As leaders, we know success is a habit. We create success from a set of behaviors that we repeat over and over again until it becomes our second nature. But how do we navigate to the next level when we feel stuck?

In my career as a Success Coach, I’ve worked with incredible clients at various levels of their professional career and entrepreneurship ventures. The most consistent commonality between all those who felt stuck for some time is that they had a hard time seeing themselves as a success. 

Not seeing yourself as a successful leader, or not feeling successful, drastically slows down your progress of getting to that next level of success. You undermine your abilities. You end up quitting things too soon. You settle for less. This makes a direct impact on your professional advancement, influence, and of course, financial success. 

Seeing yourself as a successful leader, and feeling successful, is the key to building more success. It is the lasting foundation for your growth and incredible outcomes. It’s what makes your impossible goals possible. 

Follow this 5-step blueprint on how you can feel successful so that you can elevate to your next level of success quicker. 

1. Put your personal life first

Start at the foundation level. How is your personal life? Is your personal life taking the back seat because of your career? Most leaders believe that to achieve the next level of success in their careers, their personal life should be sacrificed. But the fact is, personal life is the foundation of your professional success. 

When you’re surrounded by people who don’t value you, or when you don’t have the right support system, you start to see yourself as the way you’re being treated. You stop feeling like you can achieve anything you want. You start seeing yourself as someone that you are not. You start feeling drained from keeping up with those invalidating relationships that take up a lot of energy and effort. 

A great personal life and healthy, supportive relationships, spring you forward to get the best results. So start evaluating your personal life. Do people around you believe in you? Are people around you happy for your success? Do things in your life give you energy and motivation to continue moving forward? Your happiness in your personal life will influence how you approach your career. So make the most of it! 

2. Celebrate the smallest wins, and tell people about them

Our thoughts influence our decisions. These decisions lead to success. It is a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unfortunately, so many leaders have trouble celebrating their wins. Many freezes up thinking that it is a fluke. Some even feel aggravated even after a huge win. This makes a direct impact on their performance, team management, and even financial results. 

This is why celebrating your accomplishments is so important. No matter where you are, landing your first customer in your business or getting your dream job, you have to celebrate every step of the way. There are no flukes. Everything happens for a reason. Success is always repeatable. Make sure to notice them all, talk about them with the right people, reinforce the feeling that you’re on the right track, and you’re someone who always has luck on their side.

The smallest wins are the best wins. This goes from finally finding your favorite hairdresser, having positive interactions in a networking event, finding your niche, landing your first clients, to having an incredible adventure with your loved ones… Celebrations are the key to feeling successful. So keep celebrating.

“People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” – Tony Robbins

3. Keep a journal log of your activities and your accomplishments

Feeling successful is about positive reinforcements. Keeping a journal log of your activities and your accomplishments is a great way to create these positive reinforcements. A journal provides you with an opportunity to reflect on the day’s events, accomplishments, and lessons learned. Journaling can be a valuable tool in many aspects of your life- not just personal development.

Creating a journal log doesn’t have to be complex. You can start by asking simple questions. Were there any activities you did that made you feel accomplished and proud of yourself? What were some of the highlights for the day? What steps did you make towards your goal today? 

Have a special notebook of all the ways you did something right, how you celebrated, and writing them down in this special journal will help you get a major pick-me-up on those bad days you may face, helping you get into a positive momentum again, faster. Keep writing down anything that you know people around you will want to celebrate with you. Keep reinforcing!

4. Treat failures as a series of experiments

Our brains haven’t changed much. Yet, we have to learn to navigate this modern world with this archaic brain.  It makes sense from the cavemen days when not noticing a danger or a problem would have cost our species! Our brains are archaic, and it’s designed to notice problems more than the positive. So it makes sense why our brains cannot handle failures very well. 

But the truth is that failures are great! You’ve tried something and you got feedback, and now you can take action based on that data. Take it from Bob Ross: “We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.” Each try gets you closer to that successful outcome! So fail fast, fail forward, and laugh about it with your loved ones!

So consider every failure as an experiment. The more you try something, the better you get at it. The more you practice, the more you learn, the better you become. There are no real failures. There are no mistakes. Every failure simply means an opportunity to get closer to where you want to be much faster. 

5. Give yourself compliments and receive them

Leaders tend to be their own harshest critics. It’s not easy to compliment yourself. But compliments are the best way to boost our self-confidence and to continue the positive reinforcement. It is also a great way to keep yourself motivated.

So how do we give compliments to ourselves without sounding arrogant? Be your own best cheerleader! When you’re receiving compliments, it will be written or verbal. But it is from you to yourself, just write it out! Bombard yourself with compliments. Every time you “fail,” every time you recover, every time you win, no matter how small. You are awesome, and that’s why you are on the path to, and ridiculously deserving of, everything your heart desires.

Follow these 5 steps, feel successful, and see for yourself how fast your world changes!