IN THIS ISSUE:
What is Success? The Power of Positive Thinking by Stephanie Gravel
Q and A with Rebekah Dell and Lacey McConnell
What is success? It can mean so many things to so many people. My dad taught me at an early age, when you grow up, whatever you decide to do, make sure you enjoy it! It’s important to love what you do. If you enjoy your work you will be happy and successful. I have taken his words to heart my whole adult life. I am grateful for his direction and when making big decisions in my life, I always recall his words.
One of my biggest reoccurring goals in life is to maintain a healthy perspective and balance family and work. It’s easy to become overwhelmed and sidetracked by disillusionment. When I was growing up, my mom could keep a house clean like no other and was a great cook on top of it. She was motivated, ambitious and always had a project she was working on. When I had a family of my own, I found myself wondering how I could be a good mom that keeps a clean house, creates a healthy meal every night and still has a meaningful career. Am I investing enough energy in my work? Where am I going to come up with time to clean my house and spend quality hours with my family? In my early years of having a family, I often needed to give myself a reality check.
I concluded that although I looked up to my mom and valued everything she did for our family, I am not her and I have chosen a different path. My priorities are just different. I had to take ownership of what was important to me and best for my family. I had to adapt to my lifestyle and find a way to thrive. I can’t be a mom exactly like my mom, but I can still be successful; I just have to decide what success is to me. If an unkept house on a given week is the trade-off for being able to watch my daughter play sports well then, guess what? I will learn to accept a little dust. Choosing not to keep up with laundry or cleaning my floors so I can have a date night with my husband does not need to be deemed a failure; rather, it’s a success in being a present wife. We do not need to do everything perfectly. My honest opinion, and maybe it took a while to get there, but I could care less about being perfect. No one but God is perfect, right? I think we should strive to be the best person, wife, mother and friend we can possibly be, and that needs to be enough.
Success to me is keeping a positive outlook on things. Why waste your time and energy being negative? I grew up this way; my family did not spend much time in the world of negativity. This explains why my parents were always working on something, always staying busy. Positive people have more energy and accomplish more. Negativity breeds negativity. Think how much time is wasted on complaining about things as opposed to remaining positive about a situation. It’s pretty eye opening. Being negative is emotionally draining and exhausting and often results in nothing being accomplished. It’s one thing to spot a problem, but it’s another to think of a solution and implement change. When faced with a problem, consider thinking of three solutions and have one of those solutions include yourself.
To me success is not about money, my title, or living in a perfectly decorated and spotlessly cleaned house. If that was the case, I would be a huge failure. Success to me is staying positive in hard times and maintaining focus on what I value. If I do this well, it will provide purpose and meaning to my life. I was raised in an optimistic family with both parents being excellent role models in servant leadership. I married a man that is very positive and regularly displays and teaches selflessness. We practice a positive lifestyle including talking in the positive, and also practicing self-awareness and accountability. There is no question that a positive mindset is powerful. When I was six months pregnant, I was hospitalized for deep vein thrombosis in my left leg. I was in a tremendous amount of pain, my left leg blew up, and I literally had to drag it when I walked because it was so swollen and heavy. I was rushed by ambulance to Kalamazoo where they could handle what became a high risk pregnancy. I was bedridden for a total of six weeks. I was told later I came close to losing my baby twice. My family was so concerned and worried, but never once did I think I would lose my child. I would not even allow that negative thought in my head. She is a healthy, beautiful 20-year-old now.
“Success to me is staying positive in hard times and maintaining focus on what I value.”
Success is also about identifying your strengths and skills and building on them in every aspect of your life. Focus on areas that are natural strengths. Develop, mold and cultivate those abilities and traits every chance possible. Of course, this does not mean ignoring your weaknesses. You absolutely need to be self-aware and acknowledge your vulnerable areas. In my opinion, though, it is important to spend most of your time honing in on your strengths and less time tightening up your weaknesses. I think that is why my husband and I made such a great coaching team for the last 25 years. Together we balanced each other out, played off of each other’s strengths, and chipped in where the other had weaknesses. We both believe in teaching in the positive, but that doesn’t mean everything is sunshine, butterflies and rainbows. It does not mean that neither of us ever yell. On occasion, my daughter tells my husband and I to stop arguing, but what her sensitive soul is witnessing is two adults having a passionate conversation about something we both care about. Healthy conflict makes us better.
Success to me is effective communication. Let’s think about this for a moment: Where do most problems originate from? Usually it’s a miscommunication. It is important to focus on the positive aspects of communication and use effective and efficient methods of communication. For example, when you need to remember to do something, how often do you hear the phase “Don’t forget”? How about keeping it in the positive, and state, “Please remember to…”? If you don’t want to forget something, then why do we say the very thing we don’t want to do? Another example of why we present in the positive is that it helps get straight to the point. In volleyball, often an arm swing needs to be fixed. Instead of saying, “Your elbow is really low and that is why you are making mistakes,” get right to what needs to be adjusted. “Raise your elbow up on your next swing.” Now they’ thinking about what they need to do and not what they did wrong. Efficiency in communication is key. It seems like a simple concept, but pay attention to how people communicate around you. Do you hear more negative or positive phrases? Effective communication can eliminate problems before they even arise, and learning to eliminate these can help to contribute to success.
