"First of all, I was lucky. I was always in the right place at the right time. Doors opened for me and I walked right through them. Life is a sequence of coincidences. Only in hindsight may we imagine that there are patterns."
What is your answer? Pretty sure it won't correspond one hundred percent with any of the three I have mentioned. But maybe one of the answers sounds a bit like you? Assuming that you aren't like Patrick and consider the question alone to be strange. This is alternative four.
There is no right or wrong interpretation of your past successes. But by recognizing what interpretation pattern is most likely for you, you will learn a little more about yourself. You are on track to discover your personal principles of success. From the outside, one might say that just about every career includes certain parts of the three patterns mentioned above: commitment and struggle as well as support from others and, ultimately, happiness. But objectivity does not matter here.
What are the greatest achievements of your life so far?
I invite you to focus your attention beyond the past 12 months and onto your entire life so far: What do you consider to be the most significant achievements of your life to date? I am referring to both professional successes, such as your first steady job or your first management position, and personal successes in the broadest sense, such as your first child's birth or running a marathon. Career milestones often seem more tangible to us than private successes at first glance – after all, we are used to listing our professional development in a resume. However, in this case it doesn't matter what you would include in your resume. But rather how important success was and still is for you personally. One of my greatest professional successes, for example, is the first seminar I held entirely in English more than 20 years ago. This is hardly a valid point for a resume, but for me personally, it was a milestone.
Personal successes are just as important here as professional ones! My personal list includes my son's birth, the academic celebration of my graduation in business administration or the wedding anniversary with my husband. Personal successes can sometimes be rather dramatic and sometimes pretty low-key. For example, I know a man who learned to walk again as a teenager after a swimming accident. A huge amount of willpower and a defining success for this individual! Or a woman, whose greatest successes include, in her opinion, the fact that she was able to put aside a behavior that originated in an
overprotective childhood and started to face life with all its ups and downs. This is a long, tenacious and not very dramatic process – and at the same time one of the greatest successes of this person. What comes to mind when you think of your professional and personal successes?
Exercise: Your greatest professional and personal successes
You can use a large piece of paper, small sticky notes (Post-its®), and a pen if you like. You can also use adhesive tape to attach two smaller pieces of paper together to create one large sheet. The important thing is that you have enough space to fit ten or more sticky notes on the sheet.
Now grab your pen and divide your paper with a horizontal line into two halves of equal size. The upper half is for your professional success, the lower half for your personal success. On the right end of the line, add an arrowhead. The line/arrow is now the timeline from your past to the present.
It' s entirely up to you how far in the past you want your timeline to begin. You can start at the time of your high school graduation, enrollment in school or at birth. Or you can start with your past lives – if you believe in those and think you might have some knowledge about it … You decide!
Now use the sticky notes to write down your greatest successes to date using keywords. Then stick them along the time axis in the appropriate field for professional or private successes. Allow yourself at least twenty minutes. Some successes may be less obvious and only come to mind after a certain amount of reflection.
Sticky notes have the advantage of being able to discard individual events and replace them with those that are more important to you. Now fill your sheet and rearrange the notes as necessary until the overall picture appears coherent. Examine the result for a moment. What does this trigger in you?
Please do not toss the sheet just yet but put it aside for another exercise later in this chapter.
It is a decisive moment to look back on the greatest successes of their lives for many people for the first time. Whether it is purely in their mind or with the help of the exercise described in the box. Biographical knowledge is mostly subconscious knowledge – most of our past experiences do not occur in everyday life. But we haven't completely forgotten formative events, we can recall them. (In unique states of relaxation, such as hypnosis, we can remember almost everything).
This process of placing and becoming aware of past successes is the first step towards using these successes as a resource for the future.
Discovering and recognizing personal success strategies
The ascent to the Drachenkogel followed a wide hiking trail, which slowly ascended for many kilometers through forests, over alpine pastures and along gorges. Most hikers started early in the morning to reach the summit around noon. From there you had a breathtaking panoramic view.
When Patrick set out around noon, after a good night's sleep and a big breakfast at the hotel's lavish buffet, he had the trail almost to himself. The sun was shining brightly from a cloudless sky.
After 45 minutes on the wide, lonely path Patrick started to get bored. He thought about turning around and taking advantage of the hotel's sports facilities in the valley. Then he remembered that he was supposed to think about his greatest successes so far.
All right, he told himself and took a deep breath: I graduated from high school even though my teachers had already given up on me. I was dating my first girlfriend for over five years, while most others had broken up with their first love after a few weeks. I am still in close contact with my best friend from school.
I was the first in our family to attend university. I financed my studies with jobs and did not accept money from my parents or the state. I never missed a party as a student and still passed every exam. I had signed an employment contract even before I graduated. I was the youngest team leader, the youngest area manager and the youngest country manager ever in our sales organization.
Patrick stopped walking, glanced over to a waterfall on the other side of a deep gorge and continued thinking. He smiled because he remembered: "I saved a teenager from getting beat up in front of the Rage Club at night and ended up in hospital myself. I proposed to the woman of my dreams Laura and she said yes, even though she could have married this Australian billionaire. I came up with the idea of getting married in Las Vegas and it was a good idea.
Not bad so far, thought Patrick when he came to a mountain pasture behind a bend and could hardly believe his eyes: Wow! Two years ago, Patrick and Laura had been here. A deteriorating cabin had been standing there. Now the cabin had been renovated and transformed into a little jewel. A carved wooden sign said, "Snack Shack". On a wooden bench, next to the entrance door sat a man with a stylish hat and a full hipster beard almost down to his bellybutton. Patrick approached him.
"Hey!", Patrick greeted the host of the snack shack in a not very alpine manner.
"Hi!", he replied. "All alone on the way to the summit this late in the afternoon? You look like you've escaped from a management seminar down at the hotel."
"Almost, but not quite," laughed Patrick. "I'm coaching myself right now. Voluntarily."
"Stressed at work?"
"On the contrary. I could be Head of Global Sales in Japan, but I'm not sure if I'd really enjoy it."
"I was Head of Global Brand Management," the innkeeper said. "Until a year and a half ago. I've been doing this ever since." He pointed to the decked-out cabin. "Why don't you sit with me