As a Business and Performance Psychologist I am often asked to define the key to success. I work with a number of high performing individuals from many areas of life including business, Real Estate and sport. Over the years I have learnt that the most successful people have one thing in common, they know themselves very well.

From a Psychological perspective I believe that the single most important key to success, in every area of life, is to know yourself. Without a solid understanding of who you are, what you stand for, what you are afraid of, it will be difficult to achieve and maintain a healthy level of success. Of course you can always reach a level of success without a lot of personal insight, the issue is that in order to maintain that level, of success, in a healthy and beneficial way, you need to understand the person in the mirror. Not everything that you achieve in life is good for you and some of the sacrifices that are required along the path to success can come at a great cost.

The issue for people who are successful, but have no personal insight, is that they don’t understand when they have achieved enough. For those people, they keep pushing as hard as they did before they achieved success. If people keep pushing too hard, once they have achieved a level of success, the only thing that happens to them is that they push themselves right off the edge of the cliff.

People with a significant amount of personal insight know how to balance out their effort levels. They know how to bring in other people who can help them maintain the level of success they have achieved. They feel confident to empower others in order to help them grow and develop, which in turns allows them to reach even higher levels of success. Trust is something that every successful person needs to have in order to be able to balance, maintain and safely increase their level of success.

Joel Curtis is a registered Business and Performance Psychologist. If you are looking for support to help build, grow and maintain your levels of success, please contact Joel on 1300 954 980