Success is measured differently to everyone. For some, success is fortune, fame, and a trophy wall. For others, success is social status or popularity. Although money and recognition often go hand in hand with success, they are not the most important ingredients.

To me, success means a lifetime of personal fulfillment, from creating a sense of meaning in my life’s work. It’s something that cannot be given by anyone and cannot be taken away by anyone either. In order to achieve success, it requires risks, overcoming challenges, and using yourself to your fullest potential.

I learned that success is a journey and not a destination. My journey has helped me to look inward to navigate my life’s path that is most meaningful to me. However, before I was able to do that, I had to learn all the ingredients I needed in order to create my success.

Self Awareness
Self Esteem
Positive Thinking
Self-Direction
Self-Discipline
Self-Motivation
Positive Relationships

Combine Self Esteem, Self Awareness, and Positive Thinking and mix well. Then slowly add in Self Direction. Once completely combined, add in Self Discipline and Self Motivation. Lastly, add in the last ingredient, Positive Relationships and mix well.

As you can see, true success comes from within.

It all starts with self awareness in identifying and appreciating your personal qualities, skills, individual value and interests. To take those personal qualities, skills, and value and figure out what would give you your life’s purpose. Successful people use self awareness to build confidence in themselves and find the courage to go after their dreams. Without self awareness it becomes difficult to figure out what you really want out of life.

Once you become self aware and know your value and have confidence, self esteem comes easy. Self esteem helps you work toward your dreams and goals when other people criticize you or get in your way. It also allows you to believe that you are worthy and possess valuable personal qualities to become successful.

Now that you are self aware, possess self esteem, your thought process must be positive. Every person goes through good and bad, positive and negative experiences in life. Instead of dwelling on the bad or negative experiences, successful people learn to focus on future possibilities. I’ve learned to look for the positive in every negative situation. The setbacks I have experienced have lead to the greatest opportunities. Learning to use the power of positive thinking will propel you towards your goals.

These 3 ingredients in itself became a powerful tool for me. I became UNSTOPPABLE. By the time I was 32 years old, I went from working in the corporate world one day to being laid off the next, to taking a job I knew NOTHING about, only to take the money I was paid during the layoffs and bought the company where I took that job I knew nothing about.  At the time, the other people who got laid off when I did, could not see past the bad situation they were in. They lacked self awareness in their value, lacked self worth, and let the negative thoughts of how they were going to be able to afford their bills and all the negative feelings and fears that go with those thoughts and they left feeling defeated and powerless.

After I bought the company, I learned that it took more than those 3 ingredients to achieve greater success. I no longer worked for anyone else. No one else determined how much time off I could have a year or how much I could earn. I learned very quickly that my paycheck was a true reflection of what I did. And what I did needed to be more than just what my personal value was, self worth was and positive thinking. I needed to have self direction, be self disciplined, and have self motivation in order to achieve my dreams and goals.

So what is self-direction? Self-direction means having the ability to set a well defined goal and work towards it. Having a game plan for life. Successful people can tell you where they are going, how they are going to get there, and who they are going to share their journey with. Once I had my direction, I was on auto pilot. I worked every day doing result producing activities that got me closer to my goals.

I also had to be self-disciplined because success just doesn’t happen, it requires work. No matter what direction and what your goals are, you need to be self-disciplined to take action. Successful people take action and charge of their lives. I learned I had to be 100% responsible when things go wrong, but also take credit when they go right. I had to think critically and be harder on myself. Even though I now own the business, I had to lead by example and still come in at a certain time and be the last one to leave. Granted no one owned my time, but in order to be successful you need to give 100% of yourself all the time.

On the path to achieving success, the personal fulfillment, there was NO time to be lazy. I had to find ways to self-motivate to stay motivated. I listened to the Secret by Rhoda Byrne every night before I went to bed. I read personal development books. I set personal goals that had meanings behind them, rather than goals other people thought I should have. I understood my goals and dreams and kept moving forward despite the fear of failing. It’s what gets me out of bed every day.

