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The pain of living and working at a pace that is faster than ever before, the burden of having to make a myriad of decisions before we even step out of bed is REAL. So is the unprecedented speed of change, challenge, competition, transitions, turning points, stumbling blocks and crises that many of us face on an ongoing basis.  Can we lessen this burden?  Yes, but the only way we can lessen this burden is to change our perspective, our map of the world by learning to win the race with wolves.

What is the race with wolves.  The race that even the best and brightest among us are running with 5 wolves: 1.  Corporate, business or personal change, discontinuous change or shock.  2.  Interpersonal problems and conflicts.  3.  Daunting life and work challenges and transitions.  4.  Personal stumbling blocks and turning points.  5. Health crises-physical and mental.

Winning the race with wolves, realizing our potential to not only survive but thrive at the frontier of change, or in the face of difficult, frustrating, even painful personal, professional or business transitions, turning points, stumbling blocks and crises is a powerful skill.

A skill I learned in training, through experience, and at the frontier of some very difficult changes, challenge, turning points, stumbling blocks and crises. My my career as CEO of a successful company, and a pretty horrible life event that threatened my life and career were all excellent teachers. Yes, the greatest teacher is often our most difficult battlefield.  And, paradoxically, more often than not the greatest opponent we face is our self.

Once our basic survival needs have been met we all share a common need to be loved, appreciated and valued. And, often this primal need to be loved is distorted, minimized or maximized by a basic lack of self confidence or self esteem that can cause us to over-achieve, under-achieve, or stay stuck in relationships or careers that are wrong for us and never allow us to truly feel self love from insight out.

Here are ten simple, but powerful steps to build the DNA of success and happiness in your life and your work:

1. Know and understand what you really want, and use it to build your self confidence and self esteem from inside out.  We are socialized to have goals and objectives, and even core beliefs and values that are often not our own.  The journey to really HEAR our own voice, and tap into our true purpose, get rid of false core beliefs and replace them with our true core beliefs and values is the road to building true potential, success and happiness.

2. Be the promise manager and CEO of your life. Use every opportunity to model promise management and leadership in your life and your work. Do what you say, come through with the promises you make, do not make a commitment that you cannot fulfill.  And, get rid of relationships with toxic people who cannot ever really be trusted, have values that you do not respect, and are perhaps emotionally, physically, sexually or financially abusive.

3. Develop the DNA of sustainable happiness and success. Get coached so that you can not only build but sustain the high emotional intelligence edge (your ability to understand and manage your emotions, understand the emotions of others, and use what you are feeling and thinking to inspire, engage and motivate the best in yourself and others), strengthen the life, leadership and communication strengths that can help you not only move forward but stay there with greater happiness and success.

4. Fail forward.  Build your resiliency quotient. Learn to use failures and challenges to build a positive sense of self. That’s right, practice getting out of the comfort zone daily. You are not right all the time, neither is any one else. Yes, while most of us were trained to succeed, reality is that the sheer velocity of change, challenge, competition and stressors makes always succeeding the pixie dust of frustration, workaholism, anxiety, brown out, addictions, ailments and burn out.

5. Take your ego out of the equation, stop personalizing. Focus on building good personal boundaries, developing your ability to stay focused on your true goals and objectives.  And, when you feel angry or frustrated ask yourself if your anger and frustration is caused by feeling invalidated by another person or a situation.  If the answer is yes, you are a hostage of your ego.  Get free. 

6. Cultivate humor, optimism, resiliency. Take time each day for a good laugh.  Yes, laugh it up.  The research is in and it is conclusive, laughter not only connects you with others but it also helps strengthen the immune system and helps you tap into your right brain-your creative, communicative side. Find a way to incorporate humor and laughter in your day.

7. Nurture and build ME time.  One of the most important things you can do is find a window of opportunity each day to have ME time.  Time that you spend with yourself, cultivating your relationship with YOURSELF.  Me time is time when you need to nurture yourself, feel lovable and do something that helps you recharge, reconfigure and reboot your mind, body and soul.

8. Build constructive discontent.  What?  Your ability to not only stay grounded in the heat of an argument or dispute, but to also feel unpleasant feelings and not be held hostage by them.  That’s right you can learn to develop your ability to feel an emotion and not be held hostage by it by learning to step back ride the wave, by becoming the participant observer and letting the emotion pass by just watching and refocusing on your true goals and objectives.
9. Stop reacting and start responding. No matter what happens you have the choice to be the cause or the effect.  When you react you are been the effect, when you respond you are being the cause.  Developing your ability to respond is a learned skill that grows when you build your EQ/EI edge, and develop critical competencies like constructive discontent.

10. Re-discover, nurture and cultivate your joy factor, your happiness set point.  Recapture the child and heart and start to re-discover what really makes you feel happy and fulfillment.  Once your survival needs have been met, material acquisitions are terrific but they cannot and will not create sustainable fulfillment.  Only you can work to re-discover what your joy factor, your happiness set point is by doing things that will help you nurture and sustain your love of self from inside out.