Whose Definition of Success Are You Chasing? The Outrageous Opposites Exercise

What's your definition of success? Not the one you inherited, borrowed, or absorbed from a 5am club post. Yours.

In this episode of the Smart Business Growth Podcast, Nicky Miklós challenges business owners, sales leaders and managers to pause and ask whether their day-to-day habits are actually serving them, or whether they're running on outdated definitions of what success looks like.

Nicky walks you through Outrageous Opposites, a practical exercise straight from her book Healthy Hustle (page 43 if you're playing along at home). You'll build two lists: your current definitions of success, and the outrageous opposites that challenge them. Then you'll pick the one change that would make the biggest holistic impact for you, your family and your team.

In this episode:

The trap of running someone else's definition of success

Why the 5am club works for some and sabotages others

Working with your optimal energy instead of against it

The Outrageous Opposites exercise, step by step

Why only 43% of business owners take four weeks of annual leave (and why that matters)

Real success = commercial results AND human sustainability

How to pick the one change that makes the biggest impact

Grab the book or download chapter one free at healthyhustle.com.au

Got a question or want to share something from your Outrageous Opposites list? Connect with Nicky on LinkedIn or visit nickymiklos.com

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smart business growth, business success, sales leadership, business owner, healthy hustle, leadership development, work life balance, TEDx Speaker, Author, business coach, sales management, defining success, energy management, Nicky Miklos 

Learn more about Nicky  at nickymiklos.com

Grab The Growth Code™ here!

Get your a copy of Healthy Hustle: The New Blueprint to Thrive in Business & Life at www.healthyhustle.com.au

