"If the main thing driving your life is always going to be "anything but that",

you could spend all your life and all your energy just getting further away from some things you don't want, without ever getting closer to something that you do want."

- Melissa Sheffield

There's a difference between wanting something because you're genuinely drawn towards it and wanting something because you're desperate to avoid what happens if you don't get it. In this episode, I'm looking at towards and away motivation, why both matter, and what happens when the thing driving your decisions is fear of going backwards rather than clarity about where you're actually headed.

I share my own experience with this, break down the psychology behind approach and avoidance motivation, and talk about how your subconscious beliefs, your attention and your nervous system can all be organised around the wrong thing without you realising it. I also walk through my Shift, Step, See framework and how it helps you move from knowing what you want to actually building a life that reflects it.

Money is never really the goal. It is always about what do you believe that money will get you, what will it give you that you don't have now.

So when somebody tells me they want to earn five grand a month, ten grand a month, one hundred thousand a year, whatever the number is, I'm always curious about the answer to the question:

"What will change when you have it?"

- Melissa Sheffield

In this episode of Safe to Succeed, Melissa Sheffield looks at why hitting your income goal rarely feels as good as you expected it to.

If you have set a bigger number, hit it, and felt flat instead of successful, this episode explains why that happens and why it isn't about setting the wrong target.

Melissa breaks down why money amplifies whatever belief is already there rather than creating a new one, why your subconscious tracks safety rather than revenue, and how your Reticular Activating System filters what you notice based on what you already believe about yourself.

She also shares her Shift, Step, See framework, a practical way to start shifting the belief, instead of moving onto another income goal that is just as disappointing.

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Success is a judgement you make every minute of every day, against a standard that either you or somebody else has decided.

And it's that set standard, that rule book that people don't look at. So whenever you catch yourself saying you want to be successful, the useful move is to unfreeze success and consider:

"Successful according to who?" and “What do I think is successful?”

- Melissa Sheffield

Where did your definition of success actually come from?

In this first episode of Safe to Succeed, Clinical Hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner Melissa Sheffield traces her own definition of success back to when she was eleven, and unpacks how deeply held beliefs about ambition, money and "a useful job" get absorbed in childhood, long before we're old enough to question them.

Mel walks through the three versions of success she's lived through: the checklist she grew up with, the bigger "adulting" checklist she swapped it for, and the intentional version she lives by now. Along the way she introduces three simple NLP tools, that help you catch when you're chasing someone else's idea of success rather than your own, and invites you to try free tools to get clear on your own version of success.

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