Success is one of the main objectives of all human beings. All of us, to a greater or lesser extent, wish to be successful. But what does it really mean to be successful? What is success based on? We each understand success in our own way.
However, in the scientific community there is a fairly consensus in understanding that success has 2 components.
- An external component, that is related to achievement, setting goals, and achieving them. It has to do with your career, with the recognition of others, with being admired and respected … Unfortunately, most people understand success only in its external dimension. The perception that others have about you.
- An internal component, it has to do with happiness, with personal satisfaction … It is the most personal and private dimension of success, the most introspective.
These 2 dimensions of success (external and internal) must be balanced between them. There are people with a greater predisposition towards the external part of success who work hard to achieve great challenges. Other people bet more on the internal dimension of success. Researchers have shown that there must be a certain balance between both dimensions if you want to have sustainable success over time. This does not mean that a 50-50 relationship must be followed, but a certain balance, to ensure that success is lasting over time.
When this balance between the external dimension and the internal dimension of success is not achieved, problems arise. Surely you may think in many successful people who had great success from the external point of view. With great achievements in their professional careers (businessmen, singers, athletes, politicians …) but being truly unfortunate in their personal lives, basically, because they have dedicated all their effort and energy to achieve great achievements, unfortunately forgetting the inner dimension of the success (related to happiness, satisfaction, inner peace…). Besides, most of successful people from the external point of view who have not been able to manage their inner success have had problems. Depressions, real problems in personal life, all kind of addiction and some of them have finished their life as a homeless or even committing suicide.
Because another big mistake related to achievement-focused success is thinking that achieving great challenges will make us happy. Science has shown that this is not exactly the case, quite the contrary. If a person is happy, satisfied with himself, that is, he has managed his inner success well, he will be much more likely to succeed when it comes to the outer dimension of success.
I sincerely believe that a good part of the problems we have today are the result of not having understood the concept of success well. Many people unfortunately only understand success in its external dimension. It is essential in order to have a better world, to motivate people not only to achieve external success but also to work to achieve internal success. And this objective is to help people to get to know each other well, to identify their talents, their values, their motivations … and how to align them to achieve balanced success, both in its external version (achievements) and in its internal version (happiness).
Because, as the considered best coach in the world Tony Robbins says, “success without happiness is not success, it is failure”.
