Join me in a little thought experiment.
What does success mean to you?
You might calculate it in numbers: financial targets, an early retirement age, or a business sale value.
Or you might work more on instinct: a feeling of contentment, giving your family the life you want for them, or the satisfaction of a job well done.
Chances are that whatever it is you’re imagining right now has changed over the years. Maybe it’s become more ambitious, maybe it’s become more realistic.
Either way, the appeal of ‘success’ can sometimes be so overpowering that we feel like we’re not getting there quickly enough. That no matter how big the wins are, we’re always slightly behind the target.
Which makes the quest for success feel like a relentless foot race – and that if we only push harder and squeeze more work in we’ll get there sooner.
But consider this: what if success isn’t a race to a destination, but a rhythm?
The expectation of now
These days everything is immediate. News, emails, deliveries.
We’re so used to getting things straight away that we demand that of ourselves too – and of our businesses.
But what’s the cost?
If we don’t give credit to the achievements that got us to today, and if we don’t allow time for deeper thinking and longer-term planning, we can miss the really important things. The big decisions that shape your business and professional development.
In short, the expectation to get results, now, can mean falling into the busy trap.
What unrushed looks like
Unrushed doesn’t mean lazy. It doesn’t mean a drop in concentration or commitment. In fact, as any endurance athlete will tell you, not rushing is one of the hardest things you can ask yourself to do.
It means:
- Taking the time to reflect on why a project matters
- Letting ideas develop and mature before rushing to a half-baked answer
- Realising that some growth is invisible – and can’t be measured on a spreadsheet or quarterly review
What unrushed gives you
Once you slow and consider things more carefully, the rewards are great.
Just speaking personally, it’s taught me to appreciate:
- Depth over breadth. The importance of doing fewer, more meaningful things over superficially trying to compete on all fronts.
- How resilience depends on rest. Switching off and creating a healthier work-life balance restores your energy and keeps you fit for the longer-term, deeper thinking that makes a real change to business fortunes.
- That good process needs time. It can be frustrating when it feels like nothing is moving – and sometimes that’s the case. But it’s powerful to spot which projects need that time to germinate.
When you reflect on the last few years of your business, it’s likely that the most satisfying steps or markers of progress are the ones that didn’t feel rushed. There might have been time pressure, but there will also have been space to consider, to breathe, to adjust your plans and make a better choice.
I know that’s true for me – and I know that the projects I rushed were also the most likely to feel unsatisfying and insubstantial.
How to let time be your friend
Time is always going to be a precious resource for any business owner or senior leader.
Managing it properly is as much a question of prioritisation as efficiency. If you create a clear long-term strategy – a vision of where you want your business or professional life to be in a few years – it becomes possible to identify the path you need to follow.
That in turn drives better short- and medium-term decision-making, and gives you the structure for deeper thinking. When you know what’s ahead, it’s possible to give projects development time so you can create something better.
And I think you’ll find that success starts to feel different too. Less defined by milestones and short-term wins, and more expansive and rich. When you operate further from the edge, success can become an overarching rhythm that you live by.
Find your rhythm of success
Trying to let success arrive in its own time isn’t easy, and we all have bad habits we fall back on.
But for me, it’s made possible thanks to the presence of a coach, a sparring partner who understands my business and the challenges I’m wrestling with. That’s what makes coaching such a powerful and essential tool for finding your rhythm.
I’d love to hear what success means to you, and how you see the best way of getting there. Let’s talk.
Kind Regards,
Chris