Go Beyond Surviving to Success: Fourteen Keys to Creating the Life You Want from the Trials You Have

By Stepp Stevens Sydnor

Life is filled with challenges. Successful people know how to turn every trial into an opportunity to learn, grow, and adapt. It starts with the right attitude and ends with accepting the positive power of change. In Go Beyond Surviving to Success, author Stepp Stevens Sydnor offers a guidebook with step-by-step advice to transform your greatest failures into your greatest successes.

Sydnor, a motivational speaker, author, business coach, and leadership trainer, offers an evolution to his groundbreaking work in Survive or Thrive? Go Beyond Surviving to Success combines psychology, science, and faith to help you embrace your best life.

He presents a practical approach to taking charge of your future and your success through proven tools, fresh tips, and best practices gleaned from real-world situations. He outlines a host of techniques you can implement immediately to live a more joy filled life as you go beyond merely surviving and make yourself successful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663214881

Stepp Stevens Sydnor

Stepp Stevens Sydnor is a motivational speaker, author, business coach, and leadership trainer. He has helped hundreds of companies stay ahead of their competition through communication, cooperation, and commitment. Sydnor’s proven sales and leadership strategies have been used by companies such as Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Sam’s Club. He lives in Rockwall Texas and enjoys spending time on his boat named Friendship.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-1489-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-1488-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020924893

iUniverse rev. date: 01/12/2021

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this book to my daughter Nicole.

Nicole, you are an inspiration to everyone, especially me. I love you and I am proud of you. Keep running the race to Go Beyond Surviving!

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Chapter 1     Beyond Ground Zero

Rediscovering your core values

Chapter 2     Beyond Faulty Problem-Solving

Rewriting your inherited approach for success

Chapter 3     Beyond Shallow Roots

Create a support system to deepen the skills to face life challenges

Chapter 4     Beyond the Question—Is Life Fair?

Finding a better question on growing from disappointment

Chapter 5     Beyond Escalating Anxiety

Act by doing key things to master fear, stress, and anxiety

Chapter 6     Beyond Complaining and Blaming

Utilizing the power of gratitude to overcome unexpected life reversals

Chapter 7     Beyond the Turtle on the Freeway

What to do when fear freezes you

Chapter 8     Beyond Just Getting By

Four key distinctions to empower your life

Chapter 9     Beyond Your Reactions and What Happens Next

I am responsible—the mindset that produces freedom and power

Chapter 10   Beyond Thinking About What You Think About

Strategies for taming your negative self-talk

Chapter 11   Beyond Your Playground

Change your circle of influence and watch your success skyrocket

Chapter 12   Beyond Feeling Unsuccessful and Unaccomplished

Unlocking the impact of intentional living through the power of vision

Chapter 13   Beyond Technology Addiction

Dominate your digital world and get more done

Chapter 14   Beyond Inactivity—Where to Start?

Creating a thrive plan with simple exercises to jump-start your success

Conclusion

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all my good friends, and my TurnAround Solutions support team—Bobbie Woods and Josh Sydnor—who helped me continue to push through and complete the writing of this book. A special thank you to Nick Georgandis, whose editorial giftedness was instrumental in developing this book. Thanks to Rob Clark for his exceptional line edits and proof reading. Thank you to my community group at church—Pat Gibbons, Rob Britten, Brian Carr, and Stan Smith—for your constant encouragement and support. Thank you, Kim Beckham, for more than fifteen years of accountability for life goals. Thanks to Robert Norton and Richard Spencer for your frequent spiritual wisdom and admonishment. Others in my life have had a direct impact on my ability to do more than just get by in life and accomplish dreams. These people are the reason I continue to do what I do. My siblings: Rick Sydnor, Clay Flygare, and Bobbie Woods. My kids: Nicholas Reuel Sydnor, Nidia Nicole Sydnor, and Josh Reuel Sydnor. My grandkids: Jackson Reuel Sydnor, Sylvie Rose Sydnor, Beau Rhyder Sydnor, and my niece Bailey Sydnor Smart. You are all the reason to thrive!

FOREWORD

While surviving may seem to be the theme of the day for so many of us, especially during these stressful times, Go Beyond Surviving to Success is both poignant and perfectly timed.

I was first introduced to Stepp Sydnor by one of my former students, who had recently graduated from my master business coach certification course, and I am delighted to say Stepp and I became instant friends. I was immediately impressed with his background, expertise, and success as a business and sales consultant, but it was Stepp’s obvious and genuine desire to help others that became the foundation of our friendship. Over the years, we have worked together on numerous successful projects and our relationship has continued to grow.

When Stepp asked me to contribute the foreword to his newest book, I was honored and excited, because I knew those who were fortunate to read Go Beyond Surviving to Success would have their lives enhanced and enriched.

Go Beyond Surviving to Success is a practical approach to taking charge of your future and your success. Here you will find real-world techniques you can implement immediately to live a more joy-filled life as you go beyond merely surviving and make yourself successful.

