"Something's missing," I said, frantically sifting through client folders. "Something's not right."
I'd used Conditions For Success as an exercise at my annual planning retreat for years. It was a handy way to create sort of a "pre-flight checklist" to set your day, your month, your LIFE up for greater success. I'd developed this exercise after hearing Oscar Wilde's quote about success being a science.
Essentially, if you have the right conditions, you'll get the result.
Success is as much a feeling as it is checking boxes. In fact, I believe people conflate goal attainment and achievement with success far too often. It's why you see rich folks who don't feel successful despite having the trappings of success.
When I work with clients on creating their definitions of success, I want to know how and when they'll actually feel successful. I often ask "what's going to give you the most cause for celebration in a year? How will you know when you've 'arrived'?"
It's an embodiment activity, as much as anything else. To put them in a frame of mind where they can say, "This is what it's like when I actually feel successful by my own definitions."
Some clients were able to take this quick exercise and run with it... setting up their workspace, their morning routines, and their homes to give them the best possible chances at experiencing success in the now - not some far off "someday" that never comes.
But some folks continued to struggle.
I mean, nothing will work for everyone. We're all different people with different circumstances. But there were some recurring themes that left me with a nagging feeling that the exercise was incomplete at best, and dangerous at worst.
Dangerous, because if it's truly not helpful, it might actually be harming my clients. Giving them a false sense of hope and setting them up to experience failure instead of success - the very opposite of what I was going for!
Sifting through my notes in client folders, trying to find the common demominator(s), I realized:
Leaders don't fail from lack of effort. They fragment and fall apart under the weight of growth.
What’s really happening isn’t failure. It’s structural strain.
Your old foundations aren't supporting you anymore - if they ever were to begin with!
My clients are smart, capable, brilliantly gifted folks. They are DOING the work. They are showing up, they are making the asks, they are inviting their audience into transformation.
Some have more capacity constraints than others, but any of them can have the kind of success they're craving.
At least, that's what the quote said, right? If you have the conditions, you get the results.
Except they weren't.
Could a dead, White, Victorian-era poet be wrong?
Maybe...
But that question - and that context - helped me see that there might be more to it than I originally thought.
Every business operates inside seven domains that influence how success is created, held, and sustained.
When one domain falls out of alignment, success starts to leak out, unseen. Capitalism and the systems that run inside it are built to the advantage of some folks and not others.
Might some of those systems be creating conditions that also inhibit the growth potential of my clients, maybe even in ways that aren't easily perceived?
Hell yeah!
That was all the evidence I needed to start reconsidering my stance.
I was taking cues from an old white guy. Closeted, but still. And I already knew that the Marginalization Tax is very real. But due to my own biases (that I continue to deconstruct and unlearn), I had never considered that the two might be linked.
As i kept writing and researching, I discovered these seven "domains" that influence every business in one way or another. Some we have more direct control over, while others are beyond our personal control and rely on the broader influence of a group of people.
Core Domains revolve around Identity and Purpose. These are the things we have the most control over. If you're an independent adult, you can decide how you want to show up in the world and who you want to be. You can seek to align your identity to your purpose in the world in ways that others have little to no direct control over. Now, there may be other things at play that have you masking who you are in public. You may even have trauma from your past that makes being yourself "out loud and on purpose" challenging, but from an internal alignment standpoint, you've got the control in this domain.
Personal Domains are closely tied to your core domains. They are the external and immediate domains that concern your physical, mental, emotional, and cognitive conditions. We have a good deal of control here, and a bit of direct influence, but not everything is within our power to control. For example, you can eat well, get good sleep, and still get sick. If you are navigating a physical illness, you can't control the outcome of the illness. The best you can do is influence the outcome through your actions to create the best possible environment for healing and recovery.
Operational Domains deal with your work environment, tools, resources, and logistics. You have less control here than your personal domains because you are often engaging or interacting with other people - and you have zero control over other people. Still, you are likely the one setting up your personal work environment and interacting with the tools, so you do have some direct control. In some cases you have limited control because you are not the one setting them up. That's when you're engaging in domains set up by others, and therefore can only seek to influence what you cannot control. That happens when you speak up about a broken chair or a piece of software that's behaving badly. You may not have the power to fix it, but you can speak to the person who does.
Relational/Social Domains are your interactions with other individuals. We have limited control over these domains. But you often have more influence than you realize. You're interacting directly with these folks and building relationships over time. Because other people are involved, we can't control them. But you also train people how to treat you, based on what you've come to accept from them and what they've come to expect from you. That breeds trust, likeability, and so on, making some elements of your interpersonal relationships more predictable than others.
So far, we haven't ventured beyond what I was already doing with my clients. It's these final two domains that helped me see where my exercise was falling short and failing my clients:
Capital Domains deal with interactions with organizations and institutions (like financial, religious, or legal). We have some influence over these domains because we interact with them directly. Still, they are not generally controlled by a single individual. Women have historically had a more difficult time getting bank accounts and holding property in their own name. The Equal Credit Opportunity act of 1974 barred discrimination in lending based on gender and meant that women no longer needed a man to co-sign on their loan application. No one person made that change happen, it took, literally, an act of Congress. But Congress was only swayed because of their constituencies.
Systemic/Macro Domains are things like the Capitalist system in which most of the world functions. This also includes things like industry trends, political climates, and cultural norms. It's often these Macro Domains that get overlooked. It's the "water" in the "fish bowl" that we're swimming in. If that water isn't balanced and optimized for you, it's actively challenging your very existence - no matter how much you try to align the other Domains to work to your advantage.
This recognition helped me see where things were falling short with my clients' Conditions for Success - and my own! If the deck is stacked against you at the Macro level, there's only so much you can do to navigate or mitigate it.
It’s a strategic condition for adaptability and well-being. In simple terms: when your inner and outer worlds match, business gets lighter.
So Oscar Wilde was right: having the right conditions will yield success, but getting those conditions right isn't always so easy.
One of the reasons we moved out of Indiana to the Pacific Northwest was because we saw the handwriting on the wall: Indiana University was bowing to interests that didn't align with my values. The whole state was was moving in that direction, and while the folks I worked with were incredibly wonderful, and my own community was pretty dang cool, it was just a drop in a much larger bucket that was going to drown us.
We considered several options. I have friends, colleagues, and family members who no longer live in the U.S. For now, that's not a viable option for us. We have family here that we're not ready or willing to separate from at that level just yet. But we pared way down to make travelling light, unencumbered, even.
We created some breathing room for ourselves. When Jim's health issues cropped up, I was thankful we had that breathing room - because we sure as hell needed it!
That's why some clients were able to do so well with the exercise while others did not. Their fragilities were being exposed in ways I couldn't predict because I hadn't done the deeper work of examining these domains. But now, I have. And in doing so, I've also realized that just the awareness that these domains exist is helpful. While you can't control everything, once you see it, you can't unsee it, and you can make better plans and better use of your resources with you have that awareness.
Become a member of my Rising Tide community (it's free, yo!) and you'll get access to my upcoming Conditions for Success workshop. We'll walk through these seven domains of sustainable growth in detail. Build momentum that lasts, without losing yourself in the process, and create a business that fuels you.