I’m often asked: why do you talk about success? Why not ‘happiness’ or ‘fulfilment’? And it’s not that *I’m* obsessed with success; it’s that *everyone* is obsessed with success. Fundamentally, success is defined as “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose” and this leaves a huge amount of freedom in defining what it means to each of us. But for some reason, we tend to have a very narrow focus on career and work in this context and, as business owners, we get caught up in the ‘hustle’ and the search for the next client, quickly losing sight of why we started in the first place. In my experience – from my own life and from working with clients over the years – there are five key areas in our lives that need to be balanced in order for us to thrive and live a truly successful life in a more whole and holistic sense. Check out this week’s podcast episode to find out more!
*Resources mentioned during the episode*
The One Step Outside Facebook group– Join us over in the Facebook group to meet like-minded people who are working on reimagining success in their life and business and to get access to direct support and free training sessions from Anna. www.facebook.com/groups/onestepoutside
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Transcript
Hello, hello there and welcome back to the Reimagining Success Podcast.
Now, as you listen to this, this very moment, at least if you’re listening to it live when it comes out in the middle of November, 2019, we are going through the five pillars of a sustainable escape plan. So escaping from the nine to five, your full time job, and creating a business that’s going to be viable and sustainable for the long term. So, that’s going on as we speak over in the One Step Outside Facebook Group, so if you’re not signed up this time round, don’t worry, we’ll be doing it again probably in January, every couple of months or so now going forwards. So do join us each time, writing new content, refining it. It gets more and more polished and fun. So do join us over on onestepoutside.com/escape.
But in the meantime, we talked about those five pillars of the sustainable escape plan from work. And I have been focusing a lot on this particular aspect. So escaping from the conventional work, focus on a full time corporate job, getting that promotion, the salary increase, blah, blah, blah. But, as you may know if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, I’m not just about leaving your job and escaping the nine to five in the sense of changing career, but, really, the whole concept of reimagining success is all around re-imagining success away from just that narrow focus on the domain of work. So whatever that work looks like, even if it’s a business that you love and that is a danger. We say, “Oh, I love what I do so much that I don’t mind working on it all the time.” There are so many other things in our lives that are important and that is absolutely key.
So with that in mind, I wanted to spend basically the rest of this year, the rest of 2019, digging into each of those different areas of our lives.
So, yes, working career will be part of that, but we’re going to be digging into what I call the five Ls. Now, if you have been listening this past year, you may remember back in the beginning that I did introduce this model and you may also have used my success audit, which is a resource that I share a lot in my Facebook group and so on. But whether you’ve done it before, you’ve never heard of it, buckle up, let’s sit down and enjoy the ride because I think this is an exercise you want to do more than once. It’s never a bad thing to listen to something again and again, so you really wake up to a particular aspect that you hadn’t thought about before.
Things of course change and evolve. I can’t tell you how much this has changed for me over the last few years. So really worth listening and digging into these deeper and who knows what you might discover or rediscover. So the model, I guess is the word I’m looking for, that I want to introduce you to or reintroduce you to is the five Ls. So these are the five Ls, really, the different areas of your life that I think are important. Now, I always want to caveat this. This is not based on scientific, quantitative research. This is in no way something that these are the only five areas that matter in your life. It’s really a tool as everything else that I present to you. It’s a framework. It’s an exercise you can do. It’s to encourage you, give you that gentle prod to think about these things, your goals, what’s really important in a new way.
And so again, if there are other areas you feel are important or something that’s missing, that is absolutely fine.
And, in fact, I encourage you to play around with this model and make it your own. But in the meantime, in my experience at least, in my own life and working with clients over the last few years, there are these five more or less key areas in our lives that need to be balanced in order for us to thrive and live a truly successful life in that more whole and holistic sense. And now I hate the idea of work-life balance. I used the word balance there a little lightly, because work-life balance really posits, work versus life as if they’re two different black and white things. But really, taking a step back, you have to realise that work is a part of life.
