How to Create A Successful Life

Have you spent years chasing promotions, hitting milestones, or comparing your life to others? Only to wonder why it still doesn’t feel quite right. If the answer is yes, we’ve all been there! When we say that someone has succeeded in life, often what we mean is that they’re wealthy, famous, or extraordinarily skilled. In reality, success looks different for everyone. So, how to create a successful life? What does success even mean?

The Greek Philosopher, Aristotle, defined a successful life as living in a way that aligns with your purpose. So, if you’re an artist and you make art, you’re successful. If you’re a dancer and you dance or a scientist and you do research, you’re successful. For some, success might be owning a yacht whereas, for others, success is simply being able to spend quality time with their loved ones.

So, this means that success isn’t a universal checklist. It’s personal, and guess what? It’s based on your core values and you get to define it for yourself. As long as you are moving through the world in a way that is true to you, you’re successful. It might look different at 35 than it did at 25 and that’s OKAY.

So, how do you actually get there? In this article, you are going to learn how to create a successful life.

Visualise it
Make a plan
Track your progress

How To Create A Successful Life: Visualisation

Visualisation is an effective strategy that has been used in therapeutic contexts for decades to enhance cognitive, emotional, and behavioural change (Blackwell, 2019). When we visualise a particular action, our brains are essentially rehearsing that action. This is one of the ways on how to create a successful life. You can go a step further and capture your goals in a journal of your choice.

For example, neuroscience studies using brain imaging techniques have shown that when we imagine making a movement, our brains are activated in the same way that they would be if we were actually making that movement (Pearson et al., 2015).

In the same way that imagining an action is a sort of mental rehearsal, we can use mental imagery to identify the discrepancies between our current selves and our ideal future selves, which can help inform the behavioral changes we need to make to succeed in our goals (Murphy et al., 2015).

This means that, the mental rehearsal of imagining the steps it would take to get there, and the roadblocks you might face prepares you not just for success, but also for bouncing back when things go sideways.

How To Create A Successful Life: Make a Plan

Looking into how to create a successful life, visualising is only a first step. The next necessary step is to make a plan. Turning dreams into reality requires a concrete plan. Right? We can use visualisation to create a sort of rough draft of our plans, but when it comes to actually laying out our plans it is important that we get as specific and detailed as possible. Why not follow the SMART model for setting the action plan?

How to build a plan that will actually get you there? Two helpful strategies for making plans and achieving our goals are to create subgoals and set deadlines.

Creating Subgoals

Success is predominantly achieved by taking several incremental steps toward a goal. For example, if your goal is to be an ultra-marathon runner, you might work toward this goal by setting sub-goals like training every day and eating more healthful and nutrient-dense foods.

Research has shown that structuring a goal into a set of subgoals makes it easier to work toward your goal, enhances your self-efficacy, or your belief that you are capable of achieving your goal, and provides positive reinforcement which improves motivation and persistence (Latham & Seijts, 1999).

So, the idea here is to break your plan into subgoals or milestones that keep you on track and make the journey less overwhelming. If your goal is to run a marathon, you might want to break it down and start running three times per week for a certain period of time.

Set Deadlines

Research shows that one of the best ways for us to achieve success is to set deadlines for when we can accomplish each of our identified subgoals.

People commonly underestimate how long it will take them to complete a task, a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy. Being as specific and detailed as possible when creating your sub-goals (and sub-subgoals when necessary) is the best way to achieve your goals within the timeframe you set (Kruger & Evans, 2004).

The idea here is to give yourself target dates (even rough ones) to adds just the right amount of pressure to keep momentum going. Deadlines keep you accountable.

It can sometimes be hard to identify every subcomponent of a task in advance, so don’t get discouraged if a task ends up taking you longer than anticipated. Remember: If you fall behind, adjust your timeline. Don’t scrap the whole plan. Keep going!!

How To Create A Successful Life: Track Your Progress

Another strategy on how to create a successful life is by tracking your progress toward your goals and subgoals (Harkin et al., 2016). Download a free journal from our collection of free tools to get started.

There’s nothing more motivating than seeing how far you’ve come. Whether you’re crossing off a checklist, using a habit-tracking app, or using a sticky note, remember to always track your progress.

What does it matter? It matters because of the two following reasons:

It keeps You Honest

One benefit of tracking your progress is that it provides a more accurate perception of how much effort you’re actually putting in and consistently you’re sticking to your plan.

We often hold inaccurate perceptions of our behaviors. For example, we might think we aren’t working hard enough when in reality we are putting in more than enough time and effort. On the other hand, we might think we are consistently doing the most when we are missing the mark by a substantial amount.

Tracking your progress gives you a reality check.

It’s Motivating

Checking off completed subgoals and being able to see the progress we are making can be rewarding and can promote a sense of competence. The positive emotions that come from progress tracking can help promote sustained motivation, which increases our chances of success.

We can all agree that there is something extremely satisfying about checking a box or seeing a streak. I don’t know about you but those little wins add up, and they fuel your motivation to keep going.

Bottom Line

Success means something different for everyone and the way in which you define success might even change throughout your life. It’s something you build one step at a time, by staying true to your values, setting intentions, and moving in a direction that feels right for YOU.

To live a successful life, it is important to ask yourself three important questions: what drives me, what do i truly want out of life, and what makes me feel alive?

Only after you know what you are aiming for can you start to implement strategies such as visualisation, making a plan, and tracking your progress to help you live your dream life. The combination of a clear vision of success and effective strategies for attaining it is a surefire way to live our very best lives.

Always remember: adjusting your path doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’re learning. And frankly, that’s a success in itself.

I hope this post help you build success on your terms. Now, your turn. What does success look like for you? What’s the one step you can take this week to move closer to your vision? Share with us in the comments below 🙂

References

Blackwell, S. E. (2019). Mental imagery: From basic research to clinical practice. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 29(3), 235.

Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., … & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological bulletin, 142(2), 198.

Kruger, J., & Evans, M. (2004). If you don’t want to be late, enumerate: Unpacking reduces the planning fallacy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40(5), 586-598.

Latham, G. P., & Seijts, G. H. (1999). The effects of proximal and distal goals on performance on a moderately complex task. Journal of Organizational Behavior: The International Journal of Industrial, Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Behavior, 20(4), 421-429.

Murphy, S. E., O’Donoghue, M. C., Drazich, E. H., Blackwell, S. E., Nobre, A. C., & Holmes, E. A. (2015). Imagining a brighter future: the effect of positive imagery training on mood, prospective mental imagery and emotional bias in older adults. Psychiatry Research, 230(1), 36-43.

Pearson, J., Naselaris, T., Holmes, E. A., & Kosslyn, S. M. (2015). Mental imagery: functional mechanisms and clinical applications. Trends in cognitive sciences, 19(10), 590-602.