Category: Success

Becoming a go-to person

Leadership, Success

If people start coming to you for advice it means two things. Firstly, they trust you to treat them with respect and that you will not ridicule them for not knowing something that you do. Secondly, you have begun to establish yourself as a person of knowledge and authority in your field or your life generally. This is a critical tipping point.

How you respond will determine if this is to continue or not. If you let this go to your head and you start to feel like some sort of guru, then people will stop respecting and, crucially, trusting you, and you lose. To continue to have people’s respect and trust you need to keep respecting them; to collaborate rather than dictate, and also continue learning, continue being a seeker of truth in every field, but especially in the field you work in.

Two factors of success 

Success

When it comes to success, I believe that two intertwined behaviours are critical. The first is always being humble enough to be a student, to learn from every experience and every person we meet. The second is taking responsibility for helping others find their own success. I do believe that finding both happiness and success is a path we walk together.

On a practical level, success achieved through going it alone and without help or any form of cooperation is, in my opinion, fool hardy and will be short lived. Long term success comes from helping others and allowing others to help us. We have to trust that others will execute their part well and we have to prove that we can execute our part well also. Success and cooperation are inseparable.

The Pinky & the Brain effect

Success

When I was a child I watched a TV programme called Pinky & the Brain, which had two laboratory mice, who every night tried to take over the world. Pinky was an unintelligent sidekick to the Brain, who as his name suggests, was very clever. Each plan was as ridiculous as the previous one, which always fell short of success. The fun of each episode was watching the plans fall apart in funny ways.

Reflecting on this recently I was struck by the importance of a key part of this program. If we are to find success we firstly need to have the competence to avoid falling short of succeeding with the plan you have, but it is also very important not to be deterred by failure. Each episode would start with Pinky asking the Brain “What are we going to do tonight?”, or words to that effect, and the Brain would answer, “the same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world.”

Every successful entrepreneur or business owner is successful because they have failed many many times and learned from each failure and then tried again. Failure is an opportunity to either succeed or learn how to. If you can fail fast, learn quickly and try again, you will succeed in whatever to try to do.

Stand in your own truth

Success

I have heard the phrase “Standing in your own truth” a number of times and it has me intrigued. It has taken me some time to mull over what this deceptively deep statement means. At its most simple, I think it means being yourself and at its most complex it delves into the psyche and explores what is meant by the self and how we see ourselves in relation to the world and the society in which we live.

To me standing in your own truth means, firstly, that we have a good sense of who we are and, secondly, that we have the confidence to step forth into the world with this self on show. Something that leaves us vulnerable and shows our courage simultaneously. It is a step into the unknown grounded in the knowledge that we can take on whatever life can throw at us, but without deviating from our own truth, our own genuine self. This to me is courage itself, and is something we should all try to do. Standing in your own truth is better than following the apparent truth of someone else.

Seeking opportunities 

Success

A reliable route to success is to become an opportunity seeker, to develop a mindset that looks upon situations and asks where is the opportunity. This has three parts to it, and all three parts need to be completed for success to happen. Firstly you have to be aware of opportunities when they appear, so you have to be looking for them. Secondly you then have to seize the opportunity by either acting in the moment or offering your time and talent to your superiors to help move your team or your business forwards. They will then decide whether or not to give you the go ahead to do it. You should get approval before you do it in order to get the recognition afterwards.

This can mean putting in time for free, as long as you don’t become a dogs body. You are exchanging your time and talent for future opportunities that could come from this. Thirdly you have to follow through and produce the goods. So only take an opportunity if you know that you can follow through. Knowing that you will go all the way has to come in as part of deciding to do it, whatever it is.

On Leadership

Leadership, Success

I have heard it said that if someone in a position of leadership spends their time telling people what to do then they are not a leader, they are a manager. Leaders inspire others to follow them. They create a safe space for people to grow and experiment, to try and fail and try again. True leaders give others permission to lead those around them; people who don’t follow instructions blindly, but instead take the boundaries and rules that exist in their organisation and create masterpieces of interconnectivity, human experiences and solutions to problems. A great leader creates a movement, because they are not focused on themselves, they are focused on the possibilities that they can awaken in others.

Lessons in every moment 

Success

There are lessons to be learned in every experience, every interaction, every moment. If our first instinct is to put blame onto a situation or a person then we are not taking responsibility for our own path through life. Taking ownership of every failure and every misunderstanding will lead to looking for what each of these can teach us. We should never stop learning until our dying breath.

Walk Your Own Path

Happiness, Success

When I was twenty I received a shaving razor from a well known company free in the post, which was a savvy move on their part, as I’m still buying razor blades for it fifteen years later. This razor worked very well and has never given me any cause to think about buying one from another company. However, a few years ago I was doing my usual big shop in a local supermarket when I saw a fancy looking razor that had been reduced to half price. It was made by a rival company, it was white and it vibrated the blade of the razor to give a closer shave. Intrigued and encouraged by the low price, I bought it and gave it a try. It was no way near as good as the razor I had been using for years. The lesson here is not to be drawn in by low prices and the promises of better features that don’t actually improve your life, because they only superficially appear to do so.

It is very easy in our current society to be convinced to buy consumerist products simply by being told they are better than the last thing we were told to buy or to behave in a certain way that is deemed cool or popular because so many others are doing the same. If we are not careful we can start to sleepwalk through life, living based on borrowed thoughts and feelings, on assimilated beliefs, and we end up not following our own path. In this situation I believe rebelling and walking our own path will lead to a happier and more fulfilling life. This, however, is not easy to do. Firstly it takes courage to swim against the stream, and secondly you have to find your own path before you can walk down it. This means lots of mistakes and walks down unfamiliar paths. Walking your own path takes courage but also persistence and self compassion. Mistakes will be made, so go easy on yourself.

A Reflection on Resilience

Happiness, Success

Resilience is an essential character trait when it comes to happiness and success. It is the ability to treat knock-backs and disappointments as feedback, as opportunities to learn, which will result in both happiness and success. However, this can be a difficult mindset to engage in, because it feels more natural to react to knock-backs and disappointments with negativity, to treat them as negative feedback. This is due to the mental habits we have developed, the examples we have witnessed and the general assimilation of the narratives from the culture we have grown up in.

What we need to do is detach the negative from the feedback and disappointments, to try to look at it with a neutral mindset and try to tease out what can be constructive, so that we can move forward more positively. This, as with many things, requires practice. To a large degree we are working against all of the mental habits we have thus far embedded into the pathways of our brains. The good news is that if we repeatedly look for the feedback that we can use to make ourselves better, and as a result our careers and our relationships better, we will build resilience to cope with the disasters that life can sometimes drop on us. When we train our minds in this way we become ready for the tough times in life, but it has to be a daily practice otherwise when the disaster hits we will crumble.