Chocolate-Like Success Tips

Slightly sweet, sometimes bitter...my favorite and most satisfying treat and energizer is 72% organic free trade dark chocolate.

Why give such a specific description? Because each element can be translated into some of "the stuff" that can set you up for greater success. This may sound like a stretch but bear with me...

Here we go:

- "Favorite": Lots of people try to succeed at things they either don’t care about or are merely good at. When you’re engaged in a favorite area of concern and it calls upon some of your favorite skills and abilities, this puts you way ahead on the path to greater success.

- "Most satisfying": When the results you produce are most satisfying to you, your sense of fulfillment and self-respect are enhanced and create a feedback loop with your desire to accomplish even more.

- "Treat": Receiving other people’s recognition and praise, and truly taking it in as both a treat and how you enjoy being treated, creates rich fertile soil to continue growing who you are on the job and in your profession.

- "Energizer": Dark chocolate provides a bit of caffeine that certainly can be an energizer, but the power of owning the freedom to give yourself to your work cannot be underestimated. All too often people are held back from the success they say they desire by an unconscious forbiddance that keeps them feeling more like a prisoner of war than a race horse just leaving the starting gate.

- "72%": If you insist on 100% job satisfaction, or a 100% success rate, or 100% team collaboration you are setting yourself up for continual disappointment rather than the success you’re after. The same occurs if you continually downplay what you expect. 72% dark chocolate offers me just a bit of sweetness without losing all the powerful antioxidants and other health benefits that make dark chocolate so popular on the health front. For people who crave milk chocolate all those health benefits are lost to the high sugar content and low chocolate percentage.

- "Organic": For people of conscience it’s really tough to be successful at a job you can’t believe in, or a job in a company that you can’t believe in because by its nature it destroys ecological health, or contributes to misleading or even false advertising,, or makes drugs that you know aren’t doing the job that the advertising will claim it does. When you have a profession or job that is an organic match with your values then you can give your full heart and soul to it.

- "Free trade": Free trade describes policies that support governments in avoiding discrimination against imports or interfering with exports that would give either side an unfair advantage over the other. When it comes to your success, the more you feel like you are free from interference and are given an open hand in contributing your expertise to your team and/or company the more likely you are to build a successful career.

- "Dark": There will be dark times on your path of success to be sure. As long as you are stretching your skills, advancing beyond what you already know, and altering how you and others view who you are it can never be one long smooth ride. Your learning curve will definitely take you into some dark corners of awareness and frustration. But never fear, as long as you remember that these are "antioxidants" of career maturity, you’ll do fine.

- "Chocolate": Well, what can I say! Success can feel like the best dark chocolate in the world just melted in your mouth. And that kind of success isn’t temporary or fleeting. It’s the kind that grows your ability to succeed over and over again.

Now, be sure to celebrate your successes as you move along. And my recommendation is to include – what else – dark chocolate!