Leadership – The Fullfilment Project

Why We Should Thrive

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Relationships, Success

A tree like all things in nature tries to thrive. It does so naturally, it is it’s normal state of being. In thriving it roots itself to the ground, it fights against gravity and grows towards the light, and it produces fruit to serve those around them.

We are not much different. Our natural state of being is to try and thrive, but often our past experiences and our understanding of them shape our mind in ways that make us think small and live small. To thrive seems scary, it seems beyond our capabilities or too dangerous to attempt. It is as if we don’t want to sail the sea because we think we might fall off the horizon.

As scary as it might be to try and thrive, a life wasted living small would be a regret worse than thriving and failing along the way.

My past traumas make me want to live small. My unconscious beliefs formed like mental scares from my past experiences feel like an invisible force stopping me from doing what I know will help me thrive. It takes courage to push through these mental barriers. I plan to try and be brave. I will fail along the way, but no mountain can be climbed sitting in a chair.

Remember, you are not alone. Like trees whose roots link with other trees to share resources and hold each other against strong winds, you have a community to lean on, so do. When we serve each other we all thrive together. There is no me without you. We all exist interconnected. We walk our own paths but we do so beside others walking their own paths.

When we thrive we can better serve others. When we serve others we thrive more ourselves. Take your first step. I am taking mine.

Everything We Do Is About Legacy

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success

When we think of legacy, we think of having children or building a business or community organisation that will go on for generations, but I would argue that everything we do is about legacy.

Whenever we interact with someone, the impact, whether positive or negative, from our words and actions can be far-reaching. Like ripples across water, we can deeply wound or deeply enthuse those we interact with. Someone could be having a terrible day, but kind words or an actual of kindness can turn their day around and could be a catalyst for positive change.

Alternatively, if we are mean or unkind, we could change a person’s life trajectory down a dark path. Our words and actions have the power to impact the lives of others significantly.

Some years ago, I met a homeless man sitting outside a shop crying. I stopped to talk to him, and he told me that it was his 40th birthday and he was alone. It was November, and we were coming into a cold winter in the UK. He told me that he was on a waiting list for a hostel but had to wait 12 weeks. This meant he had to survive living on the streets through the winter before he could get a place to live.

I talked with him for a while, and as I lived nearby, I went home and packed a bag of warm clothes, including a woolly hat and gloves, and gave them to him. He was very grateful. I like to think that this small act of kindness got him through the winter and may have dissuaded thoughts of suicide during that difficult time. I also like to think that he has a better life now and is passing on the goodwill to others. I have no way of knowing, of course, but I hope. A small act of generosity from me could have had a big impact on him.

We don’t know the impact we have on those we interact with day to day. So, be kind, be generous, and be accepting of others, and together we can make the world a better place one interaction at a time, and if we make this a habit then this will change us for the better too.

Convenience Is About The Destination And Not The Journey

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success

Convenience is about the destination and not the journey. When making our way to the summit of a mountain, we can climb up on foot, or we can take a helicopter. The problem with taking the helicopter is that so much is missed in the journey.

When we climb on foot, we see things that we can not see from the air in a helicopter. We push our limits and learn what we are capable of, and we work together with others, cheering each other on and being cheered pn by others because the climb is hard and the victory is earned.

When we take shortcuts and do not do the work, the destination feels empty. There is no sense of accomplishment.

The Decisions We Make

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Relationships, Success

The other evening, I was getting ready for bed and was about to wash my face and brush my teeth when in the bathroom I saw a bee sat on the windowsil. My first reaction was fear, and my mind started racing with imaginings of the bee stinging me. At this point, I was presented with a choice: be scared or be curious.

I chose the latter and moved in closer to have a look at the bee. It was alive, and it seemed to be sleeping. I noticed it was a honeybee, and my mind became filled with compassion. The bee must have been flying around all day looking for pollen to make honey and was exhausted. I left the bee there to rest, and in the morning, I opened the window, and after a while, it woke up and flew out to head home.

