Success Begins Within: Building the Right Relationship with Yourself
We often hear that relationships are the key to success. We don’t hear much about how the relationship with yourself is essential to succeeding professionally.
Before you can thrive in your career, lead others, or build a successful business, you need to cultivate a strong, honest, and supportive relationship with yourself.
Here are 5 five foundational pillars to evaluate your relationship with self and how it directly impacts your success:
Pillar 1 - Self-Awareness: Know Who You Are + What Drives You
This one is up first because it says a lot about how you see the world.
Understanding your values, strengths, and blind spots are the tools that keep you going as you navigate professionalism. Self-awareness in action looks like using the tools to choose the right path when the wrong one is common or making the decisions that best align with your goals instead of company culture.
If you’re not in tune with yourself, that’s okay. I recommend you to take a personality test from 16personalities and find out your attachment style from The Attachment Project. I am not affiliated with these organizations. I have personally found my starting point by using them and so have many of my clients.
Pillar 2 - Self-Respect: Set Boundaries + Expect Excellence
You can’t be fruitful in your career if you do not take care of yourself properly. Choose boundaries for two purposes - 1) so they help you respect yourself and 2) set the tone for how others treat you.
The way you respect yourself shines through in your ability to negotiate and advocate for yourself and your clients. In action it looks like saying no without guilt and protecting your time and energy. It’s an essential tool for your Career Toolkit.
Pillar 3 - Self-Compassion: Embrace Imperfection + Grow From It
Mistakes will happen throughout your career. Trying to avoid them is unnecessary if you embrace that you are imperfect. Letting go of perfectionism and picking up self-compassion is a process especially if you are in a technical role or your work impacts others lives. Do your best every chance you get even if you have to keep redoing things.
Self-compassion increases your resilience, innovation, and ability to take risks. In action it looks like being able to reframe failure into lessons learned, stepping away to practice mindfulness when you are experiencing chaos or giving yourself the grace you’d offer to a friend.
Pillar 4 - Self-Discipline: Build Trust with Yourself
Trust is an inside job. You can’t trust people you work with beyond the level you trust yourself to do something. Your profession is going to require you to be consistent across projects, in your work and much more. To stay consistent in moments of self doubt, you’ll need to dig deep and find the trust in yourself to get across the finish line.
You build trust and credibility with yourself by keeping promises to yourself. This security from within gives you a foundation to have grace, expectations and keep others accountable to their promises to you.
Self discipline in action looks like having a routine with daily habits that support your day, a system for time management and a method to course correct when distractions try to take over. These actions aren’t about being perfect, they are about self-loyalty.
Pillar 5 - Self-Belief: Own Your Worth + Take Up Space
The way to stay relevant in the digital age is to take up the space in your market. To do that you have to believe in your ability to deliver your skills to your clients. This takes confidence to open doors and to keep going if you experience rejection.
Believing in yourself is a cure to the self doubt and imposter syndrome manufactured through social media. This is not a pass to be arrogant. It’s a call to action to believe in yourself to dominate in your lane and have enough humility to maneuver the highs and lows of being a professional with grace.
Self-belief in action could look like having affirmations that ground you, visualizations commonly used in vision boards to keep you motivated and growing and keeping track of the value you bring to your industry. To track your career portfolio you can use my free career game plan.
The relationship that you have with yourself sets the tone for the relationship you have with other people and the professional systems you use. I encourage you to choose one pillar to start strengthening this week and reflect on the changes they notice.
Tag me in on your findings by tagging me on social media or sending me an email at experience@christinalglancy.com
Add these Resources to Your Career Toolkit 🧰 :
Resume + LinkedIn Update: Step into the next phase of your career with a resume and LinkedIn profile that captures your value and positions you as a leader.
Career Evaluations: The weather isn’t the only thing that has seasons. Your career does, too. Make sure you’re maintaining your skills throughout the change.
Personal Brand Roadmap: Plan out how you’re going to tell the world about your expertise. Whether you’re using word of mouth or social media. This is for you.
Career Game Plan: Building a career takes investment and preparation to be ready for opportunities that come your way. Use this game plan to do both.
