What is Your Measure of Success

We live in a world where they value being a success it seems more than anything. So much so, that it’s hard to see where the line is for success anymore.

What is success?

• Is it when you make a lot of money?
• When you buy anything you want?
• Is it when you have a good marriage?
• When you go to college or finish college?
• Is it when you land that great job?

Which of these and who determines that?

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I don’t know about you, but for me, success is hard to get and hard to see. The lines are just too blurry.

Finding Success

I think success—real, true success is found in you.

What do I mean?

I think this is found in three areas. Now there are more but for the sake of this article, I believe three are important.

3 Ways To Measure Success

I think they are in the values you place on your own life in God, it’s in the things that you finish and lastly in the relationships that you keep and nourish.

I had to answer these questions when faced with decisions about moving forward in my life after divorce and finding a new church home and living alone without my adult children. Life seemed to suddenly take on a very different meaning as I moved forward and began to figure out who I was again.

Let’s look at these.

1.) The Value We Place on Our Own Lives

What do you value? Heck, what did I value? I had to take a long look at what was my value system really in. What were my core beliefs and was I living up to that for my own self and not what others expected me to live up to.

I realized I needed to really honor my own life and my choices. I had choices. First, I had to get used to that, now that I didn’t “have” to meet everyone else’s needs all the time. I could think about myself and what I wanted and valued and be okay with that. That is a success in my book.

2.) The Value We Place on Finishing

Okay now, this one is a bit harder to see. A lot of people struggle with finishing things. Some people not so much. But what if you used to finish things well and were a check the box kind of person and now you are slipping big time. I can raise my hand there. I have found it is hard to finish stuff. I am a quilter and I have tons of unfinished projects. I don’t like that. Let’s be honest it really doesn’t feel good to leave things hanging and unfinished.

Why are these things in our lives unfinished? For a lot of reasons.  Time, money, effort, or just simply I don’t value it anymore.

So what do you do? Pick it back up and place it somewhere in your life. Either you will finish it or you will not and dump it. But, put it somewhere out of the unfinished category. This way you will feel like you are a success and that thing is not just hanging there. Really, we can give ourselves a do-over.

3.) Relationships That We Keep and Nourish

Life is as much about relationships as it is work. But people seem to put more emphasis on work than relationships. What would it look like for you if you went to all the relationships in your life that were not so good, out of sorts, just off, troubled, or plain and simple dysfunctional and you worked on them.  What if you decided you would put value into them? You did your part to try to restore, heal and or understand.

Life is really about relationships. A bunch of us have them but most of them are dysfunctional at best. This is not good and not honoring to us as individuals. I personally have several that I have tried tirelessly to work on with no avail. I have others that I have done nothing with that I need to address.

The Bottom Line

Now why all this? Because the negatives of these three things don’t scream success in my life. It doesn’t even whisper you did a good job. I want to address these areas for my own life and success because they mean something to my life and for the end of my life.

I want to be a person that values others, values finishing things and being honest with myself.

What about you?

What do you want to succeed in and will you measure that against your own self?

If so, I think it will be well worth it.

Selah.

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