The point is that when we are faced with making a decision we can decide what to do based on fear, anger and other negative states, or we can make it based on curiosity, empathy and other positive states. The choice before we make the decision is whether we react or respond to circumstances. Do we step back or attack, or do we lean forward or empathise? Whichever we choose can become a habit, so choose carefully.

This Is Your Craft

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Relationships, Success

The work that people do when they are working at a successful level is often described as a craft. A craft is an activity with specialist skills that need to be perfected to be good at that thing. It is the element of perfecting these skills that causes the work of successful people to be described as a craft.

I have come to realise that whatever a person’s craft is, there is another craft that sits behind it and is the same for everyone. This singular craft is the craft of thriving. It involves the thinking of the mind, the actions of the body, and the cultivating of chi. If you do not have the right mental health, physical health, and chi health, you don’t have any health at all. And without good health, you can not be successful.

So, the craft behind your craft is to make sure that you thrive. This begins with your mind. The thoughts you have and the beliefs you hold, both conscious and unconscious, control most of how your day goes. If you are not in a good place mentally, most things will not go well. You won’t be happy and you won’t be successful. When your mind is in a good place, you can make sure that your body is healthy and your chi is balanced, strong, and flowing. Then, with this foundation, you can work on your craft and be successful.

When you thrive, you can better succeed and serve others. When you serve others, they can better thrive, and so can you. To thrive and help others to thrive is the foundation of a good life.

Build The Life You Want

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I recently watched an interview at Harvard with Oprah Winfrey and Arthur Brooks where they were discussing the book that they wrote together called Build The Life You Want. This book is on my to do list of books to read, but they covered the essentials of it in this interview. You can watch the video by following this link, but here are the essentials.

Happiness has three elements.

Enjoyment (not pleasure)
Meaning or purpose
Satisfaction

Enjoyment is pleasure plus people and memory. You must spend time with other people and make memories together to experience enjoyment. Also, you cannot keep satisfaction through acquiring things. There is an equation, however, for lasting satisfaction. Lasting satisfaction equals all the things you have divided by all the things you want. If you reduce the things that you want you increase lasting satisfaction.

Faith is believing that there is something larger than yourself. This could be God, nature, the universe, etc. The point is that you are not the centre of your universe.

As well as the elements of happiness that are mentioned above, there are institutions in your life that all need your attention to be happier. They are like a pension fund where you have to deposit in all of them to reap the rewards of feeling happier further down the road. These institutions are:

Family
Friends
Faith
Work that serves others

It is important not to think of happiness as a destination, but to aim for happierness. To be happier than you are now. It is a shift in state by ensuring that you focus on all four institutions.

When good things happen to you or bad things happen to you a good practice is to think, how can I use this in the service of others? This will mean that the bad things and the good things have purpose and you have control over what you do with what you get.

It is good to do small things with great love. Don’t always focus on having a big impact or making a big change. Doing small things with great love will, in the end, have more of an impact. After all greatness is determined by service to others.

Social media is the junk food of social life. There is no substitute for being in the same room as someone and being able to look them in the eye. This human to human interaction will give you more of the feel good hormones and will build stronger relationships. Interacting through screens is not the same.

Finally, your legacy is not some great thing that you leave behind, it is every life that you touch.

Mindset Is Everything

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

If we think of a shield we think of it being used for protection, but a shield is designed to be used in battle. In essence it is an instrument of war. In life we often use words and actions as a shield. We might tell a joke or become defensive in order to protect ourselves in some way. The assumption when doing such a thing is that we are in conflict with the world.

I would argue that being in conflict is a state of mind that comes out of the thoughts that we have. It is all tied up in our identity, our past experiences, how we grew up, the relationships we have and have had, etc, but in the present moment it is controlled by our thoughts. If we change our thoughts we change how we interact with the world. If we stop feeling like we are in conflict with the world we will stop needing our defences and we can live more in harmony with others.