Connect: LinkedIn | Instagram

Contact: 0403 191 404 | hello@nickymiklos.com 

Music by Jules Miklos-Woodley

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

I'm Nikki Miklosch and this is the Smart Business Growth Podcast, where we ditch the busy trap and get real about what it takes to drive sustainable sales, lead with clarity, and build a business that's future fit. Let's dive straight into it. Why, hello there, and welcome to this week's episode of Smart Business Growth Podcast. I am, as always, super excited to be here with you. And I want to ask you, what is your definition of success? What does success look like for you? Now, this could be big picture, big picture goals, three, five, 10 years, 12 months, a quarter, but it also could be what does success look like for you in a day, in the moments in the day? Too often we are caught up in somebody else's definition of what success or what great looks like. And as business owners and leaders, we need to take the opportunity to pause and actually consider is this what I think success looks like or is this what I've been told? Or is this what success looked like in the last three years or in the first years of building the business or in the first iteration of building a sales team? But the reality is that we grow as individuals. Our businesses grow as their own entities. There's evolution happening. And sometimes we need to pause and think: are my day-to-day habits and behaviors meeting what a successful day looks like without me feeling totally depleted, exhausted, ragged at the end of the day, the week, and the month? And also the bigger picture, you know, if we again, if we look at this from micro and macro, has my definition of success as a sales leader, sales manager, business owner changed? And we could take it further around has the definition of success changed for the actual business? But if we bring it back to definition of success for my role today and what I see as being, you know, a successful, well done day or week, I really want us to take a moment to consider do we have some outdated definitions? Do we have some outdated beliefs? And we're going to take you through an exercise that's called Outrageous Opposites. It's in the book healthyhustle.com.au. If you haven't had a look at that, you can download chapter one for free. Um, or if you've got the book, pull it out because we're actually going to do one of the exercises in the book. Because here's what I see all the time. The coaching sessions, the conversations that I have with business owners, with leaders, with sales managers is so often that they're trying to run a rhythm or have a cadence daily, weekly, monthly, because of what they think they should be doing instead of what will actually give them the best results. You know, even if we think about from a behavioral point of view, there are nuances, or I might be better in the morning, you might be better in the afternoon in terms of big energy, in terms of doing certain tasks within the day. But have we stopped to consider that, to really plan out and map out how we show up for things? Or are we just doing things because we heard that the 5 a.m. club is where we're at for successful, high-performing people, and therefore we're gonna, you know, stick to that 5 a.m. club. But the reality is this 5 a.m. club is awesome for some people and it is really not awesome for others because we're not working with our optimal energy. And so we can look at this in terms of, as I said, our own daily unique rhythm with managing our energy, with when we're doing tasks, uh, as well as what does success look like for my role outside of things like hitting targets and KPIs. Of course, that is always gonna be a part of it. So here's what I invite you to do. And again, if you've got the book, you can go to page 43 and you can play along. Otherwise, it doesn't matter if you don't, I'm gonna talk you through it. If you are driving or walking, you don't have pen and paper, you can think about these lists. You might want to come back and you know, write them down. Um, or if you are watching the YouTube channel, you probably have access to pen and paper. So uh let's get into it. I want you to write down on the first list. So on the left-hand side, what does what's your current definition of success? Now, what I love about this exercise is sometimes it can highlight our unresourceful definitions, meanings, beliefs without us even realizing it. So we want to put judgment to the side. We don't want to put any expectations on ourselves. It doesn't matter if you are doing this or you're not doing this. You know, 5 a.m. Club is a great example. That might be on the list. Like there's a belief or feeling that you have that to be successful, 5 a.m. Club. And by the way, if you don't know what that is, um, it's this whole uh approach, yeah, like that just went wild about, you know, get up at 5 a.m. and then you do all of these different things before you, before 6 a.m. and this and that and the other. I'm not a part of it because I'm not a morning person. I have tried to be in the past, um, but I'm just not wired that way. I have my morning rituals, I have the things I need to do uh each morning because I know that would bring my best self, but it's not at 5 a.m. So it's a great example and a really easy example of the hype around what success looks like. Might be good for some people, but not necessarily good for everybody. So I just want you to write down a list. I'll give you some examples to get the thinking going. You might write some of these down and resonate with them, or you might not, and that's okay. Um, so 5 a.m. Club could be one, you know, working long hours. There's so you might believe that actually working long hours or after hours is a part of being successful in your role. Um, starting work at 7:30 or 8 a.m. or a certain time, having a team of, you know, 100 people, maybe that's a definition of success for you. We're not judging it, we're not criticizing it, we're not saying is it true or not. Even if it's not, you know, if you've got a team of five people, but a definition of success for you is 100 people, write that down. There's it's okay. Um, again, we're gonna look at look at it in a moment, but there's no judgment around this. It could be working in a bricks and mortar office. So an actual office might be a definition of success for you. There might be a revenue number, you know, $10 million, $100 million. What is that revenue number? Uh, it could be for particularly for leaders and business owners. Um, I often see that there's a definition of success in the role that I have to be across every single client and interaction, like just a level of detail within the business, that might be a definition of success for you, being across all of the different departments. So there might so keep writing, keep thinking, what else would you write on that list? Or what's different that you would write on that list? Again, without any judgment, without any, this is true for me right now or it's happening, really want you to lean in. What does success look like for you? Whether it's good, bad, resourceful and results, it doesn't matter. There's no right or wrong. Just write that down. If your best salesperson left tomorrow, would your sales results survive? Most leaders don't actually know how to answer that. The free sales resilience check tells you exactly where your sales function is solid and where it's quietly exposed. In under 10 minutes, you'll get a personalized score, your key blind spots, and a 90-day focus to act on straight away. Check out the link or QR code. Okay, so I'm assuming that you popped the pause button and you've had to think about or you've even written down what that list is for you. Now, what we're gonna do is we're gonna write a second list on the right hand side. And this is the outrageous opposites. We want you to get playful around the what ifs. What if