Tips For Achieving Success

1. Most important is a purpose, goal or sense of direction which focuses your energy and guides your actions. It is difficult to achieve without a sense of direction. Use some system to remind yourself of your end goal, as it is easy to be sidetracked by passing issues or irrelevancies. However, be able to suspend your goal-pursuit temporarily if a more important issue comes to the fore that requires your attention. When resolved, you return to the main game. Your short-term goals should be conducive towards the achievement of your ultimate goal.

2. Perseverance and effort which is sustained over time. Success requires a co-ordination of your energies and efforts. The things you do should involve working towards achieving your goals, in an incremental fashion. Let’s learn from the bricklayer: he builds a house by putting down a bit of mortar and then a brick, and continuing the process until the job is done. Big achievements require a lot of effort over time. One way of encouraging sustained effort is to give yourself credit for your small achievements along the way to bigger ones.

3. Be your own best friend. Encourage and praise yourself, and limit the degree to which you punish yourself through self-criticism. By all means learn from your mistakes, but this is achieved through uncritical self-awareness - not self-flagellation. If self-criticism is a problem for you, then read the section “Guilt: How to deal with a super-critical conscience”.

4. Perseverance does not mean simply repeating what you have already tried, indefinitely. Achievers are steadfast, but flexible. They may repeat their effort at a more suitable time, or it may mean changing tack drastically, but always with the end goal in mind.

5. It is necessary to have resilience. This is the ability to bounce back after setbacks, failure or loss. For most this is a personality factor that already exists, but it can be developed through effort and the development of a positive mental outlook along the lines of “if at first you don’t succeed, then try, try and try again”, with flexibility in mind.

6. Learning from failure. Failure is not the end of the world, it is an opportunity to gain insight and knowledge. Thomas Edison found thousands of substances - a veritable database – of “non filaments”, before coming across the right ingredient for making a light bulb work effectively. These were seen by Edison not as “failures”, but as “non-filaments”. Some of your unsuccessful efforts may be “non-filaments” that can ultimately lead you to the right solution if you persevere.

7. Confidence in your own abilities and in your capacity to find what you need. This means believing in yourself and also that the world is favourably disposed to meet your needs. This entails having faith in yourself and others. If either is lacking, your confidence may have been dented by negative experiences in your formative years, and may need to be rekindled and strengthened by counselling.

8. Develop the ability to see difficulties as challenges and not obstacles. Challenges bring out our best efforts, whilst perceived obstacles hinder our progress.

9. Problem solving ability. This means not thinking there is no solution to a particular problem, nor doing the first thing that springs to mind. Good problem solvers have a method for tackling problems which guarantees that the issue is properly identified and the best option is selected for implementation.

NOTE: A free interactive programme to guide problem solving is available online, courtesy of Mercurio Cicchini and All Graphics by clicking here.

Concluding comments: If you had a sense of disappointment that you may not have some of the suggested requirements described above, then it is possible that you may learn from the following sections – “Common blocks to achievement”, “Positive Thinking”, “How to reduce the effects of negative thinking”, and “Guilt: How to deal with a super-critical conscience”.

To arrange individual professional coaching or counselling contact Mercurio on 0414 730 866 or email mcpsych@tpg.com.au