Success is An Inside-Out Job
“Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.” -Christian Larson
I don’t even have to know you to know that you want to have some kind of success in your life. While you may have already achieved your version of success on some level, you know, deep down, you were made for more – you want more; you need more; you feel the passion for more. This doesn’t necessarily mean more money (though no shame if it does), it can simply mean more of how you define success for yourself, for your family, and for your community.
The destination in this case is the easy part: MORE SUCCESS. It’s a subjective destination – unique to you – but it’s also a universal one: the same for all of us.
Here comes the hard part: getting there.
We live in a society that glamorizes hustle culture. (I spoke to this a few weeks ago in another article). If you believe getting there involves burning the candle at both ends, struggling, efforting, pushing, working multiple jobs at once, or any other form of constant DOING, it’s time for a radical shift in your approach to success.
Success is an inside-out job.
Before I dive into the exercises I use to get me past my own success-limiting blocks, I want to ask you a question. Because you’re here, reading this blog, I’m going to make a few assumptions about you first.
You consider yourself to be enlightened.
You are a reader, a seeker, a spiritual human “being” who longs for inner peace and knows about certain rituals – you light candles, you meditate, you journal, you visualize, you engage in the powerful practice of affirmations.
Why is it then, with as much as you’ve done on yourself, and as much awakening that has occurred for you, and as enlightened as you are… why are you not exactly where you want to be? Why are you still asking questions like, is the money coming? When is the money coming? Can I buy a new car? Can I get the old one fixed? Can I pay the rent? Can I quit this job and make it? Why am I doing so much and not seeing the results to match?
And hey, no judgment here, as these are also the kinds of questions I’m often asking myself.
You already know this article is about success – something that as spiritual people, especially those of us who identify as spiritual people of color, we must take control of the what-is-success and how-do-we-get-there conversation. Why? Because despite all of the external focus on success (the candles, the meditating, the visualizing, the rituals in order to manifest, etc), we’re not getting there. Because it’s performative at best, meaningless at worst!
When you take hustle culture and marry it to ritual, you just get more hustle culture: do, do, doing more, more, more and not BEING something else.
Success isn’t about effort. Putting more effort into journaling is the same as putting more effort into hustling. It’s all external activity which ignores our energy and limits our success.
I want to take you back to those internal questions. You know, the ones about money and its enoughness. I can’t tell you exactly why those questions keep coming up – the triggers are probably different from day to day, depending on circumstances – but I can tell you for certain what lies at the root of each of those triggers: FEAR. Fear causes you to separate from your divine self and move into lower states of consciousness that have you:
Confused about your vision
Unable to manifest your vision
Stuck in ‘under’ mode: underachieving, underlearning, underperforming
Stuck in ‘over’ mode: overachieving, overacting, overperforming
Frozen when it comes to making important decisions
Stuck in a job you hate
Struggle when it comes to navigating corporate waters
Problems when it comes to meeting your goals
Self-sabotaging
So, how do we take back control? How do we quash the fear that is limiting our success?
First let me tell you how we don’t do it. We don’t do it by any external action. This includes crystals, sage, all the “woo” rituals we think hold the key to unlimited success in our lives. Don’t get me wrong! Anyone who knows me knows I embrace all of those rituals on a daily basis. But they are support mechanisms. They help me “feel” good and focus my attention somewhere other than on fear. In and of themselves though, they are inanimate objects that have no power until I give it. We as human beings are the powerful beings. We are literally made of the stuff of the Universe. Thus, we must have a clear mind, clear heart and the ability to release our attachment to the person we believe we are in order to move into the person we were always meant to become.
To overcome limiting fear-based beliefs that block my success, I use an S-S-S Method:
Surrender
Self-Awareness
Self-Talk
Surrender
When we focus all of our attention within (as opposed to external, effort-based striving), we become able to see ourselves, our environment, and our circumstances with objective clarity. This is crucial to having a clear mind and heart. In order to do this, we must become the observer of our experience versus the experiencer of our experience.
This means, in the words of the refrain, LET IT GOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Let go of the idea that you need to be anything, have anything, do anything, and even the idea that anything you perceive is correct at all. Sound impossible? I’m going to share a quick way for you to ground yourself into this energy of surrender leading you into self-awareness.
Take a look at this:
Which of these circles have been running your life when it comes to getting what you want?
One of the problems we run into when overcoming limiting fear-based beliefs is that we are misinterpreting our own lives. We’re making up stories about our situations and challenges and telling them to ourselves like off-kilter bedtime stories over and over again. The most difficult part of untangling the lie in these stories is that they are often rooted in a teensy, tiny kernel of truth. This leads to illusion: a false belief about ourselves and our circumstances that becomes reality in our own minds.
When we surrender and sit with ourselves as observers versus experiencers, we can immediately differentiate between FACTS (Truth) and BELIEFS (Stories). This understanding gives us the ability to choose how we relate with ourselves, others, circumstances, our environment, our struggles, our “success” etc.
Self-Awareness
Once you’ve surrendered your internal story-telling and exchanged it for some fact-based observation, you’re ready for the Intentional Digging Exercise:*
In the first column you are going to write the facts. The thing to remember about facts, is they don’t change and they aren’t based on how you “feel”. Facts are verifiable and can be proven and not subject to interpretation. In the second column you’ll write your beliefs, meaning what you made the fact mean. This is where you write out your interpretations. For instance, if the fact is you lost an employee on your team, you might make that mean you may possibly no longer be able to service the same amount of clients. In the third column, you will write what your feelings are about the situation. Based on my example, you may feel worried, upset, disappointed. And in the last column you’ll write an intentional interpretation. This is meant to have you come up with a perspective around the situation that serves you in the pursuit of what you want to happen vs what is happening. So, maybe your intentional interpretation is that the loss of the employee is an opportunity for you to network with new people inside a fresh hiring process and work with your remaining team to find new ways to tighten up systems and practices to fill in the gaps temporarily. I did this exercise recently with one of my mentors after releasing a big client and the breakthroughs I experienced when it came to my own business were incredible!
Now I want you to think of a situation that is challenging you and making you fearful on some level of moving forward and having what you want, and then fill out the first three columns.
Self-Talk
Now, we’re moving into the Self-Talk portion of the S-S-S Method as we fill out the fourth column: intentional interpretation. Keep thinking of intentional interpretations of these challenging situations that better serves you.
This requires intentionality. Most likely, you have been telling yourself a story that involves you as a victim. Victims, by definition, cannot succeed. Only victors can be successful. Success requires a shift of the internal narrative, moving you from victim to victor. You must move out of the blame and into the truth of choice and responsibility. Responsibility does not mean accepting fault where it is not yours – it means standing in a position of power and taking control over your own story. And then, affirming that story in your mind and with your mouth … over and over again.
You know you have intentionally shifted the narrative with that fourth column when you see and feel powerful when it comes to that challenging situation, as opposed to helpless and overwhelmed. When you alter your relationship to anything or anyone through the altering of your interpretations, you then have the power to change those things. And this is the change that leads to TRUE SUCCESS that is effortless, authentic and powerful.
