Knowing yourself is vitally important in obtaining happiness and stress-free success. If you don’t know who you are and what makes you feel happy and successful, then how are you going to achieve it? By accident?

In a previous post, I wrote about how your model of success can be filled with external influences. This is natural, and some external influences are good and necessary.

As we grow and develop our own personalities, thoughts, and values it’s a clever idea to update our model of success with the latest information.

Conflict with your model

As climate change becomes a bigger issue to deal with, for example, we may give thought to what we could do to help. What habits or behaviours would we like to change?

If we decide to reduce our fossil energy usage, then our model of success will need to change to reflect this. If we don’t update our model of success, then it starts to drift away from our values.

Consider the model of success that says money is the principal factor. We could consider ourselves successful if we made a fortune selling coal. If, however, we had decided to reduce fossil fuel usage, then the model is at odds with our new values. The model of success still says that selling coal is our way to achieve success!

Granted, this is an obvious example and not a realistic scenario for most people. However, this kind of conflict does exist in lots of small ways, and in some significant ones that may be hiding in a blind spot.

A blind spot is where you have a deeply held belief, but it’s an unhelpful belief, perhaps learnt at an early age. It no longer serves you well and is always worth questioning. They can be difficult to identify though, because they are so ingrained. They may become visible if something doesn’t feel right at a gut level, something just jars with you and you’re not sure why.

How often do we look at successful people in the world of business and admire them only to find that they are miserable at home? Could this be that they are working with an outdated model of success, one that rates money and career success more highly than happiness at home for example?

Keep it up to date

Like any model, the model of success is only accurate if it contains all the important or significant factors.

If you are unhappy, or stressed, in a significant part of your life then I suggest one place to look is at your model of success.

• Is it valid?
• Is it up to date?
• What might be hiding in your blind spot?
• Which bits of the model are true to you?
• Which bits are outdated external influences?

The better you understand yourself and your model of success then greater your chance of achieving stress-free success. Invest a little bit of time in understanding what success means to you, your authentic self.