Introducing Psychology of Success

A Practical Guide

Alison Price, David Price

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781848313316
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

An INTRODUCING PRACTICAL GUIDE to getting what you want in life. Occupational Psychologist Alison Price explores both how successful people think, and how the organizations in which they work foster a culture of success, in this easy-to-read and jargon-free INTRODUCING PRACTICAL GUIDE. With numerous real-life case studies, practical strategies to implement and easy-to-remember points to remember and work towards, this book could be your first step on the road to a more successful life.

B: Begin with the end in mind

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Lily Tomlin

Did you know that a study of the richest Americans revealed that 37% are less happy than the average American? If these people had been pursuing wealth as a means of happiness, that’s what we would call being ‘successfully unsuccessful’.

So, before we give you powerful techniques that will rocket power you to achieve your goal of becoming a multi-millionaire, we want to make sure that you are aiming for the right thing.

Drawing upon Stephen Covey’s ‘jungle clearing’ story as an analogy: it doesn’t matter how successful you are at felling trees and clearing undergrowth, or indeed how hard you work, if ultimately you are in the wrong jungle.

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Before we explore any further, find a blank piece of paper and draw a picture to represent your dream life. Ask yourself, if I could make my life as good as it possibly could be, what would it look like?

It is important to remember this is about what makes you happy, not other people. What would your 10/10 life be?

If you don’t want to draw your ideal life, have a go thinking about your dream life using our FLOURISH model:

F: Friends – the people who you socialize with

L: Love – your romantic relationships

O: Occupation – how you spend your ‘working’ time

U: Usual environment – your home, its setting and the lifestyle opportunities it offers

R: Relatives – your relationships with your family members

I: Income – your personal finances

S: Spare time – how you spend your ‘free’ time

H: Health – your physical wellbeing

How would you FLOURISH?

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Why do people end up being ‘successfully unsuccessful?’

Although it has been challenged as being somewhat over-simplistic, Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs can still be really helpful in understanding why people end up in ‘the wrong jungle’ in the first place.

First here’s a quick overview of what the hierarchy of needs is: in 1943, Maslow proposed that we have five different types of needs. They all need to be satisfied, but critically, in the following order:

1. Basic needs – things we can’t survive without, such as air, water, food and shelter, then;

2. Safety needs – like protection from physical harm or having the financial security to continue to support our basic needs, then;

3. Social needs – satisfying our human requirement for companionship and involvement with others, then;

4. Esteem needs – the requirement to be respected and valued or to be able to display signs of wealth and prestige, and finally;

5. Self-actualization – the need to be everything that you are capable of being, and reaching your full potential in life.

The hierarchy of needs in action

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To see how the hierarchy of needs plays out in everyday life, let’s follow the story of Joe Average, who has recently graduated from university.

Over the past three years Joe has spent way too much money on beer and he is now officially broke, so he heads straight back to Mum and Dad to put a roof over his head and food on the table, therefore satisfying his basic needs (and clearly to satisfy the basic need of having his washing done for him too!).

After weeks of him loafing around the house watching daytime television, Joe’s mother gives him a kick up the backside and sends him down to the local temp agency to get a job. Joe somehow manages to land himself a low-level job in a good company. He begins to get a regular income and is able to pay for his own food, contribute some rent and begin to pay off his debts, therefore meeting some safety needs.

Joe has also made some new friends at work and has even found a girlfriend (that his mother actually likes), ticking lots of boxes in terms of his social needs. Joe then manages to get a permanent job in his company. The job is still nowhere near his dream job, but the pay is much better, and over the years he manages to do quite well at it. He gets promoted, becomes more qualified and earns the words ‘manager’ and then ‘senior manager’ in his job title. Joe’s esteem needs are comfortably met, especially with his nice new BMW convertible decorating the car park every day. He even manages to marry the girl that his mother liked.

