How do you define success?
Photo by sgcdesignco on Unsplash
Date: 10 February 2024 | Author: Edina Hodžić
Many of us have adopted a definition of success which is dictated by societal norms that generally lack authenticity and imagination. Unfortunately until we hit some kind of major blockage or we experience a challenging life event, we will continue to believe that hard work and more hard work is the answer to a successful life. If you are like me and you are a seeker of higher truth and you enjoy exploring life, you will not mind taking risks and finding out if there is another way of creating success without hardship and suffering that many of us unconsciously experience due to an unsatisfying job, health challenges, unfulfilling relationships and lack of (higher) life purpose. Success is not something we learn in school or copy from others, we are all unique therefore we all have our own definition of success. The idea is rather that we all go on our own personal exploration and we find what fulfils us, what gives us ease, fulfilment and joy. This can be a life long exploration or it can be a journey that we undertake to get to know ourselves better.
When we realise that we lack fulfilment, joy and authentic success in our life, we either burry our head in the sand and ignore this realisation altogether or we look into the areas of our life that could be the source of our suffering. This often leads to job or relationship changes which end up being temporary remedies for the deeper suffering and lack of purpose that we are experiencing within. For us to reconnect to a purpose and elevate our suffering, we have to look at the primary relationship and that is the relationship that we have with our self. We often change the outer circumstances of our life instead of looking at the obvious which is the self and exploring why we suffer in the first place. Those of us who are courageous enough dare to look within and feel the emptiness and the pain that is calling us, the emptiness and the pain of our self abandonment and self neglect and in some cases even self hate. Those emotional and mental states often originate in our childhood when we have relied and trusted upon others to fulfil our basic needs but we have been too often met with disappointment from our caretakers who didn’t have the ability to recognise our needs and meet them because of their own self abandonment and trauma. This is a cycle that is repeated until one chooses to courageously break it.
The beauty is that when we as adults choose to commit to ourselves and our own needs, we stop projecting those unfulfilled needs unto others and seeking from them to meet our needs through all kinds of unconscious behavioural patterns. Our own self commitment becomes a positive force that positively changes every other area of our life. We will see a positive transformation in our relationships, our health, our career, our finances and everything else in our life. By simply practicing self commitment and self love, we change the world for the better. And no, this is not selfish nor is it wrong – it is what we are supposed to do in order to make the world a better place. We are the ones we have been waiting for!