I grew up playing competitive sports. Softball and basketball began my physical journey through life and inspired me to pursue more challenging physical activities like ice hockey, hip hop dance, and weight training as an adult.
But little did I know what I was gaining from each of those physical experiences as they were building inside of me.
Not only was I building important personal skills – along with learning my strengths and weaknesses – but I was also building teamwork skills, mental resilience, and the foresight to know when to take action that continually fuels success on my own terms.
Yet those skills didn’t surface right away. While studying psychology at UCLA, I had the opportunity to observe what living within the vicinity of a big entertainment mecca looked like. External mouth-watering success would fill the air each time a celebrity crossed my path in a shopping mall or as numerous celebrities graced the red carpet at a big movie premiere in Westwood just off the UCLA campus.
And for a long time after graduating college, I was chasing the same success dream everyone else chases: successful job/career, cool car, beautiful house, and building a happy family.
But along the way as I was chasing my external success, the more I kept relegating my internal success to the back seat (or rather, more like the trunk). My internal success was becoming more and more like a “someday I’ll get to it.”
And as I was getting older, that “someday” was also starting to fade away. And that frightened me.
It frightened me so much that I started experiencing more stress and anxiety to a level that seemed never-ending. And I didn’t know why. And I didn’t know how to stop it. Or slow it down.
With a growing family and a demanding work life, that combination exuded chaos everywhere I turned. I found myself drowning in growing responsibilities and making sure my kids’ needs were met as each year got busier than the year before. And I knew that something had to change. But change never happened because I wasn’t doing anything to change it.
Until one day (more like one whole year), I unknowingly tapped into my problem-solving nature – an ability that I didn’t realize I had until identifying it a decade ago – that caused me to stop and take a mental pause in my life. That’s when I started to re-define what success really means to me and identifying what important things fulfill me as I continue building my life into the future.
I’m so glad I did because looking back over the last decade, I see how much I have achieved towards my vision goals that hold so much more meaning for me now and how much internal success I enjoy today.
And as I continue achieving my milestone goals, each year my vision gets bigger as I continually challenge myself to grow even more every step of my journey forward.
These days I focus on helping others put structure into their lives by creating clarity towards their vision, building confidence and resilience through proactivity, and re-defining what success means to them, so they can start building towards it. And I still stay physically active through fitness cardio and strength training that provide all the energy I need to enjoy living life the way I envision it to be. 😊