To live in peace you must first have a peaceful mind. This can be difficult to achieve but it can be done by doing the work, through meditation, counselling, self analysis and spiritual exploration. In the end we are responsible for how we are in the world and how we treat others and ourselves.

The Power Of Not Reacting

Leadership, Relationships, Success

This is an extreme example but it has a point. I was once at a house party and the man who owned the house got into a fight with another man at the party and the owner of the house handed the other man his ass. I then walked the other man out of the house. On the way out he got angry and decided to headbutt me in the nose. It hurt but not that much and I decided not to retaliate. I simply asked the man to leave, which he did.

If I had retaliated another fight would have kicked off and the owner of the house may well have joined in, along with others. It would have escalated. Because I did not react the other man did not know what to do and left the house when I asked him to.

The point of this story is that the power in explosive situations is in not reacting. If someone is shouting at you or being aggressive towards you, give them nothing to react against and they lose their power and you retain yours. This simple principle can be used in a lot of different situations.

Unlearning Our Divisions

Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success

We are born into this world without prejudice, without judgement, without hate. We are born one with the human race. We learn to name things and catogerise things and to say what is good and what is bad and who are good and who are bad. We sort the world into this and that, us and them. These are divisions, whether they are small or big, and at the heart of every division is a conflict. Two opposing things set apart by the way we think about them. To understand our place in the world we go through this process of organising everything into divisions, this is natural and necessary.

However, the challenge is to discern one thing from another without having prejudice and judgement of others to cloud our view of the world. To pre-judge or to have prejudice is to assume things about a certain thing or person based on how we have categorised them. It has little to do with them. We think they are this and they are that. Often this way of thinking is passed down from generation to generation and we have whole communities that are in conflict with each other because of what they are told about each other.

To break out of such thinking, when all around us our loved ones think in this way, is very difficult. However, the task of unlearning these divisions is essential in order to live a peaceful and happy life, which is the purpose of a spiritual practice. It is the deliberate practice of dissolving divisions, the end result of which is wisdom.

The Law Of Influence

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success

The third Law of Stratospheric Success for the book The Go-Giver is The Law of Influence.

“Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.”
The Go-Giver

We all know people that regularly put themselves first, who ensure that their interests are met before focusing on others. Generally we do not trust these people. We have a built-in sense of community and what makes a community work. Instinctively we do not trust selfish people. Instinctively we trust those who take care of others first.

We also know when someone is pretending to care about others. Genuine empathy and compassion build strong bonds. So if you put the interests of others first then you will be trusted and your opinion is more respected. Therefore, the more you put others first the more influence you have. A good leader is a servant leader. They serve those that they lead. If you do not have a good leader to follow then be a good leader yourself.

The Law Of Compensation

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success

The second Law of Stratospheric Success for the book The Go-Giver is The Law of Compensation.

“Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.”
The Go-Giver

When you have a customer facing job you get paid a certain amount of money, as you help one customer at a time. The higher up the chain you go the more money you get paid. With this comes more responsibility for serving more people, as your decisions affect more people. However, it also matters how well you serve people.

Service is not doing the bidding of others, it is giving people what they need. Great service is this and improving other people’s lives. Service with a smile brightens someone’s day. Having a conversation while serving someone makes them feel seen and heard.

When not customer facing, making big decisions through compassion and a moral compass means that people’s lives are improved and not negatively impacted. A CEO can take care of their employees. In fact I would say that this is the CEO’s primary role. If a CEO takes care of their employees then the employees will take care of the customers and the customers will be loyal and in turn take care of the business.

The Law Of Value

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success

The first Law of Stratospheric Success for the book The Go-Giver is The Law of Value

“Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.”
The Go-Giver

When we go to work we often think in terms of being paid for our time and effort. We go to work and do what we are asked to do and do so for a set period of time and then come home again. Then we get paid. If we only work for the money and long for the weekend then it can be hard to create any value or get any fulfilment.

