Livin in Our Own Lane

Recently, I listened to a podcast which asked the question, “How do you define success?”  As I thought about what I would put on my “success list,” I was surprised by how many items I hadn’t consciously and/or intentionally added.  A successful woman is skinny; a successful wife “puts out” at least once a week; a successful mom never wants to strangle their child.  Wait?  What?  Where the hell did those things come from? 

How we define success holds so much power over our lives yet so many of us have never consciously made our own, personal “success list.”  By failing to make our own list we allow outside influences to create our list and name our life goals; we then are surprised when we obtain one of the named goals but don’t feel successful.  It is only when we make our own list, consciously from our core, that we start to live deliberately from the inside out and living OUR lives.  It is at this point that we then possess the ability to check off a goal and experience deep and real feelings of success and fulfillment. 
    
Making your own “success list” can be challenging since it requires drowning out a lifetime of conditioning.  Families, society, friends, experts…. We are bombarded with messages of what success is.   Parents who show their kids that success is achieved through exceptional sports achievements or tell their kids that all “A’s” is the only way to achieve academic success.  There are “Experts” on everything telling us the proper way to do just about everything from raising kids to having a great sex life.  We are assaulted with messages linking physical attractiveness with success and our culture raises us to believe the more money, the more stuff, the more success.   

If you can drown out the noise, and find some silence within yourself, the answers will come.  However, it requires you to not only get in touch with your deeper self but also to trust what you find.  When I shut my mind down and asked, “how do I define success?” I did not like the answer; my deepest self wanted to write about my experiences and share them in the hopes of helping others.  I despised the idea of being so vulnerable and exposed so I pushed the desire aside.  However, day after day, the desire grew… until the day I woke up was overwhelmed with the NEED to write.  I changed my life lane, faced my fear and created a blog.  I feel a pull every day to write and experience a deep sense of fulfillment every time I post a page.

We have been trained to let others define success.  Our parents, experts, society.  So, defining our own success can be scary.  It may require you to go off the well-worn trail and take a leap of faith.  It may require that you do things you never thought you’d do and handle people thinking you are a bit “off.”  But, if you truly think about it, the only other option is to live your life by other people’s standards.  To spend year after year in the lane someone else built for you and never feeling true fulfillment. 

You have the ability to have a BIG and AMAZING and FULFILLING life.  All you have to do is drown out all the noise and listen…to YOU.