A session by Dr Maria Nemeth on "What is Success?" She says the reason she chose this definition of success is because so much of the time, we think success means that one has to be very driven and one has to overwork oneself. Moreover, one gets very tired and talks about how much one can do rather than the quality of experience.

She elaborates further that as one does hard work, one does many things in life. At the end of our lives, we could say, "Well, I have done many things." Nevertheless, it is there, but it does not have meaning. Does it have a heart? So she redefined success. It talks about the quality of action rather than the quantity of action.

As per Dr Maria, there are four components of success. She explained each one of them. Success is consistently doing what one says or does with clarity, focus, ease, and grace.

She answers, "Is success doing what you would do consistently with clarity, focus, ease, and grace?" She says, "Clarity is important because clarity means being clear about what's really important? What do you love? What has real meaning in one's life? Not what one should do or ought to do or have to do.

But what you really want to be doing in life is that to find what's important to us, what has meaning for us, and take action upon that, that's literally one of the definitions of a well lived life.

One has to be clear about what's important and act in accordance with that focus. It is about learning, once you see what's important, how to focus your brain on that which is most important to you.

One of the problems that we all face these days is that we have so many things to focus on. We are bombarded with all kinds of information and things that we should and ought to do.

If one keeps tabs on whatever, one's mind is bombarded with thoughts from one wakes up until one leaves for work. If you're listening to the radio, if you're looking at your iPhone, if you're reading the paper, so much is coming at us. And we get overwhelmed and bombarded by all these things.
So focus means learning how to focus, how to see what's important, and allowing ourselves to go in that direction.

Because one of the things about the brain is that whatever our brain focuses on, whatever we ask the brain to focus on, it will begin to allow us to go in that direction to focus.

Ease is the third component. Ease means doing things sweetly and gently. Highly successful people are people who struggle and experience the opposite of ease. You can work hard with ease if you prepare. For example, if you want to run a marathon, you learn how to practice for it every day, going a little further and a little further at the end when you actually run the marathon. You might be working hard, but you're not struggling. Struggle happens in two ways. Number one, sit by the side of your hero's journey, their hero's path, waiting one day until it's the right moment before you take action. And that's kind of a passive struggle. The next form of struggle is knowing that you didn't prepare for the event and so, to take the marathon model once again, you didn't practice, and so you run, but by the end you are overwhelmed and exhausted.

You know it's going to take your body a lot of time to catch up because you pushed yourself, you drove, you just became driven.

Grace is the final component. The definition of grace is an unexpected blessing. The gateway to grace is gratitude. Let's say if you were to take a little notebook and put it by the side of your bed, every night before you go to sleep, write two or three things for which you are grateful.

If you were to do this ongoing for about 10 days to two weeks and then read back what you wrote back ten days to two weeks later, you will find the hand of grace in your life. You will begin to see the blessings that are always and already around you. So, grace is intimately related to gratitude. We know that people who are grateful are resilient; they're able to bounce back during times of change and complexity. Because they don't become overrun by what we would call "monkey mind." It is that aspect of our mind that's always chattering at us as it swings from doubt to worry and back to doubt again, so success. Doing what you said you would do consistently with clarity, focus, ease, and grace.

When you talk about the quality of your journey, In this form of success, you can clearly say at any moment of your life I'm doing exactly what I meant to be doing, exactly what I love to be doing, I'm not driven, I'm not wasting energy, I'm focusing it very keenly toward what it is I truly love, and I'm going to it with ease and with a heart full of gratitude.

Dr. Maria reinstates that all you have to do is, thank you. Practice these components.