When we focus on adding value through human connections rather than transactions we find our work more fulfilling. Also, the more value we give the more work we get. People like being treated like people, rather than a way for us to make money. Go above and beyond and you will feel good and good things will come your way.

The Power of Momentum

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Success

When a large ship wants to change direction it’s turning circle is quite big because it has inertia, or momentum, to keep going in the direction it has been traveling in. Our lives are no different. Our habits keep us moving in a particular direction and we have to work against that momentum if we want to change direction.

On the flip side, if you want to achieve something in life starting from a standstill is difficult and small barriers will prevent us from forward movement. For example, if a train is standing still you can put a one inch block in front of the wheel and it will struggle to move at all. If a train is going at full speed it can smash through a concrete wall.

Momentum matters. Building the right habits gives you that momentum. Doing the right things everyday will give your life an intention and a direction. We are what we repeatedly do.

What Change Do You Seek To Make?

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Often in a capitalist culture we focus on one metric, the output. Any other effects of the work done are therefore treated as side effects. But really the impact of what we do, make or produce are all effects, there are no side effects. Creating mobile phones, for example. The company will focus on how many can be made in any given timeframe. The impact on the environment, the impact on the quality of life for those making the parts for the mobile phones and the impact on those who are using mobile phones are all effects. When we focus solely on the output we miss, or ignore, the other effects of what we do.

It is better, I think, to focus on creating value. This then brings quality into the equation. The quality of the impact on the environment, the quality of life for those making the product, the quality of life for those using the product, etc. The quality and the quantity must be balanced in order to create value. And quality can be quantified as can quantity, it is just easier to see the impact of quality in the long term and less so in the short term.

This then begs the question, what value do you seek to give? If you want people to collaborate you would focus on applications and tools to connect people effectively. If you want to focus on accessibility you would ensure those with disabilities could access the thing you are making. And on it goes. Being clear on what you intend to do, who it is for and why you are doing it allows for quality to matter, and once the quality is in place, the quantity will take care of itself.

But first ask yourself, what change do you seek to make?

Give Yourself Permission

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

For a long time I have struggled with achieving the same levels of success as my peers. I have questioned whether there is something wrong with me or if everyone else is just better than me and then I had a revelation. I had this revelation a few weeks ago, but it felt like just a theory and, consequently, I did not apply it to my life straight away. The revelation was that I can give myself permission to thrive.

This might sound silly or somewhat obvious, but I have grown up with others doing things for me a lot of the time. My parents took such good care of me I barely had to struggle or strive for anything. I benefited from the privilege of being white and middle class too. All this meant that when I hit the real world I subconsciously expected things to carry on as easily as they have always done, but they didn’t. Consequently, I felt average and mediocre.

What I needed to do was give myself permission to take ownership of my life, my health and my work. When I have been in leadership positions I have worked well in these roles and been a decent servant leader, but when I thought about describing myself in this way it felt disingenuous. The core of my realisation is that when others asked me to step into these roles I thrived and rather than waiting for others to give me permission, I can simply give myself permission.

This became empowering, where before I felt rather disempowered. Weirdly, for the first time I felt like I could take ownership of my life, fully and wholeheartedly, and you can too. Give yourself permission; own your life and you can thrive.

The Benefits of Generosity

Happiness, Health, Leadership, Relationships, The Pathway To Fulfilment

The other day I saw six or seven pigeons surrounding a slice of white bread that someone had left on the floor. They were all eating as much as they could as quickly as they could. Then one of them took a dislike to the pigeon next to it and started chasing it around. Perhaps it felt the other pigeon was eating its bit of bread, who knows, but for a good 30 seconds this pigeon chased the other around. Meanwhile, all of the other pigeons kept on eating. This reminded me of how our lizard brains can do us a disservice in contemporary life.

The lizard brain is in charge of fear, anger, revenge and reproduction. It is the early part of our brains that evolved which kept us safe from saber tooth tigers and from being kicked out of the tribe. It is why we survived as a species in our evolutionary early days. This served us well back then but it can ruin our lives today. It is largely the cause of stress, ill health and broken relationships. Even when we have a good life, objectively speaking, the lizard brain can take us away from the good things we have.