But Joe hits 40 and his world is rocked by the sudden and unexpected death of his mother. He is haunted by his last phone call to her, when he had to cancel coming round to see her for dinner because he was asked to prepare a work presentation at short notice. Joe realizes that although he has a nice wife, he actually spends very little time with her and instead passes a lot of his existence (he can’t call it ‘life’) sitting in his glass box of an office doing a job he doesn’t enjoy and never even wanted in the first place. There’s no time for the gym and so now not only is he the proud owner of a set of BMW tyres, but also a hefty ‘spare tyre’ around his waist.

Then, to top it all off, he receives notice that he has been made redundant. A harsh moment of reality strikes – Joe should have prioritized dinner with his mother over the now pointless meeting. At the time, she didn’t seem important enough.

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The point of this story is that many of us drift through life, very successfully climbing the hierarchy of needs, reaching close (but not close enough) to the top. This is being successfully unsuccessful.

If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll probably end up someplace else.

Lawrence J. Peter

Reaching real success

The problem is that we can reach a point of realization where we find that, because we didn’t ‘begin with the end in mind’, we are near the top of the hierarchy, but our current life cannot support us to move any higher. We are stuck. It often takes a life crisis, like bereavement or a redundancy, to get us to stop and think what we ultimately want from our lives.

But there is an even more sobering question to consider when trying to begin with the end in mind. That is: ‘Do I actually have the right end in mind?’ We have asked you to draw what 10/10 life would look like for you, and that was asking you to begin with the end in mind. Now we want to make the crucial point that even if you made that piece of paper come true, you still might not be happy.

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Imagine that you have just picked up the keys to your very own, multi-million dollar house in glamorous Hollywood. It’s stunning – marble floors, contemporary but elegant bathrooms with the highest specification of fixtures and fittings. You have your very own swimming pool and hot tub. Life is perfect.

As you pull up to the impressive gates of your new home for the first time as the owner, you glance up the hill next to you and see Jennifer Aniston’s hill top mansion. With a pang of envy you think, ‘What would it be like to live in a house with that view?’

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A critical piece of advice from this chapter: when considering what your dream life would be like, be aware of the research that shows us that even when you are really successful, you quickly adapt to what you acquire and you simply want more.

This is what psychologists call the principle of hedonic adaptation. For example, when you first climb into your brand new car, you feel a buzz of excitement. When you climb in the second time, it’s exciting, but less so. By the 547th time you get into the same car it barely has any impact on you at all.

This may help to explain why the richest Americans aren’t happier than the average American – they’ve adapted to their wealth and still have yet to reach the top of the hierarchy of needs or discover what will really make them happy. The impact of wealth on personal happiness is well summed up by the late David Lykken, who was Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota: ‘People who go to work in their overalls on the bus are just as happy, on average, as those in suits who drive to work in their own Mercedes.’

Achieving genuine success

Many people define success in terms of money or possessions. However, an increasing amount of research makes it clear that most people don’t understand the difference between what they think will make them happy and what will actually make them happy.

I’m sure we aren’t the only people to look out of the window on a miserable cold, wet British day and think how much happier we would be if we lived in a sunnier climate. We are therefore fascinated by a piece of research in Martin Seligman’s book, Authentic Happiness. This research found that people from Nebraska (who live through harsh winter weather) think that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the authors
• Authors’ note
• Contents
• Introduction
• A: Activation!
• B: Begin with the end in mind
• C: Current versus future
• D: Dare to dream
• E: Effort
• F: Fear
• G: Goals
• H: High
• I: Interim steps
• J: Just have a go!
• K: Keep going
• L: Learn
• M: Modelling
• N: Numbers
• O: Opportunities
• P: Preparation
• Q: Quick wins
• R: Rosenthal effect
• S: Self-belief
• T: Team
• U: Under pressure
• V: Visualize success
• W: Winning ingredient
• X: eXtra mile
• Y: Yes!
• Z: Zeal
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication