Me: “So what are your goals as a massage therapist?”
Student: “I want to be a success…”
Every time I teach my business classes the subject of success comes up. So what is it? Students want to be successful… who doesn’t? The problem is that people seldom know what they mean by “success”. It’s made more difficult by the fact that it means something different to everybody. Let’s take a look at this thing called success.
Dictionary.com defines success as:
- the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors
- the attainment of wealth, position, honors, or the like
- a successful performance or achievement
- the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted
What is Success?
The first three definitions above sound good, but when you get right down to it, do they really mean anything? How do I know if I am successful? I could argue either way about my success to this point and I would be right – if those are the criteria. The fourth definition is a little bit better – it introduces a concept of planning and a desired outcome. It turns out that that is the key to finding success – knowing what you want in the first place.
Intention & Priorities
You have to start by asking yourself what you want to accomplish. Simply saying that you want a successful business isn’t enough. What do you want to get out of it? And who do you want it for? You could say “I want to help people”. OK, a little better. Wait, you want a business that earns money too? Now you’ve got more than one person involved! How much money? “I want to be rich” is often the facetious reply to that question (and I’ll tell you now that there are much easier professions to grow rich in). My reply is usually, “How rich is rich?” In essence, you need to make it definable.
I like to use visualization in this process. How do you picture success? I want you to get that image in your head and then start to think of all of the elements that make your vision so appealing to you.
What gets me is that many people don’t really think about what they want to get out of their “success”. Money is one way to define it, but certainly not the only one. Do you want freedom – financially and with time? Esteem, reputation, honors & accolades, respect, credibility, recognition, gratitude, satisfaction, or any of the other things that can be derived from your work? These can all be measures of success.
There, I said it. Measure. It is one of the key points in attaining success. In order to do this right, you should list out all of the things that you want you or your business to accomplish. Then you should prioritize them in order of importance. Finally, you have to find a way to measure it.
For example, you could define success as:
- Having work that allows you to earn a full-time income on 30 hours a week
- Operating a business that earns enough to support you and itself (be sure not to short-change yourself and set this number as the bare minimum to pay the bills – it has to support your lifestyle)
- Being able to take a 2-week vacation to another country once a year.
- Owning a home (again, be specific about the type of home and where…)
…or a combination of things. Setting SMART goals is an effective method that helps you to define and attain success for yourself. More on that later. The most important thing for defining success though is being specific.
Stay on Target
Knowing what you want helps you to stay on track and not go astray. I have witnessed massage therapists let their career get away from them – either drawing in clients that weren’t their intended market or growing so dissatisfied with their jobs that they leave the profession. I would say that this is most often an alignment problem – that their internal (and undefined) idea of success and what they were actually doing were worlds apart. Defining your idea of success gives you a gold standard to compare everything to – a set of criteria. If what you’re doing doesn’t fit in with your vision of success, if it doesn’t move you closer to those measurements of success, then it’s not for you.
The best part of setting measurements of success is that you know when you get there. Do you ever wonder why kids always ask “Are we there yet?”? It’s because they don’t have a measure of how far you’ve gone or have to go. As we get older, we do have those tools. We see a sign that says 20 miles and we can instantly figure out that we’ll be there in 20 minutes – counting down the time all the way. It makes the long trips easier (and your career).
Having a specific measure of what success is to you provides motivation as well. You’re on the way. Your path. To a place that you know you want to be. And when things get tough, it’s the light at the end of the tunnel.
What to Measure
That being said, think carefully about what you measure. Make sure it really is what you’re looking for. I get asked all the time by my graduates “They pay this much at this spa. Is that good”. I don’t know, is it? The real question is, does it get you where you want to go? I’ve seen many people, in many different kinds of jobs, lose focus of what they really wanted and leave a better, lower paying job for a higher paying, higher stress job that they hate and tears their family apart. Or they do it for benefits. Or sometimes worse, they settle. Don’t do it just for the money.
If I measured my success based on money, then in my eyes I’m a failure. I won’t tell you what my definition of success money-wise is, but I can tell you that I’m not making it on a teacher’s salary. I did not say that I’m not a success though. I’m esteemed in the eyes of my colleagues (OK, so that is hard to measure). I just finished a degree. And here’s my favorite one. I’ve personally graduated and changed the lives of 120 students who by the averages are out there having made a combined $8 million! If only I got royalties!
That is a serious measure of success in my book.
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