PARKING AT A LEVEL OF SUCCESS

        PARKING AND LACK OF PLANNING FOR WHAT’S NEXT

I’ve discovered that one of the greatest enemies to success is the lack of planning for success! Another is reaching a certain level of success and then parking. Success becomes stagnate when people park themselves and insist on staying there instead of setting new goals and continuing to grow.

People park when they sit back and rest on past laurels; the mistake being that they allow overconfidence and past successes to cloud future rewards. This situation makes people lazy and overlyconfident in their business dealings. They become board with their lives and fall victim to complacency.

Another problem with parking is that it also sets up people for a nose-dive if the tide changes, as it often does. As such, it behooves successfull people to continue setting goals that keeps them feeling alive and active. Staying active doesn’t have to mean making more money or reaching a higher level of competiveness, it means setting goals that makes your life mean something more than just making money.

A stagnant situation happens when people stop dreaming, stop reaching for goals, and stop growing in their businesses!  This is NOT a good thing! However, I’ve been around a number of success- oriented people over the past thirty years, and I’ve seen this situation happen all too frequently.

It took me a long time to figure out why people die in their businesses or why they fail in life when they seemed to be at the pinnacle of success in their businesses. In almost every instance, parking was the reason; they did not plan for what to do next once success was attained.

Unfortunately, people often spend too much time and energy on building for their future that they forget how to build a good life in the present or how to maintain good relationships. In so doing, they take people in their lives  for granted and don’t see their blessings. This can happen when people see success as a destination instead of a wonderful journey through life.

The problem with people treating success as only a destination is that, once they’ve arrived, they don’t think about what to do next. In other words, they forgot to set additional goals for what is next after reaching their specified goals. Life has a tendency to become routine, mundane, dull, and unexciting. Life seems empty when people have not planned for “What comes next.”

A woman I once knew named Anne found herself in this situation. She described herself as feeling depression. That’s when she asked herself, “Why do I feel this way? All I want to do is cry. I should be happy. I have everything that I could ever want and life is so good to me.”  

Anne’s best friend suggested that perhaps what she was experiencing was just a let-down after coming off the high she had been on during that period of time. She had been successful in her business and also had just married a wonderful man. It had been such a whirlwind leading up to the wedding that, when it was all over, she did not know what to do next. In other words, because she had been busily working hard for the event of a lifetime (which she had been praying for a long time), a big hole was left inside her when it was all over. The problem was she had nothing in place to substitute for the energy high she had been on for the past several months.

My point is that you should not only plan to succeed, but you should also plan for what happens after you reach the level of success for which you had planned. You should make plans for what comes next by setting new goals. Think about the following questions:

• What motivates you to move ahead in life and to reach for another goal?
• What worthy project would you like to be involved with next?
• What will you do with your time and energy once you have gotten to where you want to be?
• How do you see yourself in the future and decide what you want to see there?
• Who will be there with you, who will not be there, and what will you be doing or not doing?
• What kind of person will you be, spoiled or humbled?
• How will you spend your time, energy, and money?
• Will you be wasteful with those assets or continue to use them wisely and charitably?
• How much time or money will you be giving to charity, and to what organizations?

These are questions you need to answer so that you have a realistic plan in place to keep you motivated and growing each time you reach a new goal. Also, you need to be adding new lifeblood to everything you set out to accomplish. Old blood gets sluggish and thick when there’s nothing to give it boost once in a while. This means you need to bring new people and new ideas into your circle on a regular basis.

I welcome comments about this subject. Do you believe that planning for what’s next and following through with what you had planned is important?