How to Internally Protect Your Success
We spend so much time learning how to succeed in life and how to succeed in business that sometimes we forget something that’s just as important as success itself. We forget to protect our success once we have it.
Safeguard what you’ve invested your blood, sweat, and tears into earning by protecting your success from internal and external threats. In this article, Dean Graziosi gives you four ways you can protect your success as you grow and learn how to succeed in business.
How to Protect Your Success Internally
We can be our own worst enemies. When it comes to success, no one can stand in your own way better than you yourself can, and that’s not a compliment. As you learn to succeed in business, you’re going to have to grow and change, and that can be difficult and painful.
Sometimes it feels like it would be easier to give up. When you start to feel like giving up, doubting your abilities or blaming others for your challenges, those are signs that it’s time to start protecting your success. You can do that by:
- Identifying your story
- Identifying what’s holding you back
- Upgrading your story
- Changing your lens
Identify Your Story
The stories you tell yourself are powerful, and they help you make sense of what’s going on in your life. They can be empowering and affect you positively. They can help you stay motivated and press on when things get tough.
But what if the stories you’re telling yourself aren’t all positive. Many times, you don’t even realize how harmful the stories that you’re telling yourself have become. Negative stories can hold you back from realizing your full potential and becoming the man or woman that God designed you to be.
That’s why you must first identify those stories in order to protect your success from the inside. Don’t be afraid to ask yourself the important questions. What is the story you’re telling yourself? Where do you think that story came from? Who’s to blame? Who took advantage of you? Who did something sideways?
The point is not to put blame on anyone or point fingers. Instead, you want to find the root cause of the story so you can dig out anything that doesn’t serve you. Letting negative stories take over can affect your life and cost you way too much. Even though it’s not fun getting to the root of past pains and trauma, just be honest, real, and raw with yourself.
Uncover What’s Holding You Back
You’ve identified where you are and recorded your story, now it’s time for the second strategy to protect your success. It’s time to uncover what’s holding you back. Until you fix the issues that are threatening your success, you can’t go to the next level.
Let’s say you’re a 12-year-old baseball player. You’ve moved out of t-ball and Little League, and now you’re into middle school sports, and you’re starting to see techniques and abilities pop up during the game that you’ve never seen before.
Then one day when you step up to the plate, you get served your very first curveball. It flies across the plate at 60 miles an hour one, two, three times. You’re out, and you don’t even know what happened.
Curveballs are tough, and now you’ve experienced it firsthand. The next time you’re up at bat, the story you’re telling yourself inside your head is different now, isn’t it? Before you had never experienced a curveball. You had no frame of reference for something like that. But now you have, and you’re totally intimidated. You approach the plate, and the whole way there, you’re telling yourself a story.
I struck out last time. What if the pitcher throws that curveball again? It’s going to be super hard to hit!
Surprise, surprise, the pitcher throws the curveball, and you strikeout. That’s the power of your story. You’ll never get past that curveball if you don’t upgrade your story … but if you do, watch out! Next time you step up to bat, you tell yourself a different story.
I’m hitting this time. This is mine. I can’t wait for this pitcher to throw me that ball. I can’t wait for him to throw me a curve so I can hit it.
Guess what? Home run. The point is, you get to choose how you frame your story. The purposeful decision to upgrade your mindset can shift everything.
“We’re all on a journey,” Graziosi said. “If we’re not climbing, we’re sliding. I truly believe that if we’re not growing, we’re dying. You’re on a journey, and the story that gets you out of Egypt is not the story that will take you to the Promised Land.”
Upgrade Your Story
Once you’ve identified the story that’s holding you back, your next step is to upgrade that story. When you experience growth and change, you have to uplevel your mindset, and the story that helped you begin is not the same story you’ll need to go forward. Dean Graziosi has experienced this firsthand.
“The story that helped me start my business is not the same story that got me to a million a year,” he said. “It’s not the same story I had when I had one employee. When I went to 50 employees, I had to adapt the new story.”
As Graziosi’s businesses grew and he began to scale into the millions and tens of millions, he was scared to death. He learned that in order to move to the next level of success, he had to revisit the story that had gotten them there, pick it apart, and upgrade it. The story that had gotten him to $1 million a year would not take him to $50 million a year.
Before you upgrade, write down your current story. Where did that story come from? Who’s to blame for things happening the way they did? How did that get anchored in, and how has it affected your life? Once you’ve recorded your story, you’ll have the ability to disconnect from it when the time comes.
Changing Your Lens
Just because the phrase “upgrade your story” sounds simple, doesn’t mean it’s easy. Sometimes we feel stuck trying to get over something that causes real fear or anxiety. So how DO you upgrade your story? You change your lens.
Perspective is powerful, and changing the way you choose to look at something can make the difference between making it to the next level or staying stuck.
Let’s say right now you’re having a problem with sales. You’ve experienced no after no, and now when you think about having to hop on a sales call you dread it. You’ve convinced yourself that you’re terrible at sales, yet if you don’t make sales your business is nothing more than an expensive hobby.
What if you change your lens? What if, instead of dreading selling, you chose to think of those sales calls you’re making as serving? When you look at sales calls as service, you realize you’re actually doing them a disservice if you don’t offer them what you have. Without your offer, they won’t get the results they want. You’d practically be keeping it from them.
You convinced yourself you hated selling, but that was because you were making it about you. That puts too much pressure on you to make the sale, when all you really have to do is serve them and make them feel good.
When you change your lens so that the thing you fear is no longer about you, you can turn it into something that’s about someone else. Guess what? You’ve just upgraded your story!
Your New Story
When you begin to identify your story and what’s holding you back, you can pinpoint the things that have gotten you to where you are today … but you don’t have to stay there! The story that brought you here will not take you to the next level. Choose to see your situation through a different lens so you can upgrade your story. Your new story will take you where your old one couldn’t, and you’ve just protected your success from your own worst enemy – YOU!
More with Dean Graziosi
For more content on protecting your success, listen to Dean Graziosi’s recent podcast episodes on “How to Protect Your Success” now on The Dean Graziosi Show in the iTunes store, or on PodBean, Spotify, or Stitcher. For more inspirational stories and messages like this, check out Dean’s website at deangraziosi.com or watch his videos on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/deangraziosi.
