In this week’s episode, we’re digging into the concept of success and how traditional metrics like job titles, income, and social media followers might not truly align with what fulfils you. If you’ve ever felt that the societal benchmarks of success don’t quite fit, or if achieving them hasn’t brought the satisfaction you expected, then this episode is for you. We’ll explore the evolution of work and success, discuss why these conventional metrics often fall short, and provide strategies for redefining success on your own terms. Plus, we’ve got a special offer to help you start envisioning a more meaningful, personalised path forward.
Resources mentioned:
- Anna’s book Outside of the 9 to 5
- The Business Academy
- Free access to the first pillar workbook of the Business Academy. Email Anna at
podcast@onestepoutside.com with the subject line “Success Workbook.”
Key moments:
[00:00] Introduction and Episode Overview
[00:53] Importance of Personalised Success Metrics
[01:47] The Individual Nature of Success
[02:14] Historical Perspective on Work and Success
[06:39] Modern Success Metrics and Their Flaws
[09:27] Strategies for Redefining and Personalising Success
[11:14] Reflecting on Fulfilment and Proud Moments
[14:33] Information on the One Step Outside Business Academy and Free Workbook Offer
[15:58] Final Thoughts and Conclusion
A personal definition of success
Reimagining Success, episode 323. And this episode is for you. If you’ve ever felt like the traditional measures of success, like job titles and income, revenue goals, social media followers just don’t fit you. Or perhaps you’ve achieved those metrics and it just isn’t as fulfilling as you thought. So if you’re ready to redefine what success really looks like for you and your business, then tune on in. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lumbo, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility, and the fulfilment you’re looking for.
Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love. Let’s get started. Traditional success metrics don’t work for everyone. In fact, maybe they don’t work for anyone. Because if we’re all trying to chase the same thing, that would suggest that we’re all the same and we all feel happy and fulfilled by the same things. And you don’t need me to tell you that that is not the case. We’re all very individual. And yes, there are certain things that, that we all value and enjoy, but we see again and again the subtle differences, whether in your family, in your friendship groups, in society as a whole, reflected in politics and all sorts of different domains, that we’re all different people, we’re motivated by different things, we feel fulfilled by different things, we enjoy different things.
And therefore the metrics we measure our success by need to be different. They need to be individual. Success is really personal. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today. And yes, I’ve talked about this before. If you’ve been following me and listening to this podcast for a while, this is not a new message, perhaps phrased in a different way. The whole podcast is called Reimagining Success. But I think this is such an important.
I know this is such an important message and needs revisiting. I need to revisit it regularly. And of course, this time of year is the natural inflection point when we all set those silly resolutions and we take some time to think about what we want. And we’ve had some time off perhaps over the holiday period and now we’re back to work and it’s a really good moment. And it certainly is the moment that most of us tend to reflect on what’s going on now, of course, I shared some strategies for reviewing your business results and planning ahead last month I’m going to say yes, but it is also last year, isn’t it? It’s 2024 in December, but this is more the big picture. Right, so let’s start from the beginning. What’s wrong with the traditional success metrics? Well, what are the traditional success metrics? Funnily enough, it’s relatively recent. Right.
And each society has had different things. And I do a keynote where I talk about how the 9 to 5 has evolved. And in fact it was one of the first ever presentations I did years ago at the 7 and 7 Digital Nomad Conference. If there’s anyone who went there or who any of the organisers who is still listening years after, then hello to you. It was an amazing conference, it was a fantastic experience. And yeah, I’m still in touch with lots of people who are involved in that. But at that talk I started to look back at the history and the evolution of what work has meant. And I uncovered that the ancient Greek word for work was, I want to say poena, so it was pain, torment.
And of course the Greeks, the Romans really valued philosophy and the arts and so on. Right. And then we had the. I mean, this is a very whistle stop trip through history, so apologies for that, but we went through things like the Protestant Reformation, when suddenly it was this work ethic and Calvinistic approach. Max Weber, all those people. It was all about our calling to God and to work hard and so on. Industrial revolution, of course, and working in the factory and digital revolution. And now I’m really fast forwarding.
We have the COVID epidemic and now AI and so on. Right. So lots of changes. Big scale, small scale, long term, short term. Some things are relatively recent, but. But over these times different things have been valued, whether it was skin colour, body size and how you lived your life, of course, gender differences, all sorts of things. And if we’re talking about sort of traditional in the more recent sense, I suppose success metrics, although even that’s evolving, I think of the 80s kind of power suits, the American dream. The house, the mortgage, the stable career, the impressive job titles and so on, revenue milestones in business and that kind of thing.
