Women's Moon Wisdom Podcast Intro - Rebecca Rankin (00:01):
Stories teachings and guidance. Welcome to the Women's Moon Wisdom podcast with your host, Rebecca Rankin.
Rebecca Rankin (00:18):
Hey there, this is Rebecca. And welcome back to the Women's Moon Wisdom podcast. In today's episode, we're going to dive into success. What does success look like to you? And it's very personal. Well, this might hit home to a lot of us who are female entrepreneurs out there, whether a side hustle or full-time gig. I'm pretty sure that for all of us success is something that we all strive for in some way, as much as we say, we wanna be successful in our career and, and life overall, if you don't take time to truly envision what it looks like and feels like, and most importantly, take action, then success will be that much more difficult to achieve. Finding some inner clarity as to what defines success for you can only then help you put more purpose into your days and lead you to living in alignment with your highest self, your true nature.
And part of finding inner clarity is asking yourself, what is your vision of success? What does it feel like? What is your why? It's one thing about dreaming up success in terms of abundance. And it's another to feel into what abundance will offer you. Your why. Like why financial abundance? Maybe it looks like getting to the point where paying the bills never has to be stressful. Why a nice home, right? So maybe your kids can have their own bedrooms and you can have an in-home office, that way you can leave the stress of commuting behind. Why the nice vacation? To explore the world with your family and create memories that last, what is your why in defining success? I know I'm not alone in that it's easy to get swept away with the day in and day out of daily life and just trudge along without defining goals or ambitions. Or perhaps your definition of success is just something that you've copy and pasted from your upbringing or what you've been taught by popular culture as to what defined success - is it a fancy house, a fancy car, fancy close, multi six or seven figure income, et cetera.
And because that image of predefined quote "success" doesn't actually fit with your desires, you might be allowed feeling like you aren't successful. Yet success is self defined and it's, it's a felt sense for myself. I must admit there have been times where I wasn't aligned with my own vision of success and was therefore using the terms of success defined by our culture. And thus, it felt pretty, quote, "poor". Now I have two brothers and they both live very differently than me. What each of us values in life is just a bit different. While both of my brothers were making six figures and their corporate careers and driving new cars, building beautiful new homes, there I was just making ends meet, no frills. I felt like I should be right there with them, despite the fact that I didn't choose that path in life. In fact, I very intentionally chose to leave my corporate architecture job to work in the healing arts and be of service to a greater community.
Yet it was really hard for me to not compare myself to them, especially when I, I have a twin brother. So it's pretty hard not to directly compare yourself to someone who is the exact age of you and was literally raised exactly the same way. And his metrics for success were so obviously different and beyond mine. A little backstory initially in my twenties, I'll admit what success looked like to me was very much what my family had imprinted on me and was not something that I had ever really self defined. I was very much raised with the notion that success looked like, get good grades in high school and then going to a good university and then getting a good job with a good retirement plan and having a family and providing the same for my family. And then once you retire, you can then enjoy life and live a life of leisure.
And then I woke up in my mid twenties and realized that isn't what I want out of this life. I wanted something different. And I think that was shocking to my family, especially my parents who ultimately just wanted me to be secure and happy. So I'll say I certainly shattered that version of success that was I born into. When I decided to quit my cushy architecture career to become a yoga teacher, my family was in a bit of shock and even the firm I worked for figured I'd just be back. They even offered me my position back with the hopes that I could then teach in-house yoga classes for them, for me though, climbing the corporate ladder is not what I envisioned for my life. I may have only been 25 at the time, but I know that wasn't my version of success. My success journey was gonna be defined under different terms.
It wasn't going to be about the fancy car, the fancy home, and settling down with a good paying job. Still to this day, I have people asking me if I'd ever go back to architecture, if that was always my fallback plan. And my answer is no, never. I never in my mind thought, yeah, if I fail at this, I can always go back. I full on took a leap of faith knowing that becoming a yoga teacher was pointing me on my path. And to fall back on architecture, well, that would feel like the failure, not the success I was looking for. Also, I do find it interesting that people still ask me it to this day. If I would ever go back to architecture and I remind them that I only spent three years in a firm in my twenties, and I've spent nearly two decades at this point as an entrepreneur, a small business owner and a yoga teacher.
So back to this little backstory on when I knew that I needed to, reenvision my version of success. Now, when I was in my twenties, I knew I wanted something different. And it's interesting to admit it on this podcast because other than probably my journal and my partner, I'm pretty sure I've never admitted this out loud to anyone. Anyways, I knew I wanted something different and at first I was really scared and I was really afraid to make that shift. Even at university, even as the president of my architecture class, even moving to San Francisco, I felt like this wasn't where I was meant to go. I just didn't know what was calling to me yet. I had though, I remember I had this like inner knowing that a life of design while I loved the study of architecture and architectural design. It never felt like my calling.