The whole time the pigeon was chasing the other pigeon it was missing out on the food that was lying on the floor ready to be eaten. There was more than enough food to go around, but fear that the other pigeon might eat their food turned to anger, which turned to revenge causing a pigeon chase around a car park.

If the pigeons were able to talk to each other and they had the capacity to have empathy, compassion or generosity, then they could have all happily shared the meal. The stress level would have been lower, and their relationships, pigeon to pigeon, would have been supportive, loving and generous. This is how we live good lives. We have good relationships, we are generous and we share what we have with those who need what we have.

The next time you see a homeless person on the street begging for money don’t automatically think, ‘why should I give them my money, they will only spend it on alcohol.’ Perhaps they haven’t eaten for two days and they need money for food, perhaps they need an extra £1 to pay for a hostel to have a comfy bed and shelter for the night.

They may have slept outside in the cold and rain for a week and are on death’s door and some change from us will save their life. And when you give them some change look them in the eye, smile at them and wish them well, because 95% of people that walked past them that day did not even acknowledge their existence. Be the 5% that cares and see their humanity.

How To Develop Confidence

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Relationships, Success

On the way into work yesterday it was quite misty, but it wasn’t thick enough to be fog. It reminded me of something I heard about how driving in fog is a metaphor for life. Often, when moving forward with a new venture, a new relationship, or anything that takes us out of our comfort zone, we are scared because we don’t know what the future holds. This is like driving in fog when you can only see 10 feet in front of you. The way to get clarity on what is ahead of you is to move forward 10 feet and then you can see the next 10 feet.

The lesson here is that we will never be able to predict the future 100%, but this should not stop us from moving forward. The best strategy is to work on your skillset and learn from your experiences. With skills and experience you can make wiser decisions and you can pivot where needed, depending on what life throws at you. If you trust your car brakes, steering, lights etc, then driving in fog is less stressful because your car and you can handle whatever you come across.

In order to improve your skillset and experience, you have to put in the time to try things out and develop skills. However, confidence also comes from our mindset, we have to believe in ourselves and our abilities or the actions we take will largely be ineffective. This mindset has to be a growth mindset, the ability to be agile and flexible requires it. Having a fixed mindset will cause your confidence to crumble when you hit the realities of life.

So, confidence requires skillset, mindset and experience. A seemingly obvious statement, but we often think of confidence as something we are born with. In reality confidence comes from how we behave on a moment to moment basis.

The final piece to the puzzle of confidence is our environment. If we feel safe enough to try and fail and try again, then our confidence goes up. If failure is treated with rejection, then we will develop a fixed mindset, we won’t believe we can do anything and we will not gain the required experience. This is why we need trusting teams at work, and supportive relationships in our lives. Add together all of these elements and you have the recipe for confidence.

Teams Need A Purpose

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success

In any organisation every team needs a Purpose. Often a company will have an overarching Purpose and/or Values, but if this is either not articulated well or made relevant to every team within the company, then productivity can drop off, as can retention of staff.

Everyone needs a reason to go to work, other than just to pay the bills. If our job gives meaning and purpose to our lives then we will be happier and will work harder for the company we work for. The assumption that staff will only work for a paycheck is a shortsighted view that many leaders have.

So, if you are a leader within your organisation, review how effective your company’s Purpose, Values or Principles are and work to ensure every member of staff feels that they are contributing towards them. This will increase levels of fulfilment and productivity, and will make them want to stay.

How To Be More Successful

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Success

In an interview I recently watched with Jay Shetty he gave some good advice on what to focus on when it comes to strengths and weaknesses.

A lot of advice generally says you should focus on your weaknesses, which is half right and half wrong, according to Jay Shetty. We should focus on both our strengths and our weaknesses, but the key is knowing which types of each to focus on.

