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There are thousands of books devoted to the subject "How to Handle Failure," but very few discussions about how to handle success. Here are a few suggestions for maintaining your equilibrium in the face of success.
1) Learn to wear both people's praise and criticism like a loose garment. Learn to listen to both, take from it what you can in the moment, but then let it roll off your back and not effect who you are at your center.
A good rule of thumb to remember about both (praise and criticism) is that some of it is always touching you, but all of it is never touching you. Use Jesus as your example as he masterfully, yet humbly dealt with both the extreme praise of a woman washing his feet and the extreme harshness of being sentenced to death by His own people. Through it all, He never lost His focus. The very same people who cried "Hosanna", later cried "Crucify Him!" He allowed neither to deter Him from His life's mission. If you lean too heavily on people's praise you will too easily buckle under their disapproval.
2) Be spiritual, but never forget your humanity. I find it an interesting phenomenon that of the many ministers I know, those who occasionally allow themselves to be "human" in public have far less dysfunction in private.
Although we are Spirit, we still live in the physical realm and it is our job to learn how to navigate between the two worlds.
3) Never forget where you've come from. We all wear different hats from time to time. We show different faces in different capacities. We have a work face, a church face, a family face, a friend face. Some of that is necessary, but in the end, we must take off all the masks we wear and the disguises we hide behind and remember who we are at our core. We came from God. We didn't create ourselves. Even when we reach a pinnacle of success, we should never forget it was God who gave us the power to get ourselves out of the pit.
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