Successful People Have These 8 Characteristics – Do You?
You’ve got big plans for your future, or maybe you just want to make some changes for the better and need to make them stick.
But as we all know, change is hard, and making that change stick is even harder.
So what are the characteristics of people who seem to be able to achieve their goals and make those good changes stick?
Here a 8 Characteristics that successful people live by that you can emulate too.
They are open to change
If you want to achieve your goals, you will have to be open to and accept change. By its very nature, goal achievement is a form of change, but many people, despite wanting lofty goals, are actually scared of change.
And to some extent that’s not surprising because sometimes the change that arrives isn’t what we thought it might be.
But, that’s the difference with successful people, they keep working towards their goals anyway and will accept the changes when they get to where they’re going – expected or unexpected.
They stick with things
If you have big goals, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s going to take time to achieve the outcomes you want.
That means that you will have to be able to stick with it, not just for now, but for the long term.
Successful people know and accept this and in doing so, set themselves up to keep pushing towards what they want even though the time it will take could feel overwhelming.
The difference is that in accepting that something worthwhile is going to take a lot of time, they see the time spent as an investment. Something that will pay off in the future. In other words, they’ve moved away from the idea of instant gratification and are working towards and holding out for longer term and bigger success.
They follow their dream regardless of other peoples’ opinions.
To be a goal-achiever and bring your dreams to life, you will be different to other people. You will stand out or not quite fit in to the “norm” and for this reason you will attract other people’s (mostly) negative opinions.
The crowd will be very keen for you to re-join the ranks of normality (you will often hear it termed “reality” or “be realistic”) and will use all their tools to make you feel bad, guilty, stupid, strange, peculiar or eccentric in a bid to have you stop all this nonsense and get back with the slow stream.
But to be successful you will have to hold firm to your commitment to your goals, say no to the crowd and keep going anyway.
They follow their dream regardless of the circumstances.
Everyone has “stuff”. In other words, everyone has circumstances that could best be described as “less than perfect” for the plans that they have.
But here’s the thing. Whilst most people will use their circumstances as reasons to hold themselves back, as excuses for staying exactly where they are or as obstacles that they just “can’t” get past, successful people will turn this whole “less than perfect” set of occurrences on their head and just get on with the things that need doing anyway.
If you look around, you will see that everyone…EVERYONE has “stuff”. It might be poor health, toxic relationships, financial worries, time pressures, etc. But in spite of these challenges, successful people push forward anyway…because what’s the alternative? To stay exactly where you are while your “stuff” continues to pull you down.
Successful people on the other hand have decided that that’s not how they want to live and so they take action to move themselves in a better direction and away from the circumstances that are challenging them.
They are (generally) optimistic and believe in their ability to achieve what they want.
It’s so important to believe in your ability to achieve whatever it is you’re working towards because if you don’t believe that you can achieve the thing you aspire to, then you are very unlikely to even make a start on the work that’s required, leave alone keep going when the going gets tough.
In this respect, optimism and belief go hand-in-hand. Knowing that things will be challenging and difficult at times but keeping going anyway demonstrates an optimistic mindset that whatever life throws your way, you will find a way to keep going and get to where you want to be.
They learn and apply
If something is going to stretch you and take up a lot of your time, then it’s inevitable that you will need to learn some new skills along the way.
When I think back to the years I spent working towards my professional accountancy qualification, there was an inordinate amount of stuff I needed to learn. From governance and regulatory requirements, to technical accounting skills and from case law to taxation, the syllabus felt endless!
But what made all that learning useful was application.
There’s absolutely no point learning for the sake of learning, because ultimately it won’t actually get you anywhere until you apply the new skills and knowledge you’ve gained.
So bare this in mind as you embark on a new course, read a new book or attend the next seminar: you must apply what you are learning.
Find ways to take something practical away from all your learnings and then apply them to the environment in which you work, or if you’re not working in that field yet, find a way to utilise those skills in your current field so that you don’t lose your new learnings.
When something doesn’t work out or fails, they find out why and try something else
It’s inevitable that if you’re working towards a goal that you’ve never worked on previously, that you’re going to come up against things that don’t work, fail or disappoint you in some way.
But failure builds us up in a way that success can’t.
Failure leads to breakthroughs, to better understanding, to pushing at boundaries that were holding us back, to disappointments that we learn to handle and turn around.
We all want success, but the road to success is paved with all the failures that got us to that place.
Remember, when thinking about your failures they were…
• your rite of passage,
• your golden ticket,
• your rung up on the ladder,
• your stepping stone.
For these reasons, they were never, ever meant to be a stick you beat yourself with and instead they are meant to direct you away from what doesn’t work and towards the stuff that will.
They’re in it for the long haul because they know there are no quick fixes
The idea that there are quick fixes, hacks and tips that will propel you to success at the speed of light are just nonsense. Every successful person will tell you that it takes hard work, commitment and persistence to achieve important goals.
The great thing about knowing and accepting this is that it immediately puts you ahead of the herd. Most people don’t want to work that hard, most people don’t want to miss social events or tv programmes.
However, as a budding successful person with big goals, you know and are willing to sacrifice the obvious immediate gratifications in favour of bigger rewards in the future.
Will you emulate these characteristics too?
So there you have it – 8 characteristics of successful people. How many of these characteristics have you already adopted into your mindset and which ones do you need to work on to help you move towards your goals faster?
As I said in point 6 – if you’ve discovered something new in this list today, then it’s all about applying the learning, so choose at least one of these characteristics and start applying it to your lifestyle now so that you will reap the benefits in the not-too-distant future.
What to do next…
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