Success carries with it many definitions – success can be the achievement of one’s goals, the attainment of wealth, of honours, achieving a position of status. From my perspective, one of the best definitions of success comes from the great Earl Nightingale, the Father of Personal Development, who said : ‘success is the progressive realisation of a worthy ideal’. And for me, this signifies that success is not actually a destination, an end objective, but rather a continual journey, and a journey that may have many paths to follow, many decisions to make, and certainly many challenges and obstacles to face.

However for many of us, success is a destination, the final stop on a journey of discovery and achievement, where we reward ourselves with a tangible trophy – something like a new car, a new watch, perhaps an overseas holiday, or simply viewing that bank statement indicating a large amount of dollars in the right column!! And based on this trophy, we believe that we have achieved success. But then what? Does the ‘feeling of success’ last or do we start to feel empty having fought so hard to achieve the goal, that we start to wonder ‘what next’? I have seen this repeated over and over again in the corporate world over the last 20 years. Extremely ambitious people who have positioned themselves for promotions, aligned themselves with ‘political’ allies, and many times ‘doing whatever it takes’ to climb that corporate ladder, all the while believing that ‘success’ was waiting for them at the top of the pyramid. I have seen them trample on others, build themselves up against other people, blatantly lie in front of others in order to place themselves in what they consider to be a more favourable position, thinking that this behaviour is what was required to achieve ‘success’. And in many cases, they compromise their own integrity in order to get to the ‘prize’.

Right here, I want to confess – I used to be like that as well. I thought that in order to achieve success, to win the prize of the big Corporate Title, and therefore the power to lead others, that I needed to align myself to the right political allies, that I needed to ‘play the game’, hold things to myself, play others off against each other, all the while thinking that this was the way to get to the ‘corner office’ – until I met my first mentor. My first mentor was a very successful corporate executive, a person of utmost integrity, who oozed confidence and commanded respect. I wanted to learn from him the ‘secret to success’ that would allow me to fast track my way to the corner office, to win the prize of the big corporate title and all the perks that came with it. At the time I was in my early 30’s and extremely ambitious, but with an equally insatiable hunger to learn. After a month of working with him, he said to me ; ‘Darren, when it is all said and done, success is not the tangible reward at the end of the climb up the corporate ladder. It is not the title, it is not the power, or the prestige, or the money, or the perks. When it is all said and done, success is an Inside Job!’ I could not believe what I was hearing. I was convinced that success was actually all of those, and yet here was my mentor saying that success was actually an inside job – what the hell did that mean? ‘Put simply’, he said, ‘success is actually the conquering of self. And through conquering self, you become an even better version of yourself, and therefore, become more worthy of the responsibility of leading others’.

I must admit, this concept shook me up a bit and took me a while to embrace it. For years, my firm belief was that success was something external that I had to chase, like a lion chasing it’s prey, and when the prey was caught, there was the prize. But gradually I started to embrace the concept that if I continued to develop within, and understood that success was actually the progressive realisation of a worthy internal ideal, I could get better and better, and that through becoming better, external opportunities would present themselves, including the corporate title, the responsibility (and privilege) of leading others, and the tangible ‘trappings of success’ – and all being achieved without the need to step on others, or to play the political games I thought was a pre-requisite. And I must say – it is a fantastic way to live.

And so for the last 5 years, I have been dedicated to working with corporate executives, high performing salespeople and high potential people leaders, to challenge them to conquer self, to focus on getting better on the inside, to focus their attention on serving others and helping others unleash the potential that is within every one of us, and through this, achieving success that is not only genuine and true, but also sustainable. And that is what I believe true success to be!