The research shows that successful people focus on their strengths, as long as they are hard skills, things that are measurable. These are the bread and butter of success.

However, they are complimented by soft skills, things like social skills, working well with others, etc. Without these skills the hard skills won’t get you very far. So, working on any weaknesses with your soft skills too will ensure you achieve more success, because we cannot achieve success alone.

How We Serve Each Other

Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We can see colour because the fruits, berries and vegetables that we evolved to eat are colourful. The fruits, berries and vegetables are colourful because we, and other animals, see in colour. All things exist in this inter-related way.

When we focus on our individual dramas and successes we forget that we only exist because everything else exists, that we are dependent on each other. Whatever position we hold in the company we work for, without every other person who works there, from the top to the bottom, we would not have a company to work for. The same could be said of our society, culture and human race.

This line of thinking could extend out to include everything in the universe, but for practical purposes it helps to think on a human level. In short, we have much to be grateful for and much work to do, as everyone else needs us as much as we need them. The challenge we have is to figure out what our part to play actually is. To have a purpose in life is to know where you fit and how you can be the best you that you can. This is how we serve each other.

Give It A Try

Leadership, Relationships, Success

Sometimes we have people around us who act as support structures, people we go to for advice. If we are lucky we have these people amongst our family and friends. We often have them in our work environments as well. For one reason or another these people can become absent in our day to day lives, either temporarily or they just drift out of our lives.

This can create a hole that leaves us feeling anxious and in need of reassurance. This feeling can be taken as a sign to worry or it can be taken as a sign to step up and be more decisive, to taken on more responsibilities and to believe in ourselves more.

You will likely be able to do more than you believe you can. Those who support you can see what you are capable of. When they are not there it becomes time for you to see what you are capable of. It is time to step into the arena of life and give it a go, whatever it is that you are scared to do. Do it, and those around you will support you, if you let them.

It Might Just Work

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Often we are just as scared that something we do will work as we are that it might fail. If it works we may need to do more of it and try more new things. It is scary to write your own script and not follow the rules set by those that have come before us.

Real value, however, is created when we go off script and do the right thing. Not because the rules said to do it, but because it made a difference. Do you want your gravestone to read he/she followed the rules or do you want it to say he/she made a difference?

If you aim to create value and make a difference, the method you end up using will come to you. You will find a way. It may be the route less travelled, but you will make a difference.

Peace In A Divided World

Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I would like to say a few words about the situation in Ukraine. There are many who are suffering, both Ukrainian civilians and Russian civilians, both Ukrainian soldiers and Russian soldiers. War makes victims of us all.

There will be Russian soldiers who do not agree with the actions of their country, but have little choice but to follow orders. There are officials in Ukraine that have the choice to treat all civilians equally, but are separating white and black refugees and prioritising those with white skin and allowing them to leave Ukraine first. War brings out the best and the worst in us all and, in my view, we should not say that Ukraine is without fault or that Russia is without salvation. Things are rarely so simple.

However, Ukraine clearly needs the world’s support in this awful situation, and we should give and do what we can. And we must also remember that there are many other war torn places in the world, and many places where there is violence; between groups of people and between individuals. For some, home is not a safe place. There is much healing needed in the world.

What can we do to make positive change in situations like the one in Ukraine? There a lots of small things we can do like donate to organisations helping support the Ukrainian people. More broadly however, you can bring peace to the world by working on your own prejudices and judgments and to work on creating more peaceful relationships in your live. We can forgive, we can rebuild, and, when needed, we can walk away. We co-create the relationships we have, which co-creates the society we live in, and the culture we have, and the country we have and so on. How we live our lives each day contributes to peace in the world or division in the world. Please choose peace.

It Shouldn’t Be Like That

Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Quite often people say that this should not happen or this should happen. People ‘should’ all over themselves, which is to say that they project their ‘shoulds’ out into the world. The problem with this way of thinking is that it creates a kind of helplessness, because if it should be a certain way, but it isn’t, we often then have nothing that we can do about it.

