How to Develop a Winning Mindset by Celebrating Success
Have you noticed how few people know how to develop a winning mindset? How difficult it is for many people to even accept a compliment?
There’s a really good reason for being unable to accept compliments or acknowledge our success. Typically, this refusal to shine is tied into dysfunctional family patterns that teach us to be self-effacing and to project an odd sort of “humble” demeanor, all the while bursting inside to share all that we are.
A dysfunctional meta pattern
We’re taught growing up that above all, we’re supposed to succeed. And most of us struggle to do just that. Yet as soon as we get there, many of us attempt to hide our success. Why?
Somewhere along the line, humanity decided that being humble meant we should hide ANY signs of success. Either that or at the very least hide any sense of personal pride in our accomplishments. Instead of exuding positive money beliefs, acknowledging success, and developing a winning mindset, we focus instead on how we need to fix things and how wrong we are about this and that. We focus on how to not seem greedy or happy about having money. If that is our day-to-day perceptual lens, success is virtually impossible.
Not only does this do us a disservice, but we also effectively cover up the clues for others to follow. We stop others from learning how to be successful and happy in life through following our example.
All this is the result of a meta pattern in society that basically says, “Don’t brag.” The problem is, this mindset is what is holding you back from achieving your goals because “Don’t brag” is often misinterpreted as “Don’t celebrate success.” But If I can’t feel good about my success. If I feel ashamed of my success and good fortune, why bother trying to succeed in the first place?
Dysfunctional family patterns
Inability to acknowledge your success may feel as though it ensures you belong in your family. Playing small may be familiar and comfortable because your family system prides itself on modesty. Playing down your abilities may make you feel safe because everybody else refuses to shine. But it also equals inability for both you and your system to thrive.
When Natalie came to see me, she was conflicted. Her family stressed the importance of being nice, polite, and humble. Rich people were not to be admired or associated with. But Natalie was a successful CFO who had taken her company all the way through a successful merger, resulting in millions of dollars in her pocket. And yet nobody—even her family—knew she was a multi-millionaire because she never talked about her accomplishments. She was still driving the same old beater car and bargain hunting for clothes like she always had.
Breaking family patterns
She was actually at the point of deciding whether to give all her money away. When I asked her why she would do this, she said belonging in her family was more important than any financial success. When I asked her whose example she was following—who she was being loyal to—she thought about it and her eyes flew wide.
“Oh my gosh, my father! He came from a family who struggled financially and had negative money beliefs—they thought it was evil. And yet he actually managed to make a fortune. But he never acknowledged his success and ended up carelessly losing it all. He retired broke!”
Natalie was carrying the same pattern of inner thoughts. By not acknowledging her success, she was staying well inside the family pattern and sowing her own seeds of destruction. Breaking the family’s pattern and showing her family how to succeed at work and how to think big hadn’t even occurred to her.
It was only when she could see the havoc the pattern was wreaking that she could acknowledge her own success and break that family pattern and allow success to belong alongside kindness and politeness.
Acknowledging success
So, why is the inability to acknowledge success so prevalent? Well, some of this may originally stem from a need to stay safe. Back in the bad old days, being super successful also meant you were at risk of being conquered by the next invader and losing everything, including your life.
But now it’s time to learn the importance of celebrating success. Acknowledging success and helping others know how to have a winning mindset and create success creates bigger opportunities for more and more people. More people breaking generational patterns of smallness, means less jealousy and envy, and more collaboration resulting in bigger resource pools and a happier world.
Acknowledging our successes, big or small, is the first step to moving our lives forward—and everyone else’s! When we can imagine the possibilities of celebrating success, teaching ourselves to acknowledge our successes and helping others do the same, we are changing the world. This is how humans grow.
Investing in achieving ever-greater goals and expansion, we could set centuries of old patterns of envy and greed aside and be victims no more, but masters instead, setting in motion new patterns of prosperity and possibility.
To unleash your own possibilities and discover the power of acknowledgement and expansion, grab your copy of ‘Decoding Your Emotional Blueprint’. To learn more, click here.
