By nature, I tend to reflect a lot about my life – what’s working, what’s not, how much energy and focus I’m going to devote to A,B or C. I especially like to know what’s influencing my success. Two factors came to mind, which I’ll share here:

The first is the need for a support system. I believe this about support: You can survive without it, but it will be difficult to thrive. I say this because it is very difficult to go it alone personally and professionally. Personally, we need people to serve as a level in our life, much like builders use. These are the people that help us find and maintain an even keel, keeping us from getting too high or too low. Professionally, a support system serves the vital role of reinforcing our value to those whom we offer services and acts as a beacon of hope when we’ve had a setback or failure. I think the lack of a support system is a major cause for why solo practitioners and entrepreneurs don’t succeed.

The second factor is to not give adverse experiences too much power and let them ruin our day. Bad stuff happens, and that’s absolutely not going to change in anybody’s life, but we don’t need to hand over personal control to it. A canceled flight or taking the wrong exit on the freeway doesn’t have spell doom, because mishaps like these don’t deserve our ceding personal power to them. When these things happen, only one thing matters – taking the next right step to get back on track.

Conversely, we should always allow a good experience to make our day. After all, positive feelings and outcomes are what we want to replicate.

External factors are largely out of our control. None of us can dictate to weather conditions, traffic, flight arrival times, or millions of other externals. But we can absolutely control internal factors (our judgment, past experience with similar situations), which largely determine how we respond to the externals and advance solutions.

Life exerts influence on us and vice versa. Controlling this reciprocal relationship in our favor the best we can is the key.