It is better to see things as they are, not as you think they should be. Then decide what action you wish to take. It might be that there is a need for something to be improved and you are the person to do it. This means that you are focusing on what you can do.

Building A Community

Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When a tree grows there are usually other plants and herbs that grow around it and the type of tree will often dictate what grows around it. So much do that when native people who were looking for a particular medicinal herb they would look for a particular type of tree.

The relationship between a tree and the plants and herbs that grow around it is often decades in the making. When we reflect on the many communities to which we belong we can see the time and symbiosis that is required for communities to thrive. Depending on the community we may be the tree or we may be the herb, neither has more or less values that the other, they simply serve a different function in that community.

There Is Nobody Like You

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Others may do the same job as you, live in the same area as you or have the same life experience as you, to a degree, but they are not you. You are a unique happening. You are also an essential part of this thing called life. The world needs your unique perspective and contribution to make the world a better place.

If you think you are ordinary or even less than some level of importance then you are underestimating yourself. You can thrive given the right environment and right self belief. Sometimes we need to find the right environment first. This could be a place of work or a group of friends. It is easier to believe in ourselves if others believe in us first.

Become A Problem Solver

Happiness, Leadership, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

I heard an interesting turn of phrase recently. Someone I was listening to online said ‘When we think of Mother Nature we could think that we have a responsibility to mother nature.’ This got me thinking about our role in the interconnected web of life and our responsibilities as co-creators of life on Earth.

We are both parent and child, so to speak. Our individual existence is both of these things and there is some responsibility in both them. This got me thinking about the ownership we choose or don’t choose to take in our lives; whether we choose to make things better or not.

Whether we like it or not, we are stewards of this world, we are taking care of the world that belongs to our grandchildren, as the saying goes. When life is seen through this point of view, we become solution focused, we become problem solvers.

Believe In Yourself

Achieving Goals, Leadership, Success

No one will give you the perfect answer as to what you should do in any situation, because they are judging it based on what they would do, and they are not you. We need to make a choice and go try it, whatever it is. If it doesn’t work and we fall on our faces, we have learned something.

The trick is to know that you will always pick yourself up and try again. A bird does not avoid landing on a tree branch because it is worried that the branch may break, if they did they would never land on a tree branch. A bird’s faith is not in the branch not breaking, it’s faith is in the ability of it’s own wings.

Break The Bias

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Relationships, Success

Today is International Women’s Day, which celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. This is something that is needed to balance how women are seen in society. Many companies and organisations are equal, with women holding positions of CEO downwards, but not every company culture supports equality. This can also be said of society as a whole.

To me, equality is a sign of respect from one human being to another. We all have different skills and experience which allows us to thrive in some roles in both the workplace and outside of it, but not in others. Opportunities should be given without any assumptions being made about whether they will suit either a man or a women, and should be offered based on merit.

This brings us to the slogan of International Women’s Day, which is #breakthebias. In order for their to be true equality then the bias towards men being more capable needs to end. In order to love a fulfilling life we need to feel as if we are progressing, which means we need access to opportunities to progress. One thing you can do I to try and see past the stereotypes and judgements and see the other person as human first, the same as you. There is no bias if we are all seen as human beings.

When One Door Closes

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Leadership, Success

In life there are ways and processes that we find helpful and that make life easier, and when they are taken away we feel angry and frustrated. We ask why and complain about how it is not like it used to be. However, what is hidden in these turns of event is that there are other ways of doing these things and other processes. Often they are more helpful and make life more meaningful.

We get stuck in ways of doing things that feel comfortable or familiar or ways that have been drummed into us as the ‘right’ way to do something. We rarely question these ways of doing things, as we go about our routine filled lives.

At work this past week I found it difficult to help a customer as a process I had become used to changed. I spent some time moaning to colleagues, who join in with my indignation, before asking my Manager what I could do. My Manager gave me an alternative that I had never thought of before, which was a better option all round and allowed me to help the customer. When one door closes look for an alternative door, it may be a better one.