What if we’ve been measuring success wrong all this time?

You’re an achiever.
You want more.
More out of your business.
More out of your life.

I get that.

Now, let me ask you this

Do you find yourself running from one achievement to the next, always completing goals without feeling like your making any progress?

That feeling of always chasing achievements and goals, like more revenue, more clients, more subscribers, more (you get the idea).

And when you don’t achieve a goal, do you feel like a failure, like something’s wrong, that there’s something you’re just not “getting?”

People, especially entrepreneurs, tend to put success in the hand of others. You can’t control if someone will become a client or not, you have no say if someone will subscribe to your newsletter or not, will attend your seminar or not, and whether someone will “like” your post or not. We tend to measure others people’s action as a benchmark for our success.

By society’s standards, success is what’s seen from the outside: revenue, “fans” or subscribers, our clothes, car, the size of our home, and more.

But what if we measured success by our own actions and our own standards?

Did I do the seminar I wanted to do (even if 1-2 people attended)
Was I present at my kid’s school concert?
Did I do a sport I enjoyed and got off the couch to exercise this week?
Did I reach out to someone who could be a potential client?

These are actions you can control, and these are the elements we should use to measure our success.

When talking with entrepreneurs, many are very excited to share their latest success stories with me:

We landed x number of clients
Reached a sales/revenue milestone
Or other interesting facts

Now, don’t get me wrong, these are important elements of business, but why do we continue using them to measure our success?

It’s important to stop and ask ourselves an important question…

In my eyes, success is living my purpose, expanding my comfort zone and continually moving towards my life goals.

And every step forward, no matter how small, needs to be considered a success.

And every success should be celebrated.

Celebrate each step. Let’s stop celebrating only when we sign an important client, when we reach a certain level of sales, or an arbitrary number of social media fans.

Let’s start celebrating the fact that we’ve reached out to a potential client – even if he said no, that we completed a series of YouTube videos – even if 7 people watched it. That we sent out the proposal for an important mandate – even if we didn’t get it.

Celebrate the fact that you’re aligned with and moving towards achieving your dreams.

And the beautiful thing about success is that it doesn’t need to be a grand gesture. Things like enjoying a cup of tea and the fact that you’ve went out of your comfort zone, calling up a friend and sharing your actions, taking an afternoon off to enjoy free time, and most importantly, to enjoy life.

These are the best celebrations – the small and authentic ones. As French writer Gustave Flaubert wisely said “Success is a result, not a goal.”

So as we enter the summer months – which also marks the mid-year point in business – why not review how you measure success? Start measuring and celebrating your actions, things that you can control. It’s time to look inwards for success, not outwards.

Because, you are more successful than you think…