When it comes to success, you know that we at the Good Success Mastermind believe that there is “plain old success,” which is nice but not necessarily fulfilling, and then there is Good Success. To us, Good Success involves both personal and professional fulfillment and requires a company, its leadership, and its employees to have a clearly defined company identity. That identity is determined by your core values, one of which must be “Growth” if you truly want to achieve Good Success.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Without continual growth and progress, such words as ‘improvement,’ ‘achievement,’ and ‘success’ have no meaning.” Today, we will talk about how to achieve that continual growth by following 10 daily steps that will help you grow personally and professionally every single day.
Here are the 10 Good Success Steps for Daily Growth:
- Make a commitment to yourself to grow every single day.
This means you need to consciously reaffirm your dedication to growth every day right after you say your morning “thanks” to God and before your feet hit the floor. Just tell yourself, “Today, I am going to do the things I need to do to grow myself and my business so I can support my customers and my community.” You can, of course, customize and personalize that statement to best fit you, but hopefully our example is a good start.
- Plan every day on purpose, with a purpose.
God doesn’t work without purpose or plan, so why should we? Be thoughtful and deliberate not just in your actions, but also in planning your actions. This helps you avoid the dreaded “spinning your wheels” that leads to inertia and exhaustion.
- Take personal responsibility for your day.
Specifically, take conscious, deliberate responsibility for your time, your talents, and your treasure. Use them wisely and be willing to accept responsibility for the error when you fail to use them wisely. This doesn’t mean beat yourself up every time you slip! All of us sometimes fail to fully leverage our time, talents, and treasure. You do not need to spend valuable time berating yourself over spilled milk, so to speak. Just take responsibility and do not blame someone or something else for that failure. Identify where you went wrong, then move on with a plan in place to avoid that pitfall in the future.
- Exhort and encourage others every day.
This is a growth pattern that I personally try very hard to instill in my life because, as you may have heard me mention before, it does not always come naturally to me. For me, this step involves working hard to make sure I tell somebody I am thankful for them every day. It’s not enough to tell them simply, “Thanks, man!” I have to tell them why I’m thankful as well. This is a kind of commitment that leads to serious growth if you keep it. It is a discipline I have put in my life every single day, and I encourage you to do the same even if it is hard or even awkward at first. I can tell you from firsthand experience you will be rewarded by the gratitude you receive from the people you personally thank.
- Be grateful and thankful for the gifts you have already been given.
This goes along with #4. Tell people you are grateful and why. Tell them you are thankful and why. So often in today’s world, we are told we have to concentrate on the things we want in the future if we want to get them. We get carried away in this and forget to concentrate on the wonderful things we already have. This creates unhappiness and a lack of fulfillment.
Remember, being truly grateful, the kind of grateful that garners you truly Good Success, involves being so full of gratitude for what you have been given that the gratitude kind of explodes all around you. It’s a beautiful feeling, and #5 will help you learn to have that feeling all the time.
- Give more in value than you take.
Every day, strive to give more in value than you take in. In this one regard, your net should always be “negative” so that your growth can be truly positive.
- Be prepared to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gains.
This is the kind of mindset you have to cultivate in order to grow, but it does not come easily to most people. If you want to reap what you sow, you have to wait for the harvest. You cannot just dig up the seeds and start eating them as soon as you are done planting! If you want the type of Good Success that leaves you with a cornucopia of blessings to enjoy and share with others, be willing to make short-term sacrifices in order to get those blessings. Every day, you will encounter opportunities to veer off-track toward the short-term benefits. Keep your eyes on the prize: the long-term gain.
- Decide in advance what things will get a “no” from you each day.
This is one of the most important components of growth: saying no. Every day, you must say “no” to some things that feel necessary. Some things will arguably be necessary. This is where that long-term mindset comes in. Say “yes” to things that yield long-term gains and “no” to things that are necessary only for short-term yields. Identifying potential pressure points for #8 will help you make the right yes-or-no call in the moment.
- Learn something new every day.
This is a huge component of growth. You cannot grow without learning. Always strive to learn something, be it learning how to do something new, memorizing a passage from the Bible or other meaningful book, or taking the time to develop a new skill, such as meditation, that will improve your life in the long-term. It doesn’t always have to be extremely serious, either. You can learn how to do an exercise better and, over time, that little improvement could result in much bigger muscles! Whatever you are learning, make sure you learn something new every day.
- Reflect on your day.
You might think by the time you have done steps #1-9, you will be ready to crash into bed. However, before you hit the hay, go back and revisit your entire day. Think to yourself, “What things should I have done better today?” Then ask yourself, “What did I do well?” Identify the things you can improve so that you do them better next time. Identify times you did well so you can repeat that success, that Good Success, tomorrow and in the days to come.
Growth is usually just one of several core values, but at Good Success it is certainly a driving force for us on a daily basis. Use these 10 Good Success Steps for Daily Growth to build up your own business, your own personal life, and your own community. You will soon find you are growing right into your own Good Success!
