Suppose You Reframed Success?

Aloha and welcome to The Secret Art of Huna, and today, I’m gonna be talking about success.

And the reason that I decided to talk about success is that it’s quite a loaded word for a lot of women, and I thought it would be worth exploring it,

because many of us, we’re either programmed to expect that we can’t have the success we want or we’re programmed to our inner perfectionist only wants us to be perfect and that’s the only way that you can possibly have success.

There’s all sorts of aspects of success, and one of the aspects that I’m definitely going to explore is that aspect of the other side of success because when we talk about success,

what is it that we’re not getting, and for a lot of people it’s things like disappointment, regret, not good enough, failure, and it’s all that kind of thing that is the only alternative to success.

One of the things that I really, really love doing is my work for One of Many. One of Many was set up by Joanna Martin,

Dr. Joanna Martin, and it’s an organisation that works with women, and what it’s all about is supporting women, helping women to make the difference that they want to see in the world, and that difference,

whatever that difference is, and helping them become leaders in their own right, whether it’s in their own community, family, organisation, business, or just leaders of themselves in the life that they are living,

because when you truly become leaders and you step into your leadership self, that’s when you can actually really start to make a difference, and Jo’s on a mission to make a difference or to touch the lives,

to make a difference of at least a million women, which is a fabulous vision. And she’s being successful at it, she’s moving along extremely fast and the rate of touching of lives is accelerating.

And I dropped in, she runs retreats and one of the retreats she runs, Be Wealth, is all about money in your life, and I dropped in on that the other day,

and they were talking about success, and how so often we measure our success in terms of money, in terms of income, but what if you were to measure success in other ways?

So often we feel a failure because we don’t have the money that we think we should have, by some standard that’s been set somewhere, or we don’t have the income that we think we should have,

and because we don’t, because we’re not paid what we think we’re worth, we feel that we’re not successful, we feel like a failure.

But what if you were to measure yourself in a completely different way? What if you were able to look at the impact that you’re having on other people, the way you’re bringing up your family, the joy that you have in your life, the way you’ve overcome problems in your life?

For me, for a long time, I was, I didn’t feel that I’d been very successful because although there had been periods in my life where I’d had good jobs and I’d made good money,

there are also periods in my life where I’d not had a lot of money or had jobs that paid very little, definitely paid under what I was worth,

but one of the things I’ve come to realise is that getting over clinical depression, and I talk about this a lot because I’m not ashamed of it anymore.

I was once, it was a failure, but getting over clinical depression is a real success for me. I did it without pills, I did it by utilising what I learned and by allowing myself to grow and so to evolve out of it,

and which is the big success really for me, it’s never come back, ’cause one of the things they tell you if they diagnose you as clinically depressed is like a heart attack,

it’s self-predicting, it could come back, and I’ve been clean of it, free of it now for oh, nearly 30 years.

So I’m proud of that. I feel that that is a success. I’m also learning to be proud of the impact that I have on other people through coaching.

It’s extraordinary, us as human beings, we don’t know necessarily the impact, the positive impact that we have on other people.

Something you say, something you tell somebody, some off the cuff comment, you don’t even remember it, but it sticks with them.

So success can be measured in so many different ways. It doesn’t just mean that you can only be a success if you turn up on dragon’s den as one of the dragons.

In the Hawaiian system, there’s a principle called the Principle of Creation, Law of Creation, and for the Hawaiians, the idea was that when something is created, when anything is created, its opposite is also created.

Now it’s easy to see this in nature so we see light and dark, hot and cold, summer and winter, night and day, so on and so forth.

We can see, low tide, high tide, full moon, new moon or indeed new moon, full moon, and we can see those examples in nature.

It becomes more difficult to get your head around this idea when we’re talking abstract concepts, abstract concepts like communication, education, success, money, what is the opposite?

What is the thing that is created at the same time, so when we create the concept of success in our minds, because it is purely a mental concept, it’s not an actual thing, you can’t touch it, you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow,

so when we develop the concept of success, when we create that concept, what is the opposite that we create at the same time?

Now, if you set up as the opposite to success, the not success if you like, if you set that up as failure, then anytime when you’re not feeling successful, you’re gonna start feeling like a failure.

If you set that up as disappointment, same thing. Anytime when you’re not feeling successful and close to 100% successful, you’re gonna start to feel some sense of disappointment.

So how do you have success set up in your way of thinking? Is the opposite of success disappointment or failure, or is it that when you think about success, it has a rather different meaning?

So success means, for example, it could be happiness, and it could be that the opposite of success or the other side of success is something to do with fulfilment?

It could be that success is actually not the end goal, it’s fulfilment that’s the end goal, so we have success and we have fulfilment,

because when you make success the end goal, this thing that you can’t touch and you can’t put in a wheelbarrow, and it’s the thing that you aspire to,

it makes it really, really hard to have joy and fun and fulfilment, and all those things unless your concept of success also embraces those things.

So next time you’re thinking about success or particularly, next time you’re thinking about not being a success or the fact, or your disappointments or your regrets, then have a look at really what do you mean by success?

What is it, because actually it can be if you want it to be, it can be so much more than most people think it is.

Hope that’s been interesting, do put your thoughts or comments if you’re seeing this on YouTube, in the YouTube box, if you’re seeing it on Facebook, on the Facebook box, or on the podcast if you’re seeing it as a podcast.

I’m running a Huna one-day event on the 30th of November 2019 so if you’re a woman and you’re interested in that, then go to secretartofhuna.com/live or if you want to talk to me in person, go to secretartofhuna.com/diary.

However you get in touch, I look forward to talking to you. Take care, aloha.

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