SUCCESS DIET
By Bill Cottringer


All the world’s leaders, sports heroes, rich and famous Hollywood actors and actresses, billionaire dot.com investors, rock groups, best-selling authors, high school teachers, soldiers, government workers, grocery store check-out clerks, parents, students, volunteers, factory workers and you and I all have something very important in common. There is a gap between where we are and where we want to be. Success is the gap-closer.

The only genuine success diet is a full circle of efforts and results—the short range, here and now things you do and don’t do to close your gap and the more global results you get at the end from doing or not doing those things.

A good, local, here and now definition of success is: Paying full attention to the now moment and making your very best effort to use your knowledge and skills to get results to make a positive difference in whatever you are doing. Just a few examples are:

• Putting aside your own personal agenda to aggressively listen with both ears to truly understand something a friend is saying and clarifying any potential misunderstanding.
• Really getting into a new leisure activity, learning how to do it well and enjoying it to the max.
• Giving your employer 100% of your attention and efforts in making a valuable contribution to the company.
• Playing with your children and enjoying their creativity and their simple enjoyment.
• Using all your strength and endurance to have an exhausting work-out, coming home and eating a healthy meal, reading a good book to learn something new, and getting a good night’s rest.

But what is the more global definition of success that we were born to achieve? Early psychologists called it “self-actualization. It is a lifetime pursuit of growing, learning and improving to become your best, ideal self in the six areas outlined below:

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

In the area of physical development we strive to meet our basic safety and security needs and achieve physical well-being. The sure prescription for success in achieving physical well-being is simple: First be an optimist. According to compelling medical research, optimists live longer and are healthier than pessimists.

Along with the right attitude of optimism comes eating right, sleeping enough, exercising, relaxing, nurturing our appearance, and being proactive with preventative health care.

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT

Robert Sternberg coined the term successful thinking which aptly describes the goal of intellectual development. Successful thinking is the type of thinking that combines logic, creativity and practical common sense to get the best results with the least cost and side effects.

You can develop successful thinking by several ways including exploring your own natural creativity, asking more questions, looking for governing principles in nature, digging below the surface to understand relationships, observing others who use successful thinking, and learning something positive from your failures.

EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Emotional development involves increasing your self-understanding, intrinsic motivation. empathy and self-control. Several researchers, including Daniel Goleman, found a strong relationship between these skills and successful performance in the workplace. The relationship between emotional development and successful personal relationships is a fact like gravity.

Emotional growth starts with determination—to know yourself and all your “demons” well and to exercise discipline to control negative behaviors such as selfishness, anger, irresponsibility and criticism, especially during adversity or when you just don’t feel like it.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

Van Sloan, Tim Sanders and myself (and probably many others), developed the concept of likeability to represent the key social skills necessary to be successful in any endeavor. Social development involves becoming more likable and learning how to communicate better.

Being likable includes practicing the behaviors of honesty, empathy, politeness, positivism, humility, humor and attractiveness. Good communication involves the use of a supportive climate by conveying equality, freedom, tentativeness, honesty, sensitivity, spontaneity, understanding and acceptance. Social development requires getting and using productive feedback to improve.

VOCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Vocational development involves increasing your work sills and using your special talents productively in the workplace. Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life, offers an excellent blueprint for vocational development. Discerning my own true calling for life was not an easy process for me, having dabbled in over seven entirely different careers over four decades.

Recognizing the common theme in all these different professions was my turning point, but my real vocational development just started when I was able to see the lessons I was meant to learn from the most unpleasant, difficult life experiences I went through. And of course, there is nothing wrong with doing one thing as a living and another as a hobby. The key to vocational development is in knowing a real need in society and providing service to others to meet that need.


SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT

The highest rung on the ladder to self-actualization is one that involves simultaneous progress in all these other developmental areas, collectively and in a balanced manner, to result in wholeness and completion. This is closing the gap between your real self and ideal self. Spiritual development requires reconciliation with our creator so we can satisfy our soul’s needs of love, understanding, acceptance, compassion and wisdom. The road to reconciliation demands two things from us—surrender, in giving up our egotistical illusion of control, and obedience, in following the natural laws of life and principles of wisdom. This is actually not passive weakness but strong love.

So, if you want to have great success consider doing these two things simultaneously—(a) bring the finish line closer (adopt the attitude of making your best effort in whatever you are doing right now) and (b) run faster (commit fully to perpetual learning, growing and improving to become your very best physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, vocationally and spiritually. Note: You will probably be so busy having fun that only other people will have the time to notice your success. That’s real success!


William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA. He is author of Getting More By Doing Less, You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, and The Bow-Wow Secrets. He can be reached for comments at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net