As we embark upon the New Year, WE Magazine for Women wanted to share this article By Evelyn Kalinosky with our loyal readers and fans.  Feel free to leave your comments below and let us know what “success” means to you. Be sure to sign up for the FREE teleseminar Evelyn is offering our readers. You’ll be glad you did!

Simple question: When you hear the words “successful” and “fulfilled,” do they mean the same thing?

Answer…In a word: No. They really don’t – at least not in our culture which tends to define “success” by position, power and accumulation.

When you stop long enough to really think about the definition of success, you might find the truth is quite different:

• Money is merely a means of exchange, not a clear cut path to all your wants and desires

• What you hope to achieve is more than what you aspire to earn

• Doing what you “should” or “need” to do rather than what you love is the reason why you fail

• The problem isn’t that the goals you’ve reached aren’t good enough. The problem is that once the goal is achieved you’re standing still again. You have no more “journey.” You need a journey. You need a direction. You need a dream.

Becoming professionally and personally “fulfilled” involves a spiritual quest of recapturing – or discovering – your dreams, and money is the higher purpose that helps you foster this fuller, more balanced life. Money is the by-product of values-based ambition, which is all about living out your authentic values and beliefs. It’s what moves you from success to significance.

You are meant to give of yourself – of your energy, your unique creative expressions, your talents, and your strengths. In our current culture, success is an endpoint. But that’s not the reality. You are a creature of change, curiosity and creativity who needs to always have your goals set a little beyond your reach.

As a fulfilled woman, your greatest power is to be willing. To be willing to look at the important questions and learn the important lessons before you:

• What do I really want to do with my life? (This isn’t a question you only ask yourself when you are 18 and just starting out)

• What do I really want to use my money for?

• What are the talents that I want to develop?

As a fulfilled woman, you must be willing to do what it is you don’t want to do. There are many things that the promise of money, or the threat of losing it, induces us to tolerate. I write this without the slightest hint of judgment or reproach, because I am a woman who tolerated things at different points in my life that my more actualized self would never allow now.

As a fulfilled woman, you must work to uncover the hidden landscape of habits, beliefs and patterns that underlie and sometimes subvert how you use money and other forms of energy.

C’mon – you know what I’m talking about. How many of you have found yourself at one time or another:

• Hanging on to a job that is physically, emotionally and psychologically draining because it provided you with a substantial amount of money, good health benefits and a retirement plan.

• Holding on to a relationship because it provided you with financial security, even though it was clear to you that separation would be best for your emotional and spiritual well-being.

• Being surrounded by all kinds of information, advice and resources, and yet something stopped you from using any of it.

Whether you’re a woman executive whose corporate life feels like a tight pair of heels, a professional woman with a nagging restlessness and the desire for something more, or a woman entrepreneur looking to build a heart-based business that combines passion, purpose and profit, you need to redefine what it means to be “successful” as only you can. By moving from success to significance, your new endpoint will be a life as unique as your fingerprint.

Author Bio: Evelyn Kalinosky is Founder & CEO of Evelyn Kalinosky, LLC, specializing in working with women executives, professional women and women entrepreneurs who want to achieve a more sacred kind of success. In addition to being an entrepreneur, she is a speaker, published author and poet. Evelyn’s passion is helping women to create lives of significance and she is offering a fr*ee teleclass on 1/12/11: Redefining Financial Success as a Spiritual Journey. To learn more and register for this fr*ee call, go to http://www.evelynkalinoskycoaching.com/redefine