Once you realize that life is never a straight line to success and that you need to navigate through the peaks and valleys, you then have the framework to forge intelligently throughout the game of life to unrivaled success and accomplishment.

Anything worth working for is worth fighting for. Success won’t come without challenges. It won’t be given to you on a silver platter, and you will need to apply mental and physical effort, skill development, and valuable time/energy currency to create your own winning formulas.

You will need to implement them with deliberate execution, consistently. No pictures of fairies or unicorns here.

There are strategic actions you can do to change your approach, your outlook, and the lens you view the world, to achieve consistent small victories and easy wins that compound towards greater achievement in health, life, and business for both time and financial freedom. They are the cornerstone of my mastermind coaching programs and once learned, form the backbone of strategic awareness and success systems.

I’m going to cover five of those in this article that is so super simple, you will evolve to the ‘next level’ of awareness and success.

1. Build your CIA

Your CIA is one of the keystone elements of success and what I teach in my MasterMind groups. Your Circle of Influence and ‘Accountability’ are your guardians, mentors, and a team that hold you accountable to do the things you need to evolve and succeed in your goals. They are also those you invest in to gain the tools, knowledge, and strategies to equip your arsenal for continued growth. 

The major point is don’t make the mistake that your CIA is your friends and family. In fact, friends and family may be the ones you definitely shouldn’t include in your CIA. They are likely to let you off the hook, say ‘it’s ok’, don’t worry about it, just let it go, everything will be alright, and just ‘try again’. This is a distinct weakness, which will keep you in your comfort zone, accepting average as acceptable and remaining complacent. The crab analogy is the perfect story. Subconsciously, they are actually sabotaging your future self and impacting the achievement of your potential.

As you may have heard in social quotes and memes, a message by Jim Rohn; ‘You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with’. To a degree, this has some truth. However, you will notice that I put in the A for ‘accountability’. 

Even though you might have your friends and family who are a ‘positive addition’ that will support you in anything that you do, they are often the first ones to help you detach the accountability for you to evolve and reach the next level. 

Now, on the flip side, don’t get me wrong, you don’t need and shouldn’t be pushing hard to the brink of burnout in a grind for success. It doesn’t need to be that way. Your acute awareness of what is necessary to work through, pivot, or redirect is another skill set to determine the optimal path forward in the present moment.

That’s why your CIA is so powerful. But because it includes. Your mentors. Your coaches. The people who have already achieved what you seek and you look up to whom you can learn from. 

Most importantly, the ones that can keep you accountable to deliver what you say and to stick to your word. To move through the challenging times, instead of saying it’s OK, you can try again tomorrow. 

Your CIA is crucial to surround yourself with the most empowering people to support your goals and your future aspirations. They call you out when you make excuses, they keep you accountable to your word. This rare breed of individuals ensures you have the platform to launch your successful initiatives and behaviors to achieve your goals. 

They will say, come on down, pick up your game, push through, let’s do it. Let’s go to the next level. Let’s overcome this obstacle, and become our future self. They are the people you need to surround yourself with and also return that level of accountability to. Research shows when you invest financially in a program or you are investing in a coach, your level of accountability increases, and so do the results you achieve. 

That financial energy and monetary investment keeps you more accountable than those who do not invest in themselves. Choose and invest in your circle wisely. Commit, be fearless, build confidence, stay highly accountable, and evolve.

2. Facing your Truth

I love this element. Rarely will you be truthful to yourself and admit your shortfalls. Seeking the truth is your opportunity to look deep inside yourself. To acknowledge and be honest with the traits, behaviors, and patterns of your past that do not lead you to your best future self. 

Facing your truth is what I call evidence. Evidence you can look back into your past and identify these limiting beliefs, self-defeating behaviors, and weaknesses, where you gave up easily and took the easy option in specific situations. These repeating patterns are your truth. You must define them and establish better methods and higher levels of accountability to respond differently and take action to better outcomes tomorrow and in the future. 

This is often one of the most difficult areas to overcome because very few people are willing and able to face their truth, be honest to themselves, and acknowledge their weaknesses. Accepting is one thing, taking action and then actually doing something about it are totally different. 

Which one are you?

Here’s how to identify them. Do a brain dump. Go back into your past and write out all the evidence of situations when you didn’t deliver. Identify our weaknesses, limiting beliefs and get clear on the situations where you dropped the ball. Be specific when you made excuses, you did not follow your word, went against your promises to yourself to your goals. 

Highlight those that repeat and come up consistently in your mind so you can anticipate future events and identify an alternative approach that you will that you must take to go beyond your previous results to create your ultimate future self

3. Build Strategic Resilience

Strategic resilience is a term that has been widely applied in my mastermind groups to establish a higher tolerance to challenge and higher threshold to stress and the necessity of getting what needs to be done, when you just don’t want to. You also have a greater capacity to bounce back, or have no need to bounce back at all. 

Strategic means it is planned. Strategic means it is intentional. To get a better understanding of what resilience actually means, think of it like you have a higher threshold to stress and challenges to environments and situations out of your control and that when things are not going your way, as expected or to plan.  It’s your mental toughness and ability to endure.

When you are resilient, you have a greater desire and resourcefulness to seek solutions and keep moving forward. There are strategies. There are tools you can master in your own performance based on your own experiences that you can implement on demand to build strategic resilience. To ensure you have the inner power, the mindset, resourcefulness and awareness of the present to develop the higher threshold to perform when you are uncomfortable and get through the tough times.

Mastering the ability to be comfortable in discomfort is a strategic resilience building system that can be automated and mastered. It is a fundamental skill set of performance mastery. That you must develop and optimize if you want to evolve and achieve bigger things in life.

It’s also super exciting and empowering when you have the confidence and courage to take on bigger risks, mountains and goals knowing you have the resilience and resourcefulness to evolve without fear. Fun times ahead when you master this.