Why People Park And Stay At Their Level Of Success

  Written by Judith Sherman on Mar 8, 2009 4:03 am

Read More: Leadership  |  Personal Development

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 PARKING IS THE RESULT OF NOT PLANNING FOR WHAT COMES NEXT

I’ve discovered that one of the greatest enemies to success is the lack of planning for success! Another is reaching a certain level of success and then parking. Success becomes stagnate when people park themselves and insist on staying where they are instead of setting new goals and continuing to grow.

People park when they sit back and rest on past laurels because they have no desire to set new goals. The mistake being that they allow overconfidence and past successes to rob them of their future rewards. This situation makes people lazy and overly confident in their business dealings. They become board with their lives and fall victim to complacency.

Another problem with parking is that it also sets up people for a nose-dive if the tide changes, as it often does. As such, it behooves successfull people to continue setting goals that keep them feeling alive and active. Staying active doesn’t have to mean making more money or reaching a higher level of competiveness. It should mean setting goals that make life meaningful and something more than just making money.

People get into a stagnant situation when they stop dreaming, stop reaching for goals, and stop growing in their businesses! This is NOT a good thing! I’ve been around a number of success- oriented people over the past thirty years, and I’ve seen this situation happen all too frequently.

It took me a long time to figure out why people die in their businesses or why they fail in life when they seemed to be at the pinnacle of success. In almost every instance, parking was the reason; they did not plan for what to do next, once success was attained.

Unfortunately, people often spend too much time and energy on building for their future. They forget how to build a good life in the present or how to maintain good and healthy relationships. In so doing, they take people for granted and do not see their blessings. This can happen when people see success as a destination instead of a wonderful journey through life.

Life Seems Empty When We Haven't Planned For "What Comes Next."

The problem with people treating success as only a destination is that, once they’ve arrived, they do not think about what to do next. In other words, they forgot to set additional goals for what is next after reaching their specified goals. Life for them has become tendious, routine, mundane, dull, and unexciting.

A woman I once knew named Anne found herself in this situation. She described herself as feeling depressed. She asked herself, “Why do I feel this way? All I want to do is cry. I should be happy. I have everything that I could ever want and life is so good to me. ”  

Anne’s best friend suggested that perhaps what she was experiencing was just a let-down after coming off the high she had been on during that period of time. She had worked hard and had been successful in her business. Also, she had just married a wonderful man. It had been such a whirlwind leading up to the wedding that, when it was all over, she did not know what to do next. In other words, because she had been busily working hard for the event of a lifetime (which she had been praying for a long time), a big hole was left inside her when it was all over. The problem was she had nothing in place to substitute for the energy high she had been on for the past several months.

The point is that we should not only plan to succeed, but we should also plan for what happens after we reach the level of success for which we had planned. We should make plans for what comes next by setting new goals. It might help to think about the following questions:

• What motivates you to move ahead in life and to reach for another goal?
• What worthy project would you like to be involved with next?
• What will you do with your time and energy once you reach the level of success you want?
• How do you see yourself in the future and what you want to see there?
• Who will be there with you, who will not be there, and what will you be doing or not doing?
• What kind of person will you be, spoiled rich or a humbled person who feels blessed?
• How will you spend your time, energy, and money?
• Will you be wasteful with your assets or continue to use them wisely and charitably?
• How much time or money will you be giving to charity, and to what organizations, or will you use it all to lavish yourself and family?

These are questions you need to answer so that you have a realistic plan in place to keep you motivated and growing each time you reach a new goal. Also, you need to be adding new life-blood to everything you set out to accomplish. Old blood gets sluggish and thick when there’s nothing in place to give it boost once in a while. This means you need to bring new people, new ideas, and new challenges into your life on a regular basis.

I welcome comments about this subject. Do you believe that planning for what’s next and following through with what you had planned is important?

Posted in Living In a rut. Tags: competiveness, enemy to success is complacency, overconfidence, parking at a level of successs, People park when they sit back and rest on past laurels, planning for success, sets up people for a nose-dive, setting goals, stop dreaming, stop growing in their businesses, stop reaching for goals, Success becomes stagnate, what comes next.

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