Yes, it’s a very important part and it’s what gives us money that then allows us to do all the other things in our lives. It’s also important from that sense of fulfilment and intellectual stimulation, meaning, contribution, making a difference and so on. And, again, if we find an incredible business, a new career, that we love, that’s fantastic, but again, it’s just one part of life. So I prefer the idea of work-life integration and the fact that is one of the five pillars of the sustainable escape plan. But work-life integration is really around thinking of how your business in particular, how you can design that to work to fit in around your life. And rather than vice versa, by the way, because the traditional structure of the so called nine to five, which can be, five to nine for some people or seven to seven, who knows, but the Monday to Friday, very rigid structure, the commute, the early morning, the late nights, whatever it is.
And so integration, allowing your business to fit around your life rather than vice versa is, I think, a much stronger concept. You may have come across Stephen Covey’s or possibly even if it was somebody else’s originally idea of the five big rocks. So the metaphor, the visual, is imagine that you have big rocks. You have some gravel, stones, sand. Now, if you put in the sand and the gravel and the rocks and so on, the smaller stones first, if you then try to put the big rocks into that jar or bucket or whatever it is, you’re not going to be able to squeeze them in. So the concept is that if you put those big rocks in there first, then you can pour in the little stones and the gravel and the sand and that will fit around the big rocks.
So your big rocks are your priorities. It might be your roles in life as a mother, a father, a partner, a son, a brother, a colleague, a business owner, and so on. It might be, again, these sort of different areas. Perhaps your fitness is really important to you. Your career, of course, is one. Your relationships and so on. So, that’s something to think about, but again, thinking about these five areas. And the five areas that I’ve to find are the following, live, love, learn, lead, laugh. So, yes, a bit of alliteration playing around with words there, but the first one is live and that’s wellness and well-being. Second one is love, relationships, and romance. Third one is lead, career, and impact. Oh, I skipped one. Third one is learn, development, and growth. And fourth one is lead, career, and impact. Fifth one is laugh, fun, and spontaneity.
So live, love, learn, lead, laugh.
Now, over the next few weeks, I want to really dig deep into each of these. So each episode now is going to be on each of these, so next time will be on wellness and well-being. Now, I am not a fitness or nutrition coach or personal trainer. I’m not a relationship coach. I’m not a fun coach, if that exists. But what I am is very passionate about helping you to consider these different areas as you define what success looks like for you, and the power of coaching, and perhaps you even are a coach or certainly you’ve experienced coaching, is that, really, it can be applied to anything. I was surprised myself to discover that the frameworks that we use in terms of goal setting and overcoming limiting beliefs and all these things are absolutely applicable to other areas such as perhaps wanting to lose weight or get fitter or wanting to meet someone.
It might seem really counterintuitive and unfamiliar and uncomfortable to apply goal setting to an area like love. But actually, that can be really helpful sometimes. So, again, I’m not saying I’m an expert in any of these areas. I’m certainly not going to tell you what you should and shouldn’t eat and so on. But what I’m trying to do is just to get you to think about these things in a different way, consider these areas that may have been neglected these past weeks and months, this past year. So I like to do this at least once a year and if not a little bit more often. So, again, over the next few weeks we’ll have an episode a week on one of these five areas starting with live and going through love, learn, lead, laugh. There will also be a bit of fun in the Advent calendar. So 25 days to Christmas, one through five and so on will be on each of these different topics, different areas of your life, and that will be taking place over in the One Step Outside Facebook Group, if you’re a member there.
If not, then do come over and join us.
You can search One Step Outside or we can go to onstepoutside.com/community. So over in the Facebook group as well as on Instagram. So if you’re not active on Facebook, it’ll be going on, on my Instagram channel as well, which is Anna S.E. Lundberg. So Anna S.E. Lundberg. And I’d love to see that as well. So I do want to start anyway this week by talking to you a little bit about these different areas. And what we’re going to do each week is look at understanding, of course, what it is, what does it mean, what does it mean to you in particular? But where are you today? Because, of course, we need to know sort of what’s our baseline today. And if you did this exercise last year, of course, this will now be a reflection of the changes you did or didn’t do over the past year.
