to be able to measuresuccess in a way that doesn't
lead to self-loathing if thingsdon't work out, and there are
things that I truly want to beexcellent at and therefore I can
work on being open to theprocess that it will take to
become excellent.

(16:29):
Those are the experiences Ichoose to have, that I know I
will learn from, and beingwilling to step across those
thresholds.
Maybe the action that changeseverything, and maybe, just
maybe, that's what success canbe.
Thanks for tuning in and don'tforget life is a journey.
It's time to start living likeit.

(16:51):
We'll see you next time.