What if 2021 is your year to succeed?
“Are you serious??? Don’t you check the news?????,” you might be screaming right now.
Otto Frederick Rowhedder knows how you feel. He’s a humble guy next door type from Davenport, Iowa, who was chasing success when the unthinkable happened. A setback so substantial that it shook him — and everyone around him — to the core.
Amidst the unthinkable, he achieved the impossible. He affected every household without ever becoming a household name. Because he introduced an innovation that forever changed us: sliced bread.
Otto’s single loaf bread-slicing machine, the first of its kind, met commercial success when the Continental Baking Company began marketing pre-sliced “Wonder Bread” around the country in 1930, during a time of deep economic challenge and social upheaval. Sound familiar?
The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread
What successful people like Otto know is that when you can’t change your circumstances, what you can change your relationship with your circumstances. Because success is always within reach, even if your current context stays the same.
The secret to your success — regardless of how ambitious your aspirations — is to access a free, renewable resource. An asset so valuable it’s never been quarantined and is available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.
Mindset.
A new year is a chance to begin again. We all make resolutions to eat better, exercise more, or learn a new skill. And I wonder, what’s going to be different for you in 2021? What mindset shifts could you make to fix your focus on what’s possible and pave the path to your success?
Simple Shifts to a Success Mindset
Rewrite the question
The second hand ticks methodically as your year end countdown begins. “10, 9, 8….” As Auld Lang Syne swells in the background, you silently wonder, “What will this year bring?” The unintended consequence of that question is that it sets up life in reactive mode — a year of responding to what happens to us, swept along from unpredictable crisis to crisis.
Shift from reactive to proactive, and put yourself in the driver’s seat of your life by changing the question from “What will this year bring?” to “What will I bring to this year?”. Success is less about what shows up and more about how you show up.
Reframe resolutions
It’s been said that resolutions were made to be broken. And therein lies the challenge. Resolutions focus on fixing something we perceive as broken — our relationships, our health, our habits. This break-fix mentality sets us up to believe success is a pass fail test and that making the grade is a matter of accessing our inner resolve. A resolve that waivers as our mood fluctuates.
Shift from pass-fail to always making the grade by reframing resolutions as intentions. Intentions point us in the direction of what we can create. Of what is possible. Of how we can access success moment by moment.
Bekki Early felt like she was living on a hamster wheel. The working wife and mother of two discovered that simply making a list — a list of daily intentions — was the best vehicle to transport her from always spinning to always winning. “The best word to describe what my life was like before I began documenting my ideal day is ‘aimless,’” Bekki recalls. She decided to make a change. “I made a checklist on my phone of intentions I use each day as a recipe to make each day a five star day,” she explains. “I don’t need to do all of the items, but I have noticed the more of them I do, the better I feel.”
As the saying goes, you will never regret being kind. Why not start… with yourself? How could you feature yourself on your daily list of intentions like Bekki?
Re-engineer your choices
You have the capacity to make better choices. Like Bekki and Otto, you can always choose differently. Why not set yourself up for success by changing your choices: Bring the healthy snacks closer to the front of the fridge. Play that song you enjoy, and maybe even dance like nobody’s watching (because they’re not).
Nobody wakes up and says, “I want to make choices I’ll regret today and then punish myself for those choices tonight!” A powerful intention is never more than one thought away. And the more you remember who you are — and what you want — the more motivated you will feel.
Because that’s how motivation works: When you step into who you know you were meant to be, your goals (and intentions) show up more effortlessly. More easily. More powerfully. As the saying goes, “If being hard on yourself was going to work, it would have worked by now.”
Start your intention with kindness, set yourself up for success, and end the day the same way you began it: remembering who you are. That’s the success inside a five-star day.