there was a different version of that that could be true? Now, some of those things you might might want to keep them as they are. That's okay. But some of them you might want to challenge that belief and that perspective. Because I really want you to think about whatever is on that list on the left-hand side, how is this serving you? How is this serving the business? And how is this serving the team in any order? You know, like, is it really getting the best results? But make sure you bring you into that conversation as well. Because in my world, if the success is at the cost of a person, a leader, a business owner, but the team is thriving and the business is thriving, that's not holistic success. And it's not sustainable success because you're human at the end of the day. You know, real success is when there's commercial results and human sustainability for all people within the business. And so often I see leaders, business owners, will put themselves last, will put themselves off to the side. You know, a great example of this is some research that was uh we talked about in the book around only 43% of business owners take four weeks of annual leave within the year. Now, that to me is kind of crazy, but not really surprising based on conversations that I have. So that is a great example of if you're a business owner, maybe writing down in your definition definition of success could be how many holidays, how much holidays you take in the year. Because if you're a business owner and you're taking one or two weeks off, then really that's kind of like having a day job, but you've got a lot more stresses uh along with it. Uh, interestingly, also to note, those that I think it was set 77% uh of people that leaders and business owners that take holidays will still check in with work. So we're not even really switching off. So again, this is just some insight of what else could be on your list current definition of success. And so when you're writing your second list on the right hand side, oh, Suki and not Eddie are getting excited key for you. If you're watching on YouTube, um, when you're writing the outrageous opposites on the other side, like challenge that. So if it's 5 a.m. club, I want you to challenge and ask yourself, is this actually my best way of working? And does this get the best result from me? Is it is this my optimal energy? Or what else could be true? Now, I don't want you to get caught up in, oh, but that could never happen. You know, like if it's start work at 7:30 a.m. and an outrageous opposite might be start work at 10 a.m. or 9 a.m. even. Park the self-doubt or the thoughts around, but that won't work, that could never happen. I just want you to park that for a second. I want you to get out that magic wand and think, what could be true? What could be the outrageous opposite to what you've written down? So examples, you know, 5 a.m. club, maybe it's sleeping until 8 a.m. Obviously, that's not going to work for everybody, but you this is your list. And so you get to challenge the status quo. Because you know what? Just because it's not okay for everybody, for those of you that it could work for, I see so many internal barriers that hold people back from doing things because it's not the expected or the norm, if that makes sense. So it could be an 8 a.m. club instead of a 5 a.m. club. It could be starting work at a certain time that's later than what you expect. You know, what about it? Could an outrageous opposite, could an outrageous definition of success actually be finishing work at 5 p.m. or 4.30? Or what could that look like for you? Could it be working four days a week? Could it actually be working three days a week? Could it be uh revenue? It might be a lower number, but a higher profit margin. Is it actually a team of 100 or is it a smaller team, but there's better efficiencies? So I trust that you can see that I want you to look at the list on the left side and think, what else could be true? What could be the outrageous opposite of that? And if you feel like actually that works really well for me and I want to keep it that way, that's okay. But this is a check-in to go, is it actually really working for you, or are you just telling yourself that? Um, you know, knowing all of the detail. It could be around knowing the need to knows. So put it, put a matching for every single one because the step after writing your outrageous opposites is really to get creative around how it could become a truth, how it could become a current reality. But I really again trust and hope that you can see the importance of parking the self-doubt, the questioning, the disbelief to write that outrageous opposite. And then you can have a look at the list. So you've got your current reality of what success looks like for your role. You've then got your um outrageous opposite, what could it look like if it was an even better version? We're gonna even that in itself, you just get some feedback around, wow, okay, I didn't realize, you know, it could be around lunch breaks, it could be about working hours. I didn't realize that I was holding myself to this. What if it could be that I have consistent lunch breaks every day? You know, I often talk to leaders and business owners about we have to walk the talk, we have to do the things that we say that is okay for our team to do, i.e., have holidays and actually switch off, have a lunch break and not be at the computer. And if you say that that's okay for your team to do, but you don't do those things, there's a double meaning that is being shared. And so this is your opportunity to also check in with the current reality. Maybe you want to keep some of them and they are the outrageous opposite, or the outrageous opposite might be actually having that holiday or taking that lunch break. And once you have those two lists, or more importantly, the outrageous opposite list, the future ideal, the reality that we want to create. Now you can pick one thing off that list. Look at what would make the biggest impact for you, for your family, for your team, because we are a holistic human. And more than ever now, we have so much thrown at us. Uh, so I think I was talking to a friend, Kylie. Shout out to you. And she saw a um statistic. I I believe it was around, we are being given, it was around 514, I want to say, over 500 different opinions are being thrown at us every single day just from when we go onto social media. No wonder we get lost in the noise in terms of what does success really mean for me. And not only that, we are breaking the cycles of those that have gone before us in terms of what business success, career success, sales success has looked like. And this is our opportunity to find a way to quieten the noise, to take a moment with ourselves to really define what success looks like for me? Not just in terms of hitting those targets, getting commissions, but really in terms of my role showing up every day, showing up every week, and from a holistic point of view. So when you look at that list, which thing on that outrageous opposite list, that future ideal that we're shooting for, would make the biggest impact for you holistically? And then you can start getting creative about okay, well, how could this work? Not why won't it work, how could this work? Write that question down. It's important. Um, friends, as always, take yourself lightly with this. You know, this is all just a game, it's all just an experiment. And guess what? When we do experiment with these things, that is when they actually hit the mark and we get really good results from them. If you have any questions or if you want to share anything off your outrageous opposite list, please feel free to do so. Either email me, send me a message on LinkedIn. Um, but most importantly, do something with it because the only way that this will create change for you is if you take that action with purpose. Have an amazing week and I'll see you soon.