It was never like my true passion. I was just going through the motions. I was going with the trajectory of success that my family had instilled in me. Well, really, what my father had instilled in me. And I had some, honestly, some really dark moments in school that I pretty much only shared with my mother. I was going through the motions and I was internally miserable. Right. I would call my mom in tears because I was putting so much self-imposed pressure to be and do the best I could without actually loving what I did and loving what I do. I would suck it up and get through another semester. And while I got good grades and was enthusiastic with the community of students in my class, I was in an inner dark place. I feel like in a way, my, my inner guidance system was trying to wake me up and help me realize that something needed to shift and my path was in a different direction. But I had convinced myself into believing that the path to success was the same as my brothers was the same as my father.
I was lucky to graduate with a job offer in place, out in San Francisco, but deep down, I just had this feeling of not being satisfied like at, at a soul level. I know that wasn't my picture of success. I remember pulling late hours at the architectural firm, working weekends, and I would've been in my, my early twenties. And I remember looking around at all my colleagues in the firm that were, you know, in their thirties, forties, fifties, all of us working late hours together. I remember thinking, this is not what I want for myself. Like I wasn't passionate enough about it all to spark that type of motivation just to be there. Not at the time in my twenties, I was diving deeper and deeper into my yoga practice and yoga studies. And it really called me. In long story short, I put my notice in so that I could attend a nine week intensive yoga teacher training down in Los Angeles.
My parents at first were really, they were really upset and honestly, everyone figured I'd be back in San Francisco at the architecture firm after those nine weeks were complete. Well, I did return to San Francisco after the training, but it wasn't to go to the firm. It was to teach yoga for a mentor of mine. From there, I redefined what success was for me in my mid twenties as a, a new yoga teacher. Success was the ability to be my own boss, to set my own hours and to travel the world and explore success. Wasn't about being at the firm all day, just to explore and enjoy life on the weekends. I wanted to meet people from all over the world and learn about their cultures. I first had to break out of the box that I had been living in and redefine sdd uccess for me and not to say I didn't struggle.
I, I hustled to make ends meet, but I was so happy. I really felt like I was fully able to feel like I was living my life and not feel like life was happening to me. And over the years, my definition of success has shifted, as it should. What I wanted in my twenties is so different from what I wanted in my thirties, which is different from that of my forties. Success is dynamic and is self specific. As you evolve, your definition of success evolves. With each year or decade, you learn from life's lessons. You evolve and your definition of success, evolves along with it. Making it all the more important to envision and reenvision what success is to you. I'm all about encouraging others to take time to step back and create a vision of your life, and then take the actions to step into the life you're dreaming of.
Yet, it takes finding time in your day to get still, listen to your needs and desires and dream into what it is that you really want your life to look like. The mindset that you are in shifts with each year. Heck, for those of us with cyclical nature, our mindset shifts each week of our cycle. So offering yourself opportunities to realign, envision and gain clarity is so potent in understanding your definition of success and letting that be the north star and guiding you on your journey, whether it's in your career or in your life. How you think and how you process, your thoughts and feelings will make or break your success, right? Your mindset sets the tone for your success. And it takes time. Success is the shift in your mindset from scarcity to abundance. Now, I, I highly recommend taking time to envision your success through visualization.
Science tells us that when we imagine something, it lights up kind of the same area of our brain as actually doing the thing. This shared area of brain activity means that visualizing something before it happens, actually helps us arrive at the result quicker. So the next time that you sit down to meditate, carve out a little time to grab your journal and work through your vision of success. Like first, just take a baseline snapshot of your before, as in what you have, where you are and all that you experienced today. Like walk through your day, each part of the day and map out what it looks like.Then get crystal clear on your most true to you, vision of success. So you can confidently work towards what you really want out of work and life. Like walk through a day in the life of the successful version of yourself, like go through each step along the way of that successful version of you, what does that look like.
Now after visualizing that, then take note of what little steps you can do to step into that vision of success, right? Create a little plan to make your vision a reality, like down to scheduling, like action items into your calendar. And this is just a beautiful visualization tool. This is just a beautiful opportunity to get clear as to what is your definition of success. If you want a step by stop audio guide for this, I highly recommend checking out my online business mentor, Amy Porterfield's free guided visualization. It's free and it comes with like this little worksheet to use. It helped me gain so much clarity and redefined my current vision for success. I put a link in the show notes to her free offer. So where we're listening to this, if you just scroll down to where all the description is, just go down to the links there for her free offer.
And also if you're looking just to tune into your needs and desires a bit more, I also have free downloadable journal prompts that will help you connect to your needs and desires as they shift with each phase of your inner cycle. I'll link to that in the show notes too. So just click the links in the description of wherever you're listening to this.
My hope is that you offer yourself an opportunity to realign, envision and gain clarity in understanding your definition of success, just so you can step into the life you're dreaming of and be in alignment with your higher self. Well, that's all I have for you today. Enjoy, and I'll talk to you soon.
