Success can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For some, success is directly related to happiness. And why shouldn’t it be? I have personally never seen someone declare success over something with a frown on their face. For others, success is all about security. Whether it is financial security, security in a relationship, or simply feeling secure in the choices that we’ve made and the lives that we’ve led. That being the case, is it arrogant or presumptuous to actually expect success?

Before we answer that question, let’s talk about what the majority of us do when it comes to success…we hope for it. So why is hoping for success a bad thing? Hope is good, right? Well, unfortunately hope leaves the door open for uncertainty, questioning, and failure. By hoping for success, we are allowing ourselves an out. If we hope for success, but fail to achieve it, we can simply place it back onto our list of hopes and dreams, which eventually ends up reading more like a fictional novel than a to-do list. And that is exactly what success should be. A task list of outcomes that must be achieved…no matter what.

As humans, we tend to take the path of least resistance. And since success typically involves being uncomfortable and making sacrifices, it really doesn’t stand a chance of competing against the couch, the television, or your favorite game on Facebook. So the only logical way to overcome this is by refusing to allow success to be optional. So how do you do that? You stop hoping for it and start expecting it. When we expect a certain outcome, we don’t allow fear, doubt, and excuses to stand in the way. We already know what is going to happen, so any obstacles that we encounter are assumed to be overcomeable. That typically becomes  the key difference between those that succeed and those that fail. For successful people, there really is no other option.

Often times, I will listen to someone tell the story of how they overcame challenges in order to achieve their definition of success. A common phrase that I hear is, “I really didn’t have any other option.” This tells me that the person was forced to expect success, since there was nowhere to go but up.

So how do we go from a place of hope to a place of sincere expectation? First, we must change our interal beliefs by creating smaller, more targeted definitions. Think of these as check points along your journey for success. For example, if your definition of success is earning over $100,000 per year, but you’re currently only earning $30,000, expecting success would certainly seem presumptuous and rather unlikely to you. However, if you temporarily changed your definition of success to earning $40,000 per year, you are much more likely to change your mindset and truly start expecting that as a result. Not only does it appear to be much more attainable, but when you succeed at increasing your income by this smaller amount, you have created a point of reference that can be used to overcome future roadblocks. Our beliefs can only be changed through achievement and experience; both of which are accomplished by adopting this targeted check point methodology.

So is it arrogant to expect success…or is it the only sure fire way of achieving it?

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