And income, salary, if you’re an employee, if we’re going to modernise that, and I’m going to still call it traditional success metrics, even though it’s a new space of working for yourself and entrepreneurship, the sort of traditional success metrics, if you take my meaning, are the revenue milestones in your business. For startups, especially VC funding, it’s all the different rounds, getting that next injection of cash and hitting your targets. It’s about the number of followers, it’s the best selling books faking your way through. You know, I don’t know if you know this, but a lot of people sort of choose categories and things where they can easily say, hey, I’m number one. Screenshot that, you know, you pay to nominate yourself for awards to then get business podcast of the year. I can’t tell you how many times a day, a week, certainly I get, hey, we’ve selected you to be one, one of the top leaders of the world, one of the top coaches in the universe and you just need to pay a small nominal fee and then we’ll put you in this magazine, right? And unfortunately I see colleagues and people sharing their own participation in these magazines and there’s no judgement there. But I think the error, the reason why this is happening is that we’re caught up in those traditional success metrics. We want to say award winning, we want to tell people and have these internal satisfaction as well of knowing that we’ve won an award for our book, our podcast and what, whatever it is.
And of course income, revenue is an important metric of success ultimately, as my harsh but lovely friend always told me, you know, success for me is money because that’s whatever your story is, but that is at the core of success for most of us. However, if you have hit those milestones, you will know already the truth, that that doesn’t necessarily lead to fulfilment. You get there and you look around, you’re like, okay, now what? You hear stories, whether it’s, you know, I heard someone who went to get their OBE or something, an award from the Royal family in London and they then had imposter syndrome because they looked around at all these other people, done even more amazing things. And of course, if you win the Olympic bronze, you want the silver, you want the gold and you want to win more gold. If you have hit the, this income milestone, you want to hit the next one. You’ve got one car, you need two cars, bigger house. I thought I was really happy with our gorgeous house here by the sea. I’m just looking across to the Isle of Wight, it’s a beautifully sunny day and I just visited a friend’s house the other day which was right by the sea, so beautiful panoramic view and Then I thought, oh wow, maybe that’s.
But no, you can see how you get caught up in chasing those goals. And it’s not to say that they’re not the right goals, but as I think we all know deep down, we’re not going to be happier and in a lasting way in any case, we’re not going to be more free, more fulfilled. There’s lots of things that, you know, come with earning more money in a business. It often means, not always, but often means bigger teams and higher expenses and more complexity. Right. Which is not probably what you want. It’s not what I want necessarily. It also could mean burning out or feeling resentful, worse work, life, balance, you know, feeling guilty and so on because you’re chasing the wrong goals or just chasing any goal I would say is wrong.
To be honest with, with my old wisdom, old woman wisdom that I have now, I think chasing goals is never a good idea. Chasing, I think is the wrong word to be embodying anyway. Working effectively towards meaningful milestones, not as sexy, but I think that’s a better approach. So how can you start redefining, I’m going to say success, of course, for yourself and you can go really big picture, but it can be quite difficult to think of where you want to be in 10 years. And to be honest, for some of us it’s so different. You know, let’s say I don’t know if you’ve got kids. You know, for me my kids now are 4 and 5, 10 years time, they’ll be teenagers. I can’t really work now with that kind of mindset in mind because I think they will need, I know they will need very different things from me.
And they’ll be in school, it’ll be different sort of from a practical setup. Who knows what’s going on then. So that’s not so helpful if you’re, you know, if you’ve got teenagers now, maybe you’re looking ahead and then of course you’ll be an empty nester then that is quite valuable to at least think where do you want to be there then? And to make sure you’re kind of laying the groundwork. But I think possibly, you know, three to five years perhaps is a more reasonable outlook if you want to actually take actionable steps towards that. And then so think about what does success look like for me? And you can do free writing if you’re a bit of a writer. Put a timer for three minutes and just write and don’t let yourself stop. Just write, write, write, write. Write, write, write.
You can do a vision board, which I’ve talked about many times, where you can just flip through magazines or Pinterest and search for images that kind of speak out to you. I haven’t done it yet as I record this, but I have been thinking about bringing a group of people together to do that in person. It’s always really nice to really have, you know, if you want to be a best selling author, really think about what does that mean? It’s not so much about the screenshot on Amazon, maybe it’s about having written meaningful books that actually help people, that reach people and so really think about something more relevant. More. Yeah, more meaningful is the word I keep saying, but that is the word that is, is key here. So doing a vision board, doing some journaling, mind mapping, whatever way your brain works, really think about what does success look and feel like for you in a few years time and then really dig down into what would make you feel proud, fulfilled, energised. At the end of this year, I’d say at the end of next year, you know, what are the things when you. We’ve just gone through that exercise now, so it should be fresh in your mind.
