Defining personal success sometimes is difficult. It’s pretty easy to buy into the social, cultural, and family messages about what makes for success, but it’s a little bit more difficult to listen to ourselves to guide us towards our own version of personal success. Let me explain.

Growing up, we have many messages about how to be successful, or how not to be unsuccessful, given to us at an early age from parents, religious institutions, school, and television. It’s easy to grow up and not have to question some of these messages, especially if we’ve been given them from an early age and they been repeated over and over again. For example, our parent’s definition of personal success may have been integrated from such an early age, and we never got around to challenging or questioning those definitions of personal success. They may have, over time, developed to be very different from those things that we would identify as successful for ourselves if it was just up to us.

Personal success is not exactly what culture, society, or our parents might have us expect. Sure, there our many things that we can all agree defined personal success: finding a good job that we like, making good money, finding a great mate, developing a happy marriage, having a healthy family, and the list goes on. Those are the kind of universally accepted definitions of what it means to be successful in our culture.

But, even reaching those peaks and gaining the culturally sanctioned versions of personal success doesn’t always bring happiness. In fact, many men still deal with depression, anxiety, low self-confidence, and the like. Take Tiger Woods for example. He was the most famous and richest golfer in the world, had a beautiful wife, and seemed to define for millions of men what it means to be successful personally. And one day in November of last year, it all started to unravel. It was discovered that he had a sex addiction and had been sleeping with lots of women on the side. My sense is that Tiger, inside of himself, doesn’t feel very successful at all. He may have all of the trappings that exude personal success, from a cultural point of view. But, it may be a very different story inside of his mind.

We have to define personal success as men in a number of ways, and not just subscribed to the universal definitions of personal success given to us by our parents, our culture, media, and our peers. Personal success goes a lot deeper.

Here are some things to think about when defining personal success for yourself:

1. What are my values? If I were to list my values, and rank them in order importance, how are my behaviors in the world representative of those values? Are my own personal values being lifted up to in my day-to-day actions? for example, if I aspire to be a good husband or father, what do I do in the day-to-day to adhere to that value? If I want to be healthy physically, and that’s my value, what do I do in the day-to-day to live that value? I think the closer you can match your own personal values to the actions that you perform in your day-to-day life, that is a mark of personal success.
2. Try challenging some of your own ideas of personal success. Are your ideas of personal success different or the same from those that you received from growing up, from your parents, from other influential sources? are there versions of success that you are finding your life that deviate from some of those messages that were given to long-ago?
3. How do you experience personal success on a day-to-day basis? what are those ” little victories” that you experience all the time? They may not be having sixpack abs or a six-figure salary, but they may be significant when you put your every day up to a microscope.

Men should challenge the very idea of what it means to be successful, and challenge the inner self critic that berates and defeats them while they’re striving for more success. Often times, we strive for achievement of personal success based on outside opinion, whether from peers, family members, our spouse, or the media. Learning to challenge those definitions of personal success, and learning to turn inward and define ourselves as successful in whatever way is right for us will make a difference in how we define ourselves as successful.

When we’re not living in our heads – in the regrets of the past and in the hopes for the future – we’re living safely in the present moment of our lives. Nothing too special, just being at peace with what is unfolding moment to moment. It’s what ‘is’.

Losing ourselves in our minds is an o.k. place to be while planning or daydreaming, but to get lost there and forget that the presence that we are – who we really are underneath it all – is there, waiting for us to attend to it.

Our work, relationships, thrills, and pain often reside in the past or the present. We fixate on things, people and experiences that are unfinished for us, and become resistant to moving on. People become emotionally frozen in time, and find it impossible to live presently. They forget about the very breath right under their noses.

With guys, who tend to go to their heads to solve problems, it becomes more difficult for them to tune in emotionally. Not being able to tune in emotionally, we fixate and circulate in our heads, trying over and over to fix our problem or dilemma, but never really getting anywhere.

Learning to live more in our lives – in the present moment – reduces some of the illusion and fantasy we carry with us. Sometimes this takes the help of a professional counselor or therapist, who can help unearth the frozen emotions. When we can learn how to develop emotional intelligence, tune into our bodies for the information we need to fix ourselves, and stop overusing our heads to figure it all out, I think we can start to develop the presence we need for greater happiness and more fulfilling lives.

(Taken from “Mentality” for men monthly newsletter, October edition. Sign up at www.phoenixmenscounseling.com)

The compromising of trust is such an infectious and widespread problem, especially in intimacy and relationships. Distrust corrodes relationships, breaks down friendships, prevents career advancement and creates a schism within ourselves that widens over time.

In intimacy, the number one problem I hear women discussing is how they don’t trust their guy. They may be holding onto distrust from past incidences, or they may be reacting to things that you’re doing to stoke that distrust today. But the barriers that distrust creates block real intimacy, sexual connection and the chance to deeper and strengthen a relationship or marriage.

There are a myriad ways in our culture to erode that trust: other women, a sexually repressive culture, divorce, excessive behaviors and addiction. In our culture, men are taught to stuff their feelings and emotions, which automatically both magnetizes us to those “erosion behaviors” and sets the stage up for distrust to come.

Questions to consider in the building of trust:

• Are you a man people can trust and rely on?
• Do you make a practice of doing what you say, when you say it?
• Would others say you compromise their trust at times? How so?
• How do you deal with others emotions? Can you listen and accept them when others are down and need support?
• Do you focus your emotional or sexual energies on other women, and not your wife? (e.g. thinking about other women, excessive masturbation, pornography, even flirting with other women)

A theme that I refer back to is the idea of values vs. behaviors. Are you practicing what you preach? Are your deeper values producing behaviors in the world that line up and are consistent? If not, what prevents them from mirroring your values?

Values could be anything like these:

• You see a vision of a strong and healthy relationship in your life, which may be different from past relationships
• You believe in truth and honesty, and seek to communicate those values through your behaviors
• You want people to know, like and trust you – do you give them reasons to do that?

If you’re in a relationship now, or would like to be, I’d invite you to open this discussion up with your wife, girlfriend or partner. Talk about the insecurities that come up, and the blocks or potential threats to building that trust. If you want to build more trust, ask your partner how you could go about doing that if you suspect your relationship could benefit from more trust.