If you want to succeed, you will need to keep growing and adapting to new risks and opportunities. Life is more marathon than sprint – and you need to plan accordingly. You need to challenge yourself constantly to become better at how you approach the different aspects of your life – from how you manage change to what issues get your time and attention. Given the pace of change today, people need to understand that there’s no endpoint in their development.

There is no secrete to achieving success. The question is are you prepared to take the steps necessary to do so.

Σ (Small, Smart Choices) x (Consistency) x (Time) = (Success)

Everyone's journey is different but every journey begins with the first step and then you keep taking one more until you reach your destination.

Broadly speaking you have control over three things in your life—the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behaviour). How you use these three things determines everything you experience.

Nobody owes you success. It is up to you to take full responsibility for your life, choices and actions. The word responsibility can be broken down to response-ability, in other words your ability to respond to your life each day, instead of reacting. We react from subconscious patterns and programmes that most of us are not even aware of. Becoming aware and conscious of our thoughts and behaviours is the first step to living a more successful life. The next is deciding to do something differently, and then doing it consistently over time.

There are so many more elements that could be considered in aiding your journey to success that you can never cover all of them. But when you come across new ideas that you find useful add them into the mix of considerations for your particular journey. Don't take this as meaning the topic is so vast that you would be overwhelmed. Instead take it that there are so many opportunities for you to improve and grow, and its up to you which of these you take advantage of.

At different stages in your life your goals and definitions of success will change. I work mainly with second level students helping them to achieve success in their academic studies. This is important but it is only one aspect of many components to living a successful life. I can only deal with a limited number of students face to face. To extend my reach I have produced booklets and online resources for others to benefit from. In "school" success might mean in part doing well in maths, or having the skills to learn other subjects effectively. But this really is only the beginning of achieving a successful life for most and I think my PDF downloads may be useful in this regard. But looking further ahead there is much more to do and learn and to help in this regard I have put my life experience and that of others into an online course, "My Success Manual" that you can follow at your own pace.

At times you will make big advances quickly, at other times you will be working on just getting that extra 1% improvement and then another 1% after that.

Since success is achieved over time, the sooner you start on your plan the better. So if you have not already deliberately begun to design and implement your plan for success, here is a little challenge to get you started. Pick a project to carry out using the following headings as prompts. If you are not used to this, start with a small project and when it is completed try another. Each project successfully completed will built your confidence to achieve even more.

The goal I will achieve is :

I will have achieved it by (date):

The steps I need to take to accomplish this are:

The resources I will need are:

The people I will get to help me are:

Good luck on your journey to a very successful life.

I wish you good luck, happiness and every success on your Life Journey, and leave you with a little poem.

Success – Its down to me

In my head, there is so much I want to do.

I need a plan to see it through.

I need a vision of where I want to go.

Then, what to do or not, I'll known.

I'll make a list with priority,

of what's important to me.

Bit by bit I'll build a plan.

I'll build it up with all the goals,

I want to achieve in my various roles.

There are things I'll need to do.

Some are old and some are new.

There are things I'll need to learn,

to accomplish what it is I yearn.

There are things I need to stop or let go,

if progress is not to be too slow.

What is success? It's down to me.

Defining and achieving, it's down to me.

Noel Molloy