What’s it going to take for you to feel as proud as you were this year, perhaps, or more proud because you felt a bit disappointed, you felt like you didn’t quite fulfil your potential last year. And what’s going to make you look back on this year, 2025, if you’re listening live, but it will be relevant in future years too, to really go, wow, yeah, I’m really pleased with that. And it doesn’t have to be something massive. Again, try to avoid the traditional external success metrics, but unfortunately some of the smaller, more subtle, nuanced things are a bit harder to measure. So I keep banging on about being present with my family and taking care of myself health wise. And that’s not necessarily because I’ve had problems with my hip now, it’s not necessarily running marathons and things. And so it’s not the shiny stuff that I can shout about on social media, but it might be in my case doing regular, you know, flexibility work and stretching, yoga or Pilates. It might be going to bed earlier, you know, to allow for the bigger things.
It probably doesn’t involve sitting in front of Netflix every evening though. So that’s something I’m reflecting on. How can I spend at least some of my evenings doing something perhaps more creative, you know, so really think about what could make you feel proud, fulfilled and energised. And also perhaps what are you willing to let go of to focus on this vision? Right. So can you let go of what people are saying, which they’re not by the way, of course, because nobody cares about us as much as we care about ourselves. Can you let go of what former you thought you should be doing by now? Can you let go of, yeah, what your family perhaps expects or someone said in a passing comment or you know, those LinkedIn metrics which yes, are relevant. And if you want to reach more people, you do need to think about how you’re writing a hook and getting the reach and all these things. But you know, ultimately, as many of my colleagues have said, you know, when they take a bit of time off LinkedIn, no one really notices their life is actually all the more improved for it.
So what are you willing to let go of in terms of external vanity metrics in particular to focus on this vision? Okay, so I was thinking what would be helpful is I have the Business Academy which is self paced course, really comprehensive. I say it’s a 49 page workbook so unfortunately I didn’t add an extra one to make it 50. It’s 20 plus videos which go through my five pillars of a profitable and enjoyable business, which is also the five pillars that are in my book outside the nine to five. So of course that’s always an option, especially if you’re at the beginning of your journey and you want to map out what success looks like for you and you know, really work on your mindset and how you can develop the confidence and resilience you’ll need for this journey. Developing, refining your business model, positioning your personal brand and designing flexible work life integration that works for you. However, what I was going to say today is I have had the idea to give you free access to the Workbook from the first pillar of the Business Academy I’ve looked through and it’s very self explanatory. Of course it would be great if you had access to the full course with the videos and so on. And so if you do want to join the full Business Academy you can go to onestepoutside.com academy1step outside.com academy for access to that course.
In the meantime though, if you email me at podcast.com podcast.com if you email and say what shall we say? Success Workbook just to make sure, in case I have many episodes where I say something else Success Workbook then I’ll pop you over a copy of this workbook. It is it is. How many pages is this? As if that matters. Eleven pages. This one. And it walks you through. Let’s just have a look. So laying the foundation of the values that you have, what your ideal day looks like.
What if it all works out exactly as you hope? Thinking of your lifeline, really looking at sort of the moments when you’re happiest, most proud, fulfilled, and so on. Finding your ikigai, which is sort of that sweet spot between what you’re really good at, what you love doing, what you care about, what will people pay for and balance. So it’s very comprehensive, really useful to go through that. So you can email me again successworkbook and you can email me podcastonestepoutside.com or you can ping me on social media as well. You can find me at Anna Selundberg on Instagram, for example, or on Facebook. But I hope that’s useful. It’s, as I said, quite a comprehensive workbook. Just gives you a bit of a structure to follow along and if anything’s unclear, then just let me know.
But I hope that’s useful for you as you begin to again, redefine or revisit your definition of success. Okay, thanks so much for listening and I’ll see you next week. Bye for now. If you are at a pivotal moment in your career, if you’re looking at that next level of success and you want more support to get you to where you want to be, then get in touch so we can have a conversation about where you are today and how I might be able to help. Apply for a free call@onestepoutside.com call. That’s onestepoutside.com call.
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