Essential Ingredients for Success
What would you include in your recipe for success?
I love root vegetables. My current love affair is with butternut squash, cubed, tossed in olive oil with salt and pepper and roasted at 400 C. Beets are right up there too. I love them because they’re so tasty and pretty and because they’re in season right now. Eating seasonally is a practice I’m embracing more and more — there’s an unbeatable quality to food that’s grown NOW and closer to home. It’s just so fresh and yum!
Yeah, I get really excited about food. I’ve always loved to cook and play with food. I don’t think of myself as a foodie by any stretch but I have my ways and preferences. (The short version of) my food journey started working in a grocery store when I was 16, followed on by getting a degree in foods and nutrition, to having a son who was the “poster child” of allergies to today, aiming in the direction of adopting a plant based lifestyle.
So, I think in ingredients…
In this post, I want to share with you some of the ingredients that are worth including in your recipe of success. I love the quote above — there is no real “recipe” for success (and the version of success we’re sold societally makes my stomach turn) other than the one you decide to mix up for you. I’m super excited to share this list, it’s like I’m standing in my kitchen cooking, and you’re there with a glass of vino and are sharing YOUR thinking with me.
Shall we?
Ingredient One: Self Knowing
I became an Integral Master Coach™ because I am endlessly fascinated with humans at the micro level. Yeah, the nuances and ways of humans are divine. One of my fave ways of knowing myself is through the lens of the Enneagram. It is a powerful system of self-knowing that allows us to be dynamic, ever growing and evolving. It also holds our growth and less-healthy ways and is therefore far from being a limiting approach. This is important because we’re always growing and unfolding — always.
Self Knowing keeps you true to who you are, and who you are becoming. And it allows us to set down parts of ourselves that aren’t needed for where we are today. Self Knowing helps us create a calibrated understanding of what matters to US. Not our mothers, or bosses, or kids or anyone else but to ourselves as the starting point.
Ingredient Two: Your Core Values
Values are timeless. How we live them out and express them may change, but our values can remain throughout our lifetimes. My husband and I came up with five values to guide our partnership when we got married that do so to this day. What they mean today is deeper/ different than when we got married 15 years ago but they’re still ours. We continue to explore what it means to live these now.
What are your values? Those principles or pillars that guide you in your day to day? If they were fully expressed in your life and work would that be a success? I think so!
Values also offer us a ton of freedom as we lean into what success looks like for us — while they can inform our day to day doings, we can, along the journey, find new ways of living out our values, and we can set down ways that aren’t needed now. As an example, how I lived out “health” as a value when I was 18 is far different than today. Values offer powerful guidance.
Ingredient Three: Emotional Fluency
Do you speak the language of your heart? Do you allow resentment to speak up and tell you what the heck she is fully pissed off about arise? And what about desire? Do you know when and where she’ll show up, and/ or will you be open to her when she does?
We have an incredible capacity to feel all the things. While emotions can also be a place of significant discomfort (my hands are held high here) they are in fact a language of what we need and can be a source of significant wisdom and insight. I don’t know about you, but I was not taught this language growing up so it’s taken dedicated effort to learn it, but WOW, has it been transformative to feel into my life.
And lest you be unsure of this one, tell me if it’s possible to feel the joy and bliss of lived success if we aren’t also willing to feel our sadness, disappointment, frustration, anger. All the feels go hand in hand. I want you to feel your success so fully!
Ingredient Four: Structures of Success.
I’m scoping up and embracing this term that my own coach, Caroline recently shared with me: “Structures of Success.” I like to think of these as the boundaries, systems and processes in our lives that allow success to flourish.
I have long been the freedom type who preferred zero structure, until I started to lean into this concept of having meaningful structures around and therefore, more able to feel myself being supported. While sleeping under the stars might sound magical (a metaphorical view of a life without structure), I’d sooner embrace a home with a nice, cozy bedroom, with a bed to hold me each night (and I’ll look at the stars from the big window in my room) where I would be protected from the elements.
Structures allow us to settle into our life. They are a shape around what matters to us. They can be stone boundaries — immoveable, or sand, that we can consciously choose to move if/when we decide.
Ingredient Five: Embodied Practice
I know you’re already a do-er. Your magic wand is your to do list and the energy you often possess to bring things into being. That matters but here’s a bit of a twist on things…
Success is also about remembering that it’s not all about the doing and having capacities (a.k.a. skills) to also BE. Our capacities to “be” have often atrophied while we’re the equivalent of the hulk when it comes to doing.
Our success isn’t just a collection of things we now have — it’s also who we become and how we live our lives. This implies that there is practicing, learning and practices that we’ll “do” to allow ourselves to also become successful.
Differently said, we learn success not simply in our dear, sweet, excessively used minds, we learn to also in our hearts, bodies and spirits. In all of us.
Success is a practice and a way of showing up in our lives.
Ingredient Six: Curiosity, Compassion and Courage
Leaning into our own version of success takes all three of the ingredients above, in different doses and different times. They’re like spices offering a little of this and that.
Curiosity allows us to start asking new questions about what we want, and to be able to look at why we’ve chased the success we have. It’s an open stance of looking at our lives, where we drop the judgment and simply inquire.
Compassion is the balm we apply when things feel or are tougher. And we decide what is hard, what is a challenge, because only we know what will cause us to contract from our lives as we engage them. It’s what we need when we’re creating change.
Courage is where we step into the unknown, without understanding or being able to predict what might happen we do. It’s choosing agency over being comfortable. It’s about taking a risk that feels important and curious for us to take void of an outcome.
Ingredient Seven: The Whole View
IMHO, you’re only successful if you’re successful in your whole life. And as woman I urge us to hold the fullest view of success we possibly can. This is our gift — our ability to see all that matters and to nurture it and tend to it. Not ALL that matters to everyone, rather all that matters to you.
If we’re only financially successful and our kids rarely get a speck of our presence and care are we successful? If our success comes off the back of burnout are we successful? If our communities are struggling but we’re sitting cozy in our homes absent to that view are we successful?
While success starts with you — it has to — who else can define it for you — I am also sure it does and can, ebb and flow into the rest of our lives and spheres of influence. So Dear One, lean into success!
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What do you think? Do these ingredients take you closer to success?
Why not play with these? What would happen if one of these was removed? Or one was amplified? Or, what amount do you need of each right now?
