Give Up the Sport of Success

It is high time you ask yourself the first vital question. Who told you that you have to be successful? Parents? School teachers? Your friends? As women we kill ourselves over a concept that in this culture has become like a sport. I believe there is a fundamental flaw in most of the self help and success material that now over saturates the bookstores and major media outlets.


Much of this comes from a military background. Consider this: since most fortune 500 companies are headed by male CEOs, a brief look into their backgrounds reveal that most have had some kind of military service history. In this context, this kind of experience is very desirable. Likewise, the beginning of much of the self-help culture arose out of the need for mentoring in business.

What this leaves us with even today, is a language positioned on key terminology like, “strategy” “laws of success” and endless checklists created to ensure preparedness before going into war. There are goals of course, and routinely these goals will lead to important landmark moments in the course of life, at which times we stop and set new series of goals which grant us new levels of power over our lives.

But do we ever stop to ask ourselves if our lives really unfold across the battlefield? Setting aside the gender political issues of male vs female CEO population across the business spectrum of our country today, what kind of cultural and personal decisions are we making today based on these ideas?

How did we become convinced that we must do battle with ourselves, that we are at war with our lives and with our own internal resources? We see such powerful figures such as a Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey whom we admire, but whom we now relegate to the level of well, there are “those kind of people” and then there is the rest of the world”. They are in our culture considered “exceptions”, extremely disciplined spiritual athletes or soldiers.

But what about the rest of us, everyday working women, mothers whose lives are filled with stops and starts, false hopes and a steady stream of despair in the background? What about the rest of us who want to live a sublime life but just don’t fit that over-achieving public profile?

The truth is that we all need to thrive. There are organic, spiritual and biological forces within us telling us this. But we become trapped by the life scripts handed to us. The reason anger plays such an important role is that it alone dislodges us from those scripts until we see them for what they are. Even while we are not always aware, it “arranges” and conspires circumstances in our lives to enable the growth. Think of this as the tree on the sidewalk that breaks the concrete to facilitate its own growth. All things biological need to thrive. And we are no different; we just have forgotten nature’s way.

Personally, success for me has become a bad word because I learned that everyone else has created a monster out of it. If I read another blog (written by women mostly) about how I have to stretch myself even thinner just so I can “have it all” I think I’ll barf. I want to challenge you to stop devising ways to be successful and start devising ways to thrive as a woman and a human being. Success is a public, social thing. Thriving is private and unique to your own standards, and when you thrive, eventually everyone around you takes notice too.

Namaste,

Adriana