The Six Keys To Success
I’ve always been a bit resistant to lists of things. Perhaps as a child I was expressing anti-religious orthodoxy, but why not eleven commandments or six deadly sins? Who gets to decide something so definitive? Or later in life was I just playing devil’s advocate when I wondered what the eighth habit of highly effective people was and questioned how Stephen Covey could be so sure there were only seven? And so I am an unlikely candidate for advocating for six keys to success – but here I am doing just that.
When looking for an image to go with this article I discovered there are actually six keys to many things, including successful apologies, customer success, successful digital transformation, marketing success, dating success and even successful distressed investing (I’m not joking).
So I need to be more specific. The six keys I’m referring to come from my Steve Harrison, my yoga teacher, who uses them as part of his teaching. These are traditionally the six keys to success in a living yoga practice, but I tend to agree with Steve when he says they can be applied to pretty much anything in life. The keys, in their original Sanskrit,, followed by the closest matching English word, are:
1 Veerya – Enthusiasm
2 Titishka – Perseverance
3 Viveka – Discernment
4 Shradda – Unshakable Faith
5 Parakrama – Courage
6 Sangha – Inspiring Company
I don’t know if I have been brainwashed by five years of a yoga practice that includes reciting these keys but I am increasingly finding them to be applicable to other aspects of my life (hence this article). To me they are really helpful mindsets to carry around as I face the various challenges that each day brings. Sangha, or inspiring company, is not really a mindset; I guess I would describe it as either an intention, a happenstance or perhaps even a consequence. I’ve written already about Sangha so I’m going to park that one and focus on the others here.
The words themselves are pretty self-explanatory so perhaps I’ll just offer some personal reflection on each and that will be enough.
Enthusiasm is something I think I bring naturally to most things. What’s more interesting to me personally is when I’m facing those things that I’d rather not, such as DIY, the dentist, writing (sometimes) and work (occasionally). Choosing an attitude of enthusiasm at these times can be really helpful. It brings with it wholeheartedness and mindful presence. I think the enthusiasm need to be genuine, so I can’t just pretend to be keen on something. The key is to find authentic enthusiasm within, nurture it and enjoy the feeling of it.
Perseverance, unlike enthusiasm, is not something that comes naturally to me. I am a starter of many things and a finisher of few. So perseverance needs a lot of focus and effort, particularly when the tasks I am facing is going to be long, complicated or both. This is where the six keys really help. If I can keep perseverance in the front of my mind I find that when I hit a problem, or a pause, I can bounce back toward the task with renewed vigour. SO I guess perseverance is like a resilience practice for me. Rather than just gritting my teeth and hanging on like grim death for the end I can wholeheartedly engage and then recover fast and carry on when I might otherwise give up. Don’t be fooled by these words though, this is much harder for me than I’m making it sound.
Discernment is probably the key that took the longest for me to engage with. It seemed much smaller in my head than the others, less glamorous, less epic. But now I’m loving having it in the mix with the others and I think the word that brought it to life was ‘choice’. We are facing choice all the time and mostly I’m guessing we don’t realise it. What to do, what to say, what to think, what to follow, what to ignore, what to fight for, what to accept, what to eat, what to drink…it’s endless. So the way I choice discernment is to realise that some choices are wiser/more helpful for me than others, and then to make those choices mindfully. And not to beat myself up if either I made a poor choice or didn’t make a choice at all. When I did the Hoffman process they taught us to visualise a left road and a right road. The right road was the journey of healthy/wise/right choices and the left road the opposite. It’s not rocket science but I now find discernment an important key.
Unshakeable faith (often reduced to just faith when I’m reciting it) is probably the trickiest key to get to grips with for me. It’s definitely a work in progress and something that I could not have contemplated until the last few years. At the basic level it’s pretty straightforward; I have faith that I boil a kettle I can make a decent cup of tea with the water. It’s a pretty unshakeable faith too! But it took me three years of yoga before I develop a strong faith in it as a practice. What I do now know is that developing faith is well worth the effort. Yoga practice now feels like a strong, stabilising foundation for me. The practice itself brings great benefit, but the important thing is that my unshakeable faith in it also brings benefits, in terms of mental/emotional strength and wellbeing. And it has also helped me look for faith more broadly.
Courage, finally, is one of the keys that I guess would appear on lots of lists. It’s the sort of king of desirable mindsets and so I probably don’t need to say too much about. How it shows up for me is being able to show vulnerability, admit when I am wrong, let go of things that I have been attached to, embrace impermanence. These are all things I would like to be better at but feel scary. And so I am, seeing courage as being different to fearless. Courage is about acknowledging fears and facing them wholeheartedly.
Writing this has helped me realise there might be some ‘meta-keys’ that sit above or below these six. I’ve mentioned them throughout so will just list them here. Choicefulness, wholeheartedness, mindfulness.