The last ingredient in my recipe for success is building positive relationships. I learned to surround myself with positive people. People who where better than me, people I could learn from, people that had already obtained their dreams and were working on new ones. Trust me, sometimes it was not easy. Family and friends are not always positive to be around and in fact can often times be toxic to you without you even realizing it. So my advice is at any point you get a negative feeling from being around a person, distance yourself and then ask what value do they bring into your life. That will usually give you the answers you need.

Wishing you all an abundance of SUCCESS!

What you say to yourself is what matters the MOST. I learned that at a very young age.

My life was less than perfect. The first few years of my life were not that great. When I was 2 I became a big sister. My sister Leanne was born and when she was 1 the doctors had discovered that she had epilepsy that damaged the speech part of her brain and she was autistic. The man I believed to be my father wanted nothing to do with her. As his hatred for my sister grew, his twisted love for me grew stronger and he began touching me and told me not to tell my mom because she wouldn’t understand the love he had for me. It was then that I knew at the age of 4 that I had a choice and it wasn’t what he said to me that mattered it was the fact I was telling myself it was wrong that did. I chose to tell my mom what he had done and that began her struggles as a single mom.

Once he left, my mom had to live on assistance and chose to be a stay at home mom to take care of my sister and I. We didn’t have the best clothes, shoes, or toys but my moms love for us made up for all of that. When I was in second grade I was made fun of for my welfare glasses and K-mart clothes and used to cry at night because I felt no one liked me and everyone made fun of me. One night my mom heard me and she came in. I told her what was happening and she said to me “Honey, sticks and stones might break your bones, but names will never hurt you”. I remember going to school and when little Steven was calling me four eyes, I turned to him and said “sticks and stones may break my bones but name will NEVER hurt me” and I stuck out my tongue and walked away. He was shocked and from that point on he stopped picking on me. It was then, that I knew I had the POWER over me and not anyone else.

I would constantly tell myself I can do anything and BE ANYTHING as long as I put my mind to it. What we say to ourselves is the MOST important thing. If I believed the words of others from when I was little to now, I would not be where I am today. Its so important to instill in our youth that the words of others have no meaning unless you give it meaning. Our Self-Talk has much greater POWER than anyone’s words.

Believe in yourself, love yourself, tell yourself that your beautiful, you can do anything, you can be anything and watch how fast your life transforms.

If you can envision it, you can achieve it.

Positive self talk leads to a life of happiness and love.

It’s Monday and you overslept. As you rush out of bed you stub your toe and you scream and think to yourself “what else is going to go wrong today”. Without even realizing it, you’ve already set the negative tone for the day.

You finally make it to school and you are already feeling anxious for being late. You rush to class, then you realize rushing out the door you forgot your essay that was sitting next to your binder and its worth 40% of your grade. Now what?

You start to break down inside, the overwhelming feeling of self disappointment and fear sets it. The teacher asks everyone to hand in their essay. You tell the teacher what happened in the morning and he says “well, who’s fault is it? You’ll have to take a zero”. You plead with him to bring it in the next day for partial credit and he tells you “NO”. What’s going through your mind?

Our first defense is to blame the events that led us to fail. You blame your parents for not waking you up sooner, you blame the stupid alarm for not going off, you even blame the bed for being in the way and stubbing your toe. If only your mom woke you up sooner you wouldn’t have rushed out of bed and stubbed your toe, you wouldn’t have been rushing and forgot your essay. Right?

Sure you overslept and are running late. Sure it hurt like hell when you stubbed your toe. Sure you forgot your essay. However, that happened in the first 60 minutes of your day. You’ve got about 840 more minutes to your day left. Are you going to waste them on feeling like you failed?

