The Why Behind Unqualified Success

My sister, April, was helping me in the final stages of getting my manuscript to the printer. This involved a number of rounds working with a designer on the book layout, standardizing the formatting, checking for errors, and finalizing everything for print. In the middle of the process, we shared this text exchange:

I sent back a text with the laughing, crying emoji—”so funny, I cried,” the emoji said. And it was funny, because it was true. There we were writing a book about being unqualified, trying to figure out the publishing process and experiencing our own learning curve along the way. I wasn’t qualified to write a book and neither of us were qualified to publish a book.

And yet, there we were doing it anyway.

I wrote Unqualified Success for one reason: to help people see that their feelings of insufficiency or deficiency or unqualification do not mean that they are unqualified to achieve their dreams or reach their goals. Too many of are waiting to “feel ready” and “fully qualified” to step into the life we really want.

We look outside of us for validation, certification, endorsement and affirmation. We think once we get this degree or this training or this promotion or this achievement under our belt, then we will finally be able to achieve the success we want.

I wrote this book because none of that is true.

Qualification, in many ways, is only an opinion, it is only a thought, it is only an idea and I see too many cases where this thought is holding people back.

We are too focused on what we need to do in order to feel qualified and worthy and acceptable.

I believe the focus needs to be on what we need to think in order to work through our own limiting beliefs so that we can achieve whatever we want. In other words, it is never what we are capable of doing, it is always what we think about our capability!

There are a lot of “how to” books out there. My shelves are full of books about how to lead and how to follow, how to innovate and how to work with what you’ve got, how to grow your business and how to grow your people, how to expand your reach and how to focus on what’s most important, how to set goals and how to deal with failure.

The trouble is that I don’t think we need to know “how.” That isn’t what is holding us back. (P.S. We think it is! We think we don’t know how so we keep buying more books trying to finally learn the missing piece that will help us feel more qualified and capable.)

But what is holding us back is not the how but the who. Who do we have to believe we are in order to achieve our goals? No amount of hows will ever change us or help us if we address the same issues and try to achieve the same goals with the exact same brain doing the exact same thinking.

In order to achieve the massive success we each want, we have to have a mindset shift in our beliefs about who we are and exactly what we are capable of. Who would you be if you stopped thinking you don’t know how? Who would you be if you believed you were fully qualified to go after your dream? Who would you be if you knew that you are 100% capable of succeeding any job or any goal or any relationship.

I wrote this book because you already know how. You just don’t believe that you can.

I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. You can be an unqualified success in any area you choose once you are willing to give up the limiting beliefs that are holding you back. I wrote this book to help you do just that and included exercises with every chapter so you can practice the thoughts and skills that will allow you to move from where you are now to where you want to be.

The why behind this book is because you don’t need the how; you just need to understand and believe that you are already the who.

What about you? Are you ready to be an unqualified success? What did you learn about who you are from reading the book?