***Admitting Success: The Simple Way To Positive Change

If you want to overcome your difficulties, achieve your goals, and live a better life, then recognizing your effort and success is the most powerful strategy you can implement. Yet, often we do not own our successes. We minimize our effort, attribute a success to luck, or fail to take credit for our persistence and hard work. By deciding to diminish or dismiss your role in creating small steps of positive change, you add to a sense of helplessness, hopelessness, or overwhelm conce
ing your life. You begin to believe that cannot have what you most want. Failing to recognize your efforts and successes leads to decreased motivation, lowered confidence or self-esteem, and a diminishing sense of hope about a triumphant outcome.

Strategies for Feeling SuccessfulnTo become an empowered self-leader, get used to feeling successful. Don't wait until your final triumph until you allow yourself the feeling you success. Make a practice of celebrating every effort and every success, no matter how small. If you can develop the habit of seeing yourself as capable of achieving success, you are more likely to build on that success the next time you face a challenge. Consider the following six strategies about admitting your role in creating success and raise your confidence, build belief that you can have what you want, and feel good knowing that you are in charge of your life.

1. Be conscious of how you feel emotionally.
Track positive emotions as they occur by keeping a small memo pad with you at all times. For example, you're driving home and tempted to pull into the drive through even though you are not hungry. Instead, you manage to wrestle with the steering wheel and keep the car moving forward. At the next stop light, pull out your jou
al and list the success! How does it feel to have put forth the effort to align yourself with your desired outcome, and follow through?

2. Record Achievements.
Keep a daily progress report of effort spent toward achieving your desired outcome. This daily report could be as simple as a daily horizontal line labeled 0 to 100. The 0 means absolutely no time or effort was directed toward the movement of a desired outcome. Define the other end of the scale in advance. For example, 100 means you spent at least one hour writing on your novel or book each day, or 10 minutes sitting quietly and breathing each day, or 30 minutes focusing on excitedly envisioning my outcome, etc.

3. Give Yourself a Golden Star!
Each time you allow yourself to take action and follow through on your plan, place a star (or some other brightly colored sticker) on your day planner. For example, you could track each day you exercised, or each time you ended a meal comfortably full, or each binge-free day. At the end of each week, you will have a colorful visual display of how successful you have been overall.

4. Develop a "Success Strategies" Scrapbook.
Begin collecting useful tidbits and nuggets of information related to your goal that that you find helpful. Everyday we run into information on the inte
et, tips in magazines, ideas from friends, inspirational quotes, success stories, etc. Collect these motivational ideas and words and paste them into an ongoing motivational jou
al. When you are most needing some encouragement and support, go back to these words to regain your own belief in your impending success.

5. Daily Success List.
At the end of each day, create a list numbered from 1 to 10. Fill in ten successful thoughts, strategies, efforts, ideas, and achievements you accomplished that day. It may be hard at first because you are not used to recognizing your own positive actions, but stick with it. It will have lasting rewards.

6. Review Your SuccessesnWhen you keep track of your individual or small successes, you can use these as evidence that you can achieve your larger goal. Review your small success and reconstruct the steps you took to achieve that success. Discover how exactly you moved beyond a challenge, obstacle, or setback. How did you support yourself when you had doubt, what did you think about, and what step did you take first? Reviewing your small successes helps you understand that you are in control of creating success. This builds confidence, hope, and motivation.

These are but a few ideas of how to measure effort and success. Remember: Each small success is another step toward your goal. Celebrate your successes and your positive qualities. As you recognize your successes, you increase your motivation to take the next step of your jou
ey into the better life you deserve and want. So take a moment and acknowledge every single effort that you put into your goal. You'll love yourself for it!nn