So you woke up late. Don’t look at the negative,  embrace the fact that your body and mind needed the extra rest. You stubbed your toe but it didn’t break. Be thankful. You left your essay at home because you didn’t put it in your bag when you finished it. There is a lesson in that. When your finished with your work put it in your bag or binder. So the day isn’t ruined you actually learned something.

As hard as it might be, one thing I learned is, when we take responsibility for the events that happen in our life we are able to move forward without feeling negative.

Embrace the bad days and learn from them. Each day is a new day and you never know if tomorrow is coming. Take time to reflect on the daily events, find a good in the day and focus on that.

After all

At some point in your life, whether you realize it or not, you have been surrounded by a narcissist. Whether it’s a past or present relationship, friendship, work colleague or family member, I can guarantee at some point you have dealt with a narcissist. Whatever the case may be, when it comes to dealing with a narcissist, it can be exhausting and draining.

Toxic Health Risks:

Abuse
Anxiety
Chronic Self-Blame
Depression
Fear
Insomnia
Lack of Self-Worth
Loss/Increased Appetite
PTSD
Weight Loss/Gain

Lucky for all of us, narcissistic people come in all genders and race.

For those of you still confused whether you’ve been exposed to narcissism or not ask yourself this one question… At any point have you ever felt that your opinion or feelings were disregarded? That the person you were talking to was too fixated on their feelings and made their opinions the only ones that mattered? If you have, chances are you’ve been exposed to the toxicity of a narcissist.

Once you’ve been exposed, buckle up because it’s a bumpy ride and depending on the type of relationship, you could be invited to ride the non-stop rollercoaster of emotions. Don’t worry though, not all of the emotions are negative, you will experience peaks of positive ones. However, like all rollercoasters there are more drops, twists and turns than there are peaks. So you must proceed with caution.

Narcissists are unable to see the good and bad qualities in others simultaneously and accept that both exist. They either see you as special and perfect like them or worthless and flawed in which they cannot associate with. Therefore, they rarely accept blame for their actions as it shows a sign of being flawed and worthless.

The narcissist’s perception of you will depend on how they feel in the moment and rarely have anything to do with you personally. When you reach the next peak on your ride we call this happiness, but take it at face value, as it is only temporary and fragile. It is vulnerable to being disrupted unexpectedly. Narcissists are extremely hypersensitive and unable to maintain a stable, positive image of you when they feel angry, hurt, disappointed, or frustrated by you causing your coaster to flip upside down. The moment the narcissist feels slightly negative towards you, anything you shared positively is completely disregarded, as if it never existed.

Narcissists have difficulty maintaining healthy relationships as they have a superior need for power and recognition and will not tolerate anything less. Narcissists are jealous people who seek constant praise and positive reinforcement from others. They are incapable of loving unconditionally. In order to gain love from a narcissist you must be willing to adhere to any conditions they demand.

Once a narcissist has your commitment, this is when your roller coaster takes a sharp turn down the spiral track and the true colors of the narcissist will begin to emerge and narcissistic abuse begins. It begins with belittling comments, ignoring behavior, adultery, and, at times, physical abuse. Their feelings of inadequacy are projected onto you. If the narcissistic person is feeling unattractive they will belittle your appearance. If the narcissist makes an error, this error becomes your fault. Narcissists also engage in manipulative abuse by giving subtle hints and comments that result in you questioning your own behavior and thoughts. Another common abusive tactic is public humiliation, when the narcissist says something seemingly innocent but offensive to you and enjoys the emotional reaction you give. Any slight criticism of the narcissist, whether actual or perceived, often triggers narcissistic rage and full-blown annihilation from the narcissistic person. This can range from a screaming tirades or silent treatment. Narcissists do not take responsibility for relationship difficulties and exhibit no feelings of remorse. Instead they believe themselves to be the victim in the relationship as you failed to meet their expectations.

Develop your character, for it becomes your destiny and only YOU have the power to change your destiny no one else.

“Character building begins in our infancy and continues until death.”

– Eleanor Roosevelt