How to Achieve Personal Success During Economic Down Times

One of the driving forces for happiness is finding purpose, achieving that purpose, and setting new goals in our ambitions.

It is not as easy as it sounds, we will certainly face challenges each time we choose an ambition, each time we take on a task, each time we find a purpose to fulfill. But what makes us winners is the fact that we never choose to quit, that we never chose defeat, and that we turn our stress into motivation.

From stress to success is a program for the ambitious because “Lucky is the man, who the demon of ambition harnesses and drives through life.”
~Arthur Brisbane.

This program discusses and tackles all the issues that surround our ambitions and creates a platform for you to harness insights to overcome supposed limitation and make a step further to achieve your dreams.

The first step to achieving anything is by seeing it, setting a goal, a definite finish line, or an endpoint that we all call success.

But achieving our goal is not as easy as writing them on a to-do list or telling them to our friends. There are hurdles that we must cross to reach our goals. Some of these hurdles, we already know, some others, we don’t, and if not properly managed, can stagnate or tarnish us through stress, anxiety and depression.
By the end of this topic, you should take home, useful strategies that can help you achieve personal success even in moments of chaos.

What is Stress?

Stress is a feeling, emotional or physical tension that can come from events or mere thoughts that can make you feel frustrated, angry and nervous. But one good way to look at stress is as a reaction. Stress is the body’s reaction to a challenge or demand.

Stress is positive in some scenarios (and can remain positive in all scenarios if we let them). An example of positive stress is ducking when the baseball comes flying or running away from the sizzling sound of the hot oil when we throw in the onions. However, stress can go beyond eluding danger to becoming detrimental to our success.
When our body reacts with stress, negative chemicals are released by the brain whose purpose is to keep you alert of possible danger, these chemicals with continued manifestation become detrimental.

Most hold unto stress like a badge of honor, a proof they are working hard enough, but that is a ridiculous approach that harms your personal success whether it is in health, financial gain, relationships or even business success.

What is success, really?

To some people, it is money, a bottle of martini on the most expensive yacht in the middle of Bahamas. Right to an extent, but the principle and foundational definition of success is a favorable or desired outcome. It can be arriving early to an event, completing an early morning jog, but no, people see these examples and the likes as trifling, overlooked and of little importance.

We are so fixated on the ‘big wins’ of life that we forget that Rome wasn’t built in a day. The truth about appreciating small wins is that it builds our attitude and motivation to achieve bigger successes. It is so easier to focus on our losses, loose count of our blessings and end up in a bad state.
Until we realize that appreciation for ‘trifling’ success is key to moving on, we can hardly achieve any goal.

How to achieve success during economic downtime?

I want you to notice your immediate response as you read this; “what’s happening in the world presently has nothing to with achieving personal success.” It feels so good to be at the other end of the keyboard typing this because someone would have me stoned, someone else would have yelled “I’m at home TOM!!, all day, doing nothing!!!”, “I have lost my body build and shape to quarantine pizzas.” However, there is a hard pill to swallow – our environment can control us if we cannot manage our perception.
What matters most is our attitude to situations that surround us.

You might have believed that to succeed, you need to gain all the knowledge, you need to work hard, you need to put in hours and hours just like I did 20 years ago, operating and managing a dental laboratory. Old quotes and reputable people like Albert Einstein have proved that it is how we think inside that affects our outward perception. In one of his famous quotes “Imagination is more important than knowledge” he proved that the inward perception supersedes the outward one.

Attitude, which is our mindset towards situations is what matters most. It is our emotional and energetic self, the thought patterns that either makes us or mar’s us. We must approach every situation with a positive attitude if we are looking to make a success from it.
We need to adjust and adapt to situation and changes. One of such can be seen the change of technology. So many people got their jobs replaced by inventions while other people leveraged these inventions.

I used to work as an executive coach, therapist and hypnotist years ago. I worked hours a day both on video platforms and in person. Over time, my colleagues and I have continued to move their businesses online because we had realized this is the new necessity. It is even easier because you do don’t need a structure, an office, and a lot of investments before you can get your business going.

Such a change and continuation would not have happened if there was no change in mindset and attitude towards changes. A negative attitude to this would have been, allowing pressure, limitation and tension get to us through our thoughts.

The biggest tip to help you succeed in achieving personal success is to embrace the process. Embracing the process means focusing on what you will do, can do, will always do, and not the destination, or the endpoint because it can be overwhelming when we decide to think out every step.
True power and success in life is in the process.

How can we manage our thoughts and navigate our attitude internally?

Life is an internal experience, no matter the stage. Before now, it was not my thing to step out in the morning to give my lungs and heart the early-morning joy of running. But considering the health benefits and how it has helped me a few times to keep a clear head, I feel a void each time an unprecedented situation makes me miss this activity.

Of course, it was not easy to get up every morning in anticipation to run. But as time passed, it became part of me. This is same for growth. Growth doesn’t happen until you have surpassed initial setbacks, and have crossed the initial phase of struggle. If you want to succeed, there has to be a level of accountability, where you take responsibility for challenges that face you.

It would be best if you avoided denial and blame because no one can do our biddings. Perception requires that you TRY, STEP UP to your CHALLENGES. Gradually, positivity begins to compound that it becomes harder to go back to a lower standard. The beauty is that at a point, your subconscious mind takes over, it becomes part of you, and you find out that you tend to enjoy or add varieties to what was supposed to be an impossible task.

Dealing with Ego

One of the difficulties in achieving personal success is facing the truth. When we are faced with tasks, it is easy to cough up a thousand reasons why we can avoid the task ahead. We can feel either too big or feel the task too small. What matters most is our thought.

New challenges introduce thoughts that are even more overwhelming than the required task. It feels like a wall that we have to only walkthrough, not over, or under, but through.

The first thing to do is to reframe the work to be done. Focus on the benefits of the tasks and the outcome. You can think about the regret that you will face when you neglect that task.

We can imagine what it would be like to get the task done – usually a happy feeling, satisfactory feeling and a successful feeling. We can dwell on the positive feelings that comes with the results instead of thinking so much about the task instead.

Changing our perception can also help to get us motivated. Thinking about running for six months is enough to make you sit at home. But thinking about the immediate tasks, wearing your shoes, and stepping out, is enough to get you over a reasonable distance.

Positive Intentions in times of Chaos

Intentions, just as mentioned earlier, will give you a start when trying to get past a challenge. We can decide to be lax about our situation or focus on the ways to get out. Most people don’t even try to get out of their conditions. Either way, the starting point of solving a challenge is our intentions.

Having good and positive intention helps us to notice opportunities even in times of chaos, and the only way to have a good intention is to control our thoughts and to believe in the process, and the certainty of solutions.

In times of chaos, some people succeed and others fail. But it is always our choice to be in any of these sides because when we look for solutions, we will find them.