Take time to check in with yourself and make sure you are keeping a healthy balance in your life. Ask yourself, “What is important to me, and what do I value?” Your thoughts control your life. What influences your thoughts? Mentors, friends, peer groups, spiritual life, education, society and many other things. What you choose to occupy your thoughts is powerful and will shape your attitude on life. Ask yourself, “Are my thoughts taking me where I want to go?” Pay attention to your daily thought patterns and jot them down. Do you tend to have more negative thoughts, reoccurring thoughts looping over and over? Or are they positive and productive? Identify what thoughts will support you in your goals and what thoughts are counterproductive to what you hope to accomplish. You need to be your own best friend and think good and productive thoughts.
Success can be defined as winning four straight G-MAC titles and being named NCAA DII Assistant Coach of the Year. Or having my husband rack up a bunch of Coach of the Year awards and turning out many All-American players. While these things happened along the way on my journey, it is not how I define success. What is success to me? It is having a loving family. It is celebrating joy in my life and witnessing the joy in other people’s lives. It is being kind and reminding people to reach out to others. It is always striving to be a good person and praising others. It is being faithful to myself and true to my word. It is staying hopeful in hard times and helping others to find the good in the world.
Life is hard, and many challenges are placed upon us. When in doubt, remember to keep things simple. Win the moment, win the hour, win the day, win the week, win the month, win the season, win the year, and then start all over again. It’s your life! You are in charge, and you have the ability to define what makes your life successful. Keep these things in mind as you grow through life and navigate your own pathway to success.
Q: How has your perception of success changed throughout your life?
Rebekah | Success has slowly become less about output and recognition and more about growth and doing hard things that stretch me outside of my comfort zone. I’m naturally someone who is externally motivated. Other’s input and opinion matter to me and this has impacted my idea of success. Praise is rewarding and approval of my choices can feel like a natural comfort blanket. I’m learning though to keep a balance in how much I allow external influence to define success because if I’m not careful, I’ll start to make decisions for external validation. I’ve found freedom in focusing on growing in who God is calling me to be on a daily basis and seeking areas I can grow next. The steps can be little and the successes small, but the reward of knowing what I am trying to accomplishing and having a personal attachment to the why tends to result in the best kind of successes.
Lacey | Success used to look like getting amazing grades, making sure that everyone was happy with me, and knowing all the answers, but these days success is knowing that I did my best work and I loved others well. This shift took a long time and some solid investigating into why I felt the need to be perfect, but it was necessary as I was no longer finding success based upon my own standards. Outside affirmations and accolades are amazing, but they cannot be our only source of knowing we are successful.
Q: How do you know what's "good enough" or when you've put in enough work?
Rebekah | I ask myself if I used my time and resources to the best of my ability. If not, I try and be honest with myself and make changes where necessary to give my best. Time and how we use it can be a very limiting factor so I often focus on how to best use the time I have available. I don’t think there is a magic way of knowing if something is good enough because often there is always something to improve. The real focus needs to be on prioritizing responsibilities and time management. If you do those two things then you’ll have a better idea of when to move on because you don’t want other things to suffer. It may also mean sacrificing things you want to do in order to have time to fulfill your responsibilities.
Lacey | These days my “good enough” is measured with 2 questions: Did I do my best work? Did I love others? If I can say “yes!” to both of those questions, then no matter how few things I checked off my list or how thrown together a project is, I can define my day as good enough. I’ve realized that if I am not happy with my work it is often because I was slacking in an area or I was crabby at someone. These are the factors that I can control and this helps me stay grounded in reality.
Q: How do you deal with failure, or feeling like you let someone down?
Rebekah | My natural reaction is often to replay the failure or area I fell short over and over in my mind to dissect what went “wrong”. But the reaction is rarely productive and often results in brooding or anxiety. I’ve learned to limit the overthinking and ask myself three questions. 1. Have I been honest and humble in my response to others and self in dealing with the failing? What did I learn about myself from the situation? What do I need to put in place in my life to reduce the chance I’ll repeat the same action in the future? I then try and implement the thing(s) I’ve learned and move on.
Lacey | First I have to be grounded in truth – I am so thankful for people in my life that are objectively able to say either “yep you messed up, but that is only a failure if you keep doing it” or “this mistake does not define you – you are not a failure.” Then I need a plan. An apology goes a long way towards mending bridges, a strategy to avoid the mistake again, or a perspective shift to realize that my definition of failure is far from the reality of what failure is. Finally I need to get back out there and try again. Nothing defeats “failure” like handling the situation better the next time around.
Q: What are the benefits and perfectionists of being a perfectionist?
Rebekah | It is important to take care in your work, pay attention to detail, and produce at a high quality level, but focusing on high quality output isn’t at the core of perfectionism. Seeking perfection is difficult because who defines perfect? Certainly there are quality standards for high performance and benchmarks we want to achieve but the heart of perfectionism can be harmful. This difference is in how we deal with falling short, not achieving a goal, or performing at a lower level than desired. True perfectionist tend to associate performance with self-worth and when this happens, ones sense of self is tied to the wrong thing. As humans, we aren’t what we do and how well we do it. I like how this quote from Brene Brown in her book Daring Greatly summarizes perfectionism. “Perfectionism is not self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval. Most perfectionists grew up being praised for achievement and performance (grades, manners, rule following, people pleasing, appearance, sports). Somewhere along the way, they adopted this dangerous and debilitating belief system: ‘I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Please. Perform. Perfect.’ Healthy striving is self-focused: How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused: What will they think Perfectionism is a hustle.”
Lacey | Benefits – I do excellent work: Strong attention to detail, lots of plans made, systems made to replicate success, Projects (food, home, life) are done well
Limitations – I won’t start a project that I think I won’t be good at OR I won’t let a project die a natural death because it will reflect poorly on me, I give up easily and am easily frustrated when life doesn’t go as planned, I can base my entire self-worth on my performance, hard for me to admit I am wrong