So where are you today? Looking back at what you’ve done the past year, looking ahead to where you want it to be this time next year, and then, of course, identifying sort of priority actions that you want to take to get there. Now, I really encourage you this week, well, certainly the next few weeks, to sit down with a notebook, possibly involve a partner, I’m going to make my boyfriend do this, I promise, I’ll tell you how that goes, and sit down with older children perhaps and do this as a family exercise. It’s so important to involve each other, and even a friend, get a few friends together. I would love to invite you guys into my home. We’d all sit with flip charts and do this together. That’s definitely a workshop idea for the future. But, for now, I encourage you to do it with a friend, with a colleague. It can be quite lonesome working on your own business and all these things.
So I really encourage you to reach out to the community, find someone else, perhaps in the One Step Outside Group, for that matter, and who wants to do this with you. And follow it on each week or you can do it all in one big burst. But, again, we’re looking at where are you today, looking back at what you’ve done to get here or perhaps not done in some cases, and looking ahead to where you want to be and what you’re going to do to change. Because, of course, if you don’t do anything to change, nothing is going to change because that’s how things work. So just want to talk to you about the different areas first, just to sort of set the scene and get your cogs in your brain working a little bit.
So the first one is live and wellness and well-being.
And again, I’m not a fitness or nutritionist coach or personal trainer or anything like that. I’m not going to tell you, you need to lose weight or so on. This is a much broader concept of well-being, wellness. So it’s the foundation, I believe, on which everything else in your life is built. I mean your physical health but also your mental health, such an important and there’s a lot of growing awareness around this very important area. As well as your emotional and your spiritual health. It’s really how you’re feeling. How well equipped do you feel to deal with everything else in your life? And it comes first in my model for an important reason because it needs to come first, but unfortunately often it comes last. So, without this foundation here, any attempt at success in other areas is going to be an uphill struggle and ultimately it won’t be sustainable.
And so, when people come to me and we have calls booked in or we’re working on the career change and the business and so on, that’s very difficult to do. And I certainly don’t want to be giving you all these frameworks and tools and exercises and things when you’re not very well. If you don’t have the physical energy, the mental strength, if you’re unwell in whatever sense of the words, it’s going to be very difficult for you to work on your business and career. So I really encourage you to focus on this first and foremost. Secondary is love, and it’s not just romantic love. It’s fundamentally we all want to be loved and love others where I think that’s sort of innate to our human nature. It can mean the affection we feel for a friend, a relative, family member. It could be romantic love, of course, we feel for a partner.
It can also be a broader sense of belonging and community,
and I’d love for you to think about that in particular now, again, as sort of a solopreneur, because it can be lonely and isolating. So, feeling, experiencing love is a massive part of life and getting support and buy-in and encouragement from other people is crucial in letting you and supporting you in reaching your goals. Third is love, relationships, and romance. Next is learn, development, and growth. So I always talk about, I’m a big believer in, lifelong learning. I’m always working with different coaches now. I do courses and things and I’m reading and so on, always challenging myself. And I think that childish sense of curiosity that we all start out with is absolutely indispensable as a business owner.
So exploring new things, setting goals, growing continually, it’s important whether we’re talking about really deep questions, profound self-awareness and personal development or learning a new language, playing musical instrument, whatever it might be. There’s nothing worse than feeling stuck and stagnant and not doing anything about it. So really continue to challenge ourselves, learn, grow, evolve as human beings, as business owners, as parents, as whatever it might be. Next is lead, because yes, career is important, as we say. It’s a really important part of life for many reasons, but it’s not traditionally sort of the prestigious job title, salary, even the seven figure, six figure, whatever you want to call it, business that we tend to get caught up in working on the hustle and all that stuff. It’s really a much broader definition again, and involves finding your ikigai, which I talk about before.