Berry Fowler, founder, Sylvan Learning Centers and Fowler International Academy of Professional Coaching

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ONE

Beyond Ground Zero

Rediscovering your core values

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The courage of living is to believe, to love, to start again. — Naide P Obiang

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The worst thing has happened. The one you had been praying never would. The one that you never saw coming. The one that makes it difficult to even think about getting past it, not to mention actually doing it.

Ground Zero is the site of the impact of the event that changes your life, and not in a good way. They call it Ground Zero where a bomb goes off, where a hurricane first makes land, or where a tornado strikes. Have you ever experienced a storm that devastates entire neighborhoods or towns? How about an earthquake, a fire, or a flood? This is one of the most powerless feelings in the world, watching the forces of nature destroy or damage your home, your vehicle, or your property.

The World Trade Center wreckage was Ground Zero on September 11, 2001. If you’re old enough to remember that terrible day, I bet it’s etched in you: where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing the moment you heard about the airplanes crashing into the twin towers. Even if you lived nowhere near the East Coast and didn’t know a single person living in New York City or Washington, D.C., that day affected your life in some way.

But Ground Zero does not merely mean a physical disaster. Ground Zero can refer to the way you feel when you find out your husband has cheated on you. Or that your wife has filed for divorce. Or perhaps when a routine physical exam turns out to be not so routine, and you’re suddenly faced with an illness or a disease that is going to take its toll on your ability to work and your bank account for the foreseeable future.

Ground Zero also refers to where we start when we’ve been hit with financial troubles. Our business fails. The stock market crashes and our retirement fund drops 80 percent in value in a week. We lose a job, and suddenly the mortgage and the car note and our kid’s college tuition are all due.

Death puts us at Ground Zero like nothing else. We know it’s inevitable that everyone we know and love will die someday, but nothing can prepare us for it. Whether it’s a parent who has been sick for a long time, a loved one who dies in an accident, or a child who dies tragically, it stops us in our tracks. It makes everything else seem trivial, and we wonder how our lives will ever seem worth living again.

When something terrible happens, it is human nature to go into survival mode. We’re temporarily overwhelmed, because the things we’ve come to rely on as norms in our lives are suddenly thrown aside, and we struggle to right the course of our vessel. Because we are all emotional beings, we can’t just methodically plot our steps of recovery right away. We need time to process, to heal, to cope, and to plan our next steps. In these terrible times, we tend to get tunnel vision and pull the corners of our lives tight around us, eliminating anything that we don’t feel like we have the strength to handle at the moment.

It’s rather like when you pause a TV show or a movie you’re watching. From your perspective, everything has stopped, and when you’re good and ready, you’ll get back to the story. But for everyone else watching around the country, the show is still going on. It’s you that’s paused.

Why do we call it survival mode? Because that was the one thing people’s instincts told them to do way back at the beginning of time, when we didn’t have all these modern comforts. If you were part of a nomadic tribe that followed herds of game across the continent, and you got lost from the rest of your people on a hunt, you went into survival mode. Your main objectives became finding enough food, water, and shelter—the essentials of survival—to keep you alive until you caught up with your tribe. Animals have that same instinct. When a zebra realizes there are cheetahs closing in, it doesn’t worry about getting the best strain of grass to eat or how far away the watering hole is. All it needs to do is run fast enough and in the right direction to survive and live to see the next sunrise.

Sometimes we go into survival mode without even realizing it, because no one big thing occurs that makes it obvious that we’ve changed our narrative from thrive to survive. Earlier in my life, I was struggling through some real financial problems, but I had a plan I was sticking to and was slowly working myself back out of debt, little by little. At the time I had several cars and needed to get rid of some of them. A friend had a need, and asked if he could take over the payments of one of my cars with the promise that I would give him the title when he paid it off. The arrangement was helpful to both of us. However, after two years he broke his promise and gave the car back to me.

After I picked it up, I was driving from out of town back home when this big rock came flying off the back of a truck. It hit the freeway, bounced up and shattered my windshield—a really bad piece of luck that left me frustrated, but not feeling like the world was ending. I quickly also realized that my friend had left the car with basically no gas in it, so I had to pull over and fill it up. Again, pretty annoying. I went inside to pay, and when I came back out it seemed like the car was sitting funny on the ground. I walked around to the other side to see one of the tires had gone completely flat. I was then delayed while having to get help changing the spare tire, which was flat as well. By the time I got back home, all I wanted to do was hide under my covers, put a pillow over my head, and scream!

Little things can add up, and you never even notice the weight they’re putting on you until you’re buried under them. If it feels like life is beating you down, it’s easy to shift into survival mode and start living by mantras: I just need to make it to 5 p.m. I just need to get to Saturday so I can relax. I just need to make it through the next two years to pay off this credit card. It’s great to feel like better days are in front of you, but discounting where you are right now in your life is a terrible use of your time.

You’ve only got one life to live, so make the most of every day to the fullest extent that you can! Just because you have to go to work today, or you can’t take a long vacation this year, is no reason to get down on yourself and fall back into survival mode. We all have to work and pay our bills. That doesn’t mean everything is so terribly bleak that we have to sludge our way through the day-to-day.

Some of the toughest things that