There are eight steps to success in life that are fundamental to your chances of success. Follow these steps and you will be able to achieve whatever you truly want. Some of the steps need you to work on developing yourself, in this article you are going to find out about the four steps that are critical to the way that you organize yourself and how you deal with people and your surroundings.
Applying the timeless principles embodied in the eight steps to success will have a tremendous impact on the results you can achieve in your life, whether you want to start a new business, loose weight, give up smoking, learn a new skill, get a promotion, pass an exam …in fact any significant challenge you face in your life!
Personal planning and goal setting for success
Personal planning and goal setting are two of the core elements you need to be successful.
First you need to clearly know where you are going, what it is you want to achieve. Do you want to loose weight – if so how much and by when? Do you want to get a promotion – if so what is the new job you want and when do you want it by? Do you want to make more money – how much and by when?.
It’s absolutely vital that you spend some time thinking about what is it you want and understanding how important it is to you. If you don’t know the answers to these questions it would be a bit like setting out to go the supermarket without any idea where it is and what you are going to do when you get there. You wouldn’t waste your time like that would you?
Try to imagine yourself having achieved your goal – what would the result look like, how would you feel – write down the answer to these questions.
Once you have a clear understanding of where you want to go, it’s time to draw the map of how you’re going to get there. In our supermarket example, if you didn’t know where the store was you would draw a map. It’s just the same with any destination you have in mind.
Start by looking at what you need to achieve to reach your goal – do you need to learn some new skills in order to get the job you want? If you want to loose weight, how much will you have to loose each week. If you want to make more money, what steps are you going to have to take.
Break your plan down into a few major goals and set dates for them. Does the plan look realistic, is it challenging but achievable? If not, you may need to rethink. If it does look challenging, that’s fine - it’s very important not to underestimate how much you can achieve!
Now starting with your first goal, break it down into small steps – each one should be something you know can do in a short space of time – hours, or at most a day or two.
Be proactive
Now you’ve got your plan you’re already ahead of 95% of the population – take a moment to congratulate yourself. It’s time to get going and take action. Be proactive, make sure you do what you said you were going to do and make sure you don’t let opportunities pass you by.
So many people fall into the trap of setting themselves goals and then doing nothing – there’s something they want to watch on television, their cat got ill…. How many times have you set New Year’s resolutions that go nowhere!
The best laid plans of mice and men…
… often go astray! Expect the unexpected – very few people know all the answers when they draw up a plan so it’s very likely that your goal setting will meet some unanticipated obstacles. Be prepared to be flexible and proactive, adjust your plan as you go along.
Whatever you do, don’t loose sight of your overall goal – don’t compromise on that unless you absolutely have to – and if you have to make a change maybe you’ll need just a little bit more time to get there. Warning! Don’t make a habit of making a change to your goal or you’ll loose sight of it and end up back where you started – only more frustrated and more convinced that you can’t do it.
The eight steps to success in life
There are eight steps to success in life, we’ve talked about the four steps you need to take to organise yourself towards achieving your goals – personal planning, goal setting for success, being proactive and being flexible. If you apply these timeless principles in your life, you can enjoy your share of success too! Learn more about the eight steps to success
Are you looking for greater success in your life? Do you want to loose weight, stop smoking, raise your self esteem, start a business, make money, learn a new skill, get a promotion …in fact be more successful at anything you want to try. Did you know that there are eight steps to success that can make a critical difference to your chances of success in life?
The eight steps to success are all timeless principles that have been identified as being critical to your personal success by leaders throughout history. Many have written great works on the keys to success – Napoleon Hill, Stephen R Covey, Anthony Robbins. As you read what they have written, you can identify some guiding principles – the eight steps to success.
Leaders from around the world and from all walks of life– Mahatma Ghandi, Oprah Winfrey, Mother Theresa, Bill Gates, the Dhali Lama – all give outstanding examples of what you can achieve if you apply the eight steps to success in your life. Many highly successful people started out as ‘normal’ individuals but by consistently applying the timeless principles in the eights steps to success they were able to achieve phenomenal success.
The problem is that most people do not use the eights steps to success in their lives. The choice is yours – use them or carry on doing what you have always done and getting nowhere fast!
The eight steps to success can be broken down into two groups of fundamentals for success. The first four steps are what you do to achieve personal growth and personal success. They focus on self growth so that you can become the person you need to be to achieve the success you want to achieve.
The second four steps are what you do to organise and manage your efforts. They include goal setting and personal planning for success. They focus on how you interact with the world around you
The eight steps to success – personal growth and personal success
- Develop and maintain a Positive attitude. This will underpin all your efforts to succeed. When you have a positive attitude you are energised and motivated, obstacles seem more insignificant and you are much more optimistic. There’s even medical evidence that a positive attitude can help you to live longer! Find out more about a positive attitude.
- Understand the needs of others before you ask them to understand you. So many people listen to others without understanding, filtering what the other person is saying through the lens of their own experience. They are more interested in what they are going to say in reply than in truly understanding. The art of communication is to first understand the other person and then decide how you are going to respond using all the resources available to you.
- Commit yourself to continuous learning. You will never have all the answers. One of the most exciting things about life is that it is a journey of continual discovery. As you learn more, you can achieve more so commit yourself to lifelong learning. Hint: the resources and articleson this website are a good place to start!
- Enjoy life on the way. You are most likely on a journey to success that is going to last for many months… or even years. As an example Colonel Saunders only succeeded with Kentucky Fried Chicken at the age of 65!. You should make sure that you are pursuing things that fill you with passionate interest and that you take the time to have some fun and to refresh yourself spiritually.
The eight steps to success – manage your interaction with the world:
- Personal planning - find your dream, develop your vision and develop your long term goals. Read more about personal planning.
- Goal setting identify the steps you need to reach your long term goals make them challenging but achievable and commit yourself to doing them. Then take your journey one step at a time. Find out about goal setting.
- Be proactive All the planning and positive attitude is useless unless you take action! Being proactive also means that you take the responsibility to make things happen.
- Be flexible “The best plans of mice and men oft go awry” – you can only plan based on what you know. When things go wrong, you should regard this as an opportunity to learn and grow through solving the problem and adjusting your plans. Perhaps the best way is to treat life like a game played with passion, serious intent and, above all, enjoyment!
Now you know what the eight steps to success in life, you can start thinking about applying them to the areas of your life where you want to achieve more success. These steps are timeless principles that have been tested and proven over many years by many highly successful people so you should not doubt that they will work for you.
…It’s up to you. You have the power to choose to apply the eight steps to success and make the changes you want to in your life.
Just remember this: If you apply these eight steps to success consistently, you can achieve anything that you truly believe is possible!
Go ahead. Pick just one of the eight steps, the one that seems to resonate most with you right now and spend some time today working on putting it to use in your quest for success!