It’s doing work that you love, that you really enjoy.
It’s making the most of your particular skills and strengths. It’s doing something that ultimately is making a meaningful difference in the world, is needed and not just PowerPoints, Excel sheets, or selling more products that nobody needs, and, in fact, are, if anything, contributing in a negative way. But also, of course, meeting your income goals because that is an important part of the puzzle. So lead, career, and impact. It is the financial, the income side of things, but also the fulfilment, doing stimulating work, making a meaningful difference and making an impact ultimately. And then finally love, and this is a tricky one. Fun and spontaneity is a bit hard to pin down, but I just like to have it there. It’s important to have that space, all that other stuff that doesn’t involve setting goals and planning and pushing yourself.
Because even fun things can become, and for those of us who are these types of Taipei goal setters, we can make something really fun and relaxed into something that’s more competitive and push ourselves too much, so even playing the piano or whatever it might be might become something we’re sort of forcing ourselves to do. So making sure that you’re enjoying life, having fun doing what you feel like, because that’s what it’s all about. So it’s definitely not selfish to spend time doing what you want to do now and then. In fact, it’s really critical to living a happy and balanced life. So there is definitely space and needs to be space for that fun, for reading novels, for playing, for laughing, and ultimately, for feeling joy. So, again, those are the five areas. Live, wellness, and well-being, love, relationships, and romance, learn, development and growth, lead, career and impact, and laugh, fun and spontaneity.
So that’s where I’ll leave it for this week. I just wanted to introduce you to the model, perhaps remind you about the different areas. Maybe you can start thinking about it. Get a notebook ready for next week. We’ll be diving into the first area, live, wellness, and well-being. So maybe begin to reflect on how you’re feeling in all those different aspects, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, and really begin to think how you might want to move forward in the coming year. So I look forward to digging into that with you next week. Remember the Advent calendar’s going on very soon as of the 1st of December over in the Facebook group, One Step Outside and my Instagram channel as well. So hope you enjoy this, taking a step back, slowing things down a little bit to not talking branding and marketing and content strategy and quitting a job and fear of failure and so on, but really taking this time to look at the big picture, check in on where you are, where you want to get to.
So can’t wait to work with you on this. I’ll be doing the same. As I said, myself and with my boyfriend. So we’ll see how that goes and I look forward to getting clear on where we are and where we want to get to in 2020, which again is not just a new year, but a new decade. So looking forward to seeing you next week. Can’t wait to get started. Bye for now.
Connect with Anna:
www.facebook.com/onestepoutside
www.instagram.com/annaselundberg
If you’re ready to start to reimagine what success could look like for you, here are some of the ways in which Anna can support you:
Get private mentoring for your business – Partnering with a business coach can help you see those blind spots and get both external accountability and expert guidance to take your business to where you want it to be. www.onestepoutside.com/freeconsultation
Get private career coaching – Individual coaching is fully tailored to your specific goals and desires so we can create the programme that works best for you, with the support that you need to move forwards. www.onestepoutside.com/claritycall
Grab a copy of Leaving the Corporate 9 to 5 – After interviewing 50 people who have left the corporate 9 to 5 to forge their own path, Anna has collected their stories in a book that will inspire you with the possibilities that are out there and reassure you that you’re not alone in looking for an alternative. www.leavingthecorporate9to5.com
Join the One Step Outside the 9 to 5 Business Incubator – This is your roadmap to transitioning from a corporate job into setting up a meaningful business that will bring you more freedom, flexibility and fulfilment outside of the corporate 9 to 5. www.onestepoutside.com/9to5
Level up with The Outsiders Business Accelerator – This is a mastermind for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small business owners who want to create a long-term sustainable brand and business. www.onestepoutside.com/accelerate
